Today me and a bunch of friends are going over to check out my brother’s new bottle opener.
That’s what we’ve been calling his headstone. But I swear to god if any of his friends uses it to crack open a beer and puts a scratch on it they will be down there with him.
Then, I ordered 100 wings and we are going to drink some beers and ride some trains.
What else is going on? Let’s see…
Pro-tip, you can just take the label back to the store and they will give you your money back. The beleaguered person at the return desk does not want your old nut butter.
Candy, snacks made with Jif peanut butter recalled for salmonella concerns, rebates offered
https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/food/2022/05/26/jif-peanut-butter-salmonella-recall-rebate/9943909002/
This is all very upsetting. I don’t believe a word the police say at this point.
Gunman emerged from classroom closet firing at Border Patrol agents, official says
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/05/27/texas-school-shooting-uvalde-victims-live-updates/
Someone should follow him around with this sign every day.
I for one welcome our future mutant hamster overlords.
Have a great Saturday! Brain Drain will be by shortly. These kids got me watching the last season of Stranger Things, without having seen it before. Safe to say I have not idea what is going on, but what else is new?
can i have an overly agressive mutant rage hamster?
they are ridiculously cute
With big nasty pointy teeth
ive never let anything like that stop me from wanting to pet anything….
its amazing i still have all my fingers really
If I had one I would name it Pennywise.
I ate the peanut butter. I am addicted to pb. I eat it by the spoonful. I was about half way through the jug (not in one sitting, Jesus.) Seem to be okay so far.
It’s all fun and games til you turn into a mutant hamster!!
I ate a bunch of salmonella salad mix a few years ago unintentionally. I luckily did not get sick.
Regarding the newly aggressive hamsters – isn’t that how the Reavers were made in Firefly?
On a more somber but hopeful that there are still good people out there note – the Irma and Joe Garcia gofundme is over $2 million. I know this shouldn’t exist but it does and I’m glad people are stepping up.
https://www.gofundme.com/f/joe-irma-garcia
Here is the link for some of the other Uvalde victims’ gofundme accounts if anyone is interested.
https://www.gofundme.com/c/act/donate-to-texas-elementary-school-shooting-relief
That poor family.
I have eaten
the peanut butter
that was on
the counter
and which
you were probably
saving
to return to the store and get your $7 back
Forgive me
For I now have salmonella
so sick
and so pukey
Did you steal that from one of the Great War poets? Isn’t that from John McCrea’s “In Flanders Fields”? McCrae was a Canadian doctor in civilian life, by the way. He commanded a field hospital in Boulogne and died there during World War I, but not from war wounds per se, he contracted pneumonia and meningitis.
…I think one way or another we might all feel a bit like we’re in the wars at the minute…but this is just to say I think meg had a different poem in mind this time?
I had never seen that poem before! That’s perfect. It’s what I get for AP-examing my way out of any and all of my university’s English classes and having to self-educate over the last several decades.
And, as a follow-up, reading his birth and death dates, and the copyright on that poem, he wrote that when he was 79? Or maybe he wrote it (much?) earlier and the copyright was taken out or renewed in 1962?
Originally published in the 1930s.
William Carlos Williams was in that literary modernism group of authors in the early/mid 1900s.
Speaking of poems from the 1930s, have you ever read John Betjeman’s “Slough”?
http://www-cdr.stanford.edu/intuition/Slough.html
It’s one of my favorites because I completely agree with him (not literally and not about Slough, in particular, although I’ve been and it’s only gotten worse). Unfortunately, though, that poem appeared in 1937, and just three years later bombs did start falling on places like Slough and lots of other places in Britain.
Unrelated question to the poem,but a word-pronunciation question…
In relation to the city/town of Slough…
How does one say it correctly?
Is it said like “slew” or “sluff”…
Because here in the Midwestern US, shough in the “shedding of skin–as done like a snake” is pronounced “sluff”…
But the marshy-boggy-bit of wet ground, also known as a ” ‘Squito-Breeder” is pronounced as if it were spelled “slooo”
…as a town it’s sl- as in sleep & -ough as in “ow”…like if you’ve stubbed your toe or something
…pretty sure the UK version of the show the office is based in slough…make of that what you will?
Yes, technical points all ’round, but you should hear how my friends in Berkshire (who most certainly don’t live in Slough) tell you how the Slough residents pronounce it.
There’s really nothing wrong with the concept of Slough except that it was, I believe, meant to be a kind of City Beautiful “new town” based around the most forward-thinking urban planning principles of the post-WWI era. Worse was yet to come, though, when the most forward-thinking urban planning principles of the post-WWII era ripped through historic city centers, including in a few pieces of central London, and laid waste to almost every American city thanks to various “slum clearance” and “urban renewal” schemes and the transition over to a car-transport-dependent economy.
Don’t get me started on publicly funded civic architecture from the period from about 1945 to about 1980. The 1920s stuff, while tending toward vague Greco-Roman/Neoclassical motifs, was fine and well-built. Even the stuff from the 1930s (Washington is loaded with examples, here is one of my favorites : does its grandiosity point toward a Fascist or Communist New Deal? Only the Supreme Court threatened with court-packing and populist uprisings knows for sure!) has a sort of, well, again, grandiosity, with a thrilling soupçon of totalitarianism.
Now compare that to lowest-bidder government crap that gets spat out today, and in the postwar era coupled with those dollar-store understandings of the works of Mies and the Bauhaus it was almost unimaginably hellish, and you get this, for example, (to me it’s like I’m Count Dracula being exposed to sunlight; maybe Torontonians can explain its sentimental appeal) but if you scroll down you find an even worse and far more common example of the style I’m talking about.
That concludes my TedTalk, live from Poundbury.
Graciously yours,
Your Sovereign-in-Waiting,
HRH Charles, Prince of Wales (Cammie says Hu-llo 🙂 )
Thanks for the ‘splainer, Rip!😉
I figured it was proooobably another “Pepys”-like word (or in that case, name really)!😄😆😂🤣
(And I STILL don’t get how “Peeps” comes from a name that should obviously sound like “pep-iss”…. otherwise WHY is there a “y” in there?!?😉💖
Buuut I did grow up in a place where “grammar rules made some sense,” and it was “normal” to learn that names that begin with “Dzi” are pronounced instead, like “Diz”… or that ones ending in “jdl” have an end-sound like “idle”…. nice and *logical,* even if we *do* have odd mish-mashes of words from all over the place!😉)
Every new detail that emerges about the shooting response just makes me want to vomit. Children were calling 911 from the room, which is information that dispatch should have relayed to the incident commander, which suggests he knew there were kids trapped in there. Apparently one of the 19 cops assembled for coffee and donuts outside the door for 45 minutes yelled and said scream help if you need us, and when a little girl did, the gunman shot her. He needs to face criminal charges, like the goober in Parkland.
All of these officers (that weren’t actually shot) should have resigned immediately. That shitwad governor Abbott should shut the entire department down and staff it with state police pending full investigation. Actually, the mayor of Uvalde should be demanding that too.
I get being scared of overwhelming force (I’m not dismissing that aspect, believe me, which is a separate but much worse problem than the police response). But if you find out you can’t do what you’re supposed to do, the only thing you should be doing is tendering your resignation, effective immediately, and volunteering to testify. This smokescreen of lies and misinformation is intolerable.
…I’m pretty sure that the only thing I can be reasonably certain of is that I don’t know the best/fastest/safest way to bust into a classroom & deal with an over-armed & homicidal teenager…beyond that there are a lot of ugly facts that leave the remaining gaps in the picture they paint looking uglier still…& all told I think it breaks my head as well as my heart
…I read in a supposedly reputable newspaper that one caller to 911 (possibly the one you refer to) called from inside the room something like half a dozen times over a span of something like 40mins
…& elsewhere I saw it suggested the door to the classroom did in fact have a window in it…& also that the kid was shooting before he entered the building
…I can not grasp a logic that explains how the situation played out the way it did even using every permutation of the explanations thus far offered by law enforcement…or abbott et al…but even I can see that the “solutions” offered by NRA/GOP/MAGA-type folks are insane…in that not only as far as I can make out would none of them have served to avert this specific tragedy had they been in place beforehand…but they actively “solve for” precisely the upward trends (in both sales & deaths) which make this the latest milestone along a trajectory that passes so many so frequently as to imply a not only lethal but alarming velocity
…the paradox of finding it impossible to believe that there’s nothing to be done but lacking any faith that in fact anything will be done is hard to stomach…I can’t even imagine how hard for the people directly affected…so…I’d like to believe that the 2nd amendment overton window might actually shift enough for sanity to at least get a look in as a result of just how insanely badly this all seems to have gone?
Active shooter policy is you keep pushing forward until the shooter is dead. Unless the door is battleplate steel, police are supposed to have breaching rams that will break through it. I can barely accept that the chaos meant they couldn’t find a key, but cops execute no-knock warrants all the time by smashing down doors and shooting people. Just battering the door might have distracted the shooter from killing kids, and it certainly would have generated noise to help the kids inside stay hidden. I haven’t heard if there was a window (and can’t find information), but that should have been another target for breach.
Setting police incompetence aside (and make no mistake, this was massive incompetence — why was a mother handcuffed and then set free to rescue her own children?), the major problem is that an 18-year-old can go buy enough armament to terrify a full police department into utter inaction.
I saw a Twitter thread from a resident of Uvalde that also highlights that this is a predominantly Latinx working class community. The cops serve more to terrorize the population than to defend and protect them. Racism played a big part in why they were unwilling to risk their lives for those children.
I’ve read that too. I’ve also read an article quoting a former prosecutor from Uvalde that said the department is staffed with high-school graduates who took a 6-month certification course. She (I think the prosecutor was female) said that the police couldn’t even write a coherent incident report.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/federal-agents-entered-uvalde-school-kill-gunman-local-police-initiall-rcna30941
It honestly gets worse and worse. Up to 19 cops fucking around and not advancing on the shooter. With a “swat” team that bragged about working to learn schools and stuff last year. I’ve also read reports of some cops going into the school to just get their own kids and then going back to doing crowd control outside. I guess fuck them kids to the rest of the school.
Meanwhile Border Control apparently said FUCK IT after 30 minutes and ran the ambush.
I also read that the local cops had their handguns as well as AR-15s available, so like this isn’t even a case of being outgunned.
Commando cosplay.
That is a Cleveland Steamer? I’ve been getting it wrong all these years! This may explain a few things?
Oh you naughty, naughty boy.
Yes to trains, I remain crushed by the continued news from, and the aftermath, from Texas. We had two jars of that peanut butter, one for use in hiding dog medication and one for the other human. I figure I would have ended up with four $$$$ veterinarian bills and one $$$$ ER bill (poorly covered by the really terrible insurance). Thank you to Butcher for today’s Brain Drain – and remember, should you want to do an as hoc Brain Drain, just ping me. Have a lovely weekend everyone!
I see the pending Brain Drain…but maybe the scheduled time is off? It’s above my paygrade @elliecoo
We need more of these heroes!
@farscythe
We talked about this the other day but here’s a whole article on why conservatives are so easily duped.
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/5/24/2088332/-Science-has-answers-to-why-conservatives-fall-so-easily-for-COVID-19-and-Russian-propaganda
Quote: There are multiple studies that show how liberals and conservatives differ, not just in political views, but in different purviews of life. Conservatives register a greater response to negative stimuli because they tend to view the world as a dangerous place and are “hyper-attuned” to the hazards in the world.
Quote:
Liberals don’t typically fall for nonsense, but don’t take my word for it. Professional fake-news creators admit that conservatives are targeted over liberals.