Friday Ephemera (783)
Well, at least her phone was okay. || Hers may be the biggest I’ve ever seen. || Hoovering of note. || I vote for the magic bucket. || “Over 80% of Canadians live within 100 miles of the US border.” || Oh look, bubbles. || Bristol’s bonfire kids, 1962. || Not unfair. || Nommy-nommy-nom. || A use of other people’s time and money. || The rapid sorting of tomatoes. Also, potatoes. || At last, toilet-paper mushrooms. || More peer-reviewed scholarship. || Inapt fap. || Space reserved. || The progressive retail experience, parts 659, 660, 661, 662, 663, 664, 665 and 666. || Parking scenes. || Unlikely leaf propellant. || Thing that never happens happens again. || The right tool. || Sights of London. || Newcomers. || And finally, on making The Wizard of Oz – a tale of fires, amphetamines and asbestos snow.
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I’d just like to drive home the point that a certain type of bird lives only in the Americas, and several of them frequent my yard.
In case we’d gone too long since the last Yookay / Yooess rivalry posts.
[ Fetches binoculars, angrily stares at trees. ]
[ Muttering. ]
I recently learned (was it here maybe?) that preying mantises will hang out by hummingbird feeders and kill/eat them.
Damned insomnia.
That’s what everyone called the generic Kool-Aid they served at summer camp.
Worst-a-shure.
Also, think about the increasing number of things we’re asked to use a phone app for. Losing a phone is getting to be almost as bad as losing one’s wallet with a bunch of forms of ID in it.
Now do the pronunciation of place names in New York of Dutch origin. Valatie, for starters.
Madness. Sheer madness.
One of the reasons I like having trumpet vine around the place.
In matters astronomical, there’s to be a lunar eclipse tomorrow.
Oh noes, dicentra’s identifying as WTP now
No, that’s me. In spite of my previous disdain for Twitter, after Musk took it over I purchased the blue checkmark. Follow me on X! All the hot, half naked chicks do!
Another comment here:
I wouldn’t be surprised if “how and by whom” were nearly all the progressive bien-pensants in his social and professional circle.
Is it possible, with aggressive yearly pruning, to coax trumpet vines to produce more flowers? A number of neighbors have trumpet vines but most produce only a small number of blooms. A trumpet vine hedge would look spectacular if it was covered in blooms from bottom to top.
It must be quite odd, to admit that you’ve been loudly mouthing things that you don’t actually believe, and which are vividly absurd, merely because they were fashionable and expected. In order to retain your position in the desired social and political class.
Which implies quite strongly that your similarly pious peers, that high-status fashionable set, the ones who also loudly mouth these things, may well be similarly dishonest and in fact a bunch of tossers.
To pick at that idea risks unravelling the whole thing.
As you might imagine, I’m not what one could call sympathetic.
Utter bastard that I am.
OK…since someone on Gutfeld just asked this same question, I thought I might help some of the similarly ignorant here…unless I’m the only one…as to who Malcom Gladwell is. At first I thought he was from over yonder across the pond because I underestimated, yet again, Canadians and their willingness to give their male children 98 pound weakling names. But I digress. Here from Wiki, since I looked it up anyway. Still not sure why he’s a thing. Except, Canada. Tho why that’s a thing…well…
Can’t say for certain (that’s not my picture but is close to what my vines produce).
I’ve been conducting something of a haphazard experiment, snipping it back along the fence line every couple of days – nothing dramatic, just a few snips here & there, avoiding the buds, each visit. There are a couple of areas left to nature & I can’t see any greater flower density than in the areas I’ve been tending. These are all established vines that I cut back in the winter. They don’t get much attention beyond that so some judicious fertilisation might result in more blooms.
David, I believe I have a stuck comment. Too many links from wiki copy/paste I suspect.
Freed. And yes, six or more links does make the spam filter twitchy.
No specific experience with trumpet vines but with other more tropical flowering plants I learned that mulch or rocks or bare ground can have an effect on whether/how well hibiscus and crepe myrtles and similar plants will flower.
[ Abducts neighbour’s cat, makes offering to spam filter. ]
Top men.
[ Spam filter now has a reason to be twitchy ]
[ And in need of stitches ]
In Texas, the stupid is bigger too.
I find myself in agreement with Ms Rowling.
https://nypost.com/2025/09/04/opinion/malcolm-gladwell-admits-he-lied-about-trans-athletes-because-telling-the-truth-destroyed-careers/
His Munk Debate with Murray being an example.
One example of why the constabulary is no longer fit for purpose.
His book The Bomber Mafia has been criticized for errors and omissions and over-simplification.
That’s why we come here.
Well, it does, I think, rather speak to Mr Gladwell’s character. That he’s considered a public intellectual, a teller of truths, not least by himself, doesn’t exactly diminish what it says about him.
Our David, master of the understatement.
I can sympathize with ordinary people who silently bow to “peer” pressure with regard to these sorts of “progressive truths”. Getting ostracized can be devastatingly traumatic, as some psychologists have said. But a public intellectual has a fundamental duty to the truth.
https://www.unz.com/isteve/malcolm-gladwell-on-why-his-bestseller/
It’s So Tiresome, slow-or-stop for road construction division.
A Black man is deeply offended that so many white people talk about their personal lives rather than politics. (Or, dare I say it, that they’re not talking about how black people are oppressed?)
Black woman is offended that neighbor posts “please clean up after your dog” but does not provide a trash can.
Muslim man is offended that normal Brits don’t “admit” that Britain was built by dark-skinned people. That these dark-skinned people are largely absent from photographic archives, newspapers, censuses, etc. is irrelevant to his fantasy.
How to explain why he wasn’t locked up: Sympathy for the Devil?
The Fabian Society at work
“The West is a woman to be mounted.”
More thoughts from ESR:
This could be applied to so many other current things.
And yet “smart” liberals profess to wonder why they are distrusted and even hated.
Old: “Conservatives think liberals are wrong. Liberals think conservatives are evil.”
New: “Conservatives know liberals are evil.”
“I do not know of a single successful intervention for changing conscientiousness and emotional stability, nor do twin studies give any reason to think that the shared environment plays a role in shaping the big five.” — Charles Murray
Identifying children who are even 1 SD above the mean on all three should be on the priority list for K-12 education. They are a precious resource–the appropriate spine of civil society.
Bookmark and happy ending.
May all his comrades and allies join him soon.
Seen on TV program guide:
1950’s bums remain bums, and can never become “homeless”.
Lots of foliage and few fleurs usually means too much nitrogen. If the vine is adjacent to a lawn, it might get too much lawn fertilizer, which is heavy on the N. Raise its P value.
My Campsis x tagliabuana “Mme Galen” is almost 25 years old. I usually wait until it starts leafing out, then cut back whatever’s obviously dead.
It doesn’t need anything fancy in the way of pruning. It blooms on new wood, which it produces in abundance every season. Mine goes from a scrawny-looking thing in the spring to an absolute unit by June.
Look for Campsis radicans fulva, which has yellow flowers, as a nice companion.
I suspect his problem is that it’s not odd in the least, because it’s what all his peers do on the regular, with greater and lesser degrees of self-awareness.
It’s only odd to people who use language to say what they think is true rather than to manipulate perceptions.