Happy International Day of Labor! [DOT 1/5/22]

"The world is too much with us"--William Wordsworth

1/5/22 MatthewCrawley 19
Can't tell if these are meant to be sarcasm quotes or scare quotes.

In much of the world today is Labor Day. This concept was started in the US by the Federation of Organized Trade and Labor Unions (the FOTLU, which later became the AFL, which merged in 1955 with the Congress of Industrial Organizations to become the modern-day AFL-CIO) to commemorate Chicago’s Haymarket Riot, which I now see is referred to as the Haymarket Affair. On May 4, 1886, a group of peaceful protesters were striking for the introduction of an eight-hour workday. Seven police officers and at least four civilians were killed after someone lobbed a bomb into the fray. The idea caught on in the US, for the holiday, not the bomb-throwing, and in 1894 President Grover Cleveland made Labor Day a holiday but only for Federal workers. He chose a later date, seemingly picked at random, because he didn’t want an official holiday endorsing “anarchy and socialism.” Cities and states were allowed to follow along if they wanted and it wasn’t until the 1930s that it was universally adopted.

One May 1 tradition likely to be disrupted is the annual Russian military hardware-apalooza parade. Putin must have thought that 2022 was going to be the best one yet, foe in Ukraine vanquished, little or no loss of life, a prime opportunity to show off the finest specimens of Russia’s unstoppable combat prowess. [EDIT: I’m an idiot. Military hardware-apalooza takes place on May 9, the Victory Day Parade, and commemorates the defeat of Germany and the end of World War II.] As if this wasn’t bad enough, things don’t look so great on his health front and he may be going under the knife any day now.

https://news.yahoo.com/putin-visited-cancer-surgeon-dozens-112724988.html

Sprots:

Fresh off unloading his 23-year-old model and photographer son Brooklyn to the unsuspecting Peltz family, it looks like Becks has been given the green light to enter into a very complicated scheme to build a $1 billion soccer (sorry, “football”) stadium:

https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/article260809267.html

Supposedly various as-yet-unnamed entities will ensure that “most” of this will be privately financed. I can hear Kathy Hochul’s screams of laughter from here.

Stonks:

The markets are, mercifully, closed today. The S&P has notched its worst 4-month year-to-date performance since it was founded in 1939.

https://www.barrons.com/articles/stock-market-dow-nasdaq-sp-500-51651273777

There will aways be an England:

[Emphasis mine] Neil Parish, 65, was yesterday unmasked as the Tory accused by female colleagues earlier this week of viewing explicit content in Parliament on at least two occasions.

A grandfather who has campaigned passionately for better rural broadband, he has now been stripped of the Tory whip and has referred himself to the MPs’ Committee on Standards.

He rejected calls to resign immediately, however, claiming that he had opened pornographic content on his phone ‘in error’. He did not elaborate further.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10769415/Teary-porn-probe-Tory-MP-apologies-wife-claims-watched-x-rated-video-Commons.html

UPDATE: RED SIREN: Parish the very naughty MP-OnlyFans has resigned and explained that he was searching for “tractor porn.” I consider myself a worldly, even jaded, person, and I have never heard of this sub-genre of adult programming.

Madison Cawthorn is in the news again!

That 26-year-old has packed a lot of living in his short life:

https://www.newsweek.com/madison-cawthorn-stephen-smith-venmo-messages-1702112

Keep reading toward the end. The staffer in the video also got mysterious Venmo payments from him, lived in his house, was his roommate, allegedly accompanied him on his honeymoon (to Dubai of course) and is his (third) cousin. Is this what Mayberry, RFD was like behind closed doors? Maybe this is why Cawthorn’s wife left him after eight months of marriage?

New York State, a Shining Beacon of Democracy:

Lee Zeldin is the Republican Party’s official choice to be the next Governor. He is being primaried by Andrew Giuliani, son of Rudy, loyal patron of suburban Philadelphia’s Four Seasons Garden Supply.

Are you a fan of Dave & Buster’s? If you’re planning a trip to The Big Apple rest assured that we have one (precisely one in the entire city) in Times Square and it

https://nypost.com/2022/05/01/times-square-dave-and-busters-stabbing-leaves-person-dead/

(If you click on the link, notice in the header image that there’s an Applebee’s right next door! You don’t get more convenient than that! AND, both are in the Hilton Times Square so you never have to venture outside!)

Here is one of the most depressing tales you’ll read today/this month/year:

And it wasn’t written by Paul Auster. No, it is a fairly long read about the life and troubled times of his recently deceased son, Daniel.

https://nypost.com/2022/04/30/inside-club-kid-life-and-tragic-death-of-daniel-auster/

I, for one, could use a palate cleanser. Today is Dame Joanna Lumley’s 76th birthday. She is a former Bond Girl (she played one of Blofeld’s Angels of Death in the only George Lazenby Bond film, 1969’s “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service”) and is the author or editor of several books, including this recently released hagiography:

I get the feeling that Lumley is at least a Royal hanger-on and might just possibly be a Palace Insider. However, she is probably most famous for her role as Patsy on “Absolutely Fabulous”:

I am not forgetting my friends Up North!

Trucker Convoy 2.0, this time in 2-wheeled form, has settled in on Ottawa. Though very Trucker Convoy-adjacent, “Rolling Thunder,” as it is known, is going far more smoothly.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/rolling-thunder-day-2-1.6436591

Since I’m up there anyway, this is the top headline (as I write this) on the Montreal Gazette’s website:

https://montrealgazette.com/news/local-news/as-montreal-as-the-mystery-of-the-cheese-bagel

My search for a Deadsplinter Clubhouse continues. How about Liberace’s surprisingly subdued “secret” townhouse?

https://www.latimes.com/business/real-estate/story/2021-11-10/liberaces-former-townhouse-above-the-sunset-strip-listed-for-3-4-million

I googled this address. If you know this area at all, the swankier part of the Sunset Strip is to the east, where all the glitzy hotels and cocktail bars and rooftop pools are. This is really close, walking distance if you dare brave the traffic on Sunset Boulevard, to Whisky-a-Go-Go and The Viper Room, which I thought closed years ago but is still on Google maps. One block to the east of the Viper Room is the excellent Book Soup indy bookstore. But everything spreads and sprawls and even this modest tour of local sights is best done by car.

Can you guess which American metro area is suffering the highest rate of inflation? The answer may surprise you. It surprised me.

https://www.bloombergquint.com/business/hottest-inflation-in-phoenix-haunts-democrats-midterm-bid-to-keep-senate

Finally, no tunes but a happy video of a kangaroo and her joey:

and one of a dog and her pups doing “zoomies”:

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19 Comments

  1. D’oh a deer, a male fear (of his impending doom) is what is driving Putin’s Ukrainian invasion?

    It would make sense the rushed planning and piss poor logistics Operation Cluster Fuckski.  It took the US military almost a year to prepare the invasion of Iraq in Operation Steal Iraqi Oil which was executed for the most vile of reasons.

    And really?  Rolling Blunder?  At least make up a name like “Ride of the Dipshits” instead of borrowing it from one of the most ineffective air campaigns in history.

    • We raised our current and previous dogs from puppyhood (sequentially, not at the same time, thank God). While I found this video exceptionally charming I also experienced considerable free floating anxiety. But I’m always up for a good animal video so I figured I’d share.

  3. So. Tractor porn. As an intrepid Deadsplinter contributor, I took it upon myself to research this term and found … almost no consensus on what it means. Various explanations include:

    1. A specific sexual position, the parameters of which I am unable to determine.

    2. Pornography that occurs on or around tractors and/or farm equipment.

    3. Explicit and detailed pictures of … tractors?

    I’m going to toss number 3 out because the member who saw Parish found the content objectionable, and I don’t see how that could even be possible. In fact, I’m hard-pressed to think of something more boring. I’m going to stop where I am on number 1, because, well, I mean, I’m curious but … no. But it seems like a likely culprit, whatever it is. And then number 2 is certainly plausible.

    Or he’s just lying and it was just ordinary (?) porn.

    • How was the show by the way? And what did you see again? I was wondering if Mr. Parish was viewing an adult sex parody video of “Oklahoma” or something. “Surrey with the fringe on top”. Ewww.

      • It was Ragtime. It was a community theater production, and there were definitely standouts and highlights. One of the leads, though, while an excellent dancer, wasn’t a strong or trained singer. He started out as adequate, but the show runs about 3 hours and by the end he wasn’t getting close to the notes. Several of the others were very good, though, which kind of lampshaded this poor fellow’s inadequacies.

        I’d never seen it so I found the book at tad … jarring. There’s a heel turn where both my daughter and I said, what just happened here? But overall I’m glad to have seen it, and would see it again with a different cast.

    • …I don’t know how common it is but I know at least a few people who use porn as a sort of all purpose suffix for anything you could be said to take an arguably excessive (to the point of possibly “indecent”) enjoyment from

      …food porn…real estate porn…gardening porn…which would make for a case that your option #3 was more plausible than it seems?

      …as for the MP…maybe he started out looking at tractors like he claims…but I don’t know how he supposedly wound up looking at porn from there…particularly while in parliament…& the fact that he skipped the tractor part entirely on a reprise…leaves me more than a bit skeptical that tractors had anything to do with anything

      …then again I’m still more than a little taken aback that apparently watching porn in public is a lot less unheard of than I’d have expected…for reasons that seem to have less to do with any enjoyment on the part of the watcher & more to do with making those around them uncomfortable?

  4. The last thing I need to see right now is puppies!  Up at the crack of dawn again to spend the day outside or have constant barking, crying, accidents, & trying to rip out pieces of my wife’s favorite throw rug!  I never thought I would want a weekend to end so much!

  6. Let’s remember that May Day started in Chicago.

     On May 1, 1886, more than 300,000 workers in 13,000 businesses across the United States walked off their jobs in the first May Day celebration in history. In Chicago, the epicenter for the 8-hour day agitators, 40,000 went out on strike with the anarchists in the forefront of the public’s eye.

    https://archive.iww.org/history/library/misc/origins_of_mayday/#:~:text=On%20May%201%2C%201886%2C%20more,forefront%20of%20the%20public's%20eye.

  7. The NY Times, which I regularly bash for its political coverage, has printed a front page, above the fold roughly billion word piece on Tucker Carlson and “what may be the most racist show in the history of cable news.”

    https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/30/us/tucker-carlson-gop-republican-party.html

    And it’s just Part 1.

    It is notably by Nick Confessore, who is not part of the regular DC crew for the Times. His place in the paper’s structure is undoubtably a big reason why he was both capable and interested in writing this. And it is probably not going to break through the stovepiping at the Times which will lead the DC crew of Haberman, Schmidt, Baker et al to pretend that their clients aren’t captive to a racist.

    But the major ink for this piece is at a minimum helpful in keeping the DC team’s toxic stuff on the sidelines for a little bit, and may be a glimmer of a change in the priorities of management. Fox News has thrived for so long in part because the DC and NYC establishment has carried out a stupid equivalent of separating the artist from the art, and treated Fox employees as somehow good people just doing their jobs. It’s ridiculously late in the game, but treat them like the pestilence that they are.

  10. Joke’s on you, NYC. The Dave&Buster’s in St Louis has had violence and whatnot for decades.

    Let me know when you get shootouts at the Chuck E Cheese parties. We’ve had several of those.

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