Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

No one could have predicted…

I showered with Rahm and all I got was this shitty blog.

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

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity.

We can agree to disagree, but I’m right.

I personally stopped the public option…

Usually wrong but never in doubt.

Impressively dumb. Congratulations.

The house always wins.

Peak wingnut was a lie.

All your base are belong to Tunch.

Gastritis Broke My Calculator

Too inconsequential to be sued

‘Forty-two’ said Deep Thought, with infinite majesty and calm.

Lighten up, Francis.

Militantly superior in their own minds…

Verified, but limited!

Dinky Hocker Shoots Smack!

Shocking, but not surprising.

Where tasty lettuce and good mustard aren’t elitist.

Good luck with your asparagus.

This is how realignments happen…

This blog is Obama’s Katrina.

We are aware of all internet traditions.

You are here: Home / Archives for Someone Somewhere Is Having More Fun Than I Am

Regrets, I Have a Few: Trump’s Young Black Leadership Conference

by | 49 Comments

This post is in: , ,

I made a snarky response on twitter, forgetting what Trump supporters are like. Now I’m in a whirlwind of approval and equal nastiness.

But honestly? Can anyone blame me for thinking it would be another “Hispanics for Trump” and “Blacks for Trump” signs being held up by a sea of white faces?

News reports say there were 200 attendees – black, white and orange. There is a real lack of photos of the audience. Just the front two rows.

 (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

Anyway…I’m about ready to delete my tweet because I’m over the interaction. LOL, I prefer my tweets unread.

What are your thoughts on this rally?

Regrets, I Have a Few: Trump’s Young Black Leadership ConferencePost + Comments (49)

Things To Do On Days When Do Nothing Seems Like The Best Option

by | 185 Comments

This post is in: , ,

Perhaps…rotate your improbable confections once a day for six months…

 

My son dug this up (it should be noted that the sole useful purpose of a sixteen year old roommate is exposure to the zeitgeist — or at least that part of it to which us certain-age types have no direct access). I am awed by the whacky patience required to come up with a chocolate geode.

What’s the most unlikely project you’ve ever attempted. Did it work?

And beyond that question…open thread.

PS: lovely meet up last night. As usual, I completely failed to match up names to nyms but it was a hoot to see such friendly jackals in congress.

Things To Do On Days When Do Nothing Seems Like The Best OptionPost + Comments (185)

Happy New Year: Ireland Man Edition!

by | 96 Comments

This post is in: , , , , , , ,

We have an early entrant in the bizarre things that occur on New Year’s Eve contest. This one courtesy of Ireland Man (like Florida Man, but with a better accent!).

(h/t: https://twitter.com/AMoCS/status/815302062829404160)

Hope everyone’s festivities or quiet night’s in are going to plan!

Stay frosty!

Happy New Year: Ireland Man Edition!Post + Comments (96)

College Football + Other Stuff Open Thread

by | 132 Comments

This post is in: , , ,

LSU has dispatched Loo-uh-vull, and Georgia Tech handily dismantled Kentucky, so now it’s on to the games with title implications: ‘Bama vs. Washington starts at 3 PM ET (Roll Tide!), and Ohio State and Clemson play at 7 PM (Go Clemson!).

I’ve got ropa vieja simmering in the kitchen (following this recipe, more or less, only I use Goya Adobo instead of assembling the spice mix described in the recipe because ain’t nobody got TIME for that shit!) and am enjoying the beautiful weather outside.

A beer would complete the circle of my domestic contentment, but I gotta pace myself: I want to make damn sure I’m awake at midnight to watch motherfucking 2016 die!

Open thread for both sportsball and non-sportsball talk!

College Football + Other Stuff Open ThreadPost + Comments (132)

Late Night/Early Morning (Eastern Daylight Time) Open Thread: Mad Weapon Designer Edition

by | 66 Comments

This post is in: , , ,

If you’ve never seen one of the Slingshot Channel’s videos, you are missing out on sheer, insane, fun. Jorge Sprave, the genius behind the Slingshot Channel, seems to have more fun, at all times, than anyone I’ve ever seen. In this recent episode from April 7, he demonstrates his fully automatic Ping Pong ball shooting Gatling Gun!

 

Late Night/Early Morning (Eastern Daylight Time) Open Thread: Mad Weapon Designer EditionPost + Comments (66)

Sort of Maybe a Bit Like Friday Recipe Exchange on Monday: Do NOT Try This at Home Edition!!!!!

by | 87 Comments

This post is in: , , , , , , ,

Alton Brown has been tinkering again. He’s invented a way to make ice cream in under 10 seconds. The video is below. Whatever you do, do not try this at home!

Bon appetit! And open thread.

Sort of Maybe a Bit Like Friday Recipe Exchange on Monday: Do NOT Try This at Home Edition!!!!!Post + Comments (87)

And Now for Something Completely Different: Syrian Refugees Welcomed by Canadian Furries

by | 107 Comments

This post is in: , , , , , , , , , ,

Yes, you read that headline right. Given all the insanity we’ve been covering this weekend, I thought it would be good to post about something nice for a change. When the Vancouver, BC hotel that was hosting the annual VancouFur convention turned out to also be one of the temporary housing sites for Syrian refugees that have been admitted to Canada something really wonderful happened. The anthropomorphic animal reenactors reached out to the refugee children to welcome them to Canada.

CdC1r9RXEAA6IWY*

To quote one of the participants:

Mike Schmidt, who attended VancouFur wrote on Vancity Buzz: “One of the many highlights for me was when the new group of Syrian refugee children came in and got to interact with us. To them we were cartoons to come to life, to us [it] was a means to display our acting performance to a very appreciative audience.

CdADgviWEAAvDVg**

Click on over and see the videos and more pictures of the refugee children having a great time interacting with the furries (the first one is autoplay).

 

* Image found here.

** Image found here.

And Now for Something Completely Different: Syrian Refugees Welcomed by Canadian FurriesPost + Comments (107)

If Not the Best, Then Certainly the Most Pleasurable Response to the November Terrorist Attacks in Paris

by | 52 Comments

This post is in: , , , , , ,

The Guardian has reported that when Brussels went into lockdown immediately after the Paris terrorist attacks the Belgian security response was, shall we say, innovative. A number of soldiers and police working out of a station in Ganshoren had an orgy! This gives new meaning to both the concept of a full body search and security theater, if you know what I mean… This seems to be a far superior response than to freak out on cable news 24/7, but your mileage may vary.

If Not the Best, Then Certainly the Most Pleasurable Response to the November Terrorist Attacks in ParisPost + Comments (52)

You be the referee

by | 40 Comments

This post is in: , ,

A couple of scenarios on gamesmanship for you to mull over this morning.

Scenario A:  Home team is losing by one goal with 10 minutes left in the game.  Home team launches a shot on goal that goes high and wide.  The ball travels to the parking lot.  The Home team supplies ball chasers but they are lolly gagging so the visiting goalkeeper goes after the ball at an intermediate trot (not a hard sprint, but not an easy walk.)  Retrieving and then returning the ball to play takes 20 seconds.  The Home team wants the referee to either stop the clock (high school and college rules) or add time (FIFA rules).  What do you do?

Does your decision change if it is the Visiting team is down by 1 and it is the Home team goalkeeper taking an intermediate 40 yard round trip trot to retrieve the ball?

Scenario B: One of the major points of emphasis for referees in the past three years under all rule sets of soccer has been to be extremely sensitive to head injuries or possible head injuries.  At the college level, we are being told that if we see or think we see a head injury kill play immediately to assess the player and get extra help if needed.  This is to happen even if the ball is halfway into the net.  We’re not medical professionals, so we want medical professionals to tell us a player is good to play.  If we don’t stop play, we, as referees, take on all future liability from a potential head injury without any insurance support as we will have violated procedures.

1-1 game.  Gold and Black #8 have a fair challenge on Gold’s defensive third that sends Black #8 to the ground.  Gold plays the ball long to a streaking forward who just beat an offside trap so the forward has ten yards on the nearest defender and just the keeper to beat.  Black #8 is still on the ground as he calls out “My head, my head hurts.”

The referee stops plays, and calls on a trainer to assess.  The trainer pulls the player to the side, and Black elects to play down as #8 is evaluated.  Thirty seconds later, #8 is allowed back onto the field and he plays the rest of the game.

#8 pulled a fast one and everyone knows it, so how do you manage that situation?

Scenario C:

You’re refereeing a double header, the women play first and then the men play second.  Both visiting squads are notably superior to the home teams.

The visiting women’s team is in the stands during the men’s game and they are sitting behind the home bench (as that is where the stands end).  The players make up 75% of the fans.   They are into the game and letting the home team know how bad they are and what poor choices they are making.  As AR-1, I am enjoying the commentary as it is cutting, on point and knowledgeable.

A couple of minutes into the second half, the home team botches a set of first touches that leads to a visiting goal.  I hear from the stands

“Hey Red, if you’re going to suck, suck like this”

I half turn my head to see what is happening, and I see a girl on her knees aggressively blowing a fairly large and realistic dildo.

what do you do?

show full post on front page

You be the refereePost + Comments (40)

Fables of the Reconstruction: Tom Petty Edition

by | 34 Comments

This post is in: , , ,

It’s been a while I know, and in the meantime real life has been so agonizingly real that the problems of three (or more) little kitchen appliances don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.

But it’s getting on for evening, and in our house the sun has definitely passed over the yardarm, so perhaps a little renovation schadenfreude might suit y’all just fine.

So here’s the current look:

IMG_1986

 

Those of you familiar with the renovation rhythm will recognize this phase.  We’re really in the end game.  The cabinets are in and … wait for it … almost all the trim has been fitted.  The appliances (all but one)  have been placed — not hooked up, mostly — but placed.  The painters are doing their thing, the electrician is scheduled and … you get the drill.

And yet, inevitably, what I blithely label an ending is not a matter of the number of actual days the different crafts have to do to complete the project.  It is, of course, the number of weeks it will take to get the guys in for the day here and the day there to do all the bits and pieces.

We’ve already been hammered by that.  The key, as everyone who’s done this kind of thing knows deep in the bone, is that first stumble off the neat center line of the project.  Or, to put it into the SNAFU military frame familiar to many here, every renovation reaffirms the eternal truth: no plan survives first contact with the enemy.   This particular enemy is, of course, the effrontery of wood and stone and flooring and all the other bits that don’t miraculously assemble themselves.

As late as November 5th or so, everyone involved thought we had a reasonable shot at a working kitchen by Thanksgiving.  Now, today, we got a sink plumbed, with the dispose-all to be hooked up Friday — maybe.  As for the rest…

It’ll come.  It all will happen.  We’ll likely have ovens on Friday.  The stove will take longer, as we have a little code problem that will take a bit of carpentry to fix (don’t ask).  And….

Never mind.  Everyone who’s entered renovation hell knows this story, and it’s never an interesting one, no matter how often it gets retold.  This job will likely be actually done, no one coming back, everything in and working, by sometime in January.  Could be February — wouldn’t surprise me.  It’s a minimum of a 50% schedule fail on a four month job.  Par for the course.

When it’s all finished, we’ll be able as a family to do what we truly love:   cook and cook and cook and cook for friends and friends and friends and friends.  If in the meantime y’all get a bit of vicarious pleasure at knowing that the eternal verities of construction remain true…so much the better.

Last — and I mean last:  we’ve been pretty good this going-on-for-half-a-year at cooking interesting, enjoyable meals on a hot plate, an electric frying pan, and a gas grill. But we’ve been beaten down.  Tonight was supposed to be spatchcocked chicken roasted on the grill, but it’s pissing down with a steady, penetrating drizzle and it’s cold and it’s late, and f**k it sideways.  We give up:  pizza is on its way.

And I’m not ashamed.

So there.

And really last (no I’m not joking) — the obligatory soundtrack to a post about attending on the arrival of Godot’s scullion:

The thread, it is open.  Talk about whatever, and especially the worst construction traumas you chose to share.

Fables of the Reconstruction: Tom Petty EditionPost + Comments (34)

Fables Of The Reconstruction: Cue The World’s Tiniest Violin Edition — Plus: Bonus For A Good Time On The Cape!

by | 132 Comments

This post is in: , , , ,

Attention conservation notice (term stolen from Cosma): What follows is mostly purely Levenson-domicile maundering.  The good stuff is at the end; great art by someone I love.  Now you know.

I’ve gone silent on our kitchen renovation farrago, for the obvious and very good reason:  it’s the eternal return of the same, and thus boring. Everyone who’s lived through (or, FSM-forbid, DIY’d) a major house project knows the one universal truth: it sucks.  It’s like parachuting without the thrill:  August 1 at 7 a.m. we were riding a perfectly functional airplane had a perfectly functional kitchen.  By 8:30 we’d jumped.

And the usual followed:  the house is filled with dust; we’ve broken so many glasses in our makeshift sink that we’ve finally given up and gone to plastic; and as the weeks go by the house looks more like a communal grad-student flop than I ever thought I’d inhabit again.

But there’s hope.  Yesterday — all in one day! — saw the transition from this:

IMG_1876

 

To this:

IMG_1881

 

Of course, the resulting upsurge in that sweet feeling that suggests, yes, this may someday end, is “hope” only in the sense that Robin Williams describe here. (Round about 1:48 for the reference.)   Yeah, the room finally looks more or less like a room again — but now we’re going head on into the fiddly stage, where two or more skilled craftspeople will nudge something or other into some precise configuration that takes hours to work out, for an indefinite and seemingly unending future.  Again…tiny violin time.

Never mind.  We still cook — this week I managed a lamb stew, even, browning the meat on the gas grill — in the midst of a thunder squall — before finishing everything else on 12o0 watt burner on the hot plate:

IMG_1874

Tasted fine.

There’s HOOOOOOOOPE (18 f**king times!)

Meanwhile, of course, life continues to do its thing — and given that, can I draw your attention to something that makes me very happy, and that I think (as I should) shows real power as a work of art.

That would be the new installation show my wife, Katha Seidman, is about to open with two other artists at the Cotuit Center for the Arts — calling all Cape Cod-proximate Balloon Juicers!.

Inspired by and in conversation with Giacometti’s The Palace at 4 a.m. (to be seen at MOMA in New York), the installation opens tonight.  Details on the card:

ecard

Lots more on the installation (with photos of both the stages of creation and some of the more sculptural elements) can be found at its Facebook page.

I’ve seen it go through all the stages of gestation, from sketches and models to huge bits and pieces, some of which we trialled on our lawn.  It’s (in my no-doubt utterly unbiased opinion) a deeply conceived and executed work of art, powerful as spectacle and more so as I’ve lingered with what its elements say in themselves and with and through each other.  So, if you happen to be passing anywhere near that way in the next month, check it out.

Last, just for grins, here’s a picture of me, singing cooking in the rain:

IMG_1873

And now…open thread.

Fables Of The Reconstruction: Cue The World’s Tiniest Violin Edition — Plus: Bonus For A Good Time On The Cape!Post + Comments (132)

Late Night Idiocy Open Thread

by | 103 Comments

This post is in: , ,

And yet, while Louie Gohmert remains in office, Perry will never be the dumbest pol in Texas.

I’ve been trying to regain Internet access, and my email, for the last twelve hours. Being as I am not technologically skilled, this mostly involved yelling at people. How was your day?

Late Night Idiocy Open ThreadPost + Comments (103)

Tuesday Evening Open Thread: The “Joys” of Housecleaning

by | 54 Comments

This post is in: , , ,

And here I thought “Go on vacation for two weeks, and when you come home everything in your frig has turned into a science experiment” was a joke… From the Washington Post:

A government scientist cleaning out a storage room at a lab on the NIH Bethesda campus found decades-old vials of smallpox last week, the second incident involving the mishandling of a highly dangerous pathogen by a federal health agency in a month.

The vials, which appear to date from the 1950s, were flown Sunday night by government plane to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention headquarters in Atlanta, officials said Tuesday. Initial testing confirmed the presence of smallpox virus DNA. Further testing, which could take up to two weeks, will determine whether the material is live. The samples will be destroyed after the testing is completed…

An FDA scientist found a cardboard box on July 1 containing glass vials, each several inches long, sealed with melted glass. The box was lined with cotton padding, Skinner said. Several vials were labeled flu virus or other specimens. Sixteen other vials were either labeled “variola,” or smallpox, or suspected of containing smallpox virus. All the vials were immediately secured in a containment laboratory on the NIH. The 16 suspect vials were flown to Atlanta. Testing confirmed the presence of smallpox virus DNA in six.

“This was a lab that didn’t realize it had these vials,” said Skinner. Because the vials are made of glass and sealed with melted glass, officials say the vials appear to date to the 1950s. He said the material could have been sitting around in the storage room “unbeknownst to the people up there for many years.”…

********
Apart from an uneasy feeling about those dusty shelves in the back of the garage, what’s on the agenda for the evening?

Tuesday Evening Open Thread: The “Joys” of HousecleaningPost + Comments (54)

I need to go the fuck to sleep

by | 75 Comments

This post is in: , ,

Got to bed last night at midnight after a fifteen hour day working on next year’s Exchange filing plan. My son then woke up at 1:30 in the morning and would not get back to sleep until 4:40 as he had one of those spurts of putting things together for the first time as he started on three and four world sentences that cracked him up. And today looks like another sixteen hour day.

Fuck!

I need to go the fuck to sleepPost + Comments (75)