The 2020 Libertarian Party presidential nominee has been bitten by a possibly rabid bat.
— Jim Antle (@jimantle) August 8, 2020
I will not be able to attend the campaign rally tomorrow morning. I will be getting a rabies vaccine as a precaution after having been bitten by a bat near the start of this campaign tour! I have every intention of participating in the FLAME march and I will deliver remarks at…
— Jo Jorgensen (@Jorgensen4POTUS) August 8, 2020
What effect might his have on Ms. Jorgenson’s views on the US healthcare system? Well let’s just say kvetching was involved!
Not with the health care system we have now!
And I'm not stopped…I'm just pausing for a few hours.
— Jo Jorgensen (@Jorgensen4POTUS) August 8, 2020
Or maybe we should have a free market in which doctors could travel to the patient outside of a hospital or their offices.
— Jo Jorgensen (@Jorgensen4POTUS) August 8, 2020
There is, as of 11:10 PM EDT, no word on the condition of the bat and whether it has contracted anything serious or life threatening from coming into contact with Ms. Jorgenson.
Open thread!
Obligatory:
Ken
I suppose it wouldn’t help to point out that we do have a free market where the doctors can travel to the patients, and many do. Perhaps Ms. Jorgensen isn’t paying enough for that service, or didn’t carefully study all the insurance plans on offer and select one that allowed house calls?
Enhanced Voting Techniques
My neighbor has a doctor who does house calls. I briefly talked to him and he said most doctors can’t be bothered.
Adam L Silverman
@Ken: Someone told her:
trollhattan
Libertarian Party platform insertion:
10.b.iii “All physicians shall own and maintain a Batmoble for rapid deployment purposes, as the Free Markets [pbut] demand.”
Baud
I still don’t understand why Senator Rick Scott bit the guy in the first place.
sdhays
@Ken: Indeed. And with COVID-19, doctors can name their price for luxuries like in-home service. Why, they can even demand more than a chicken or two!
(Referencing the whack-a-doodle who thought she could take down Harry Reid a few years ago, who thought we should return to a barter system for health care.)
Splitting Image
You’d think that being batshit insane would innoculate her from whatever the poor bat might have had.
Captain C
Libertarians seem to have this fantasy thinking that everyone will provide them with any high quality goods and services they want, at any time, for little or no cost, and that everyone who provides those extremely inexpensive and convenient services will somehow get rich. Though they don’t actually seem to care about (or even believe) the latter part, as that whole bit is really just the sales pitch.
sdhays
@Baud: What a horrible slander! We have no evidence that Rick Scott is rabid.
Baud
@sdhays: What’s the alternative explanation?
Ken
Is that “Peace be upon them” or “Profit be upon them”?
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Captain C:
If you think (capital L) libertarians are nuts, look up anarcho-capitalists
Ken
The Green party is breeding bio-weapons to take out the other third-party candidates. The Libertarian got a bat, and Kanye is batsh*t.
westyny
@Baud: That it was Rudy Giuliani who bit her.
Ken
Aren’t they the ones who think the society in the later Mad Max movies had too much government?
Carlo
I like the idea of the bat flying off and becoming suddenly beset by worry that it’s communal sleeping-cave might be subsidized housing provided by the Park Service…
sdhays
@westyny: He’ll bite anything that moves.
sdhays
@Carlo: I think he’s probably more worried that HIS property rights are being abused by other bats sleeping in HIS cave.
ETA: Without paying him rent in bugs, of course.
Adam L Silverman
@Baud: It’s a woman.
Adam L Silverman
@westyny:
via GIPHY
sdhays
@Adam L Silverman: The guys in the movies are always more handsome than the people they’re playing.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Ken:
Yup. They somehow think capitalism and anarchism combined won’t devolve into dictatorship by those with the most guns.
One infamous AnCap on Tumblr in particular thinks the anti-war left of the 2000s are posers because the movement largely faded away once Obama was in office. Oh, and that Trump is being besiged by the “Deep State”.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Adam L Silverman:
Ghoulini: “You called?”
Martin
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): Oh, no, they do, which is why they all own a fuckton of guns.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Splitting Image: Like Adam, I’m more worried about what the bat might have contracted from her.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Baud: Floriduh.
ruemara
I’m either not sober enough or drunk enough for this ridiculous year.
frosty
When my son was 4 he ran into (or was run into) another kid on a bike and ended up with a compound fracture of the shinbone. The pediatric orthopedic surgeon dropped by the house the two days after setting the fracture to make sure there wasn’t any infection or other problems.
House call! From a surgeon!!
TBH, we found out later he had a great reputation. We lucked out, we had no idea.
dmsilev
@?BillinGlendaleCA: Is libertarianism infectious? Even if the bat is asymptomatic, it could still act as a carrier and pass the disease onwards.
Amir Khalid
I’ve tried for years, and I still can’t quite wrap my head around the concept of a political party dedicated to libertarianism, which prizes individual rights above all else.
Bitten by a bat? How often does that happen in the US? I thought vampire bats were a South American thing.
Danielx
It’s 2020, Jake.
debbie
@ruemara:
Yeah, I’m not even sure I can laugh any more.
SectionH
working…
dmsilev
@Amir Khalid: North American bats are mostly (entirely?) insect eaters that under normal circumstances won’t bite anything as big as a cat, never mind a person. If they’re rabid, however, all bets are off.
debbie
This thread has inspired me to reserve Freaks and Nosferatu from my library. The double bill seems appropriate.
westyny
@Adam L Silverman: Hahaha. That’s the image I have of him. Also sleeping upside down, wrapped in his leather wings . . .
different-church-lady
A vampire presidency would just be peak 2020.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@dmsilev:
Only if it’s a teenage bat.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Martin:
Oh, so they do actually believe in the social darwinism?
Yutsano
Well there will be one less Dolt45 humper in office. Sheriff Joe can officially fuck off now.
Jager
@sdhays: My grandfather was a lawyer and his brother was a doctor, I remember overhearing them after a huge Thanksgiving dinner, Doctor Earl said “when was it, 1935? Between the two of us, we earned $17 dollars.” Gramps said, “Yeah but I got a ham and a basket of vegetables and if I remember correctly you delivered the Johnson baby for two chickens and a couple of heads of cabbage.”
Adam L Silverman
@westyny:
Adam L Silverman
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): Unless it’s delivered by Rand Paul’s neighbor.
HumboldtBlue
I remember watching Nosferatu in the 6th grade after school film club.
That motherfucker scared me.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Adam L Silverman:
Hey Adam. Since Batman was brought up, I wanted to pick your brain a bit about BTAS and Batman in the comics in general.
Apparently, during roughly the late 90s and early 2000s, there was a tendency in the comics and the DCAU shows to try to make give Batman badass moments in both mediums, sometimes at the expense of other characters, that could come across as “forced”. Some complain that this started with Bruce Timm and later bled into the comics proper. Do you have a take on this?
Also, what the hell was Timm thinking with the whole Bruce/Barbra Gordon thing? Or the execs at Warner Bros for that matter
One more thing! Was the Batman/WW pairing ever a thing in the comics?
SectionH
@Amir Khalid: NA bats are insectivores. They can be infected with rabies but – yes I did look on google – best stats show that < .5% of bats may carry rabies virus. How one actually goes about getting bitten, I don’t know. Possibly infected bats may act weirdly in the last stages, like rabid dogs from English 19th c. folklore. I’m firmly in the camp of any critter that eats that many mosquitos/day is my ally.
[Still trying to make an “embed” from the Twit machine work here. Failing… Grump.]
Brachiator
You sure it wasn’t Stephen Miller transformed into a vampire bat?
His crypt must be nearby. Bring the garlic and a mirror.
SFAW
@Amir Khalid:
Your comment reminded me of this Steve Martin bit (unfortunately, the vid truncates the lead-in).
Steeplejack
@Amir Khalid:
Well, “vampire” got added by the snarky commenters. But bats are not uncommon in the United States.
Given the libertarian reality warp, it will probably turn out that she was slightly bumped by a flying squirrel.
Just Chuck
@Amir Khalid: Your average libertarian is one who fights tooth and nail for their individual right to trample the rights of others.
different-church-lady
Abraca-pocus!
Hocus-cadabra!
Newport News!
Walla Walla, Washington!
Mary G
Twitler’s stooge purging the USPS tonight has me feeling hopeless. Somebody talk me down.
trollhattan
@SectionH:
Lunching streetside with a friend at a downtown restaurant one weekday, I looked down to see a bat dragging (or however they cross the ground) him/herself right next to our table. Did not inquire as to its potential rabies status but took the bizarre behavior as perhaps a hint to end lunch, pronto.
Mexican free tailed bats (don’t tell ICE) have a seasonal colony in the I-80 Yolo Causeway structure and at dusk they pour out in the tens of thousands, forming bat ribbons into the evening sky. Have seen this but once in my car and am surprised there aren’t dozens of accidents from startled folks slamming on their brakes. It’s quite a sight and because of the rice paddies in the causeway, they have plenty to eat. When I saw it a raptor, kite, I think, was busily crashing the bat ribbon for dinner. Circle of life.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Steeplejack: I think I tracked down the squirrel, he’s with a moose down on the strip.
cain
@different-church-lady:
Ah yes.. the famous bugs bunny episode. That was a fun one.
(gen Xers the bridge generation ;)
Kattails
Lots of doctors make house calls. They’re called veterinarians. (Hard to bring the average cow in for a checkup–OK, Bessie, what seems to be the problem? a little gassy you say? OK, open up and say MOO… )
gwangung
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
Let me butt in….
I think Batman being badass in his own book is fine. It was in the Morrison JLAs where he was super starring over people like the Flash and Green Lantern and even Superman was a bit over the top. Hard to take it seriously when they’re fighting Martians and New Gods.
Bats and Barbara Gordon? Beats me.
Bats and Wonder Woman? That’s.a Greg Rucka thing if anything in the comics, as a reaction to the stereotypical Superman/WW paring. Most of it was subtextural (which plays to RUcka’s strengths), and not to overt, but there were some definite strains.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Rabbis makes animals aggressive, Normally bats don’t bite people unless provoked.
oatler.
@SFAW:
From Life of Brian:
“You’re all individuals!”
“We’re all individuals!”
different-church-lady
@cain: The odd thing is that tonight I was thinking about that cartoon before I saw this post!
West of the Rockies
@Mary G:
Best case scenario: Trump loses badly and the Republican party craters. Until the transition, Trump loses interest and mostly sulks and rage-Tweets and does penny-ante shit the can quickly be undone (other than some pardons done only to piss off his enemies.
Biden comes in and the long process of healing and recovery begins.
Kattails
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: errr, autocorrect? — you of course mean rabies not rabbis, it was a bit startling at first glance.
Steeplejack
@SectionH:
Twitter embed:
In Twitter:
In the destination Balloon Juice thread:
Fin.
Adam L Silverman
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): The comics and the animated series were really different approaches. The original run of BTAS, through episode 65, was basically Batman focused. After that a 20 episode run, entitled The Batman & Robin Adventures, was ordered which brought Robin on as a full time co-lead. And according to interviews Fox was really insistent on Robin had to be in every episode. There was supposed to be a Black Canary episode, but it couldn’t happen because no Robin. They were going to do the Lady Nocturna story arc as a two parter, couldn’t do it because 1) not enough Robin and 2) no blood! Eventually the show was dropped by Fox and moved to a WB owned network and got additional seasons, under the title of The New Batman Adventures, which ran in a block with Superman: The Animated Series. Up until the show transitioned to Batman and Robin, the focus was on Batman, with Robin and Batgirl occasionally co-leading an episode. A lot of what did and didn’t happen on the show in those first 85 episodes was the result of what Fox demanded when they were the bill payer. For a good rundown of this, as part of a rundown of episodes that were pitched or brainstormed, but never happened for various reasons, watch these two videos:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZm7HG9RBMQ&t=376s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3SFugA_KnQ
When they eventually transitioned to Justice League and then Justice League Unlimited, there were specific efforts made not to utilize Batman’s villains too much. Yes, you had the Joker centric episode that introduced the Royal Flush gang as a Cadmus creation and another two parter with the Injustice Society where Joker shows up as a spoiler character to create chaos for everyone, but beyond that they really stayed away from them. Once they went to JLU the formula seemed to be having at least one of the original 7, as they referred to them – Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, Martian Manhunter, Green Lantern/Jon Stewart, Flash (Wally West version), and Hawkgirl – as the episode lead. My understanding is they went out of their way to try to prevent it from becoming Batman and Friends because of the popularity of both the animated Batman in this continuity and the voice work for the character.
The comics were a different story, pardon the pun, completely. A great deal of what was driving the comics at that point in regard to Batman was responding to, as an overreaction, the popularity of Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. This grim, ultra-violent characterization of the character and DC’s attempt to chase the success of Miller’s story from the mid to late 1980s really drove a lot of the comics and their story lines. And while The Dark Knight Returns is an interesting story and I’ve got a first printing hardcover in mint condition and never been out of the shrinkwrap, which is worth a decent amount, frankly it works as a one off ElseWorlds future story, not as a way to go back and overwrite the primary character in day to day continuity. Frankly, the better of these types of stories is Kingdom Come. And the art is better.
Frankly, I stopped reading the Batman books around the mid 90s because they just became far too convoluted. I stopped just after the Knightfall arc as they were beginning to set up the Cataclysm and No Man’s Land arcs. There were suddenly far too many books and far too many subplots to keep straight. This was also post Death and Rebirth of Superman and Green Lantern: Emerald Twilight. I was writing my second masters thesis and then starting my doctorate and was reading thousands of pages a week. While I tried to make sure I still read a novel every couple of weeks, I neither had the time, nor the money, to buy a 1/2 dozen Batman books, at least 2 Superman books, Green Lantern, Flash, and a Justice League book so I could stay constant with the plots and subplots within each related series and then the huge crossovers every year or so.
Now as to Bruce Timm and his weird fixation on hooking up Batman and Barbara Gordon, which he made semi-explicit in the Old Wounds episode of The New Batman Adventures and in Batman Beyond and now, in what most consider to be completely cringe inducing, Batman: The Killing Joke the animated movie. I don’t know whether he just thinks the characters would fit together or he’s got some kink or there’s something else. I haven’t looked it up because I honestly don’t want to know.
As for The Killing Joke animated movie it is the only DC animated movie, regardless of continuity, that I do not own and have also never watched. The art in the comic is amazing, but the story line sucks. Alan Moore is a lunatic. Why anyone would let them use their characters to work out his sick fetishes is beyond me. I don’t find Frank Miller to be a creative genius and other than his four story arc on Wolverine, The Dark Knight Returns, and Batman Year One, I won’t read anything he’s written because he’s a fascistic, white supremacist, misogynistic asshole. In the case of Moore, who as far as I know is not a white supremacist and is definitely not a fascist, he’s just bugfuck nuts! Look up the story outline he pitched for a DC crossover mega event called Twilight of the Superheroes. I get that he’s now largely pickled, brined, cured, smoked, and baked himself with the drugs and the booze, but that doesn’t make him a genius. I own The Killing Joke. I bought it when it came out. I read it and didn’t find it engaging or even disturbingly provocative, just disturbing. So I made a decision that I wasn’t going to watch it or buy it. Even before it leaked that Timm was explicitly going to have Bruce Wayne and Barbara Gordon have an affair in the animated movie to up the stakes and the tension.
Batman and Wonder Woman were never paired up in the comics to the best of my knowledge. It has always been either Steve Trevor or, in the New 52, Superman & Wonder Woman. The only other place I’ve seen it in the comics are in ElseWorlds. In the sequel to The Dark Knight Returns, Superman and Wonder Woman are involved and have a daughter who is half Kryptonian and half Amazon. In Kingdom Come, at the end of the story, in which Lois Lane has been dead for at least 20 years, Superman and Wonder Woman become a couple and the narrative part of the story ends with her pregnant and Clark and Diana asking Bruce to be the godfather.
If that doesn’t fully answer your question, shoot me an email and I’ll try to give you a better answer tomorrow.
Adam L Silverman
@Amir Khalid: @dmsilev: @SectionH: @Steeplejack: We have a bat house in a glade around the corner from my house.
Omnes Omnibus
@dmsilev: I take this as evidence that Jorgensen is an insect of some kind. Look, it would explain a lot.
SectionH
@trollhattan: Poor thing. I probably wouldn’t have tried to help either then. Or it wouldn’t have helped much.
Cool! well, I don’t notice much of anything but cars when I’m driving, so that’s probably good. Austin has a famous bat colony under one its in-town bridges, but I’ve never managed to see them come out. Always completely busy on business that time of the evening. Mammoth Cave of course has bats which make an evening fly-out, and I think Carlsbad also has their bats. Well, the latter 2 can has year-round perfect temps anyway. I wonder if Austin’s bats are also migratory like Yolo’s.
Damn. The world is so full of interesting things. Unlike the self-centered subjects of the OP.
Steeplejack
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
Anti yo-semite!
Omnes Omnibus
Do tell.
Adam L Silverman
@gwangung: Batman and Wonder Woman as a couple was played up in the Justice League and Justice League Unlimited run. Basically she decided she was interested in him, he was like “are you nuts?”, if I recall the line from This Little Piggy correctly it was “you’re an immortal Amazonian princess, I’m a rich kid with issues”. The initial connection, for lack of a better term, was in Maid of Honor, it resurfaces in Justice League Unlimited in both The Little Piggy and the two parter Once & Future Thing Parts 1 and 2.
Adam L Silverman
@Kattails:
The members of my tribe have stories that could be told…//
trollhattan
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
That’s why they don’t keep cats.
Steeplejack
@Omnes Omnibus:
Point well taken. ?
Adam L Silverman
@SectionH: I’ve seen them come out. On one of my temporary duty assignments to Ft. Hood, I drove into Austin one night to see some friends from grad school who were married and teach at UT -Austin. We walked down from their apartment and watched the bats fly at sunset. And I’ve been to Carlsbad and watched the bat flight there too.
Omnes Omnibus
@Adam L Silverman: If I recall correctly there was one in DC who had cams installed in the mikvah. Then again, one of my high school classmate’s dad was a Lutheran minister who ran off with his church secretary – not even original.
Adam L Silverman
@Omnes Omnibus: What got lost in the shuffle of the Church child sex scandals is that the rate of sexually deviant/criminal behavior by clergy in the US is almost constant across all religions and denominations at about 11%. I haven’t looked at the data in a while, so the numbers may have shifted, so don’t take that as the final word on the percentage. In the case of Judaism, most of the mainline Protestant denominations, and Islam to take the big three, the behavior normally breaks out into one of two categories. Because the clergy in these religions and denominations don’t have to be celibate and can be married, it is often things like affairs with congregants, which isn’t illegal, but is certainly toxic to the congregation in general and the individuals and their partners in specific. The second type is what you’ve described with the mikvah in DC, where you had a rabbi install a peep cam so he could watch the women ritually bathe. In these religions and denominations you don’t usually see high levels of child sexual abuse – heterosexual or homosexual. Where you do see that is in the very well reported problems the Catholic Church has had and in the not very well reported Evangelical denominations. Especially the more fundamentalist ones.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Adam L Silverman:
Thanks!
I actually looked into this further on Reddit. Apparently, back in the 60s and 70s, her and Batman’s age gap wasn’t nearly so large as it later would be. She was a graduate student (so in her late 20s) and Batman was his usual age (mid 30s). So not nearly as bad as a 30 something dating a 20 y/o. On top of that, there were completely different power dynamics between them. They didn’t have the same mentor/student relationship and were on more equal terms. The writers would tease “almost flirting” scenes. So maybe that was what Timm was going for?
The problem with that, of course, was the age disparity between them in modern continuity as well as the different relationship dynamics as a result.
I hadn’t thought about the aftereffects of the grim and gritty fad of the 80s and early 90s. Interesting point. It seemed like Batman at one point became a creator’s pet, for both Timm and imo Morrison in JLA, where he got to one up the other superheroes by beating the super-villains of the issue, including Martians and New Gods, as @gwangung: noted
Yeah, reading multiple comic books to keep up with the overarching story, while a cool concept, is an expensive hobby. The one factoid I always remember about 90s Superman is that he had like 3 monthly book
I’ve liked Moore’s work on Animal Man. I’ve only seen the famous ending, where Animal Man literally gets to meet Moore himself and Moore complains to him about the real world. I’ve always really enjoyed meta stuff like that
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Adam L Silverman:
Which is weird. Given how popular the ship is in the fandom, I figured it had a lot more buildup
Kattails
@Mary G: Do you like to sew? You could watch Bernadette Banner chattily making a copy of an 1890’s ball gown in black silk velvet using an ungodly amount of hand-stitching. Bonus pet guinea pig leaving little foot prints across the silk lining pieces laid out across the floor. I am finding her little youtube videos quite soothing.
SectionH
@Steeplejack: Thanks but the problem is on the BJ end apparently – I know how to embed tweets. Maybe it was starting in text. I’ll see – have had a lot of issues with BJ in the last couple of weeks I’ve never had before. I am starting to document them for WG.
Citizen Alan
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
Hell, I just looked it up on wiki to confirm my recollection, and Barbara Gordon not only had a doctorate, she briefly retired from superheroics to become a Congresswoman!
Also, pretty sure Animal Man was Grant Morrison rather than Alan Moore.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Citizen Alan:
You’re correct on both counts
Brachiator
@Adam L Silverman:
I had not thought about this stuff as a continuum of bad sexual behavior from the unethical to the clearly illegal. Interesting.
But I always figured that every religion, and every denomination, had some problems.
Adam L Silverman
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): @Citizen Alan: Correct, I was just coming back to respond to Goku on that. I have that entire run from the late 70s to mid 80s. If I’m recalling correctly Barbara Gordon’s doctorate was in Library Science or Literature to play off of the Batman 66 TV series where she was a librarian. Both she and Robin, who was getting ready to and then was spun off as the lead in The New Teen Titans followed by stopping being Robin and becoming Nightwing, were both clearly in the early to late 20s with Barbara being older than Dick Grayson. In one issue I remember very clearly, Batman goes to Louisiana to investigate a series of ritual murders and goes missing. Robin goes to DC en route to Louisiana to collect Barbara Gordon from Congress. The art was either by Neal Adams or Jim Aparo.
And with that, I’m off to bed.
Adam L Silverman
@Brachiator: The two in the US where the majority is either criminal or close to a majority is, was the Catholic Church child molestation and sex scandal and the evangelical equivalents. They occur for different reasons, which is why the Catholic Church’s problems tended to be overwhelmingly homosexual. In the case of the issues within evangelicalism it runs the gamut, some of it is similar to the Catholic problem, heavily closeted gay clergy or lay leaders, but a chunk has to do with inappropriate heterosexual interactions with teenage girls and younger girls. My understanding of this latter type of bad acts is that it is rooted in the strict patriarchy of the denominations and sects combined with what those outside them would clearly call grooming girls, teenage girls, and young women to marry early, submit to their husbands, and be obedient. If you look at both the Duggar patriarch, as well as the Duck Dynasty patriarch, if I recall correctly their wives weren’t much over 16 when they started “courting” them. And in the case of “The Duck Commander” he’s stated she was 14. If having older men marry girls as young as 14 is supposed to be scripturally appropriate in some of these denominations and sects, you can see where things are going to go off the rails.
Anya
The universe to third party spoilers: Not this year, Satan, not this year.
SectionH
@Adam L Silverman: Nice – I may have been in Austin once or twice where I could have made time, but sadly didn’t. Glad you got to see them.
I’m not really the Caver type, although I’ve been in a few – waves at OH – but big caves make sense for bats. And humans too, come to think of it, so that coexistence does go back a longlong time.
prostratedragon
… when nature itself starts trying to tell you something:
I guess in Bugs Bunny land the equivalent would be a neon sign flashing “Tilted! Tilted! …”
eddie blake
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
i think you mean grant morrison
eta: beaten to the punch
frosty
@Mary G: I can’t talk you down. My wife and I are voting in person to get it counted on 11/3. We’re lucky that our polling place is the gym in the former local school. Big area, huge ceilings, not much danger for an indoor site.
My millenial son who didn’t vote in 2016 is voting this time. As are all his friends (PA). So that might be a little positive too.
PS Dead thread, hope you see this.
frosty
@Adam L Silverman: Wow. How could that NOT fully answer anyone’s question? National security and comics both!
Ruckus
@ruemara:
I’m stone sober and that’s way, way too sober for this year.
trnc
@Adam L Silverman:
So you can give us all this info without violating any NDAs, but you can’t give up a couple of candidates you worked for? C’mon, man.
opiejeanne
@trollhattan: Riverside City College used to put on plays in an amphitheater adjacent to the theater building, and every evening at dusk, just before the play would begin, thousands of bats would pour out of the top of the building. It was an amazing sight, and unnerved some of the people sitting outdoors until they realized the bats weren’t heading our direction. We lived two blocks from RCC so we went to a lot of Shakespeare one summer with our son when he was 8 and 9, and he loved it.
Mr opiejeanne and I used to go for walks every evening in the summer when we lived there, and one memorable evening a bat flew between us at face level. We felt its passage but it didn’t touch us.
Luciamia
Guess she lost the rabid bat vote.
opiejeanne
@Kattails: Oh, how wonderful! Thank you. I’ve saved the link so I can find it tomorrow. I worked as a costumer and much of the time I was flying blind when asked to recreate something similar to a historic piece of clothing. Similar, because it was almost always for a dancer in a studio and it needed to be something that could be danced in. That was aside from the Scottish ball gown I made, which I actually found a decent pattern I could alter, but even finding a picture of what it should look like was a challenge. (The local library totally sucked). The client helped with a clear description of what she wanted and she found the fabric for me (thank goodness).
This was before the internet and I retired in 2000, but I am fascinated by this sort of thing.
John S.
@Ken: The correct answer to “Who runs Bartertown?” should be “The free market”, not “Master Blaster”.
Robert Sneddon
@Kattails: Long time back I was working for a company that refurbished X-ray rooms and radiological facilities in hospitals. They had a lucrative sideline in recycling older X-ray gear for veterinary hospital operations. I went on a visit to measure up a large-animal vet unit with a tilting-table X-ray room that needed some work. While I was there they showed me the pictures they had taken when a zoo had requested they X-ray an elephant for them. Okay, it was a baby elephant but still…
Inspectrix
Dead thread and I can’t compete with Batman or rabid bats, but I’d like to point out that doctors aren’t paid for travel time for home visits so they typically lose income if they spend time driving to a home. This is life in a fee for service model. Do you know who understands the incredible value of home care for elderly and home bound patients and puts it right into its model of care? The VA. If we get to single payer/Medicare for all, I’m willing to bet house calls come back for the rest of us.
jonas
@Captain C: Well, I guess if you scrapped all licensing and board certifications and let anyone who wanted to call themselves an MD and provide “health care” services in a truly free, unregulated market, supply would go up and prices would come down. Libertarian paradise!
westyny
@Adam L Silverman: This is . . . uncanny.
eddie blake
@trnc:
dude, kingdom come is a 24 year old story. you wouldn’t think you would need spoiler warnings.
BruceJ
@SectionH: Most people who are bitten by bats get bitten trying to get them out of a dwelling. The issue with rabies is you have to presume infection and immediate vaccination if you don’t have the animal in hand to test for it, because vaccination is ineffective if symptoms have started.
J R in WV
Pretty much a dead thread, but I’ve got a funny bat story, so here goes:
Long ago we had neighbors up at the head of the hollow, maybe 1/2 or 3/4 of a mile of one lane dirt road, back in the late 70s and early 80s. One evening he called me, told me they had a batch of home brew that was over powered and popping tops off, wanted me to come up and help do away with some of the green (as in unaged) beer.
Oh, my, it was strong, too. So after 2 or 3, I headed home, probably 10:30 or so summer eve. Flashlight was nearly dead, so walked by starlight. As I neared home, something fell from the sky and splished in the edge of a puddle in the road. When I powered up the dim red flashlight glow, I could see what looked like a bat, threshing.
I wondered if it was rabid, as this didn’t seem like typical bat behavior. I considered putting the potentially ill bat down. Then one of them flew away, soon followed by the other bat. Yes, they were atypical, mating in mid-air, losing control, landing in the road beside me, flying away one after the other.
Don’t know anyone else who has seen bats in love. So unlikely. Such a good short story…
ETA: we used to have a ton of bats, as there were a ton of little sheds in the woods at every O&G well site. Those sheds are gone now, most of the wells plugged, but we still have a few bats.