Friday Ephemera (701)
“I am not a cat.” || Nommy-nommy-nom. || Nude descending. || “Can you give me your phone, please?” || “This weird phenomenon.” || Big fellah. || Mastering a foreign tongue. || Maybe the melting is a bad thing. || Intriguing object. || “It brings them a sense of peace.” || Utopian scenes. Related. || Andromeda is approaching. || New dance sensation. || Novel experience. || Penny drops, but takes a while. || Cooling chair, 1786. || Soho, London, 1956. || Quality time. (NSFW) || I have questions. || Short quiz. || She’s “cute” and she’s “nice,” but she expects you to lie on demand, or she’ll kick you in the teeth. || Jake used to be a trans woman. (NSFW) || Today’s word is gratitude. || And finally, a guide to megalasers, relativistic missiles, and other means of waging interstellar war.
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Cleanliness is next to Union Station.
Cleanliness is next to Union Station.
At least he kept his pants on. Unlike that woman a couple of weeks back “bathing” in the fire hydrant.
The sky is pocked with stars, What eyes the wise men must have had to spot a new one in so many. — Henry Plantagenet, The Lion in Winter
In case anyone is wondering, the animal in the sewer is a capybara.
Or so says Google Image Search, and it sure looks like other images of the creatures.
“Your breasts are gonna get super-tender…”
“Oh, I like that.”
Also, the “phallus stew” is geoduck.
Ssshh. Let them dream.
She needs to get a divorce – quickly.
Get your
ChristmasWinter Holiday decorations now while supplies last!Nutcracker. NUTcracker.
That was really quite something – as thought-provoking as it was mesmerising.
I mean, the waiters’ race alone is something else, not to mention John Geilguid swanning down the road with a cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth.
Peter King, the young artist with a beret who appears in Gallery One near the end of the film, died just a year later in 1957 which just adds to the pathos.
But it’s also quite striking how many of the themes in the film are still being played out in today’s conversations.
There’s the emphasis on cuisine as a major benefit of ‘cosmopolitan’ (read ‘multicultural’ in more recent years) SoHo – which is still something often mentioned in this context.
There’s also the rather condescending notion that black people are somehow there as decoration and to make everything more exciting for the young and affluent (“Nights in SoHo are exciting and colourful” as the camera presents black jazz musicians and a young white girl dancing with a young black man).
Brilliant find that in any event.
[ Turns to mirror, admires self. ]
I can’t decide whether to use the slider animation that usually goes at the top of the home page, and which I’ve now deactivated to see how I feel about it. Feel free to opine, assuming you care one way or the other.
FFFFFS, maybe bin Laden did have a point.
Feel free to opine, assuming you care one way or the other.
It is cleaner without. I would suggest, however, changing the “Thompson, Blog” on the home masthead to a lighter color as, depending on the monitor/screen, it can be nigh invisible.
If I have an opinion one way or the other…it was cool-ish and served a purpose when you fist switch platforms but it’s kinda superfluous now.
[ Sounds of your host being distracted by prospect of fish and chips for lunch. ]
This has just been reported in the BBC – and it may be significant that it’s the BBC, not Spiked, The Spectator, The Daily Mail etc:
OK, well, that could be seen as an unfortunate mishap, but clearly something anyone sane and rational can just move on from.
After all, no child was actually poisoned in the incident even though I appreciate it’s a sensitive issue.
But there’s more (my emphasis):
That school is in Sheffield, Yorkshire.
Meanwhile, another Yorkshire school, Batley Grammar, still has a former teacher in hiding with his family for fear of violent reprisals two years after teaching a lesson on religious controversy that was a part of the course syllabus.
At yet another Yorkshire school, this time in Wakefield, a copy of the Koran was dropped, resulting in minor damage to its cover, leading to a national incident, four suspensions, and death threats aimed at one of the pupil’s involved and his family.
With no small irony, but very little in the way of self-awareness, November is Islamophobia Awareness Month in the UK.
This is not a good situation for a country to be in.
Considering the war in Ukraine is very likely to end within the next 6 months or less, and not to the benefit of Ukraine, this is potentially an even worse situation.
Ukraine is awash with every type of small arms and lots of ammunition.
It is fairly high on the corruption index and it will not take long for someone to realise that those weapons can be exchanged for more stable currencies and they will likely not be too fussy about the credentials of those who they sell them to.
Unless in the unlikely event something quite unexpected happens, by which I mean a government actually growing a pair of balls and addressing the situation before it’s too late, the trajectory we seem to be on is not a happy one.
[ Reactivates slider animation. ]
It’s somewhat remarkable that this obnoxious young woman hasn’t had the stupid slapped out of her head.
As often as is needed.
Seems like they’re having an argument but it isn’t. An argument isn’t just contradiction. An argument is a connected series of statements intended to establish a proposition. It isn’t just contradiction. It isn’t just saying ‘no it isn’t’. I learned that when I was in school. OK, not actually in school, but back in the day, the time period when I was in school. Turns out much of what I learned in school was pretty useless. Hopefully this obnoxious young woman will learn the same. Hopefully soon. But that’s as unlikely to happen as it is that someone will slap the stupid out of her head. Literally or figuratively. And by ‘literally’…oh, never mind.
She thinks being rude and racist and talking too quickly makes her clever.
Well it makes her sound clever. To most people. People that matter. In her life anyway. And that’s all that really matters when you think about it. Now who’s the clever one?
Lōrīca segmentāta legiōnāriī Rōmānī
There wouldn’t be anything left if it was.
Always respect the media.
Yes it is.
(You knew this was going to happen, didn’t you?)
Remember, all human beings are equally precious and special.
The official multikulti justification for school canteens to serve Halal is that it creates an inclusive environment for Muslim students, and that we unclean infidels should if anything be grateful that our Muslim friends are so much more careful about the sourcing of the meat they eat. The serving of pork products is another level: are they made available to non-Muslims, or are excuses (limited kitchen resources, encouraging a healthy diet) made for phasing them out?
But putting Halal meat into a Christian school is also (1) territory marking in the ordinary lives of Christian children, (2) compels Christian schools to fund Muslim business and religious practice, and (3) as we’ve seen here, compels Christian schools to grovel to Muslim leaders if some non-Halal gets into the Halal pot. Does that all look like dhimmitude yet?
By the way, and since you ask, the fish-and-chips lunch was very good. Our chip-shop proprietrix does good work.
The dessert that I picked up yesterday, however, was bewilderingly awful. The unhappy aftertaste is vaguely suggestive of some industrial solvent. Or stamp adhesive.
#DaveDoesDiningTips
Lawyers also tend to believe that everything is about words. They have an absolute, dare say Biblical faith in the law and seem dumbfounded when you try to get across to them that words without actions, without backbone behind those words make the words powerless and effectively meaningless. I have a theory that many journalists are just failed lawyers…
Additionally…no it isn’t.
You know, I’d heard the expression, “eat a big bowl of dicks”, but I’d always assumed it was a figure of speech of some kind.
Like our gracious host says, when you hear progressive excuses for criminals, look for video. “Just like us”…
Well, when you actually see what is often being excused, the dissonance, the perversity, is pretty hard to miss.
This incident, from the same thread, comes to mind.
Being told that creatures who are defined by their pathological selfishness – and for whom the rest of us are merely prey from whom things can be taken – to be told that such creatures are the real victims of the drama and deserving of our compassion and indulgence, does rather chafe the arse.
Note, too, the arse-backwards thinking. The coyly buried assumption that if the perpetrators of the crimes in question are largely black, then any objections to their criminal activity must be questioned or trivialised, or framed as something suspect.
As if concerns about a marked increase in organised and emboldened looting – recorded in 24 cities – were somehow unwarranted or déclassé. As if not wanting your local shops to be wrecked and raided by ferals, over and over again, and consequently closing, were just some “panic” among the prim and faint-hearted. A “panic” supposedly being “exploited to oppose criminal justice policy reforms” – i.e., grotesque progressive leniency – and thereby to “hit Black and brown communities hardest.” The insinuation being of some racial motivation.
And so we’re steered towards the conceit that if people find the rise in looting and brazen thievery a worry, a sign of social decay, or a threat to their livelihoods, then their dismay at lawlessness is a mistake, or some kind of pretext, rather than a normal, quite sane reaction to a glaringly obvious problem. A problem caused in very large part by the kinds of progressive policies that the author of the CNN piece, Mr Meyersohn, endorses.
Inevitably, we’re told that “tougher criminal policies may not deter crime,” and that punishing habitual criminals is “ineffective.”
We’ve been here before, of course. And doubtless will again.
“the world is just words”–this is so true. It comes from never having to do anything physical like building a house. All their jobs are abstract (education, government, journalism) where all you do is process words. There are no incentives to check your words against the real world. The claim that punishing crime doesn’t work is so easily falsified. The huge uptick in crime is due to NOT punishing crime. People respond to incentives.
Speaking of journalists…A constipated fictional victorian era detective comes to mind…
People aren’t hating the media half as much as they should.
There are only so many hours in a day.