Friday Ephemera (748)
Interspecies attraction of note. || The oxygen tank is, I suppose, an innovative touch. || Not new, but evergreen. Related. || At last, drinkable mayonnaise. || More adventures in modernity. || “How can anything made of matter be that cold?” || Bold artistic breakthrough. || The litter bins of Disneyland. || The chair bodgers of the Chilterns, 1950. || Hercules. || At last, sewing machine techno. || Unauthorised parking anthropology. (h/t, Elephants Gerald) || The progressive retail experience, parts 599, 600, 601, and 602. || Oh, winter wonderland. || Swimwear. || When your foot’s hard on the brakes, but your car won’t stop, and you’re heading towards a lake, while pregnant. || Free at last. || Sweet potato, sharp knife. || The tomb of Queen Nefertari. || And finally, an uncanny deduction.
To be notified of new posts, you can follow me on X / Twitter.
To enable extra commenting options – including @username mentions, upvotes, and live notifications – scroll down to the black ‘Meta’ box at the very bottom of the page and click register. It’s free and quite painless.
Puts me in mind of a Disney movie . . . from before they lost their senses.
Barney’s not looking too good.
How to ensure a murder investigation.
The anti-progressive retail experience.
At the end of the day, when it’s time to sleep, read it this bedtime story.
I’d like to think it’s fake–rage clickbait–and yet we do live in depraved times.
Revenge.
Bold artistic breakthrough.
Most Swifties were just born yesterday. In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida at 17:04 for the win. Plus many, many others.
Here’s GoldMine’s top 20 songs longer than 10 minutes.
[ Gets sucked into rabbit hole ]
Did Pink Floyd do any songs less than 10 minutes long? /sarcasm
Really don’t mind if you sit this one out.
Worry about Jimmy.
.
His public defender tried to argue the number of officers in the room was ‘oppressive.’
Ah–em
Zeppelin’s Ramble On, in the parallel universe where they composed and recorded in the 1950s.
I’ve been looking for this clip. Some culture bloggers were using this (specifically the guy playing the scissors) during their review of “The Acolyte.”
Can’t tell you what scissoring has to do with Star Wars, however.
Most Swifties were just born yesterday. In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida at 17:04 for the win.
That whole generation is very Soviet in the way they think they invented everything.
Allman Brothers At Fillmore East 1971
Of course Coltrane could blow on a standard like “My Favorite Things” for damn near an hour.
Can’t tell you what scissoring has to do with Star Wars, however.
Regarding The Acolyte, I will pass on the obvious joke…
Ah–em
I was actually going to mention Tubular Bells. I thought it might be too obscure. I love when Oldfield starts naming/introducing the individual instruments.
Part I, at about 20:15
What do you mean she doesn’t have a parking break?
I asked the Google AI, which said, “To activate the [Chevy Malibu] parking brake, pull up on the parking brake switch.”
Well, there’s your problem. There’s supposed to be a proper lever to yank up on (no electronic intervention) or a smaller pedal to the far right of the foot compartment that you can mash down, again without electronic intervention.
[I drive a stick, so I have the extra protection of lower gears, provided the clutch doesn’t go out at the same time as the brake.]
Also on the Google results page: “The parking brake, also known as the emergency brake or hand brake, was originally designed to be used if the vehicle’s main braking system failed. However, in modern vehicles, the parking brake doesn’t have enough stopping power to bring the car to a halt.”
STOP MAKING THINGS WORSE
Also, isn’t it a bad idea to switch off the car while it’s in motion? Won’t some of those cars lock the steering wheel?
Kudos to aelfheld, that was the very first thing that occurred to me talking about uber long songs; though there are numerous examples of course.
As regards that runaway car, it does seem that the car in question, a recent Chevy Malibu has a proximity key plus start/stop button to start (and stop!) the vehicle. The caller did say in the recording that there had been a fault with that setup and that the button did not work to turn off the engine. Presumably if it did the proximity key would ensure that the steering lock would probably not engage.
What puzzled me was why not just move the shifter (assuming an auto) to neutral, or even to manual and just down shift ? Car didn’t appear to also be suffering from runaway acceleration as it was moving relatively slowly. Neutral might over-rev the engine if there was a fault there as well, but…
Just to note that the spate of “unintended acceleration” cases from about (I think) 20-25 years ago, often affecting Audis were at least IMHO best explained by drivers being so incompetent that they confused the brake and accelerator pedals, though there may be the odd exception. Those cars though would have physical keys to switch off and/or remove.
I missed that one. 👌
“She immediately assembles a highly-skilled team of specialists.”
Morning, all.
It’s like house music never happened. Why, it doesn’t bear thinking about.
The preferred outcome. The robbers’ behaviour does rather suggest, quite strongly, how concerned one should be for their wellbeing.
[ Slurps coffee. ]
Laughed, not sorry.
It’s a shame the owner moved to new premises. I rather miss his anthropological approach to unauthorised parking. And the beebling scooters.
Her delivery… Perfect.
Reminder of note:
But according to Our Betters, it’s all just random.
The whole ‘gay voice’ thing has long puzzled me. It’s faintly aggravating and not at all attractive. I don’t sound like that. The Other Half doesn’t. I have heard men who do sound like that, but I’d assumed it must be some weird affectation, a learned mannerism.
Eggs for breakfast?
David:
Yes that channel is quite a rabbit hole.
Any indication what city this is?
We were not that clueless during my youth in the Graffitied Subway Car era of New Yawk City, even at that age.
Jordan Peterson talks with Warren Smith – about, among other things, being fired as an educator. Fired, presumably, at least in part, for throwing into relief some default assumptions.
[ Added: ]
The short video, by the way, the one that went viral and caused all of the chest-clutching, is this one here.
Readers who haven’t seen it may want give it a watch, before marvelling at how that – that – is a basis for woke fainting, and for firing people.
Dallas, Texas, I believe.
Many hours of amusement were had watching the videos. Not just the scooter gags and the squeaky skirts, etc., which still make me laugh, but the basic premise and the repetition. Over and over again, people approach the wall where the cameras are – and which has half a dozen signs explaining what will happen if you park there without permission – and which they look at, even point to, before parking there anyway.
Cue #DRUMBEATS
It’s like an ongoing video essay on human stupidity.
The reality of heritability had to be erased from public awareness because it contradicts the Blank Slate Hypothesis, and thus stands in the way of Utopia.
But the fervent suppression of reality by Smart People should not call into question their smartness, wisdom, or moral worth.
They’re after the water on the dog’s fur.
Egalitarian pretensions do tend to buckle, and bits do tend to fall off, when confronted with fairly obvious aspects of reality.
And so, as seen, we get childless progressives insisting, quite emphatically, that a person just happens to be born into a context that their parents also just happened to be born into. As if there could be no causal connection.
Because, we’re told, it “was mere chance” that your parents’ child was you.
But then, that applies to many other things, too.
Why do so many people not understand insurance? Because they have been “educated” into ignorance and delusion.
I bet they’re hard to boil
Edit: Joking aside, I used to live near an ostrich farm. It’s about 45 minutes and will feed the entire family.
Truth:
It’s also a lack of curiosity about the world and how things work. I don’t remember ever being taught about how insurance works, I just picked it up somewhere through osmosis. You should just learn certain things from living in a culture.
It’s the kind of supposedly moral perspective that doesn’t seem likely to be arrived at, or to flourish, without some perverse intervention. Say, by progressive educators.
I’m thinking you can knock the shift lever out of gear without using the clutch
Wasn’t there some odd pedal spacing or something that was discovered?
[ Rattles tray of snacks. ]
Rush 2112, 20 minutes 33 seconds of awesomeness
Dallas, Texas, I believe.
Yes. 4 years ago DEEP ELLUM. A historically black section of Dallas that is arguably the original home of Dallas blues and which has gone through a cycle of being a less than swell place to go to being a swell place to go to being less than swell.
The inspiration for Deep Ellum* Blues, a traditional tune covered by everyone including the non-traditional such as the Grateful Dead.
*(Also spelled Elem in some of he earlier recordings)
Educational, you hear? That’s what this place is.
[ Spots typo, deducts points. ]
Extra super double gross-out time for Muldoon.
Infinite cunning.
Interesting but there’s something . . . lacking.
Dallas, Texas if memory serves.
A bit of punctuation might have been useful there.
Perpetual victimhood.
Paging Dicentra….
Just Betty Dumb-Toes and Joe Boat-Foot*.
*Couldn’t find O’Rourke’s original text
Not at all sorry for laughing.
That. Been watching them for years (probably found them here).
The doctor(s?) on that thread calling it “heartbreaking” need to get a real heart.
We keep hearing about “legitimate concerns” over hatred of the left. In truth, there are none.
They have cropped up in the Ephemera over the years. And among the whimsy and moments of the bizarre, there are reminders of how some people – lots of people, in fact – just won’t stop making what are referred to drily as “unfortunate choices.”
I remember one chap who parked illegally, despite the warnings that he’d seen, and found that his truck had been towed away. Instead of calling the towing company, as advised by the signs he’d been staring at, he decided to spend the next half hour harassing the employees of the business whose car park he’d been abusing.
This involved claiming that there were no signs, and then that the signs (which didn’t exist) were unclear, and that the signs (which didn’t exist) didn’t apply to him, and a seemingly endless series of deflections and outright lies, none of which were likely to result in his truck magically materialising.
If memory serves, it ended with the police arriving.
Again, some people just seem bent on exacerbating their own self-inflicted problems, even when the solution is obvious and not particularly difficult.
Our betters in action: US military buys its drones from China.
I love Musk and Vivek but most of US budget goes out the door, not in salaries. Grants, social security, Medicare, military procurement, etc.
Interesting that even needing O2 does not give the singer a hint that he’s dying.
That tire sure shows that the highway barricades work.
Shrug. I know morbidly obese people who won’t stop eating sweets, and who deny the value of a low-carb diet.
How it starts . . .
Godliness and eye glitter, together at last.
The Mouse Problem.
Together or in close juxtaposition?
“Bold artistic breakthru”
Inna gadda da vida by Iron Butterfly is 17 minutes long.
Sorry, TS, 10 minutes might seem like the “longest song evah” to 12 year old
girls, but it ain’t.
On the other hand, a bad song can seem to last a lifetime.
Okay, now do Europeans changing their underwear daily.
(I don’t know if that map is accurate or a hoax, but it’s an excuse to mention that years ago I read a couple items online comparing how often Europeans change their underwear. The French did not fare well by comparison.)
“Never thought I’d live in a time when courts were quoting Patrick Henry…”
Norwegian lesbian faces up to 3 years in prison for saying men cannot be lesbians.
More here. (From 2022.) She has a Twitter page, so it appears that in the end she was not imprisoned.
Men’s prison or women’s prison?
Cockroach farms.
Good move.
Why?
Animal feed, pharma research, cosmetics industry, and … wait for it … Chinese traditional medicine.
Please do.
My recollection is that they didn’t necessarily all that great on older cars either. Especially on standard transmissions where the usage for everyday parking had the cable generally stretched. Maybe on autotrans they would work.
Older cars you will lose power steering and the power brakes. Which isn’t all that bad in an emergency but perhaps for a smaller woman it might. I wondered why the operator didn’t tell her to put it in neutral first. When she finally did she was going downhill which gave me as much angst as the other video with the runaway dual tires. I gave up on the former at that point. I presume she got out ok. Might watch/listen again if I have more time.
I thought they wrote those off to the car mats. Accelerators can stick. Gunk building up on the accelerator cable on some older vehicles can stop the throttle from retracting when the foot is taken off the accelerator.
I recall being told my paternal grandmother had, when young, taken an injury and, so as to ward off tetanus, was given cockroach tea. This was in far South Louisiana in the late 1800s (as best as I can estimate).
“What is your name? What is your quest?”
That was Toyotas – I remember my mechanic grousing about it.
Victor Davis Hanson has noted that fleeing the scene of an accident is just what illegal immigrants do. Driving drunk, too, I would add.
So: Always choose your floor mats with care? I know the ones that came with my car were cheap and slid around easily.
I’ve never had an issue with stock car floor mats, certainly not with them riding up on the gas pedal. My view is the floor mat thing was the ‘official’ explanation so as not to upset those with obnoxious pedal extremities.
Classic.
Dedication of note.
Cockroach farms.
How it started:
Jul 1, 2022 — At full capacity, Aspire Food Group’s facility is expected to house four billion crickets and produce 13 million kilograms of the insect each …
How it’s going:
Nov 13, 2024 — An innovative London cricket farm has laid off two-thirds of its workforce as it retools, the city’s economic development agency says.
I think I’d prefer Soylent Green.
Especially if it’s made of leftists.
But then it wouldn’t be made of people.
Whatever the explanation for the Toyota acceleration problems, legislation was produced. At least in the US, floor mats are now required to attach to the floor. When I was working in a factory that produced car floors, most lines had at least one person whose job was to attach the plastic bits to the carpet that hold the mats in place.
ON IT!
Better?
We keep hearing about “legitimate concerns” over hatred of the left. In truth, there are none.
https://archive.is/GlBmE
“Legitimate concerns” is part of a two-step dance, the first step being anti-immigration gripers who avoid arguing against immigration on principle, for example the principle that this is our people’s home, not the home of anyone who invites himself. They bring up secondary issues (housing availability) or issues they know to be statusful (whether all the newcomers are entirely on board with female sexual displays or gay parades). The second step is that authorities reward such non-advocates by not calling them racist for a month or two, by managing concerns and appearances as such, by addressing the secondary issues that the gripers have helpfully teed up (since there’s cross-spectrum agreement that aliens aren’t a problem apart from the fact that they need housing, let’s build housing for them).
People with what are called legitimate concerns are ashamed of their own feelings of home/peoplehood/ethnicity/loyalty, so they’re displacing those feelings into what they hope is socially acceptable language, fooling nobody (white people who want their own nations have to get up pretty early in the morning to put one past the vigilant Ms “Goodfellow” in the Guardian), and just reinforcing an impression of shameful bigotry hiding behind pseudo-concerns. When it comes to what ethnocentric feelings are legitimate, white people shouldn’t be calibrating on the government or media, but on the natural unashamed undisplaced ethnocentrism of every race other than whites.
To shift into neutral, yes. But to shift into third or second? Need the clutch.
Part of the resistance to heritability comes from the American Ethos, which holds that it doesn’t matter who your family is, you can still make something of yourself.
This idea arose from the European lower classes immigrating to the U.S. and getting ahead on merit, not bloodlines.
It might be the case, though, that all these generations later, the more capable have sorted themselves out from the rest, just by a natural process of meeting and mating with other competent people, having met them at college and such. That book by Charles Murray, “Coming Apart,” showed how we’re self-segregating by competence.
Though there’s a lot going on with heritability, I would hate to see us get into a Gattaca society, because genes can’t (yet) predict who’s going to be a virtuous person and who’s going to be a Cluster B jackwagon.
I’d rather live among virtuous midwits than brilliant sociopaths.