Friday Ephemera (787)
Intimate moment detected. || Danger zone. || So how was your day? || Shower scenes. || We’ll never know if he escaped. || Almost ripe. || The mist would help no end. || An average of 29. || Crunchy ant cheese. You heard me. || Modernity, baby. || Our betters smile. || He “took some weed pills.” Also, he was “bored” and he “hates cops.” || Plot twist. Related. || Autumnal recording project. || “When a troubled teen’s crimes spiral into murder, a desperate plastic surgery scheme unleashes chaos.” || I’m not quite sure they’ve captured her. || Hard to tell who’s winning. || Nommy-nommy-nom. || Australia’s uranium rush, 1964. || Rubby the robot. || Rage. || Today’s word is pre-emptive. || The progressive trajectory. || Progressive policing. || Funereal cones. || And finally, for fans of the fiddlesome.
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Sometimes they’re quite explicit about it.
Today In Stupidity™:
Bud, Jag, these idiots, where these marketing geniuses come from, and why they don’t know a damned thing about the companies for which they work, is a mystery. Maxwell House was a hotel, not a house.
Tod Browning would be appalled.
Nah, he’s still a commie.
She’s not wrong.
Also, her commentary on bad screenwriting is often very good.
Four plus years and a quarter of a million or more dollars to make a compleat idiot. You’d think it wouldn’t take so long or cost so much but this kind of result doesn’t happen overnight.
He is being harassed and is going to fight for his survival.
I find myself considering the cut-off point for what constitutes human. As in, something more than just a beast that can talk.
Sometimes death by torture is fully justified.
Won’t someone think of the would be assassins?
Anarcho-tyranny. By design.
You’re not the first:
Oh no, they’ve twigged it.
I assume Maxwell House is desperate for publicity, given that it has a reputation for mediocre coffee.
Heinlein was never much for nuanced speech. Always went for the extreme position.
If I were tyrant, that right there would lead me to lock up her family, too.
[ Sound of Other Half cancelling Netflix. ]
Two tier policing?
Did it yesterday.
Much as I hate to diminish any impression of heroic sacrifice on my part, in fact I rarely watch it. The last thing I can recall watching on Netflix was an episode of Young Sheldon, which, while intermittently amusing in a very low-level way, is hardly a loss to my cultural life.
I’m scrolling through the Netflix app in search of something we’ve watched since The Crown, which ended in 2023. So far, I’ve found… one documentary. Oh, and maybe an old episode of Seinfeld. That’s pretty much it.
I’m guessing we’ll survive.
[ Returns from pleasant walk. ]
Arrrgh! His family! His family!
I have never regretted giving up watching television.
[ Faced with this new, post-Netflix landscape, makes plans to fill autumn evenings with embroidery, bottle-top collecting. ]
I hadn’t been aware that “born and bred” was on the blacklist, in fact I’ve often heard first generations, the children of immigrants, using “born and bred” as a claim that their rights are fully vested, an anchor baby being taken to be just as “born and bred here” as somebody whose ancestral lines were in the country since prehistory.
We’ll probably find that “born and bred” was installed in the blacklist by being put in the mouth of an unattractive character in a soap opera that the Reform lady and her friends watch. Once it’s on the blacklist it’s not processed rationally – the ideological antivirus, the crimestop apparatus, just goes bzzzz. In the Charlie Kirk campus videos what passes for mental activity in a lot of the students is going bzzzz when Charlie uses a blacklisted combination of words, and in fact Charlie was more successful than most conservatives in being able to curl a phrase past the antivirus 10-20% of the time, thereby making a student think beyond the catchphrases for the first time in their life.
As for that Reform lady – with friends like these. I’ve never seen a collapse like that. And then the news lady asks how it makes people feel who’ve “made a home here”, that phrase being on another list that causes rational thought to be bypassed. If aliens and parasites are making a home here, that’s presented as a cue for mindless hypnotized celebration among the host population.
[ Adorns bar with home-made doilies. ]
Even though the evidence shows that assimilation, when it takes place, takes multiple generations–and usually many.
More to the point, it takes a desire on the part of the immigrants to assimilate, rather than to reshape the host society.
I don’t watch much TV at all. I struggle to find viewing that isn’t alienating. Which I suppose allows me to spend more time here, listening to you heathens.
Wow. Rock and hard place.
…listening to you heathens.
Only a heathen would say “rock and a hard place” instead of “Scylla and Charybdis”…
Shout out to Britain on the existence of microwaves.
[ Starts work on enormous, fractally elaborate antimacassar. ]
And once again this place reeks of class.
Um …. Trans Berry?
Are you anticipating an influx of particularly greasy patrons?
[ Peers over spectacles. ]
[ Must not allow David to find out I own a kettle. Much less all my English teas. ]
I wonder if anyone has reached out to John Derbyshire for comment.
Another rapper gets what he deserves.
[ Finds supplier of Macassar oil ]
The Other Half is watching a remastered version of Star Trek: The Motion Picture.
[ Needlework intensifies. ]
Attempted kidnapping? The only plea-bargaining should have been down to a merciful execution.
I assume Maxwell House is desperate for publicity, given that it has a reputation for mediocre coffee.
Eight O’Clock for me. Subscription Amazon order.
[ Starts work on enormous, fractally elaborate antimacassar. ]
My Granda was the Antimacassar Queen. And all while watching Merv Griffin and the Lawrence Welk Show.
What if it was a one-way ticket to Gaza?
A little light masochism to pass the evening?
“With state law requiring a 50% sentence reduction for good behavior and additional credits earned while in the Cook County Jail, Marshall is expected to be paroled on November 10.”
If there was any way to be certain the money would actually be used for immediate, irrevocable, emigration and not for neon hair dye, unconvincing manicures, and size 20 heels, I’d be out picking up cans along the roadways.
It has some nice touches and some of the V’GER cosmic Christmas tree effects are pretty, but it’s not exactly a compelling experience. There are only so many ponderous reaction shots a chap can handle.
[ Checks antimacassar blueprints. ]
Once in a while, every now and then, things work out as they should.