At Least It’s Not Monday [DOT 8/12/20]

8/12/20 MegMegMcGee 49

Happy Tuesday! Hope you’re having a good week thus far.

This is so not cool:

Melania fiddles:

Melania Trump faces backlash after revealing new White House tennis pavilion
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/dec/07/melania-backlash-tennis-pavilion-twitter

Meanwhile, America burns:

With Covid-19 raging, where are America’s leaders?
https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/07/opinions/covid-19-americas-leaders-brown/index.html

[Adjusts tin foil hat] Will more doses become available once Biden takes office? Are they just fucking with Trump? OR, also plausible, Trump’s a serial killer.

Pfizer tells U.S. officials it cannot supply substantial additional vaccine until late June or July
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/12/07/pfizer-vaccine-doses-trump/

Stonks!

Stock futures fall as traders weigh stimulus prospects and increasing Covid-19 cases
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/07/stock-market-futures-open-to-close-news.html

Sprots!

Womp womp!

Pittsburgh Steelers no longer undefeated after blowing 14-point lead to Washington Football Team
https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/30472677/pittsburgh-steelers-no-longer-undefeated-blowing-14-point-lead-washington-football-team

Some good Tweets:

Let’s taco ’bout it!

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49 Comments

  1. …so…the rebekah jones thing…there’s a bunch of dubious stuff out there trying to claim she’s somehow at fault (the daily mail has tried pretty hard to paint her in a poor light before now, I think) or blame her for the conduct of the police

    …but underlying it all it seems like the warrant under which her devices were seized relates to a message posted to employees on a network she is no longer supposed to have access to requesting that they speak out & citing that 17,000 people have died from covid-related causes in florida

    …not to start my own conspiracy theory this early in the morning but 17,000 is a lowball estimate of that figure…& she of all people seems unlike to have rounded-down?

    …meanwhile it sounds like the phone they took contains basically everything they’d need to identify one of the people who’ve been willing to be a source of information for her

    …which I’m guessing they’ll have more success accessing than this guy’s

    https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/justice-department/fbi-can-t-open-indicted-giuliani-associate-lev-parnas-phones

    …either way it’s hard not to see that as a deeply fucked up thing done under a thinly-veiled pretext?

    • Oh, it’s absolutely a pretext. Ron DeSantis is looking to punish her and anyone else he suspects of blowing the whistle on his piss-poor pandemic response. He’s doubled down on the whole “no pandemic” thing and he’s being excoriated in the press. Local leaders are stepping up to create and enforce mask mandates because cases are spiking out of control. 
      https://www.orlandosentinel.com/coronavirus/os-prem-desantis-spin-coronavirus-florida-20201203-hi6tbvixxbhzlmlfn2vqcyvsym-htmlstory.html
       
      Paywall I think, but DeSantis has been lying his ass off to pretend that everything is under control. Unfortunately for him (and for the victims), anybody with eyes can see things are severely fucked up. Plus city and county governments are creating their own mandates, which usually start with “in the absence of any leadership from the governor’s office.” He’s tried to outlaw those too, but it’s tough for Republicans to scream “self-government” while still demanding that municipalities kowtow to their bullshit. 

  2. I do not follow sprots but maybe you or someone would know this: Does Washington Football Team have any plans to adopt a snappier, less Soviet bloc name? Washington Football Team reminds me of something like Novgorod Food Store #4. Maybe the ownership could propose a few names and let fans decide. I would stay away from inferiority complex names. You already have the Nationals and the Capitals. Yes, we get it, DC is the national capital, mystifying as that is to those whose capitals are London, Paris, Madrid, Rome, Berlin, Stockholm, the list goes on. A decade ago I would have thought “Columbians” would be good but that name has become so toxic as the 21st century moves on. 
     

    • Dan Snyder, the worst team owner in the history of team owners, fought tooth and nail for years and years to keep the team name. One case even made it to SCOTUS.

      A Virginian named Martin McCaulay spent those years Trademarking pretty much every possible team name except the Warriors. So if Snyder wants to re-name the team, he has to buy the name from Martin, pretty much.

      Here is the best part…Snyder, since 2001, has had the Warriors trademarked just in case he eventually had to change the team name. Thinking he had won all of the team name battles, Snyder let that trademark expire in March of this year. Martin McCaulay trademarked it immediately after it expired. A month later was the George Floyd murder which led to Snyder really having no choice but to change the team name.

      LOL (not at the murder but at Snyder being Snyder) at that because it is the most Dan Snyder thing that has ever Dan Snydered.

      …so Snyder doesn’t have any decent options when it comea to renaming the team which is why they are the Washington Football Team for the foreceeable future.

      • He did not change the name due to the floyd murder, he did it to distract from all the other issues the team were having, mainly sexual misconduct in the org.

        • He did not change the team name because of the misconduct allegations as those had been going on for years.

          He changed the name because Fedex and other sponsors sent him a letter that if he didn’t change the racist name they were withdrawing their sponsorships…because of pressure from human rights groups, including BLM, after Floyd’s murder.

          • A report was about to drop, and did, about rampant sexual misconduct in the organization, …actually, just googled, report came out 17th of June, name change dropped the 20th, I have a hard time believing they are not related, and it worked.

    • Wtf is better than redskins. I hate the WFT, being a New York Football Giants team fan, but I like WFT. But the Washington Football Team is better than other team names also, ala Texans. May I ask you a question, do you watch the NFL?

      • I don’t but I have friends and family members who are football uberfans. The Texans are not called The Houston Football Team or The Texas Football Team, as far as I know. 

        • I apologize that I missed your first sentence, and I was not implying by any stretch that you should not have an opinion on it and I am sorry of it came across that way and it is my fault if it did, I will try harder, I mean this in all sincerity.

        • I have actually hosted a Super Bowl Party! Yes, in 2012. Giants vs. Patriots. It was perverse on my part. The guest list was restricted to residents of the Boston area, New Yorkers, and Bostonians who had moved to New York, so divided loyalties. I couldn’t have cared less, but my husband is a native Bostonian who moved to New York to be with me over 30 years ago.
           
          No fist fights, despite the abundance of alcohol, and since to me the Super Bowl is like something fictional, like out of a “Harry Potter” film, I was like the SNL character in those “Tostinos” skits or whatever they’re called. I laid out what I thought was Super Bowl food, like pigs in a blanket and a big seven-layer dip in my trusty trifle bowl. Later I said, “I made some crab Rangoon…” “You stupid fuckers! Jesus! Fuck!” “Ha ha, so lame. I’ve got fifty bucks on this with my coworkers and I’m gonna win BIG TIME!”
           
          One of the fed-up and bored girlfriends said, “Mattie, this doesn’t seem fair. Do you want some help in the kitchen? Sit and watch the game and I’ll –”
           
          “I’d rather watch a public hanging but come with me. I’m going to make a champagne punch to celebrate the victors and you can help with that. It must be over soon. It feels like it’s been going on for three days.”

    • My theory is that the name is entirely passive aggressive on the part of Dan Snyder. He finally got fed up with all the complaints about the Redskins name and said to himself, “fuck everyone. They want a new name? I’ll give them one that is stupid and means nothing. Then they’ll be begging me to change it back. “
       
      However, I don’t think this will turn out the way he thinks it will. 

      • I watch all the Seahawks games and ESPN more than I care to mention, though once LeBatard is gone, I’m going to try to stop.  Whenever I see Washington on the bottom scroll, I always think it is our Huskies not the NFL team.  The name should be changed to something that truly represents DC so has to be either the Fascists or the Lobbyists.

  5. Since I managed to divert this DOT entirely away from politics let me lead us even farther afield. 
     
    We have debated putting up a tree this year. We actually usually put up two huge ones, plus a smaller one in the den, because we’re insane, and normally they would have all been up by now because we schedule our annual Open House on the first Sunday in December so as not to conflict with all the other holiday parties and to squeeze Hanukkah in there. One year we had a conflict so the party came later and Hanukkah came early so by the time of the Open House it was “Merry Christmas!” all around, even among our Jewish friends.
     
    ANYWAY, we decided that we should put one up because it’s so bleak and cold and dark right now, and COVID hangs over us, so we figured we could put one up in our living room. We have this weird (but to me very desirable) hexagonal living room in a corner unit, floor-to-ceiling windows, and we think this would bring some holiday cheer to the (very few nowadays) passersby who might see it from the street. 
     
    What’s stopping us? Well, my temporarily bum leg, for one thing, so the most I could do is decorate the part of the tree that about a couple of feet above or below eye level. Luckily I’m very tall but the two big trees are about 9′ tall (we have very high ceilings; modern construction) so 90% of the job would fall to The Better Half. He has never been busier and has been working (from home, for at least three years now) 12-hour days. Pre-pandemic this was all conducted over the phone and via bloodless emails, but now of course everyone is obsessed with Zoom, for no good reason that I can discern, so he is glued to the two lap-tops. 
     
    “Why don’t you position one so they can see you in your cute Santa hat hanging ornaments? It would humanize the calls and generate goodwill!”
     
    “I work in global finance and the clients who most want video presence are not Christian.”
     
    We did however get the wreath on the door last week. This is very passive-aggressive on our part. Once ours go up, a very tasteful, understated nod to the holidays, it starts off this weird competition. We put the same wreath up year after year, but we do it first. Our extremely try-hard neighbors down the hall, one of whom was “an interior designer” whose multiple bankruptcies finally forced him to give up, always comes up with these tasteless, over-the-top extravaganzas. I ran into him over the weekend. “Wow, your wreath is so big and elaborate! It’s like something you’d see as a centerpiece in a department store or something. Or like a hotel lobby. Amazing!” This, he took, as a compliment. 
     
    I suppose it was. Happy Holidays to all. Hanukkah is only two nights away this year. 

    • @Cousin Matthew’s Tingling Leg, and this is why we love you. Ply the Better Half with alcohol and make it a game – everybody drinks, at each set of 10 ornaments hung or 4 feet of garland draped, or some such?

      • I somehow screwed up and lost a lengthy response mid-reply. All to the good, probably. The gist of it was in the run-up to one of the Holiday Open Houses we had recently seen “Neptune’s Daughter.” It’s where the Frank Loesser song “Baby It’s Cold Outside” comes from. The Better Half asked, “What was in that drink?” “I can guess and it didn’t involve roofies.”
         
        That year I went out and bought Cognac, crème de cacao, and we had some cream. I’m responsible for stocking the bar anyway for the Holiday Open House. For us I made Brandy Alexanders, and I used the Cognac later on to add to whatever Holiday punch I made. Neither of us likes egg nog very much and a BA is oddly not off the mark, so we had a (chilled, you don’t serve over ice) glass each. We soon switched over to water because it was unseasonably warm and we get a lot of afternoon sun. The trees looked great, though, NINE SOLID HOURS LATER. But it was fine. A decent Italian restaurant had finally and recently opened near us (our neighborhood doesn’t even have a Ray’s Pizza; the only “Italian” place I know of otherwise is a Domino’s) and they kept kind of late hours for this neighborhood so we got takeout. Somewhere squirreled away I have notes on what I ate, wrote notes, and have more-or-less successfully replicated it, so maybe I’ll try to do a FYCE on that. Mind you, this was years before the pandemic struck and Deadsplinter existed, but I’ve been home cooking for three decades. 

        • @Cousin Matthew’s Tingling Leg, I thank you for all the cooking – your FYCE posts are a joy to read and replicate! Also a nine-foot tree is impressive; we’ve scaled down to 6′ or under. Ho ho Holidays!

          • I cook all the time and most people I know are pretty good cooks, but others are just hopeless. They subsist on fast food and takeout and rip-off delivery services, especially now during the pandemic. I was in their position when I went off to college. My freshman year the only real food option was the cafeteria and the slop they served would, nowadays, have defied the Geneva Convention. And this was at at Top 30 school. (It has since improved, because the tuition has increased at least five-fold, and they have to compete with other schools whose students nowadays do not live like medium-security prisoners.) When I went there was a lottery for this substandard on-campus housing and I, being heavily scholar shipped, somehow lost out, and was thrown into the private rental market. 
             
            But, goldddigger that I was, over that summer I met a guy and he wanted me to move in with him, so that’s what I did. (He was a little older than I was. He said about 6 years but, in retrospect, probably more like 15, but whatever, he was fun, and we had a lot of fun.) His apartment came with a full kitchen and he couldn’t cook, so we ate a lot of sandwiches and diner food. That is where my Joy of Cooking was first sparked. 
             
            “You know how we go to that diner and get eggs? I think I could make them.” He was astonished. But behind his back I had women friends (they were all women; the guys were useless) who had chosen to move off campus, partly because the cafeteria food was inedible, and they were taught how to cook by their mothers and/or “a housekeeper.” I’m not young. I had a fairly late class that met Tuesdays and Thursdays and then I would trek to one of their apartments and we’d have a communal dinner. As part of it I’d help and cook alongside them and learn. That’s partly why my FYCE posts are so rooted in the past: This was the 80s and we were born in the 60s and the mothers/housekeepers would have started families in the 50s. 
             
            I’ll conclude by saying that all high schools and post-secondary schools should have a “Home Ec” mandatory course. IT IS NOT DIFFICULT, once you get over the fear. If a teenager with no experience can be taught to work in a chain restaurant kitchen (not fast food, something more complicated) so can we all. I have a niece who, the minute she was legal to work, got a job as a busser at some local breakfast place. She had a crush on one of the “chefs”, a fellow teenager maybe a year older, and would hang out with him while he worked. He’d get there at the crack of dawn and she’d show up early, before the place was open, to help set up, and once that was done she helped the “chef.” This was all aboveboard, family-run place, the wife watched everything like a hawk. That niece is now 19 and of all of us, several dozens of us, I bet she’s the only one who’s a better cook than I am when it comes to anything and everything breakfast-related, especially baked goods. “No, Uncle Mattie, what you want to do with the corn flour is…” “Now that we’ve [she meant ‘I’ve’] made the dough we roll it gently. It is our friend, not our enemy. See how it’s co-operating?”

    • These women just said that “everything” in the universe is “alive” because it vibrates…
       
      They are OFFICIALLY dumber than *two* whole boxes of rocks (one box each!), because at least the rocks know they are not alive…
       
      I think these twits may be getting their rocks and their Tribbles confused….
      🙄😬😖🤪

      • Also….
        I KNOW that by now, I OUGHT to be “unsurprisable” when it comes to the lack of a “rock bottom” in the hole-of-stupidity which exists in MAGA-world…
        But then I hear things like “Everything in the universe is alive, because it vibrates!”
         
        And… I’m just fucking speechless AGAIN,  y’all!🤯🤯🤯
         
        And ALL I can think of is Oddball, Donald Sutherland’s character in Kelly’s Heroes, and how THAT incredible dumbass would be a fucking GENUIS in comparison!😳🙃😱
         
        For those of you, who aren’t familiar–THIS is the role that made me begin my adoration of Donald Sutherland as an actor…. although, how much of it is acting *may* be debatable😉;


         

  8. That is just American exceptionalism right there!  Also, I think I’m glad they spent more time enjoying their “vibrational frequency” than breeding because that is a gene pool that needs to be drained and scrubbed thoroughly! 

    • That pool may need to be scrubbed with deuterium & tritium, then vaulted into the sun, tbh, to get it cleaned up properly, Shaq, my friend😳😬🥴

  9. FRIENDS

    FRIENDS

    I haven’t followed the NFL at all for a couple of years because I’m still fucking bitter that Stan Kroenke moved the Rams from St. Louis.

    That other asshole actually renamed the Redskins the Washington Football Team???!!!!!! 

    I thought you were all being snarky about it. 

    Wow, just wow. What a fun thing to learn. What a dumb sprots world we live in. 

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