Friday Ephemera (720)
On cyclists, an illustrated poem. || The Electrocula, 1962. || Careful who you hire. Related. || 131,000 historical maps. || He’s 43 and entering his Club Ho phase. || Alcohol may help. || The progressive retail experience, parts 549 and 550. || Road obstructed by wrong ‘uns, cue dairy product. || The Greens. || Big gulp. || Glittering, dazzling, etc, and so forth. || Go with the black number, it’s slimming. || Hear the voices of the marginalised. || Hard to know where to start. || It was the Seventies, everyone was doing it. || Incoming. || Incoming 2. || A meal and a show, they said. || “Tasty and versatile python meat.” (h/t, Rich Rostrom) || Progressive anthropology. Related. || I’m sensing a little tension. || Dumbass detected. || Man with fake nails issues ultimatum. || And finally, no, you first.
If inclined, you can follow me on X / Twitter.
To register with the blog and thereby enable extra commenting options – including @username mentions and live notifications – scroll down to the black ‘Meta’ box at the very bottom of the page. It’s free and quite painless.
Grew up and became the IHADSS.
The side of MeToo which feminists pretend does not exist.
Gentlemen should always consider cups, and I’m not talking about a red Solo cup, a Dixie cup, or a coffee cup, but you sure as hell don’t want to drink out of it.
Pedalast.
A neologism I can get behind.
About $10,000 in current dollars.
They must have The Amazing Criswell on staff.
The ‘off’ button would be my suggestion.
Road repairs are the worst.
The elite.
Hear the voices of the marginalised.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jun/17/hamtramck-michigan-muslim-council-lgbtq-pride-flags-banned
“Did you know that people quite like being who they are?”
Man with fake nails issues ultimatum.
Speaking of men with fake nails.
I’m dying to know what the prompt was.
The Left has absolutely failed to take into account the strength of religious belief and community. They may have thought that the 3rd-worlders, having arrived in the West, would eventually assimilate into the Left and leave behind all that Islam nonsense. Instead, the Muslims actually do believe that Allah wants them to rule the world, and the cohesion they get out of that shared purpose is near unshakeable.
Further, their strict religious observance keeps them from mingling overmuch with secularists and adopting their ideas and habits. Abstaining from alcohol means that Muslims exclude themselves from a lot of socialization — sure, you can go to the pub with friends and have a Coke instead of a pint of ale, but within the hour the tipsy ones are laughing at stuff the sober ones don’t find funny, and that gets old really fast.
The sharp contrast in sexual mores also means that Muslims are loath to moderate — you can either be a good Muslim woman or a ho, as they see it, so outside a few rebellious teen girls, the Muslims will stick with their own morality, thank you very much, thus reinforcing the boundaries of the community.
As that dude observes, they are still reproducing, while the decadent West has utterly deprioritized colonizing the future. They only accepted Western law because they had to, because they were in the minority. As soon as they have the numbers to replace human law with the law of Allah, they will do it, because they have a religious duty to do so.
Here in the U.S. we have mostly Latinos, who aren’t attached to their Catholicism in the same way as Muslims are to Islam — and many are interested in Protestantism — so they’re not about to impose religious tyranny on us or any other kind of unified theory of governance.
“Tasty and versatile python meat.”
On what scale are they farmed in Asia? How many pythons are on a “farm”, and how many pounds of meat can you get from one python? So they eat one big meal and take a few days to digest it, compared to a vegan cow that has to eat a (metaphorical) ton of vegetation every day to stay alive. What do you feed pythons, and how sustainable and all that crap is the python food? I think pythons are meat eaters so unless the farmed pythons are scavenging rats and other rodent vermin, you’re buying meat from someone else to feed your danged pythons – how is that sustainable food of the future?? Just eat the damned rats and verminous rodents – they reproduce like crazy and eat anything. Seems as though that would be more sustainable than a freakin higher predator. Maybe there’s a reason agricultural science has overlooked pythons as food of the future. Morons.
See what I mean? They have zero clue who Muslims are and what motivates them. Absolutely no clue.
Hear the voices of the marginalised
There’s a rule of thumb in sociology that says all it takes to start a revolution in a country is 10% of the population to be on board with it.
There’s another rule of thumb that says once the Muslim population of a country reaches 10%, sharia law is inevitable.
In Canada we’re at 11.5% Muslim. Draw your own conclusions.
Speaking of men with fake nails.
“This is child abuse”
No, it isn’t. He’s not trying to breastfeed that obviously premature baby. The conventional wisdom on preemies, that they need to be whisked into an incubator and kept away from the environment, was dead wrong. Bare skin-to-skin contact for a preemie stimulates oxytocin and endorphin production and has such a dramatic effect on the development of the immune system and ultimately survival rates that keeping the preemie on the mother’s chest as long as possible during the day is now standard practice. If the mother isn’t capable, the father will work just as well.
I don’t know who the dude is, presumably the father (in which case there’s a whole bunch of other things to be concerned about), but what’s in that video is nothing but good for the baby.
you can either be a good Muslim woman or a ho, as they see it, so outside a few rebellious teen girls, the Muslims will stick with their own morality
That may be what they tell you, but there’s a reason honour killings were such a huge problem in Canada before the media just stopped reporting them altogether. The current practice appears to be forcibly sending the wayward girl back to the mother country with a male relative, who will restore the family honour once they get there.
“On cyclists, an illustrated poem”
OOoh…
Never had python before, but I have tried rattlesnake and gator. They don’t have a strong taste and you have to spice ’em up real good Cajun style.
*applauds*
Morning, all.
It does have a certain… charm.
As noted before on the subject of People Of The Pedal,
It occurs to me that if I suddenly became aware that I was needlessly delaying and frustrating large numbers of people, and had been doing so for some time, I would most likely be rather embarrassed – and apologetic.
And yet.
Yes.
For the amateur / dabbler, I bet you are in best form around 5 to 6 cans in, just like 8 ball, duck shooting etc.
THAT.
Well, when we’re on a country road and see up ahead a horse rider or a tractor, this doesn’t elicit any ill-feeling. In fact, in general, I’m mildly pleased by the sight of people riding horses, and, as we pass, there’s usually a reciprocal courtesy wave. A pleasing nod of acknowledgement.
But when cyclists hove into view, and especially groups of cyclists, there’s often a small heart-sinking effect. And this anticipation of irritation and twattery is not entirely unfounded.
As I’ve said before, if you were to suggest that a significant number of motorists are aggravating and inconsiderate, this would be unlikely to provoke much denial from other motorists, who doubtless spend a fair amount of time faced with this unhappy reality. But to suggest that many cyclists are also aggravating and inconsiderate is more likely to result in denial – often quite indignant denial – from other cyclists.
My impression is, in this regard, there’s an asymmetry.
For illustrative purposes.
I want to see them in the same room.
Yes, I suspect the meetings could get lively.
Something to think about, if not, necessarily, to be pleased about.
That’s the guy who invented the term Kafkatrapping.
What’s striking, I think, is the vaguely scandalous air of even thinking in such terms. Acknowledging variables that one very much isn’t supposed to consider, and which seem so far removed from the glib witterings of our institutions and the people they tend to employ.
She says she has ‘coping skills’. That’s the opposite of coping.
On cyclists, an illustrated poem
Art worth appreciating.
I would send it to a former friend – a London Metro cop who has his own cycling YT channel – but he recently showed his true colors when he started agitating against “the apartheid state of Israel” that “stole the land” of the Palestinians and has no issue with his radicalized NIH doctor wife taking their school age kids to
anti-Zionismpro-Hamas rallies, the same woman who posts American rapper protest songs with “fuck tha police” and railings against “White Colonizers” on her social media. Which is all made funnier by the fact he’s a White boy from Sussex and she is an Indian Muslim whose family hails from Kerala.This is all to show that cyclists can be cunts for other reasons, as well.
Well, indeed. I mean, if a colleague or customer fails to indulge your pretensions of themness, and if this immediately results in walking out of the workplace and “spiralling” into depression, and then making attention-seeking TikTok videos about how traumatic this one word was, and about having to talk yourself into turning up for work the next day… coping isn’t the word.
And as many others have noted, in the workplace or more generally, who the hell has time for this self-absorbed twattery?
Again,
Unless, of course, every employer, and every workmate, and every customer, wants to be held to ransom with workplace meltdowns if the absurd made-up rules, which can change arbitrarily, at seemingly any time, aren’t obeyed.
Again, if I suddenly became aware that I was needlessly delaying and frustrating large numbers of people, and had been doing so for some time, I would most likely be rather embarrassed – and apologetic.
Say, if I and my companions were cycling two-abreast or even three-abreast on a country road with a 60mph speed limit, resulting in a long backlog of traffic, many dozens of cars, with drivers unable to safely overtake and therefore being forced to travel at barely a third of that 60mph. Without acknowledgement and for long stretches of time.
I don’t think this is something about which I could be, at best, indifferent. While continuing to do the same damn thing.
Marge wants a cup.
Well if the media no longer reports them I guess they don’t happen any more, right?
The difficulty with this is that “merit” has been redefined primarily to include things such as race, sex (real or imagined), political leanings, and not ability, past performance, or IQ.
Were this not evident, we wouldn’t have things like plagiarists running universities, many current politicians, billionaires with harebrained schemes to control weather, Taylor Swift, or the Kardashians.
And country roads tend to be narrower in the UK than in the US, which aggravates the situation from my US perspective.
One American writer, on the knuckle-whitening experience of driving around England: “…and just when you think the road can’t get any narrower, it gets narrower. And then you suddenly see a lorry coming at you at 40mph.”
Thanks. I don’t read esr as often as I should.
Yes, and my own general view of cyclists is based on encounters on country roads. In the city, I have seen a few merrily whizz through red lights, as if exempt from the Highway Code and the laws of physics, but for the most part the aggravation is a country road thing, where cyclists abound and appear emboldened.
Currently fending off another barrage of spam. If anyone’s comment fails to materialise, do let me know and I’ll fetch a broom handle and poke at the spam filter.
Our two lane blacktops here in the States are wider than typical country roads in the UK–and they have wide margins on either side instead of centuries-old stone walls flanking what used to be cart lanes.
I do occasionally encounter groups of cyclists on two land blacktops in the far suburbs, and even when they are in single file (which I admit is most common) they do cause traffic backups, and I keep wondering: If they are cycling for exercise, why not stick to less traveled roads? In fact, a cyclist was killed in front of a friend’s house when he hit a stone and fell under the wheels of a passing truck–when he could have easily used the grid of side streets to get his exercise or get to his destination. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
While in the city, I have seen cyclists get a “boost” by grabbing the rear fender of a passing car. Even pass cars on the right as they are preparing to turn, which seems suicidal.
I should point out that I do occasionally see considerate cyclists who, for instance, wave backlogged traffic past them when they see a safe opportunity. On two occasions that I can recall, the group of cyclists actually stopped and moved over to allow the jam to clear. A jam they’d created, but still.
But this is not a typical experience. Displays of indifference or self-absorption – or petty, low-level spite – seem rather more common.
8^) Thanks for the new word – ‘captiousness’
It does, I think, describe an attitude very much in fashion.
Are you familiar with Rimsky & Handkerchief?
https://youtu.be/hM1eBLWFSSw
Heh. Though I still wonder why some people seem unable to turn their phone cameras to a landscape orientation.
Gen-Z employee: there was one at the bank. Pretty asian girl with huge cleavage and tattoos on neck and arms. Urgh. Same bank has a diversity hire from Africa (immigrant) who took an hour to add my name to an account and it still was wrong and I had to come back 2 more times to fix it.
I’ll just leave this here.
Because I can, that’s why.
I’ve had crocodile with mango chutney (in Australia) and it was ok as a novelty but not for everyday consumption. Plus I doubt I could cook it into an edible form. The problem with pythons as food is they are predators, so you have to feed them meat. Plus, it takes one years to get big. Third problem: they can climb anything and escape, becoming a risk to wildlife. Another stupid idea.
We have long been warned that various toxins are concentrated as one moves up the food chain, so that, for example, tuna has more mercury than does herring. I wonder what similar issues might relate to land-dwelling predators in comparison to herbivores.
I’m still struggling with the whole mango chutney thing.
Ooh, 23°.
[ Sits in garden, waits for squirrels. ]
Could your Green and Pleasant Land do with a little bit of global warmening?
David,
I believe that clip was filmed for portrait-orientation social media viewing on smart phones. It’s the world we live in now.
[ Continues raging against aesthetically inapt camera orientation. ]
I forgot how much I disliked that show. Not that I ever watched it but the promos were ridiculous. She always looked so incredibly awkward doing athletic things. I really never understood the appeal. Charlie’s Angels or Police Woman or whatever were at least somewhat believable as far as the women’s physical movements went. WW looked like every scene was done in one take.
As a very long-time cyclist, few things piss me off more than other cyclists behaving boorishly.
Also, I will be cycling a bit in western England in a few months. I PROMISE to be a considerate gentleman.
Solid theme tune, though.
[ Fetches binoculars, fault-listing notepad. ]
Oh, and speaking of Wonder Woman, I’d forgotten about this.
The perennial question, why would anyone willingly attend such a “performance”?
I really never understood the appeal.
Here’s a couple of reasons…
And, if lively enough, deadly.
Yeah but Lynda Carter, hubba hubba.
[ Keeps spray bottle on hot standby. ]
Silicon Valley and autism?
I see what you did there.
It sounds plausible but doesn’t take into account the massive expansion of the welfare state starting in the mid-1960s.
I don’t read esr as often as I should
Well, he also wrote The Cathedral and the Bazaar, so I’ve always taken everything he says with a mountain of salt. As the last six months or so have demonstrated, open source turns out to, well, not work.
Continues raging against aesthetically inapt camera orientation
There are multiple domestic Chinese TV shows – professionally produced – that are directed and shot in 9:16 format for viewing on smartphones because that’s where they’re consumed.
I really never understood the appeal
People really don’t grasp the impact the 1966 Batman TV show had. It was massively popular and massively profitable, and the goofy deadpan tongue-in-cheek tone impacted everything WB/DC did for decades afterwards. The first season of Wonder Woman (set in WWII) never gets aired, but it’s very obvious there. And there’s a lot of it in the 1978 Superman movies, even after Puzo’s script doctoring.
I still haven’t watched the iPad video that seemingly everyone hates.
[ Watches video. ]
Oh. It’s… er, open to interpretations that I’m guessing weren’t intended.
It brought to mind the recent, eye-widening, marketing misfires by John Lewis.
Apropos of nothing I’ve been watching a bunch of Korean TV lately. It’s charming and completely free of the West’s current neuroses, although certainly formulaic (so much so Viki made an entire series lampooning the fact).
I find the production values interesting. There’s virtually no sets, everything is filmed on location, lighting is very natural and I’m pretty sure they’re filming at 24fps, all of which makes it feel like you’re watching a film rather than a TV show. And since it’s Korea, everyone has the exact Samsung flagship phone which is the size of an iPad.
There are apparently Korean version of Suits, Leverage, and Life on Mars and I am now obsessed with tracking these down.
A few years ago, we went through a phase of watching Return of Superman, a Korean reality show in which ill-prepared husbands were deprived of their wives and tasked with solo childcare. The episodes with the triplets, Daehan, Manse and Minguk, were quite entertaining.
Damn it, David, get yer nan home, she got loose again!
…she got loose again!
They need to reopen the Tower of London for shitheels like that.
How to create a low-trust society, part 246.
Well as I said there were other attractive women, many in fact, in action shows back then. Yes, she had the physical features but I can’t think of a more Amazon looking one. I mean, if that’s your thing…I promise not to draw any unspoken assumptions…
I was a huge Batman fan. Campy fun. WW just seemed dumb. Maybe I’m gay. Who knows. Not that there’s anything wrong with it. I kinda doubt it though. But those Amazon…whatever…
Something I’ve noticed in recent protests is how many of the women behave. Boys growing up constantly tussle, fight, climb things, and challenge each other (“bet you can’t hit that tree with a rock”, “bet you can’t jump over this fence”) so by the time they are adults they have a grasp of the true level of their own strength vs other guys and realize that fighting another guy would mostly just get both of them injured with no clear winner. Guys therefore learn to control their anger, at least suburban guys. Girls do not do this stuff and worse they are spoiled because guys around them have been taught to never hit girls. Girls further do not grasp just how much stronger guys are. In protests, I think this leads to them raging all out of proportion to their actual physical strength and going nuts when a cop just picks them up and carries them away, like they can’t believe it. Or hitting a cop who turns and knocks them out with a single punch (vid I’ve seen). It also spills over domestically–women are more likely to be the initiator of a physical altercation with husband/boyfriend. Lesbian couples suffer more physical fights than hetero couples, excepting the henchlesbians of course.
Heh.
I’m guessing no cars of any kind will be permitted come the glorious revolution.
A “Christian minister” and a retired teacher”. Both female. Maybe senile, definitely demented.
I’m guessing no cars of any kind will be permitted come the glorious revolution.
Typo, illiterate, or were they driving at excessive speed and last minute braking to scare the rozzers to break through the lines?
“Other than having the snot beat out of us for no reason whatsoever things were swell. You weren’t there man!” Ole added.
And I noticed some time ago that he tends to express his opinions with an air of absolute certainty.
Well, there were a couple of things many male viewers enjoyed.
EDIT: Mr. Muldoon beat me to the punch. Oh well.
The highlight was squishing the emoji.
By Jove, I think he’s got it!
As I said earlier at Insty, I didn’t get what the omgomgomg was about. And I’m more conscious than most people , “conservatives” even, about these sometimes not so subtle cultural brainwashing games than most. I was waiting for something else and all I could come up with was the rainbow thing. Not too long ago there were a lot of videos about crushing stuff that were kinda cool in an early-adolescent sense. I didn’t view those as being anti-whatever-was-being-crushed. I just saw it as saying they compressed all that stuff into one device. Which, granted, is an old point but not completely out of the ballpark.
I get where one can see it as offensive or whatever but the OMGOMGOMG HOW CAN YOU NOT SEE IT YOU MUST BE A COMMIE bit from more than a few people is…odd. Almost in an overcompensating way.
While we’re in the gutter of meretricious appeals to men’s baser natures…
…Who’s interested in a Peter Jackson adaptation of Bored of the Rings?
“Do you like what you doth see? said the voluptuous elf maiden…but first you must give me your Ring. I must have the Ring…”
this is passive-aggressive narcissism on steriods. This pink-haired freak is the cry-bully always at your office door (when you’re the supervisor) with the latest whine about whomever is on her sh*tlist (and it’s almost always a her. I know a project leader saddled with a trans-identified man who acts just like Ms. Pink). She get’s unfriended on FB by the gal two cubicles over? She wants YOU to “talk to her” about the hostile work environment that creates … and when you don’t do it, she runs straight to HR to complain about you.
Damn, I’m so glad I retired 4 years ago.
Heh.
Even simpler, fundamentally I know “trans” girls aren’t girls.
So…if I might share this…my wife posted to a FB group up here in red, red, red Appalachia, a cute photo of one of the previously mentioned deer poking its head around a tree (attached) and…oh, I knew there was going to be trouble for her saying this… felt it in my bones…mentioned that she might need to reapply Deer Scram because the recent rains may have washed the previous stuff out. Well, the outrage. She dared to clarify (I should have warned her) that she loved the deer but just wanted to protect her plants. No. Can’t have that:
The thing that strikes me about this crap isn’t the nut job BSCW and AWFLs, it’s the cowardice of the many conservative…”conservative” people up here in red, red, red flyover country. I know they’re out there. I see and even speak with many on occasion around here. They big, big talkers in their safe spaces at the barber shop and hardware store, on more specifically conservative posts on FB, and (I presume) church. However lacking any critical mass of other conservatives, they’re scarce as hen’s teeth in a more hostile environment. But hey, get a lynch mob going over some stupid crushing device advert for a new iPad and up they pop again.
I’m not a commie, and I don’t understand the controversy. It was uncreative, and painfully sloooow to get to the obvious conclusion. It’s that it?
Help…?
Floop said the tar pit.
“Floop suggested the tar pit” perfectly summarizes my attitude towards Peter Jackson further milking the Tolkien franchise. The Hobbit was pretty bad. But now The Search for Gollum? Goddam. Perhaps I should take up scrabble.
I can only bow in admiration to this level of creative spite.
It’s been rather a while since I read the book.
I walked out halfway through the second of the The Lord of the Rings movies – Jackson’s . . . emendations . . . became too much to tolerate. Didn’t bother with the next movie & had no interest in whatever he did with The Hobbit.
Brilliant.
Lucy Lawless, OTOH, looked like she might really have been landing hard blows against burly dudez. She looked like she loved every minute of it, too. Pity the show was ruined by Gabrielle and all the other tiny, willowy chicks who I was supposed to believe were badasses.
Around here they all enjoy the challenge of cycling up the 2-lane canyon roads, which mostly have wide enough shoulders to accommodate them.
On the way down they can manage a goodly pace, but they’re going so fast they don’t dare ride in the margins, which contain enough debris that it would send them flying if they hit even a small rock. So they ride in the middle of the lane. Yippee.