Back in Business, Baybee [DOT 24/9/22]

24/9/22 MegMegMcGee 27

Welcome to the weekend gang. I got a day off yesterday, so thanks to Myo for that.

Hope you all had a great week otherwise.

Iran Updates:

Videos show Iran’s violent crackdown as protests intensify
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/09/23/iran-hijab-protest-violent-crackdown/

Ukraine Updates:

Border queues build as people flee Russia to escape Putin’s call-up
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/sep/23/border-queues-build-as-people-flee-russia-to-escape-putin-call-up

Because of course

Prosecutors recommend against charging GOP Rep. Matt Gaetz in sex trafficking probe, report says
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/09/23/matt-gaetz-sex-trafficking-probe-prosecutors-recommend-against-charges.html

Stonks!

From the Fed to Europe’s currency crisis, here’s what’s behind this selloff in financial markets
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/09/23/from-the-fed-to-europes-currency-crisis-heres-whats-behind-this-selloff-in-financial-markets.html

Sprots!

Roger Federer brings down curtain on his career with a defeat, but still dazzles alongside longtime friend and rival Rafael Nadal
https://www.cnn.com/2022/09/23/tennis/roger-federer-final-match-career-spt-intl/index.html

RIP

Dame Hilary Mantel obituary
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/sep/23/dame-hilary-mantel-obituary

In case you need anything…

Cute?

Have a great day!

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27 Comments

  1. i’m beginning to think putin is not one of the worlds great military commanders….unless the intent of the mobilization was to cause russians to panic whilst the rest of the world collectively shrugs

    in which case i take it back….great call

  2. In the larger scheme of things “Europe’s currency crisis” is bad news. But in the immediate term, right now the pound is at $1.11 (which is very low) and I’m pretty sure all the leftover tat that was rushed into production to commemorate the Death of the Queen is flooding the discount aisles at the local “pound shops” (their “dollar stores”) so now is the time to stock up. You can never have enough tea towels.

    I just learned of more Death of the Queen fallout. This is what Wills and Kath said to some volunteers who worked the funeral:

    The new Prince and Princess of Wales noted how the queen is “looking down” on them after they saw several rainbows hanging above Balmoral Castle following her passing.

    “In Scotland, how many rainbows turned up?” William, 40, asked the staff, according to the Telegraph. “You hardly ever see rainbows up there, but there were five.”

    Middleton, 40, chimed in, “Her Majesty was looking down on us.”

    The last time a Queen died was in 1901, and that Queen was Victoria. Wills’s equivalent was the man who became King George V, QEII’s grandfather. When Victoria died he was 36, slightly younger than the current Prince of Wales. Had he expressed in public any sentiment in this vein it would have sent Councillors and Parliamentary Secretaries racing to the libraries to scour laws and precedents to prevent him from ever taking the throne.

    An interesting thing about George V was that he was the first of two consecutive accidental kings. He had an older brother who died childless, so he became the unexpected heir apparent. The brother, Albert Victor, had all kinds of rumors swirling around him but none have ever been substantiated. If you like good gossip from the late 19th century, give him a google. AV died at the age of 28 and his brother inherited not only his place in the succession but also his widowed fiancée, Princess Mary of Teck. They bonded over the grief for Albert Victor. That’s how Hunter Biden explained his sleeping with his brother Beau’s widow.

    Now George V dies and his oldest son, Edward VIII, takes the throne, but abdicates, and the crown passes to George VI, QEII’s da’. Had AV not died and gone on to produce children (Queen Victoria had nine, Edward VII had six, and George V had six) the Queen would have been a very distant relative of the monarch, and probably would have just barely squeezed onto the Buckingham Palace balcony in some very minor subsidiary role during a Royal Flyover or whatever occasion demanded such an appearance.

     

      • The money was for his charities (and for possible knighthoods and British passports) so I guess in the Windsor accounts books that made it somehow acceptable. I find Becks’s current role as the smiling, welcoming face of Qatar far more reprehensible. I think he should be forced to go all in and be stripped of his British citizenship, become a Qatari citizen, and take Posh and his layabout children with him. I’m sure Posh would thrive under the Qatari marriage laws and their expectations of women in general.

      • […this got out of hand…sorry]
        …I feel like there’s a fairly decent analogy to be made between the royal family & something akin to UK PLC…to some (pretty considerable in some terms) extent the family themselves are more akin to the board with “the crown” being the company

        …there were certainly a number of people who were keen on the idea that he ought to pass on his chance at being CEO after a lifetime in the wings in favor of his son who it’s fair to say hasn’t had time to acquire the same amount of baggage…but if it were really going to happen they would have given a lot of foreshadowing before herself became the focus of state funeral proceedings…& I’d admit to being on the fence about it being maybe the right call…it certainly seems like the rules for some stuff have changed pretty dramatically & it might have gone badly for william if his generation (in which his brother is certainly considered fair game in the tabloid fodder stakes which hasn’t been quite as bad for him since someone made a few bob selling pictures of his mrs sunbathing topless on (iirc?) their honeymoon…but that clip that did the rounds of charles sounding petulant about a leaking pen mere days after his mother died surprised me…not because it was necessarily indicative of anything on particular or in/out of line with things about his character…but because you just wouldn’t have got that sort of coverage of a hot mike moment from liz…not sure exactly what I think played the biggest part in that but it strikes me as possibly indicating a significant shift in the rules of engagement between the royals & the media

        …I don’t have it to hand but there was an article the other day that put some numbers to a few things that might put some of the underwater parts of the royal iceberg & in broad strokes under charles the duchy of cornwall (kinda like a trust fund for the heir to the throne since 1300-&-something) saw considerable capital growth…while what replaced the civil list (which a lot of people equate to the “cost” of the royal family to the public purse) is a grant calculated as a proportion (pretty sure under 25%) of the income the crown lays claim to from its holdings…it’s not the only way in which money arguably belonging to the taxpayer gets spent on the royal family but it’s literally worked out as a fraction of the money that they traditionally waive their option to say is theirs & give to the government to spend

        …so…I reckon there’s a good bit of debate to be had about the pros & cons of the monarchy & the relative merits of charlie & his relatives that’s somewhat removed from the grist the press generally mills away at…& who knows…maybe we’ll start to get a bit of that sort of thing now in ways that wouldn’t have been contemplated while his sainted mother reigned for oh-so-very-long…but I think maybe their track record gives them better chances of being unsinkable than the titanic even with him at the helm…they might have more in common with the iceberg…not least when it comes to dirty money…compared to the origins of most of that wealth the sort of things charles has been caught out on are…how can I put it respectfully…small beer?

        …go back far enough with the riches of any monarch & eventually you get to a point where someone made a fortune by murderous forms of acquisition that were generally much in fashion at the time(s) in question more or less along the lines of “I say all this is mine & I can, have & will kill anybody who claims otherwise – you see if I don’t” or whatever the fuedal equivalent was of “come & ‘ave a go if ya fink yer ‘ard enough” might be

        …meanwhile…for context…that “min-budget” business…the one where after it was announced the pound took a bit of a dive…the one they’ve done after years of austerity followed by brexit followed by a pandemic (& let’s face it neither of those is done) followed by a land war in europe & a supply chain & fuel crisis compounded by inflation…that one…that they claim will make 30-odd million people better off?

        …to get that tens-of-millions number you need to be looking at an average improvement of less than 200quid a year…funny thing, though…as you move up the pay scale to the sort of region where you’d find perhaps the sort of bankers they just uncapped the bonus for…there’s maybe 600,000 or so people who’ll be about 10 grand to the good…which is 2/3 of the way to where (iirc) the floor is below which you’re considered to earn too little to pay income tax

        …if you dial that back to just the people earning more than a million a year…the mini-budget makes them something like 40 grand a year better off…which is most of the way to 50 grand…& would you believe it…that’s about where the cut-off is above which you pay the now-top-rate of tax on income at 40%

        …so the saving they just gave to the wealthiest of the tiny slice of people who have income above the million-a-year mark…particularly at the thinner parts of the long-tail…is enough on its own to put them in the top tax bracket

        …so…the government put in place by the people who brexit’s great & proper british people should just buck up their ideas & stop saying defeatist stuff like maybe everything that’s happened in the last few years might have been less bad if other people were in charge…but hasn’t checked in with them for a report card since before they fired the bloke in charge for being a colossal arse & parachuted in a woman intent on proving her true blue tory colors…that’s their response to the approaching winter with all it’s implications in terms of ukraine & gas supplies & cost of living & that pesky inflation business

        …not even putting his jug-eared highness on the throne comes off as tone deaf as that…at least to most of the folks I know in that part of the world?

        • go back far enough with the riches of any monarch & eventually you get to a point where someone made a fortune by murderous forms of acquisition

          To link this to the mention of Hilary Mantel’s death, her books do a great job of illustrating how murderous and greedy Henry VIII was. And depending on the angle you take (Mantel is great at shifting perspectives) he may have been awful AND not-awful at the same time.

          • I was surprised to learn of Hilary Mantel’s death but even more surprised to learn that she was 70. For some reason I thought she was in her 30s but I must have been mixing her up with someone similar. Fascinating, I know.

      • I’m still trying  to figure out who in their right mind would go to all the trouble to make Perfect Pumpkin Foam unless they were standing behind a counter and being paid to do it. I’m not the target audience, though. I shy away from pumpkin-spiced anything. I will say though that I love the Silver Palate Cookbook’s pumpkin soup recipe, and am not averse to a slice of pumpkin pie if one shows up on my holiday dinner plate.

        • …I associate “foam” in that sense with the sort of restaurants that tend to ask for a lot more money to give you a lot less food than you’d probably want…often over the course of any number of courses maybe one of which might consist of enough sustenance to make you feel at least momentarily full

          …not being one to get into the expensive end of the wine-list in even less expensive places than those I’d have to admit I’d much rather spend a lot less to have a slap up meal somewhere that keeps the foam to the dishwashing portion of proceedings?

          • My very first experience with Nouvelle Cuisine took place under remarkable circumstances. A friend of mine in college had a very posh English girlfriend who came to visit him. The girlfriend and I became chummy. I told her that I was heading off to Germany to study there for a while but had been invited to spend a couple of weeks with another college friend and his family outside London to get me acclimated to the whole “Europe thing.” Plus that family were huge Germanophiles so they thought it was splendid that I, whom they had met before, were undertaking such an endeavor.

            The girlfriend lived the other way around from London so she suggested I call her at some point and she would take me out to dinner somewhere in London, a convenient meeting point. I pictured a pub somewhere but when I eventually arrived in London and eventually called her she said, “I’ll book us a table at the Dorchester for 7 PM. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you this but there is a dress code. Not black tie, just wear a suit.” Luckily I had packed one!

            I still remember that meal. It was a small piece of fish with a dainty bit of sauce arrayed artistically, and two baby carrots. For dessert I had a thumb’s worth of vanilla ice cream centered on a plate the size of a cocktail table dotted with three drops of chocolate sauce. One of the reasons we got to be so chummy was she liked to drink so we also had three bottles of wine and I was more than tipsy by the time I was loaded into a black cab and sent off to Charing Cross to get my train back to the sylvan suburb.

            I’ll never know how much she paid for that because she took the menu with the prices on it and I got the one without. I suppose I could ask her if she still remembers, we still talk and video chat all the time, and it was through her that I met some of my other British friends.

  4. thanks for the betty white tweet btw….one of the oppos actually has the golden girls tattood on him…ive passed the link on…mostly for my own entertainment of seeing what happens when he finds it

  7. If you go down on the street today you’re sure of a big surprise.

    If you go down on the street today you’d better go in riot cop guise

    For every angry bear that there ever was

    Will gather there for certain because

    Today’s the day the black bears have their battle.

    Grrrrrrr

    Grrrrrr

    Everybody was bear Fu fighting

    Those bears were pissed and brawling

    In fact it was a little bit amusing

    But they fought with sloppy timing…

     

  8. Local news picked up a story from Colorado last week where cops pulled over a lady for road rage, put her in the cruiser, than the cop fucking parked the cruiser on train tracks.

    AND THEN A TRAIN CAME THROUGH and hit the car.

    Surprisingly, she’s alive. The train did all the right things – blew the horn, lights, etc etc etc. It was entirely the cop’s fault and the worst part is when the train started the approach and blew the horn the cops didn’t even think “oh that woman is in the cruiser, we should move that car.”

    • On the bright side, no more road rage… Just cop and rail rage.

      How fucking stupid are these motherfuckers? Did they think the train was just going to stop? Why did they think parking on the rails was a good idea? I know American cops aren’t picked for their intelligence but damn…

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