Friday Ephemera (826)
Modern problems. || They’re behind you. || Do you want to buy a belt? || King of the combover. || Life in a one-loo village, 1970. || An archive of tangible media, from magnets and grooves to coatings and pins. (h/t, Things) || An archive of punch cards. || An archive of vintage cycling publications. || Not in fact harmless, it turns out. || Just call him Daddy. || I’m sure more drag-themed programming will fix that in no time. || Nuts. || Got milk? || Gentlemen callers. || Incoming. || Help incoming. || Answers on a postcard, please. || A three-way interspecies negotiation. || The progressive retail experience, parts 745, 746 and 747. || The thrill of physics. || At last, drag-queen rugby. || A situation is reported. || Diversity has occurred. || At those elegant snuff parties, your nostrils will be revitalised.
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But don’t mention the mental illness.
Because that would be unkind.
He collects the bits they cut off him. ⊙_ʘ
Well, this is a man who seems unable to tolerate his own appearance without ludicrous software filtering, and who collects and displays the pieces of his body that have been removed, needlessly, supposedly to purge himself of testosterone and thereby bolster his fantasy of buying womanhood. None of which suggests someone who’s even-keeled.
And it’s interesting how this so-called affirmation resembles a never-ending self-harm project.
I think Hell is being stuck on an eternal Viking cruise with this guy giving an endless lecture and the TV in your cabin only plays public broadcasting.
As so often with his type, Mr Steves shows no interest whatsoever in those less well-off who will also be targeted by the same criminals, for this and other crimes – say, as a result of not being reported and apprehended. As if criminals neatly confine their antisocial behaviour to one sphere only. As if the kind of shit stain who will merrily steal your camera or phone or wallet would never, ever do anything else untoward.
And as if being less wealthy than the law-abiding victim were a license for criminal predation.
The joys of being a farmer.
None of the three demonstrate any understanding of what Elon Musk has accomplished or how he actually lives. They are just young loudmouths who contribute nothing of substance to society. Andrew Santino & Bobby Lee are comedians, so of course their entire careers are built on seeking cheap laughs rather than understanding. The host is Shannon Sharpe (the Club Shay Shay Show), a former NFL athlete who, like most blacks who grew up poor, demonstrates zero knowledge of anything outside sports and mouthing off.
He also says that terrorism is merely “something to which Americans should get accustomed”, and that displaying the American flag on car antennas “creates a fearful, schizophrenic dynamic that may stoke today’s terrorism and tomorrow’s international conflicts“.
It would be poetic justice if he were to discover that his publicly expressed views were stoking violent hatred of him, and that as a result he was forced to “get accustomed to terrorism” in a very personal way. But all I want is for this enemy of America to formally renounce his citizenship and permanently relocate to Iran or Gaza or one of those other nations that he sees as victims of American power.
He’s a nepo baby, and so unable to understand–much less care about–such people.
If you cut yourself, you need institutionalisation. If you pay a doctor to cut you, you need affirmation.
The mental illness wouldn’t be much more than a personal issue if it weren’t for the degreed psychopaths profiting from it.
Apparently, it wasn’t enough to say something like, “Keep an eye on your belongings and if you do get robbed, try not to let it ruin your holiday.” He has to say, “You’re rich and thieves aren’t.” I.e., he has to claim that the people robbing you – quite possibly organised gangs – are poorer, which isn’t necessarily the case at all.
Some people scrape together the money for a holiday overseas, doing without other things in order to afford a holiday as a one-off treat. Many criminal gangs, whose activities tend to extend into other criminal spheres, are very rich compared to the people on whom they prey.
To invoke the supposed poverty of those robbing the law-abiding is both glib and a moral non sequitur. Yet it’s aired as a sophisticated attitude, some pivotal insight.
Mr Steves’ net worth, by the way, is somewhere in the region of $15 million. Which I would guess makes the rest of us poor compared to him.
Meanwhile at Arizona State University,
Narcissism 101, Introductory TikTok.
Note also that the chief cause of endemic poverty is criminality and the other social pathologies that make the accumulation of wealth impossible.
Someone once asked what I did. “Oh, like an influencer,” they said.
I still wake up screaming.
‘Students in the program will learn how to “market themselves.”‘
Virtual street corners are a thing?
You have influenced me to put Bosch on my list for future viewing.
Seasons 1-5, yes. Seasons 6 and 7 can be skipped with no great loss.
Are you being culturally enriched?
Leader of Muslim home invasion crew gets only 26 months in prison.
(He’ll probably be out in less than 10.)
Never forget: The ideal outcome of a home invasion is every invader dead. And any who cry out “he dindu nuffin” get deported.
Laughed, not sorry.
My father grew them in The Villages for a couple years and they were fantastic. I tried a tree in the norther Orlando ‘burbs and they got eaten up by bugs. I suspect the key is finding the right balance between frost to kill off the bugs but not too much/too late to avoid what you got. And also it all being in the right year. Commercial efforts with massive insect and temperature controls being a different animal. Certainly not like plopping a citrus tree in the ground and forgetting about it. Citrus canker not withstanding.
While he grew up far more privileged than I, not sure to what degree he would be a nepo. Yet somehow his high school band director/music teacher father was able to take the family on a long European vacations.
It’s people like Steves however, the well-off (somehow) middle class who for whatever reason didn’t have to concern themselves much about having enough money to send their kids to college, who could afford vacations across The Pond or even regular trips beyond their local region, who I see as the real white privilege. Families like that are who many blacks and other minorities see as the broadly white privilege and think that all of us are just like that. They don’t see the struggling white middle and lower-middle classes. To them it’s as if every white person, and more importantly their parents, are professionals with a college education.
Given that perspective I understand and to a small degree even identify with it. Not the degree resentment, though I do feel strong resentment of people like Steves who has this sort of attitude. When people like him pop off about “white privilege” I get resentful. Sure, he has his camera or wallet stolen, it’s not a big deal. Easy for him to get another one. People like him don’t get how hard people work, the sacrifices they make just to reach some degree of housing security, food security, etc. I doubt he was collecting beer cans and newspapers from his neighbors for scrap to sell to make a few extra dollars and cents or delivering newspapers before dawn or refurbishing rusty old load binders and other beat up construction materials. He had his piano lessons.
Preach, brother! One thing that really annoys me about this “hoarding wealth” BS is it comes from the same people who cry about “stolen land”. If anyone has been “hoarding wealth”, it’s the indigenous peoples who have sat on enormous resources and done nothing with them. Now granted, most of that was out of ignorance but the “hoarding” thing, as ridiculous as it is, applies far, far more to them than it does to people like Elon.
Nepo babies: Growing up, nobody in my extended family could afford to vacation in Europe. My parents didn’t have enough money to do it (a few times) until they were over 60 years old.
And more to this Rick Steves BS, I’m kinda tired of leftists talking about people in Europe and elsewhere saying that the United States, as a whole, is unsafe to visit because of gun violence but my reluctance to visit NYC or other blue shitholes, partly due to their gun and other violence is somehow irrational.
From his mouth to God’s ear.
“Hoarding wealth” translates to “It should be given to me”.
To clarify, the last two seasons aren’t awful as such – it didn’t reach zombie levels of bad. But there is a sense of fatigue and a quite noticeable drop in quality. I rewatched the first five seasons a while ago, happily, but I couldn’t muster any enthusiasm for rewatching seasons six and seven.
Given the general quality of the first five seasons, I’d suggest ending there.
Nearly all TV series should be planned to end after between two and eight seasons, before the inspiration is exhausted and they’re reduced to dragging a dead horse around a racetrack.
Must be fun as hell to work for him.
Among his colleagues, Steves is a notorious workaholic. After grueling days of filming in Europe, he has been known to slip script revisions under the crew’s doors at 2 a.m., and then to ask them, at breakfast, for their feedback.
Feedback in the form of face revisions would be appropriate.
There is something to be said for knowing when to stop.
[ Said he, on a blog he’s been bashing out for nigh on twenty chuffing years. ]
A little Cagney to Steves’ Clarke might be the ticket.
Demonstrating that his blog is the exception that proves (tests) the rule, showing the limits of the rule.
A grapefruit in the face?
Be careful not to catch this deadly, repulsive disease.
Pink hair AND septum ring. Shocked face.
[ Said he, on a blog he’s been bashing out for nigh on twenty chuffing years. ]
In all fairness, it’s not like the subjects of your blog have stopped providing new material for you to fisk.
While there are some overarching themes, and even those have changed from the very early days, it still doesn’t seem like we’re in dead horse territory yet. Often it’s more like “what fresh hell is this?”, interspersed with bits of Ephemera that uplift, or at least provide interesting things to geek out on.
High praise.
Speaking of . . .
I should put that in the brochure.
That mean drinks prices will drop?
[ Peers over spectacles. ]
*sigh*
Guess not.
Brochure.
We’re in slo-mo horse with flowing mane territory.
Only one of those two words describes the bar snacks.
Look, three bucks. Like I paid your mom last night.
A P should be prepended to Steves’ first name, it seems.
Housing activists deserve slavery, because turnabout is fair play.
Truly, these activists and government commissars should be seen as sub-human.
Well, this explains New Orleans.