Friday Ephemera (772)
Relax with a little gardening. || She felt the important thing was to self-narrate. || Mom, I suspect, was not home at the time. || One for the anatomy quiz. || Men With Long Hair, 1967. || The floor is lava. || Ploppy chocolate. || For armchair tourists, a walk around Pall Mall and St James’s Palace. || Some improvement needed. || The progressive retail experience, parts 630, 631, 632, 633 and 634. || “People keep saying that Hamas hates us, but, like… maybe we vibe.” || It helps to have the children afterwards. || The new minority. || Not maddening at all. || Cursor anxiety, a thread ensues. || Our totally balanced betters express their feelings. || Balance shifted. || Belated pushback. || Unboxing video. || No, he doesn’t own a grocery store. || Not sure it fits, love. || Customer feedback.
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[ Admires own awesomeness, awaits applause, chocolates. ]
The much better, more entertaining video that followed David’s lively exchange of views link.
oh, and sound on for full effect.
First, hedgehogs, now this.
There seems to be an . . . exotic . . . theme developing.
[ Rummages in cellar, returns with enormous magnifying lens, almost a metre across, positions in front of face. ]
[ Does innocent face. ]
Does anyone ever ask those ‘giving voice to the voiceless’ for evidence the ‘voice’ is genuine?
[ Sits in garden, watches enormous bee. ]
Think you need a bigger lens.
There ya go…
Crime is concentrated.
Related to the above, this:
The post includes links to more eye-widening statistics.
isn’t this a good thing, build your enemy a golden bridge to escape, rather than them waiting Downfall like?
Classic leftist diatribe, note how suddenly the grocer is not included in “the public”, as if the collective noun that represents everyone, including the grocer, has been elevated to a separate entity, which, apropos to leftist thought, can simply kick out it’s constituents on a whim.
Another one for the Climate Change – what can’t it do? list: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/jun/19/flavour-of-gin-and-tonic-could-be-impacted-by-climate-change-study-finds
Even accepting the idiotic premise that a changing climate (and when in the history of the planet has the climate not changed?) will change the flavor of the juniper berries, I highly doubt the cut-rate bottom-shelf gins are going to taste much different than they do now, so only the most expensive ones could possibly change – and thus only the wealthier clientele would be affected. I thought the Guardian hated rich people, so why should we care about this?
Grapes have terrior too, and wines probably have changed flavor over the years as soils have changed, but somehow the wine industry has adapted. No doubt the gin industry will too, if it ever comes to that. Besides, Sharia law forbids alcohol, so how are they gonna square that circle?
You can argue that DS9 is the best among them because they question Federation dogma.* The Hell to the Chief episode, Hard Time, where O’Brien experiences simulated years and years in prison, wherein he kills a fellow prisoner over a food ration. He comes out changed by what he did in the simulation, which is not what he thought a good Federation officer would ever do.
There’s also a scene in one episode where Nog challenges Jake about the Federation’s nonsensical attitude toward currency. Quark is a great foil to the Federation’s idealism while elevating Ferengi ethics to practicality over Evul Capitalism.
The Visitor (a young writer visits the aging Jake, played to perfection by Tony Todd) was outstanding in that you could ONLY tell such a story in the sci-fi genre.
Then there’s Gul Dukat’s descent into messianic madness alongside the brilliant Louise Fletcher. (She plays Cluster B women absolutely perfectly.) I just skimmed the episode guide, and there were a lot of bangers.
* Also, that Tribbles episode.
Coincidentally I’ve just completed finishing a binge watch of DS9, now moving on to Enterprise
I struck me how Trek writing was brilliantly escapist, and by recent iterations that are adapting to “modern audiences” it just shunted back into the real world, kind of defeating the whole point of the series.
Yes, DS9 did have some pretty solid non-space-monster antagonists. Louise Fletcher was always fun to watch. Ditto Dukat.
Oh, and Weyoun (and his clones).
.
Hm. Good luck with that one. Just getting past the theme song – and it is a song – was enough of a challenge. The Trek formula was getting pretty tired and repetitive by that point and I can only recall a couple of entertaining episodes.
[ Fetches heavy-duty gloves, rolls shelled, fluff-encrusted hard-boiled egg – now roughly the size, weight and appearance of a coconut – along bar to @PiperPaul. ]
[ Rolls strangely discolored, debris- and fluff-covered chocolate towards David. ]
Two questions: How did it get out of the tank and how long can it survive out of water?
Shark pic?!…not Shark Week yet?…It is the 50th anniversary of the release of the movie Jaws and…well excuse for this rant anyway. A high school friend/teammate posted this and I was somewhat amused because she never was all that bright. A rich kid, daughter of a rich kid, son of…well someone with money. Anyway I thought it funny that a girl who lives on a yacht in the Caribbean would fall for a story this bloody stupid. Then I checked the various likes/cares/hearts on this post and I…well…I just…if I had any idea that so many of the girls in my high school were this bloody stupid…well…I probably wouldn’t have taken advantage but…well…it’s fun to speculate but…I mean come on.
Ooh, that gives me an idea…
Oh yes. Yes indeed. But it seems like “yet one more islamo-monster contributing to the erosion of our culture”.
1) Tune the damn thing;
2) So much for all blacks have rhythm;
3) If you can’t play, don’t.
“…someone’s lunch, which they probably would have wanted to eat…”
Nothing but the finest “journalism” at CNN.
“Damn the
torpedoesleftists, full speed ahead!”“Parts of unexploded bombs in here”
“This is where it hit because it is charred”
The finest
The finest
“They say she came back to finish the broadcast”. Of course, from where in the ruins it doesn’t occur to him to ask.
Even more transparently bullshit: AFP’s bogus report of evil American bullets that hit an innocent elderly Iraqi woman’s house.
The shoes do indeed tell the tale.
pfft. Flowers and bugs. These people have no vision. They should try the OSMUN (Outer Space Model United Nations).
Why would you want your enemy to escape to plot another day?
[…] IRNA and CNN hardest hit.
Based: https://x.com/Rothmus/status/1936162998772551871?t=HkOsAZLM1GZ5utV1ZnfSpw&s=19
Star Trek Voyager with a female captain: I daresay all female writers also, because they never had any plot dealing with time loops, cryptid parasites, mutations of the crew, or wormholes. Just personal drama 24/7.
CNN if planes are grounded in Iran, how the hell did they get there? And they are sad about a propaganda station? Sick.
Eric Hoffer on intellectuals and totalitarianism:
I’m convinced that the intellectuals as a type, as a group, are more corrupted by power than any other human type. It’s disconcerting to realize that businessmen, generals, soldiers, men of action are less corrupted by power than intellectuals.
…
You take a conventional man of action, and he’s satisfied if you obey, eh? But not the intellectual. He doesn’t want you just to obey. He wants you to get down on your knees and praise the one who makes you love what you hate and hate what you love. In other words, whenever the intellectuals are in power, there’s soul-raping going on.
—Eric Sevareid interviews Eric Hoffer, 1967
One of our betters opines:
Oh, well, OK then, it will be a respectful nuke.
Israel,Egypt, and Jordan were unavailable for comment.
Yes. IIRC, that’s a Sun Tzu thing. The general idea being that you want ti get rid of them and, assuming you have a general advantage anyway, as one would in the world of way back then, their opportunity to regroup, refresh, rearm is rather slim. In today’s world, where allies or even your own resources can allow you to be ready for battle much sooner don’t really fit the game plan. Though if you provide a corridor for them to go through that allows you to maintain or enhance your advantage, it still works. If.
“A penis is not a male body part. It’s just an unusual part for a woman”
This clown is at it again.
Attention gentlemen, beware of phantom marriages.
God, no.
And I need a bookmark. Trudy, again. The cat of the homestead.
Re phantom marriages:
Ummm…can I get a witness? Are witnesses no longer required? Isn’t this how things were done in the past to make this sort of BS less likely? Also, wtf with this “pastor”? Why his name isn’t mentioned? Ah, rules man! Don’t be harshing my vide with your rules.
The Vance Boelter story is getting weirder and weirder.
Au contraire, mon frere.
The Year of Hell, parts 1 and 2, wherein a man with a time machine that he invented to win a war (IIRC) loses his wife and child in a battle, so he keeps going back into the past to change things to create the timeline where they don’t die.
Voyager gets caught in the constantly revised timeline, and irretrievably bad things happen. Crewmembers die, Voyager is gradually destroyed. It was great!
And then of course by the end it all resets back to zero, but there was a great story told in the meantime about this desperate man killing off entire races to alter the timeline to get his family back. And Tuvok goes blind, and everything gets totally wrecked.
Is that third one from The X-Files or do I miss my guess?
Heh. The tone was just right.
Mentally ill woman, a fabulist, is mentally ill, and fabulist.
A “safe space for women” that “includes trans women.” All announced breezily. As if no possible issues might arise.
They’re praying for your annihilation in a mostly peaceful way.
The writers were mostly male, with a handful of exceptions.
Voyager is an odd one, in that it’s not generally regarded as a triumph overall, as a series, never quite living up to its premise, and with too much cosy padding. But it does, I think, have some of the strongest Trek episodes.
Timeless is a good one. As is Year of Hell. Also, Death Wish.
And the aforementioned Scorpion is excellent. In terms of pacing, structure and dramatic oomph, it kicks into a gear that was rarely seen again.
My memory of watching that episode for the first time is still quite vivid. After three seasons of meh, so-so, okay-but-not-great, with only the occasional flash of potential, Scorpion kicked off in a much higher gear on pretty much every front.
It had a pace and dramatic momentum that was much stronger and more polished than any previous episode, with a deft ramping up of peril. (The “think good thoughts” scene comes to mind, as does the “I want to negotiate” cliffhanger.) And the deal-with-the-devil premise was both unexpected and ripe with possibilities.
Sadly, in the seasons that followed, this high gear was seen only intermittently and never quite as successfully.
Do I … really want to know what I just saw???