Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Trump’s legal defense is going to be a dumpster fire inside a clown car on a derailing train.

Authoritarian republicans are opposed to freedom for the rest of us.

Hi god, it’s us. Thanks a heap, you’re having a great week and it’s only Thursday!

Found liable for massive fraud, is required to post a massive bond, gets a break, then files a *fraudulent* bond!

Tick tock motherfuckers!

People really shouldn’t expect the government to help after they watched the GOP drown it in a bathtub.

Not all heroes wear capes.

Do not shrug your shoulders and accept the normalization of untruths.

You can’t love your country only when you win.

It looks like winning debates is a black job!

Another missed opportunity for Jamie Dimon to just shut the fuck up.

New McCarthy, same old McCarthyism.

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

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

Bad news for Ron DeSantis is great news for America.

Be a traveling stable for those who can’t find room at the inn.

“What are Republicans afraid of?” Everything.

And we’re all out of bubblegum.

Dead end MAGA boomers crying about Talyor Swift being a Dem is my kind of music. Turn it up.

If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.

I didn’t have alien invasion on my 2023 BINGO card.

The rest of the comments were smacking Boebert like she was a piñata.

Marge, god is saying you’re stupid.

We’re not going back!

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Friday Evening Open Thread: Find the Funny Where You Can

Reader Interactions

77Comments

  3. 3.

    raven

    We just watched “I’m So Excited! (“Los amantes pasajeros”) the recent Almodóvar flick. Not for everyone but we liked it.

  5. 5.

    JasonF

    @Mark Jones: No kidding. I’m happy so many people found her funny, but when I’m on a plane, the last thing I want is to be trapped listening to a wannabe stand-up comic. Just tell me about the oxygen masks so I can go back to reading my book.

  9. 9.

    MikeJ

    Atlanta’s pitcher is doing that thing we don’t mention until it’s over through the 7th.

    That’s right, he’s staging Macbeth.

  11. 11.

    ruemara

    I’m in a dog training class. For work. So, been up since 5 am, worked a full 8, & now have to audit this workshop for the next 3 hours. I’m learning body language. My ears are back, there’s a raising of my back hairs and my fangs are exposed. I wonder what I’m feeling?

  12. 12.

    Mike in NC

    “The Grand Budapest Hotel” is a wonderful movie. Surprised it even made it to this ridiculous backwater we live in.

  13. 13.

    Violet

    Chilling. Making pizza. Catching up on the DVR. I worked in the garden some today. Did some shopping for groceries. Busy day but feel like I haven’t accomplished much.

  15. 15.

    Gex

    Wow, my day turned to shit really suddenly at the end of the work day.

    I was scheduled to upgrade a component on our system on Thursday night, but things weren’t working right so I sent an email to my boss explaining that I would not be rolling it out that night.

    Had a totally normal work day today, lots of communication back and forth on a number of items I’m working on. Then all of a sudden at 4 pm she sent me an email saying the cancellation on Thursday night was “unacceptable” and that I need to “stick to my due dates.”

    Stick to my due dates? I asked her if that meant I should have rolled it out even though it wasn’t working. Which I think is a legitimate question after she tells me I need to stick to my deadlines, but pissed her off because she thought it sarcastic.

    I wasn’t trying to be sarcastic, but I apologized anyhow. Then I asked her “What should I have done differently on Thursday night? I guess I would like your feedback on that.” Which she didn’t answer.

    I am not accustomed to getting chastised for my work. I was always been the kid who tries really hard to meet expectations and never failed to please the teachers and the bosses. Now this is going to bug me all goddamn weekend.

  17. 17.

    Steeplejack

    I started to watch the first episode of Orphan Black on BBC America, then decided that I didn’t have the stamina to binge-watch the entire first season tonight and that I also didn’t have the decisiveness to jettison enough stuff from the DVR to make room for it. This is reminder number 93 that I need to get my TV, cable and router all connected and talking to each other so I can stream stuff from Netflix, Hulu, etc. Oh, yeah, and hook up the stereo and real speakers. I’ve been in this apartment over a year and in some ways I’m still camping out.

  19. 19.

    trollhattan

    Nino is not impressed by your 9-0 ruling, dead Supreme Court justices.

    This spring marks the 50th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision in New York Times v. Sullivan, its most important pronouncement on the freedom of the press, but the ruling has not won the acceptance of Justice Antonin Scalia.

    “It was wrong,” he said Thursday evening at the National Press Club in a joint appearance with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. “I think the Framers would have been appalled. … It was revising the Constitution.”

    The 9-0 ruling handed down in March 1964 threw out a libel suit brought by police Commissioner L.B. Sullivan from Montgomery, Ala. He claimed he had been defamed by a paid ad in The New York Times, even though it did not mention him by name. The ad, signed by prominent Americans, including former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, sought donations to support the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and the struggle for civil rights in the South.

    http://seattletimes.com/html/nationworld/2023409659_scaliafreepressxml.html

    The “Framers” would kick your ass all the way to the chilly Atlantic, you pompous git.

  21. 21.

    Tommy

    I could use some cell phone suggestions, because I find people here are kind of smart. I have a Samsung Galaxy Note II. Love it. Long story short my parents cell phone is not much more than a paper weight. Dad loves it. Mom wants a smart phone. Dad is a step away from yelling “get off my yard” I just learned how to use this phone, we’re not getting a new one. When I show her what I can do with mine she is blown away. So when they are over this weekend I am going to give her my phone and pick up a new one (we both have Verizon).

    First off I got no issue with iPhones, but want to keep it Android. I’d also like a smaller phone, mine is almost the size of my tablet.

    Any input/suggestions would be very welcome.

  22. 22.

    Steeplejack

    @Gex:

    I wonder if your boss got some heat from above and was reflexively conducting it downward. Doesn’t sound like she has thought this through.

  25. 25.

    Arclite

    @Gex:

    I was scheduled to upgrade a component on our system on Thursday night, but things weren’t working right so I sent an email to my boss explaining that I would not be rolling it out that night.

    Next time say, “Boss, the component isn’t working right for ABC reason. If we deploy it, it will cause XYZ problems in the system. How do you want to handle it?” Then SHE’LL make the decision not to go forward (or TO go forward) and it will be out of your hands.

  26. 26.

    raven

    @MikeJ: Pitch count and it is fucking freezing. With the injuries the Braves have to their pitchers it probably makes sense.

  27. 27.

    Mnemosyne (iPhone)

    @Gex:

    My guess is that she was fine with it until HER boss emailed her to say it was unacceptable. She needed to be able to tell him/her that she’d “talked to you” about it. That’s why she couldn’t explain what was unacceptable about it — she needed to placate her boss.

    Though, if she is the CEO/head boss and doesn’t report to anyone else, then I don’t know what her goddamn problem is.

  28. 28.

    MikeJ

    @Baud: If a pitcher has a no hitter going with 200 pitches you leave him in unless he wants to come out. And any pitcher that wants to come out with a no hitter going should be traded.

  30. 30.

    Tommy

    @Gex: I feel your pain. I had a client I gave a due date. I told him that due date was only possible if he got me access to his server/hosting account. That was last Wednesday. It took until yesterday for his IT guy to give me FTP access. For you non-tech people it just took me longer to write this then it should have taken to give me FTP access. He knew this happened and didn’t think the due date was bumped 7 days. Some folks will never understand.

  32. 32.

    Tommy

    @Baud: Yeah you have to be careful. My Cardinals basically have three rookies starting. Studs. They all have like a sub-2 ERA after three starts. We pull then at the end of 7 even if it is a shutout, cause well they are young arms and we don’t want to hurt them. I totally get the thinking of leaving the guy in, but 136 is kind of a lot of pitches. I’d pull him.

  33. 33.

    grillo

    So, not all that funny. Allow me to over share. This is the way it all went down.

    I wasn’t home the night, a year ago, when the Tsarnaev brothers had a gunfight in front of my garage. I was not there when the police smashed the door of my house open to search it. One of my neighbors put the whole business on YouTube, so I got to se them going in, but I was not there.

    And the reason I was not there was elemental to a chain of events which lead to this morning, one year later, when I served my wife of these fifteen years with divorce papers.

    She had always been more than a little hard on me. Her way of being married was different from what I observed in my parent’s marriage. Lying, wild accusations, screaming and throwing things. Dark mutterings and threats. But these were sometime things. They seemed like the exceptions.

    The story of how you boil a frog is false. However slowly you heat the water, the frog eventually jumps out when it gets very hot. I am not as smart as a frog. Not by half.

    To me it all seemed normal. Of course she would threaten to pour urine on the seats of my car. Of course she would tell me I am a failure in every way. Just normal.

    Of course she would insist on having a lover outside of our marriage, my opposition to this was just enforcing the structures of the patriarchy. Of course she would demand that I also have a girlfriend, and threaten me if I did not comply.

    When the shooting began no one was home. She was with her paramour, I was with mine. The children with their grandfather.

    And while I was there, the calls and texts began to come in. The screaming, the threats. For the first time, someone else saw. Someone else witnessed what was happening to me. And told me I was not crazy. That my life was crazy. That I was the sane one.

    It took a year to get here, but I got here. I am done. No one calls me the names that FYWP will not allow me to type. No one makes me live a life of fear and pain. And shame.

    That is what this day means to me.

  34. 34.

    Arclite

    @Tommy: I got a Galaxy S4 a year ago and I love it. The S5 *just* came out, and I already have tech envy, which rarely happens to me. This Ars review is pretty in depth. Ignore their clickbait headline, they like it fine and here’s what they complain about:

    The Bad

    – TouchWiz is a fragmented clash of three different operating system styles.
    – We aren’t sure a heart rate monitor would be useful on a phone, but the one on this phone is only right about half the time.
    – The fingerprint reader can’t be used one-handed.
    – The usual cheap-feeling plastic. It’s a little improved over the glossy S4 but still not great.

    Did I mention it’s waterproof?

  35. 35.

    Steeplejack

    @Tommy:

    I love my Moto X, which I got in January. It’s small—5.1" by 2.6" by 0.4"—has a 4.7" screen (720 x 1280, 316 ppi), weighs 4.6 ounces. It’s much speedier than my old Droid Incredible, call quality and app speed are great, and it’s a camel on battery usage—I have to charge it only about every other day. It’s running Android 4.4.2. And you can customize it with a wooden back! Cool. (I got bamboo.)

  36. 36.

    Mnemosyne (iPhone)

    @Tommy:

    A no-hitter is still sufficiently rare that you need to leave the guy in there until someone gets a hit or he decides to go. Otherwise, it’s like stopping a runner at mile 24 of a marathon because you’re afraid he’ll be too tired for next month’s race.

  37. 37.

    Tommy

    @Arclite: Thanks. Heck just saw an ad for the S5 while I was reading your comment. I think that is the way I will go. I am something of a nerd/tech geek and in my experience when you buy something by this or that brand and you like it, it is usually a good idea to buy the next thing from them as well and I love my Samsung.

  38. 38.

    raven

    Not one person here knows whether Freddie pulled him or not. Take a fucking deep breath.

  40. 40.

    Baud

    @trollhattan:

    Scalia on NSA:

    Scalia said the court is the “least qualified” to decide on the questions posed by the NSA controversy.

    “It’s foolish,” Scalia said. “We know nothing about the degree of the risk. The executive knows. The Congress knows. We don’t know anything, and we’re going to be the one to decide that question?”

    I still think his hatred of Obama will win out in the end.

  42. 42.

    Feebog

    I had a great afternoon. I gave mock interviews to the Granada Hills Charter High School Academic Decathlon team. This was to help them prepare for the National Academic Decathlon finals in Hawaii next week. Personal interviews are part of the competition. GHCHS is the three time national champion, going for number four in a row. Really a lot of fun, Go Granada!

  43. 43.

    Gex

    @Steeplejack: I was wondering that but it would be really uncharacteristic for our company. We’re a small group and I have mostly just reported to the CEO until I was put under her. And even then we are more like peers than boss/employee. And the place is usually so casual. As the only developer, they tend to defer to my judgment and when I’ve had to change schedules in the past, there usually isn’t an issue.

    I wanted to ask the CEO if he was upset about the reschedule or if it was just my boss, but I don’t want to make it worse by appearing to go over her head.

    @Arclite: Nice. Good advice, which I will keep in mind for the future.

  44. 44.

    Arclite

    @Baud: Isn’t the degree of risk irrelevant? I thought it was the constitutional risk that was in question, and on that mark he is one of the most qualified, regardless of his ideology.

  45. 45.

    Tommy

    @Arclite: Interesting. This may sound dumb but my current phone is so close to the size of my tablet I find myself never using my tablet, cause well they are about the same size. I hate paying money for something and not using it. If I had a smaller phone that wouldn’t be the case.

    @Steeplejack: The Moto X was the other phone I was thinking about. I am generally speaking a “brand loyal” kind of guy and in the late 90s I always had a Motorola phone and always liked them.

  49. 49.

    grillo

    @Anne Laurie: Thank you Anne. I feel so odd. I feel like I am on a different planet. I also feel like myself for the first time since the Clinton administration.

  52. 52.

    Tommy

    @Mnemosyne (iPhone): No I get it. I am a huge baseball guy, but really only follow my team and/or division. I am old enough to recall what the Cubs did to Kerry Woods. Ruined the guy his first year or two. Pitch counts off the charts.

    My Cardinals 5 best pitchers are all under 24 (well other then Wainwright & Lynn). We’ll pull them in a heartbeat if their pitch count gets up.

  53. 53.

    Steeplejack

    @Gex:

    I agree with Arclite. Next time kick it upstairs to your boss and let her make the call. And do it (or at least confirm it) via e-mail so there is a record.

  54. 54.

    Arclite

    @Gex: Yeah, it sounds like they’d given you defacto power to change the schedule. You might chalk it up to someone having a bad day, but if it turns into a pattern, change your M.O. And like Steeplejack says, always have an email trail. =D

  56. 56.

    Pogonip

    @grillo: Wow. That’s quite a story. My best to you as you move on in life.

    As for me this evening–much less exciting. Boiling eggs with an eye towards coloring tomorrow, distributing to neighbors Sunday, and devilling leftovers Monday. My devilled eggs include mustard, Miracle Whip, celery salt, and sometimes a little surprise of tuna, capers, or devilled ham, depending on what’s on hand.

  57. 57.

    schrodinger's cat

    From the open thread below: I am going to see Cumberbatch and Johnny Lee Miller in Frankenstein, National Theater Live performance. Cumberbatch is playing the creature. It is a birthday treat for me and I am excited.

  64. 64.

    Steeplejack

    @A Humble Lurker:

    I hate that bullshit. You create an environment in which workers are afraid to “take ownership” of their jobs and do anything beyond exactly what they’re told, and then you wonder why nothing gets done. Modern management at its finest.

  66. 66.

    Tommy

    @Matt McIrvin: That is what my brother and his wife have. I might have to wait till June and get the S5 mini as somebody else noted. That seems to be what I want if I didn’t realize it until now.

  67. 67.

    ruemara

    1. Grillo, congratulations. Welcome back to yourself. I finally finished sorting & shredding my ex’s paperwork today. I have that feeling of freedom you’re marveling at.

    2. This is not welcome at the end of the day, but I’m engaged, learning and working on way to reinforce the training my fellow employees are working on with their pets. She’s really good, even though she just came back from a seminar last night and is flying out in a day to another one.

  68. 68.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Tommy: There was an S4 mini, but, as I recall, the disappointing thing about it was that it had pared-down specs in ways other than size–it wasn’t just a smaller S4.

  69. 69.

    2liberal

    a lot of southwest flight personnel have a comedy routine for their flight announcements on takeoff and landing. One of them in particular was loaded with double entendres – i think the one we got on arriving ended with “I hope you enjoyed giving us the business as much as we enjoyed giving you a ride” or something similar (and probably more clever)

  71. 71.

    Fort Geek

    @grillo: Very late to the thread…but congratulations for getting out of that.

    I had an abusive relationship of my own almost 18 years ago. As soon as it was over, I resolved that no one would ever scream at or threaten me again. Not negotiable. No one should have to go through it or settle for it.

  72. 72.

    Tommy

    @Fort Geek: I’ve never been in an abusive relationship. Hope that keeps going. Sorry to hear you were. I think of my parents. They have been married almost 50 years and not sure they ever raised their voices to each other. Never around me. Always respect for each other. I have to think there is something in that way of living that matters.

  73. 73.

    Tommy

    @2liberal: Southwest does this all the time. I often use them cause (1) they are cheap and (2) they have a major hub in St. Louis.

    On Christmas Eve they often try to get the entire plane to sing Christmas songs.

    Look I have a sense of humor, but when I fly I put my head down and just want to get where I am going. I HATE stuff like this.

  74. 74.

    Fort Geek

    @Tommy: I don’t remember my parents arguing publicly, either. They were together nearly 40 years.

    That screeching harpie I endured was for just under 4 months–and then only because I was in a part-time job that wouldn’t cover apartment rent, which meant I was trapped with her. I job-hunted on days off, found a full-time job in the 3rd month, used most of my 3rd paycheck for a security deposit, and 11 days before the end of month #4 I was moving into my own place and out from under her thumb.

    December 20th is a much bigger day for me than the 25th, because of that.

  75. 75.

    raven

    “I fought to go back out there,” he said. “But looking at my best interests, it was a smarter play (not to let him). “It’s Fredi looking out for me, he wants me to pitch the rest of the year…. He knows I’m a competitor, he knows I’m going to go out there and keep pitching. As a manager, I know it’s probably the hardest decision that he’s ever going to have to make. Bud Black has told me the same thing.”

  76. 76.

    Uncle Cosmo

    @2liberal: “We hope you enjoyed giving us the business as much as we’ve enjoyed taking you for a ride.” Been around since the 80s IIRC.

    No comment on the quality of the comedy until & unless I can piece together a full transcript. Between the speed of the delivery & the poor quality of the playback I could only understand every third word. I guess I’ll have to replay it a couple of times–it sounds promising.

    @Mark Jones: @JasonF: Yet another reason to fly Southwest, which I will be doing next week. And if humor-challenged nimrods begin to avoid doing so it will be an even better reason to fly them..

  77. 77.

    imonlylurking

    @grillo: Grillo-congratulations. That is a big first step.

    BREATHE.

    Do you have a support group of friends? It helps to have people that treat you with respect around you. You’ll want to consider some therapy in a bit-not now, you aren’t ready for it now, but in a bit. That helps too.

    BREATHE.

    Enjoy the calm.

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