Ya Know…[DOT 1/2/23]

1/2/23 MegMegMcGee 34

…after how many years of doing this I still have to think for a second about the backwards (yeah I said backwards) date scheme we use on this site. 1/2/23 = February 1st, 2023.

Be safe out there

2 killed in crashes in Texas as millions across the South and central US brace for ice storm
https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/31/weather/winter-ice-storm-south-central-us/index.html

More than 1,700 Tuesday flights canceled as winter weather hits the US
https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/flight-cancellations-delays-tuesday-winter-weather/index.html

Keep going…

Rep. George Santos is stepping down from committees amid fabrications about his biography
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/01/31/santos-fabrications-committee-assignments-republicans/

Stonks

Exxon posts record $56bn profit for 2022 in historic high for western oil industry
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/jan/31/exxon-profits-2022-western-oil-industry-record

Sprots!

#RIP

Cindy Williams of Laverne & Shirley fame dies at age 75
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jan/30/cindy-williams-laverne-shirley-dies-age-75

Sign me up!

This restaurant is run by grandmothers. Customers clap for them each night.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2023/01/24/staten-island-nonna-grandmothers-restaurant/

Today in cute!

Have a great day!

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34 Comments

  1. It’s strange to me that the Washington Post would cover a gimmicky Staten Island restaurant that’s been around for a few years now, but having gone twice (pre-pandemic, pre-Tingling Leg) I can attest to its virtues.

    Both times I conducted out-of-towners on a “sunset cruise” aboard the Staten Island Ferry, and then to proceed to dinner. It’s still free. Around a decade ago (de Blasio, we all blame de Blasio for the Decline and Fall) people started aggressively trying to sell the unwary bogus tickets to board the ferry but pretend you’re deaf or speak only Finnish or Hungarian and march on through to the terminal. Under no circumstances should you engage.

    Once on the other side your first inclination is to turn right around and head back to Manhattan, but Enoteca Maria is actually walkable from the St. George Ferry Terminal. It’s not a pleasant walk, but it’s no worse than a hike I once took after a semi-legal jitney bus took me over to the opposite side of the George Washington Bridge and the friend I was meeting up with was actually about a half a mile away, but I digress.

    Even the New York Times, which is loath to set foot on Staten Island, except to go on a safari hunt in an attempt to explain to its readership why anyone would ever vote Republican, dispatched some rookie to cover Enoteca Maria almost six years ago:

    https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/02/nyregion/at-this-staten-island-restaurant-a-kitchen-run-by-grandmas.html

  2. Here’s some good news. Oprah unleashed Dr. Oz upon a gullible semi-educated audience and he’s now gone down in flames. Another of her protégés, Dr. Phil, is now pursuing other ventures 

    It’s amazing how far–sorry, my inherent academic snobbishness and disdain for “psychology” (as opposed to psychiatry) is showing through here. Dr. Phil deserves his tens of millions of dollars and has every right to cross-promote his wife’s and son’s dubious ventures because, after all, he has a Ph.D. in psychology from North Texas State University. Part of the core curriculum must involve “The Jerry Springer Holistic Approach to Audience Participation Group Therapy.”

    • Prime time?

      His audience of bored seniors (including my parents) and house husbands/wives have better things to watch like Shark Tank or the Housewives of Hellhole.

      Glad I don’t watch none streaming tv networks anymore.

       

    • There are plenty of bad psychiatrists and good psychologists, but I’ve long felt the rotten state of the leadership of the American Psychological Association after September 11 says something about the overall makeup of the membership.

      When the Bush Administration went looking for collaborators to create a legal pretext for illegal torture, the American Psychiatric Association did its duty and said no. The American Psychological Association figured there would be some juicy contracts, and said ethics, schmethics, and not only agreed to allow members to observe of torture but signed off on letting members develop methods of torture.

      And when the leadership finally got called to the mat, they spent years trying weasel out of opening their books on what they did and putting unequivocal standards in place for the future.

      • Psychiatry involves a much higher level of training. They are MDs, for example, and can prescribe drugs, among other things. They have hospital privileges. Their testimony in legal cases is considered more valuable and is not readily dismissed by a judge.

        I know a few psychiatrists (my downstairs neighbors among them, and there’s at least one more in the building, and then I know a couple of others from friends) and I once asked one of them 20 or so years ago, “Without betraying any client/patient confidences, have you ever said to someone, ‘I’m sorry, but I think we’ve gone as far as we can go and I think you’re wasting your money’?” I’ve asked all of them subsequently. All of them have said they’d done it at least once. Someone like Dr. Phil? Oh no, he’d recommend intensive therapy five days a week, cash or check only, and he would conduct his sessions over a Zoom call with Fox news playing in the background.

         

        • There are definitely bad psychiatrists out there — I suspect it’s a field like surgery which tends to collect more weird personalities than pediatricians. But I think there’s a tendency for psychology to attract more Dr. Phil types looking to get rich off of self help programs.

          One of my pet peeves is with the field of evolutionary psychology, which seems to attract a lot of really shady characters. Again, not all of them — some engage in genuine basic science. But it’s also full of PR hungry types who send surveys to college kids and then run data sets until they can come up a few P values that back up their preestablished idiotic theories.

          • I also know a lot of social workers (how could I not; I live in New York and that’s what kind-hearted white girls from wealthy backgrounds who went to small, expensive, private liberal arts colleges studied in the 1980s) and there’s a lot of psychology involved in that. Unfortunately, there’s been a movement for years now that the best place for a child, no matter how abusive the household, is with a birth parent, and to place a non-white child with a stable, prosperous, loving white family is the equivalent of genocide. To just give one example.

            On the psychiatry side, I’m reminded of a friend of mine whose father was a child psychiatrist. In public he was a great bon vivant, and everyone who met him who wasn’t his child wished their fathers could be like him. In reality, well, that would be my friend’s story to tell, so if she’s reading this maybe she will.

  3. …after how many years of doing this I still have to think for a second about the backwards (yeah I said backwards) date scheme we use on this site. 1/2/23 = February 1st, 2023.

    I stand with Meg.

    • …I guess the date thing seems a bit like which side of the road you drive on to me…in that it doesn’t particularly seem to matter so long as it’s consistent…at least I don’t know of anything that makes the roads work less well in one model over the other

      …but…if I had to try to pry some logic out of the thing…day-month-year is at least in order in the sense that days are shortest of the three, years longest, leaving months in the middle…so…it does sort of make sense…month-day-year seems a trifle arbitrary…if not really any more than february 1st or 1st february seems an arbitrary distinction

      …at least we don’t start with the year…that really would be confusing

      • Believe me, they do. I used to freelance for a British company and they asked me to title my invoices Day/Month/Year, two digits each, and then my initials. So, for example, 01_02_23_MC. The first time I forgot this, so I submitted an invoice like 02_23_20_MC and I got a sternly written email back from the Bob Cratchit in the A/P department (God knows what they called that) informing me that in the Gregorian calendar there is no 23rd month and I should submit a revised invoice.

  4. I’ve probably told this story before, but I attend comic conventions in various places, but mostly around Orlando.

    The saddest thing I ever saw was Cindy Williams, Donny Most, and Anson Williams sitting at signing tables alone at the Central Florida Fairgrounds. Nobody was talking to them, nobody was in line for their signatures, nobody was within about 30 feet of them. Pre-cell-phone, so I didn’t get a picture (sometimes you can get in trouble if you snap pictures without paying for the privilege, but I don’t know how they could have stopped me). I’ve never seen them listed as guests for anything again, so I assume they stopped doing it, at least in this area.

    It’s hard to fathom how people can go from one of the most watched TV shows in America to being ignored in a repurposed cattle barn in Central Florida. And Cindy Williams left Laverne & Shirley before it ended. It has to screw with your head. I think about that a lot when I read about has-been stars that get into trouble.

    • Cindy Williams had a lot of problems with Laverne & Shirley. She didn’t particularly care for her co-star, Penny Marshall, who was another nepo-baby, because her father Gerry Marshall produced the show. She didn’t have a lot of clout, let’s put it that way.

      Having come relatively fresh off 1973’s American Graffiti, where she played a teenager in the 1950s (she was 26) now she was cast as a young woman living in the 1950s/early 1960s with a roommate but not a same-sex sex partner, desite the fact that they only had one bedroom. A spin-off from Happy Days, in which her American Graffiti co-star Ron Howard began his ascent and went on to spawn his own nepo-baby, Dallas Bryce Howard, she’s now pushing 30 and Penny Marshall about 33. Penny Marshall, despite being about as Jewish as Golda Meir, was cast as an Italian American, Laverne DiFazio. That did not pass unnoticed in the halls of the local Knights of Columbus hangout that my parents’ friends frequented.

      Penny, with a huge assist from Dad, went on to become a successful producer herself. Cindy, forever typecast as a peppy, somewhat dim 50s teenager/young adult, was not so lucky. Well, lucky in the sense that she outlived Penny, who went first, and then her father Gerry, so I guess it’s all relative.

      • Yeah, Cindy also sued Gerry Marshall for a LOT of money which was eventually settled. Although reports said she and Penny “reconciled,” I seriously doubt there was any significant reconciliation. Accounts I’ve read over the years said Cindy was “difficult to work with,” but I take that with a grain of salt — lots of women picked up that label for simply standing up for themselves. And she was pregnant when she left the show. so I suspect she was in fact mistreated, and the settlement tends to support that.

        • You, my friend, should do a Celebrity Sunday Matinee. I could use a little backup. You could make something up, like “This is What Cindy Williams Might Have Eaten at Some Point,” provide a juicy bio, and then fill in with a recipe that you know.

    • DeSantis will come after public libraries next. Which would be government overreach, since they are county and city run, but then schools are ostensibly run by the counties as well. DeSantis isn’t even bothering to pretend what he’s doing is legal — the courts are now stacked all the way to the Supreme Taliban, so nobody is going to stop him. And again, there’s no organization among Democrats here, so we’re screwed.

      At this point I can only hope the rest of the country sees this and refuses to nominate this scum. Trump is a buffoon — I cannot possibly overstate how dangerous DeSantis is. If he makes it to the White House the country will become the Kingdom of Gilead (or Pakistan, like in Loveshaq’s post).

      • …somehow I’d always assumed the potential president of the nightmare scenario would most likely come from texas

        …I don’t know if that would be a case of underestimating florida or overestimating texas in terms of producing scumbag politicians

        …but I guess somewhere that produces that abbott asshat & also manages to churn out a joe r lansdale maybe isn’t any stranger than desantis emerging from the same place as a carl hiaasen?

        …either way donnie dotard is floundering & I still figure is looking at a better chance of conviction than election…but the field isn’t doing much public jockeying for position or ostensible fundraising presidential race-wise…at least from what I’ve seen…which kind of concerns me what with florida’s erstwhile dictator looking like the man to beat for that nomination

        …I’d say it couldn’t happen…but…I think my belief in there being a “too low” for the bar to sink may never recover from the beating it’s taken the last few years?

      • No kidding. Far too much of the narrative is about trying to make him some kind of clever conman and the rest of the GOP as dupes.

        By all accounts he was as subtle as the three kids in Bojack Horseman posing as an adult who stood on each other’s shoulders covered by a trenchcoat.

        The question shouldn’t be why did he think he could get away with this. It’s why did McCarthy and the NY GOP think they could get away with it? And why is the press so eager to run with a bad storyline?

        • The best part about this is that it is a direct result of right wing SCOTUS declaring that it was totally cool for Ted Cruz to exceed the statutory limit on self financing of campaigns. They absolutely knew this would happen and it was the intended result. They just didn’t expect it to be done by such a cartoonish dipshit.

        • Short answer is I don’t think the party nationally or locally knew enough to worry and he was running in a district in which they didn’t expect things to go their way … and then he got a lot more spotlight than they were bargaining for. They certainly don’t care about it IF you’re helping the party, but he’s not Mango Unchained and I think they see him as a distraction/liability so they might actually have to do something about it.

          • They won’t have to do much. Knowingly submitting fraudulent campaign finance reports is a federal crime. It’s pretty clear Santos did that, over and over.

            Which also fucks up the “clever conman” narrative. He’s not the Talented Mr. Ripley — he’s more like Otis from the Superman movies. Comic relief.

            Anyway, if he gets arrested for election fraud, even Barely Speaker Qevin will have to do something. And then the Governor of New York gets to schedule a special election, and I doubt the Republicans will be able to pull off an upset again.

            So really Qevin can continue chasing nude pictures of Hunter Biden and let matters take their course. His margin will get narrower, but that’s going to happen anyway through natural attrition.

  7. It’s the 1st day of February, 2023.

    End of discussion.

    Really the slugs would be all messed up if it were the WRONG AMERICAN way which is why I insisted it be this VERY MUCH CORRECT way if we were to keep dates in the headings.

    One good reason it is important for slugs to match theme & WP settings is because otherwise it turns the site into a confusing nightmare for anyone who requires accessibility features.

    Sorry for the inconvenience.

    The important thing is that everyone is aware that this is today’s DOT.

    I hope everyone has a very wonderful 1st day of February, 2023.

    🙂

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