Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

My years-long effort to drive family and friends away has really paid off this year.

The lights are all blinking red.

If you cannot answer whether trump lost the 2020 election, you are unfit for office.

We are builders in a constant struggle with destroyers. keep building.

They want us to be overwhelmed and exhausted. Focus. Resist. Oppose.

In after Baud. Damn.

The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.

It’s easy to sit in safety and prescribe what other people should be doing.

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

A thin legal pretext to veneer over their personal religious and political desires.

There are consequences to being an arrogant, sullen prick.

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

New McCarthy, same old McCarthyism.

Russian mouthpiece, go fuck yourself.

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

Democracy cannot function without a free press.

Hot air and ill-informed banter

If America since Jan 2025 hasn’t broken your heart, you haven’t loved her enough.

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

The snowflake in chief appeared visibly frustrated when questioned by a reporter about egg prices.

Yeah, with this crowd one never knows.

An almost top 10,000 blog!

I really should read my own blog.

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

You are here: Home / Popular Culture / KULCHA! / Tuesday Evening Open Thread: Metamophosis

Tuesday Evening Open Thread: Metamophosis

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google doodle 2 april 13
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Per the Telegraph:

The German naturalist and artist Maria Sibylla Merian is today being honoured by a Google doodle, on the 366th anniversary of her birth.

Merian is known in the world of science and nature for studying plants and insects and producing detailed paintings of them.

She was born in Frankfurt in 1647 and began painting insect specimens she had captured at the age of 13. She later worked as a botanic artist, publishing three collections of engravings of plants in 1675, 1677 and 1680.

Following this, she began to focus more on the study of insects. Her work on the life-cycle and metamorphosis of butterflies is regarded as groundbreaking, making her a significant contributor to entomology…

***********

Apart from longing for Spring, what’s on the agenda for the evening?

Reader Interactions

90Comments

  1. 1.

    Just Some Fuckhead

    I’m prolly gonna lay here watching the Disney channel with the boy until I fall asleep. When he notices I’m asleep, he’ll quietly turn off the computer he’s playing on, turn off the television..

    .. and then sneak downstairs and watch the big screen all night.

  3. 3.

    scav

    Horrors! After offending the Baby Jebus Bunny and followers, the Google highlights the contribution of a female scintist that just might have intruded into studies promoting Evolution? !

  8. 8.

    Studly Pantload, the emotionally unavailable unicorn

    Oh, it’s definitely springtime here in the Seattle rain forests — which, of course, means it’s grey and rainy same as it’s been since October, but at least the grey and rainy now features blossoms! (OK, the Easter weekend was sunny and gorgeous, but the chances of another two sunny days in a row falling on a Saturday & Sunday between now & June are sorta smallish.)

  10. 10.

    Arm The Homeless

    The fiance defends her thesis tomorrow. She keeps sending me texts about how having the Dean of the college sitting in on it is making her nervous. I keep telling her it’s the rum and leftover easter candy.

    The giant, tiger striped mosquitos are out in full force tonight. I am searching my entire Facebook in an attempt to get rid of the 20lbs of zucchini I have in my fridge.

    Also, too: “Whisky is for drinkin’, water is for fightin’ over” – Not actually said by Mark Twain

  15. 15.

    raven

    @Gin & Tonic: Well, this is a one day shot on May 11th. I have nothing to lose, going for a reunion Friday night with a bunch of guys I haven’t seen in 409 years. Thought, if things are right, I’d go down to the docks and see if there was a spot on a boat. Just looking around will be fine.

  17. 17.

    hitchhiker

    maternal bragfest time

    my 22 yr old daughter just decided to do a 2nd yr of service work with domestic violence victims . . . she’s going to be in Sitka, Alaska living in a shared housing thing and being challenged every single day to empower and support women.

    the path she didn’t take — but still intends to — was riding her bike from Seattle to Boston.

    oh, man, to be young and filled with optimism and energy ~~ and how forking great to see her pick up her life and shake it for joy and meaning.

    i’m having a good night.

  18. 18.

    dance around in your bones

    Well, I just sat down on my toilet to pee and got my butt all wet. Thanks, grandboys.

    They sprinkle all over the place. Oh, but I love the little buggers.

  20. 20.

    Mnemosyne

    Eating Easter leftovers (ham, roasted asparagus and yummy potatoes), then continuing the ongoing apartment reorg. I think tonight we tackle the bathroom — yikes! It’s small, but it’s scary in there.

  22. 22.

    Gin & Tonic

    @raven: Party boats go out from Galilee all the time. Get there early. If you’re on a party boat, you don’t need a license. May/June is fluke season.

  24. 24.

    dance around in your bones

    @Baud: They do that all by themselves.Every fucking night. How do I know? I do the laundry.

    But I like the idea of ME peeing in THEIR beds.

    @raven: I’ve actually got the youngest one trained to wipe off the toilet seat. With ‘tiny tiny paper’ – not wads, like he wanted to do. He’s pretty smart, that one.

  27. 27.

    raven

    @Gin & Tonic: Yea, one of the guys recommended this outfit. The reunion is Friday and I don’t drink and I barely sleep so I won’t have any problem getting their early.

    Do you know this place:

    Lancellotta’s Rest.
    1113 Charles Street
    North Providence
    ?

  29. 29.

    raven

    @efgoldman: Shit no, they’ve somehow adopted it in football now and then. It was real for us, middle of the night get your ass in formation in a raincoat.

  30. 30.

    Alison

    CONCACAF Champions League on tonight, where I will be a terrible person and sorta kinda root against the MLS team, because it’s Seattle and my best friend is a Portland fan :)

  36. 36.

    dance around in your bones

    @Cassidy:

    Ok, you try peering at the toilet seat to check it for sprinkles. They are only visible at a certain angle. Hell, if I could pee standing up, I’d do it and not worry about the sprinkles.

    These boys not only sprinkle on the toilet seat, but on the waste basket and the wall as well. Let’s just say they don’t have, uh …..total control over the dangling thingie as of yet.

  40. 40.

    raven

    @Baud: There’s no other way to put it unless you want to say, “you didn’t fully extend your arms to meet the ball and that’s why the pass was incomplete”! That IS the current definition.

  41. 41.

    Gin & Tonic

    @raven: Sorry, no useful opinion on either the boat or the resto. A lot (of both) are pretty interchangeable.

  42. 42.

    Mnemosyne

    @LesGS:

    Well, it doesn’t really fit in with the stacked-up potatoes (they end up as a deliciously towering mass, and having pieces of garlic in between might ruin the effect). I took one of the suggestions from the comments and put the cut garlic into the milk while it boiled and then discarded it before pouring the milk on.

  45. 45.

    raven

    @efgoldman: My pal from Philly always called it gravy. Cooked the meatballs, braciole, chicken together, took the meat out and mixed the pasta with the gravy!

  46. 46.

    Baud

    @raven:

    I’m just saying there may be a certain class of ladies one could meet that might be interested in pecker checking activities.

  48. 48.

    Gin & Tonic

    @raven: There is a pretty surprising lack of good Italian restaurants in this area. They all tend to be pretty unimaginative Italo-American “red sauce” places. If the guys you’re with are RI-raised Italian-Americans, they don’t want Italian food, they want the food their mother made for them, which tends to be mediocre eggplant parm or chicken parm (or most times you can’t even tell whether it’s chicken or eggplant under there.)

    Sorry, but I eat out a lot and know the dining scene here pretty well.

  49. 49.

    JasonF

    It’s the feast day of St. Polycarp of Alexandria and this is who Google chooses to honor!?! I am outraged.

  51. 51.

    dance around in your bones

    @Cassidy: They just let it fly. Why not? They don’t have to clean it up.

    I remember my brother doing that once, when my sister and I were in the bathtub. Just let go and let it rip. Our screams were epic.

  54. 54.

    Just Some Fuckhead

    @Mothra1:

    This time it’s Rick Harrison of Pawn Stars complaining that if he were a liberal, he’d have gotten a permit to film on federal land.

    There ain’t anything stopping him from becoming a liberal, is there? Or did Obama issue an executive order forbidding it?

  55. 55.

    Gin & Tonic

    @efgoldman: The Hill? Meh, mostly. Angelo’s does the family-style thing well. Zooma, Siena? Loud, and more a scene than food. Blue Grotto? I don’t think so. Mediterraneo? Maybe sometimes. Pane e Vino is good, true, but almost off the hill. Best thing on the Hill? Pastiche.

    Really good? Try Mike’s Kitchen (the VFW hall in Cranston.) I’m serious. More Italian than Italian-American? Try La Masseria in EG.

  58. 58.

    eemom

    @dance around in your bones:

    Let’s just say they don’t have, uh …..total control over the dangling thingie as of yet.

    omg, don’t get me started.

    I’ve never been a 14 year old boy myself,so I couldn’t swear to it…..but I THINK my son must be past that stage by now….and yet…..ugh.

  59. 59.

    Mnemosyne

    @PeakVT:

    They must have been covering it on NPR, because I heard just the phrase “he said he was hiking the Appalachian Trail” before I clicked away.

  62. 62.

    dance around in your bones

    @eemom: These boys (2,4 and 6) have their own bathroom. It is totally disgusting.

    They run in to pee in my bathroom at times, and I always yell “Lift up the seat and aim for the water!” Usually it works ok, other times it’s a total disaster. The 2 yr old has to stand up on his little tippy-toes to even hit the water. It’s cute as hell, but I refrain from taking pictures because of the freakos out there. The 2 yr old spends most of his day butt-naked.

    I assume that’s not the case with your 14 yr old :)

  63. 63.

    Studly Pantload, the emotionally unavailable unicorn

    @dance around in your bones: Not to turn the lads into panty-waisted little liberal pansies, but shouldn’t the right to stand for no. 1 be – uh, earned?

    ***
    OK, reminded now of a joke: It’s the early days of Adam & Eve, and God comes to Eden for some housekeeping. “OK,” says God to the two, “Got a few loose ends to get tied up, here. First, which of two of you wants to be able to stand while peeing, and whi–”

    “Ooo, me!! Me!!” interrupts Adam.

    God says, “But don’t you want to hear-”

    “Don’t need to!” says Adam. “That’ll be like the coolest thing ever!”

    “Very well,” says God, making a note on his clipboard. “Eve, I guess that means you get the multiple orgasms.”

    (May or may not seem funnier when told to you in a bar.)

  64. 64.

    Redshirt

    @hitchhiker: Congratulations on raising a wonderful daughter. Laying yourself out on the line for little gain (other than helping others) is one of the hardest and greatest things we as people can do.

  68. 68.

    Studly Pantload, the emotionally unavailable unicorn

    @eemom: Right there with ya. My work days revolve around Word and Excel, in part because I’m every day at multiple people’s desks helping them through the digital wilderness. I’m just a middle-aged schmuck with a high-level book on the 2010 MS Office Suite and a twitchy Google finger, and yet somehow I’m the dept. “guru” on that stuff. That’s OK; saving tushes from fires has its advantages.

    Although, one day my boss was at my desk, and she asked me to run something through my 10-key that included division. I just stared blankly at the thing for a bit, trying to find the / symbol, when I had to confess I couldn’t find the divide key on the damn thing, and so just opened a spreadsheet. That horizontal bar flanked by two dots had just become a hazy, 40-year-old memory from grade school.

  69. 69.

    Just Some Fuckhead

    @Studly Pantload, the emotionally unavailable unicorn: I had to help someone with an excel project today. I think with my fingers so I got my laptop to work side by side with them.

    I closed the spreadsheet I was working on. And then the next one. And then the next one. And then the next one.

    12 different spreadsheets open at the same time.

  70. 70.

    Studly Pantload, the emotionally unavailable unicorn

    @Just Some Fuckhead: Yeah, just today I was showing a coworker something on my screen, and when she saw the sheer volume of docs, spreadsheets, and directories I had open at once, she had to ask how I kept track of all those open windows.

    Actually, in Windows 7, if you group your icons, it’s not hard at all. I actually think W7 is the slickest thing I’ve worked with — except for the multiple times per hour I get a false message saying a file is already open by someone else. I’d wish someone would work on that, but with W8 going a whole other direction, I guess we’re stuck with false open-file messages.

  71. 71.

    Todd

    Had a beautiful afternoon of diving on Key West. Capped that off with a twilight dive and a night dive. Saw huge things, a couple of sharks, fiddled with bioluminescing things, crabs a foot wide, etc. It was nice.

  72. 72.

    El Cid

    I think the role of illustrators in having created the passion and basis for the love & understanding so many of us for science is vastly underestimated, so her contribution cannot be emphasized enough — even beyond our ignorance of how recently the scientific understanding of metamorphosis in the biological kingdom was formed.

  73. 73.

    Anne Laurie

    @dance around in your bones:

    Heck, it’s been a long slog just to get the boys to go in the potty instead of a diaper.

    Have not tried this at home, but those among my friends who had to housebreak young male homo-saps swear by a half-dozen generic cheerios or frootloops in the bowl. Apparently having a smaller target improves the aim….

  74. 74.

    Mnemosyne

    Also, I voted in our small city’s City Council election today. My polling place was moved to the laser tag arena. That was … different. Better than another church, I guess.

  76. 76.

    Petorado

    @Arm The Homeless:
    Right on. That expression that is so famous out here in the West is, at best, a “Mark Twainism.” It sure sounds like something he’d say, but there’s no record of him ever saying it. It’s also really tiresome to hear, for the millionth time, every politician using it in a speech when speaking about the latest water conflict.

  77. 77.

    dance around in your bones

    @Anne Laurie: Well now, that’s a good suggestion.

    Heck, I could re-use all the Cheerios they don’t finish and come out ahead!

  78. 78.

    eemom

    @Todd:

    Had a beautiful afternoon of diving on Key West. Capped that off with a twilight dive and a night dive. Saw huge things, a couple of sharks, fiddled with bioluminescing things, crabs a foot wide, etc. It was nice.

    Perhaps you could cap THAT off with a lovely evening of GFY, with love and kisses from the “nice” challenged rest of us.

    kthxbai.

  80. 80.

    Roger Moore

    @eemom:
    No male ever has complete control. Even if you aim correctly, the pee can still come out in an unpredictable direction. There’s a reason urinals are designed the way they are, and a busy men’s room still needs regular mopping.

  82. 82.

    Mnemosyne

    @Roger Moore:

    Yes, but properly brought-up men understand that, in their home, it’s their own responsibility to wipe up their misfires, not their mom’s or their wife’s.

  83. 83.

    Origuy

    @Roger Moore:

    No male ever has complete control. Even if you aim correctly, the pee can still come out in an unpredictable directions.

    FIFY
    The curse of the split streams.

  84. 84.

    eemom

    @Mnemosyne:

    properly brought-up men

    [sigh]….and therein lies the proverbial rub.

    For once — long ago — when I learned I was to bear a son, I thought, aha! this is my chance, on behalf of all womankind, to mold the perfect male.

    And lo, how miserably have I failed. : (

  86. 86.

    dance around in your bones

    @Mnemosyne: You know what’s funny?

    The two yr old sprinkled on my toilet seat, and I said ‘we need to wipe that up’. He watched intently, and now whenever he goes in my toilet he gets the toilet paper (‘not a lot, a TINY bit’ as I told him) and carefully wipes the seat.

    He’s a good little dude.

  87. 87.

    Mnemosyne

    @dance around in your bones:

    See? You gotta get ’em young. Though I suspect eemom is dealing with a little bit of teen rebellion there, which hopefully will improve with age.

    I shared a bathroom with one of my brothers and I don’t think I had to sit on a wet seat more than once. The shrieks of a grossed-out sister are more difficult to ignore than any number of lectures from mom.

  88. 88.

    dance around in your bones

    @Mnemosyne:

    He’s a remarkably helpful little guy. He loves to sniff the older boy’s beds to see if they smell like pee (they mostly do) and load the laundry bag with me, then stand on the dryer and throw stuff into the washer and toss the ‘pods’ in. Push the buttons and wait for the sounds of ‘washing’. Then he throws his arms around my neck and says ‘I’m helping, Nonny!”.

    I’m sure it won’t last, but I’ll take advantage of it while he’s willing.

  89. 89.

    csbella

    @Gin & Tonic:

    I grew up in Prov & N Prov with 36 first cousins, all Italian, they all call it gravy. After college I moved to West coast and learned to cook real Italian from better sources/sauces.

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