Wait, Tolkien was English. He didn’t mean “Shire” to be pronounced like we Americans do it?

I just saw a sign this morning that said “Irish Wristwatch - now you know you can’t pronounce it”. The sign was right.

Our ancestors’ brains went from chimpanzee-sized to modern-sized (actually slightly bigger than today) between two million and one million years ago, and more importantly the language-governing areas increased in size during that stretch. So human beings a million years ago were very much like us today, just without the advanced technology.

My favorite was “a sucking chest wound is Nature’s Way of telling you you’ve been in a firefight”.

Galluspetat

I always liked how archaeologists would dig up ancient statues of big-breasted and big-butted women and call them evidence of a “cult of fertility”. I guess that sounds better than “porn”.

As a school bus driver, I work with a bunch of older people who are already utterly dependent on social security and medicare to have any semblance of a life that doesn’t involve living in a tent in the park and dumpster diving for dinner. They are mostly trumpers. We’re all Teamsters as well, and a few are married lesbians (and these are the most rabidly pro-trump of all). I have made a few attempts to convince them that trump (and Republicans for fucking decades) are out to destroy social security, medicare, unions and gay rights (among lots of other things) - but they reacted to me like I had grown an extra head. Somehow they’ve convinced themselves that the GOP is the original source and the protector of these things.

Why would he go to prison when he can flee to Russia and spend the rest of his misbegotten life there?

Fun fact: through the 1800s coal-powered steamships mostly replaced sailing vessels for the transportation of people and time-sensitive cargo around the world. But steamships were highly inefficient and required frequent re-coaling, and locally available coal was dirtier and contained less thermal energy than the good stuff that Britain (who was doing by far most of the shipping) got from Wales and other places on their island. Because steamships could not efficiently and cheaply haul the coal that they needed around the world to restock the coaling stations, this was done instead by an enormous fleet of sailing colliers. So the “steam revolution” of the 1800s was actually a steam/wind-power hybrid. It wasn’t until the advent of triple- and quadruple-expansion steam engines, turbines, and greatly improved boilers in the early 1900s that steam-powered vessels could efficiently and economically haul their own fuel. And even with that, wind-powered cargo vessels remained economically viable and operating in significant numbers right up until the start of WWII (that’s II, not I).

A great read is The Last Grain Race by Eric Newby, about his time as a sailor aboard Moshulu (a large steel sail-powered cargo ship) in 1938-1939. Moshulu went on to star in The Godfather Part II as the ship which brings young Vito Corleone to New York, and is now weirdly enough a floating restaurant in my city of Philadelphia (I’ve never eaten there but I want to).

The Palestinians have taken to the streets to sing songs in your honor. You’ve saved them!

Heh, according to the guy who sold me the house, he had to put the grey vinyl flooring in because of water damage from a portable AC unit.

grey vinyl flooring

I hate that shit even more than I hated the fake wood paneling and shag carpet of the '70s. I bought a house last year that had the grey vinyl flooring in the living room and I’ve tried my hardest to fuck it up during the renovation so I have to replace it, but unfortunately it holds up to extreme abuse pretty well.

I have Republican acquaintances who still make fucking Clinton/Lewinksi jokes. I’m not sure they’ve ever even heard of Epstein.

Yesterday I watched some lady hand-wave away Trump’s actions by saying “we’re all sinners, and trump deserves our forgiveness just like we deserve Jesus’ forgiveness”.

A couple of weeks ago I watched fucking John Fetterman make essentially the same argument, saying that we shouldn’t harp on Trump’s status as a convicted felon because Democrats are supposed to be “the party of forgiveness and redemption”. It’s hard to watch (some, not all) Democrat leaders falling over themselves in their attempts to give away political advantage.

Might be mango lassi - possibly the greatest drink on earth.

It’s almost as bad as provolone on a cheesesteak.

He’ll flee to Russia before he does a day in prison. And I think that would be better for the country as it would clearly expose him as a traitor - and some of his cultists might follow him there.

Altavista is telling me I should vote for Bill Clinton.

If ya liked it then ya shoulda put ring mail on it
If ya liked it then ya shoulda put ring mail on it
If ya liked it then ya shoulda put ring mail on it
If ya liked it then ya shoulda put ring mail on it

Edit: before any nerds weigh in, I know that’s not ring mail.

while Superman himself is invulnerable, the rest of the world isn’t

Larry Niven wrote a great essay many years ago about the physical realities of being Superman. My favorite bit was about how him having sex with Lois Lane would have resulted in her head being blown off.