Friday Ephemera (831)
Just tap it. Trust me. || At last, a solution to the problem of wearing of a belt. || I have questions. || I have questions 2. || Insert joke here. || A tender moment. || Intriguing cheeks. || Lifelike home robot is curiously flexible. || A rolling stone. (h/t, Things) || Situational awareness. || The wrong kind of water for making tea, 1975. || Toddler, tall building. || Look, just try to keep it down in there. || Colander percussion. || Crumple zone. || Power plants around the world. || On the upside, it ain’t crowded. || IKEA products ranked by how long they take to assemble. || Aerodynamics. || On circles and vibrations. (h/t, Things) || Vloggers, you say. || She’ll love it. || Shoes can really pull an outfit together. || Because it can be done. || And finally, Ms Dolly Parton’s Jolene, on a 7″ 45 single, played at 33.
To enable extra commenting options – including @username mentions, comment editing, upvotes, custom avatars, and live notifications – scroll down to the black ‘Meta’ box at the very bottom of the page and click register. It’s free and quite painless.
For additional rumblings, follow me on X.





From Albania to Yale (over 4,500 miles):
They also made Norman Wisdom a movie star because the Albanian Communists apparently believed his movies were a withering critique of capitalist exploitation of the worker.
From Yale to madness (a short walk):
from the comments:
Anyone who bills himself as “antifascist” can safely be assumed to be a relentless liar (and other things). But on the other hand the anecdote does sound plausible, at least with regards to certain segments of academia.
From Albania to madness: zero distance.
Another curiously flexible robot.
Wretched, wretched girl.
Found in shag carpets?
An obvious insufficiency of midnight basketball.
Emphasis on the latter?
So this just happened…we are in Greenville, SC to see a baseball game tomorrow night with a high school friend, staying at the hotel across the street from the baseball stadium (and around the corner from the Shoeless Joe Jackson Museum). Right across the street and kinda above the stadium is a restaurant called Lefty’s Grill…Something. The web page description said it had a rooftop element to it and we saw earlier the designated elevator to the rooftop. So just before game time we go to the elevator and I ask the guy at the podium there what the deal is. He hands us two tickets, scans them, and up we go. There were six or seven younger (early 30’s maybe?) people who got in with us. We go to the top and a guy asks us for ID and gives us the usual wrist bands. We walk in, beautiful view from above the Big Green Monster in left field. The local team, Greenville Drive, is a Red Sox farm club so the field dimensions are exactly those of Fenway Park. I see a food buffet of burgers, fried chicken tenders, popcorn, etc. I go to the bar and ask the guy what the deal is and he says “Open bar”. Confused I’m like umm…ok…two miller lights. I get two miller lights, a couple of burgers and some chicken tenders and a big bucket of popcorn at the buffet and take it over to my wife sitting at barstools overlooking the field. Only then does it hit me…looking around at the younger crowd around us (nobody under 50)…they all seem to know each other…we just crashed a corporate event. I look at my wife and say, “If anybody asks, you’re from corporate HR”. Because nobody but a fat black woman is going to question a white woman from corporate HR and there were no fat black women around. I had about five or six 16 oz beers…which, given a modest prostate age handicap certainly qualifies for a solo beer-an-inning win. My wife had a couple as well. Then around the 7th inning or so, a woman who had ridden up in the elevator with us, along with presumably a coworker, asks if we would like to do some tequila shots. Sure! We would love to do tequila shots! We saw a fantastic ball game, well from the home team perspective anyway. 7-1 good guys.
Eric Clapton could not be reached for comment. What? Too soon?
Still good.
Speaking of inappropriate comments about Dolly Parton.
I had to look up what the one-eye sign is. According to Grok,
*winces
“Deactivation is a premium feature”
It’s a sign of mental disorder in the observer, clearly..
Hard pass.
Morning, all.
Still very good. Even slowed down, I don’t hear any flaws, any wobbles.
I see what you did there.
I’m not entirely sure what’s happening here.
But hey, at least everyone’s filming each other, as is the modern custom.
And speaking of flexibility.
Like something from a cartoon…
It’s the combination of seeing someone, presumably a friend, in quite significant potential danger and the dirty laugh.
Coleman Hughes and Nathan Cofnas have a difficult but civil conversation.
Broken ankles in 3… 2…
Burly men, tiny kitten.
Context here.
California, baby:
Where all the progress happens.
Unless the situation is obvious, I assume these types of videos are staged for click money or attention-seeking.
It’s possible I’m being very slightly unfair to California. But only insofar as I can imagine our own leftist city council doing much the same thing.
There’s a little man inside, isn’t there?
Amateur. My mother once slipped down the cellar steps and the fall twisted her right foot 180 degrees.
On the plus side, while she spent six months in a hip to toe cast, Grandma cooked and dinners were great again.
Rejoice, comrades! The time to get a crosswalk painted has decreased from 6 months to 12 months!
I suspect that would be extra, a premium membership thing.
But as you’re intrigued.
Now tickled by the idea that there actually is a little man inside – giving it his all, as it were – while the ladies look underwhelmed and flick through their phones.
Because he’s so little?
They could be provided to all those military-age immigrant males who seem to want sex but think women are lesser beings.
Does it have a remotely-activatable terminator setting?
It’s possible. But not at all probable.
Wait … that’s not normal?
Cassette deck Vader.
Always respect the media.
As noted recently, Metro does have a history of propagating baseless fantasy.
Fun for all ages!
Plywood and spray paint sales are up, though, for some reason beyond the ken of the Met, apparently.
I was reminded of this, featured here previously.
The man in the boat? Kinda…
Shouldn’t there be a red shift as well?… or is it blue?
The Doppler shift in the audio was cute. Though I question the physics.
I suppose, if we could build one, the Enterprise would look bluer when approaching at a significant fraction of the speed of light, and redder when accelerating away. Presumably, there would be other, more radical distortions as you get closer to c. Though I defer to any passing physicists.
I think fnord it’s a little over the fnord top to be ascribing mental fnord illness to a theory with such a fnord long and storied fnord history.
The floor is lava.
Ok, that’s pretty damn funny.
[ Titivates store-bought pizza. ]
Cook, cook, cook, cook, cook.
The Other Half says the word cooking is inappropriate for what it is I’m doing. Instead, he’s suggested the verb kitchening. As in, to be doing something in the kitchen, possibly even something vaguely food-adjacent, but with none of the skills typically associated with cooking.
Seems needlessly harsh, frankly.
The quintessential archetype of burly guys and kittens is right here.