Ok so we have somehow made it through this week.
I’m driving to Cleveland today so you all are going to have to talk amongst yourselves.
Keep reading yesterday’s DOT: there’s no way you were done with it and honestly not much has changed.
6 travel tips to make it through Memorial Day weekend
https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2022/05/26/memorial-day-travel-summer-vacation/
Boop the snoots!
Have a good day!
Hmmm. There is so much to talk about, none of it good. Instead, let’s kick off this Memorial Day weekend (for us ‘Muricans) with some quality otter content:
I love the end.
We’ve got a couple of otters that live at the lake. It’s fun in the winter to watch them punch a hole in thin ice and go fishing.
Ray Liotta died. Only 67. I guess it was all that clean living.
Also Andy “Fletch” Fletcher, founding member of DePeche Mode, at 60, of “natural causes.” That sent a chill down my spine, because I’m not much younger than him and was a huge fan during their heyday.
Oh God no!
https://www1.nyc.gov/office-of-the-mayor/news/338-22/mayor-adams-new-york-city-state-federal-elected-leaders-launch-bid-2024-democratic-national#/0
This has a crude map graphic that brings to mind the old saying, “Good enough for government work.” Pay special attention to the cultural attraction near the top center, the Zigfield Theatre. That should be Ziegfeld, named for one of the most famous theater impressarios New York has ever known, and it closed in 2016.
Whatever happened to the concept of holding conventions in swing states? Hold it in Detroit or Cleveland. Or, better yet, hold it in swing-state Arizona’s Biosphere 2. After about three hours when the oxygen starts running low that’ll clear out some of the deadwood among the delegates. Subject them to a subsistence diet of roots and nuts and grasses, so they can see where all this food-shaming will lead.
That’s a typo. Adams is just getting around to applying to host the 2004 convention.
Who can forget the 2004 Democratic Convention, when John “Long Jawn” Kerry and his super-terrific running mate John Edwards accepted the nominaton in an overwhelmed Boston, wile the Big Dig was still going on? Didn’t Boston take several months to recover from the onslaught of all those conventioneers? And why did DNC chair Terry McAuliffe, no one’s idea of a master strategist, let the convention be held in a native son’s true-blue home state, a state that would have voted for me and my dog if we had received the Democratic nomination.
So many highlights. Kerry speeding across Boston Harbor and showing up at the podium, giving a crisp salute, and saying something like “Willing to serve” or “Reporting for duty,” when meanwhile he was dogged relentlessly by his (anti-) Vietnam past, including one of his swift boaters revealing that they never got anywhere near any action so there was little that could have been “seared” into his memory. Performatively throwing another soldier’s medals over the fence at the White House all those years ago. The sly implication that he was a good Irishman when in fact his last name was an Ellis Island invention made up by his grandfather, an Austro-Hungarian Jewish immigrant, whose near death by clinging to the ledge of a burning Boston hotel (he was a fairly prominent businessman at the time) made the front pages of all the Boston newspapers and his Jewishness (remember, this is his own grandfather) came as a complete shock to Kerry, or so he claimed. And he would never reveal what his middle initial, F., really stood for, letting people think it might be Fitzgerald, all the better to link him in the popular mind with the sainted memory of JFK, when in fact it was his mother’s maiden name, which inconveniently is Forbes.
And who can forget Theresa (pronounced “Ta-RAY-za,”) his fabulously wealthy wife and widow of John Heinz, who greeted the convention by saying the word for “Welcome” in about 47 languages, including, if I’m remembering correctly, Klingon, and proudly namechecked her African American identity. This was true, at least; her parents were Portuguese colonial settlers who owned vast estates in Mozambique. Keynote speaker: the then-mostly unknown Illinois State Senator Barack Obama, who left half the republic wondering, “Why the fuck couldn’t he be the nominee?” As if this wasn’t enough, Kerry gave a keynote speech that no one remembers, the confetti dropped like acid rain on the heads of the conventioneers, and the speakers blared “Dancin’ in the Streets,” while, in reality, every night of the convention there was brawling the streets!
Oh, I would give anything to relive every night of that convention. Sadly, my enthusiasm wasn’t widely shared, and he lost to deranged warmonger George W. Bush by three million votes.
Here’s a trivia quiz: what made the results of that election so special? Give up? It is the only time that a Democratic Presidential candidate lost the popular vote in the 21st century.
God I’m bored.
I’m adding a cute baby cow rescued from a dairy farm frolicking around a barn as my contribution to soul cleansing this morning.
@MegMegMcGee, is “driving to Cleveland” code for something you kids are doing these days?
The term is at least a decade old. It’s when you lay in lots of snacks and drinks within reaching distance in your “home office,” don your adult diapers, and lock yourself in for a three- or four-day World of Warcraft binge.
I mean I am actually in Cleveland now… if it’s a euphemism for anything it’s going to a Super Wal-Mart and watching Stanger Things with my friend’s kids!
Sorry, I know we’re trying to be happy, but I don’t have it in me today.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/05/26/uvalde-police-response-questions/
Quote: The initial response appears to have veered from guidance, widely implemented since the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School in Colorado, that says officers should pursue shooters inside buildings without waiting for specialized backup.
Quote: Uvalde Police Department’s policy on responding to an active shooter is not publicly available, but a sample policy manual offered to local departments by the Texas Police Chiefs Association states: “The first two to five responding officers should form a single team and enter the structure.” The sample manual contains best practices and has been used by more than 100 agencies, according to the association.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/wxdwgn/uvalde-swat-team-bragged-about-training-at-schools-on-facebook
https://www.rawstory.com/uvalde-police-response/
Quote: “Ms. Gomez, a farm supervisor, said that she was one of numerous parents who began encouraging—first politely, and then with more urgency—police and other law enforcement to enter the school. After a few minutes, she said, federal marshals approached her and put her in handcuffs, telling her she was being arrested for intervening in an active investigation,” the [Wall Street Journal] reported. “Ms. Gomez convinced local Uvalde police officers whom she knew to persuade the marshals to set her free. Around her, the scene was frantic. She said she saw a father tackled and thrown to the ground by police and a third pepper-sprayed. Once freed from her cuffs, Ms. Gomez made her distance from the crowd, jumped the school fence, and ran inside to grab her two children. She sprinted out of the school with them.”
Quote: [Governor] Abbott, whose uncompromising pro-gun stances have been sharply criticized by Democrats since the massacre, hailed the swiftness of the police response on Wednesday and praised their tactics.
“It is a fact that because of their quick response getting on the scene, being able to respond to the gunman and eliminate the gunman, they were able to save lives,” Abbott said at a news conference.
This is a few days old but still pretty good…
The only police action that I was impressed with was how fast that Border Patrol tactical team got there, seeing as they were like 70 miles away.
Many years ago a friend of mine was visiting from out of town so we went out to dinner and I said, “A new leather bar just opened around the corner. Do you wanna go just to see it?” Unbeknownst to me the bar and its patrons were super into this, they had a very strict strict dress code, so we showed up and the leather daddy at the door said (with great contempt) “I can’t let you in.” I demanded to know why not. “No button down shirts.” I said, “I’ll have you know this is from the Ralph Lauren Purple Label collection–” and my friend broke up laughing and dragged me away before the leather daddy could beat me to a pulp and the last words I were ever to hear again would have been, “Die yuppie scum!”
made the news a couple days ago here…..this is how many fishies caught in the westerschelde you can eat before ingesting damaging levels of pfas
per year….
…google translate could probably tell me but if you had a moment I’m curious what the weight : image ratio is because either that’s a lot less sole(?plaice?) than I was expecting & a potentially frighteningly small number of prawns/mussels or there’s two variables I think I’m short of?
dunno what the weight is…but the picture is showing a fishy per portion
sooo…lets be generous and say…200 grams?…thats about a good sized fillet
…that kinda sucks…like more than I’d thought?
…maybe I don’t eat mussels more than 7 times in a year, I dunno I don’t keep track…but I’m pretty sure I have more than a half-dozen prawn dishes in a year
…but I guess it makes sense when you think about the scale of their diet & the chemicals?
Jesus, I could eat that within 2 months….
same as….i love me some fish….luckily the westerschelde isnt used for commercial fishing….the warning was mostly meant for the sport fishers…
no eaty what you caught….we fucked up the water… a lot
More beaver content.
End drought and wildfires? I stand prepared to smuggle beavers throughout the US West.
High five for the Great Idaho Beaver Airdrop (around 1:38 in the video).
BTW, highly recommend the PBS Terra channel on YouTube. Lots of climate change content.
The adorable destroyer of plush, caught with the evidence in one of her many lairs.
Noted: Quite the capable decapitator.