Over It [DOT 31/3/21]

31/3/21 MegMegMcGee 34

Hi all! Welcome to Wednesday.

This is so traumatic; it’s so awful for these young witnesses.

Young witnesses to George Floyd’s death testify they felt helpless as they watched him die and feared Derek Chauvin
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/03/30/derek-chauvin-trial/

Chauvin trial witness sums up what George Floyd means for Black people in America
https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/30/us/witness-derek-chauvin-trial/index.html

ICYMI:

Bless His Heart, I hope he rots in prison [NOT 30/3/21]

And some more:

Wait, is it FINALLY Infrastructure Week?

Biden to lay out infrastructure plans as part of massive economic proposal
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/30/biden-infrastructure-plan-white-house-unveils-economic-recovery-proposal.html

The kids seem fine, what’s wrong with the adults?

Trans kids on the Republican bills targeting them: ‘I’m not a problem to society’
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/mar/30/trans-kids-rights-republican-state-bills-healthcare-sports

Sprots!

Kevin Durant apologizes to Michael Rapaport after homophobic rant
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2021/mar/30/kevin-durant-michael-rapaport-threats-instagram

Rock your Wednesday!

Oh, one last thing…Anyone in Illinois need a Chowder?

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34 Comments

  1. If I smoked pot here’s something that would cheer me up:
     
    https://abcnews.go.com/US/york-legalizes-recreational-marijuana-expunges-pot-convictions/story?id=76775175
     
    Cuomo must really be on the ropes. He’s opposed this for years. I particularly enjoyed this quote:
     
    “New York has a storied history of being the progressive capital of the nation, and this important legislation will once again carry on that legacy,” [Cuomo] added. “I look forward to signing this legislation into law.”
     
    It most certainly has not had this storied history. I think New York was something like the 12th state in the union to legalize gay marriage, just off the top of my head. When Massachusetts legalized it well before us (as they did with marijuana by the way) we had some people over and we were asked if we were going to go up the Bay State and get married. Imagine having to travel to a distant state to get married. It was like when some states had anti-miscegenation laws and mixed-race couples had to do this. 
     
    For that matter, NYC is pretty liberal, but we had 20 uninterrupted years of Republican mayors (and don’t give me that “But Bloomberg isn’t really a Republican” crap.) De Blasio has been such a disaster that I could see this returning soon enough, but the Republican field is pretty…eccentric, let’s say. There are something like 40 Democrats running. In the lead is Andrew Yang, whom you might have heard of. In second place is Eric “Go back to Ohio” Adams, who is drawing an NYPD pension. In third is Maya Wiley, a veteran of de Blasio’s legal department, who spent most of her time at City Hall defending de Blasio against various pay-to-play investigations. Terrific. Happy Days are Here Again. 

    • PS: Yes, I know MA borders NY but we’re in NYC and when we go we go to the Boston area. That means a drive through CT. CT is small and this only takes a couple of hours if the traffic gods favor you, but the drive is so boring you feel like you’re a character in the old Oregon Trail game waiting for dysentery to hit. 

        • Yes, but I think MA is like NY, doesn’t something like half the state (or more?) live in the Boston metro area? Plus they were smart enough to situate their capital there, rather than create a strange government-focused entity like Albany, or Springfield, IL, or Sacramento. Or, for that matter the mother of all public-sector funded metropolises, Washington, DC, or as a friend of mine who lives there uncharitably calls it, “Brasilia on the Potomac.” 

        • Booooo HARD disagree. I love Boston (no I never lived in the city proper but I’ve lived in Cambridge and Somerville and worked in the city for several years) and I hate NYC. Nothing against New Yorkers, but that city is just a big panic attack. 

          • At least NYC is laid out in a logical manner and not based on the meanderings of cows. I had an appointment at Brigham and Women’s, road construction and a cop waved me down a side street, I could see the building and could not get to it, next highway on-ramp I turned and never went back.
             

            • …I don’t know if you’ve ever been to london…although I know it’s not unique in having a layout that might seem insane if you’re used to cities built on a grid pattern…but I think there’s an argument for that having a certain amount of charm in its own way

              I used to joke with friends that you were never more than a handful of arbitrary turnings from a piece of london you’d never seen before…which makes it easy to get lost…but the reverse is just as true…if you’re somewhere you don’t know often you’re only round the corner from a place you do…it’s all sort folded around itself until places you expect to be far apart somehow wind up sandwiched together

              …that said…we also joked that the distance/speed/time equation in london has a special coefficient built in…no matter what you try to do about it it’s amazing the range of distances for which the journey pans out taking “about half an hour to forty minutes”

              …like you could either be trying to get pretty much clear across town or you could be popping out to grab a loaf of bread  & somehow both would wind up taking about that long…sounds crazy but once the joke started it was surprisingly hard to find counter-examples?

              …of course it may have broken my brain because I find it weirdly hard to predict how long it’ll take me to walk places in the grid style of city…not that some of them seem to think of “pedestrian” as a viable transport option

            • Driving is a nightmare, sure, though I will defend the hell out of the T – for all the complaining most of us have done about it, it is a well designed and fairly easy to navigate subway system. I generally don’t drive in the city. When I was commuting there I always took the T, and even now I still sometimes do, though if I’m going into the city with my husband, he has no issues driving. He lived in the city and worked there for many years and can navigate the hell out of it. 
               
              But is driving in NYC a good time? They have a grid system but traffic is awful.
               
              Oh, but all this reminds me of one of the best websites I have ever seen, 11foot8.com, about storrowing. 

    • “Sales might not start until 2022, as the state will take time to establish its regulatory framework, legislative sources told ABC News.”
       
      The weird obsession with toughness with guys like Cuomo always ends up making them look like timid followers.
       
      He maintains his seat in power by making sure things are as chaotic and underpowered as possible, so when he needs to turn on a dime he can’t.  So now NY is tiptoeing over the line with South Dakota.

    • Yes but the upside is that if another woman comes forward to accuse Cuomo of something, we get more progressive goodies: gun ban, all drug legalization, legalized sex work, police defunding. Hell, if an underage girl accuses him of something you might get your fondest desire and cut off the state at Westchester!

      • That’s not my fondest desire. I’m of a certain age where some of my friends, even pre-pandemic, left NYC but didn’t leave NYS. On the other hand some left upstate New York (empty-nesters) and squeezed into NYC. We’re all in this together. I just wish we in NYC didn’t have Scandinavian-level taxes and “fees” in return for services that are not the envy of Scandinavian countries. As a f’er instance, I just had to renew my driver’s license. This is a statewide curse. I am temporarily housebound but because of the pandemic you can do this online, and even self-certify that your vision is good enough to drive. I haven’t driven a car in 20 years but it’s handy to have a driver’s license and the last thing I want to do is let my license lapse and face a NYS DMV and take a driver’s test. So that was good. The downside is that even though Real IDs have been around for years NYS sat on their ass and were very late to issue them. When you do this online renewal process you can’t get a Real ID, so later in the year if I want to fly to Chicago, for example, I’ll have to bring a passport for ID. I have a valid passport, I got my first one as a teenager, but many New Yorkers do not. 
         
        Yes, I’m still in a cranky mood. 

  3. CHOWDER!!!!!! I live near him! But can’t have dogs at the condo, plus I have a cat anyway. Pibbles/big head dogs are my fave. Though he sounds like… A lot. I’m sure he’ll get snatched up quick thanks to that ad. My shelter gets a lot of pit types from that area and you cam tell the males were fight dogs and the females were overbred. Hopefully they have a good vetting process.

  5. In the good news department, a poll released by Kaiser Health yesterday said the number of people saying they won’t buckle up their big boy pants continues to decline.
     
    https://khn.org/news/article/covid-vaccine-hesitancy-drops-among-americans-new-kff-survey-shows/
     
    The bad news is that the “definitely not” group remains about the same at 13% — it’s been pingponging between 13-15%. Still, it looks like the undecideds are moving steadily into the yes group, instead of breaking the other way.

    • He’s 74 and despite what his meth- and alcohol-addicted “doctors” would have you believe can’t be in the best of health. He will literally be hounded into his grave by dozens of lawsuits, which he will fight using his ill-gotten funds obtained through shady PACs. I feel a slight twinge of pity for the Gang of Three, Half-Scoop, Daughter-Wife, and the Lurch Oaf, because they in turn will be hounded to their graves by lawsuits and/or collection agents. Daughter-Wife is probably in the most peril because her husband, Javanka, actually has family money and if the Kushners get dragged into this all bets are off. The Kushner don’t play games. Google Javanka’s convicted felon/pardoned-by-Trump father Charles Kushner. Tiff is probably off the hook because no jury would ever believe her father even knows/knew who she is, plus if she can put a ring on it her (also shady) billionaire boyfriend can bail her out. Mel, I’m convinced, has an ironclad pre-nup, renegotiated several times, so she and Barron can remove themselves abroad, possibly to a place with no extradition treaty with the US (go for Monaco, Mel!) and live off the millions her ex- or deceased husband shifted into offshore bank accounts. 
       
      Still cranky.

      • I think Tiff may deserve a little compassion, but the other Trump spawn get no sympathy from me. They are all complicit in criminal actions and deserve whatever they get. Mel’s biggest problem at this point is going to be seized assets. She can’t collect her paycheck if the feds freeze all the funds. And I seriously doubt Big Orange can or will make provisions to take care of them. He’s never honored a contract in his life.
         
        I think the Trump Cartel is beginning to realize how deep in the shit they are. Trump has stopped talking about running for office again, preferring to sell his endorsements. Ivanka and Lara seem to have dumped their political aspirations. Jared’s putting as much daylight between himself and the family as possible, and I fully expect to hear a divorce announcement in the next few months. No one took the two idiots seriously but even they seem to be scaling back on their activities. I get a very strong sense that they are circling the wagons. 

  8. “It has nothing to do with potential fraud”

  9. In completely unrelated non-news:  our strawberry crowns came in today!  So I’ll be planting them this weekend and hope they work out.  Of course, it’ll be a year before I know this (assuming they don’t die).

    • I installed my hanging basket plant stand yesterday and planted my Topsy Turvy!

      (Plant stand is iron, hand forged by my dad; there were lag bolts and a socket wrench involved in its installation.)

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