Really, Living Social and Yacht StarShip?
I eagerly await the Donner Party-themed mountain trek and picnic, the Hindenburg zeppelin tour, etc.
(Please consider this an open thread.)
This post is in: Open Threads, General Stupidity
Comments are closed.
dr.hypercube
“Five passengers set sail that day/For a three hour tour…”
Woodrowfan
Even better, it’s a “three hour cruise”!!! (sings “a three hour cruise”) If there’s a Hollywood starlet, a professor and a Kansas farm girl onboard I am getting off before the cruise begins…
Martin
I packed three arms and a foot. Who’s bringing drinks?
Angelos Tzelepis
A Three… Hour… Tour.
canuckistani
Damn you, dr.hypercube for a) stealing my joke and b) saddling me with a killer earworm.
yet another jeff
It’s a three hour cruise…what could possibly go wrong? Right, Skipper?
yet another jeff
@yet another jeff: @canuckistani:
What he said…
The Ancient Randonneur
How about a Jonestown Cocktail Hour? Everyone would be dying to go to that one, eh?
lamh35
I’m still not a fan of David Frum but you can sometimes find agreement with people you dislike…rarely, but sometimes. Frum’s reasoning kinda reflects some of my own in regards to the possibility that SCOTUS strikes down ACA still being a win/win situation for the White House
Yglesias Award Nominee
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Martin:
Blenderella will bring her Salt Pig.
Martin
Overquoting, since SCOTUSblog is being slow to load:
Betty Cracker
@lamh35: While Frum is right that this would be the GOP’s essential position, they’ll lie about it, of course. They’ll try to sell the “we’ll allow consumers to purchase plans across state lines” magic beans. Of course, the president would then have the opportunity to slam their standard-bearer over the head on the issue during the debates, and since it’s going to be Romney, he’s in an especially shitty position for healthcare to become a big issue again. In that way it could redound to Obama’s credit.
Martin
How cool would it be if SCOTUS found the mandate to be unconstitutional but allowed it to stand because the GOP fucked Congress so hard that the Justices couldn’t envision a way for legislators to pass an alternative.
...now I try to be amused
The Hindenburg shindig should include a jumbo wiener roast.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@lamh35:
Republicans have the Scalia Plan: close the Emergency Rooms to anybody expect paying customers.
And over on the emoprog Left, they have a much better plan: let it all fall apart, and then Nach Aetna uns.
Gin & Tonic
The way the “previous post” and “next post” are showing up in the post header is dumb. The previous post is in a div of its own, it seems, and then the current post and next post bump against each other confusingly in the same div.
Roger Moore
There’s always the Alferd Packer Restaurant and Grill at the University of Colorado. Packer may not be as famous as the Donners, but it is a restaurant named after an infamous cannibal.
dmsilev
So, let me guess: The premium passengers get to egress at their leisure, while the poor saps who only paid for …economy are locked below decks and have to break the gates down once it’s time to leave.
Amir Khalid
“Captain, we set off two hours and fifty minutes ago. Isn’t it time we were heading back?”
“Back?”
Hill Dweller
If the Republican obstructionism in congress, and the Justices’ subsequent belief that congressional ineptitude would prevent any new health care legislaition, compels the SCOTUS to keep the mandate, I am going to enjoy the wingers’ bitter tears.
c u n d gulag
I’m waiting for the Jim Jones Kool Aid tasting tour!
Wayne
@Woodrowfan-Even better, it’s a “three hour cruise” (sings “a three hour cruise”) If there’s a Hollywood starlet, a professor and a Kansas farm girl onboard I am getting off before the cruise begins…:
Au contraire. I call dibbs on the hut with the brunette.
Marcellus Shale, Public Dick
@Woodrowfan:
with the professor, the farm girl, or the starlet?
and its a shame you stereotype farm girls and starlets like that.
Calouste
I guess Cape Canaveral must be hitting themselves that they missed out on the potential of the Challenger Tribute Flights.
NotMax
Mitt morphing into the Bizarro Sally Field (“You don’t like me. You really, really don’t like me.”).
Romney’s negatives hit new high, poll finds
Marcellus Shale, Public Dick
@Betty Cracker:
this is why i haven’t lost hope in the scrotus.
they know that striking down the law, and making health care the central issue in this campaign kills the gop.
any bump they might get from the unemployed and under-employeed, those who are “consulting”, etc, goes bye-bye when you stack health plans, election-style.
BGinCHI
I guess none of these people read George Saunders.
Maude
If the cruise comes with an iceberg, it will last less than three hours.
Nice of them to make money off of a true tragedy.
jibeaux
@Martin: I think the decision would have to say something else.
redshirt
Heaven’s Gate Comet Watching Tours!
Sponsored by Nike.
Woodrowfan
I’m waiting for the Lusitania memorial cruise. it only takes about 20 minutes.
jibeaux
@Martin: Oh yes. I don’t doubt SCOTUSblog, but I read somewhere that “all or nothing” was also the government’s position — that the mandate isn’t in there for shits and giggles, it’s in there because the whole things is interconnected, there’s no severability clause for a reason, etc. Is that not actually their position?
artemis
friend of mine and his partner are hosting a dinner party on 4/13 recreating the first class 12 course menu that was served on the last night. they have to get the place settings from a service. there are something like 18 or 20 different utensils PER person and I forget how many wine glasses.
you can read more about the last dinner here…
http://www.amazon.com/Last-Dinner-On-Titanic-Recipes/dp/078686303X
danielx
Does this cruise include a string quartet playing “Nearer My God to Thee?”
Speaking of string quartets and open threads…I attended some bizarre concerts in my misspent youth, both in terms of billing and venue. As far as my memory serves, the strangest on both counts was one at a 5/8 mile dirt track in Jeffersonville, Indiana (across the Ohio from Louisville) in late July – meaning it was roughly as hot as the surface of Venus. The concert bill was Peter Frampton’s Camel, John McLaughlin and the Mahavishnu Orchestra and the headliner – ta-da! – was Johnny Winter in his hard core rock and roll phase. Anything stranger?
Horrendo Slapp (formerly Jimperson Zibb, Duncan Dönitz, Otto Graf von Pfmidtnöchtler-Pízsmőgy, Mumphrey, et al.)
I’d really like to know what kind of food they’ll be having when they do the Donner Party Mountain Trek…
danimal
I’ve been trying to come up with a disaster-related snarky comment, but with limited success. For example:
“Amelia Earhardt World Tours”
“Charles Manson Publicity Trip”
“Hindenberg Air”
“The 2012 Republican Presidential Nominees”
Argive
Next: the Bhopal Memorial Oxygen Bar! Be sure to try a different inhaling station each time, as you never know which one might be secretly loaded with toxic gas! Then we can go to the Minamata Bay Seafood Restaurant.
redshirt
@Horrendo Slapp (formerly Jimperson Zibb, Duncan Dönitz, Otto Graf von Pfmidtnöchtler-Pízsmőgy, Mumphrey, et al.): In all veggie places they serve fake looking meat all the time. I think someone should go all the way and serve vegan fingers and the like.
It’s cannibalism/not cannibalism.
Another Martin
George Donner’s campsite is only about a quarter mile from the Donner Camp Picnic Grounds. Not much of a trek.
Amir Khalid
Since this an open thread, can I bring up a couple of site rebuild matters?
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One, the disappearance of the “Recent Comments” list, which has always been to me (and to others, I’m sure) a quick guide to which threads are the most active. Can we have it back, please?
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Two, why does the site search box on the right-hand edge of the banner have a tail?
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@danimal:
My wife saw “Amelia Earhart” brand luggage on sale in a department store once. For some reason it wasn’t exactly flying off the shelves.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Amir Khalid:
Ditto this. I miss that feature.
Martin
@jibeaux:
Yes, and as it should be. But even in that position there’s a calculation – do they force the courts hand and compel them to strike the entire law down if they take issue with one provision, or do they allow that provision to be struck down and legislate up an alternative. There are alternatives to the mandate, after all.
Sometimes the solution to small problems is to make them such big problems that nobody wants to touch them. I don’t think the court is fond of the idea of striking down the entirety of what they all appear to recognize as truly landmark legislation.
Perhaps what we’ll get is something more along the lines of how Roe v Wade came down: drawing lines where the government can and can’t go on this. Rather than seek some limiting factor in regulating non-commerce, perhaps the court will simply declare what that limiting factor is and be done with it. It seems that much of their concern is over the precedent this would set, and they can head that off themselves by declaring public health a special commerce case (which it is).
floridafrog
I have an acquaintance who is taking a cruise ( more than 3 hours) that will reach the site of the Titanic sinking at the exact time and date as that awful night. Apparently there will be a memorial service. Very strange.
Martin
@Another Martin:
Christ, what a lazy fucker that he couldn’t just walk over there and bum a peanut butter sandwich and Mars bar from one of the picnickers. Even in heavy snow that’s less than an hour walk. I’d have cleared out my cooler for him.
catclub
@NotMax: More on this, please!
—
I am hoping that the way Mitt gets under the skin of his GOP opponents will carry through October. This was reported after the 2008 primaries. You could have made a television series: “Everyone hates Mitt”.
—
It is not too hard to imagine Newt Sniping all the way. A little harder to imagine Santorum doing that. But a guy can dream.
Brachiator
I thought the GOP opposed birth control.
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In other news, the Guardian reports that the Daily Mail spent “an estimated £143,000 asking a private eye to make 1,728 potentially illegal requests to unearth phone numbers and addresses of public figures over a three-year period, including personal details of Kate Middleton and her sister Pippa.”
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Hacking is not just for Rupert, anymore.
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Meanwhile, recently some Balloon Juicers, applauding a recent decision in Canada, suggested that prostituion should be legalized more widely. But in the real world, people fall down in faux rage and butt hurt when a rival paper reveals that a Houston Chronicle columnist also works as a stripper, and worse, blogs about her experiences.
Apparently, “respectable women” just don’t do such things.
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Martin
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ: As do I. Also particularly useful for us late nighters when there’s a few of us having conversations in multiple posts to not have to reload a bunch of pages.
Ripley
@danielx:
I saw Slim Whitman and BJ Shepard at a steam engine festival once.
gogol's wife
@Ripley:
Anything involving Slim Whitman wins the bizarre award.
Martin
@NotMax: Wow, 34/52 is pretty bad. He’s been below -18 before, but with lower fav/unfav.
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I’ve been poking at it but I don’t think any major party candidate has ever been nominated against an incumbent with a negative approval rating. Some pretty break-even, but generally candidates enter the general election with positive ratings.
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Mitt has only 14% of voters with no opinion, and they aren’t going to break for him any better than the general pool. I have a hard time seeing him polling higher (outside of MOE) than Obama in any national poll at this point. And the GOP doesn’t have a path to the WH against this president that allows them to lose the popular vote and win on EVs.
catclub
@Martin: LGM posting of Paul Clement arguing that the mandate was unconstituional, and hence all the rest, like the required issue and no preconditions denial was also unconstitutional, was also an argument that the mandate is intrinsic to the regulations — and hence unseverable — is also an argument that the mandate is a regulation of commerce.
—
I am favoring the fact that a tax penalty looks just like a tax will be used in not overturning it. (If it is tax, things are much easier — but then the non-argument of day one determines the case. I am unlikely to get my wish. Even though it makes perfect sense to me!)
For example:
IRS form 1040 checkboxes:
Paid child support? => Lower taxes
Contributed to IRA => lower taxess
Paid for health insurance => lower taxes
Did not? => higher taxes
Contributed to IRA => lower taxes
—
Why is that not a tax?
Amir Khalid
@Brachiator:
An actress who does nudity and sex scenes is a respectable artist these days, which is as it should be; but a striptease artist (and it is an art) remains stuck in the days when the only women who exhibited their bodies were whores.
Death Panel Truck
@Woodrowfan:
I don’t know. I might just stick around for that Kansas farm girl, if she looks anything at all like Mary Ann.
Anoniminous
@Martin: Teh Master of Teh Blog:
Jeez.
Not only did you get paragraph separation you got it in a blockquote!
How the heck did you manage THAT?
redshirt
@Death Panel Truck: Gilligan’s Island (or it’s modern version, Lost) never really resonated with me in the way the creators intended, cuz I was always like: Why would you want to get rescued?
Hell, you got coconut phones and cars, nice houses. Why not hide from rescue? And any surprise visits from the Harlem Globetrotters.
Martin
@Anoniminous: Put double underscores everywhere.
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And CNN gives the GOP another sad:
If the economy keeps improving, it’s going to be a landslide victory.
redshirt
@Martin: They better crash the economy, STAT! For America, of course.
Anoniminous
@Martin:
Thank you and may your tribe increase, Inshallah.
(Now all I have to do is remember the code for a double underscore.)
...now I try to be amused
@Roger Moore:
Poor Alferd Packer. If the hilarious Cannibal! The Musical can’t make him more famous than the Donner Party, I don’t know what will.
Watusie
Alive rugby tours of the Andes
Martin
@Anoniminous: No, not double underscore that way – two underscores in a row:
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redshirt
__What’s this now about double underscores?__
Anoniminous
@Martin:
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Ah.
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Thanks.
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(Do you make House Calls? I need someone to wipe the drool off my chin!)
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:-)
redshirt
So where do you put the underscores? In post 63 I had double underscores at the beginning and end of my sentence and somehow that turned things italic.
TooManyJens
Note to self: never ask Mitt Romney to raise my kid if something happens to me.
(via)
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Anoniminous:
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There’s no special code to use. Just type the underscore character twice in a row.
"Fair and Balanced" Dave
@danielx:
The Jimi Hendrix Experience opening for The Monkees
Martin
@redshirt:
You put them on the blank line, like this:
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Paragraph 1
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Paragraph 2
Betty Cracker
Testing this here underscore thing:
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Does this produce a block quote?
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Won’t I look silly if it doesn’t work?
Betty Cracker
Nope. Didn’t work.
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How about this?
Did that work?
Betty Cracker
Nope. Le sigh.
Martin
@Betty Cracker: Are you doing it exactly as I described? Try just cutting and pasting my Paragraph 1 Paragraph 2 example. Here – I’ll just cut and paste it and stick it in a block quote and see what happens:
replicnt6
@The Ancient Randonneur:
Now see what you’ve done? There’s coffee all over my monitor.
Martin
Yep. That works. Give it a whirl. And once you get that to work, then you can play around a bit with it.
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It is indeed silly that we need to do this. Should just disable that WP plugin that does the shorthand formatting and use something like Markdown instead if you want to give people easy formatting.
Martin
Maybe Betty needs to toss up a FYWP thread where everyone can practice paragraph breaks and blockquoting.
LanceThruster
I’d actually like to go and the price seems right. They have Death Tours in LA and many other cities. Civil War battlegrounds are popular despite the massive loss of life. In the Henry Rollins book,”Occupants”, he spoke of visiting the killing fields of Cambodia and Tiananmen Square and other sites of historical interest because to actually be there held some special meaning for him.
I cried at Cape Kennedy imagining the horror of the Challenger explosion.
I do not consider myself a “ghoul.”
replicnt6
@Wayne:
On those rare occasions when someone asks me if I like ginger, I enjoy replying “I’ve always been more of a Mary Ann guy, myself.”
I kill me.
LanceThruster
I’d actually like to go and the price seems right. They have Death Tours in LA and many other cities. Civil War battlegrounds are popular despite the massive loss of life. In the Henry Rollins book,”Occupants”, he spoke of visiting the killing fields of Cambodia and Tiananmen Square and other sites of historical interest because to actually be there held some special meaning for him.
I cried at Cape Kennedy imagining the horror of the Challenger explosion.
I do not consider myself a “ghoul” for having an historical interest.
LanceThruster
@replicnt6:
Me too, although if I was stuck on that island, even “Lovie” wouldn’t be safe.
Darkrose
Has anyone been able to get the pie filter to work with the redesign? On Chrome?
Brachiator
@Amir Khalid:
I agree. But the extra despicable thing is that there are people, men and women, who insist on putting people in a box. You can be either a “respectable” person, like a newspaper columnist, or a stripper. But not both. And if you are a stripper, you must remain hidden away in a special zone where your actions cannot “pollute” the “respectable” people.
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Part of this is related to an embarassment about sexuality that exists in many cultures. So, the reporter who outed the stripper might know people who saw her show, may even have gone himself. But, having seen her strip, or even just knowing that she does this, he can no longer see her in a non-sexual context.
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Similarly, there are some people who can no longer take an actress seriously if she has done nude scenes. This does not apply to the same degree for most male actors. However, some people wrote about the odd puritanism that denied Michael Fassbender an Oscar nomination for his role in Shame.
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Jeff Fecke
@redshirt: Plus, only on a deserted island was Gilligan *ever* going to have a shot at Mary-Ann and/or Ginger.
pseudonymous in nc
That “three-hour cruise” is just glomming off the (multiple) full-on transatlantic Titanic memorial cruises, complete with first-class stuff — though not with steerage cabins. One of them is even going to re-enact the distress signalling from Newfoundland.
Brachiator
@Jeff Fecke:
There was that special episode.
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Ginger: Oh, Gilligan, that’s no little buddy! Mary-Ann, Gilligan, threesome!
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.
Martin
@Amir Khalid:
By the way, that differentiation in label isn’t a function of the woman or the act, but the audience.
The actress is respectable because the audience is respectable. When the film exists independent of the naughty bits, we trust the audience isn’t attending purely for the naughty bits. Once that determination shifts (NC-17 or higher) and we presume the audience is attending purely for the naughty bits, then we move from art to (presumed) exploitation, and our impression of the audience changes, as well as our impression of the woman for participating. Same goes for photos and other media.
Stripping generally falls exclusively in the exploitation category, but booth babes are generally fine, as they aren’t presumably the focus of the event. That the fine line that Sports Illustrated and Victoria’s Secret are constantly walking – can they keep just enough of the core product in the show to keep public opinion on their side, even when nobody is really unaware of the real intent of the show.
Brachiator
@Martin:
The problem is that NC-17 supposedly can be used for serious art, but still carries a taint. I don’t recall if Shame was rated NC-17 in the US, but because Michael Fassbender has some scenes with full frontal, some audiences and critics had a problem.
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The few serious films with actualdepictions of sex have created problems for the actresses. Oddly enough,or more typical, fewer problems for the males in the film.
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brenda
Groupon ran an offer a couple of weeks ago for a Jeffrey Dahmer tour in Milwaukee. True fact.