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.
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Same. Even when it’s explained to me it makes no sense.
Even when it’s explained to me it makes no sense.
Other than the fact they haven’t and that some overpriced Apple POS will never be a piano, guitar, trumpet, oil painting, or other smashed thing that requires ability to operate/do. The best it can do is be a brummagem facsimile of those things, and do them badly.
“You are living in their forest, enjoy them.”
Where I live (Southwestern Ontario), we have a coyote problem. People’s pets are snatched daily from their backyards. Cue the idiots screaming, we’re to blame for taking away coyote habitat with development blah, blah, blah. You can explain until your blue in the face that Coyotes are not indigenous to this area. They migrated here in the 1920s and thrive because of the environment people have created. But despite the education: man bad, coyote good. Our coyotes aren’t even real coyotes, they’re coywolves–western coyotes that bred with eastern wolves to create what’s called the eastern coyote.
w00t! new word!
Oh, this f****** thing. This f******* thing right here. Not that I am sure of much of anything but I am convinced that there’s a concerted effort to create a coyote problem in the eastern US. It’s what undermines my irritation about this more innocuous deer thing. I first noticed it about a dozen years ago in the Orlando area when a coyote was reported on a local news site being spotted in a neighborhood not far from downtown.
They were never an issue in Florida. The story was (of course it keeps changing now) that the only coyotes in Florida had been brought to the state in the 1930’s or so by hunters for sport. Which itself sounds ridiculous as cattle ranching was, still somewhat is, a big business there…but whatever. I follow a number of community groups along the east coast of FL from Ft. Lauderdale to Vero to Cape Canaveral to St. Augustine.* All places where I have lived in or near for months or years. Every one of those groups has had this issue come up. Cape Canaveral was the most ridiculous. It’s a bloody island that had no access for coyotes except via man made causeways. The idea that there would have been any there when I lived there in the 80’s is ridiculous. Yet these people get all howler monkey about how “we moved into their habitat”. It’s all so bloody stupid. The damn things are indigenous to Mexico up into Alberta/etc. but not east of the Mississippi. If anything they are moving into our habitat. Not only do they kill indigenous prey but they compete with indigenous local predators even to the point of killing off the smaller ones, like foxes.
*Added: And outside of Florida, it has also come up here in north GA and in news groups that I follow in the Pittsburgh area.
Where I live (Southwestern Ontario), we have a coyote problem
I routinely get banned from community FB groups for commenting “Have you tried just shooting the damn things?”
Pity the show was ruined by Gabrielle and all the other tiny, willowy chicks who I was supposed to believe were badasses
If you can believe that Lucy Lawless is a badass Warrior Princess but find it a bridge too far that Renee O’Connor isn’t an Amazon, Michael Hurst would like a word with you.
JK Rowling spars with a parody troon.
Hurst was plausible as a scrappy dude who could hold his own. He wasn’t clingy and annoying, which utterly negates any badassery Gabrielle might have aspired to. And then there’s petit Hudson Leick, who though she had the right attitude, was too delicate to permit the suspension of disbelief.
Lawless had meat on her bones. The others did not.
[ Slurps coffee. ]
Some of the hair-tearing is overblown, certainly. But it’s not a good ad. Setting aside the alternative readings of the imagery, the reversed parodies, etc., the basic visual premise isn’t even conveyed very well. The various cultural objects and tools – things with which many viewers may feel some affinity – don’t appear to be being compressed or condensed into EXCITING NEW GREY BOX. They just appear to be being destroyed, as if obsolete.
Caution, graphic.
as I replied there, the original video is from 2019.
Did someone already post this? It seems a propos.
The Hollywood disease.
Remember this?
And then there’s whats-her-name in
FireflySerenity.That had me a tad confused as it says “3900 block of N Pittsburgh” but I see now it’s a tweet from the Chicago police. Well, that makes more sense. For now anyway.
w00t! new word!
HT H L Mencken, interesting etymology:
Pedestrian path overlap prevention system.
Related, “Karon Fisher is in jail tonight…”
I suspect, and someone here may have said something similar earlier, that the omgomgomg was initially planted by the marketers to generate this very buzz/attention that we are discussing. Especially among potential customers outside of their usual left-leaning advertising channels. And “conservatives” fell for it and amplified it.
I bet those people are just the lazy neighbors whose yards are eyesores of weeds, overgrown/dying shrubs, trees and peeling paint on the house. There’s probably a rusty car or pickup up on blocks on the side of the house or a boat on a trailer that hasn’t seen the water in 20 years.
I finally live in an area the deer feel free to wander through, but I don’t appreciate their snacking on my roses (so yeah, I spray, too). Their forest is over there, my home is here.
Well we are mostly country living but yes. These are the country equivalent of the city people who piss and moan about leaf blowers and other lawn maintenance equipment.
F***, I hate people. These specific animals not quite as much as the dumb, stupid b@st@rds who enable this crap with their voting habits and especially the “conservatives” who are to bloody chickensh*t to open their pie-holes and speak up about it.
“Have you tried just shooting the damn things?”
Well exactly. People didn’t have coyotes, raccoons and even squirrels wandering around unabated in their back yards in 20s and 30s for this very reason. More of the damage done by the Disneyfication of wildlife.
Now there’s a phrase with… resonance.
Think of the savings.
Maybe a co-marketing opportunity for the Squatty-potty people.
Think of the savings.
For the Amazon shopping list, get one today! Pairs nicely with the Toilet Meadow™ Organic Toilet Seat Cover and Toilet Tunes™ Speaker and Sanitizer!
Think of the savings.
I’m thinking “Spots on the Wall” by Wu Flung Poo if you crank up the rpms too high.
[ Returns triumphantly from expedition of oenophilic investigation. ]
Will a glass of wine enable me to maintain equanimity while reading this thread?
Moderately amusing, but outclassed by 101 Unuseless Japanese Inventions which were all actually built.
Would that be from Mencken’s The American Language?
Strangely enough, very few of my nerd friends were at all bothered by a skinny little waif effortlessly killing dozens of beefy berserkers.
One glass of wine may not be enough.
Not specifically, he used it frequently, no doubt can be found somewhere in the 600 pages of “A Mencken Chrestomathy”.
Chloe. Also a plausible badass.
She was no ordinary skinny little waif. She had been modified and deranged by bad people. That made her a secret weapon, and so she was plausible.
How it works.
A glass?
Seems improbable.
Try multiple.
Zoe Washburn was a plausible human badass. River Tam was a manmade thing, a telepathic psychopath.
Yeah but Lynda Carter, hubba hubba.
Yep
Think of the savings
Think of the seriously scraped scrotum
It has to be said – band name
Hat, coat, bandages…
A glass?
Seems improbable.
Try multiple.
Bottles
Is this at all accurate?
Like a lot of people I know I spent years (very) poor and still managed not to start killing people.
You’re not alone in that respect.
But as we’ve seen many times, progressives tend to repeat hopelessly unrealistic assumptions about crime and criminals. To an extent one might call perverse. For the most part, these assumptions do not seem amenable to factual correction, even when expressed by the criminals themselves.
As others have noted, saying “poverty causes crime” seems a bit like saying “car crashes cause drunk driving.” It’s also something of a slight to people of very modest means who manage not to burgle their neighbours, or sucker-punch strangers for amusement, or murder random people and then pick anything of value from the victim’s dying body.
And the propagation of this conceit – say, in universities – can lead to utterly perverse worldviews. Worldviews one might regard as morally disgusting.
See also this, in which maintaining the contrivance, the pretence of elevation, entails a kind of neuroticism.
I’m sorry, I have to step into the bathroom and shave off my beard because apparently I’ve slipped into the Mirror Universe where I’m defending 5’4″ female action heroes.
too delicate to permit the suspension of disbelief
You…you do realize we’re talking about “suspension of disbelief” in a franchise that routinely featured Kevin Sorbo punching pink balloons covered in K-Y lube, supporting cast named Falafel and Salmoneous, Karl Urban in diapers, and the Widow Twanky?
I’m curious where you stand on Secret Agent Cody Banks.
Lucy Lawless, OTOH, looked like she might really have been landing hard blows
This is show where the goons will run up to the heroes flailing their obviously dull swords madly, and then stop and fling their arms out to the side so the actor has a wide open safe field to deliver a punch that whooshes a foot away from them, causing them to leap backwards on to the mats hidden under the dry leaves. The Three Musketeers it ain’t.
Chloe. Also a plausible badass.
My days of not taking you seriously are certainly coming to a middle. To the Agony Booth with you!
very few of my nerd friends were at all bothered by a skinny little waif effortlessly killing dozens of beefy berserkers
That’s because there’s generally some form of explanation for it within the universe. In Xena’s case, it’s because she’s actually a demigod like Hercules. For Gabrielle and Callisto, it’s because they were invested with power by the gods. The problem arises when you have characters like, say, Sarah Connor or Elizabeth Jennings, who are presented as being impossibly strong, skilled or invulnerable in ways that the backstory doesn’t account for.
And also because nerds are all horny teenagers who get a frisson up their spines at the idea of a badass muscle mommy gf.
I was waiting for this. Heh.
I have no idea what this refers to, and yet I sort of don’t want to spoil the mystery.
To tell if our relationship’s sororal or sapphistical
That one’s a great example of the inability of most fans to distinguish between an actor and their character. Lawless insists that Gabrielle and Xena were gay lovers and “are married” after the end of the series. The actual writers and producers, on the other hand, have always been pretty clear that that wasn’t the case.
What happened was that when they found out that Xena was the number one show in women’s prisons and the LGBTQWERTY cohort had latched on to it, they started slipping in scenes intentionally to tweak those viewers (there’s an episode where Xena and Gabrielle literally drop the soap while bathing in a hot tub). Because in 1997, “we’re going to poke fun at the fact that bunch of weirdos and/or criminals are taking our action comedy show way too seriously” was something you could get away with.
Man, I haven’t thought about this show in years. I really wish the Joxur Takes a Level in Badass script had gotten filmed.
If you’re poor and criminally inclined, you commit blue-collar crimes such as burglary, assault, carjacking, murder.
If you’re middle-class and criminally inclined, you commit fraud and embezzlement.
If you’re in the 1% and are criminally inclined, you engage in insider trading and securities fraud and all sorts of other crimes that the rest of us don’t have the ability to commit.
And yet the only crime statistics that seem to matter are the crimes committed by the poor. Those crimes are scarier because they can involve bodily harm and property damage.
Fraud and the other crimes also negatively affect the populace but the effects are distributed and invisible, so they don’t go into the stats.
I’m just going to leave that there, I think.
I have a question for you. Should I allow myself to be taken out for a pub lunch again?
I mean, I won’t be corrupted by the pampering, will I? You will still hold me in the highest esteem?
I remember that, but didn’t accept it, as a more muscular girl would have been far more plausible. But Hollywood wants its cute girlish protagonists because us men like the way they look.
And yet these nerds think of themselves as super-rational beings.
Short answer, yes.
Longer answer, yes, I too have no idea other then Lynda Carter what any of this refers to, but leave the phone, I am not sure this TV/movie superhero is good for anyone.
I have decided, selflessly and heroically, to risk it.
[ Books table, prepares self for heavy gorging. ]
Meanwhile, WTF Ireland?
Great-great grandpa Muldoon must be spinning in his grave like a runaway gyroscope.
Bambi Thug tells us why she is special.
Even weirder example: The female science fiction fans I knew in the 70’s who were obsessed with gay Star Trek fan fiction, which they called K/S (for Kirk/Spock). Lots of extremely explicit sado-masochistic sex scenes between all the male Star Trek stars, but especially Kirk and Spock. Creepy and disturbing to be given, un-asked-for, such a glimpse into someone’s dark obsessions. Some of the fans even insisted that the evidence for such relationships could be discerned in the TV shows, demonstrating the fan-world tendency to confuse wish with reality. So much, again, for those intellectually superior nerds.
Enjoy your pub lunch.
Back at the Eurovision Song contest, of course the winner was “non-binary” but “Swiss Rapper”? Right…
Enjoy the videos. Of course the Israeli singer got booed because these are classy people.
Said – band name
It Has To Be Said – album name…can’t decide if it should be the debut album or perhaps the third one. Could work as a come-back album name tho.
It Has To Be – racehorse name. Possibly drop it to just Has To Be.
You’ve got to have serious doubts about everyone running this contest.
Well considering what they did to Ann-Margaret…
Here’s a couple of reasons
But if they are supposed to be Amazon women, ought they to have only one reason chest-wise?
Well when you consider that they now have Australia in Europe…maybe they meant Austria?
Me neither but this is exactly the sort of slippery slope a society falls into once it tolerates explosions going boom in a vacuum.
It has to be said – band name
Ah, I screwed up the grammatical construction there. I was considering Seriously Scraped Scrotum as the candidate band name.
I see you’ve been busy in my absence.
It is pronounced Sa-Eed, a rapper out of the UAE who will be entered in the next Eurovision along with the European countries of Australia and Israel, and I thought Brexit would have made the UK a non European country also.
I see you’ve been busy in my absence.
Someone has to maintain the disrepute.
AI meets The Who.
Female super-heroes: it is ok if the woman is some sort of demi-god like WW, but if you consider Black Widow, she gets thrown 30 ft and slams into a wall and just gets up. She would be dead. She has no super powers. Oh well–if you accept The Hulk you really can’t complain.
There are poor populations that do not commit crime. I was dirt poor in college. Could not afford movies or eating out at all. Interestingly the black population in let’s say 1940 when racism was truly bad did NOT commit an unusual number of murders, and had low % single mothers. Perhaps those two things are related.
You will leave the keys to the cellar within easy reach?
Don’t care.
Only special in the sense of “special needs”. Needs massive dose of Haldol.
Did anyone figure out where he hides the good toothpicks?
Did anyone figure out where he hides the good toothpicks?
The last Swiss Army knife with a blade in the UK is chained to a metal fitting in the concrete at the end of the bar. You have to whittle your own out of the bar stool.
We have an Agony Booth?
Was about to ask how a knife without a blade could be a knife but then I remembered the era we’re living through.
In other news…
Outrage as usual ensues.
Bambi Thug on repeat.
Openly. As if there might otherwise be doubt.
Or, cross-dressing father of three not in fact a woman, bad wig notwithstanding.
Somewhat related.
The words “basic decency” have taken on absurdist connotations that I’m guessing weren’t intended.
Was about to ask how a knife without a blade could be a knife…
That’s not a knife.
That would be even worst than Vogon poetry.
And in entertainment news.
Would you play this game?
Dr Seuss does Tolkien
You really feel that bass.
Unfortunately, there are people out there who will think this is real and will want it.
Quelle surprise.
Meanwhile at a graduation…
Oh, well that explains it.
Stewardesses need to issued tranquilizer darts.
When you’ve a moment could you poke the Link-No-Mor (Ausf. G)?
Spasiba…
As previously mentioned, am planning UK trip. Latest customer review info re: possible lodging near Oxford: “Small but comfortable rooms, with large soap dispensers.”
Ok. I’m just a provincial American. What does this mean?
Shippers are the worst part of any fandom, which is why girls shouldn’t be allowed unless they swear an oath to renounce slashfic and all its evil works.
[ feels chill of horror run down spine ]
That might imply that every fandom has shippers. Doctor Who? Battlestar Galactica? Lost in Space? Starsky and Hutch? Sherlock Holmes? All Creatures Great and Small? My God, what ugly madness have I escaped only by accident?
Either that’s the nicest thing they can say about the establishment, or it’s upstairs from the Wrestle a Live Nude Student emporium . 😮
I hate those places. You never end up wrestling the student you imagined.
Considering the state of academia, should I have written “Wrestle a Live Nude Oxford Don”?
The joke came to mind because I’d just listened to a Michael Franks album, one track of which was “Wrestle a Live Nude Girl”. Very strange.