Friday Ephemera (694)
The secret life of cats. || I’ll be back. || About bordellos. (h/t, o4p1) || The thrill of barrel relocation. || Pair of 1960s Star Trek Tribbles, $2,000. (h/t, Things) || Her thighs are too powerful, you see. || Some gentle sponging may be needed. || Today’s word is influencer. || Question asked. || Dining scenes. || Adornment. || Fair point. A reply in the comments. || Plot twist. || Caption competition. || Spraying scenes. More to come, I suspect. || The progressive retail experience, parts 505(a), 505(b), 505(c), 505(d), and 505(e). || “The modern university is the primary laboratory for the Cluster B pathologies.” See also. || Telling obvious lies. || Meanwhile, in women’s gaming and e-sports news. || How to make Worcestershire Sauce. (h/t, Mark) || Today’s other word is focus. || And finally, fashionably, the thrill of early Eighties hair.
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At speed.
Live action remake of Corpse Bride.
Progressive Retail experience
Yelling “everyone must eat” whilst looters break into a wine and liquor store behind her. Says it all.
I’m afraid I don’t what you are talking about.Ah. Flush after the snake disappears, obviously.My favourites out of that lot were
+
and
wasn’t too bad either.
Long nails signify that you aren’t doing manual labor of almost any kind.
Whilst being a younger instance living up to my nick during a visit to the local grocery store, the woman ringing up the total was wearing longish paste-on (I hope) nails. One of them flew off and landed in the area where you bag your scanned-in booty. I picked it up, looked at it quizzically, realized what it actually was, and offered it to the check-out lady with the comment “I think this is yours.”
I don’t remember her expression, but my wife was aghast that I would do such a thing. The check-out lady at least took the errant paste-on fingernail from me.
“Spraying scenes. More to come, I suspect. “
Oh, I do hope so!
Animals.
Morning, all.
Ah, but they’re keeping their babies warm with those bricked iPhones.
Think of it as a journey from “Got One! Ha-Ha!” to “We don’t got nothing to do with it,” and concluding with a tearful mugshot. Though whether Ms Blackwell will learn anything from the experience is perhaps another matter. I’m not sure there’s the mental or moral wherewithal for such things to occur.
And it must be quite strange to be so accustomed to bare-faced lying. Seemingly with every second breath.
The motorized Walking Tribble is only $4,000.
This looks like something that might have appeared in Mad Magazine, but it didn’t.
https://twitter.com/SRCHicks/status/1707372500370284696
For those without twitter access.
[ Slurps coffee. ]
That.
Well, the New Rules Of Pretending aren’t entirely coherent, even if one were willing to play along. On the one hand, fat screeching drag queens are supposedly comedic and a kind of pantomime, something exaggerated and silly and suitable for children. Something to make the kiddies laugh. But on the other hand, dysmorphic men and autogynephiles, who are often difficult to distinguish from drag queens, are supposedly Beings Of Infinite Seriousness And Validity, and even a raised eyebrow can result in finger-wagging and accusations of hatred.
And so the inherent absurdity of a cross-dressing man is something we must find amusing and, simultaneously, not at all funny.
It’s a tricky manoeuvre.
I mean, do we chuckle or not?
A nice otherwise pointless story about Peter Tosh going to Africa 40 years ago. Provided for no other reason than that I can see myself slipping into using the expression “Suh weh di bongo clippings dis is…”. Which could be fun. Or not.
A link to the full 13 page, peer reviewed…or so it implies at the top of the pages, original article. From 2022. Old news? Should be mainstream thinking…heh, ‘thinking’…by now.
Is it from the missing Doctor Who / Toy Story crossover episode?
Heh. It does suggest… possibilities.
Oh, come on.
Part of what made me laugh was that Mr Hartnell was apparently quite fastidious about which lever performed which function on his imaginary space-and-time machine. So you can picture him explaining to passing extras how the TARDIS works.
The last paragraph of THE BASIC LAWS OF HUMAN STUPIDITY by Carlo M. Cipolla:
“In a country which is moving downhill, the fraction of stupid people is still equal to σ;
however in the remaining population one notices among those in power an alarming proliferation of the bandits with overtones of stupidity (sub-area B1 of quadrant B in figure 3) and among those not in power an equally alarming growth in the number of helpless individuals (area H in basic graph, fig.1). Such change in the composition of the non-stupid population inevitably strengthens the destructive power of the σ fraction and makes decline a certainty. And the country goes to Hell.”
Summary:
“If Tom takes an action and suffers a loss while producing a gain to Dick, Tom’s mark will fall in field H: Tom acted helplessly. If Tom takes an action by which he makes a gain while yielding a gain also to Dick, Tom’s mark will fall in area I: Tom acted intelligently. If Tom takes an action by which he makes a gain causing Dick a loss, Tom’s mark will fall in area B: Tom acted as a bandit. Stupidity is related to area S and to all positions on axis Y below point O. As the Third Basic Law explicitly clarifies:
A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.”
🙋Oooh Miss, Miss? 🙋Pick me Miss. 🙋I have an answer Miss…
I thought the skins were used for bagpipe bodies.
I think you’ll find it’s the bagpipes that are used to make haggis. The accumulation of multi-generational sputum is what gives the family haggis its unique and delicate flavour.
Nice photo of indigenous hairy Scottish beasts though.
And their pets are quite attractive.
I think we may need Sam’s views on this. What with him being from The Barren North.
Isn’t that him with the big hat?
I’m just going to leave this here for no reason whatsoever.
[ Looks in mirror, practises innocent face. ]
More scenes from The Barren North.
Sam’s mum is looking well.
What?
If Sam shows up, I’m not standing near you.
Ahead of the curve, barkeep.
Some illustrations, for those who, like me, had questions of a perfectly respectable intellectual nature.
Doesn’t “whorehouse” sound so much finer in French?
I’ll distract him with a bottle of yer finest Buckfast.
I miss that much saner world. It’s all going to pot now.
I’m going to need a moment to process that.
…all for just $900 per month – air purifiers and fans included!.
The word private is creaking under the load there.
Sign of the times
The necessary reserves for the former are fairly depleted.
In college we crammed seven of us into a ~1600 square foot home. Fortunately that density only lasted a semester until one guy dropped out and the cohabiting couple moved on, but for that one semester it was tolerable. We all knew each other to some degree though. I cannot imagine cramming 6 beds x 3 bedrooms = 18 people, 18 strangers into that space. Unless they’re all chinese or similar people to whom such might be considered normal. That’s just begging for problems, especially for the landlord. Heh…wonder who, or what entity, that is.
Ladies and gentlemen pretending to be ladies, are you troubled by your short squatty legs?
Fear no longer! Chinese Gen Zers to the rescue with a hack that can make your legs look “10x longer”!
[ Imagines striding about neighbourhood on ten-metre legs, drifts into reverie. ]
[ Reverie intensifies. ]
[ From behind bar, cruel laughter, sounds of manic stomping. ]
Hmmm. The hell you say.
[Strokes beard]
…
…
OK men, as you were.
It just makes your cock look further away from your belly button.
An update on Ms Blackwell, seen above.
Mugshot merch now available.
In that dumpster fire of responses it’s hard to tell which randos are serious, which are sarcastic, which are genuinely trolling…heh, ‘genuinely trolling’.
“Down the road, on the left. You’ll know it when you see it.”
Had to look up Lili St. Cyr.
The joys of public education.
(courtesy of NTB)
Her thighs are too powerful, you see.
I hate you and I hate what you have done to me.
No refunds. Credit note only.
Had to look up Lili St. Cyr.
Dammit Janet, not a Rocky Horror Picture Show Fan?
Last verse of the Song “Don’t Dream It” is:
Don’t dream it, be it
It’s beyond me
Help me, mommy
God bless Lili St. Cyr
It’s the only reason I knew who she was. It was quite a phenomenon back in the day. In my high school, kids in grades 11, 12 and 13 would go to late night showings 3 or 4 times a month just to do the time warp again.
My exposure to The Rocky Horror Picture Show preceded the audience participation and, yes, is probably why Lili St. Cyr came to mind.
“bottle of yer finest Buckfast.”
From Bucksnort?
(Yes, that’s a real place. So there)
Gentle reminder to self: Do not peruse ephemera while eating.
Being a narcissist with a pinhead ideology dressed in word-salad prose probably doesn’t help.
Mao’s Great Leap Forward.
An excerpt from this.
Question asked.
Yeah, yeah. But the important question is – how much were the curtains and who paid for them?
Object found in road.
Seconds earlier.
Somewhat related, but coming from the other direction as it were (apologies for the extended quote, full article from The Telegraph here, italics are mine):
I have questions.
What else can this precedent apply to I wonder?
Wouldn’t it be age discrimination if a 42 year-old divorcee wants to sign up for a new life in the armed forces, which currently only accepts applicants ages 18-35?
I mean, shouldn’t the British Army simply get rid of that upper age limit and apply a proportional standard of fitness?
And just how many violent underworld criminal types will be “mindful of the biological and physiological differences between men and women” when resisting arrest by a female officer?
I am of course, being tongue in cheek here. Mostly, anyway.
But why does living in Britain feel so much like sitting in a deck chair on The Titanic as it gently lists towards oblivion?
Stated plainly, physically incompetent women must be treated as if they were in fact competent. And to hell with the obvious, inevitable consequences for everyone else.
See also.
I think we both know the answer to that one.
Indeed, old boy.
[ replaces monocle ]
I say, when are those musician Johnnies going to appear?
I’m not by nature inclined to despair. But it seems to me that on many cultural and institutional fronts we’re seeing an unrealism and pathology that is often impervious to correction via normal channels. There’s frequently an air of obstinate wrongness, a competitive perversity. Such that, for instance, we arrive at things like this. Which suggests that the things currently being degraded – academia, education, the police force, the armed forces, borders, etc – will be degraded further, and perhaps ultimately fail, at least in significant part, before anything approaching realism and functionality can be restored.
Assuming they can be.
Being a narcissist with a pinhead ideology dressed in word-salad prose probably doesn’t help.
So oppressed and afraid to leave an apartment and the whole shtick is traveling around giving hectoring lectures, BTW, did someone mention word salad?
“Helps”, the Dinsdales were unavailable for comment.
Narcissist might be a bit understated though.
As the article notes, not only did Brown fail the test by clear margin (a score of 6.7 on a test requiring a minimum standard of 7.6), but “[s]he was still deployed”.
They gave her a job for which they – and she – knew she had already failed.
And not only that, but while in the post for which she had failed to reach the minimum required standard they allowed her to take “other attempts at the test”, every one of which she also failed.
How can this possibly be a description of discrimination?
And, according to some, in an allegedly male-dominated Patriarchal society no less?
I know I’m repeating my earlier post, but I almost have to do so to remind myself that it’s actually happening.
How can any state claim both that any man who transitions (regardless of how convincingly) over to a female identity has absolutely no advantages over women competitors in sports and at one and the very same time rule that tests of physical fitness for roles in the military, police or fire service, must be proportional for women due to their relative biological limitations?
How?
From Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom:
Object found in road.
So, if you found the toddler in the middle of the road and some rando in a minivan showed up saying ‘that’s mine’, would you hand over the child, or put in a second 911 call?
^#*&(^&*^
I didn’t think it was possible to upbugger italics on the new platform
Object found in road.
Again, it’s not the mentally unwell person giving such a lecture that disturbs me. It’s the people who approved of the presentation, providing the space, those who helped put it on, and the people who sat there in the audience and listened to it without serious questioning. I can be quite certain there was no serious questioning because if there were I’m quite certain the person asking would have made news by getting tossed. Tossed out, I mean. Not…you know…the other thing…nobody would say boo about that…
Many of the responses are so bloody thick with the stupid and yet it’s hard to discern whether some of them are coming from leftists or conservatives…”conservatives”.
“She grew up in a military family, and moved around every 3-4 years growing up, …”
Is anyone surprised by this? There once was a time when I would have been. The last 20 years or so, nope.
Better question, how can a serious people continue to make excuses for tolerating such a state?
Human ingenuity will, I’ve discovered, always find a way.
For someone complaining about how hard it is to think about his mental health, he does seem to spend rather a lot of time doing just that.
It is difficult to grasp just how stupid and ignorant Communist dictators are and have been.
Then we are presented with such stunning intellects as Fae Johnstone . . .
Yes.
If it’s any consolation, the same combination of rampant idiocy and willful ignorance is advancing across the United States.
You spelled ‘Joe Biden’ wrong. Fae Johnstone’s ramblings are the least of my concerns. See also ‘Kamala Harris’, etc. etc. etc.
Again, the problem lies not with the leaders like Mao but with a people stupid enough to go along with the likes of him. Especially those who didn’t speak up. See Winston Churchill…
“If you will not fight for right when you can easily win without blood shed; if you will not fight when your victory is sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.”
Biden & Harris are followers, intellectual straphangers. It’s grifters like Johnstone that drive what passes for intellectual thought in Western civilisation these days & provide the justification for Biden, Harris, et al to abuse their authority. To borrow a phrase, politics is downstream of culture.
In the etc. etc. etc department, this is from when this clown was mayor of SF a dozen or so years ago. Yet people, “serious” people supported and elected him governor. Now they’re floating this clown for president.
Agree. Or that’s halfway to my point. Yes these lower level grifters drive it but it’s the people in the audience, the people who buy into it that are the real problem. These idiots are not possessed of any sort of Svengali like powers. The real problem is 1) that the mindless masses take them seriously, which is itself driven by 2) rational, normal thinking people of above average intelligence are too intimidated to publicly, forcefully, dare I say loudly speak up against it. The average mid-wit, along with many, many of the above average “intellectuals” just go along with whatever they perceive as the thing “most people” believe. Which is effectively what defines the culture. Culture…now wtf did I put my revolver…
“Employers should be mindful of the biological and physiological differences between men and women when applying fitness standards and act accordingly.”
Bleep test: bursts of speed with ever shorter pauses to catch your breath. Seems like a reasonable simulation of the physical demands on a street officer. Is it ok for female officers to have less of a burst of speed or more time to catch their breath? Can or should employers take sex differences into account in decisions about job assignments or promotions?
Yesterday: how very low class of you to you suggest that our group can’t assimilate to your norms. If you read a book you’d know that was debunked pseudoscience. All that’s required is an effort of socialization and promotion of role models. Besides, harping on about boring statistical group differences is discouraging to the individuals who can assimilate to your norms: they ask for nothing more than for you to treat them like one of the guys, and what sort of unfounded fears could you possibly have that you’re hesitant to give full insider status to outsiders?
Today: naturally our group can’t assimilate to your oppressive norms that were designed for no other purpose than to keep us out. So what are you going to do to make it up to us? You have to assimilate to us just as much as we have to assimilate to you. And it goes without saying, doesn’t it, that you believe as sincerely as we do that the presence, influence, and status of our group is the organizational goal that prevails over all others?
“Employers should be mindful of the biological and physiological differences between men and women when applying fitness standards and act accordingly.”
Oooh, now do men pretending to be women playing in women’s sports.
As noted here, regarding the demographic ‘correction’ of the RAF:
Apparently, such questions are not to be asked.
It seems to me that either Biden is guilty of bribery OR if he took the money and did not deliver, then he is guilty of fraud OR if he took the money that Hunter gave him without asking questions then he is guilty of money laundering.
That’s our side of the pond. I wonder what our gracious host thinks of the King (who no longer has the prerogative to have human heads separated from their bodies, which can be good and can be bad). I guess the PM is the closest equivalent to our President; I don’t think the current British PM is as senile and quite as evil as our President.
The Manhattan Contrarian has an opinion.
From the title:
“When Can We Start Calling It What It Is, Namely Bribery?“
Question asked. Answer? When we stop asking permission to say the bloody f’n obvious, seize the initiative and start saying the bloody f’n obvious. Publicly, firmly, dare I say loudly and without apology. They still will to this day tell you that Trump told people to drink bleach along with at least a dozen other lies publicly, firmly, loudly, and have yet to apologize for jack shit. Conservatives at best apologize for upsetting them.
BadThink! HateLogic!
At the time, I was genuinely surprised. The comment questioned some prevailing assumptions, but was civil, to the point, and in no way offensive or improper. That it was apparently deemed indigestible may, I think, offer some insight into the kinds of attitudes ascendant in HR departments.
https://www.the-sun.com/health/8977104/born-boy-doctors-secretly-changed-gender-after-birth/
From that article:
I don’t know the exact situation in the UK. In the USA and Canada, the mental health professionals have decided the only correct course is to affirm people who think they might be trans. Any other course could lead to loss of one’s professional license, as Jordan Peterson has known all along.
And even at this point, as it has come time for reevaluation and a smidgeon of contrition, they STILL do not get it. St. George of Floyd was not murdered. He died as a result of his own behavior resulting in the need for an officer of the law to restrain him and because he had various drugs, including fentanyl, in his system that relatively slight physical stress killed him. An otherwise healthy person would have survived such an encounter. An otherwise law abiding, or even marginally deviant person who obeyed the instructions given to him would not have died. His death was only “appalling” in the sense that his past behavior should have had him in prison and not out on the streets doing drugs and committing crimes. It was all a lie. All of it. And this also in regards to BLM’s previous statements/actions regarding St. Trevon of Martin and St. Michael of Brown.
Maybe Canada but I think in most US states and in federal context MHP’s are still legally free to not affirm trans. I think. Their professional organizations may be all pro-transition though. I also see a bit of rollback on this stuff from the continent. Is the UK possibly waking up as well?
some insight into the kinds of attitudes ascendant in HR departments.
Sadly, in the case of the RAF, it was the front-line, operational management, the top honcho himself, that created the situation.
Much as criminologists spend their time finding newer and more elaborate excuses for criminal behaviour.
I saw Injurious Wedgie open for the Plasmatics back in ’81. It was a free concert so I figured what the hell…
Protective shorts is also a plausible band name.