TGIF! [DOT 2/2/24]

2/2/24 MegMegMcGee 39

Happy Friday gang! It’s Groundhog Day – did the little varmint see his shadow or not?

Also, you guys are basically on your own today. It’s 8PM Thursday night and I am going to bed.

I got the ‘vid. My dude was up at the Ravens game and brought Covid home, so frankly I can blame this one on the Ravens, or the Chiefs.

Oh yeah this seems like a brilliant idea. All the wrong people have too much money.

Hiiii

Have a great day!

avataravataravataravataravataravataravataravataravataravataravatar

39 Comments

  1. In last night’s thrilling episode of “Hawaii 5-0” Jack Cassidy, Mr. Shirley Partridge and Dad to David and Shaun, is a vice principal at a school for troubled boys. That’s nice, you think, but no, it’s not. He uses the troubled boys as drug carriers. And then they are killed, lest they “sing.” When the show begins we’re out on the high seas and very sketch guy receives a shipment of heroin delivered by what looks like a scuba diver. He’s promptly shot. But then what’s that? There’s a Hawaii PD helicopter hovering above them, so he wraps a bright red piece of cloth around his shipment and throws it into the ocean. It is worth $1 million. My inflation calculator informs me that that’s almost $6 million today.

    Stuff happens, and then Jack Cassidy and the guy from the boat who tossed the heroin, the “junk,” into the ocean, steal a very small submarine. There is where things get very “Life Aquatic.” You see Jack Cassidy’s face pressed against a porthole looking for the parcel. They locate it, and the sub has this little extendable arm, but alas the chopper is once more up in the sky and there’s a ship tracking them by sonar. On board that ship is my boyfriend Danno, wielding a rifle (!) and Steve McGarrett of course, who directs the crew to start lobbing depth charges (by hand; they’re thrown like baseballs) so that the sub will surface. It does, and they are both charged with murder 1 et finis.

    Poor Jack Cassidy. Do you know how he died? He was a very heavy drinker and smoker (probably why Shirley Jones divorced him) so he passed out drunk on his naugahyde couch with a lit cigarette, and the couch, his apartment, and some of his apartment building went up in flames. He was only 49.

    • That sounds hilariously bad. The Hunt For Junk October?

      • Oh no, it’s fabulous. The kind of weird thing is the female character (there always is one) is the girlfriend of one of the murdered drug runners and just in time Danno and McGarrett burst into her apartment, where she has overdosed herself. (The boyfriend has supplied her and she’s overcome with grief.) She’s lying in bed, one foot in the grave, so McGarrett walks/drags her around and Danno makes “hot coffee.” She recovers. I’ll have to remember this if Better Half or the Faithful Hound ever overdoses. Chances of that are slim.

    • That came out five years after the horrible Disney movie The Boatniks, where jewel thieves steal a mini submarine and try to escape the Coast Guard by firing a salami through the torpedo tube.

      How Freudian can you get?

      • Oh, I’ve released some weaponry through my torpedo tube over the years…Luckily, it was friendly fire, and not lethal.

  2. So, not proud of this, but watching Good morning America, and Lays potato chips has run 4 same commercials .  With the insurance salesman from ” groundhog day”.

  3. So… are we going to be honest, and just call those “Enhanced Games” the New Nazi Games, or what?

    Because between the PED’s, and the fact that he uses blood products *himself* in his quest to turn himself into a real vampire, not just a metaphorical one “live forever” it *certainly* sounds like Gawker’s Old Oily Nemesis (hereafter known as The Goon, and not in the *least* because in that picture for some reason, he reminds me of Alice😉😈🤭)…

    it appears he wants to start himself and his buddies a “new” Master Race🤢🤢🤢🤢🤢

    He met Noel the Coward, back when they were young, in Apartheid South Africa…

    Judging by the things *both* men have said over the years, the Goon on the incompatibility of Capitalism & Democracy, and Noel on, well *Everything* now that he’s bought then broken Twitter?

    They both have far too many tendencies that are Fascist &/or Nazi adjacent, to *not* be called Nazis/NeoNazis.

    • Thiel is some seriously demented loon. Denton and gang serious underestimated how crazy this fucker really was and the depths he would go for revenge.

      The whole Paypal gang pretty much infected Silicon Valley with the libertarian tech brahs who think that they alone deserve everything and everyone else gets nothing (weird because the framework for the internet was publicly funded (military.))

      • Pretty much the standard playbook for rich assholes. Socialism for me but not for thee.

  4. Even for the NYT, this is a horrendous story, but the fact that it fronted a section on the first day of Black History Month is … I mean, that’s a choice: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/01/us/coleman-hughes-black-conservative-colorblind.html

    But I suppose on Groundhog Day, one can’t be totally surprised by the same thing happening over and over and over and over again.

    • That’s written by Jeremy Peters, the same useful idiot who wrote the notorious article claiming Musk wasn’t a conservative, he was too complicated.

      He’s long been top editor Carolyn Ryan’s gofer – he’s the guy who spent days trying to track down rumors for her that former Governor Paterson’s seven pound Maltese was a dangerous dog who was constantly mauling people.

      Peters is also the reporter who has been caught writing articles citing supposedly independent former Democrats who were leaning toward Trump who were actually longtime GOP party activists.

      Peters is the guy Ryan tasks with laundering right wing pitches. He’s sloppy and easily refuted, but she keeps giving him a ton of room to do her hatchet work.

      As far as Hughes, he’s also a dishonest hack, and Bari Weiss is running his lies defending Derek Chauvin’s murder of George Floyd. That kind of thing only makes him more useful to Ryan and Peters, though, not less.

      https://radleybalko.substack.com/p/the-retconning-of-george-floyd

    • Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha

       

      Never Back Down is a really stupid name considering what happened.

      How about:

      Blew money, Clown?

      Surrender Clown?

      Deathscentence down?

      • …how about “double or quits”?

  6. My bizarre stroll through the Alice in Wonderland-ish American health care system continues. I’m way behind on this project and I have a follow-up appointment this afternoon. There’s not really much to follow up on. I called the central switchboard (you can’t call the practice itself, but at least you’re not passed off to a call center in Islamabad or outside of Delhi) to convert the visit to a phone visit.

    “I’m sorry, I can’t do that. There are only certain times that the doctors will take televisits. You’re scheduled for an in-person appointment.”

    “First of all, this won’t be a televisit, it will be a phone call. Second of all, if I were available to show up today, which sadly I am not, I’d be in that office for a certain length of time. Why can’t the doctor just close the door and give me a call?”

    This must be insurance-related. Thanks, Joe Lieberman, I-Aetna and Cigna. Al Gore’s VP pick. We thought Dick Cheney was bad.

    So the appointment got canceled and now I have a phone appointment for next Friday. “But wait, these appointments are available on Fridays but I can’t have one today?”

    No wonder we have one of the lowest life expectancies in the developed west. Well, the shitty health care system and the guns and the drugs, I suppose.

    • I found out that a lot of practitioners won’t be reimbursed by insurance companies in part or full if they do phone-only consultations.

      If you dig, you’ll find out that insurers fear that making health care easier to access would mean more people would try to get health care.  The horrors.

      So they use whatever leverage they can muster to drive patients and practitioners together in the most complicated ways. Instead of a five minute call to go over test results and approve a prescription, they try to force everyone to run around to multiple in person visits.

      If you’re up for it, this piece by former Gawker and Deadspin writer Tom Scocca details his struggles going through the medical system for a serious, elusive illness. It’s infuriating but really well written.

      https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/tom-scocca-medical-mystery-essay.html

  7. MAGAt males freaking out about Tay-tay maybe endorsing Biden?

    Never seen so much impotent rage. I’d feel sorry about their limp flaccid dicks, but they’re MAGAts so… no.

  8. Hey loveshaq, check in so we know the gas leak didn’t get ya?

    • I’m awake & almost alive!  Thanks for checking.

  9. Unrelated to anything in here, so covid really can fuck with menstruation but who cares, we’re only women. We’re lucky if medical research even has female subjects. Every time I’ve had covid, it’s been like *immediate period* right after symptoms clear up regardless of when that was supposed to happen. Anyways, the Christmas covid meant the cycle got messed up and this morning I’ve got major PMS happening, right on track for the pre-covid schedule. If I even get 2 periods in less than 2 weeks, I’m going to curl up and sob.

    • …so…this is anecdotal…& it’s not exactly a topic that comes up all that often in general conversation…but I’m pretty sure that a bunch of places (like the NHS & the National Institute of Health in the states) did get enough reports of COVID including various sorts of upheaval with otherwise fairly predictable stuff of that nature…& at least the beginnings of some study of that got kicked off

      …but then…in a painfully inevitable way given COVID was involved…a bunch of dubious looking stuff started turning up in places like the BMJ that lent themselves to being quoted out of context in ways that brought the vaccine into the equation

      …if it’s a symptom/effect of the infection & it turns out people who hadn’t been infected experienced the same thing when they were inoculated I expect that would probably be useful & important information to people who understand literally everything involved in ways I clearly don’t…but pretty much since then I haven’t seen much discussion of it…outside of a few laments not much different to yours

      …I know the phrase is normally intended to be funny…but healthcare in the states…&/or for women…it’s legitimately a first world problem that really isn’t funny?

      • Friend, I was in the Moderna vaccine trial and when I told the nurse that the vaccine had a major impact on my period while I had an IUD and hadn’t had a real period in 3 years, the answer she gave me was yeah we’ve been hearing that but nobody really cares about women’s health.

        • …one of my friends as far back as I’ve known them has been at the mercies of endometriosis & as astonished as I was as a teenager to find out how much of that boiled down to “gee, that sucks for you but you’ll have to find a way to deal – have you tried a hot water bottle?”…how little has changed since…I mean…it’s longer ago than I mostly care to dwell on…but…it’s not a short amount of time & although it’s not that nobody’s tried to do anything…it’s way nearer nothing than not?

          …I have a different friend who works in the academic side of a field that overlaps with medicine & they suggested, fairly seriously, that part of the problem is that there is in a sense only so much money to go around in terms of research grants…& there are…fads…some of which mean that people write up proposals for stuff because stuff like it got funded so it stands a good chance…even though their proposal has either shonky methodology or a hypothesis that’s already been shown to be a dead end, or both…& those get funded…repeatedly…while other research never even gets started

          …I assume some proportion of that is venting the way anyone does about whatever they do for a living…but I think it’s also a real thing…I’ve heard similar from charity fundraisers about having to compete against the cause du jour when it’s never yours?

          • Rip, the points you made here–arrrrrrrgggghhhh!!!!!!!!!

             

            Having been another of those girls who ended up spending the entirety of a day or two every month of my sophomore to senior years of high school, curled in a blanket-covered ball, down on a cot in the school nurse’s office, after taking an ineffective ibuprofen?

            I STILL feel so incredibly lucky that my small-town MD was the sort who *read* research papers in his downtime, and that he’d kept up to date on new ideas throughout his career!

            He’s the one who handed me the giant handful of Aleve, saying, “The pain receptors for period pain, and the pain receptors for arthritis are *often* the same type of mechanism. This is coming online as an OTC medication soon, it was ORIGINALLY developed for Arthritis pain–and it *works,* but it’s going OTC, because the FDA realized it doesn’t *need* to be so heavily regulated that it stays a prescription med.  Try it out, SEE if it works for you, if it does, this should get you through until then.  If it DOESN’T work, come back and we’ll try until we can find something that DOES.

            He knew me, and he KNEW how high my pain tolerance is. So he *also* knew how BAD the “Rusty spork, scraping away at the inside of my uterus” feeling WAS, because it hurt terribly if i moved *at all.*

            Even curled into a tiny ball with a hot water bottle on my lower abdomen, there was *still* a constant dull ache.

            But that Aleve made ALL the difference (still does!), two pills, as soon as the rusty spork/”rusty saw cutting into your abdomen” feelings begin, and an hour later, the pain moves to the background, completely manageable!

            It’s WILD.

            And that bit you mentioned about the research grants, too?

            We talk about that pretty frequently over on the grownup side of Autismland!

            There has ALWAYS been tons of money–innthe beginning, “To Find a Cure!” which now has become, “To Find a Therapy That Works!!!”, because older Autists have gotten people to understand that you *can’t* “cure” a type of Neurodivergence.

            But while there IS tons of research funding into ABA and other “therapies”?

            It’s REALLY HARD to get funds to help folks figure out how best to SUPPORT the needs of their Autistic loved ones, and ways to meet those needs, reduce their triggers/stressor, and decrease the number of meltdowns they have.

            And studies on how to meet the support needs of Autistic ADULTS,  are even rarer than the proverbial Hen’s Teeth🙃

            Sooooooo many folks out there, NEEDING that sort of support, and there just *isn’t* funding for it, typically, because it’s not fancy, “splashy,” or a “cure” for something abled folks SEE as a need🫤

            (Edited for typos, because my new phone is STILL being a butt and dropping the first letter of certain words, or autocorrecting the crap out of what I typw🫠)

    • Wow. How many times have you had Covid? I only caught it once, recently, and it was passed to me in the hospital (there are a surprising number of low-level employees who are “vaccine hesitant,” thanks, that’s not helpful) and I was asymptomatic but there are lingering effects.

      It really is something. I will say that the last doctor I saw told me that the disease has mutated, and has weakened, so the death rate has gone way down. So that’s a good thing.

      • Third time was over Christmas. None of the three times was that bad, I’ve had colds worse than the last round of covid. That being said, the first vaccine, the first booster, and all 3 actual rounds of covid made for some real juicy off-cycle periods. The subsequent 2 boosters had no impact, so at least that’s calmed down.

        There’s some doctors starting to consider the uterus as loosely part of the immune system, so this makes sense in that covid was a novel thing for us all to have to deal with a few years ago.

        • I also know some women who unexpectedly got huge periods two weeks after their first Covid vaccines (myself included). In my case, it was shocking because I never get my period unless I’m on birth control.

    • More anecdotal evidence: The first time my wife got Covid, it came very early for her but then settled back to normal by the next month. Second time she got it, she reported no change in cycle.

      I still wish scientists had the cobbles to pull together some fake data on how Covid caused ED or shrank men’s genitals or whatever. Really could have helped the vax push.

       

    • …ok…I haven’t managed to find time to read the substack thing from this lady that was one of the tweets in the crooksandliars effort

      …but…getting past the possibility he had the lock changed *while his lawyer was escorting the FBI around the premises*…which just about screams “would seem like a cheap way to build dramatic tension in a movie”…or at the very least does not say “look at the machiavellian genius in the full mastery of his powers of dominance by subterfuge”

      …it…took them until after the hunt for the loads of classified shit they kept saying wasn’t there even as they were finding it…that they had people on video fucking about with in ways sworn affidavits said there couldn’t be video of…to think that maybe they should have opened all the doors & looked in all the rooms?

      …clearly I would be terrible at that sort of thing because I foolishly assumed that to be pretty much the order of the day…with, like, a judge’s signature on it & stuff…so if they’d just ripped the thing off with a prybar & busted it off the hinges…or otherwise destroyed it the way I’m pretty certain I’ve seen regular people have to pay out of their own pocket to repair when it happens to the front door of their house so it isn’t wide open to the public

      …I’d have been fine with that…so…presumably my ass would get fired in a heartbeat for federal over-reach?

      • P.S.
        …from the other one

        They have prevented him from hiring competent council the entire time & when he does find council they ALL seem to be incompetent or corrupt. This is planned

        …this is my new favorite conspiracy theory…apologies tra-tay or whatever we’re calling them…but…”they” are coming for donnie boy by preventing him from hiring competent representation

        …I would consider buying deep state merch if that was true…a coffee mug at the very least…probably a hoodie…definitely a t-shirt?

  11. Sorry to hear about the ‘vid. Have lots of soup.

  12. Aw rats! Sorry to hear this @megmegmcgee. Do you blame Taylor Swift? Snuggle up with your lovely cat and feel better soon!

  13. While we’re sharing healthcare stories. My optometrist took images of the inside of my eyelids and I have barely any oil glands left. What few I do have are blocked. He tried to sell me on a combination treatment of Lipiflow which melts the hardened oil to unclog the glands and OptiLight which is a laser treatment for rosacea on my cheeks. Apparently there is  inflation in my tears and rosacea from previous sunburns contribute to eye un-health. None of this is covered by insurance and it is a yearly treatment spanning multiple appointments (3k! 😭). So my question is, have you guys ever heard of this!? I have zero dry eye discomfort. Had they not checked, I could continue living and seeing blissfully unaware of my eyelids’ lack of oil glands. It doesn’t lead to blindness but it does lead to possible eye discomfort as I get older. I feel like it is a scam.

    • …I don’t know really…& I probably lean to thinking it’s on the scammy side of upselling…but I think there is a recognized condition to do with the inflammation side of things…like, if your eyelids are dry to the point of feeling gritty & you rub them & everything gets inflamed…there’s a name for that unless I’m mistaken…but I think generally one of those handheld eye-baths is generally all it takes to rein it in…never known anyone who needed to find out what happens if that doesn’t work…but did discover that optrex, which used to come in a box that had an eye-bath in…does not mix well with some treatments for keeping contact lenses clean…not likely to be relevant but to anyone it might be the way I heard it finding out the hard way is painful

      …otherwise I think that’s the first I’ve heard of it…sorry if that’s not much help?

    • Can’t you just try hot washcloths against your eyelids first to try to loosen up those oil glands? I mean maybe that’s useless but also doesn’t involve anything else.

      • I could! He said the melting point is 105°F 😂 it’d be ironic if I blind myself while trying to improve my eye health.

Leave a Reply