.
On Monday, I posted:
… Cruz is reaching Dinesh D’Souza levels of middle-school masochism, where he cartwheels into an unrelated playground conversation and says Watch me eat a bug!…
All hail the Trickster God, who seldom stoops to subtlety:
#ToadCruz needs to trend @TG22110… please ?? https://t.co/SzIrJ2gQng
— Grand Jury Patriot (@PatriotPartyPR) May 27, 2021
Also, now playing at the Hades Octoplex: Return of the Zombie-Eyed Granny Starver!
I'm expected to say in a speech in my bathroom that I am the Emperor of Earth. They will have similar impacts on the world. https://t.co/ka68yA5gjh
— Jeff Fecke (@jkfecke) May 27, 2021
paul ryan has no influence over fox news and i am baffled that people think otherwise. he is there to collect money because he likes money. he's an ayn rand objectivist ghoul. if he could snap his fingers and make all poor people disappear he would. just an awful human being.
— World Famous Art Thief (@CalmSporting) May 27, 2021
i don't think paul ryan is a worse human being than marjorie taylor greene but he has, without any doubt, done more damage to the general welfare of the country. objectively. and so at the end of the day who has been the bigger problem. when it's that bad who even cares.
— World Famous Art Thief (@CalmSporting) May 27, 2021
And to round off the horrorshow: The Giant Amphibian is baaaaack, folks!…
Trump recruits Newt to write new Contract With America for 2022.https://t.co/tsq5Uf7zTF
— David J Harris Jr (@DavidJHarrisJr) May 27, 2021
Nobody in their right mind would ever sign a contract with Newt Gingrich or Donald Trump. https://t.co/OhliXxrSAd
— Ted Boutrous (@BoutrousTed) May 26, 2021
phdesmond
in an otherwise fascinating article in The Guardian, we read:
While some hardline leftists objected to the WPA’s gestalt, claiming that accepting money from the “bourgeois state” meant “making friends out of the mammoth of iniquity”, the resultant works still hewed to an anti-authoritarian bent.
and in a suitable companion contribution from the BBC: a young female presenter managed to get through to a professor of paleontology at California State University. she had heard word of the Miocene fossil field that had been discovered, and she asked about the finds of “bones and — what’s this? — putrified wood?”
West of the Rockies
Trump and Gingrich… because what America really wants are the opinions and promises of a pair of aged, racist and philandering swindlers.
craigie
I didn’t click the link because, you know, but is the story that starts out “This is a stroke of genius” sarcasm?
dr. bloor
Pence, Cruz…never let it be said that flies don’t know shit when they see it.
Adam L Silverman
The Cruz ate a fly video is fake. Someone took old footage and doctored it.
Adam L Silverman
My work here is done and I’m going to bed.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Adam L Silverman: Make sure you get a fly or two before bed Adam, good source of protein.
SiubhanDuinne
@AnneLaurie:
AL, you are a witch. And I am here for it.
SiubhanDuinne
@Adam L Silverman:
Jeez. I used to like Daniel Dale, but recently he’s turned into a real wet blanket.
//s
SiubhanDuinne
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
And roughage.
Bruuuuce
Since we’re open thready, I thought I’d take five minutes our of packing the house for tomorrow’s move and look in. We move out tomorrow — putting the apartment in storage — and await a closing date on the house. Meanwhile, we’ll move from Queens to Fishkill, to an extended stay hotel M’s mom lived in for a couple of years, until we close on the house. We should be close (2-3 weeks at most, I seriously hope) but the seller has been dragging his feet at every turn (and I will cop to having gotten the latest round of requested documents to the mortgage broker within five days, not one).
The house itself is in Poughkeepsie (in the Arlington section close to Vassar’s campus), and I am aching to just move in.
Comrade Colette
@Bruuuuce: Fishkill is my favorite NY place name.
Happy trails and good luck with the transition. Moving is stressful no matter how much you want to do it.
Steeplejack
@Bruuuuce:
Congratulations! I hope the transition goes smoothly.
karen marie
@Adam L Silverman: I don’t know how anyone was really fooled, except it’s very much par for the course for Cruz.
JWR
Introducing the “Despair Closet”, built by robots, for robots!
Bruuuuce
@Comrade Colette: @Steeplejack: Thank you. 5BR, 2BA, and we’ll be able to move my MiL in with us and out of her (admittedly good but pricey) assistive living community, along with our two adult (20 and 23) children.
Wheee!
Ruckus
@dr. bloor:
Thank You!
Ruckus
@karen marie:
Yep.
It really isn’t difficult to believe that he did.
Only because most people would gag and heave if they couldn’t spit it out. But one can easily see that little teddy is the one not to be in any way normal.
cckids
Because we all want it to be true, that’s how. Proof he’s a lizard person.
Tony Jay
@Bruuuuce:
Wait, Poughkeepsie is a real place? I thought it was just some tough-sounding name they made up for verisimilitude in 1930s gangster movies. Well I never.
Oh, you so nearly had me. Even fishermen aren’t that unimaginative!
Great band-name though.
Bruuuuce
@Tony Jay: Of course Poughkeepsie is a real place. Silverlock came from there! :-)
karen marie
@cckids: I wanted it to be true too. My disappointment was palpable. Cruz humiliating himself is a favorite video genre of mine.
Amir Khalid
@Adam L Silverman:
The video may be fake; but damn it, Ted Cruz is so creepy that it ought to be real.
mrmoshpotato
Oh good lord… What year (decade) is it again?
Amir Khalid
@Tony Jay:
Yes, Poughkeepsie is a real place. I’ve even been there, and I can vouch for its reality.
mrmoshpotato
@Bruuuuce: Happy moving!
Tony Jay
@Bruuuuce:
That’s the guy who taught The Fonz how to joust like Ivanhoe, right? 8-)
@Amir Khalid:
Sure you have, Amir, but the rest of us don’t have your room full of magical wardrobes.
Incidentally. Third in the League. I did not see that coming a couple of months ago.
Martin
@Tony Jay: Lots of city names around New York are named after native tribes or individuals. Poughkeepsie, Massapequa, Montauk, etc.
Fishkill is actually from the dutch settlers. It means ‘fish creek’. Lots of place names with ‘kill’ in them around New York from the dutch.
mrmoshpotato
@Tony Jay:
Hahahahaha!
R-Jud
I just submitted my last class assignment for my creative writing MA. Now it is all thesis all the time until September.
But first, we nap.
Jay
@Martin:
also from the 60’s, when the factories dumped all that stuff in the crick, creek, kill, stream,………
opiejeanne
@Tony Jay: Yes, it’s real. And so is Schenectady.
sab
@Tony Jay: We had a thunderstorm alert today, so the TV beeped and then went through the National Weather Service list of affected cities and towns. It is computer generated, so it pronounced almost every place name wrong but it did pronounce Cuyahoga Falls perfectly. Go figure.
Do you know how to pronounce the mythical town of Poughkeepsie?
opiejeanne
@Martin: There are some interesting ones, like Schuykill River in Pennsylvania, Muscupiabe in California. Don’t get me started on place-names in Washington state, because after ten years here I’m still not sure how to pronounce some of them I see all the time.
sab
@opiejeanne: How do you pronounce Spokane?
opiejeanne
@sab: Spoke-ann.
Well, that’s how I pronounce it. God knows how those heathens on the other side of the Cascades say it.
Bruuuuce
@Martin: I grew up on Lawn Guy Land, where there are a metric ton of Native-derived names. And yet, the ones from more distant lands seem odd while names like Copiague, Commack, and Hauppauge are utterly normal.
Jay
@opiejeanne:
no big deal. White supremacy robbed most of the indigenous peoples of not only their languages, but their names. The Kwuakutl, are now known by their own name, quawuwuakwakawaqa.
T’kumloops are now Sestimiuwuck Salishan.
Language is healing.
Jay
Anne Laurie
@opiejeanne: And so is Skaneateles, which (despite having travelled through) I always think of as a construction toy for small children…
Amir Khalid
@Tony Jay:
The team is fundamentally sound with a strong mentality. With Virgil back fit next season and the youngsters coming along the back line should be in good shape again. I’m optimistic about the coming season.
Anne Laurie
In NYC (people commute — my Nana had a summer cottage there) it’s pronounced Pa-KIP-see.
But, yes, people I knew who grew up there joked about Puff-gypsie…
Amir Khalid
I remember an episode of The X-Files where Asst Director Skinner mangled the pronunciation of Quonochontaug, Rhode Island.
sab
Here in NE Ohio we pronounce our local village of Ghent (named after some city in Europe where a treaty affecting us was signed) as if it were a homophone for “gent” short for gentleman. I believe the “gh” in Europe is pronounced more like a cough or a “k” instead of the jay sound we give it.
Jay
Epic, so many layers,
yellowdog
@cckids: If he were a lizard person he would have flicked out his tongue and caught it in mid-air.
Jay
@yellowdog:
nobody want’s to see his tongue
Martin
@Bruuuuce: Lived in Wantagh for a while (first settled in 1644). I can still recite all the stops on the LIRR Montauk line in LIRR announcer diction where the first syllable is over-stressed.
One of the things I most miss are the drill team competitions. Man, I loved going to those.
prostratedragon
Nice little play from yesterday’s baseball, as the Cubs’s Javier “El Mago” Baez hypnotizes a 2-out ground ball into an RBI double. At the beginning of the video, that’s Wilson Contreras dancing off 2nd base while Baez is at the plate. Mood music: “Hypnotized [Hypmatized],” Linda Jones
[Addiing credit to Paul Campos at LGM]
@Jay: Right you are!
Soprano2
I like the idea of the AmaZen room, but what I’ve always thought employers needed was a small, soundproof, padded room where you could pound on the walls and yell. I think it would help morale a lot.
We had a department store called Heers, pronounced “hers”. You could always tell people were from somewhere else because they pronounced it with a long “e”.
What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us?
@opiejeanne: I think they pronounce the ane in Spokane like the mane in lion’s mane. But that comes from and old college roommate who grew up in Maine and moved to Helena Montana after college, so what does he know about eastern Washington?
@sab: Yes and Milan is pronounced MY-lan. And Versailles is pronounced Ver-sales in Michigan.
Cameron
Ah, Newtie, pride of Hummelstown, PA……
Cameron
Putrified wood? Trump’s johnson?
Jay
@Soprano2:
Toshiba, in their heyday, had a Staff Room with “punching bozo’s”, each one had a MGR’s name on it, Punches were digitally recorded.
every week the one with the most punches, would get “reviewed”, or fired.
ab_normal
@opiejeanne: That’s correct; sometimes I pronounce it as “Well at least the cost of living isn’t that bad but god the idiots I’m surrounded by”.
RedDirtGirl
I lived in Port Jefferson and took the LIRR to the city on alternate weekends to see my dad. I, too, can recite most of the towns on the line. “See-tauket, next stop. See-tauket.” @Martin:
Chris Johnson
Former House Speaker Paul Ryan is of course the one who told Kevin McCarthy to shut the hell up when McCarthy said, “I think Putin pays two guys, Rohrbacher and Trump”.
And that was the moment McCarthy learned Putin pays three guys.
I’m thinking his learning continued, and now look at him.
I’m wary of Madison Cawthorne, but I KNOW to be suspicious of Paul Ryan. Paul Ryan is one of the ones smart enough to get out of the way and act like more of a sleeper agent. In fact he’s smart enough to do that on his own initiative, because while these guys work for Putin, Putin and Russia don’t really care which of them live or die: they are only valuable to the extent that they can do the most damage.
If we’re seeing Paul Ryan again it’s probably because he thinks other Russian agents are showing weakness. Specifically, if we’re seeing him again, it’s probably because he wants to take McConnell’s place.
Chris T.
@sab:
Since “Tough” is pronounced “tuff”, it must be “puff-keep-see”.
Then again, “bough” (as in tree branch) is pronounced “b” + “ow”, so it must be “pow-keep-see”.
On the third hand (cough), it must be “poff-keep-see”.
So there you go!
debbie
Colbert pointed to one of the provisions of TFG/Newt’s contract that “abolishes the 1619 Project.” Give me a break.
SFAW
@Tony Jay:
People in the NYC and Long Island area think of it as not tough-sounding, but “one of them places with Dutch names in the boonies north of The City.”
The “kill” part of “Fishkill” is a Dutch word/name meaning “some meaningless word, added just to fuck with the English.” **
Now who can argue with that?
** Yes, I know what it really means, pedants.
SFAW
@Chris T.:
The Tough Coughs as He Ploughs the Dough (by Ted Geisel)
SFAW
@Chris Johnson:
Me baby brudder** said, a number of years ago, that Paul Ryan wakes up every day trying to think of new ways to hurt the poor. I don’t recall seeing anything to contradict that.
** “Tumbleweeds” ref. I just found out that Tom Ryan died in 2019. Too bad, even if he had retired the strip in ’07.
H.E.Wolf
“Though the tough cough and hiccough, plough him through.”
(Not my coinage, but I don’t have an attribution for it.)
H.E.Wolf
On place names:
I have a relative-in-law who grew up near Spokane, who pronounces it “Spo-KANN”. :)
One of the pleasures of being a word nerd is learning the characteristic “sound” of a region’s place names – particularly those of the local Native American (and early non-Native setters’) languages.
Seekonk, Nacogdoches, Hoquiam, El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Angeles, Schuykill, Fort Ponchartrain de Détroit, [languages of your region here]….
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Adam L Silverman: I figured as much, there was never any reports of the Zodiac Killer eating flies.