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.
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[ 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.