Yikes, Monday! [DOT 30/8/21]

30/8/21 MegMegMcGee 36

Lights Out; stay safe everyone!

Nearly 1 million people without power as Hurricane Ida charges inland
https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2021/08/29/hurricane-ida-live-updates/

Fucking around…

Florida radio host who called himself ‘Mr Anti-Vax’ dies of Covid-19
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/aug/29/conservative-radio-host-anti-vaxxer-dies-covid-marc-bernier

…and more finding out…

Texas man who led anti-mask protests in name of ‘freedom’ dies of Covid-19
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/aug/29/texas-caleb-wallace-anti-mask-protests-freedom-dies-covid-19

#RIP Ed Asner

https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/29/entertainment/ed-asner-death/index.html

Have a great day!

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36 Comments

  1. i’ve been following ida on oppo…live updates kind of thing…they’ve gone quiet now…but with the whole state apparently being out of power..i guess thats not hugely surprising..
    in a little tidbit i came across on my local news…apparently it was so windy it reversed the flow of the missipi for a while
    stay safe out there….lot of water coming

    • welp…one of the two oppos i was following seems to be safe and sound…just waiting for the other to check in now

  2. Can I offer another daily edition of the Cuomo Criminality Report?

    There is a particularly loathsome co-conspirator still running amok named James Malatras. Not long ago he was the President of of the State University of New York’s (hereafter called SUNY, as it is known) Empire State College, which is an online “institution of learning” and so is SUNY’s answer to Trump University. As if the education you get a some SUNYs isn’t worthless enough

    President Malatras was chosen by Emperor Andreus Marcus Maximus to serve on his Covid-19 Advisory Panel. The sexual harassment stories started rolling in. Malatras started calling County Executives (New York likes nothing better than a good, bloated bureaucracy; these are like governors of counties, rather than states). During discussions of what their counties might need to fight Covid-19 a not-subtle question was asked: “So what do you think about Governor Cuomo?”

    All perfectly innocent, Malatras assures us, though at least one County Executive didn’t see it that way, and blew the whistle by going public.

    At some point Malatras was one of the ghostwriters on Cuomo’s self-serving Covid-19 memoir, The Ecstasy and Me, or whatever it was called. For this perfectly innocent endeavor, he most certainly did not do this on the state’s dime, and did not dragoon any of his employees to foul their hands with this, he shows up in the damning Inspector General’s Report five times. It was the IG report that finally lanced the boil of Cuomo’s Reign of Terror.

    Shortly after selflessly “taking PTO” to ghostwrite I Am the Way, the Truth, and the Life, or whatever the memoir was called, the SUNY Board, controlled, like everything else, by Emperor Andreus Marcus Maximus, appointed him Chancellor of the entire 64-campus system. 

    So he’s gotta go. It’s too bad Trump University went down in flames so spectacularly because it seems like he would be a good fit. I guess there’s always SNHU, which seems to be thriving, judging by the many ads that show up late at night on third-tier cable stations. 

     

    • What happened to the abandoned dog?

      • Captain? That is a great mystery. Captain is a Siberian/Shepherd mix and is…”troublesome.” Supposedly Cuomo asked his staffers if they wanted him and, since Cuomo no longer retained life-and-death powers over their careers, it was a hard no. So as far as anyone knows Cuomo just left him in the Executive Mansion. But I think Hochul is living there now and she probably would have noticed him prowling about.

        When asked about this, Rich “Baghdad Bob” Azzopardi, Cuomo’s spokesman, characteristically snarled at the press, as Captain would have done, and claimed this was all a misunderstanding and that this was a temporary arrangement while Handsy was taking a well-earned vacation.

        The “arrangement” wasn’t spelled out. I take time off to stay with siblings, like it is assumed Handsy is doing with his sister, Maria (Mrs. Kenneth) Cole in Purchase, NY. I don’t call it a vacation, though. I call it, “I need somewhere to stay for the family reunion/family wedding/Christmas because Better Half wants no part of this.”

        Now I would like to invoke Godwin’s Law if I may, your Honor. There were some animals in Hitler’s bunker in Berlin. One of the secretaries had a dog; Eva Braun had a pair, and Hitler had his beloved Goldie. One of the residents of the bunker was a veterinarian. I don’t want to revisit this but I believe that Hitler himself shot Goldie lest s/he fall into the hands of the Soviets. Maybe Captain no longer wanders among us on this temporal plane. 

        • Well then, add animal cruelty and murder to his rap sheet. 

    • For this perfectly innocent endeavor, he most certainly did not do this on the state’s dime, and did not dragoon any of his employees to foul their hands with this, 

      When even David Paterson calls bullshit on that, you know it’s baloney. 

    • …what I don’t get is that after whoever jumps back into the vehicle in the middle of the frame & pulls away the truck with the blade seems to be pulling off the tracks just fine…so why was it sitting there in the first place?

      • I’m continually dumbfounded by people who simply freeze in the most bizarre situations in vehicles. I’ve seen people simply stop in the middle of the road for emergency vehicles. Not pull over — just STOP and block the road. I’ve watched ambulances drive up on sidewalks to get around them, blowing the horn and trying to get them to move. The driver just stares. There’s video of one situation where a firetruck just pulls up behind a car, and PUSHES it out of the way so they can get to the emergency. It’s this weird “deer in headlights” reaction. They know they’re supposed to do something, but they can’t decide what, so they just freeze. 

      • If you look closely at the track signal on the left side of the screen, it gets knocked down by the blade when the truck gasses it to get out of the way.  So, I think their problem was they had stopped to try and figure out how to either go forward or backward without breaking something.

    • uhh…what the fuck?
      over here that kind of transport tends to be carefully planned and guided….you know….so a fucking train doesnt hit it
      guess you do things differently in murica

      • American exceptionalism! This is why we’re always top of the league in the Darwin Awards!

      • There are videos of boats and barges navigating Dutch canals and moving between docks and under bridges, and I’m sick with envy at how much better basic engineering is over there.
         
        Cousin Matt could probably write a few chapters of the Cuomo saga just on the way NY State has screwed up basic building projects.

        • Indeed I could! Chapter XVI: The Governor Mario M. Cuomo Bridge

          Rammed through the Legislature to replace the aging Tappan Zee Bridge which, to be fair, as they say in Letterkenny, ON, needed replacing. Stalled in the Legislature for decades; went up seemingly overnight. As was the power of His Divine Will, it was named the Governor Mario M. Cuomo Bridge. Why is this a problem?

          1. An anonymous engineer: “The thing isn’t even open yet and the fucking bolts are already falling off.”

          2. The Tappan Zee is both a reference to the Tappan, the indigenous people who lived there, and Zee by the Dutch, so it’s a nod toward the first and then the second settlers. Now it is a reference to a guy who was born to Italian parents in Queens, which is many miles from the Tappan Zee.

          3. Calls are coming from all quarters to rename it back to the Tappan Zee Bridge. “Imagine being a survivor of Andrew Cuomo’s assaults and abuse and driving over that thing and having to see the name ‘Cuomo’. It’s a disgrace.” I’m sure Mario’s widow/Handsy’s Mom is none too happy about the besmirching of the family name she married into.

          • Speaking of the Nominal Besmirchment, Handsy’s sis, Maria (Mrs. Kenneth) Cole seems have dropped Cuomo from all references to her. I’m almost sure she used to go by Maria Cuomo Cole, because the name is so mellifluous and that’s what made it memorable to me. But now I think she is formally Maria Cole. And she’s the one who’s apparently hosting Handsy while he decides on “next steps.”

            If Chris Cuomo is ever forced to walk the gangplank at CNN (fingers crossed!) he could take a page from Bill de Blasio’s book. Our soon-to-be-gone (but not soon enough) Mayor’s birth name was Warren Wilhelm, Jr. I can’t remember where the “Bill” came from but “de Blasio” is his mother’s maiden name. If Chris does this he will be Chris Raffa.

      • We have Freedumb here–especially in Texas–so we don’t need no stinkin’ gumbint to tell us how to do shit.

  4. Maybe I’m just out of sorts today, but I’m just not getting the same kind of schadenfreude buzz from all the stories about anti-vax/anti-mask people croaking from COVID that I was a few weeks back.
    Plus, I’m scared to death about my wife having to give three lectures today.  Her students are masked and vaxxed, but…  I haven’t really been all that afraid of COVID until recently.

    • it stopped being funny a while back i think
      but when your options are point and laugh or curl up into a ball and cry
      its probably better to go out laughing

    • Good luck to her. It definitely is anxiety inducing. 

    • I’m kind of winding up on the opposite end of that spectrum.  Fuck ’em all for being this belligerently ignorant.  I’ve tried being nice about it and I’m done.

      I’m guessing that Natasha isn’t allowed to do remote lectures?

      • similar here.  COVID restrictions are finally starting to wear on me, and I think it’s starting to affect my temper…
         
        While I’m still worried about kids who are too young to be vaccinated (and being pushed back into in-person schooling…), and people with legitimate medical issues, if some dumbass is going to be spouting conspiracy theories and other nonsense, and then try to self-medicate with agricultural antihelminthics…  well, fuck’em – shitting their pants in the grocery store is the best they deserve, and they should be laughed at, at this point.

        • …it’s genuinely hard to summon sympathy for people who could have been vaccinated but opted not to for a bunch of reasons that boil down to bullshit…or to even understand why you wouldn’t take a vaccine that had been tested even before it was given to millions of people but would subject yourself to a medication used for livestock that has been shown to be harmful to people & not to have any benefits in terms of covid

          …but when there are millions of people all over the world who aren’t even in a position to get vaccinated that seems like it goes beyond hubris or willful ignorance & into something actively malignant…so I get the anger

          …what I find hard to wrap my head around though is how kids deemed too young to require vaccination but somehow stuck with being exposed to the virus in schools must feel when told that they won’t even be mandating wearing masks…in their shoes I’d be beyond angry

          …I think any satisfaction I’d get from the consequences of these people’s fatal idiocy landing on them personally is wiped out by the knowledge that it’s also landing on people who know how fucking dumb it is…the collateral damage angle is too much for me…not least because of the implied selfishness of the idiots in question…which seems like it’s outliving a bunch of them?

    • Dammit!  So many reggae greats are getting up there in age, I hope this doesn’t come in 3’s!

    • woah….kid rock has a band?
      i wasnt aware he made music

      • Well, he apparently has half a band at this point. But I share your amazement. 

      • Truly, I wasn’t aware he still toured. I thought he was just working the tech start-up circuit for has-beens-for-hire. 


    • Just posting this here for the hell of it. Very Vanilla Ice meets Chris “Kid” Kelly. 
       

      • Well, crap. 

  7. This is a strange story. ESPN broadcast a high school football game but one of the teams “Bishop Sycamore” apparently doesn’t really exist.
     
    https://footballscoop.com/news/bishop-sycamore-online-only-prep-school-espn-img-academy
     
    The players weren’t robots or Golden Retrievers, but everything else about them is a mystery.
     
    There is a modern capitalism angle to this story. Apparently ESPN has outsourced all of the vetting and scheduling of these games to an outside consulting company, which seems to have not even bothered to do a basic online search before collecting its fee. But I’m sure some exec at ESPN got a bonus for shrinking headcount, nevermind how that played out in real life.

    • I’m trying to understand why a bunch of kids would pretend to be a high school team. What’s the point? Surely colleges check such things, much less pro scouts. Why would they do it? 

  10. tiktoks that made karens hate tiktok?


    i mean…i am highly amused
    but i probably need to find a hobby

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