Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

I’d try pessimism, but it probably wouldn’t work.

I’d hate to be the candidate who lost to this guy.

No one could have predicted…

You don’t get to peddle hatred on saturday and offer condolences on sunday.

Usually wrong but never in doubt

Bad news for Ron DeSantis is great news for America.

Why is it so hard for them to condemn hate?

It’s always darkest before the other shoe drops.

Too often we hand the biggest microphones to the cynics and the critics who delight in declaring failure.

So it was an October Surprise A Day, like an Advent calendar but for crime.

When I decide to be condescending, you won’t have to dream up a fantasy about it.

“Jesus paying for the sins of everyone is an insult to those who paid for their own sins.”

Never entrust democracy to any process that requires republicans to act in good faith.

Is it negotiation when the other party actually wants to shoot the hostage?

Come on, media. you have one job. start doing it.

The revolution will be supervised.

The party of Reagan has become the party of Putin.

“Everybody’s entitled to be an idiot.”

Roe isn’t about choice, it’s about freedom.

Make the republican party small enough to drown in a bathtub.

I know this must be bad for Joe Biden, I just don’t know how.

There are consequences to being an arrogant, sullen prick.

Jesus, Mary, & Joseph how is that election even close?

A consequence of cucumbers

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92Comments

  3. 3.

    Wile E. Quixote

    How can you say that when

    WordPress is a state-of-the-art publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time.

    It’s free and priceless at the same time. In fact it’s overwhelmingly likely that it’s freeness and pricelessness have increased by 50 percent in the last month!

    The company I’m working for is thinking of setting up a a site using WordPress. I’m kind of intimidated by this because I might have to learn PHP. And you know what PHP is like. I mean you get jacked up on PHP and you go crazy can’t feel any pain. In fact I heard this story about a young buck who was using food stamps to buy PHP and when the cops finally busted him he was so out of control that he snapped his handcuffs, kicked the door off of a cop car was shot five times and then ran three blocks before dropping dead of a massive heart attack.

  10. 10.

    MikeJ

    @Wile E. Quixote: WP works fine on a reasonably specc’ed server with a moderate load. The biggest problem is that everybody who extends it in anyway whatsoever thinks “one more database call won’t hurt anything”.

    I was working on a campaign’s website where they populated a drop down table of state names form the database. Every fucking page load we had to check and see if any new states had been added since .005 seconds ago.

    Today’s developers are too spoiled by having fast machines and honestly don’t know how to be stingy. Stingy makes code small and fast. Yes, premature optimisation is the root of all evil, but you need to know what to look for when you need to do it.

  12. 12.

    MattR

    @freelancer: All you really need to know is that she shoots smack.

    Actually, it is a book for teens that was turned into an afterschool TV special that I had to watch during health class in 9th grade.

  13. 13.

    Brian J

    1. Does anyone remember the name of the ab workout book that was being advertised on the sides of this blog? I haven’t seen that one in a while, but I wanted to get it.

    2. And how’s this for something depressing? Today, at a family event, I heard a couple of conservative family members remark that they would go to Tea Party events if they had the time. I’m going to believe that consider these events and the people that attend them in an entirely different way than I do. How else can I get over the fact that well educated, cultured, seemingly normal people would buy into that bullshit?

    At least two cool but fairly distant relatives, a doctor who teaches surgery at Harvard but wasn’t there and an architect who designs all of the stores for Marc Jacobs, are Democrats. So is, from what I heard, the wife of one of my cousins who lives in Maryland who is supposedly pals with Bob Erlich, the governor who might be challenging O’Malley in the fall.

  18. 18.

    Wile E. Quixote

    @MikeJ:

    Today’s developers are too spoiled by having fast machines and honestly don’t know how to be stingy. Stingy makes code small and fast.

    I have a friend who does embedded system development. One day I was bitching about some code that the developers at my employer rolled out that averaged that averaged 128Mb per running instance and which leaked memory like a sieve. Tom was excited because a new line of industrial controllers that he was working with had been improved and now had 32k of onboard memory. I’d love to learn embedded systems programming. I think that if you could master that then any other field of programming would be a cinch.

  20. 20.

    MattR

    @MattR: Someone will have to confirm this as my memory is a bit hazy, but IIRC it was all a vicious rumor and Dinky Hocker does not in fact shoot smack.

  21. 21.

    Brian J

    @demkat620:

    I laugh at the comments here (in a good way) probably more than I do at anything else. There’s the appropriate amount of sarcasm, snark, and cynicism for each issue. I knew I was addicted when I kept on thinking, “Damn, if only I was at home reading and writing about this with the other people on Balloon Juice.” Instead, I come home, laptop or iphone in my lap, and stay up until 2:00 AM reading through what everyone writes. Damn productivity killer, that’s what this site is.

  22. 22.

    cleek

    @Wile E. Quixote:
    my first job out of school was doing embedded C on a machine with 64K of memory (which included the program itself, the OS, video memory and data storage). it was … a challenge.

    these days, i cringe when i have to load a 7MB data table into memory. but i do it anyway, and the PC doesn’t even blink.

  25. 25.

    Wile E. Quixote

    @Task Force Ripper:

    Dude, is the link to your site some kind of really meta, post-modern irony thing meant as a comment on John’s problems with WordPress? If it is then bravo, if not then you might want to fix this.

    Warning: main(./forum/includes/sessions.php): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/content/r/i/p/ripperskipper/html/common.php on line 192
    __
    Warning: main(): Failed opening ‘./forum/includes/sessions.php’ for inclusion (include_path=’.:/usr/local/lib/php’) in /home/content/r/i/p/ripperskipper/html/common.php on line 192
    __
    Warning: main(./forum/includes/db.php): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/content/r/i/p/ripperskipper/html/common.php on line 195
    __
    Warning: main(): Failed opening ‘./forum/includes/db.php’ for inclusion (include_path=’.:/usr/local/lib/php’) in /home/content/r/i/p/ripperskipper/html/common.php on line 195
    __
    Warning: main(./forum/includes/functions_selects.php): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/content/r/i/p/ripperskipper/html/common.php on line 199
    __
    Warning: main(): Failed opening ‘./forum/includes/functions_selects.php’ for inclusion (include_path=’.:/usr/local/lib/php’) in /home/content/r/i/p/ripperskipper/html/common.php on line 199
    __
    Fatal error: Call to a member function on a non-object in /home/content/r/i/p/ripperskipper/html/includes/mx_functions.php on line 88

  31. 31.

    MattR

    I absolutely refuse to go to Redstate, but I do wish that someone would post the excerpt that John originally quoted in this post before WordPress ate it.

  32. 32.

    Martin

    @Wile E. Quixote: PHP is fine. I do a fair bit of it and even having come from the world of real programming languages, I don’t take umbrage with it.

    But don’t go anywhere near WordPress, IMO. They’ve had these problems for years and made only marginal progress. I went with Drupal and am very happy with that choice. Never had the site go down and never had any major compatibility problem. It’s a bit more heavy duty than WP, but I don’t think it’s any harder to use in spite of that.

    My .02

  33. 33.

    Tx Expat

    @Eric U.:

    De-lurking to chime in here. I’m glad to know that I’m not the only one. It’s very odd as it just started happening a few days ago and only when I click to read comments.

  35. 35.

    Randy P

    @Wile E. Quixote:
    Just because my mind free-associates in weird ways, that made me think of the legend of San Miniato al Monte (St. Minias of the mountain) in Florence:

    In about 250, he arrived in Florence and took up life as a hermit. He became a victim of the persecutions of the Emperor Decius (249-251 A.D.) and was beheaded. Legend has it that, after his decapitation, he picked up his head, put it back on his shoulders and went to die in the cave on Monte alle Croci where he had lived as a hermit. That cave is now the location of the oratory and the church that bear his name.

    If you’re ever in Florence and hate crowds, go up in the hills and check this place out. Listen to some Gregorian chant, go visit the nearby park of Piazzale Michelangelo which has a David statue you don’t have to wait 3 days and fight hordes of tourists to see.

  41. 41.

    Montysano

    Allman Brothers tonight, so wife and I are resting up in hopes of making it until midnight.

  42. 42.

    Randy P

    @MikeJ: Having cut my teeth on systems where we had to fight saber-tooth tigers for every byte, uphill in the snow both ways, I try to be stingy and at least THINK about resources. One of my programming rules when I’m working on teams, is anytime you tell me that you don’t have to worry about resource X (memory, disk space, number of open file handles, whatever), then sooner or later you’re going to run out of resource X.

    Can’t teach these damn whippersnappers though. Let ’em run out of memory. F*k em.

  45. 45.

    Brian J

    @Wile E. Quixote:

    How would you know that? And why would he be naked? I’ll admit, I sometimes get down to my underwear when cleaning the bathroom (if I am alone) but that’s because I can’t stand being in a wet t-shirt. I also usually find ways to almost strangle myself, which is the same reason I sleep in only underwear.

  47. 47.

    Wile E. Quixote

    @Martin:

    @Wile E. Quixote: PHP is fine. I do a fair bit of it and even having come from the world of real programming languages, I don’t take umbrage with it.

    I’ve been learning Ruby over the last year or so, but my heart belongs to Ada. Not because of the strong typing, easily readable syntax or maintainability of the language (although knowing Ada was handy when I was learning PL/SQL) but because of the nipple clips, jack boots, shock collar and riding crop that came with every fully validated compiler.

  48. 48.

    Randy P

    @Brian J:

    How would you know that?

    Allow me to pass on some Wisdom of the Elders, mostly gleaned from having more or less survived parenthood.

    Asketh Not a Question if Thou Wantest Not to Know the Answer.

  49. 49.

    stuckinred

    @Montysano: I’m sure you are dying to hear my ABB story. I saw them what I thought was three times with Duane. In NYC at the Manhattan Center, on Boston Common and at “the Barn” in Peoria. For years I told people that I just couldn’t see them without Duane. Last summer one of my buddies informed me that the concert in Peoria was after he died but before Barry Oakley did. All those years and I totally misremembered!

  50. 50.

    EIGRP

    @MikeJ:

    Yes, premature optimisation is the root of all evil, but you need to know what to look for when you need to do it.

    I have a friend who has this problem.

  51. 51.

    Brian J

    @Randy P:

    I’m pretty sure I’ve heard worse, and even if I haven’t, it takes a lot to offend me. Still, point taken.

  53. 53.

    Wile E. Quixote

    @Brian J:

    How would you know that? And why would he be naked?

    Well Cole did fess up to a predilection for naked mopping. Unfortunately my BJ search fu is weak and I can’t find the post where he admitted this. As to the rest, well, it would be irresponsible not to speculate.

  54. 54.

    Randy P

    @Brian J: I’m just joking. I have no idea but I started pondering possible answers to that question. I learned this rule the hard way. Examples of parental Questions You Don’t Want Answered: “What did you just put in your mouth?”
    “Why are you so late getting home from school?”
    “But what happened to the coat you were wearing this morning? And whose is this?”

  56. 56.

    Brian J

    @Wile E. Quixote:

    My best friend in our group of friends in college really, really liked to be naked, the point of absurdity. Yes, he’d be worse when he was drunk, but it was still far too frequent when he was sober. He’d get ready to take a shower but walk to the bathroom completely naked, no matter who was around. He’d often just randomly strip and start walking around naked, especially to freak me out. A couple of mutual friends who lived with him after most of us finished undergrad said they came home one day and found him on the couch, watching television without any clothes. The fact that he was–how should I put this?–huge in a couple of ways made it all the more awkward.

  58. 58.

    Brian J

    @Mark S.:

    I guess John Cole, Rahm “The Source of All Evil” Emmanuel, and Eric Massa have something to talk about the next time they meet up for drinks.

  59. 59.

    JGabriel

    @Mark S.: Goddammit, I just wasted 20 minutes looking for that post, found it, and came back here to find out you got there first?

    On a Saturday night, too.

    God, I’m pathetic.

    .

  60. 60.

    JGabriel

    John Cole’s famous naked mopping post:

    I decided to combine some housecleaning with personal hygiene, stripped naked to mop the bathroom and mopped my way into the tub, then, forgetting that the last time I showered I had not turned the knob back so that the water would come out the bottom when I turned it back on, started the shower. This, of course, shot cold water onto the back of my head and neck and back, causing me to shoot straight up into the air, trying to stabilize myself with the mop, slipping, and falling through the shower curtain, almost braining myself on the commode.
    __
    I won’t do that again.

    I can’t decide which is funnier: the naked mopping, or the actually telling us about it.

    .

  61. 61.

    Jim, Once

    href=”#comment-1716014″>Brian J:

    Yeah, my dorm roommate way back in the day (the Sixties) liked to do the nude thing – she was a state beauty contest finalist (which I heard about CONSTANTLY) who took all too much pleasure in arching her naked breasts toward the mirror and asking what we (her female roommates) thought of them. Construction work was going on directly across the way from our dorm room, so she made a point of rising nude from her bed every morning, standing up on the desk under our picture window, and welcoming the “morning” as she opened the curtains, stretching her arms and watching the workmen stop their work. Many years later, I ended up talking with a young woman who tearfully shared how her aunt had ruined her and her mother’s life with her antics. Auntie was the former roommate, of course.

    Speaking of obscene, another interview with Bill Black:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9HKKyNPe4k&[email protected]<a

  62. 62.

    Wile E. Quixote

    Hmmm, I’m trying to work up a humorous post referencing John’s travails with WordPress, and using the Balloon Juice catchphrases “Show us on the doll where he touched you”, “iatropic excitement” and “Jane Hamshers of the left”, “No one could have predicted” and the ever classic “This is excellent news for John McCain” but it’s just not coming together. Damn. I guess I should go to the gym. Perhaps inspiration will strike while I’m on the elliptical trainer.

  63. 63.

    stuckinred

    @Jim, Once: Nanci Griffith

    Drive in Movies and Dashboard Lights

    Where is she now
    The backseat queen of fraternity
    Where is she now
    She’s heavy on thigh
    And light on integrity
    Someone should have told her
    When beauty’s all you offer
    How soon the world discovers
    That your beauty’s gone
    Its gone

  64. 64.

    DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal)

    Today’s developers are too spoiled by having fast machines and honestly don’t know how to be stingy. Stingy makes code small and fast. Yes, premature optimisation is the root of all evil, but you need to know what to look for when you need to do it.

    Yup. One game project I worked on was a great example of lazy programming. For example, the chatmessage code section was one long trunk, not a fucking branch on the tree. The administrators chatmessage section had over 250 commands to sort through every single time you called the function. Every single time. What was hilarious was that nobody tied the lag from this to the problem that caused it. Since nobody wanted to rewrite something that was built by many individuals over a long time (too many cooks?) I decided to take it on. It took me almost two months work but when I was finished with it any chatmessage call could be resolved in 34 (or fewer) steps. This completely eliminated the lag and reduced the size of that code section by almost 1/3.

    I won’t even get into the storing of static data inside the Python scripts instead of creating specific modules to do the job. Naaah, that would make it too easy to update the static data and make the scripting files much smaller!

    I started learning coding in BASIC back in the early 80’s and you learned to write lean and mean to get the most out of what you are doing. That good habit has carried over into all coding I do. It takes more work but the results are worth it.

  65. 65.

    Jim, Once

    @Wile E. Quixote:
    I have an elliptical trainer. I’m sure good things happen on it. It’s just that I hate it so deeply. But I continue to use the damned thing.

  69. 69.

    Wile E. Quixote

    Hmmm, the link weirdness isn’t visible in FireFox. Only in Safari. It’s post 61 by Jim, Once that starts off with what looks like an incomplete link to a post by Brian J.

  72. 72.

    Jim, Once

    @stuckinred:
    Thanks so much, SIR. That’s perfect. I just have to share a couple more things: 1) When I arrived at UI as a little freshman from a town of 410, I couldn’t fit my clothing into our shared closet – she had 38 cashmere sweaters that needed to “breathe”. Plenty of room on the shelves for the books I brought, though. 2) She left halfway through her freshman year to marry the UI quarterback. That is all. Sorry to talk about it as much as I have.

    Everybody, please watch Moyers and Bill Black.

  73. 73.

    debit

    Today I made homemade guacamole (and eated it), english toffee bars (partially eated) and am waiting on the beef tenderloin and roasted asparagus. I’m going to make an au ju, since my daughter insists, but I will be having my tenderloin with horseradish sauce and rye bread. NOM.

  74. 74.

    MikeJ

    @DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal):

    I started learning coding in BASIC back in the early 80’s and you learned to write lean and mean to get the most out of what you are doing.

    2k of ram on the Vic-20 will make you think about every command. That and a 1 (one) MHz clock on the processor.

  75. 75.

    Anne Laurie

    @MattR:

    Someone will have to confirm this as my memory is a bit hazy, but IIRC it was all a vicious rumor and Dinky Hocker does not in fact shoot smack.

    Yep, Susan “Dinky” Hocker, morbidly obese teenager, spread that rumor about her own self to draw her parents’ attention back from their do-gooder preoccupation with “less fortunate” non-family teenagers. I’m thinking the YA novel is due for a big sales peak, now that the horror of childhood obesity has become America’s new Moral Panic Issue.

    But I suspect young John Cole just identified with her cranky prematurely wingnut “boyfriend”, isolated in an Upper West Side private school full of holier-than-thou capital-L Liberals.

  77. 77.

    Jim, Once

    @debit:

    Mmmm. I started Weight Watchers this week. Just finished a vegetable/beef broth soup that was not too bad. It was sheer joy just reading your post, though.

  78. 78.

    Jim, Once

    As a teacher of YAF (Young Adult Fiction), two great books:

    The World, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things

    Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes

    My students, the so-called “reluctant readers,” loved these books. Something about my life that I don’t have to apologize for – my students left my classes reading, and loving it. This is my first year of retirement, and I’m doing a lot of retrospective thinking.

  79. 79.

    debit

    @Jim, Once: Heh. I normally don’t eat like this, but I’d put almost 200 miles on my bike last week and felt I’d earned it. Soup actually almost made it onto my menu tonight. It’s been cold and rainy today; a nice veggie beef would have gone down quite well, but the tenderloin was on sale and that was that.

    Do you like Weight Watchers? I have friends who’ve had great results with it, and I always ponder joining in the winter when I stop exercising and start packing on the pounds.

  80. 80.

    DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal)

    @MikeJ:

    I started out on a C-64 system in ’84 and got an IBM PCjr in ’85 (64Kb system w/ MSDOS v1.1!). While that was a lot of RAM at the time, it sure was easy to chew it up loading a poorly written program and leaving little space for it to run. I learned to write in ‘modules’ so that if another function was needed it would load that program to perform it.

    The flaw of writing and rewriting code to perfection was soon discovered and I learned to finish what I was doing before going off on a different version of the same thing. But you are right, there is a time to compact code and it needs to be done at that time. Putting it off just increases the size of the clusterfuck and too many coders like to put it off so they can focus on the ‘good stuff’ (new code).

    Refining code can be tedious but the rewards are worth it. I have always liked refining because I can get a ‘minds-eye’ view of the complete operation for a section and zero in on specific refinements. Some find that boring but I find it challenging, kind of like solving a tough puzzle.

  82. 82.

    Jim, Once

    @debit:
    Weight Watchers is the best for me. I’ve tried a lot of different eating plans – this one really works. Mainly because , as they say, it’s not a diet, it’s just a new way of eating. I lost 35 pounds the first time I used it, gained back 15 after my dad’s death – and now am having not too much trouble getting back into the program.

  85. 85.

    Jim, Once

    @stuckinred:
    I’m intrigued about your starting in September after arriving from Vietnam one month before. What was that like? I felt like a freak just going back at age 22, with none of the baggage you brought.

  86. 86.

    OriGuy

    @DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal):
    You learn to care about memory leaks when a process is supposed to run 24/7/365 until the customer schedules a system upgrade. You can get away with it if your code runs for a minute or an hour or on Windows. You can’t if it’s running an ATM network.

  88. 88.

    DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal)

    @OriGuy:

    Any good programmer should be concerned about memory leaks though as you say, on short-run systems they can get away with it. Poor housekeeping but it ain’t their house it’s in…lol!

  90. 90.

    stuckinred

    @Jim, Once: Not one month, 10 days from the Nam to campus. I also did a 13 month tour on the DMZ in Korea before the Nam. You could get an “early out” if you were admitted to a college. I weasled my way in on a GED (I went in on my 17th birthday at the request of the local magistrate). How did it feel? I hated the fucking army and the war and all I wanted to do was get fucked up and join “my people”. Took many moons to “readjust” but being active in the VVAW helped because, to my way of thinking, I had a right and a responsibility to do what I could to bring my brothers (and sisters) home.

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