Well, it’s freezing here so I haven’t left the house this weekend. I made a beautiful Paella Valenciana yesterday which should tide me over for a few days.
I’m hunkered down with some Britbox. How’s your weekend so far?
Fart noise.
Manchin’s $1.8 trillion spending offer appears no longer to be on the table
https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2022/01/08/manchin-white-house-talks/
I’d like one ticket to Crazytown!
Flames, flames on the side of my face.
South Dakota places further restrictions on medication abortions
https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/08/politics/south-dakota-medication-abortions/index.html
Sprots!
Novak Djokovic was granted vaccine exemption after testing positive for Covid-19 in December, court documents show
https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/08/tennis/novak-djokovic-covid-australia-intl-spt/index.html
Stonks!
Citigroup will terminate unvaccinated workers by Jan. 31, a first among Wall Street banks
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/07/citigroup-is-the-first-major-wall-street-bank-to-terminate-unvaccinated-workers.html
#RIP
Son of Sinéad O’Connor dies at age of 17 after going missing
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2022/jan/08/son-of-sinead-oconnor-dies-at-age-of-17-after-going-missing
Stay cozy Deadsplinter-ers!
Here is a penguin video:
Also, today is
Kate Middleton’sCatherine, Duchess of Cambridge’s birthday. She hits the big 4-0. Just imagine. If her father-in-law lives as long as his dear ol’ Da, she’s only 26 short years away from being Queen!I always expected Queen Elizabeth to outlive Charles. Mainly because he has always seemed useless. It’s not that I think Queen Elizabeth is particularly useful, but she reminds me a lot of three of my great aunts and those ladies got shit done.
…I think I know what you mean about her “being queen” but it reminds me that despite some confusing language it’s not actually true in anything but a nominal sense?
…it’s also sort of a classic bit of linguistically-enshrined inequality…so…philip was the spouse of the monarch but never eligible for the title of king…hence “prince philip” or duke of wherever…but the current queen’s mother was queen (or I guess technically “queen consort”) while her husband was king…because if there’s a king it’s apparently no biggie to let the lady be called queen the way it would be if she’s meant to be the monarch & he the consort
…but once he died she morphed into the queen mother while her daughter took the throne…otherwise said daughter would be elizabeth III since her mother was also “queen elizabeth” while her husband was alive but didn’t count in the sense of those roman numerals
…in most respects I couldn’t give a monkey’s about it all…but in a world where quite a few people seem inclined to paint meghan as a wallis simpson to harry’s edward & much is made about gender equality & how the next generation of royals are so thoroughly modern…there’s a part of me that thinks maybe she ought to stick at princess the way philip did as prince?
The only form of republicanism I endorse is that related to the matter of royalty. As far as I’m concerned they all need to be stripped of their titles, have their estates and money confiscated for the public good, and be forced to work for a living.
Nonsense. Someone has to employ the liveried helpers, of which there are far too few left:
https://www.royal.uk/meet-our-people-ross
Nonsense. The properties can be repurposed as living museums. No way would I want these estates to move from one rich family to another through a private sale.
…& as luck would have it there’s even a way to do that…you just give them to the national trust
…I guess I’m on the fence about that one…in that I think the royal family in the UK isn’t entirely without some redeeming features…ranging from the facetious ones like the way that putting their picture on bits of paper handily confers value to those…to the way that in the UK model having to answer a royal summons on the regular does something similar for prime ministers to what the slave muttering “you’re only human” in the ear of a roman emperor during a triumphal procession was supposed to
…it’s not perfect or anything…& if it didn’t exist I rather doubt I’d be arguing to create one…but a hereditary ruler who’s mostly for ceremonial purposes that also serves as a reminder to a head of state of their politically mortal status strikes me as a good thing?
…given what the tories act like when there is one I wouldn’t like to see what they’d be like without it, anyway
One thing I never understood about the Wallis Simpson thing is that the royal line and the Church of England were all directly tied to Henry VIII’s divorce-happy ways and general disregard for the institution of marriage.
How did things get so uptight by the time Simpson came along? I know there are connections to the Anglicans being vaguely Catholic-ish, but I also know there’s a huge amount of anti-Catholic sentiment in England, and it’s never clear to me why they seemed to have flip flopped on the whole divorce issue.
I don’t think it had anything to do with her being divorced. That was just a nice excuse. It was really because she was “common”.
And (don’t say this too loudly)…American.
…I think butcher & matt are basically right about the reasons for that…but in terms of where/when the flip took place I’d hazard a guess it would have been around about the victorian era in at least some respects…much of what informs it might predate that but the victorians were somewhat past masters in terms of hypocrisy
…& yet at the same time they were responsible for some pretty amazing stuff getting done…like the civil engineering london sits on top of…not only did they build the first underground trainline & thereby birth what brits call “the tube”…but the stuff they did with rivers & sewage was done so well that only in the last few decades has it started to be unequal to the demands of a vastly larger metropolis to the point that serious efforts have been made to significantly improve on it
…so while I tend to agree that the part of that legacy that led to edward being forced to choose between the throne & an american divocée pretty much sucked…it might be one of the rare instances where the ability to get rid of a lot of bathwater arguably outweighed the importance of the metaphorical baby in the equation?
It’s been a rough week at the clinic for my wife. We were so short on staff that my youngest daughter was handling the phones. A lady calls and asks if we prescribe Ivermectin? She didn’t know that was but asked an MA who said “absolutely not!”. So my daughter said “not at this time” which caused the woman to go on a rant and ask more questions like, “so you did? You know it works, right?”. I told her next time just ask “are you a horse? No? Then no!” Families are not quarantining kids when they are sick. Fuck people, use some common sense!
if you wonder why we won’t get out of this?
https://www.axios.com/red-states-fight-school-vaccine-mandates-a8338057-6410-47a1-8ef3-8541abe687e8.html
and this makes that story worst!
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2022/01/hospitalizations-of-kids-under-five-increase-as-omicron-rages/
and you anti-vaxxer of the day!
https://www.yahoo.com/news/qanon-star-said-only-idiots-194553934.html
Better to be a live idiot than a dead Antivaxxer.
For them, but not for us.
I shouldn’t have laughed at that, but I did.
I’m enjoying watching this guy get his ass handed to him on the twitters.
I’ve been on both sides of that equation.
Come home first from work and had to dig my driveway out (including for my housemate.)
Also come home late and found I had to dig my driveway out because he didn’t even bother to shovel. The first few times, I was passively aggressively rage shoveling. He would make the excuse that he has a physical job and he’s tired which I bought (although less and less as our friendship died.)
The last few times as my relationship with my housemate deteriorated, I started just clearing my side of the driveway. He would cry because I was working at home thus I should do all the shoveling. He had a small point, but he rarely lifted a goddamn finger to help. It was my then passive aggressive fuck you.
After I lost my tech job and eventually started working a physical job and realized he was just a lazy fuck. Despite working long hours, I still shoveled snow.
I live in a condo where shoveling/salting the walkway is a shared responsibility. Me and one other guy regularly do it, and that other guy travels for work, so guess who that leaves. Since working from home, i don’t even use the sidewalk as much, but i suppose there’s the “time” argument. I still do it though, because otherwise it would never get done and i have no desire to see my mail lady paralyzed.
The price of being a responsible person.
HE HAD TIME TO STAND AT A WINDOW AND TAKE PICTURES BUT NOT GO HELP?
Or couldn’t pay some kids to do it? Or a company that does snow removal?
Does this clown also never do anything around the house because he doesn’t get a formal invitation to do a load of laundry or wash some dishes??????
Sounds like he made breakfast (or thought about it), but it was probably a microwaveable thingy she made made during the weekly meal prep.
“Honey, I made you breakfast!”
She sees a banana and a yogurt cup on a plate. With a granola bar next to it.
I got my gas bill for Dec, it was over 2x my Nov bill. $75 vs $35. I almost wouldn’t mind, because there have been several articles about gas going up so it wasn’t entirely unexpected. But i logged into my account and there was a little widget that said my usage increased by 222%. Since when, idk. Last month? Last Dec? I was wfh then, too. The weather has been about the same for the two months, not a particularly cold or warm Dec, though it was 60 on xmas and there were a couple days i even had the windows open. Also, I’m pretty sure I’m premenopausal. I’ve got the heat down several degrees from my winter average. Sometimes i turn it off entirely to sit under the ceiling fan for 45 min. So I’m greatly interested to find out how they calculate usage (they don’t tell you in any obvious way).
I think they use scare tactics and creative math. Like take your highest usage day in that time frame and extrapolate out what the entire billing cycle would look like at that usage compared to what you actually did use in the previous year.
Then when people get high bills because of whatever fuckery doing they’re doing. they are prepared to expect a higher amount.