It’s so brilliant, you want to kick yourself for not coming up with it first!
With a heavy heart and a good amount of sadness, Somara and I are no longer married. The final decree is in her side’s hands now to make this all 100% complete but for all practical reasons, purposes, etc. it’s done. The division of money, property, debts, LEGO sets, whatever are in stone. I also learned that neither of us can make any claims of infidelity too which thankfully was never an issue with us. We had disagreements even during the good years but one thing our marriage lacked was jealousy or accusations of cheating. We both had strong moral fortitude in this department, a Maggi flaw I am grateful not to have since I have an idiot uncle with it. Word has it, the “gene” managed to skip all the cousins! Phew!
I still hope to be friends with Somara later. Currently, matters are rather raw. Hell, I’m amazed I can sit down after what it cost me and according to my other divorced friends, I got off light plus I got to keep my house. Somara remains a good person and we were friends too, I want to hold on the friendship which made the relationship work, just give me some days to heal.
Thanks for all your support.
Now I would watch that show and play the annoying iOS game!
Alright alright alright. No, don’t say it like Matthew McConaughey. I’m just posting something a tad nicer after my rather heavy screed on how Kapitalism gets a pass in America. This was pretty inspiring to see on someone’s minivan around Austin.
The answer……BOTH!
Last weekend, I went to a little toy convention at the makeshift convention space in what used to be Northcross Mall and these two operations where in other halls on a Saturday. Hey, at least my money went toward good things.
I gave this machine a whirl while I was at WizWorld last weekend. The verdict? Humans don’t have much to fear with this hunk of mediocrity. Firstly, a person could’ve made my drink twice as fast. Secondly, it’s just eye candy alongside those now gone greeting card machines from the Nineties (I loved those though, especially when it could draw Beavis & Butt-head). Lastly, the drink cost more than Starbucks, probably due to this being downtown and in the convention center; it wasn’t memorable beyond it also misspelling my last name which it should’ve known via my credit card. It’s definitely the ED-209, not the actual Robobarrista to cheer on.
Times sure have changed since I was a teenager/college student. Back when the SCLM wrote about Dungeons & Dragons, it was 99% of time the Santanic Panic bullshit or how it was a factor in some misfit’s demise. Well, lazy journalism remains as long as Judith Miller lives and breeds.
It was nice to see something positive about one of my favorite hobbies, even if it is encased in the rather unimpressive Fifith Edition rules. Good press is better than bad press or no press since bad festers in ignorance.
There’s an old grade-school joke regarding the Bride of Frankenstein (which I guess was supposed to be the monster’s bride). Ready?
Why did the Bride freak out when she saw the monster for the first time?
Because his nuts were on his neck!
I didn’t say the joke was good or necessarily very clever. I did score this at WizWorld though and it was one of the bigger highlights since this year’s guests were decent but not anything to go crazy about.
This one has the sisters on each side
Frozen is one of the weakest animated movies Disney has made in a long time because the story isn’t terribly interesting, original nor worthy of repeat viewings. The music is even worse, “The Let It Go” song is sooooooo shitty and poorly written. However, it’s a success with little kids and little IQs like its male equivalent Cars. So why did I get Chucks of the sequel? Design trumps the source’s quality in other avenues. I mean, c’mon! I’m not crazy about The Doors or Gorillaz yet I have their shoes.
Besides, it’s always fun to have something to show little girls when I’m walking around the mall or someplace. I think they are amused whenever big people have such items.
The world learned a year later about US forces slaughtering My Lai with its logic of in order to save the village, we have to destroy the village. It just piled on all the bad news on how poorly and pointlessly the conflict had gone.
All the lessons went down the crapper though. The architect of the massacre, Lt. William L. Calley, was released from prison in 1974 and he remains a free man instead of rotting in prison where war criminals belong. Calley received plenty of aid from General Westmoreland and Colin Powell (Calley’s superior up the chain).
Another case in point, Orange Foolius is constantly pardoning and interfering with investigations of our forces in the numerous wars Obummer failed to get us out of while pulling us into at least two more. The moron element of America will never get it through its collective thick, dense skulls that you cannot win in the long run with such tactics. If they really worked, the Soviet Union would’ve controlled Afghanistan easily since those people have no concept of “freedom” as Faux News explains it.
Around this time the Royal Society of London and the Royal Astronomical Society announced their findings from a solar eclipse which occurred earlier in 1919 and it concurred that this patent clerk’s new concept of General Relativity appeared to be correct!
This was really a revolution in Physics too. Until then, the Scientific Community was mostly locked into the Newtonian view which to my understanding is rather constant, predictable and mechanical. You can read more about Einstein’s newfound celebrity here through Smithsonian and I’m confident there are better explanations on what he proved elsewhere. If you’re lazy and want the TLDR version from me, keep on reading because this is what I remembered from Astronomy class in high school.
For decades, everyone pretty much thought light was sort of invincible. As in it travelled in a straight line yet it could be bogged through the atmosphere (why its speed is measured in a vacuum) and refracted through a prism. I’m confident the particle versus wave debate was also occurring before 1919. What Einstein proposed and it required an eclipse to initially prove was gravity being capable of bending light. So photos were taken during the darkness caused by the Moon blocking out the Sun and…the stars behind our Sun (what constellations we’d see six earlier/later in the night sky) weren’t exactly where they should be. Thus, Einstein was on to something! Our mere Sun (compared to the Supergiants in Orion) had enough pull to bend the light emitted from stars years, decades, centuries away! It led to other implications regarding gravity. If it could bend light, it’s also bending space (all objects do) and here’s where my head begins to hurt, time. Time? Yes. Time progresses on Earth at a slower rate than for the astronauts living up in the International Space Station. It really isn’t terribly significant on the scale we humans exist on. I think the astronaut who has an identical twin came back only a second or two younger than his Earthbound counterpart and he had to be on ISS for over half a year. However, Einstein is dead on with this mattering for computers and satellites in that a millisecond, even nanosecond’s worth of accuracy is critical. Case in point, GPS satellites have to compensate for the Earth “getting ahead of them.”
Despite a century of evidence proving Einstein 99.9% correct, Phyllis Schaffley has a dipshit son who operates a right-wing Wikipedia site claiming General Relativity is a Liberal fiction and/or conspiracy. He better not depend on Google Maps or the GPS on his smart phone.
If you’ve never heard of him, Don is Canada’s beloved but racist uncle that was often a favorite feature to watch on Hockey Night in Canada. Before his final tirade, it was easier to give these parallels to most Americans…Don Cherry = Canadian John Madden; HNIC = Monday Night Football. When he wasn’t bitching about his nation’s predominant political perspective, he was more of a pundit lamenting over the ‘good ol’ days’ when there were no helmets, composite sticks or Swedes. You could also purchase DVDs of great fights with him as the host.
What the 80-year-old grouch had to say wasn’t terribly new regarding immigrants. Sadly, Canada has always had a xenophobia batch amongst them too and it consolidated into a louder, stronger faction of shitheads around Ontario called Ford Nation. Yeah. Named after their (thankfully) dead, former Toronto mayor who was caught on camera smoking crack by Gawker and the Toronto Star. Not a surprise, the Ford family has been known to be involved with drug dealing in addition to their pump-and-dump investment scams.
With Don, I think he was overdue to retire. People his age and from his former profession, hockey player in the Fifties, are more likely to suffer from dementia. Despite being Canadian, he was born a little before the Boomers which made him more likely to harbor such a crappy, outdated and racist attitude. Canada like America is changing. Either welcome the newcomers to help them synthesize their Canadian-ness or build up useless walls (mental, economic) which results in France’s ongoing problems with their few million Arabs and Africans.
One of JFK’s more positive legacies was his push for more Public Television stations around the US and LBJ helped make it happen with the development of PBS, America’s first “state” network. The other I would go out on a limb would be C-SPAN and maybe NASA, which was always free with DISH.
An immediate benefit was Sesame Street! I grew up with it. My brother did. Practically everyone in Generation X did. It’s easy to keep kids’ attention with the Muppets doing hilarious things.
By mimicking how advertising worked (in the late Sixties), the repetition helped children get a leg up on pre-school and kindergarten on their letters, numbers, colors, shapes and basic social interaction (nowadays, Trumpkins and the Right would call cooperation socialism).
When I was in university, Dr. Thorne said the plan was to help the inner-city and rural poor catch up with the middle class. Overall, it did work well but unfortunately, the affluent pulled further ahead because their parents could afford the additional materials the brand offered. I remember my folks got us this really cool toy in which the letters of the alphabet had legs and they’d walk down a ramp. When they stopped at the bottom, you’d insert this plastic key-like thing to see if you spelled the word correctly. It wasn’t terribly difficult. Even semi-literate people can make symbols match. Anyway, if there was an incorrect letter, these pegs tied to the key would knock the letter over to let you know you misspelled the word. We also had to hardback books filled with illustrations of Bert & Ernie, Big Bird, etc. to reinforce the show’s lessons.
Given the rise of cable, streaming, income inequality and the idiotic litany of “lower my taxes!” (code for, don’t spend money on people darker than me!)…Sesame Street doesn’t have many new episodes made lately. I story I read a few years ago stated it’s a low as 20. Then came a horrible blow to show how much America hates poor people, HBO would be producing new episodes and these wouldn’t be available to Public Television for months. We’re supposed to be grateful that HBO (now part of the AT&T empire) is releasing them at all, in their benign corporate largesse.
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting has achieved its goal to widen educational offerings yet this material is now in private hands via Disney, Viacom with Nick, Jr. and however else AT&T and Comcast distribute this. It just isn’t free or easily available to those getting by in our bullshit economy; unemployment may be “low” but the wages don’t reflect reality.
I’m still grateful to all the work Jim Henson and his Muppet crew put into this, the writers, all the actors/actresses who’ve come and gone; my Uncle Skip went to high school with Bob! Sesame Street was essential to entertaining us and it was super effective because it was teaching us without us knowing, the best kind of learning since most children are turned off by education.
The show’s essentials laid down the groundwork for what would lead to the next level in Generation X’s edification…Schoolhouse Rock.
Regardless of who gets the nod for the Democratic nomination, I highly doubt getting Sesame Street back into the hands of the people is a priority given all the other things the NeoLiberals and Republicans have let fall into crappiness.
Holy frickin’ crap along with BULLSHIT! The Trumpkin Dictatorship made the US State Department go on in a remembrance of Communism’s victims? Talk about how ignorant, partisan and un-self-aware such an asinine stance is!
Where to begin with the inaccuracies with such a lazy attempt that only successfully gins up the MAGA shitheads. The Economist of course has no shame in being the water boy for runaway Kapitalism as their standard apologist stance is (with a Thurston Howell III voice); well, it’s better than the freedom-destroying Communism.
Really?
OK, sure I’m being a big bummer in the same vein as say Noam Chomsky or Bernie Sanders. Plus all who know me, I’ve never been a fan of Stalin, Mao, Trotsky, Lenin and their followers, is also a given. It’s just irritating to see such simpleton bullshit being made policy by thieves who know damned well that Kapitalism is a different form of slavery and it isn’t Freedom or Democracy’s friend. Its only freedom is getting a choice of which color your chains are. They can co-exist but we need to remember Democracy, Justice, Equality and Freedom should be in the driver’s seat, not Kapitalism Uber Alles.
Woo hoo! Not bad, not bad! Managed another 1000 miles for the year within three-ish months. I’m glad to be pushing the envelope for an annual accomplishment. My determination has put me past Honolulu and Cork with Amsterdam as the next target for the cumulative biking.
I doubt I’ll be anywhere close to 4000 so I’m already mentally gearing up to beat what 2019 closes out with by exceeding it by five to ten percent.
