Good morning! SplinterRIP is recovering from a late night with an old friend, so I am your substitute DOT provider. It has been too long since I went to a party. Or hosted a party. Or even partied with close friends. Today’s DOT is dedicated to the party.
News | Sports | History | Weather | Party | Music
News
There’s always news about political parties; here’s some from the Green Party, the European Left, and daily updates from Politico. (But sometimes all that Green comes at too high a price.)
New third parties don’t fare well in the US (Mr. Yang, please meet Mr. Perot). But the Democrats are riding an infrastructure bill win and the Republicans continue to live in an alternate reality.
Then there are bad, bad, parties “A mom threw parties for teens and pressured them into sex acts, prosecutors say. She’s charged with 39 crimes.” Even treating a concert like a party can go very, very wrong – just ask Travis Scott.
And there is always Party City for accessories.
Sports
Here’s an old article from 2012 on sports teams who partied hard. I suspect you may have better or more recent examples of sports parties, feel free to share! You have to give props to any bit of writing that includes subheadings ranging from “Philadelphia Flyers Crash Frat Party” to “England’s Rugby Team Drinks Heavily, Attends Dwarf-Throwing Event”. Do you know of any recent examples? (Note to Cousin M, the rugby incident has a royalty tie-in.)
History (Freedom Party)
“The fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9th 1989, while largely a result of East Germans’ hunger for freedom, also relied on chance, bungling and the absence of orders that could have unleashed a cataclysm.”
Weather
It would be lovely to control the weather to ensure a perfect day for a party, wouldn’t it? Weather control sounds like wizardry, but even our Canadian friends are in on it “The Alberta government in Canada also uses cloud seeding to modify precipitation. Its hail suppression program uses aircraft to launch dispersal agents into storm clouds and reduce the size of hail. According to Chemical and Engineering News, the use of silver iodide seeding was able to reduce hail storm severity above Alberta by 27 percent.” The US is trying to make it rain to fight drought.
Party
What is the absolute best party you have ever attended or hosted? The best one I ever hosted was a summer patio party for friends and neighbors. The best party I ever attended was a friend’s ritzy farm estate with hundreds of people, food catered by a white house chef, and Joel Jerome playing live. As for a concert that was like a party, that honor goes to Glass Animals in 2016.
Music
Are you a party animal?
Or do we need a party starter?
Even guilty parties are welcome:
Here at DeadSplinter we party all the time!
Wishing you all a good Tuesday, also known as The Day You Realize You Still Have 3 More Days of Work.
So of course I clicked and that’s not just any royal connection, that’s Zara Tyndall. Bleacher has her as one of QEII’s grandchildren, but so what, she has many. No, Zara Tyndall is Princess Anne’s daughter. Imagine having Princess Anne as your mother-in-law. That story has a link, to the Daily Mail of course, and there are photos of Zara and she looks so much like her mother that you would think that she was born through parthogenesis.
This is not what I remember Zara (we’re on a first-name basis) looking like at her grandfather Prince Philip’s funeral. Which, by the way, I watched every minute of and teared up a little bit when the bagpipes started playing…I was disappointed by its brevity though. It should have gone on for hours and have had thousands in attendance but first of all the Queen is not a young woman and they had been married for 138 years or so and second, because of the UK Covid protocols everyone, and that means everyone, was only allowed 30 guests.
I was also disappointed by the fact that among the 30 guests were three who were given no backgrounder info, from Philip’s German family. Unfortunately they were the sons (or maybe at least one was a grandson?) of his Nazi siblings, not the Nazis themselves, so I guess they didn’t really deserve any airtime. But still, I bet a lot of people were wondering why the Hereditary Prince of Baden, the Margrave of Hesse, and the Prince Hohenlohe were allowed into this select group.
Since I seem to have the floor to myself:
The somewhat inadvertent Fall of the Berlin Wall, the Mauerfall, bears a slight resemblance to why gay marriage was made legal.
In 2012 gay marriage was legal in a few states but not at the federal level. If things continued as they were going civil unions would be legal in a lot of states, let alone gay marriage. Marriage also confers a ton of benefits at the federal level, so even if MA and VT had it Social Security certainly didn’t, for example.
Obama was not into it (probably for political reasons but perhaps also for personal reasons) and he was running for re-election so he preferred not to talk about it. Then on May 6th VP Joe Biden went on “Meet the Press.” Biden was famous for speaking at length and extemporaneously and on that show he endorsed gay marriage. Now it appeared as if it were administration policy.
So, does Obama force Biden to say, “Oops, of course I didn’t mean that, two men and two women shouldn’t be allowed to get married,” which would piss off a large chunk of the Democratic vote, or does the administration, despite all their past statements, suddenly embrace marriage equality? Well, embrace it they did, it became law, it survived a Supreme Court challenge (Obergefell v. Hodges) and here we have it.
Thanks, Uncle Joe!
One interesting thing is that public opinion swung so much faster in favor toward accepting gay marriage in the past decade than interracial marriage after the Loving decision in 1967. I think it took three decades for a majority of Americans to poll accepting interracial marriage.
The anti-trans backlash is a proxy for anti-gay forces, though, and a lot of people are in denial about where the right wing wants to take the country not just in terms of one minority, but ultimately the large majority of Americans who are not White evangelical men.
NY Times Fake Moderates Watch!
The Times Opinion Page ran a piece by Mark Penn and Andrew Stein posing as mainstream Dems with supposed advice for the 2022 elections.
Penn was notorious during the Bill Clinton years for his efforts to move Clinton right and has become a cable news staple insisting the GOP operates in good faith and the Dems can win by negotiating, and has gone so far right that he became a Trump consultant in recent years.
Cousin Matt no doubt knows far more about Stein, but he endorsed Trump and pled guilty to helping run a ponzi scheme according to Wikipedia.
It’s bad enough that the Times runs these bozos — every column going to hacks is a column denied to worthwhile voices. But the kicker is the Times didn’t bother to disclose these people are Trump backers. In the inbred world of the Times editors, this stuff doesn’t matter.
Another excellent DOT @Elliecoo!
I’ve been to way too many parties, good and bad. The less said about most of them the better.
I’ve hosted some really fun patio get togethers. One particularly hot summer day I gave everyone squirt guns and set out buckets of water to refill. Unbeknownst to our guests my partner and I had hidden our prefilled Super Soakers, pulled them out and doused everyone. It was a lot of fun.
One of the best parties I ever went to was the Dog Christmas party several years ago. Fanny and her besties played in the hostess’s back yard. She made elaborately decorated dog biscuits and tons of food and drinks for the hoomans.
I’ve also been to some great shows. But a really memorable one was seeing k. d. lang. Cyndi Lauper was a surprise guest, came out and they sang I Fall To Pieces together. It was a once in a lifetime thing.
I miss parties.
Comcast dependent middle-Atlantic folks were without service for about an hour this morning. Work-from-home isn’t great with no internet; at least I had a budget on my hard drive to fine tune.
@Hannibal, the squirt gun party sounds awesome!
It was, lol. In the interest of fair play we passed out Super Soakers to everyone else after the initial hosing down. A good time was had by all.
Great job @Elliecoo! I’ve been to some epic parties back in the day. One was a Toga party that our very own Lemmy’s band played at back in high school. My 18th birthday where I had 2 bands (plus my brother in law playing Hawaiian music) and my drunk mother mixing up everyone’s slippers at the door (you take off your shoes in Hawaii when you enter a house, even at parties). The best though was my buddy’s bachelor party where we rented a bus with a keg of beer on board, went to strip clubs with the bachelor having a bowling ball bolted to his leg and then bringing some strippers back on the bus to his house for a second show. I’ll never forget a stripper whipping the bachelor with a cat-o-nine tails while his dad shouted “you’re killing my boy!” until he saw the shit eating grin on his face and he started shouting “harder, harder!!!”
Nothing to do with parties but…always one in every crowd…
https://crooksandliars.com/2021/11/anti-vaxxer-muppet-speaks-out
Thank you, @Loveshaq, DOTs are hard and Meg and Splinter make them look effortless (okay, maybe SplinterRIP doesn’t make it look easy). You have been to much wilder parties than I have. Is your buddy with the beer bus party still married?
That was a doomed relationship from the start, the 2 weeks before he was getting married we were in Tahiti where he was screwing anything in sight. He was the horniest dude in the world and she didn’t like sex. Opposites attract but that never works. They did have twin boys somehow and never divorced but lived apart as much as they lived together. He died doing a cannonball at a cliff diving spot in our old neighborhood. He knocked himself out with his knees and his body sunk 50 feet where nobody could rescue him. His boys were still in elementary school at the time and we are all still pretty mad what a dumbass he was & how indestructible he thought he was. This is the place…
Oh my, beautiful place, tragic story.
okay…ive recovered from my post work brain death and am ready to party now
(but seriously…those first couple hours after i get back from work and sit down my brain is fried…)