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

Their freedom requires your slavery.

Dear media: perhaps we ought to let Donald Trump speak for himself!

Anyone who bans teaching American history has no right to shape America’s future.

The current Supreme Court is a dangerous, rogue court.

Keep the Immigrants and deport the fascists!

“Loving your country does not mean lying about its history.”

Conservatism: there are people the law protects but does not bind and others who the law binds but does not protect.

Celebrate the fucking wins.

Bad people in a position to do bad things will do bad things because they are bad people. End of story.

“When somebody takes the time to draw up a playbook, they’re gonna use it.”

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Marge, god is saying you’re stupid.

They are not red states to be hated; they are voter suppression states to be fixed.

Republicans don’t want a speaker to lead them; they want a hostage.

Beware of advice from anyone for whom Democrats are “they” and not “we.”

“I was told there would be no fact checking.”

… pundit janitors mopping up after the gop

People identifying as christian while ignoring christ and his teachings is a strange thing indeed.

This year has been the longest three days of putin’s life.

We’ve had enough carrots to last a lifetime. break out the sticks.

Donald Trump found guilty as fuck – May 30, 2024!

I’m more christian than these people and i’m an atheist.

Sometimes the world just tells you your cat is here.

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Open Thread

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It has been rainy and cold and dark all day today, and dad dropped off some homemade chicken soup, so I’m going to have some soup, watch a movie on netflix, and then chow down on a little frozen yogurt.

I’m just loving netflix. Watched the International, Traitor, and Defiance in the last couple of days. Loved the International, thought the Traitor was good, and Defiance was worth watching bet felt sort of low budget (the story itself is pretty amazing, although not quite as straightforward as the movie would suggest). Not sure what I am going to watch tonight.

BTW- did you all catch the piece on the Fawlty Towers on PRI’s the World, today?

Finally, no need to guess who the trash bandit is any more. Those of you who had money on Rosalita win. How do I know this? Because earlier, as I was sitting at the computer, she brazenly walked up next to me and started rooting around in the trash can. Damned dogs think they run this house.

Reader Interactions

119Comments

  1. 1.

    General Stuck

    Yea, I just watched Defiance for the second time, and loved it. But I got a thing for movies about civilians coping in war time. And Daniel Craig has become one of my favorite actors.

    Another movie of his just popped up on NF instant, and am going to watch it tonight, but have no idea what it’s about or if any good.

    Flying Jewel

  2. 2.

    Kerr Lockhart

    Here’s a couple to add to your queue: District B13 and District B13 Ultimatum. Best action pictures this side of Hong Kong, fusing martial arts and parkour. Terrific fun!

  6. 6.

    quaint irene

    I know you don’t have any control over the Google ads that pop up here onsite. But that ‘Tired of this in Minnesota politics?’ featuring a creepy wall-eyed guy with two different colored iris’s is seriously giving me the skeevies.

  7. 7.

    Cliff

    I Has A Sad.

    Molly Too.

    The puppy neighbor just had his ears chopped off.

    Me,Molly, and pups fam(other than owner) all are quite unhappy with the ear cropper. its not a happy thing to return from a international trip to see.

    — we have a major Sad. — =(

  11. 11.

    Keith G

    Damned dogs think they run this house.

    There really wasn’t any doubt, was there? Rosie is just your sweet but troubled child who we all love.

  12. 12.

    MikeJ

    @SIA: I love it too, but by March I’ll be ready for some sun again. At that point it will still be three months away.

    On the upside, I bought new gore-tex last weekend.

  13. 13.

    Annie

    Damned dogs think they run this house.

    No, we think Tunch does. What is interesting is why he allows this behavior to continue? Maybe because in the recent past, you blocked his outdoor escape route?

  14. 14.

    South of I-10

    @John Cole: My cat threw up a piece of tinsel from my child’s pom pom today, and I thought of you.

  16. 16.

    quaint irene

    It has been rainy and cold and dark all day today, and dad dropped

    Cold and dark, eh? Here in NJ/NY area we had a massive storm blow through in about 20 minutes. They confirm a tornado touched down in Park Slope, Brooklyn, for like the first time in recorded weather.
    They’re predicting more storms in the wee hours, saying ‘still being fueled.’ Fueled by what? It’s frigging 65 degrees out!

    Climate change anyone?

  19. 19.

    Keith G

    @Nazgul35: Quite right. I own Layer Cake and watch it every now and then. For a genre film, its an amazing piece of work – intense and enjoyable.

  22. 22.

    PaulW

    I took my first 80 pages of the novel I typed out for the 3-Day Novel contest to my local writers’ group meeting… and they immediately spotted five grammar errors and complained about a slow opening. /facepalm Yeah, I know it’s a rough draft, but still it’s like taking your baby out for the first time to show up off and all the other parents are noting his nose is too big.

  27. 27.

    jl

    Thanks for solution to trash bandit mystery.

    I had my money on Tunch, because I could not understand how a fat low slung little dog (the beloved Rosalita) would get into a trash basket Cole said was four and a half feet high.

    Next only my list of suspects, a sleepwalking Cole.

    Glad this could get solved without any pet poop reports.

  30. 30.

    Maude

    @PaulW:
    It might be better not to show what you write to anyone until the final draft. I know you are supposed to keep a stiff upper lip, but it hurts and can make you less confident about writing.
    You would find the errors during the process and also improve the beginning.
    Keep writing and don’t give up.
    Remember that anyone who says something about your writing is stating an opinion. Also, too.

  31. 31.

    Cliff

    @Annie:

    I don’t know, I don’t know of any justification for the procedure that makes any sort of sense.

    one thing though, its made the lady leader of the family consider divorce/separation – whatever is appropriate.

    also the teenage son is as disgusted by the thing as I and the lady of the house are.

  34. 34.

    Mnemosyne

    So does anyone here do NaNoWriMo? I keep thinking about it and chickening out at the last minute, but this year may be the year.

  35. 35.

    Mumphrey

    I heard Eugene Robinson just sum up the way teabaggers seem to think: You’re free to live the way I tell you to.

    That’s about the best way to wrap it up I’ve heard yet.

  36. 36.

    lamh32

    I see that Rachel took Tuesday night’s election coverage “women will vote for O’Donnell” debate she had which Tweety and decided to make a whole segment on why Tweety’s analysis was so dumb and so wrong.

    If there is one thing I can say about Rachel, when she is challenged, she researches and researched her data point and makes reasonded analysis on those data point and embalms her commentary with enough wit and humor to really capture her audience.

  41. 41.

    Betsy

    @stuckinred:
    The best is when they forget what they told you to do on the last draft they read, and give you advice that totally contradicts their previous comments.

    Not that that’s ever happened to me of course.

  43. 43.

    Betsy

    @stuckinred:
    Why do people DO that? Why did it become a thing to dock ears and tails? It seriously grosses me out. But there must have been a reason other than aesthetics at some point, right?

  44. 44.

    stuckinred

    @Betsy: Yea, fighting breeds had it done to give the opponent less to grab onto and some for working breeds it was thought to be safer. We have always thought that our cockers were docked because they’d knock everything off the coffee table if they weren’t!

  46. 46.

    uila

    John,

    Here is the best movie on Netflix you never heard of:

    Visioneers

    If nothing else, just watch the first 10 minutes. If you don’t love it, then I completely misunderstand this blog.

  47. 47.

    Anne Laurie

    she brazenly walked up next to me and started rooting around in the trash can. Damned dogs think they run this house.

    I’m sure the “immediate verbal disincentive”, aka “yelling at her thieving arse” part of your ongoing Rosie-training was quite instinctive. Next step, for the sake of your blood pressure, is dogproofing all the trashcans. There are a variety of gadgets available at kitchen/homegood stores to mount cans on sliding tracks, or suspend bags inside doors, and in a pinch the bungee cord is your friend. Some people swear by weighting down a can that’s too tall for her to climb into, making it too heavy for her to knock over. But in my experience even if you succeed weight-wise, a dog with Rosie’s assertive personality will just start peeing on the can (“Someday these scraps will be accessible again, and then they are MINE! ! !”) and that starts a whole new version of Unacceptable Behavior. Putting the cans out of her reach physically seems like “surrendering” but my training philosophy is, pick your battles carefully…

    P.S. Do not be surprised if Tunch decides that pushing the new trashcan off the counter for Rosie to “get herself in trouble” is a fun thing. Also, Lily is taking notes — if it looks to her like Rosie is getting away with being a defiant little hoodlum piglet, she’s liable to start acting up as well. The joys of the multi-pet household… now go apologize to your mom for the stunts you & your sibs pulled…

  48. 48.

    D-Chance.

    Interesting… ex-President Jimmy Carter claims that we could all have benefited from 30+ years of CarterCare, had it not been for Theodore (Teddy) M. Kennedy killing the efforts at universal health coverage. So much for the liberal icon status; although, to be fair, it may have just been the booze talking at the time.

  50. 50.

    stuckinred

    From a cocker breeder site

    Why do Cockers always have their tails chopped off?

    Animated graphic of Cocker Spaniel wagging tail It’s called tail docking, and there are actually a few reasons it is done. It started back in the days when Cockers did a lot of hunting in the brush, and their tails would get full of burrs and thickets. But there are still plenty of good reasons to dock the tail of a pet Cocker:

    First, Cockers wag their tail so vigorously that they can actually hurt themselves by either hitting their tail against their own body or by hitting it in to things such as walls or furniture. Another reason is that a full, bushy tail tends to get dirty with fecal matter. Finally, Cockers are a small breed with a BIG tail… and it just plain looks goofy because it’s out of proportion to their bodies.

  51. 51.

    PurpleGirl

    @Betsy: Doberman Pinschers have long floppy ears and tails. They began docking the tails so they wouldn’t drag on the ground and get bloody.

  52. 52.

    wobbly

    Like I’m supposed to care about what kind of day you had?

    This used to be a political blog, featuring John Cole, who actually converted from right to left (insane to sane) some years ago.

    I used to eagerly await his posts on the state of the nation,

    Now all I get is live blogging from John Cole about which dogs shared his bed last night, what he ate for dinner, and what the weather was when John Cole got up in the morning!

    Get a wife, John, have yourself a couple of kids and then opine about your dog problems

  53. 53.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @jl #21 (or #27? — don’t remember, don’t feel like scrolling back to find out):

    *Glad this could get solved without any pet poop reports.*

    Don’t be too sanguine. The night’s still young.

  54. 54.

    debit

    @Betsy: I was told by a guy with an Old English Sheepdog that it was a tax thing back in Ye Olde England. Working dogs were not taxable, but only working dogs had docked tails.

    Note: Not fact checked! I was at the dog park and vulnerable; he could have been lying, but his story sounded so plausible and his dog was so pretty…

  58. 58.

    Warren Terra

    A truly awful story today in the Times:

    Gunman Who Shot Doctor Is Dead
    __
    A man learning about his mother’s condition from a doctor at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore on Thursday became so emotionally distraught in a hospital hallway that he took a handgun from his pants, shot the doctor in the stomach, and then, after a two-hour standoff with police, killed his mother in her hospital room and then shot himself to death, the authorities said.

    Damn gun-control enthusiasts, putting our doctors at risk. If only that doctor had been armed, he could have defended himself. Shot the bullet out of the air, or something.

  59. 59.

    Restrung

    check my math–
    if everything above 250,000 in income gets taxed at 4% more, and couples filing jointly get a $6300 tax cut on the first 250k, then:

    6300/.04=157500
    157500+250000=407500

  63. 63.

    Anne Laurie

    @Cliff: Poor puppy! Looks like he’s a Doberman? Seems the AKC breed standard still specifies Dobie ears are ‘normally cropped’, unfortunately — I don’t pay attention to general conformation shows any more, so I don’t know how much the EU bans on ear-cropping have influenced American breeders’ willingness to sacrifice their dogs’ comfort for “aesthetics”. But it will probably take another generation for the casual idiot owner to stop automatically demanding that his dog be mutilated to “look tougher”, alas. There are some cropping defenders who say that hanging ears are more likely get infected, but the most ear-infection-prone common breeds are cockers, poodles & beagles, none of whom are “supposed” to go through this cosmetic surgery.

    On the bright side, since it’s too late for your little neighbor, I can attest from personal experience (just piercing, in my case) that traumatized ear tissue isn’t as painful as you’d expect & usually heals rapidly. I’m sure it was traumatic for the little guy, but hopefully he’ll have forgotten all about it long before you do!

  64. 64.

    SiubhanDuinne

    I didn’t see VPOTUS on Rachel last night, but I’m watching Part Deux right now. The more I see him, the more he grows on me. He wasn’t my preferred candidate (ME = Obot since 2004) but I’m really liking him more and more. “Badass,” heh.

  66. 66.

    jl

    @wobbly:

    You think this here miserable lefty blog is supposed to make sense? I have noticed a dearth of pet pics and garden posts, and that irks me. I think of this as a drinking/food/pets/sports/gardening/artsandcrafts blog, and we put up with Cole’s political posts out of good manners and desire to help him cope with his implacable private political demons.

    Anyway, this is an open thread, people should be able to say whatever they think is important.

    I think it is important to point out that I ate a heap o’ beans yesterday, with none of expected after affects at all. I am wondering what happened to them beans. That is not normal.

    Any ideas?

    Also, as a middle age male, once in awhile I notice a bunch of hair in the shower drain and watch the situation like a hawk for awhile, but I see nothing and my hairline stays stuck where it has been for thirty years. Then a long while later, another hunk o’ hair in the drain. How does that work? Does our hair live and die in cohorts?

  67. 67.

    Restrung

    @SiubhanDuinne:

    from a fellow Obot from 2004, I thought picking Biden was the biggest genius move of the whole campaign. Not kidding! That’s when I really started grinning and thinking “yup, he just won it.”

  72. 72.

    fasteddie9318

    @lamh32:

    Obama tries to compromise with wingnut Republicans* in order to get something done in Senate; firebaggers shout “FOR FUCK’S SAKE WHY IS HE INSULTING US LIKE THIS? WHY DOES HE KEEP BENDING OVER FOR THESE PEOPLE INSTEAD OF PLAYING HARDBALL WITH THEM?”

    Obama uses backdoor tactic to get firebaggers’ preferred candidate appointed to important post, playing hardball with Senate Republicans* who wouldn’t have confirmed said candidate; firebaggers shout “FOR FUCK’S SAKE WHY IS HE INSULTING US LIKE THIS? WHY DIDN’T HE WORK WITH REPUBLICANS TO GET HER APPOINTED FOR REAL?”

    Hard to believe the Republicans are going to be able to beat the Gang Who Couldn’t Shoot At Anything But Themselves, but there you go.

    *For purposes of this post I include Lieberman and Ben Nelson here

  73. 73.

    debit

    @ openthread: A sure fire way to get Chloe worked up and exited is to ask if she wants a Benadryl, since she gets her dose hidden in a piece of chicken. However, the aftermath is very quiet. I can’t wait for allergy season to be over.

  75. 75.

    Nick

    I got hit by a tornado on the Long Island Expressway in Queens at about 5:45 this afternoon.

    So…yeah. how was your day?

  78. 78.

    Nick

    @Restrung:

    Jeez, hope you were in a car. Airbags?

    I got out of it unscathed. I mean I don’t know how to describe it. It’s like something I’ve never experienced. I was driving along, saw the storm coming and all of a sudden it just hit, rain so hard, I couldn’t see the car in front of me, and it was rush hour, all I saw was the lamppost next to me shaking. I wasn’t sure if something was going to come flying out of the white and smashing into my window. I looked up and saw the swirling brownish green mass and I could hear the roar, like a train flying past you at 70 mph. We just sat there and waited for it to pass. So scary. I could feel the car moving on it’s own, the wind pushing it. I was literally a half mile from where that woman was killed by the tree. I was at the interchange of the Long Island Expressway and Grand Central Parkway, she was on the GCP just south.

    couldn’t even get home, all the streets in Queens were blocked by downed trees. I had to park my car and walk the three miles home.

    Unbelievable. I’ve never seen a tornado in my life. I never want to see one again.

  79. 79.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @D-Chance #48:

    Interesting… ex-President Jimmy Carter claims that we could all have benefited from 30+ years of CarterCare, had it not been for *Theodore (Teddy) M. Kennedy* killing the efforts at universal health coverage.

    Actually — Edward M. Kennedy, not Theodore. But the rest of it’s interesting. I adore Jimmy Carter, and I adored many things about Teddy, but I have to think the Democratic Party might be a shade less fractious today if the two of them had both learned all the words to Kumbaya 30 years ago.

    Wait, what am I saying? Fractiousness and the Democratic Party are inseparable. So never mind.

  82. 82.

    Davis X. Machina

    @fasteddie9318: I had a girlfriend like that once.

    Scenario A:
    GF: “Do you like my new haircut?”
    Me: “No.”
    GF: Tears.

    Scenario B: :
    GF: “Do you like my new haircut?”
    Me: “Yes.”
    GF: “You’re just saying that because of last time! You don’t mean it!” Tears

    I eventually concluded this was not the general shape of a successful relationship.

  83. 83.

    parsimon

    65: Anyway, this is an open thread, people should be able to say whatever they think is important.

    Oh, good.

    I have a procedural, or house rules, question: I may be missing something about the procedure for linking prior comments in order to respond to them; when you click on the “Reply” link, it auto-generates an “@so-and-so” prefix to your reply, and most people use that method for replying to one another.

    However, I find that difficult for actually following the conversation: I can click back to the original comment, certainly, but then must find my way back to the reply, which may be be many dozens of comments later, so I’ve hopefully made note of its comment number for sake of ease … but this really hampers continuity.

    I’m pretty used to using a “find” function in my browser, and referring to comment number. Is there a reason comment numbers, or actually quoting the comment you’re replying to, aren’t used here?

    ETA: I know people quote others on occasion – shows up in an offset grey box – but it doesn’t seem a standard.

  84. 84.

    Cliff

    @Anne Laurie:

    Nah, he is a beut blond pitbull, despite the horrible looking bloody ears/scars, the pup is just as excited to play w/molly as he was before the operation.

    its just so depressing that the dude went thru with it after EVERYONE in the family told him not to do it. its esp depressing for everyone who just got back from visiting africa only to find a huge mess in their house and the dog w/ his ears chopped off when they get back.

  85. 85.

    General Stuck

    @parsimon: There is no free lunch in blogging. One aggravation weighed against another that is certain, is the only criteria I use for such judgments. It drives me crazy when somebody quotes another commenter without a reply link to where it came from. If it’s something I REALLY want to know the source, before the reply function, wasted too many minutes of my life scrolling up and down reading every dern comment to find it, that nearly always turned out to be the last one I checked. Scrolling back and forth to a single comment I am responding to is the lesser aggravation for me. I loves me some reply function.

  86. 86.

    freelancer

    @parsimon:

    Yes, we burned all the copies of Robert’s Rules of Order in the immediate vicinity because of officious fellas like yourself.

    Also, most comment threads on most websites suck. BJ is very readable, and has the best commentariat on the web.

  87. 87.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @Nick #77: I was on the phone with my best friend of the past 55 years; call was interrupted; when she came back after about 10 minutes it was to tell me that her daughter in Queens had just phoned to report the tornado. No one hurt, no major damage to their property, but the young grandson looked solemnly out the window and announced to his parents: “Someone is going to need to clean that up.”

    Tornados are nasty. I’ve been through a couple down here; they’re wicked scary. Hope everyone is safe.

  88. 88.

    Restrung

    @Nick:

    Yeah, they’re scary. I’m seriously surprised to hear of one hitting NYC. That’s not ordinary, is it? Out here on the plains, sure. But I’m on a river bluff. hoo noes.

  89. 89.

    WaterGirl

    @parsimon:

    However, I find that difficult for actually following the conversation: I can click back to the original comment, certainly, but then must find my way back to the reply, which may be be many dozens of comments later, so I’ve hopefully made note of its comment number for sake of ease … but this really hampers continuity.

    Not sure why things are the way they are, but maybe it would help you to know that the back arrow is your friend. You read a comment, they reference some other person’s comment, click on the name they replied to, read the original comment, then press the back arrow once to go back to where you were when you read before you clicked on the name. Hope this helps.

  91. 91.

    parsimon

    @General Stuck: Understood. On other blogs, I use the Find function in my browser to find either the comment number cited in the reply or the quoted phrases – so there’s not a lot of scrolling up and down. House rules differ in different places: no free lunch. In some places there’s a general rule that the original comment number should be cited, and I’m mostly used to that.

    @freelancer:

    No officiousness or criticism here. I was just asking a question.

  92. 92.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @Restrung #67
    @debit #68

    Don’t misunderstand me, I never *didn’t* like Biden, and I was very pleased that Obama picked him. But I really like the way he just gets better and better for me. (I think part of it is just liking a guy who can toss out the occasional “fuck” or “badass” when no other word will do, without sounding sleazy like Dubya and Darth.)

  94. 94.

    RinaX

    Over on the GOS, I just read about this:

    horsesass.org/?p=29502

    It really is just coming at us from all sides. I had no idea that I needed to watch out for the Girl Scouts. I thought all our problems were resolved when Acorn was disbanded.

  96. 96.

    Nick

    @Restrung:

    That’s not ordinary, is it?

    No, thought I think the city has been hit by three tornadoes now in the past three years.

    Snowiest winter ever, hottest summer ever, tornadoes

    Can’t possibly understand why that’s the case.

  98. 98.

    Anne Laurie

    @Cliff:
    __

    its esp depressing for everyone who just got back from visiting africa only to find a huge mess in their house and the dog w/ his ears chopped off when they get back.

    Eugh! Well, the puppy will get over it, and maybe the humans can get therapy?

  100. 100.

    Batocchio

    Yup, Defiance was pretty good and Layer Cake is well worth a look. I heard the Fawlty Towers piece – the entire World episode was good, actually.

  101. 101.

    And Another Thing...

    @lamh32: Made the mistake of watching Tweety yesterday. He did this speech about how the French & Indian War is his favorite war and then said the French won. What an idiot. And foolish me who thought I might pick up so good analysis abt the primaries.

  102. 102.

    sfinny

    A couple of months ago I was driving home from CT to NY. Extreme downpour, lightning, wind forced me to pull off the road and I swear that it felt as if a tornado went by me.

    There were ‘micro-burst’s reported in near-by CT towns that day. Actual reported tornados have occurred six or seven times in the last three years. Don’t remember any in the prior forty or so years I’ve lived in the area.

    Nick, glad you are safe. It certainly is a harrowing experience.

  103. 103.

    Warren Terra

    @And Another Thing…:
    I’m not sure how you decide who won the French And Indian War. Partly, it’s a question of whether you think there was a “French And Indian War”. If you do, then OK: the Brits and their local allies didn’t do too well. But what we call the “French And Indian War” was a small part of a world-spanning war, and the Brits cleaned up elsewhere, claiming Canada as their ransom for the lucrative French sugar colonies they’d seized in the Caribbean.

    Still, while it might be hard to name the winners of the “French And Indian War”, with France maybe taking the title on a technicality, it’s pretty damn easy to name the losers: the Indians. After all, they entered the war to defend their territory and prerogatives, they won the war for the French, and they were comprehensively betrayed by France after the war.

  104. 104.

    bey

    My dad’s golden retriever never met a trash can she could resist.

    I once spent 20 excruciating minutes in the Wal-Mart wastebasket aisle while my dad made dog noses with his hand and poked at wastebasket lids.

  107. 107.

    New Yorker

    @Nick:

    Wow. When the tornado warning came on weather.com for Brooklyn and Queens and the warning said Park Slope and Brooklyn Heights, I started getting nervous (I’m in Greenpoint). I looked out the window and the clouds were moving at an insane speed. Then it just got as dark as I’ve ever seen a daytime sky, and that’s when I bolted for the basement. For about 10 minutes it sounded like hell on earth out there. When it finally quieted down outside, I stepped back outside and looked east at that ridiculously black sky with lightning flashing constantly.

    I didn’t lose power and didn’t see any damage in my neighborhood. I think the worst of it passed just to the south of me.

  108. 108.

    Nick

    @New Yorker:

    I think the worst of it passed just to the south of me.

    It basically went in a line from Red Hook, Park Slope, Clinton Hill, Bushwick, then into Queens; Ridgewood, Middle Village, Rego Park, Forest Hills, Flushing Meadows, Flushing, Fresh Meadows and Bayside.

    Middle Village in Queens looks like a warzone.

    My car is still in Queens, I walked home to Williamsburg.

  109. 109.

    TrishB

    Metal trash cans with lids work well to keep dogs out in the kitchen and bath. In the living room, I have an old metal umbrella stand that works well, as it is tall and narrow, and makes enough of a clatter on the tile to scare the hell out of my tissue-shredding troublemaker if he knocks it over.

    Cropped ears are cruel. Most vets I’ve spoken to no longer perform the procedure. Both my schnauzers have floppy ears, but unfortunately their tails are docked. It’s very difficult to find a breeder who doesn’t dock at 3 days old, long before they’ve decide which pup is pet quality.

  110. 110.

    2th&nayle

    @Warren Terra: I’ll grant the Indians pretty well got hosed by the French, but the Acadians didn’t fair too well under the tender mercies of the British either.

  111. 111.

    MattR

    @parsimon: I’m late to the party but hopefully you will see this. One reason the number system doesn’t work too well is that comments go into and are released from moderation so the numbering changes as comments are “inserted” into the middle (Or if one of your comments is in moderation, you can see it so the numbering is different that for everyone else.). Ideally, people would give both a link and the quote

  112. 112.

    parsimon

    @MattR:

    Ideally, people would give both a link and the quote.

    That’s my preference as well. I figured that quoting comment number wasn’t done because there were a lot of deleted spam comments, or comments otherwise switched their numbers around.

  114. 114.

    Steeplejack

    @parsimon:

    I can click back to the original comment, certainly, but then must find my way back to the reply, which may be be many dozens of comments later, so I’ve hopefully made note of its comment number for sake of ease . . . but this really hampers continuity.

    No, it’s much easier than that. If you click on the hyperlinks to go “upward”to the original comments, you can trace your way back “down” by pressing the back button on your keyboard. It will retrace your steps down through the tree of comments. Easy-peasy.

  115. 115.

    Steeplejack

    @parsimon:

    If you just use the “reply” button, all is well. It accounts for “moderated” comments being inserted into the thread later, comments being deleted, etc.

    Believe me, I am as finicky as they come, and you will not find a better commenting setup on the Web than here at Balloon Juice. The “reply” button is your friend, and the “back” button is your friend for navigating through chains of replies.

  116. 116.

    jayboat

    Late to the party as I was busy watching Defiance last night…

    I have come to the conclusion that Netflix streaming is the final nail in my productivity’s coffin.

    RIP, and pass the Milk Duds.

  117. 117.

    slag

    How is it that you’ve had animals all this time and still haven’t learned to secure your trash? I might as well be living with bears for all the protection our trash gets. We’ve practically installed child-proof caps on our trash cans.

  118. 118.

    asiangrrlMN

    @Cliff: Oh my god. That makes me ill. He’s such a cutie and a sweetie. Vibes that he will be OK.

    @Mnemosyne: I have done it for the past three years. I probably won’t this year because the actual writing has never been a problem for me–it’s the editing.

    @Steeplejack: November. I think you should. You have a way with words.

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