Evening Respite Thread: Words!
I don’t know about you, but I sure would love a nice relaxing respite thread. So! My friend Louis was kind enough to bring this fun page to my attention this weekend:
This website tells you what words were born the same year you were.
Delighted to share the stage with “cringey,” “chat room,” “FYI,” “deets,” and “perestroika.” https://t.co/Z2yHqYQdXj
— BOO-is Frightsman (@LouisPeitzman) October 19, 2019
I’m the same vintage as ‘dead-cat bounce’, ‘IP address’, ‘graphene’, ‘anime’, and ‘breakbeat’, to pick a few that I like. They aren’t all winners; ‘alternative country’ had the audacity to be first used in print* that year, too. What about y’all?
Respite Long Watch Open Thread: Hokkaido Master Craftsman Builds A Desk
(via Rick Wilson’s twitter feed, of all unlikely places)
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Saturday Morning Open Thread: Don’t Just Protest, Do It Fabulously!
Climate protesters in Melbourne, Australia have come up with a new term:
Civil Disco-bedience
— Joshua Potash ?? (@JoshuaPotash) October 11, 2019
From the Washington Post, “A spice company spent more money on impeachment ads on Facebook than anyone not named Trump”:
… On Wednesday, Axios published a list of the entities spending the most money on Facebook ads on both sides of the impeachment debate. They included the usual suspects of the political war roll call, including Trump himself (he was top of the list, of course, at $718,000), Democratic presidential candidates Tom Steyer and Elizabeth Warren, and both the National Republican Congressional Committee and the National Republican Senatorial Committee.
But one name jumped off the screen for its sheer one-of-these-things-is-not-like-the-other factor: Penzeys Spices, the nation’s largest spice retailer, had dropped $92,000 from Sept. 29 to Oct. 5 on ads championing impeachment. That was more than self-funding millionaire Steyer, more than hard-charging Warren — more than anyone else other than Trump…
For many Penzeys fans, it comes as no surprise. The company has a history of unabashed liberal activism. Its founder, Bill Penzey, greeted Trump’s election with an email calling the president an “openly racist candidate.” As Helen Rosner noted in a New Yorker story last year, that set him far apart from the rest of the business-leader pack. He was “quite possibly the first to publicly call Trump’s election an ‘embrace of racism,’” she wrote. “And he was definitely the first to do so while hawking a free bottle of Quebec Seasonings with any five-dollar purchase.”…
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Respite Open Thread: New Fat Bear Winner
I'm really jealous of Holly, the Fat Bear Champion that gets to sleep through a significant portion of the primary. pic.twitter.com/b2kGrcmI6P
— Brandi Thee Nice Goose (on Halloween or whatever) (@ItsTheBrandi) October 9, 2019
A size-acceptance model for the rest of us. Per NPR:
… Fat Bear Week has been an annual event for the past five years in Katmai National Park and Preserve in southwestern Alaska. The idea is to publicize and celebrate the process of bears eating as much as they can to build up crucial fat reserves in advance of winter hibernation.
Park rangers made a game out of the process — a March Madness-style bracket matching bear against bear, each with photos proving girth and inviting the public to vote on the fattest bear in each pair…
Katmai Conservancy Media Ranger Naomi Boak says Holly earned her title.
“It was very hard to get a good picture [of Holly] out of the water,” she says, “because she was a submarine for the entire month. She did not stop fishing, except to dig a belly hole big enough for her to sleep in.”
Holly and all of this year’s 12 contestants are coastal brown bears that forage along the Brooks River. The Alaskan waterway has one of the largest concentrations of sockeye salmon in the world, and the bears there take full advantage.
This year’s weeklong competition was a huge success, with a record total of 187,000 votes cast — more than three times last year’s total…
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Wednesday Morning Open Thread: Extremely Social Media
Turns out bats talk and 60% of what they say is arguments, including a whole category of calls for “males making unwanted mating advances” and another for when “a bat argues with another bat sitting too close.“ https://t.co/DasX9Oo3Ah
— Celeste Ng (@pronounced_ing) October 8, 2019
(Okay, it’s not ‘new’ — but it’s still fun!)
Elsewhere…
The Democratic House has been one of the most productive in history.
Its passed over 400 pieces of legislation, including gun control, increasing the minimum wage, lowering prescription drug costs, and taking on climate change.
But Mitch McConnell has blocked every single one.
— Nate Lerner (@NathanLerner) October 8, 2019
We can have a democracy or we can have a Republican Party. We cannot have both. https://t.co/5wjOeDdMdA
— Daniel Gilmore (@gilmored85) October 8, 2019
BREAKING: New NBC/WSJ poll shows majority of Americans back impeachment inquiry or Trump's removal from office #MTPDaily@ChuckTodd: "A combined 55 per cent of the country now supports the president's either removal from office completely or supports an inquiry." pic.twitter.com/FboALqZTzi
— Meet the Press (@MeetThePress) October 8, 2019
Or the White House may be panicked as all hell and not really calculating rationally at all…. https://t.co/HPjqRhaOH5
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) October 8, 2019
Neither Trump or Putin are acting like people who are confident he’ll win reelection.
— Boo-risma Executive Board Member (@agraybee) October 8, 2019
Elizabeth Warren is now the frontrunner for the 2020 Democratic nomination. pic.twitter.com/GePN5HGOz2
— Ian Millhiser (@imillhiser) October 8, 2019
Don’t tempt me. Do your job.
— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) October 8, 2019
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“Dear FSM! Make It Stop!” Silly Pix Respite Thread
So, our criminal president is (by Turkish proxy) bringing death down upon innocents who thought they could trust US friendship. His party, most of them so far, is just fine with that. He is actively working with every bad actor available to enrich himself and steal the next election. He is publicly admitting new impeachable offenses more or less on the hour. And there’s a non-zero chance that as the walls close in on his criminal enterprise he’ll find new ways to kill lots of the rest of us.
So I don’t know about you, but I could use a break. So here’s a couple of silly pictures that managed to make me laugh through the madness.
1: From a professor’s office at an undisclosed west coast institution of higher learning (the pic. was smuggled to me):
2: An oldie — a picture I took at the ASU bookstore a few years ago. Puts a whole new dimension of meaning into the imperative “Publish or Perish”:
3: And finally, inspired by Pat Robertson asserting that Trump has lost the “Mandate of Heaven” — my absolutely true story, no lie, factual to the bone image of the new yacht the Shitgibbon just picked up from the Dowager Empress Cixi*
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