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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[ Googles Tay-Tay. ]
There’s so much I have to learn.
I suggest your life would be greatly improved by un-learning much of it.
[ Starts massive scrapbook of happening pop artistes, orders glow-sticks, whistle. ]
Now that it is in public domain…
I’ve seen some well done “Mickey Mouse as Big Brother” satires over the years. Maybe we’ll see more of them, now that Disney’s lawyers are not a threat.
Maybe we’ll see more of them,
TPC comes through with many besides Gulag Vasily to brighten the GWONT.
Just remembered: Air Pirates: 70’s underground comic artists intentionally infringe Disney copyrights. I don’t really understand what happened, because I only heard a little bit, all from people on one side of the issue. And Harlan Ellison was not someone I trusted to tell the full story on anything he cared about.
From the ACME Upstairs Library School:
from the link:
I rather thought she made a fool of herself from the start.
That’s a deeper cautionary tale for the young: Be very careful about the road you choose.
I rather thought she made a fool of herself from the start.
Indeed, but small mercies, at least she has clothes on in that clip.
Meanwhile, “I am powerful…powerful guy“. Repeat after me, “All Cultures Are Equal™”.
from the above link:
“Sky News once conducted a survey of men near Johannesburg in South Africa; of the 38 men they interviewed, 28 admitted to having forced a woman to have sex with them. The reporters were shocked at how candid their answers were.”
This is an clip from My Neighbor the Rapist, a BBC Africa Eye documentary. Also on Facebook.
I think we are all agreed that the West should treat such people with militant intolerance. But how about the Westerners who deny reality and demand that we welcome millions of such savages?
Witch/shaman in Peru unsuccessfully attempts to stop a landslide.
Follow the link to Reddit for the original clip without dubbed audio.
All Cultures and Belief Systems Are Equal.(TM)
That page seems to be gone, I assume it was a King Canute-type moment but messier and with actual harm to the incanter?
Isn’t it Steamboat Willie and not Mickey whose copyright has ended?
That page seems to be gone
My apologies: I screwed up the link.
Here is the un-buggered-up link.
And here is the Reddit page it points to, just in case.
Another example: Asimov’s Foundation series (7 novels) and his Robot series (4 novels). I bailed after the fourth Foundation novel and never even finished the third Robot novel. Further absurdity: Asimov merging the two series into one. Oh, please.
Also: I recall a number of writers talking about how their publishers pressured them to write sequels to stories they preferred to be done with: The fans could be counted on to buy them whereas a new unrelated novel was a less certain moneymaker. Asimov talked about his publisher telling him they would publish the book he wanted to write if he would write another sequel–or so I recall after many years.
Looks like drink prices are going up again.
If Dibbler shows up again with his bargain booze, do not buy it.
It’s only the Steamboat Willie version that’s transitioned to public domain. You can be assured Disney will still hound anyone daring to encroach on their protected IP.
Another reminder of the utility of ebooks.
No worries on that score. The memory of the last round hasn’t faded.
“Asimov’s Foundation series (7 novels)”
W? Seriously, didn’t know it went beyond 3. Ah well.
(realizes that dates end of reading SF…)
Would it be a bit much to suggest they be made to submit to the rape they would excuse?
It’s the Steamboat Willie version of Mickey.
It occurs to me that there are some who would flinch at the word savages. Or who would tut, or chide, or hiss indignantly. Which makes me wonder what precise level of savagery would make them feel more comfortable hearing it.
One of the reasons Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle partnered with Michael Flynn and Steven Barnes on books was to work around contractual demands for a sequel to The Mote in God’s Eye. The Gripping Hand (the sequel) was good but didn’t have quite the substance of its predecessor.
Given what they’ve excused in the past it seems unlikely there is any barbarity they wouldn’t condone. Just look at recent events in Harvard Square.
See also the pompous eruptions that followed entirely apposite use of the word feral.
“my neighbor the rapist”
while crime stats in Europe might be accurate, comparisons of US to crime in much of the world is trash because no one keeps count.
And of course, best of all – you can read your ebooks over and over again and each time they will be new and excitingly different – re-rendered to conform to the latest woke ideological proclivities.
I did not know that. Thanks.
Agreed. Entertaining, but not memorable.
Side note: The novel attempted to solve the terrible trap that the Moties were in. (Doomed to endless Cycles of unconstrained population growth followed by war and collapse in a sealed-off solar system.) And the human Empire forced thereby to find a way to end the Motie menace (lest they escape their solar system, overrun the galaxy, and wipe out humanity in galaxy-wide cycles of boom and bust and war.) I seem to have read other sequels which were written to solve the insoluble problems portrayed in the first novel. The sequels were never as good, and the solutions were sometimes rather contrived.* Furthermore, a key point of the first novels was the existence of terrible situations for which there is no solution–a useful moral lesson for we humans who live in a tragic world where this is sometimes the case. Attempting to abolish the tragedy of insoluble problems (see also Thomas Sowell et al on how life is all about trade-offs) sometimes seems like a childish evasion of reality. Better to stick with the more adult message of the original story.
* Remember Tom Godwin’s short story “The Cold Equations”? (Stowaway must be jettisoned out the airlock lest everyone die because there would not be enough food and oxygen to reach the destination.) A number of writers attempted to “prove” that the stowaway need not die, but all these were in my mind dishonest evasions of the conditions presented in the story and obvious fact that space ships only carried limited quantities of food and water and breathing air.
Oh, but surely the liberty-minded Jeff Bezos would never allow that! /sarc
I can imagine a day when the left has so much power that Amazon removes all politically incorrect authors from its library (leading to their removal from buyers’ Kindles) particularly such heretics as David Horowitz and Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
Now, I have been told that ebook library management apps such as calibre could be useful: You import your ebooks into the calibre library where they are safe from alteration or deletion by the ebook publisher. However, I have not investigated how apps like calibre deal with Amazon’s DRM and how this affects the accessibility of those ebooks and what readers can do.
As I understand it, many Western European countries do not keep (or keep secret) data on the ethnic identify of criminals. Supposedly the Scandinavian countries are particular stupid in this regard. (“If we don’t publish the data, nobody will know that we are betraying our own citizens, and it’s much more important to be Nice to savages.”)
How dare you suggest such a thing. And today, on the High Holy Day of the Remembrance of the Great Insurrection. For shame.
You underestimate their game. By keeping all such statistics under one umbrella of ‘citizen’ it enables them to use even greater power to suppress the ‘citizens’ by eroding their otherwise inalienable rights to free speech, weapons, fertilizer, etc.
Screw Amazon, your own local governments are engaged in such behavior in the libraries you pay for with your tax dollars. Slowly, gradually. Because the bindings are deteriorating and/or because “no one is reading them”. Try donating books to your library, good books, useful books, not the modern trash fiction. See what roadblocks they throw up.
Well, ebook vulnerabilities is a legitimate question deserving attention.
I have already written off libraries for donating books, and intend to find individuals and organizations that will have a serious interest.
I agree. But Amazon is its own entity. Somewhat. Though their abuse/rewriting of books to make them more politically correct needs to be addressed far more loudly and broadly. But then conservatives being the losers that they are…
Of course these tech monopolies are becoming governments themselves. Funny how the left screamed about the evils and dangers of monopolies (rightly so) while declaring monopolies where they didn’t actually exist (Microsoft at one time) but are all good with them now.
it’s much more important to be Nice to savages
They ARE acting normal
Would watch.
And Israel (aka Little Satan) is second for murder rate????
Based on that blatant political grandstanding, I question all the rest of it.
Two thoughts: Are terrorist crimes lumped into those numbers? What is the ethnic breakdown of offenders? Are they disproportionately Arab?
Would you watch it ironically or unironically?
pst314:
Even taking into account the higher rates of violence in the Arab population – it is still nothing like the rates of violent crime in Eastern Europe or other countries.
Highly unlikely.
King Tut?
*ducks*
He’s my favorite honkey so…?
I express a similar statement about diplomacy, which boils down to: “What cha gonna do about it.”
Check out the Dating Delusions channel on YT. Guy looks at women’s profiles on Bumble and other dating sites, especially those with anger issues, princess issues, and long lists of requirements in their men. These are from women 40+, many of them with clear issues with eating, yet they expect to attract someone to put up with their issues.
For balance, he includes one profile from a woman who does it right.
I don’t know if this is true — and I hope someone can set me straight on this — but I understand that homicides in Britain are only counted if someone is tried and found guilty. Is there a stat on the rate of suspicious murders in the UK?
You’re a wild and crazy guy.
How did I miss this hilarious crackpottery? Too loony even for the Guardian: Gwyneth Paltrow educates us: water just doesn’t like bad vibes and you should buy a water bottle containing a healing crystal.
Ironically, “novel” derives from the French or Italian, meaning “new”. I guess I’m actually reading “olds”.