Friday Ephemera

And finally, topically, when the guy in front of you is doing this.
As was mentioned elsewhere, when the Kung Flu cancelled hockey playoffs it took Canadians about a week to develop a potential vaccine.
Tim Horton’s and hockey are two things you do not f*ck with around here.

George’s besties.
At this point:
This Tweet is unavailable.
Which George?

To the end of her life that poor girl will be hearing “Aren’t you the one who was trying to fire the cannon?”

Morning, all.
David, your long nightmare is almost over
I think I’ll wait for the Script Doctor’s more credible review. Oh and, now that it’s finally arrived in the UK, I’m quite enjoying The Mandalorian. I’ve only seen the first two episodes, so there’s not a huge amount I can say yet. But despite the low-key vibe, and despite the limitations of the basic conceit – the minimal dialogue, the lead character’s face being hidden, etc., it has a certain charm.
Which George?
Monbiot, and his super-cool buddies Extinction Rebellion, who seem to publicly delight in people dying from coronavirus. For Mother Earth, you see.
[ Edited. ]

” Like a stubborn jar of pickles.”
She loosened it for him!

A dark and twisted selection this week…
I was previously unfamiliar with the erotic practice of stumping.
No-one needs to know about this.
Those prone to fainting should look away now.
I foolishly clicked on this but managed to click away in time to avoid trauma.
I don’t even want a credit note. I am going to try to self-isolate in Monet’s virtual garden. (band name)

No-one needs to know about this.
Hey, I had to read it. I don’t see why the rest of you should get off unscathed.

Can we imagine the end of capitalism now?
Queues for food. Shortages of toilet paper. People dying. Sounds a lot like communism.
Is that what she meant? 🙂

I can’t imagine Laurie wouldn’t fall hook, line, and sinker for it.
I’ll just leave this here.

fully-automated luxury communism
A long-winded and shiny new way of selling the lie of plain old communism. The communist elite get the luxury, the masses get to play the automatons.

Twitching meat.
Band name.

Star Trek: The Motionless Picture.
Great soundtrack though. One of Jerry Goldsmith’s best: dense harmonies and interesting orchestral textures. I could listen to the music on its own.

especially you David.
[ Peers over spectacles. ]

The communist elite get the luxury, the masses get to play the automatons.
Ooh, that’s good. Also, now shamelessly stolen.
Sometimes I wonder if I’m entirely alone in really liking ST:TMP.

More joys of public transport.
He’s an “artist”.
via: https://twitter.com/FabFitzy/status/1242819824339890176

“Name the counties of the United States. You have 12 minutes.”
2130 isn’t too shabby considering I only knew about three, and just randomly guessed Founding Fathers and 19th Century presidents (plus a few educated geographical punts) for 11 minutes. The 100km splash damage helps, mind you; I probably only got about 20 actual correct answers.
I’m not sure I could name all the counties in Britain in 12 minutes, to be honest.
“it took Canadians about a week to develop a potential vaccine.”
That was quick, but as the Blogfather is wont to say, faster please.
“I’m not sure that Laurie is quite making the point that she thinks she is.“
I’m sure as hellfire imagining the end of Chinese Communism right now.

I was previously unfamiliar with the erotic practice of stumping.
Watching Rio Bravo will never be the same again.

Yes, Laurie, you, too, could just sit at home and die while the Great People’s Republic leaders were the only ones with access to healthcare – usually in a different, capitalist country.
At risk of being vulgar, I’m going to quote myself. From the comments following this:

Laurie is following the standard trajectory of her type. Her status and career would have been much less likely without the very same bourgeois values she claims to despise and urges others to reject. If instead of a stable, rather comfortable middle-class upbringing she’d been raised in keeping with her own professed values – say, by a welfare-dependent single parent with multiple transient partners and no stability or commitment – I somehow doubt she’d have been able to spend time at Wadham College finding herself politically and playing “riot girl.” And I doubt she’d now be able to flit around the world while tweeting about how oppressed she is.
Likewise, her self-imagined role as a wordsmith revolutionary would be much harder to sustain without a great many other people cultivating those same bourgeois values and keeping things ticking over. A fact that Laurie counts on, despite her pretence. In effect, we, the bourgeois rubes whose values she rails against, are her safety net. The fact that few of us are credulous enough to take her at her words and follow her advice is what allows her to mouth it in relative comfort and security, knowing that the destruction of capitalism, marriage and the family unit (and all that would go with it), which she claims to want, won’t happen just yet.

It’s what makes Laurie, and all the other Lauries, so contemptible.

I’ve tried putting in terms that a spoiled college brat would understand:

“Today, you have four or five coffee shops within an easy walk. Each of them tries to source the best coffee beans they can, and blends them and roasts them in a variety of ways in an effort to be the most appealing to you. You have a favorite place with a favorite variety, but you know that you can stop into any of them and get a very satisfying cup.
“In your Brave New World, there will be only the People’s Glorious Revolutionary Coffee Centre, and you’ll be lucky if even one of these locations is convenient to your daily routine. The P.G.R. Coffee Committee will buy beans from the cheapest provider, at whatever minimum quality standard they think they can get away with. There will be one roast available, and it will be whatever the Commissar prefers. It might be free in your Worker’s Paradise, but you’ll be lucky if you get enough coffee ration cards to treat yourself twice a week.
“If you complain about the situation, you’ll be punished by the P.G.R. Morale Committee. And if you ever decide to supply your own beans and roast them yourself, you’ll have to do it in secret, because the moment one of your friends or neighbors gets in trouble with the P.G.R. Morale Committee themselves, they’ll turn you over in a heartbeat to save their own skin.
Is this really a lifestyle conducive to your dreams of radical creativity? Can you write your revolutionary masterpiece fueled by just two cups of watery brown pseudo-coffee per week?”

Admittedly, the message gets through to very few. They always assume their Marxist philosophy professor will be the Commissar, never imagining that it’s far more likely they’ll be First Against The Wall.

If you ever decide to supply your own beans and roast them yourself, you’ll have to do it in secret
The Modern Little Red Hen by Sir Ronaldus Magnus 1976.

Sometimes I wonder if I’m entirely alone in really liking ST:TMP.
You are not alone. It could certainly be a bit shorter, and the philosophy is kind of dopey, but I enjoy watching it. And, as others have said, the soundtrack is a masterpiece.

Ersatz Coffee, usually Chicory
Don’t forget Postum.

Feminist, Queer and Trans Geographies: abolish the family!abolish the state! “What really matters to me… is the abolishment of the isolated privatization of human misery: the radical scarcity and overwork that is born of the logic of marriage and of family”

here’s an epic Picard rant for you
“I actually went back and looked on Google Groups, which acquired Usenet [..]”
Oh, FFS.
It’s actually not true there were no complaints about the “female captain”, but the rants were usually about how inconsistently and nonsensically her character was written. And in the later seasons where the show had devolved into Kate Mulgrew and Jeri Ryan failing to conceal their mutual loathing despite having to have multiple “heartwarming” scenes together in each episode – the quip “Voyager? More like Her Voyage, if you know what I mean” was not unheard of.

Kate Mulgrew and Jeri Ryan failing to conceal their mutual loathing
And so, we had a totes-progressive and totes-empowered female captain, played by a Hillary-hugging actress who famously had on-set meltdowns about the arrival of a younger, prettier cast member. A rivalry that lasted years, resulting in a notoriously awful work experience for everyone else, with Mulgrew issuing regular demands that Ryan be fired – basically, for being prettier and attracting more press interest – along with endless petty behaviour. Say, deliberately disrupting Ryan’s lighting and makeup checks – and issuing openly spiteful conditions of her presence on set. As when demanding that she, the younger, prettier actress, not be allowed to use the bathroom during the working day.
As a supposedly inspirational model of women in positions of authority, a microcosm of feminism, it was almost funny.

Catchy tune.

“Extinction Rebellion” account @xr_east taken down. archive.org snagged a copy.
Thanks for that. Link updated.

Catchy tune.
Heh. My father-in-law has just WhatsApped that to me.

? Canadians kept saying Tim Hortons was the best.
Not all of us. Tim Hortons stopped being the best a long time ago. It’s mediocre to terrible now. Even McDonald’s makes a better cup of coffee.
As a side story, my uncle was an early supplier of flour to Tim Hortons. He was a baking food supplies salesman and was introduced to Tim by Pat Quinn one of Tim’s future team mates on the Toronto Maple Leafs. My uncle grew up with the Quinn family in Hamilton. Pat was best man at my uncle’s wedding. So my uncle got to meet a lot of the Leafs from that time period. I got to meet Tim Horton through my uncle shortly before Tim died in a horrible car accident. He was driving a De Tomaso Pantera at a high rate of speed while under the influence of alcohol.
My uncle was offered a chance to buy a small region of Tim Hortons franchises early on. He turned down the opportunity and instead bought a franchise in a restaurant chain called The Millionaire. His franchise went bust after about five years. Ironicaly the region of Tim Hortons franchises is worth millions today.

How long ago would that be?
They were pretty good up until the early 2000s. Until that time each location did its own baking on site by a qualified baker. So there was a much higher level of care and attention to detail. After that time, baking was done at a central locaton en masse and shipped to the franchises. Even their other food offerings today are just heated and served on site.
Of course, YMMV, and there are a lot of Canadians who still think Timmies is the best. I think that’s more because they grew up believing that than because of their experience there.

Titania McGrath on priorities.

Also heh.
Via Julia.

It’s not just Extinction Rebellion
And so the livelihoods of countless people become “unnecessary operations.”

…I would like to get an opinion from the doctors and such regarding this video.
Seeing as how the guy is a chiropractor, he was bound to go off the rails and that is the whole nutrition/microflora/etc bit. His epidemiology is off and out of date, his virology a bit simplified – they may mutate over a population, but a virus is neither alive nor dead, it is just a packet of DNA or RNA with no metabolic functions, it can’t “become stronger” in any given individual sans mutation.
I don’t care what disease you get, if you are debilitated, older, and/or sicker to start with it will be worse, with the possible exception of the old practice of using malaria to treat syphilis.
You can take all the vitamin C, or other water soluble vitamins, you want, and if your body doesn’t need them, you will literally be pissing them away, there is no magic about selenium, zinc, (though essential) or vitamin E. Too much vitamin D can lead to toxic effects, selenium and zinc also. Excess vitamin E can lead to bleeding disorders.
The bottom line is, barring underlying condition, if you keep yourself in reasonable shape, eat a balanced diet and if you really want to, take any OTC multivitamin, you are good to hook.
Some fun facts about The Great Toilet Paper Apocalypse, seeing as how the US&A is now being touted as the “epicenter” of this mess, we in the trade tend to evaluate this sort of thing in terms of cases/population, in which case (NPI) mighty Switzerland* is the epicenter with over 160/100,000 people, followed closely by Italy at 154. The US comes in at 39/100,000 unless you take out NY metro, in which case it is less than Canada which is 19/100,000.
*(As of 1403Z today)

“If I may, the example of history would be Ersatz Coffee, usually Chicory.”
Having grown up with it, my grandfather preferred chicory. This stuff, to be specific (I didn’t know until just now that it was a local product). To be fair, it is actually a whole 4% real coffee.

Thanks, Muldoon. I’m kinda disappointed both in myself for not checking out this guy’s credentials, though he did throw a good number of caveats in there, and my source. I let my guard down because my source’s wife is certified pediatric cardiologist with degrees from the Royal College of Surgeons in Dublin, Baylor University, and does some teaching at University of Florida College of Medicine. He told me that she had been called up by a colleague or was in NYC for some reason in regard to the virus breaking out there.
That said, I do feel the general idea of that video is significantly valid, especially in regard to stress factors and as you say, common sense nutrition. That vitamin C thing did raise an eyebrow as, as you say, over consumption of it is just waste. But then didn’t Linus Pauling or Saulk or somebody kinda besmirch their reputation obsessing over it?

Now do socialized medicine.
Canadians who believe in the institution of socialized medicine should be institutionalized. 😉

But then didn’t Linus Pauling…
Yep, Pauling, which goes to show that even brilliant people can be susceptible to oddball theories. The problem, of course, is the people who see this sort of thing and think “if one is good ten is better” and end up screwing themselves up not unlike the “chloroquine is chloroquine” people in Arizona.

Chicory (or dandelion root) is nice. But tastes nothing like real coffee.