Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Peak wingnut was a lie.

Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.

Reality always lies in wait for … Democrats.

I did not have this on my fuck 2021 bingo card.

Sitting here in limbo waiting for the dice to roll

Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to.

I’m going back to the respite thread.

If you tweet it in all caps, that makes it true!

Fuck these fucking interesting times.

Good luck with your asparagus.

Battle won, war still ongoing.

It’s the corruption, stupid.

Black Jesus loves a paper trail.

If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.

Make the republican party small enough to drown in a bathtub.

Balloon Juice has never been a refuge for the linguistically delicate.

I’d like to think you all would remain faithful to me if i ever tried to have some of you killed.

Nothing worth doing is easy.

Republican obstruction dressed up as bipartisanship. Again.

Wow, I can’t imagine what it was like to comment in morse code.

You can’t attract Republican voters. You can only out organize them.

When do we start airlifting the women and children out of Texas?

We’ve had enough carrots to last a lifetime. break out the sticks.

The math demands it!

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Faunasphere

Oh Mah Gawd! Is That Floriduh! Man’s Music?!?!

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Floriduh says hold mah beer!

As a native Floriduhian, I guarantee someone in Miami actually owns one of these. I can also guarantee that either he or someone he knows will use it to try to self medicate against Covid.

And a whole bunch of people who live in the parts of the state we call BettyCracker land are right now trying to figure out how to illegally import them so they can self medicate with them against Covid.

This will all be followed by them being dumped, en masse, into the scrub in different parts of Floriduh creating a new non-native and invasive menace to go along with the monkeys that have herpes, the anacondas, the retirees from the rust belt living in the Villages who also all have STDs, and people from Long Island living in Broward and Palm Beach Counties!

Obligatory!

Looney Tunes Florida GIF - Find & Share on GIPHY

Open thread!

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Saturday Evening Open Thread: Pop Culture & Otherwise

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The movie I’m looking forward to is The Green Knight, but not until I can watch it at home. Any of you braver Jackals seen it yet?

Sportsball-adjacent:

Former U.S. President Barack Obama has joined NBA Africa as a strategic partner to help advance social responsibility efforts across the continent, the National Basketball Association said on Tuesday.

Obama will have a minority equity stake in the new venture, which over time he intends to use to fund Obama Foundation youth and leadership programs across Africa.

“By investing in communities, promoting gender equality, and cultivating the love of the game of basketball, I believe that NBA Africa can make a difference for so many of Africa’s young people,” Obama said in a news release…

And from the faunasphere…

… [Bird ecologist Richard] Major has been studying Australian birds for almost 40 years. A few years back, he began noticing something peculiar in Sydney: cockatoos that were eating out of someone’s open trash bin.

“I wasn’t really expecting cockatoos to be rubbish bin feeders,” he said. “They’re not something like ibis or crows that are scavengers. These are good, self-respecting seed-eaters — or at least plant-eaters.”…

“The thing that really got me was when I saw a cockatoo fly up from a rubbish bin, sit on a electricity wire, holding a chicken drumstick in its foot,” he says, explaining that a cockatoo can perch on one leg and hold its food in another. “Here it was, just munching on a drumstick, and I thought, ‘Oh god, this is verging on cannibalism.’ Certainly once cockatoos start eating meat, we’re done for.”

He’d just assumed that those bins were already open and overflowing — nothing clever about that. But Major later began observing several of the birds actually opening the bins themselves, and now he was intrigued. If this behavior spreads, he thought, “There’ll be cockatoos opening bins all over the place and they’ll have this endless supply of rubbish.” A cockatoo smorgasbord…

A team of scientists — including John Martin, Sonja Wild, Jana K. Hörsch and Lucy Aplin — joined Klump and Major to figure out what was going on with these clever cockatoos. They started by sending surveys out to different suburbs in Sydney to ask people if they had noticed the big white parrots opening up their trash bins and, if they had, when they first saw it. The survey results showed that over two years, the number of trash-raiding cockatoo sightings had increased from just three suburbs to 44, indicating that the birds were learning from each other. A culture of trash can break-ins was radiating out from the birds who first figured it out…

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Late Night Open Thread: Fishy Tales

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Whale: You think it’s bad, getting a fly in your soup?…

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Apparently the Blog Took a Siesta!

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I have no idea where all the other front pagers have been since Tony Jay’s guest post. I know where I’ve been. I had a teleconference on a project I’m involved in, then I went and ran an errand for the Mominator, then I came home and worked out, then I walked the dogs in the steam room we call the outdoors here, and now I’m typing this. As soon as I hit publish I’m going to go get the grime off, turn on the Avs game, and have something to eat.

In the meantime, I have baby wild turkeys!!!!!!!!

Apparently the Blog Took a Siesta!

Apparently the Blog Took a Siesta! 1

They’re SOOOO CUTE!!!!

Also, I really think I have a chance to win this year!

I don’t care what the odds makers say!!!

Open thread!

 

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Do *Not* Try This At Home Open Thread: She Shoved A Bear!

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Goddess protect her, if her mom has a service dog, presumably this kid has not had the luxury of waiting on further instructions. And, in retrospect, she advises against shoving bears, per NPR:

A 17-year-old Southern California girl got in a shoving match with a bear to protect her dogs and walked away nearly unscathed.

Hailey Morinico and her mother were gardening in their backyard in Bradbury, Calif., on Monday afternoon when a bear and her cubs began walking atop a cinder block wall at one end of the garden…

Video of the terrifying encounter shows that the appearance of the family of California black bears on the short wall set off one of Morinico’s dogs, which began barking and lunging at them. Mama bear, in turn, started swatting at the large dog and three small ones that had joined the canine vs. ursine confrontation…

“I see the bear, it’s grabbing my dog, Valentina, and I have to run over there. She’s a baby,” Morinico said. “And the first thing I think to do is push the bear. And somehow it worked.”…

The teen said she is lucky to have walked away with only a sprained finger and a scraped knee.

Her advice: Do not push bears. “Don’t do what I did — you might not have the same outcome.”

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Mid-day Cat Break

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Mid-day Cat Break 1

Mid-day Cat Break

There’s a funny little daily drama that plays out in the house. The video is of Neighbor Cat, Ginger. I believe that is a girl but it could be a boy. Ginger is fascinated by my house as I have 2 cats. Which means he/she gets to pick fights safely from the outside of the window and attack the window until I tell Ging to bugger off. Odo has decided this challenge shall not stand, so he is eternally vigilant by my shoes, so he doesn’t fall off the window sill again (& again) when Ginger attacks the window (again). Hime, as any sensible female would feel, thinks both of these 2 are silly, so she focuses on her obsession with… me. At this point, I’m glad everyone has a hobby, I just wish it involved a space not right next to my computer & my recording mic.

And in other news, trying to organize myself before the big debut movie script table read on Saturday and I’m hoping to get all the pre-panic done today so tomorrow is relatively calm. How’s your day going? Open thread!

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Florida Man Does Something Good!

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Florida Man saves his puppy from a gator!

Don’t even think about messing with this Florida man’s puppy.

Richard Wilbanks, 74, acted swiftly when his 3-month-old pup Gunner was snatched by an alligator in the backyard pond of his home in Estero, near South Florida’s Gulf Coast.

In a stunning video, Wilbanks wrestles the young gator in waist-deep water, bringing it above the surface and prying open its jaws to release the King Charles Cavalier spaniel.

“We were just out walking by the pond,” Wilbanks told CNN, “and it came out of the water like a missile. I never thought an alligator could be that fast. It was so quick.”

Acting on adrenaline or instinct, Wilbanks said he just “automatically jumped into the water.”

He said he sustained some injuries to his hands and went to the doctor for a tetanus shot to be safe.

Gunner had one small puncture wound to his belly, but is doing fine after a trip to the vet, Wilbanks said.

Wilbanks told WINK News that he understands this is the alligator’s home and does not want it removed from the pond. He urged other pet owners to keep their animals away from the water’s edge.

The dramatic encounter was caught on camera thanks to a partnership between the Florida Wildlife Federation and the fSTOP Foundation as part of a campaign called “Sharing the Landscape.” Its mission is to help the community understand and appreciate the wildlife they live near and help reduce conflicts.

Meredith Budd, the regional policy director of the Florida Wildlife Federation, said the cameras typically capture videos of deer or bobcats. It’s not often they catch something like what Wilbanks and Gunner went through.

“We live on a shared landscape,” Budd said. “We don’t just want to tolerate wildlife, but, rather, we want to thrive with wildlife on a shared landscape.”

Louise Wilbanks, Richard’s wife, told WINK the incident has given them a new appreciation for the wildlife near their homes.

“We do need to be aware they are wild animals. They’re not here for our benefit. We’re very lucky to share this space with them,” she said.

Here’s a bit more video with some reporting:

As a native Floridian who grew up on a salt water canal that fed into Tampa Bay, but has also lived in areas of the state with lakes, retention ponds, and cypress swamp and scrub just outside my doors – front and back – one of the things you learn is that gators can be anywhere. And that they’re fast, very, very fast. When I’m out with the dogs near water, even if it is just low lying scrub that has filled up because of rain to form a pond, I keep eyes on the water and my ears focused on any movement in it and along its edges. Day or night!

And Gunner is a very good and very lucky boy!

Open thread!

 

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