Okay, she’s not a young, beautiful, squirmy, squeaky puppy:
She’s a slightly overweight, fart-prone, snoring, middle-aged dog. But she’s mine, and I love her.
Big storm blowing through here tonight. What are you up to?
Reader Interactions
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Jerzy Russian
Did you put a mirror under her nose to see if she is alive?
TaMara (BHF)
I love it when they sleep that way. It’s so relaxed and secure.
srv
BJ, like every blog and US news source suppresses the great victory for freedumb:
Bropedia 4chanever!
Betty Cracker
@efgoldman: Smart girl and shrewd negotiator! You done good!
Violet
@efgoldman: That’s really cool. You’ll have to tell us when her Jeopardy! episode airs.
Violet
Heading to bed. Should have been in bed an hour ago. Moving a bunch of stuff tomorrow. Ugh.
Wally Ballou
Ernie Banks has died. Aw, nuts.
SRW1
OMG. I realize that FSM has already been exceedingly generous, but apparently there is no way to overload the clown car: Sara P is talking about possibly running for Pres in 2016!!
Amir Khalid
Just finished Unit 3 of 14 in my Spanish self-instruction kit. (It’s from Oxford University Press’ Take Off in … series; I’ve already been through the German and French ones, and learning languages is not a bad hobby.) There’s a fair bit of lithping in Castilian Spanish, because that’s how they pronounce the Zs and soft Cs. Is Latin American Spanish like that too?
Peale
@srv: I didn’t understand gamergate then, I don’t get it now, and I guess now that Wikipedia is compromised, I’ll never understand it.
SRW1
@efgoldman:
Yep, I doubt Palin is serious. But it’ll get the juices, not to speak of the the willingness to donate, of a certain segment of, oddly enough, mainly male admirers going.
Violet
@SRW1: No she is not. If you read what she said, she’s in no way considering running for president. She is, however, hoping to shake some more coins off the money tree. That’s what that tease is about.
sharl
@Amir Khalid: I don’t have an answer, and don’t speak Spanish myself, but I have seen discussions of the Castilian lisp before; here is Wikipedia’s take on it.
Aaaand another one of my favorite explanations of Why Things Are goes down in flames as an urban legend. :-(
Amir Khalid
@SRW1:
Of course, she’s interested. Running for President is the Holy Grail of political grifting in America. It’s a matter of deciding whether pretending to run entails a prohibitive amount of actual work.
Amir Khalid
@sharl:
Very helpful article. Thanks.
DaveInOz
Beautiful day here in Melbourne, the first day of the long weekend. We’re just back from a drive down the Mornington Peninsula with lunch a tasting plate at Red Hill Cheese followed by a trip immediately over the road to taste the wines at Main Ridge Estate Winery. It doesn’t get much better than that.
SRW1
@Violet:
Sorry, but if you read again what I said and what Sarah said, she most definitely was talking about running for Pres. I’ll go a step further: She was insinuating that she was talking about her majestic self running.
Whether she was serious is a somehwat different matter. Scepticism abounds.
Violet
@Amir Khalid: No, Latin American Spanish isn’t as lisp-y as Castillian. From what I remember, very upper class Mexican Spanish can sound more that way, but in general Mexican Spanish doesn’t have the lisp–at least not to my ears nor when I studied it. There are definitely differences throughout Latin America, though. For instance, the “double L” sound–I was taught it was like a “y” sound in English. However, in Costa Rica is sounds much more like a “j”. It was confusing to me until I figured out it was an accent/regional thing.
BillinGlendaleCA
@efgoldman: I still have the first car I bought, 30 years ago Dec 4 this year.
Amir Khalid
@Violet:
The pronunciation guide in Take Off in Spanish says to pronounce the double L, ll, like “y” in English, but the native speakers on the recordings (presumably all Spanish themselves) often pronounce it more like “j”.
Betty Cracker
@DaveInOz: Sounds like heaven!
sharl
It’s the Des Moines Grifter Parade. Yaaaaayyy!
Mr. Weigel may actually be in the West Des Moines Marriott though:
Given the number of trips he’s made to Iowa by now, you’d think Weigel would know the local geography.
srv
@efgoldman: I saw a restored K-car a couple of months ago.
Amir Khalid
Some Journamalism news: The Sun, Britain’s standard-bearer for the opposite of journalism, has “clarified” that it is in fact not discontinuing its four-decade-old tradition of topless girls on page three.
Last week’s “leak”, to its sister paper The Times of London, that it was planning to end the practice has turned out to be a scam to drum up publicity. I wonder how The Times feels about being used like that.
ETA: For what it’s worth, both papers are owned by Rupert Murdoch.
Origuy
@Amir Khalid: Latin American speakers pronounce ll as “y”, but Castillians tend to pronounce it closer to “ly”, in my experience. I suppose that can sound like “j”.
Violet
@SRW1: Oh, sure, the conversation was about running for president, I’ll give you that. I’ve read what she said more than once today. It’s her usual bit of talking around the issue of running for president, making it sound like she’s thinking about it, but she never says she’s thinking about it at all. She does the same thing all the time. Like this, from your linked article:
She has said very similar things before. “Servant’s heart,” “put yourself forward,”–that’s boilerplate Palin. It’s the media who interprets that as she’s looking into running. She’s not. She never is. And she doesn’t say she is. She talks about the idea of running for president, in general. As in someone will do it (“anybody would be interested”). Not her.
And this:
She never says she’s interested in “driving the competition” by actually getting into the race. It’s vintage Palin word salad, which the media interprets how they want. She gives it away when she says, “not necessarily me.” Yeah, no kidding. It’s not her. That would be work, which Sarah Paln doesn’t do.
She’s going to Iowa for some Republican something or other. That’ll ramp up the speculation again. And she hopes it’ll bring in more money to her SuperPAC. She’s spending more than she’s taking in at the moment. Needs to top it up.
Origuy
Servant’s heart is an evangelical buzzword. The phrase itself doesn’t appear in the Bible, but there are many verses that refer to being a servant of God. It’s another dogwhistle to her base.
BillinGlendaleCA
@efgoldman: Nope, VW Jetta(made in West Germany).
Steeplejack (tablet)
Eyeballing the weather. There was the threat of snow and ice overnight, and I have to drive to Dulles about 6:00 a.m. to pick up a friend. But it looks like just cold rain now, and it’s supposed to slack off a bit over the next few hours.
And I caught a few episodes of Law and Order: Criminal Intent that I hadn’t seen before, so there’s that.
Anne Laurie
@sharl:
Weigel has a very dry sense of humor — you should always read his tweets, particularly, with your snark-goggles firmly affixed.
Violet
@Amir Khalid: In Mexican Spanish the “ll” is pronounced much more like a “y”. I think the “j” sound is more Castilian-style, but like I said it was quite pronounced in Costa Rica. I found the different accents in various Latin American countries quite interesting. My Spanish isn’t good enough to pick up on the variations in, say, different Mexican states, but I definitely could tell differences in countries.
An English friend has a brother who lives and works in Latin America. My friend studied Spanish to be able to communicate better when visiting his brother. Studying Spanish in the UK he learned the Castilian pronounciation and to my ears his UK English-accented lispy Spanish sounds really strange. I asked him about how he got on with his Spanish while visiting his brother and he said he did okay but mostly his brother did the talking.
Their kids have watched “Dora the Explorer” cartoons and learned basic Spanish that way. That’s North American-accented Spanish, so without the lisp. So the kids speak it without the lisp and he speaks it with. Funny to hear them all.
Violet
@Origuy: It sure is. She knows exactly what she’s doing. I notice the article didn’t include pictures of her in her tight jeans and black boots. We all know what she’s selling and it’s not her policy acumen.
Nor did it include the picture of her with the sign that says, “Fuc_ You Michael Moore,” where the O’s in “Moore” are crosshairs. She signed the poster and then posed for pictures with it and the guy who made it.
SRW1
@Violet:
I don’t think we’re that far apart in our interpretation of what Sarah Palin was trying to accomplish with her brabbeling, other than that I used the expression of her ‘insinuating’ herself being interested and you didn’t while describing her motives in pretty much the same way.
Just out of curiosity, though, and given my understanding that only two other femal candidates have been seriously discussed in the public as candidates for 2016, one of which (Warren) has pretty clearly ruled it out already: Do you think there is any way to understand the following quote, right after “anybody would be interested”, as pointing to someone other than Mrs Sarah herself?
I am sort of sceptical that it was meant as an endorsement of Hillary Clinton.
Tommy
@Violet: Yeah they know exactly what they are doing. I don’t ever post much on Facebook. I did years ago after Gifford got shot. I posted a link to this video, of Palin putting a bulls eyes on her. I felt it was just a statement of fact, not really political.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7046bo92a4
People ran to tell me how terrible I was. The only upside was somebody was stupid enough to try and bring “jews” into the conversation. I got a few friends on Facebook that are Jewish and they kind of took it from there for me.
Violet
@SRW1: She’s not talking about anyone in particular. She hopes the rubes will think she means herself. Michele Bachmann ran last time so it could be anyone.
SRW1
@Violet:
I feel compelled to assume that we have complete agreement in that suspicion.
Tommy
@Violet: I will say this over and over again because I think it needs repeating. Palin turned my mom from a Republican to a Democrat. 67 at the time. Never voted for a Democrat. Mom said, and this is a direct quote, “Palin is fucking shit all stupid.” I’ve never heard my mother cuss in her life, but she was so mad about Palin.
She said Palin was an affront to intelligent women. She would not stand for it. I was like you go mom!
Amir Khalid
Make what you will of this: Hooters is thinking of opening in Malaysia.
Tommy
@Amir Khalid: I just always assumed we had already opened that horror of a place on them. Seems there is a Hooters every place I go (at least in the US).
Amir Khalid
@Tommy:
I think they put Malaysia in their Southeast Asia expansion plan because we are, after all, in Southeast Asia. But Hooters in Malaysia? I’m not feeling it. I think it might be the same kind of mistake as Playboy’s Indonesian edition. (Indonesia is a conservative society, where running naked-lady photos in your magazine is not okay. Playboy Indonesia had cheesecake photos instead. It caught flak for having the name but lost cred for having none of the nudity. It folded quickly.)
Pogonip
@Amir Khalid: No, everywhere but parts of Spain, an S is an S and a Z is a Z.
JCT
@efgoldman: Our college-student son is visiting us this weekend and the first order of business is to go look for his first car. He thought he could make it through college without one, but after 2 years in West Los Angeles he changed his mind. The difficulty is in convincing his dad the life-long New Yorker that used cars are perfectly fine out West.
JR in WV
We went
Nutella
@Origuy:
Some Latin American speakers pronounce LL as English Y but there are regional variations. People from the Rio Plata area (Montevideo and Buenos Aires) pronounce LL like English J. I’ve also noticed in Juanes songs he says J so at least one Colombian does it, too.
JR in WV
WE went out last night for the first time in a long time. Dinner at a nice partly Italian place, glass of wine. Then to the Symphony for a Beethoven overture, the Mendelssohn Violin concerto, played by a fabulous Canadian young man, Nikki Chooi, who did a fabulous job with the famous standard.
After the completion of the concerto he played a brief solo piece, it may have been the capriccio from another concerto, was flashy and extremely well done. He conducted master classes for string players while he was in town, which is always nice for the local students.
The local orchestra is very good for the size of town Charleston is, and we always enjoy the show whenever we realize there’s an interesting performance scheduled. I really enjoy concertos as you get to experience real expertise on the instrument. We’ve seen cello, violin and piano concertos here locally.
Harry Connick Jr. is appearing next month, but it’s only a week after my shoulder replacement surgery, so I may not be up for it.
It was wet foggy and rainy last night, and this morning every twig in the forest is covered with white snow. Only an inch or so, but the woods are beautiful!
The puppies went out for a few minutes, but only long enough to do their business, and right back in. The younger dog hasn’t ever experienced a really big snow, so that will be amazing for her, and us.