Friday Ephemera (705)
Judgement promptly validated. || Ice-cream scoop insertions and other medical emergencies. || Somewhat related: Things done to penises in 2023. || Recovered Kodachromes of New York in the Fifties and Sixties. (h/t, Lancastrian Oik) || Like conkers, I guess. || On crime and incarceration. || Question asked, answered. || Being so clever, he doesn’t believe in sky daddy. || Lion relocation. || If you got rid of the toaster, you’d have space for one of these. || Suboptimal road surface. || Set-up and payoff. || The progressive retail experience, parts 526 and 527. || Pressing oil. || For enthusiasts of diecast model cars, The Little Wheels Museum. (h/t, Things) || I laughed and I’m not sorry. || A little artistic licence. || At last, a shower-toilet combo. || And finally, a hawk encounters a kitten with a force field.
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I was looking at that yesterday.
It’s fair to suppose that those people at Disney completely possessed by the Cult of Woke are interested in Disney products only as a means to proselytise their faith, and to sexually groom children. But given that Disney is a multi-billion-dollar international corporation with stock-holders and (presumably) teams of accountants, I can’t believe that no-one in a senior position is motivated by money. Or concerned at the steadily falling objective financial returns on the Star Wars films and serieseses.
Even were that true, they’re obviously losing money now. The return on their massive investment, seeming pretty healthy at first, is showing steadily falling revenues now. The commercial and artistic disaster that is Kathleen Kennedy has been helming this car crash now for 10 years, and what would you guess is the remaining value of the Star Wars IP? Nothing like what they paid for it I would say. Surely there ought to be an adult at Disney able to fire the clusterB of incompetent ideological parasites running the place into the ground, before it’s too late?
I hadn’t realised that Absolutely Fabulous was a documentary.
That one should have been held back.
Today’s word is dupes.
Wonder how well that would work on the Just Stop Oil types.
The soon-to-be-useless bog roll is a nice touch.
That is a valid point. Yes indeed.
But I do wonder if, in part, we are seeing a large scale version of the decades long delusions that my liberal acquaintances have been lost in: They have not abandoned any of the ruling myths that motivated them 40 to 60 years ago: In spite of all the evidence of the failure of “affirmative action” programs, they continue to cling to the belief that all that’s needed to equalize the racial achievement gap in education and employment is to water down standards and institute more quotas in admissions and hiring. Similarly, they continue to believe in the need for “equity” in policing and the courts, which includes replacing prison with various fashionable fads–in spite of the evidence that the only thing that works with repeat offenders is to keep them locked up until they are about 40 years old (and sometimes for much longer) and that criminality is sometimes due to something fundamentally wrong in the brain which no amount of “therapy” can fix.
Old photos: 60 yrs ago in Chicago, the soot from coal meant that every spring we had to wash down our porch. On old buildings in back alleys where the building had not been power washed or painted, you could still see the black soot even recently.
Question – what is the safety harness for? Is it to prevent her breaking her hip if she weebles too enthusiastically?
Judgement: I have to say, that was a hell of a leap. Talk about lack of impulse control, which is what probably brought him to court in the first place.
Note that the account is called “upscale luxury” although this combo could only be marketed to downscale plebs being forced into micro apartments.
I saw that a lot, especially since at one time businesses did not routinely clean off that soot–even downtown.
Neck tattoos do seem to be an indicator of often psychopathic criminality.
An irony being that Absolutely Fabulous, an initially funny parody of such conceits, didn’t know when to bow out either.
Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different. -Claudine Gay…or me…honestly, I forget.
Seriously though, think about this. If someone was to hand anyone on this space a million dollars, that likely would significantly change their lives. Any opportunity to possibly earn a million dollars over say the next year would very likely be seized upon. Maybe I underestimate but I would be surprised that anyone here is worth multiples of tens of millions of dollars. At some point over the Christmas holidays we took a water taxi ($40/pp) down the intracoastal waterway in Ft. Lauderdale. Homes worth tens of millions of dollars, yachts worth nearly 100 million sit idle except for maybe a few weeks of the year. These people have more money than you or I or even they can imagine. And it just keeps rolling in. Especially in the “entertainment” business. Unless they, or their money managers, are very, very stupid, they diversify out of Disney or whatever stock. Sure they keep some play money in the game. For appearances. Because it’s all about appearances. Because the money itself isn’t the thing. It’s the status. The 20th century, especially the latter half, has seen such a tremendous acceleration in wealth, absolutely unprecedented in human history. Generational wealth that at least in the past, in the times of kings and empires and such, still required work, effort, fight to hold onto. The Gods of the Copybook Headings sleep much longer than they used to. There’s a lot of ruin in a nation and/or a society. This lull between times of terror and slaughter will end at some point. Even for many of them once their stupid runs out of reserves.
(if the font on that stays big after posting, I apologize. I couldn’t figure out how to change it as my usual tool of Notepad isn’t on this device)
On a local perambulation a friend and I passed the parochial old manor house, dating back to 1614, and I remarked upon the dark soot-stained stonework. My friend demurred, opining that the variety of stone from which the building was constructed naturally blackened over time due to certain miasmic influences in the air.
I suppose I could Google that to see if it’s true, but now it’s your job.
They deserve what they get at this point.
In a never-ending gyre, the one excuses the other.
I once read about someone who had great difficulties fitting in/being accepted when he moved into a New York City coop building. You see, his net worth was only in the tens of millions while everyone else was far more wealthy. And they looked down on him.
Sorry I don’t remember the details or where I read this.
Perhaps.
I do known that the despite showing casual disregard for many of their jaw-droppingly expensive possessions, I’ve never met anyone become more aggrieved at the notion that somebody somewhere might be cheating them out of a single penny than the fabulously rich.
Well, we can but hope.
Yes, but I would still worry a great deal about the future, since a stock market crash can wipe out large fortunes.
Them’s name is Tempest.
Tempest meet teapot. Use the wrong pronouns and reduce it to tears. So tough.
If they keep buying shit, then they deserve shit.
Doyle killed off Holmes at Reichenbach Falls as he was tired of writing the stories. The subsequent stories, driven in part by public clamour for the of Holmes’, lacked some of the brio of the earlier tales.
Star Wars: even in the original, women had privilege. For example, Anakin’s twin kids were treated differently. The girl became a princess. The boy was sent to a desert planet to be adopted by poor shlubs who treated him like a servant.
Then, in the reboot, the female soon-to-be jedi simply starts manifesting huge powers without any coaching, without learning anything about the war or the jedi way, and without any doubts or difficulties. There were never any female jedi before her and this is never explained.
And the conceit that you can make an action sci-fi movie that insults men…without guys and couples on dates (which includes a guy), who will the audience be? Just children?
I have indeed known a lot of fans with very bad taste: They were blind to stylistic differences between utter pulp and finely written stories. They made no aesthetic distinction between Thomas Kinkaid and N C Wyeth (much less Vermeer and Da Vinci.) They could not appreciate the difference between a moderately competent singer’s interpretation of a song and that of a superb singer. They didn’t notice subtle allusions and clues in stories and could not see them even when pointed out–not even very overt ones like the Nazi imagery in Verhoeven’s butchery of Starship Troopers.
Them has the very definition of a punch-able face.
It’s also not a good strategy for maintaining a healthy society. But radical leftists tend to be Dark Tetrad personalities who want to tear down society.
It must be defeated, you know.
Yes, I recall that. But the subsequent tales were, I think, still quite readable. (I cannot say whether I would agree that they were somewhat less lively than the earlier stories, as it’s been awhile since I’ve read through them all. Damn you! <wink> Now I’m going to have to pull them off the shelf and see!) In contrast, I gave up on Frank Herbert and Philip Jose Farmer after a few volumes and never wanted to return.
Was that <wink> necessary? Might it otherwise have sounded like actual anger rather than silliness?
She looking for a teapot?
David says:
Yes, because the common thread is laziness. All that stuff about standards and quality and hard work is just so white and oppressive. All us woke people should just be affirmed for our essential selves. No one should be a failure. Hey, let’s put a mediocre talent in charge of what would otherwise be a billion dollar movie!!! The money should just flow in because of how transgressive and brave we are.
Without reviewing her back-catalogue, I think it might be Baggage Claim who suggested that one of the reasons for the grotesque ideological debasement of Star Wars under Disney is that they are still, fundamentally, pursuing family entertainment. And consequently they can’t help bastardising even their ostensibly adult properties by attempting to make them appealing to children.
Not sure I see much difference between feminisation and infantilism myself.
Pardon me, but who (or what) is that?
On the whole I prefer the medieval flagellants.
A sitcom.
Sorry, I wasn’t clear. I was asking about the personage (?) featured in the clip.
I’ve seen an episode Absolutely Fabulous. Well, part of one. Drunken antics pall quickly.
Ah, the gyrating, er, vision is Madonna.
Hieronymus Bosch, call your office.
…we don’t see this anymore because of the proliferation of building codes dictating in ever more detail what must and must not be done.In this case, the motivation being to keep downtown looking “clean” in an “elegant simplicity”.
As opposed to having it all on the sidewalk and in the street in the form of homeless encampments and endless trash and waste?
In the hellhole in which I currently reside, the city charges businesses a fee for every outside sign, which would naturally reduce signage, and I have no reason to doubt other cities are doing something similar. And like you said, the building codes are likely getting onerous, too. Everything going up looks the same now, soon to be covered in graffiti and garbage. Some codes/laws get enforced, others don’t.
Aporia magazine: marginalized art: hahaha one of the things about art is that the viewer does not even know the sex, race, nationality or sexual deviation of the artist. The art speaks for itself. That a museum must make a special exhibit for minorities says louder than words that the art is crap.\
It is the same with scientific work. When a journal gets a manuscript, they (and the reviewers) generally do not know the author and are thus unable to discriminate.
Heh:
I found Dune Messiah to be half as good as Dune, and Children of Dune to be half as good as Dune Messiah. God Emperor of Dune put me off completely.
I only recall 3 books or so of the Riverworld series. If there were more, they escaped my notice.
pst314 wrote
Please do, at least for some future open thread.
Please feel free to nag me, if I not come though within 2 days. I should have time; the only thing that gets in the way is getting distracted due to numerous demands on my time.
Geometric progression, yes.
Each subsequent book became less interesting and more occupied by byzantine plots within plots.
There were about 6. I abandoned the series long before that, though.
That seemed to be one of Herbert’s predilections which showed up in other series as well.
Mental health professional struggles with basic concept: