Weekend Vibes! [DOT 17/9/22]

17/9/22 MegMegMcGee 18

Sweet, it’s the weekend! Today is also my BFF’s birthday, so send some good vibes towards the Cleveland area to the best friend, best daughter, best mom I know.

Anything else exciting going on?

And for what? To feed Putin’s ego?

‘We don’t know where the rest of the bodies went’: the search for answers in Izium
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/sep/16/some-hanged-themselves-the-work-to-find-answers-amid-iziums-mass-grave

More on that Vegas story

‘Dagger at the heart of free press’: colleagues of slain Las Vegas journalist continue his work
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/sep/16/las-vegas-journalist-jeff-german-free-press

I loathe him

Wait what? Did you guys know about this?

So is it a worker shortage or is it that companies don’t want to pay decent wages/benefits while racking up record profits? Hmmmmm

Worker shortages are fueling America’s biggest labor crises
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/09/16/worker-shortage-strikes-economy/

Queen, still ded

‘Out of respect’: the worst examples of public mourning for the Queen
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/sep/15/out-of-respect-the-worst-examples-of-public-mourning-for-the-queen

Hips don’t lie!

It’s late, like RIP late, so I didn’t track down anything cute for you. You’ll have to provide today!

Have an awesome weekend!

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18 Comments

    • Canadian too. Mostly because not taking it seriously can lead to a rotten day or in my case, frost bite.

      Happened on my first ever Boy Scout winter camp, where we got hit with a 1-2 meters (3-7 feet) of lake effect snow (when the cold northern winds pick up moisture from the Great Lakes which amplifies the amount of snow that hits land) almost over night.  We went to bed in our tents with almost no snow on the ground and woke up covered in a meter of snow.  The return hike was cold and miserable and I honestly wished I hadn’t gone.  It was on this Frozen hike that I discovered I had a dark sense of humor.

      I ended up with frost bit on my face where my glasses touched my cheeks, part of my ears and on my toes.

      You would think I was smart and this being my last winter camp… haha.  Nope, I was the stupid one who kept going to several unlike most of the guys who went on this one.  I finally did learn as an adult that winter camping was a stupid idea when I got invited to one and said no.

    • The corgis look better with tails. In fact all dogs look better with tails. It would be nice if the standard setters would eliminate that irrelevant practice. I’m sure there was a good reason for certain breeds to have their tails docked 200 years ago, but almost everybody keeps dogs just as pets now.

  3. Things are looking dire at The Queue. It reopened briefly, then paused, and now it’s open again. As I predicted there are pre-Queues, three of them, and as best I can make out they are in Southwark Park (which is fairly large.) Should Southwark Park reach capacity The Queue will be paused again. The current waiting time is 16 hours. Not since the Battle of Britain in 1940 have things looked so grim for the good people of the United Kingdom.

    I learned that there are in fact Fast Track passes. Becks wanted to view the coffin, and an MP offered to somehow get him to the head of The Queue, but he refused, and spent 13 hours in The Queue. It is probably penance, in the same way that the devout walk long distances, sometimes on their knees, to various shrines. Now he can go back to being the public face of the brutal regime of the Emirate of Qatar, conscience clear.

    • …so you could say I’ve only been paying cursory attention since the volume of coverage has meant I’ve more avoided it than sought it out…but other members of my family have taken a more avid approach…& I’m given to understand that you have several distinct routes…there’s the ones holding vigil (so family/royalty)…the “VIP” lane that includes politicians…the accessible queue for the infirm (which I believe had a big run of chealsea pensioners at some point yesterday unless they got the VIP lane?)…& then The Queue…but everyone except the vigil-holders winds up in the same double (or possibly it’s been tripled?) ranks for the actual filing-past-the-coffin part

      …meanwhile for those playing close attention there’s been a bunch of “how come edward’s wearing a uniform for an air force he’s only an honorary member of & harry’s not allowed the one that goes with his prior active service?”

      …so I gather he’s been granted a dispensation by his father to be uniformed for the vigil he’ll stand with his brother

      …though it’s a fair bet you knew all that sooner than I did?

      • Oh yes, of course. And the same with Andrew, who saw combat in the Falklands but wore a mere suit while his three siblings looked like figures from a Gilbert & Sullivan farce. He’ll be wearing a uniform too. Edward is particularly galling to people who believe uniforms should be worn by those who deserve to. I think Edward is my favorite of the four. After achieving a C and two Ds in his A-levels he…was admitted to Jesus College, Cambridge! How’s that for affirmative action? He graduated with a BA with lower second class honors. This is the one time you can associate the term “lower class” with a child of the late queen’s. Then, of course, the Royal Marines, all the male members do military duty, but Edward dropped out after four months. He next turned his attention to the theater, and eventually produced the greatest spectacular ever shown on British TV, “It’s a Royal Knockout.”

        Ultimately common sense (his parents) prevailed and he stopped failing upwards, married (this caused widespread shock because he was assumed for decades to be gay) and became a working royal.

  4. Speaking of people traveling from faraway and joining queues, but obviously in a far more serious way, the warm welcome that the migrants received on Martha’s Vineyard didn’t last long. They were on the island for less than 24 hours. MV’s Director of Homeless Services quite rightly pointed out that what they have is meant to be very temporary and given the fact that workers on the island, like cops, firefighters, teachers, medical personnel, etc., can no longer afford to live on the island, they can’t just magick housing for 50 overnight.

    But there was an excellent solution. There’s a little-used, or possibly disused, air base not all that far away called Joint Base Cape Cod, in Buzzards Bay (the town, not the Bay itself.) At its height it was one of the three major air bases on the East Coast providing defense. It was and is huge. Operations wound down, but the infrastructure (if not the personnel) is still there, including housing, a school, they must have dining facilities, probably a medical facility. The migrants were sent there, which is far more sustainable. When Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005 a lot of former New Orleans residents were sent there. If DeSantis or another governor pulls another stunt like this (jet-setting climate advisor John Kerry is intimately tied to Nantucket; that might be a next target) Joint Base Cape Cod might be an option.

  5. Brett Farve goddamn.

    Mississippi welfare scam gets worse. It’s pretty fucking low, but unsurprising how the poor get poorer and the rich get richer.  Turns out the biggest welfare queens are rich white Mississippians who steal welfare money to build volleyball stadiums (hey, where have we heard that before??? Brett Farve points a finger at Jerry Jones and other NFL owners “I LEARNED IT FROM YOU!!!!!”)

    • Small potatoes. Our Governor handed the Florida-dwelling billionaire Pergola family anywhere from $600 million to $1.2 billion (depending on how you do the math; $1.6 billion is probably going to be more like it given the history of how these things go in this state) for a new Buffalo Bills stadium. As a little side grift, her husband is a senior VP at the large corporation that was handed sole concession rights, presumably in perpetuity or until the next Governor who comes along receives a better bribe more compelling package from a rival concessionaire.

  6. So AG Sulzberger seems to be sitting on a powder keg at the NY Times.

    The reporters union is furious about how he and management are refusing to seriously work on a new contract, and reporters are seething over stagnant pay amid big money being spent on acquisitions, and they are seriously considering a strike.

    https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/09/will-the-new-york-times-go-on-strike.html

    The return to the office order has them furious too — reporters are a classic example of remote workers even in the days before cell phones and laptops.

    And it turns out the Times management has been systematically giving non-white employees poor performance reviews.

    https://www.npr.org/2022/08/23/1118817023/new-york-times-race-employees-job-review-union

    Times management played hardball with the affiliate Wirecutter’s union recognition bid until a walkout during Christmas shopping season finally forced Sulzberger to accept the union. Sulzberger has a track record of thinking he can play hardball, but like everything, he’s too dumb to manage the angles of what he envisions himself to be.

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