Friday Ephemera (729)
It’s all about a heightened awareness of the road. || Welding helmet of note. || Massage, drumming, and fire, together at last. || Skillz. || Not skillz. || I have concerns. || Assisting the encore, or lady not left hanging. || Surprisingly calm, considering. || Some clutter, toilet needs attention, £80,000. || I’m told it can get competitive. || Parenting. || Night vision. || New Doctor Who monster detected. || Scenes of duck up-picking. || And in pub-purchasing news. || The progressive retail experience, parts 566, 567, and 568. || Airbending attempted. || At last, the statistics of simultaneous blinking. || A little kicking required, methinks. || Incoming. || Incoming 2. || Lost flock of sheep found. || He had four hamsters in his pants, not gerbils, as stated. || And finally, fear not, he has jugs and jugs of it.
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Lobachevsky’s Eyes, Roger Zelazny
Lobachevsky alone has looked on Beauty bare.
She curves in here, she curves in here. She curves out there.
Her parallel clefts come together to tease
In un-callipygianous-wise;
With feweer than one hundred eighty degrees
Her glorious triangle lies.
Her double-trumpet symmetry Riemann did not court-
His tastes to simpler-curvedness, the buxom Teuton sort!
An ellipse is fine for as far as it goes,
But modesty, away!
If I’m going to see Beauty without her clothes
Give me hyperbolas any old day.
The world is curves, I’ve heard it said,
And straightway in it nothing lies.
This then my wish, before I’m dead:
To look through Lobachevsky’s eyes.
(found in Doorways in the Sand and To Spin is Miracle Cat and Nine Black Doves: The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny, Vol 5.)
If you like Zelazny, go buy The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny. Nesfa Press, hardcover and ebook editions.
Future scholars will decry the lunacy that pollutes academia, saying “There were some people doing solid honest research, but you’ll have to wade through rivers of sewage to find the gems of knowledge.”
Lobachevsky’s Eyes, Roger Zelazny
Lobachevsky, Tom Lehrer,
Remember Nora the socialist, the deep thinker from Quebec? The one who tells us that a third conviction for car theft shouldn’t result in incarceration, or any meaningful impediment to further, bolder car theft? Because the victims aren’t actually victims and can always “get new cars”?
One for her, I think.
Not entirely unrelated.
Well aren’t you the optimistic one…
That.
Note that Mr Karakatsanis is a civil rights lawyer and the author of Copaganda.
Which brought to mind this:
From this, which some readers may have missed.
is there anything Project 2025 can’t do?
You had my curiosity. Now you have my attention.
What I see is lots of time devoted to vacuuming out pet hair, crumbs and spare change to keep that channel working.
Darleen is wise.
[ Passes Darleen enormous feathered headdress, denoting High Oracle status. ]
[ Adds flashing fairy lights. ]
[ Fetches glitter. ]
There is such a thing as too much glitter.
from the link:
Somewhat like the sainted Trayvon Martin, perhaps.
It’s important to be understanding of human nature: We all are impulsive at times, eating a second donut, buying something we don’t need, robbing a pedestrian, carjacking a young mother, shooting someone who annoyed us.
The demand that we celebrate the rainbow leads to absurdities. Ok, fine, gay people exist. Who cares anymore? Kids do not need to know all the details. We even spare kids the details of hetero sex because they can’t handle it. Nudists also exist and probably outnumber trans–do we need a nudist month? There are lots of other kinks–must we celebrate them all? urghle
I knew he was beatified but missed the canonisation.
You take that back. You take that back right now.
[ Adds baubles, more glitter, to Darleen’s imposing headdress. ]
Mind the chandelier. You may have to stoop a little.
Depends on the church.
[preens … walks slowly down staircase]
Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my closeup …
…or is that Busby Berkeley?
Hush, child.
It’s not, I grant you, altogether practical, but somehow you make it work.
[ Researches cost of having ceilings raised. ]
Obligatory reference.
But that will summon the spirit of Carmen Miranda.
Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my closeup …
…or is that Busby Berkeley?
Or Carol Burnett, perhaps.
The demand that we celebrate the rainbow leads to absurdities.
No one captures that zeitgeist quite like Norm Macdonald.
[ Orders wind machine. ]
Initially read ‘plants’ as ‘pants’.
Nah.
This is the obligatory reference.
Ready when you are C.B.
You take that back right now.
Good Lord! Glitter costs more than black truffles and Sevruga caviar. It better be FABULOUS!
Oh FFS. Everyone knows he was an “indigenous” two spirit.
This bovine excrement oozes out in public every ten years or so, after the last “OMG Abe was GHEY!” flames across the media, is summarily dispensed with, and goes back to sleep until another group of willing ninnies is ready to freak out.
Lincoln was straight. End of story.
Biden shits his pants, Biden says stupid things, the media gets exposed for the lying scum that they have been for…decades, Kamala Harris is a bloody moron and nobody remotely serious thinks she’s a viable alternative, Biden says stupid shit again, Kamala says stupid shit when nobody is even paying attention, Biden says stupid shit at NATO conference, Biden calls Zelensky ‘Putin’, the media gets exposed…yet again…for being lying liars who even lie about their lying lies, Biden shits his pants again…Biden embarrasses himself at his “Big Boy” presser, the media and Hollywood try to dump him but fail to convince the idiots that they have brainwashed so well, the string pullers having played every tiresome song in their playbook…
HEY EVERYONE! REMEMBER WHEN WE MADE UP ANACHRONISTIC BS ABOUT LINCOLN BEING GAY? HE WAS GAY YOU KNOW!!!!
IFHE. It’s all so…
About that “Abe was GHEY!” documentary. Meet Serious Scholar #3.
The last one I remember was “Abe was gay because he sometimes shared a bed with another man”. After which it was pointed out that in many circumstances people had to double up due to the shortage of beds.
As for this one, in prior centuries it was not uncommon for men to use the word “love” when speaking to or about a good friend.
Related: I believe racialists will point to a historical description of someone as “black” although at the time “black” meant “black hair”. Or, on occasion, blackened faces of coal miners and game poachers. And the very white author Patrick O’Brian described himself as “black, choleric and married.”
Carmen Miranda is looking a bit seedy.
This one really…high school championship meets, traveling out of town/state, 4 guys/girls to a room. 2 guys/girls in each bed. Late 1970’s. I know I ain’t gay because there’s no f’n way I would put up with women were it not for the curse of my heterosexuality. Go tell the other three guys on those trips that they’re gay. Go ahead. I want to see that.
High self-esteem.
Everything he said there was quite apparent to me upon observation of people when I was a teenager. That it applied more significantly to black people was kinda obvious/clear to me but I didn’t as much see the exaggerated self-esteem problem in a racial context as much as I saw it as a function of short-man’s disease. Yet even that, while I saw it rather clearly I was brainwashed into believing that I was a bigot for thinking that I saw it thanks to the Randy Newman hit song, Short People.
Preferably when there are no security cameras to record the response.
Queer studies, women’s studies, black studies: They all are cabals of liars with gravely serious psychological defects.
It does seem to be a serious problem, often manifesting as extreme narcissism.
And yet “researchers” tell us that criminals suffer from “low self esteem” for which the cure is inordinate praise. Do these scholars research anything but their own rectums?
Theodore Dalrymple, having extensive experience with criminals, wrote:
Self-esteem is odious, where it exists, for example among most criminals, and anyone who even thinks about his self-esteem has sunk into a swamp of self-regard. Self-respect imposes a discipline and obligations; self-esteem is a kind of flabby, bullying solipsism.
Needless to say, self-esteem is the concern of our age. Whenever a patient claimed to suffer from insufficient self-esteem, I said to him that at least he had accurately understood his own worthlessness. Far from evoking anger, my remark evoked laughter and a sigh of relief. It’s a fair cop, gov, and I don’t have to pretend any more.
I got into some altercation with a bully in school (6th grade maybe?), don’t remember much about it. Probably wasn’t much more than a shoving match that got us separate stern talkings-to. The only thing I remember about it (probably the only reason I even vaguely remember it) was being told that I was supposed to feel sorry for the other kid because he had low self-esteem. I puzzled on that for years. Especially when I saw these sort of “researchers” spouting that crap in newspapers and magazines over the later years.
Dear lord, my grandpa (born 1901 in Pennsylvania) left school after 8th grade and with 2 of his closest friends worked their way across the country to California. They slept THREE to a bed! (grandpa was barely 5’5″ and said he was short enough to sleep across the foot of the bed)
The prevailing theory has been that bullies are just paying forward their own abuse. That they’re traumatized and so they take it out on weaker kids.
In reality, bullying is a way for kids to establish and enforce social hierarchies. It’s the high-status kids (or those who aspire to high status) who bully the dorky kids as a way of enforcing the social order.
I also have to wonder if there’s an instinct in our lizard brains to attack members of the flock that show signs of weirdness or weakness, the way chickens peck to death a chicken that appears to be sick — to prevent the sickness from spreading.
If it is a lizard-brain thing, it’s maladaptive (like so much of our hard-wiring), so it has to be socialized out, but if the bully is already a sociopath, good luck with that.
No matter how many times I watch it I can’t seem to find the reason it’s the van’s fault. The knucklehead on the bicycle pedaled right into a huge stationary object. A stationary object with bright flashing lights, no less.
No, no. We mustn’t judge. It’s easily done, apparently.
Instant arse.