Busy day today and I had to spend a bunch of time driving, and I have no idea what is going on in Ontario, but I swear the entire population of Toronto and St. Catherines were on I-79 heading south at 85 miles an hour and not using their turn signals. It’s a weird quirk I have noticed- one of the most polite nation in the world, and they drive like fucking oil rich Saudi Arabians princes with an Egyptian brake.
Tonight was red meat Friday, so I grilled two ribeyes, made some sweet potato fries with a touch of rosemary, and Shawn didn’t like the texture of the kale last night, so I steamed it a bit before the sautee, and I put some bacon and garlic and some portabellas in it again, and he like it a lot more, so that was good. I like the texture of kale, but I like a lot of different textures with meals. Apparently, not everyone does. Live and learn.
Waiting for the Pens to keep me up all night and lose again. You?
schrodinger's cat
Are you in Canada?
hilts
RIP Bartcop
http://crooksandliars.com/2014/03/last-word-bartcop
Ferdzy
March Break! Above freezing temperatures or bust! Lotsa students heading south! That’s what.
Svensker
The entire population of St. Catherine’s? You’ve HEARD of St. Catherine’s? Nice book store there.
Also, as badly as you think Canadians drive, you have no idea how they WALK. Frigging pedestrians. Step right into the street without looking left or right, just expect the cars to spot them and stop. Every driving day in Toronto is like practicing for a heart attack. Terrifying.
the Conster
Daine Sawyer told me that Colorado is training 100 cops how to bust you for driving while stoned because freedom. Since there isn’t a breathalyzer yet they’re being told to base arrests on dilated pupils. What could possibly go wrong?
schrodinger's cat
@efgoldman: I was confused, because Cole speaks of driving to Canada and then cooking steak. Wondering how can he drive to Ontario and then be back in WV to cook dinner?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
It’s like Felix Unger started blogging here. A month from now we’re gonna be getting strong opinions on Donizetti vs Rossini
schrodinger's cat
Open thread needs best dressed kitteh.
Ferdzy
@schrodinger’s cat: No, the student-of-driving-age population of Ontario is streaming past Cole’s house on their way to the beach. A thawed out beach, that is. We have beaches, it’s just a little hard to tell exactly where they begin and end at the moment.
Roger That
Me? Decided to check Reason.com for shits and giggles to see how they covered CPAC, their top story is by former MTV veejay Kennedy and is titled “CPAC: Fred Thompson, Other Cons Totally Cool with States Legalizing Pot, Gay Marriage” and goes “Surprisingly, the attendees she talked with were on board with letting states decide issues such as drug legalization and gay marriage.” How stupid do you think we are and deluded do you have to be to write that?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Julia Ioffe: Crimea’s gone. It’s Russian. Forget about it.
I tend to agree. I think the best case scenario is some kind of “autonomous region” fig leaf. Tatars are reporting their doors are being marked with what might be a cross.
New Rule: Anyone wishing to comment on this situation must first point to Crimea on a blank world map.
dexwood
@the Conster:
Hmm, no idea, Step out of the car, mam, remove your sunglasses. Shine a flashlight in some poor guy’s eyes at night. No problems. Probable cause in their minds.
MomSense
Made dinner for some friends and celebrated a successful concert they helped to put together. I pan seared some beautiful scallops and served with some homemade pesto and spinach pasta. The salad was full of baby greens, squash, nuts, fruits, avocado, etc. Yummy!
I made flourless chocolate brownies for dessert.
the Conster
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Chris Hayes had Nina Khruscheva on his show last night who said that Crimea is the jewel that Putin wants, and he’ll concede Ukraine as a sop to the rest of the world. She said it’s all over except for the shouting.
Roger That
@Roger That: Geez, I sound angry there. I was laughing when I read it, can’t believe they expect to be taken seriously.
Pogonip
@schrodinger’s cat: He took a short cut through the farmer’s field.
raven
A flight carrying 239 people from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing is missing and would likely have run out of fuel, the airline says.
Cassidy
Watching heavyweights throw leather is fun. It’s like a slow motion meteor: it may never land, but the one time it does BOOM!
Poopyman
@hilts: Well… fuck.
hilts
@the Conster:
A day without dope is like night
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lY8IQnHFKTA
Randy P
Is this like anti-Lent? Do you have big meals every day, and then go for the red meat on Fridays?
Amir Khalid
@raven:
Latest word is that contact was lost when MH370 was over Vietnam. And that of its 227 passengers, 158 are Chinese nationals.
Suffern ACE
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: yep. But if you’re a true liberal you should only point to right wing Ukrainians.
raven
@Amir Khalid: Yea I saw that. Looking at the route on the web it appears it goes over Cambodia and Laos and cuts across what we used to call North Vietnam near Dien Bien Phu.
mclaren
More evidence that America’s military is commanded by incompetent careerist cowards and made up of felons, rapists and gang members:
Source: “Purge the Generals,” Lt. Col. Daniel Davis, The Armed Forces Journal, 1 August 2013.
No surprise.
The Army’s best officers are leaving like rats jumping out of a burning building:
Source: “Why Our Best Officers Are Leaving,” The Atlantic Magazine, 4 January 2011.
With the best and brightest abandoning the U.S. military officer corps, only inept clowns and fools remain. These halfwits lead an army made up of felons and misfits into battle — with predictable results. The American military is getting its ass kicked by teenage kids who are armed with bolt-action rifles.
See “U.S. is recruiting misfits for the army: felons, racists, gang members fill the ranks,” The San Francisco Chronicle, 1 October 2006.
This explains why one out of every three women in the U.S. military now gets raped by U.S. soldiers:
“Factors Associated with Women’s Risk of Rape in the Military Environment,” American Journal of Industrial Medicine, 43:262-273 (2003).
* A 2004 study of women veterans from Vietnam and all wars since, who were seeking help for post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), found that 71% said they were sexually assaulted or raped while serving.
* The VA study (referenced in the title above) was funded by the Army Medical Research Department and found that 30% of women veterans said they were raped while serving. That is almost one in three.
* Thirty seven percent of the attempted raped and raped women in the VA study also reported being raped more than once and 14% of them reported being gang raped. This study also discovered that 75% of raped women in the military failed to report it.
No wonder the useless incompetent U.S. military can’t win any wars. The officers are too busy punching their career tickets and the enlisted men are too busy raping their fellow soldiers to bother actually winning any wars.
Time to shut the whole thing down.
End the clusterfuck. Yank funding, shut down the U.S. army. Go back to a national guard and a coast guard for coastal defense.
Shut it down, shut it all down.
raven
@mclaren: Hey idiot, how ya doin?
Jay C
@raven:
How does one of today’s airliners not carry enough fuel to get where it’s going (barring weird flukes like the Gimli Glider)? From the published accounts, it looks like this was about a six-hour flight: not extraordinary long for a 777: one must assume that the airline personnel in KL put enough fuel aboard to get to China, anyway: must be something else….
raven
@Jay C: As you point out, I think it is probably the time it’s been missing.
Cassidy
@mclaren: Oh yeah. We scheduled all out raping for right after morning maintenance. If we hurried, we could get our raping done before lunch and then move on to something else. Yeah man, raping, that’s all every single enlisted male ever did.
It must be so easy to live in a world devoid of context, so simple, like a child’s world view.
Hal
I was listening to Here and Now on NPR Thursday with Ron Elving, NPR’s Senior Washington Correspondent. I thought he made an exacting point about Obama’s inability to make Putin do what ever he wants:
Pogonip
@Cassidy: But when did you have time for pillage and plundering?
Cassidy
@Pogonip: Tuesdays and Fridays.
Steeplejack
@Jay C:
I think the point was that the plane has now been missing so long that it would have run out of fuel no matter where it was flying, not that it didn’t start with enough fuel to get to its destination.
raven
@Hal: Hungary is a little different since we encouraged the Hungarians to revolt and then bailed.
Omnes Omnibus
@Cassidy: He isn’t wrong about the culture of conformity and risk avoidance of among the officer corps. It even existed in my day, and I have watched some very talented and innovative officers struggle to get promoted to high rank (H.R. McMaster, for example)
raven
@Omnes Omnibus: Even a blind squirrel gets an acorn once in a while.
Cassidy
@Omnes Omnibus: Sure, but I’m not going to pretend to have a reasonable conversation with someone so simpleminded to think that the whole enlisted corp are rapists. It’s stupid. There’s no other conclusion. The kind of person who jumps to that conclusion is dumber than dogshit.
Suffern ACE
@raven: yeah. But I’m guessing going forward, we aren’t going to be throwing our lot with what comes out of protests for awhile. Egypt, Syria and Ukraine have not been positive outcomes. Maybe Tunisia and Libya worked.
Now we’re going to be saddled with bailing out a Ukraine against a Russia that will be working hard to make certain that government never establishes itself.
raven
@Cassidy: Just attack, cut the head of the snake and when it grows back, do it again.
Cassidy
@Omnes Omnibus: To address your point, the officer corp has always been about conformity. This is nothing new. Any dipshit ring knocker who publishes that kind of drivel as wisdom should have his thinking privileges revoked for a while.
Omnes Omnibus
@Cassidy: Well, yeah.
raven
@Suffern ACE: Nor should we.
Omnes Omnibus
@Cassidy: Not completely. There are bright, capable people there, and they occasionally bubble up to the top. In the senior ranks, look for the guys with grad degrees in subjects like history, international relations, and/or foreign languages. The ones who gain an outside perspective.
Cassidy
@Omnes Omnibus: Of course, but it’s not the norm. Dipping is okay, but no smoking, unless it’s a cigar. Be into something recreationally athletic, but nothing hardcore like combat sports. Read this list of books. Be married by Captain. So on and so forth.
Amir Khalid
@Jay C:
MH370 was due in Beijing at 06:30. (KL and Beijing are in the same time zone.) Its fuel reserve might have have given it an hour or so more of flight in case it needed to be diverted. It’s almost noon here as I type this.
Omnes Omnibus
@Cassidy: There are reasons I got out.
Cassidy
@Omnes Omnibus: Same here.
Kevin
Ha! I’m a Canadian, and every time I had to drive down to Ohio to visit my brother, i would wonder why a people who are known for being rude and aggressive drove so slowly and stayed in one lane. The dirty looks I would get as a passed them all confused me. So I wasn’t crazy, we do drive faster for some reason. Not sure I can explain it.
Kevin
Ha! I’m a Canadian, and every time I had to drive down to Ohio to visit my brother, i would wonder why a people who are known for being rude and aggressive drove so slowly and stayed in one lane. The dirty looks I would get as a passed them all confused me. So I wasn’t crazy, we do drive faster for some reason. Not sure I can explain it.
Omnes Omnibus
@Kevin: I have suspicions that Cole drives like a crotchety old man.
Comrade Mary
Dude. DUDE. It’s St. Catharines.
Omnes Omnibus
@Comrade Mary: I am sure it is an accent thing. We in the Upper Midwest can understand both, but many cannot.
Comrade Mary
@Omnes Omnibus: Nah, it’s just those people in the slightly milder part of Ontario being fancy.
Omnes Omnibus
@Comrade Mary: What do I know? All my Canadian ancestors come from the south side of the St Lawrence near Quebec.
Comrade Mary
@Omnes Omnibus: Where-ish?
Omnes Omnibus
@Comrade Mary:Ici-ish. My Frog-Canuck people were here early – we can trace ourselves to Louis Hebert.
The Tragically Flip
I don’t really drive much out of province so I’ve never noticed people’s lane & signal habits, but on highways around Toronto, I’d say there’s a mix of those who signal lane changes and those who don’t. I’d say it’s more common than not, though we’re certainly not religious about it.
I sometimes don’t if there’s no one near by, like if I’m passing and I’ve well cleared the other car (several car lengths – none of this cutting back in just in front of them). If someone passes me the same way, the lack of signaling doesn’t bother me. Prefer no-signal but lots of room to cutting in front of me with a signal.
Ontario is big enough that different driving habits could prevail in St. Catharine’s or any other part, really.
Comrade Mary
Ah! Can’t hear that place name without thinking of this (with a young and hawt Genevieve Bujold).
Nice bragging point on Hébert! My dad traced our family to Abraham Martin dit L’Ecossais. Obviously Martin didn’t live to see what a mess people would make of his nice, green field.
Omnes Omnibus
@Comrade Mary: What I find rather interesting is that my mom’s French Canadian family and my dad’s early, early New England family spent years trying to kill one another. The Frogs lead Native Americans against the Yanks. And the Yanks tended to invade and burn things. My dad is a bit genealogy obsessed, but he has found “battles” where relatives fought each other. OTOH, they have been married for over 50 years so, the hatchet seems buried.
Comrade Mary
@Omnes Omnibus: Yes, wars stop when the shagging starts. Sometimes, anyway.
Kind of but not totally tangential: if you’re looking for a novel that covers a small chunk of the Canadian colonial period, you might want to look for The Orenda.
Omnes Omnibus
@Comrade Mary: I’ll look it up. Thanks.