Friday Ephemera (832)
It’s his surfboard now, baby. || Big shaking booty. || Boof. || On buying a computer, 1980s. || Mr Reubens has 600 banjos, 1979. || On Columbo and creating intrigue without mystery. || Rotation detected. || What do drugs do? (1971) || So how was your day, dear? || Colour counter. Less than 50 is unacceptable. || Tastes like chicken. || Incoming. || Detection detected. || We’ve all done it. || Sci-fi franchise convergence. || Diverging values. || Divert auxiliary power to the filter. || Tony Hancock in The Impersonator, 1959. || More than a hanging flap, you know. || Grip strength confirmed. || Passing piglings. || The progressive retail experience, parts 755, 756, 757, 758, 759 and 760. || Place in food chain negotiation. || Scenes of shouting, tugging and bodily fluid. || And finally, a project for the weekend.
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.
Oh, and hitting the tip jar is what keeps this place here.
Never mind those damned French, what about the perfidious penguins?
Old saying: “Behind the mountains of depravity, more mountains of depravity”
Hectocotylus: “[H]e may wrench it off and present it to the female.”
Some context.
For the record, I posted this before I read the first entry.
Wir sind Devo!
“Scotty, we need more power to the
shieldsfilters!”Is that what you meant the other day by kitchening?
So many problems could be solved by executing the bottom 1% of society…and 100% of the bien pensants.
Speaking of which: She accidentally did the
rightbest thing.Titivation in practice.
Good thing there aren’t many horses on the streets these days.
The problem with less lethal weapons is that sometimes the perp deserves lethal.
Amazing how quickly the UK has surpassed the US in progressive retail experience.
It is almost as if when thieves learn there is no punishment for little crimes you get more crime.
Somewhere in the realm of cool and eldritch horror.
Skynet, when the humans fell.
Ah, nostalgia…
It never does the hands.
Morning, all.
I call him Hoppity.
Incoming 2.
Only $359.
Hey, I don’t judge.
Nothing quite that severe.
And anything you hear to the contrary is a filthy lie.
Filthy? As in covered in carbonized pizza dust? 🧐
There are countless videos I don’t include, generally because they’re very similar. Branches of Greggs, for instance, seem to be a favoured target over here, and the booze aisles of mini markets.
Because the allegedly downtrodden have a need for pasties and vodka in large, resaleable quantities, before uploading their adventures to social media and boasting of how easy it is to thieve. In our uplifted progressive age.
And so we can watch the decline in close to real time.
It’s hard to avoid the air of degradation.
I recently went into a branch of Boots, a high-street pharmacist, for the first time in ages, and couldn’t help but notice the rather obvious transformation. Many shelves now have crappy plastic flaps to frustrate thieves. And at regular intervals, a recorded voice reminds customers that they are being watched by security cameras and that thieving will result in a call to the police. It repeats once a minute.
Which doesn’t exactly make shopping for mouthwash an uplifting experience.
This is the social cost of our ongoing moral impotence.
Can you name 100 colours?
Why, yes, yes I can. Though not quickly. It took me 70 minutes.
I’m feeling quite pleased with myself.
Did you check out some of the other products on that site? They only get freakier.
[ Rings tiny, silver bell. ]
[ Burly Nubians emerge from cellar, bearing discoloured mattress. ]
[ Discoloured mattress is deposited ceremoniously on bar. ]
There you go. Some Vanish spray should get the stains out.
And for any trans-racial readers.
Same thing here. It’s so depressing like they’ve just given up.
Well, it’s the knowledge that, despite the plastic covers on shelves and the dreary announcements, you can be fairly sure that if anyone were to start looting the place, nothing whatsoever would be done to impede their thievery.
I know people who’ve tutted half-heartedly about how unpleasant shopping has now become for the law-abiding in any number of stores. “Oh, isn’t it awful,” they say, before changing the subject. But none of these people would ever vote for or endorse the necessary corrective measures.
They’ll just let things get worse, for everyone, and continue sighing occasionally, while feeling morally superior to those who suggest that the decline can be corrected, given a little effort. A little vigour.
The sighing people – these effete, flimsy creatures – seem to imagine that being a moral person, which is how they see themselves, somehow means never having to punish wrongdoing. Never having to do what is necessary to maintain civilisation. Because that would be terribly mean. And they want to seem nice.
Which strikes me as a rather fundamental misunderstanding of what morality is.
So that’s what happened to Emma Sulkowicz’s ‘groundbreaking’ mattress performance, Carry That Weight (2014-15)?
Somewhat unexpectedly, Sulkowicz is now a practising acupuncturist.
That, as they say.
Just going to leave this here.
Who says fly-tippers don’t have a sense of irony?
It captures something, that’s for sure. Re-reading the subsequent thread, I was tickled by the idea that the establishment in question still sells magazines and DVDs.
When musicologists get drunk.
The horror of much of the decline is just how rapid, just how concentrated it has been over the last five years in particular.
In the wake of the Global Financial Crisis 2007-09 that might sound a tad hyperbolic.
But for me it was really the lockdown, and what came after, that has stripped away any illusion that Britain is still in anyway a serious country.
You mentioned your experience in the NHS the other day and I’ve had very similar ones.
One in particular stands out.
This was a rather rotund, very voluble foreign lady sitting directly under a sign saying something to the effect of ‘Shh! Please respect staff and other patients by not talking on your mobile’.
Repeatedly, her phone would go off, repeatedly, she would bark into it so loudly you genuinely wondered whether or not she even needed a mechanical aid to have the conversation, repeatedly forcing the reception staff from behind their desk to cross the room to tell her not to have the conversation, being ushered outside, then coming back in and doing the whole thing over again.
What struck me at the time was less the exasperation of the staff members, but the foreign lady’s apparent obliviousness to the seething resentment brewing amongst others in the waiting room.
One elderly white British couple in particular you could see practically twitching with suppressed rage.
And with shops now – my local Lidl was so riddled with brazen shoplifters that they’ve now installed airport security technology.
There is now an exit barrier that will only allow you to leave by scanning the receipt.
And as for the long opening hour stores such as Tesco Express or Sainsbury’s Local – all of them now have their cashier staff ensconced in what are basically panic rooms, but with see-through perspex panels.
And as you (David) have discussed here previously, the chances of a conviction are becoming ever more remote and the chances of any meaningful punishment following on from that conviction more remote still.
Dismal.
Very much not dismal.
That’s brightened my day up that has.
Heh. It’s almost funny.
There’s a Sainsbury’s Local a mile or so up the road and the process of paying for things has been made about as convoluted and demoralising as seems humanly possible.
You can either use the self-checkout, which often malfunctions or is out of order, and which doesn’t suit the elderly, or you can stand waiting at the heavily shielded checkout kiosk, for what may be some time, in the hope that an employee will at some point arrive and deign to, you know, take your money.
When a visibly resentful employee does eventually materialise behind the Perspex security screen, then the farce proper can ensue.
Now, you, the paying customer, must squeeze your basket of purchases through a slot so narrow and awkwardly positioned that the basket will barely fit. Then, after some scanning and scowling, each item is passed back to you through the same narrow, awkwardly positioned slot.
This is done with the expectation that you, the paying customer, will wrestle these items into a bag, despite there being no space whatsoever on which rest a bag in order to do so. Resulting in much comical standing on one leg, with one knee used as an improvised, and not entirely adequate, platform.
On the mercifully rare occasions I find myself in there, I feel a strong urge to say to the scowling cashier, “You do see the absurdity, don’t you? Just how fucking mad this is?”
I didn’t get it and figured I did’t care, but then realized I would be denying some geek here from having the chance to EXPLAIN it all in detail, and I was brought up to be kind to the mentally impaired.
So, let your ‘tizz fly and tell me what I am missing.
Heh.
Heh.
[ Deep breath. ]
It’s a riff on the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode Darmok – a fan favourite, though I think it’s overrated – in which the crew encounter a species who communicate only in metaphor.
For instance, “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra” means something like “Let’s collaborate against a common enemy.” “Shaka, when the walls fell” means a disaster of some kind. And “Temba, his arms wide” means something like “Please accept this gift.”
The universal translator, a recurring gadget and plot device, proves inadequate, deciphering only the words but not the allusions and therefore the meaning, and much hinges on clear communication.
So the joke is that only a diehard Trek enthusiast would know how to respond. Which the shapeshifting machine impersonating John Connor’s mother isn’t. And I suppose it’s also a nod to the incomprehensible nature of many memes. Much like the one we’re talking about.
See, explaining the joke rather kicks the wind out of it.
Nipplage.
A sacrifice you must make, as He Who Posts the Ephemera. For that we are grateful.
Did I hear an Australian accent at the end?
DisaPOINTed!
Not my favorite; the premise struck me as pseudo-intellectual silliness.
Scroll down for early Jim Henson muppet ads for Wilkins Coffee.
As I observed, many problems could be solved by executing the bottom 1% of society and 100% of the bien pensants.
It’s a conceit that’s mildy amusing for two minutes, but it doesn’t withstand much scrutiny. The premise simply doesn’t work in context.
I mean, how could a species that communicates only in metaphor develop mathematics and technology in order to become space-faring and a serious threat? Where’s the necessary precision, if all you have are metaphors and mythic anecdotes?
If the crew had encountered a primitive society in which this happened, it might be less jarring. But the powerful-space-faring-species thing seems entirely at odds with the premise of the episode.
Hence, overrated.