Drummers attempt to speak. || Some activity around the breasts. || Bubble. || Place your bets. || At last, a pre-weakened handrail. || Restraightened rebar, structural properties uncertain. || You know, there may, just may, be a party upstairs. || Purr. || The progressive retail experience, parts 506 and 507. || On crime and incarceration. || Canoe and candle ice. || Kites. || Hallowe’en costume of note. || Incoming creatures. || Squishing avoided, narrowly. || If you laugh at this, you’re a terrible, terrible person. || Blind date, ditto. || Scientists, séances, ectoplasm, and table-tipping. || Question asked. || Question asked, answered. || Decisions were made. || Sexual dysmorphia, a thread. || Edinburgh. || Close enough. || New realms of loveliness. || And finally, a theft is detected.

If tempted, you can follow me on X / Twitter.

To register with the blog and thereby enable extra commenting options – including @username mentions and live notifications – scroll down to the black ‘Meta’ box at the very bottom of the page. It’s free and quite painless.

With domain renewal looming, along with other behind-the-scenes overheads, now seems a good time to remind patrons that this rickety barge is kept afloat by the kindness of strangers. If you’d like to help it remain buoyant a while longer, and remain ad-free, there are three buttons below the fold with which to monetise any love. Debit and credit cards are accepted.

If one-click haste is called for, there’s a QR code in the sidebar, at which you point your phone, and my PayPal.Me page can be found here. As requested, I’ve added SubscribeStar and Ko-Fi accounts, via which love may also be monetised, whether as one-off donations or monthly subscriptions.

Additionally, any Amazon UK shopping done via this link, or for Amazon US via this link, or via the buttons in the sidebar, results in a small fee for your host at no extra cost to you. Feel free to buy things wildly and in bulk.

For newcomers wishing to know more about what’s been going on here for the last sixteen years, in over 3,000 posts and 200,000 comments, the reheated series is a pretty good place to start – in particular, the end-of-year summaries, which convey the fullest flavour of what it is we do. A sort of blog concentrate. If you like what you find there… well, there’s lots more of that.

Do take a moment to poke through the discussion threads too. The posts are intended as starting points, not full stops, and the comments are where much of the good stuff is waiting to be found. And do please join in.

As always, thanks for the support, the comments, and the company.

Oh yes. The buttons:

An aggravating tool for aggravating tools who talk too loudly. || Fly the skies in style and comfort. || British Seaside Simulator. || And then, quite suddenly, sadness happened. || Assorted bendy rivers. || Fat Bear Week is upon us. || The state of British cooking, with Mr Vincent Price (1972). || Entirely unrelated, substance relocation. || Car relocation. || I believe it’s powered by beer. || Possibly not ideal. || Revealed preference. || Incoming. || Cheeeldren of the night, what music they make. || I’d say they’re sick of your shit. || Sshh, he said. || Tongue action. || Today’s word is turbulence. || Sobriety test. || Excessive toe. || That’s exactly how I would have done it. || You want one and you know it. || The wings are full of fuel. (h/t, Elephants Gerald) || And finally, your mind is filthy.

If tempted, you can follow me on X / Twitter.

To register with the blog and thereby enable extra commenting options – including @username mentions and live notifications – scroll down to the black ‘Meta’ box at the very bottom of the page. It’s free and quite painless.

Currently doing the rounds, The late Norman Rockwell depicts Modern America:

Oh, there’s more. Not all of it savoury.

Update, via the comments:

There’s some discussion below about the aforementioned unsavoury content – the anti-Semitism and so forth. I did wonder about whether or not to link to the full selection, or what I assume is the full selection. But on balance, better to have the wider context, I think. Regulars of this site are, after all, grown-ups and can make up their own minds without my hand-holding.

And in case it needs pointing out, the basic juxtaposition that runs throughout the series – those jarring ideals – does rather throw into relief some fashionable assumptions of our time. The Forties’ suits with pronoun pins, the applauded looting, classroom violence, transgender sports, the Pride-obsessed educators with big, phallic balloons, etc. There is, I think, a certain… resonance.

The Rockwell aesthetic and period setting invites the viewer to imagine how one’s grandparents or great-grandparents might have reacted if faced with our time’s more modish pieties. A borderless, degenerate, bug-eating dystopia in which childhood is bureaucratically sexualised, and in which sporting unfairness and feral selfishness are met, by our betters, with pretentious approval. It’s very now.

Also, open thread.

Readers may recall this unhappy scene, mentioned here, part of a spree of racially targeted Seattle home invasions:

The day is coming when thugs like this will be shot by angry homeowners or neighbors, and no one will give a shit, because it would have improved life for everybody. https://t.co/lrz5KGBO81

— Rod Dreher (@roddreher) August 29, 2023

In a more cheering turn of events, the perpetrators, five black men and one black teenager, were recently apprehended and charged with no fewer than fourteen similar crimes, the victims of which were all of East Asian ancestry:

Hey, it’s an easy mistake to make. Accidentally putting on a balaclava and stalking someone, based on their race, then menacing them, and tasing them, and tugging the wedding ring from their twitching finger, and then barging into their home and taking their stuff. And then doing it all over again, and again, and again, all entirely by accident. I mean, who here hasn’t done it?

And as we’ve been told, repeatedly, from on high, the creatures who do such things are just like us.

Only more downtrodden and deserving of sympathy.

Needless to say, most of the suspects have extensive criminal histories and over a dozen prior convictions for assault, burglary and robbery, plus numerous other charges for domestic violence, animal cruelty, and driving without a licence. One suspect, a Mr Javez Tubbs, has been the subject of 30 warrants since 2006.

Fourteen firearms were found in the gang’s possession.

What catches the eye, however, is this brief exchange between the sixteen-year-old home invader and the judge:

Or,

I paraphrase, of course. Though not, I think, outrageously.

Consider this an open thread. Share ye links and bicker.