Well, the race to the midterm elections has begun. Which means drama, pathos, skullduggery, crime, corruption, dishonesty, buffoonery, incompetency, and idiocy. And one man, the erstwhile head of the Republican Party, leads the way.
Oh, for fuck’s sake.
Trump says he knows why the FBI really searched Mar-a-Lago: They were looking for Hillary’s emails
What the esteemed Dr. Oz failed to mention is that these men only gave a dude a ride and ultimately their sentences were commuted.
Mehmet Oz’s campaign digs deeper hole, attacking exonerated men, calling them ‘murderers’
I mean, I hate McConnell too, but he’s … not in my party?
Rick Scott kicks off final push to midterms by escalating his war with Mitch McConnell
So this is the best candidate Republicans could find in Georgia? … Yeah, okay, sounds about right.
New Attack Ad Targets Herschel Walker’s History of Domestic Abuse
It’s getting hot in here.
Heat dome roasts the West, with brutal record-breaking temperatures
The wheels of justice turn slowly, but grind exceedingly fine.
NYPD veteran who assaulted police receives longest Jan. 6 sentence yet: 10 years
I also disagree.
Bosses say remote work kills culture. These companies disagree.
Sprots. This is still weird.
Nearly a redemption tale, Dwayne Haskins became a tragic mystery
Stonks. These things generate noise, too?
A neighborhood’s cryptocurrency mine: ‘Like a jet that never leaves’
Turtle content. Turtles are fed up with your bullshit, people.
I was bitten on the butt and nearly drowned by an angry sea turtle
Okay, today’s DOT drifted over to the dark side and pretty much stayed there. I promise, I’ll try to make it up to you tomorrow.
I’ve got a pinch-hit DOT coming up and I have a question: I seem to have lost the ability to convert a link to summary text, like you and everyone else seems to do. When I copy/paste the link, it forces me to embed as a link but doesn’t give me the handy second line in the pop-up box where I can type in my own text. I’m able to do it as a comment but not as a post for some reason. I used to be able to do it in posts. Maybe there was a WordPress upgrade and my lax browser/iOS updating habits have caught up to me. Myo, if you’re reading this, I thought this was too minor to bother you with and maybe I could “crowdsource” a solution.
However, I do have a real comment to make.
I was reading the Daily Mail this morning (I know) because I wanted to learn why
Posh SpiceMrs. Victoria Beckham and her new daughter-in-law Nicola Peltz loathe each other so much. After all, Nicola Peltz is an actor (she’s in the “Transformers” movie) and their son Brooklyn can charitably be described as “pursuing various projects.” (He and the wife live with her parents, Dad’s a billionaire, Brooklyn has no life skills apparently…) I learned there are plenty of reasons.Anyway, I stumbled across an article that I’m not going to link to for reasons (chief among them they allow commenting) but I’ll summarize.
In 2016 Britain had its Brexit vote and slightly over half the UK voted to leave, mostly people in England. This split the country in a similar way as the elections of 2016 and 2020 have split ours.
The whole process of Brexit and its aftermath has been nightmarish. In 2018 Theresa “Mother Theresa” May, a Remainer, was the Prime Minister half-heartedly trying to secure the exit and announced that at some future date there would be a Festival of Brexit, to put a gloss on things. The government allocated £120 million. That time is now!
However, it’s not turning out quite as the Brexiteers had imagined, and a flashpoint is British gardening. I know a lot of you are keen gardeners so I thought this might be of interest.
This was not met without controversy (pronounced “con-TRO-ver-sy”):
There’s more:
Indeed. Well, that’s something to think about this long holiday weekend. I won’t, but it’s something that could be thought about this long holiday weekend.
How I miss Wednesdays at Jez and Dodai Stewart.
Midweek Madness! For you, ma chère, I will pass along the link which explains in great, if somewhat badly written, detail, why Posh and Nicky loathe each other.
Personally, I think the Peltzes got the short end of the stick. As if having
Posh SpiceMrs. Victoria Beckham join the family weren’t bad enough (well, having Brooklyn Beckham really join the family is worst enough, and I hope Nicky has an ironclad pre-nup) now David “Golden Balls” Beckham has become the highly paid spokesmen for one of the most loathsome regimes on earth, the Emir of Qatar. “Guest workers” having their passports seized and worked to death in the unforgiving heat building bombastic soccer stadiums, gay people given the death penalty with no appeal, women treated like chattel slaves. Honestly, Becks, there’s more to life than money.“Pursuing various projects” is my code for playing video games.
In the Daily Mail article I discreetly linked to above, in my reply to @HammerZeitgeist , there’s an anecdote about the self-made billionaire coming across his new son-in-law lounging around in his pajamas one afternoon. This did not sit well with the paterfamilias, because he, not Brooklyn himself, and not his not-doing-too-badly-for-themselves parents, is the one paying for the expensive process of getting his new son-in-law his green card. He asked, probably a little frostily, whether Brooklyn had at least called the lawyers that day to see how things were moving along. Of course, how would anyone know this? If true, someone had to leak it, but who? I suppose the Peltzes employ ample staff, I would, so maybe one of them.
I’m giddy from all the gossip. Thank you! I had no idea the eldest Spawn Spice (Spice(y) Spawn? We should vote on that.) was married and to a billionaire heiress no less. That sent me down a rabbit hole. Did you know that at the ripe you age of 23 he is a former model and an aspiring chef. Judging by his pizza, he wouldn’t make the cut for your celebrity FYCE posts. Then again, the gossip that surrounds him could potentially make up for his lame recipe.
There’s a video of him showing us how to make a sandwich and I forget what went wrong, he couldn’t do it I know that much, and I think one of the camera crew had to step in…
Apparently the Beckhams, bless, didn’t really believe in school for their children or any kind of structured activity, except for yachting and vacationing in exclusive hotels, so the four children are really, almost criminally, unprepared to live in the real world. It’s not clear if they’re literate. The youngest, Cruz, at 17, is a singer and DJ and there’s some doubt whether he can sign his own name to contracts. I am just passing on salacious gossip, against my better judgment. Of course I don’t believe any of this, and it’s shameful that such stories are circulating. There. I think I have indemnified myself.
Whoops, sorry, fake news. Cruz is the second youngest. The youngest is called Harper Seven Beckham. Seven is presumably a reference to Golden Balls’s player number.
I, too, am attracted to the scoop on those with much money and little sense.
Oh yes. I can’t tell you how many articles I came across and took the time to read about JLo & Ben Affleck’s wedding. I wasn’t joking when I commented a couple of days ago that it was shameful that Deadsplinter ignored this defining cultural moment. Well, to be honest, yes, of course I was joking.
I hereby put forth the motion for a weekly/biweekly/monthly celebrity gossip roundup. Anyone second that?
It wouldn’t be difficult to do. Just go to Page Six (which, of late, is inordinately top-heavy with Real Housewives-related news, which is strange because I think all the franchises are failing.) Consult TMZ, they’re always good. Skim the headlines in the Daily Mail UK version. The US version is really slimmed down; the UK version refreshes constantly and strict libel laws or no they always have the good stuff. They covered the “Wagatha Christie” trial like the Washington Post covered Watergate.
Then, if that’s not enough, google something you might be interested in, like “Victoria Beckham” “Nicola Peltz” and see what smaller online sources are saying. These change constantly and they wax and wane. Jezebel, for example, used to be an excellent source. Now it’s…well, it’s very unfortunate. Steer clear of anything you might find on a newsstand, like People; that’s now all sanitized and their revenue stream seems to consist mainly of “celebrity” PR flacks (and not very good ones) churning out favorable puff pieces which are regurgitated for some fee that the author/flacks pay for placement.
What a surprise that the Daily Mail, which was endlessly banging a drum for Brexit, is now ginning up a controversy about a mention of colonial failures at a Brexit celebration!
The comments…I try not to stray into their UK true crime stories or any mention of American politics, but as a distraction I like reading about how the UK government functions, or doesn’t. Not only in the DM but in the Guardian and other non-paywalled sources. I’m also going to make a vow to contribute to tomorrow’s Brain Drain about my other secret hobby, which is watching Have I Got News For You reruns on Youtube.
Anyway, as far as I can tell from the comments, badly written as many of them are, there seems to be this whole sort of not-so-secret army of actual British readers (you can tell by the spelling and the phraseology) of the DM who are more fervent Trumpers than your garden variety American “deplorable,” in Hillary Clinton’s unfortunate descriptive. Imagine an American taking such an active role in commenting on the domestic politics of a country to which they have no ties.
It’s really kind of awesome, in the old sense of the word, how large a role America plays in the imagination of people who have never been here. I’ve mentioned this before. Germany is arguably the most powerful country in Europe. Who is the leader and what is the title of the office? I could spend a whole day hobbling around the streets of “cosmopolitan” Manhattan asking people and I’d be surprised if anyone could tell me.
(I won’t keep you in suspense. The answer is Chancellor, in English, Olaf Scholz.)
I pretty much assume that the Mail not only subscribes to bot farms to massively goose their page views but they also subscribe to AI-generated comment farms too. Or maybe they pay living 19 year olds in India and El Salvador to comment.
I thought that might be true too but there’s something about them that seems genuine. As a connaisseur of media comment sections I can fully believe that the correspondents are embellishing the truth (“As a successful business owner” = “irregularly employed early school leaver”, for example) but there’s something…I don’t know, it’s a language unto itself. Sometimes there’s slang, for example, that I have to look up, and sometimes there’s a typo in it, but it’s not because the word is unknown to the writer, it’s because the letter is right next to the correct one on the keyboard, so I interpret that as drunkenness or someone like me who is too old to enjoy texting a comment via smartphone.
To “circle back” (one of my most despised examples of garbage speak) to the Posh/Nicky feud, there were a few paragraphs devoted to speculating as to why Nicola Peltz didn’t wear a wedding gown created by her mother-in-law, who has a “couture” clothing line. (Posh Spice has an “atelier” apparently.) One of the comments went something like, “Good on her [Nicola] because she [Vicky] showed up wearing a nightie.” That was not crafted in a server farm in Bangalore or the outskirts of San Salvador.
I can absolutely believe there are a lot of real people commenting. I’m guessing it’s a lot like Twitter where often the point of bots is not to dominate the back and forth but to prime the pump with a starter set of comments to draw real people into the fray.
I also wonder in the back of my mind how often the writer themselves is doing this. In a lot of places continued employment and bonuses depend on engagement numbers, and I assume after a little while in the business it must be awfully easy to create a persona that sparks reactions.
I know there were frequent accusations of this happening at old Gawker, with obvious troll accounts mysteriously being elevated out of the grays.
Ahem…
Canadian on US sites.
Although to be fair, I know enough of US/Canadian relations that what affects you is going north (and visa versa… Celine Dionne, Justin Beaver and the Reform Party freaks…. really sorry about that.)
That I can see because we’re sitting beside each other and (mostly) share a language. Even most of the Québécois at this point can understand English, though some of them won’t admit it. But ask the average American who the PM of Canada is and you’ll get a blank stare. Be more explicit and ask the average American who Justin Trudeau is and you’ll also get a blank stare, maybe a “I think he was on ‘American Idol’?” I bet I’d have better luck asking asking random Canadians who Joe Biden is, and I’m sure I’d hit the jackpot with Donald Trump, since he seems to be, in a second-hand way, almost as popular north of the border as he is here in this benighted, once-great republic.
…I’m running around a bit today but I’ll try to get a comprehensible method across to you if someone doesn’t beat me to it?
That would be most helpful. The frustrating thing is I know I can still do it, but it takes some almost-accidental fumbling around and it’s not easy and I’m never conscious of what I’m doing when I’m able to achieve this. I’m on a Mac if that matters.
If the crowdsourcing doesn’t come through by tonight, pm me.
FYI I did a lot of updates the other day.
…on the crypto-mining/noise thing
…from what I’m told the whole thing where graphics cards for PCs have been crazy money is because the way the graphics-oriented processors work is better at the calculations than the sort that sits on a motherboard…I don’t know if you’ve looked at one of those cards recently but they tend to be bulky because they have a fan built in to keep them from overheating
…running banks of the things for mining tends to require yet more of those…not unlike some gamer-rig of a PC…& I don’t know if you’ve heard one of those when it’s working hard/over locked but just one can be louder than you’d think
…depending on the size of the mining effort I’d imagine without soundproofing that might not be an exaggeration assuming the plane is flying overhead & the mining operation is on your block?
I guess hundreds or thousands of anything running constantly will generate noise. I tend to forget fans because all my computers are solid state now.
I’ve got an SSD but the laptop still has a fan and sometimes that sucker can get really loud.
Remote work certainly hasn’t killed the culture with my department. Perhaps the bosses who are so concerned about this were already shitty bosses with shitty culture, and now their remote workers are actually enjoying the ability to not be neck deep in it.
Exactly. I deal with zero office politics. I know they occur, but they don’t affect me and I don’t care. I have more personal time because I don’t commute. I have much greater flexibility during the day — if I need to run an errand, I just DO it.
Literally the only downside is that I don’t have office friends to go to lunch with. So I make do with actual friends. So … that may not be a downside. Yeah, I made a lot of actual friends at work so it’s a downside. But I’ll live with it. The tradeoff is no office assholes, so again, not a terrible thing.
Also, I’ve worked in a lot of places and I don’t ever remember any of them having a definable “culture.” Mostly when management says “culture” they mean “doing what I say.”
If office culture is being killed it probably needs to be put out of its misery.
I worked 4 years from home (to the dismay of former housemate because he was a jealous petty crybaby.)
Yes there’s no office politics, but you miss out on a lot of gossip/intel which didn’t help me get retained in 2011 (when I got heaved out the door.)
But is it worth commuting into morning hell, er, rush hour? Not really.
I was kind of lucky that during the first 2 1/2 of my years working from home that I had a decent boss instead of the turd I had for the last 1 1/2.
The only managers I know who were screaming about workers working from home were the intepticon managers and the control freaks (which in a lot of cases is one and the same.)
At big companies, CEOs and execs all mostly work remotely. They go to conferences, meet with consultants, visit different offices, give TED talks, blah blah. They spend their time in hotels, airport lounges, golf courses and stadium luxury boxes.
Forcing employees to work in the office is partly a status booster — they hate the idea that regular employees might have the flexibility to fire up a laptop at 8:30 am and go through email in bed just like they do.
I didn’t think of it that way. You may be onto something.
The reason I ended up doing the remote office is because the motherfucker CFO moved us to the area with the worst traffic in the GTA was in part to REDUCE HIS COMMUTE and didn’t give a fuck that it caused a lot of headaches for 2/3 of us. I sent several emails pointing this out and those got mocked (to my fury) at the townhall on the move. All my bitching and complaining (like lack of parking, the horrendous commute, the lousy facilities ) turned out to be right though.
I found out later he threw a hissy fit months later when he visited the location and found it basically to be a ghost town.
The CEO at my last company did the exact same thing. He sold a building that they owned, and then rented two floors of a building that was 20 miles closer to his house. He also signed a 10-year lease that they’re stuck with for at least three more years.
So then he retired, new CEO came in (I got fired at this point) and the new CEO is demanding that everyone spend at least 3 days in the office. Otherwise it sits empty and they’re paying rent.
He, however, claimed that it was important that everyone come to work because … wait for it … “culture.”
This makes me smile and I hope they have the goods on this ass!
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/jan-6-house-committee-asks-newt-gingrich-for-interview-alleging-involvement-in-effort-to-overturn-election-results/ar-AA11nNT4
Did you guys watch Biden’s speech last night? I thought it was the best I have heard from him. Thom nails what the cult of Trump is really about…
https://hartmannreport.com/p/is-something-called-narcissistic
and I just found out that Bob Ross has been reincarnated!!!
When I finally got out from under Cokehead Narcissist’s thumb, I feared that collapse/rage as she made regular threats on my life. So much so that I slept with a baseball bat for at least four months.
Reasoning that birds of a feather flock together. Not surprised most of Trump’s supporters are narcissists and idiots.
Like my uncle the now former doctor who used to annoy my dad about how much money he made and how successful he was. Till he lost a malpractice lawsuit (we still don’t know all the details some 30 years later) that cost him almost everything.
I fucking MUST see this:
https://www.loudersound.com/news/winnie-the-pooh-blood-and-honey-trailer
“Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey sees Piglet and Pooh embark on a twisted rampage after being abandoned by their friend, Christopher Robin,” reads the official synopsis on the trailer. “Journey into 100 Acre Wood as you’ve never seen it before.”
The potential is there. I see Piglet cast as a giant razorback, and Pooh is a Kodiak bear. Mayhem ensues. It writes itself!