Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Putin dreamed of ending NATO, and now it’s Finnish-ed.

with the Kraken taking a plea, the Cheese stands alone.

Reality always lies in wait for … Democrats.

This has so much WTF written all over it that it is hard to comprehend.

Why is it so hard for them to condemn hate?

JFC, are there no editors left at that goddamn rag?

Republicans do not pay their debts.

When the time comes to make an endorsement, the pain of NYT editors will be palpable as they reluctantly whisper “Biden.”

When do we start airlifting the women and children out of Texas?

“Joe Biden deserved better than he got from some folks in his own party.”

If West Virginia and San Francisco had a love child.

There are more Russians standing up to Putin than Republicans.

Nothing says ‘pro-life’ like letting children go hungry.

Quote tweet friends, screenshot enemies.

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

He imagines himself as The Big Bad, Who Is Universally Feared… instead of The Big Jagoff, Who Is Universally Mocked.

No one could have predicted…

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

The Supreme Court cannot be allowed to become the ultimate, unaccountable arbiter of everything.

When we show up, we win.

White supremacy is terrorism.

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

I was confident that someone would point it out and thought why not me.

Bad news for Ron DeSantis is great news for America.

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Upset Open Thread

Upset Open Thread

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What’s it called when you have no dog in the fight but you just root for the team playing the team with the most obnoxious fans. At any rate, said team, the Kentucky Wildcats, just lost to Wisconsin.

Other than that, spent the day spring cleaning the house, eating my weight in deviled eggs, and dealing with online trolls.

Reader Interactions

84Comments

  1. 1.

    Corner Stone

    and dealing with online trolls.

    Ahh, raven is just an obnoxious asshole, not really a troll per se.

  4. 4.

    max

    At any rate, said team, the Kentucky Wildcats, just lost to Wisconsin.

    Upyoursset.

    dealing with online trolls.

    Twitter trolls?

    max
    [‘New! Blogging with lower output and more friction! Bonus stupid!’]

  8. 8.

    jl

    I had to drive a little today in this, IMHO, undriveable city for a couple of errands. Seemed like there were a lot of people who ranged each in their own special way, from oddly irritating to insufferable. Saw lots of peculiar behavior.

    I wondered whether it was just me. Maybe I had woken up in (and I say this is just the best way possible) a ‘Cole’ mood.

    But on my way home stopped off at the grocery store and when i saw all the crowds, and people buying flowers and pastries and lamb and passover foods, I realized it was that time of year when all the people who only go to church or temple, or whatever only once or twice a year were out and about all at the same time.

    Some time ago, I tried to be a half-way conventional, albeit extremely liberal and broad minded Christian, and went to church and whatnot. Didn’t work out. Was not a bad experience, in some ways very good, but it just did not work. Seemed like spent a lot of time with people who argued about silly stuff. Too much of that.

    Will avoid crowds tomorrow.

  10. 10.

    Violet

    Spent the entire day gardening. Mostly digging out weeds, from the easy to pull kind to the larger ones that turn into trees and require digging down over a foot to get to the roots and even then you’re not sure you’ve got them all. I’m exhausted.

  11. 11.

    Betty Cracker

    I’m at the airport waiting to collect the spawn, who has been on a school trip all week. The best thing Tampa Int’l Airport ever did was to build a cell phone waiting lot.

    Now I don’t have to circle the baggage claim curbside like a vulture and get shooed away by security if I try to park without a passenger in sight.

    Could be all airports do this. I wouldn’t know since I only fly maybe once a decade or so…

  12. 12.

    Mike in NC

    @Gin & Tonic: While scuba diving in Newport one time, we actually spotted some squid in shallow water, but we were going after lobster. Got five of them one night.

    The best calamari I ever had was at a restaurant on the grounds of the Biltmore estate in Asheville, NC.

  15. 15.

    The Dangerman

    From downstairs:

    He didn’t sell shit. They made a no call.

    Actually, both happened, sorry. Go back and watch the tape. Why do you think the ref’s swallowed their whistles for a no-call when there was obvious contact?

    Getting up early tomorrow; play nicely Folks.

  16. 16.

    Steeplejack (phone)

    Klute (1971) starting on TCM. Worth a look if you haven’t seen it. Jane Fonda, Donald Sutherland.

  17. 17.

    Violet

    @Betty Cracker: A lot of airports have cell phone lots now. The security theater stuff means they don’t let cars lurk at passenger pickup at baggage claim so they created cell phone lots to cut down on that practice.

  19. 19.

    Corner Stone

    @The Dangerman: The replay and no call is the important part, friend. It’s all on tape where he got physically smacked across the face. If his falling down caused the refs to not call that contact that’s very interesting, indeed.

  22. 22.

    Gex

    @jl: From my friend who works retail: “Unnumbered Retail Rule: The closer you are to a religious holiday, the higher quantity of nasty people you shall receive.”

  23. 23.

    Steeplejack (phone)

    @jl:

    If you’re picking up someone it’s a (free) parking lot where you can sit and wait for the person to call you on your cell phone and tell you that they’re ready to be picked up at the curb. So you don’t have to endlessly circle looking for them while they aren’t out there yet.

  25. 25.

    seaboogie

    I had some pre-Easter jelly bellies and a tiny chocolate bar in a nod to the season. Yesterday I read “the life-changing magic of tidying up” by Marie Kondo and am ready to get started tomorrow on my spring cleaning/transformation. I mentioned it to two of my “pack-rat” friends and it turns out that they both have the book, which is really well-written and thought out.

    I think that being a natural purger and having down-sized twice in the last few years gives me a good head-start. I love the notion of keeping only what “brings you joy”, and also allowing that some things have served their joy purpose at the moment they were purchased or gifted, and that moment has passed, so off to the thrift shop or into the garbage they go!

    Since my cottage is tiny (it was a 2-car garage) and also serves as my home office, this is a necessary thing for me to do right now. Looking forward to lifting and losing the psychic burden of the clutter!

  27. 27.

    Violet

    @jl: efgoldman explained it pretty well. Both the arriving passenger and the person in the car need phones to make it work, so if someone’s phone isn’t working or they don’t have one that is a problem. Some cellphone lots are far enough away that they take a bit of time to get from there to passenger pickup.

    I’ve noticed in recent years the cops at passenger pickup have got a bit lax on letting cars just wait to pick up arriving passengers. Maybe it’s just my local airport, but I’ve had it happen both when I’ve been the passenger and the driver. Either the person picking me up or me as driver can just wait in the arrivals section for the person to walk out the door. Definite change from five or six years ago when everyone was all panicky about it.

  28. 28.

    jl

    @Gex: Only some of them were nasty, but did seem like higher proportion than usual.

    Many of them just acted confused and aimless, but at the same time very rushed and frustrated that they were not getting things done quickly enough. At least that is what I gathered from snippets of conversation.

    Several times, jammed up behind some weird passive aggressive group I felt like yelling “OK, look, THAT is piece of fucking lamb, THAT is a piece of lamb. It’s the same damn thing. So buy one of them, awright?.” “Look, fools, that is cake, and that is cake, they are cakes. They will be sweet. You cannot tell which one is more tender and moist from looking at the damn things. Buy one of the fucking cakes, awright. Jesus Christ!”

  30. 30.

    Roger Moore

    @efgoldman:

    Or wait in the stupidly congested pickup area, blocking other cars in or being blocked in yourself.

    So the idea is to have an actual short-term parking area rather than turn the arrivals area into a de facto short-term parking area.

  31. 31.

    jl

    Thanks for explanations of cell phone parking lots. I will check if any airports here has them.

  32. 32.

    Violet

    @Roger Moore: But a free one. Most airports have short term parking but you have to pay. Most cell phone lots are free. They’re monitored so people don’t leave their cars there.

  34. 34.

    Randy P

    Re: cell phone lots. Philly has one, but people seem to prefer lining up illegally on the shoulder of the highway exit ramp instead. It’s been that way ever since we moved here. Occasionally the police will shoo everybody away, but they just come drifting back.

  37. 37.

    Mnemosyne (tablet)

    @Suzanne:

    Also the best rental car setup. Why hasn’t anyone else thought of putting all of the major rental car outlets in a single building that has a garage big enough for all of the rental cars? It’s genius!

  39. 39.

    Suzanne

    @Mnemosyne (tablet): I know. It’s a good airport. However, I got a $200 ticket for speeding last week, which pissed me off because I was slowing down as I came down the ramp into the terminals area. Fucking bullshit. They’re cracking down big time on speeding in there. Typically, people drive through there at freeway speed, and I was only going 50.

  44. 44.

    Violet

    @srv: I think centralized, offsite rental cars are another thing that has happened due to security concerns.

  46. 46.

    Steeplejack

    @Mnemosyne (tablet):

    That’s not my memory of it, but I haven’t watched it in quite a while. Thought I would watch it tonight, or at least put it on the DVR for later.

    My memory of it is colored by the fact that I saw it in the theater when it first came out. I was in college, and it was one of the movies from that golden period that gave me hope: “Holy shit, Hollywood actually can make a movie as good as the foreign ones I’ve been seeing!” Not saying it’s perfect, by any means, but I think it holds up pretty well. I liked the cinematography and the spare music, and I thought Fonda’s Oscar was deserved.

    To your point: I think Donald Sutherland’s character is conservative. He finds himself falling for this call girl and doesn’t have a frame of reference for what kind of relationship they could have outside of a “traditional” one. Fonda’s character, Bree, is more messed up—on the surface, at least—and I think she doesn’t know what she wants, but she thinks all the available options look either bad or unattainable. (I think she is shown taking acting or modeling lessons to get out of prostitution.) She doesn’t want to be controlled by men—including by marriage—but the only way she can control them is by servicing them sexually. She is drawn to John Klute because he is restrained and respectable. Maybe she could be a housewife with him because he’s not a grasping pig.

    Anyway, the best part of the movie is their interaction. The “thriller” part is a murky mess that just keeps things moving. I think it’s a nice period piece—in the best sense—from the early days of “women’s lib” and all the upheaval around trying to figure out relationships in the post-Norman Rockwell world.

  47. 47.

    jl

    @srv:

    I always take BART when I am flying by myself for business.
    But sometimes I have to pick up visitors flying in. Or, maybe don’t really ‘have to’, but when asked I almost always say yes.

  51. 51.

    jl

    @Steeplejack: What part of San effingcisco do you not understand? I talk about the place all the time.

    I moved out to the ‘Avenues’

    Fantastic for hiking, at low tide I can walk down the beach all the way to Pacifica, and if want to walk all day, over the hill into… forget the name of that beach town.

  52. 52.

    Mnemosyne (tablet)

    @Steeplejack:

    Listen more closely to the killer’s monologues, though — he blames Bree for “liberating” him and says that now that there are no sexual limits, why should there be limits on other morality? I think the movie agrees with him, which is why it ends they way it does. It’s a very well-made film, but it’s deeply reactionary IMO.

  53. 53.

    jl

    @jl: Can hike down the beach, over Montara Mountain, into Montara. Take shuttle bus back during summer.

  54. 54.

    JustRuss

    @jl:

    San effingcisco

    I rarely drive in big cities anymore, but spent an afternoon driving around SF a year ago. You have my sympathy.

  56. 56.

    Tree With Water

    @jl: Daly City is not a “beach town”. Hahahahahaha….. “beach town”….hahahahaha…

  57. 57.

    Betty Cracker

    @Mnemosyne (tablet): Tampa’s has a jumbotron too. Very handy. We’re home now, and I should go to bed because I have to get up early and cook a side dish before we head off to the in-laws’ for Easter dinner. But I’m wide awake. Le sigh.

  58. 58.

    jl

    @JustRuss: I do it as little as possible. And there are some places I will never ever even attempt to drive. Some parts of this town, particularly some tourist parts, would be quicker to to lie on your back and push yourself along the sidewalk by your heels.

    One cranny of my family has been wandering around the SF Bay environs for well over a hundred years. They say that, back when SF was a ‘real city’, there weren’t so damn many cars, much easier and quicker back then, and wold be now, to take tranist. And they say you could go a whole hell of a lot more places via transit.

  61. 61.

    Mnemosyne (tablet)

    @Steeplejack:

    The movie agrees with the psycho that all of this liberation is dangerous and it’s not his fault he was driven to murder by having no limits, so it’s best to clamp down on all of the sexual liberation so other people won’t be driven to become murderers. That’s what’s reactionary about it.

  67. 67.

    SectionH

    @Betty Cracker: Yeah, but you still live in Florida. The dejected Wildcats at least can go home to a state with Obamacare, and a Democratic governor.

    Most of us who are mild-mannered Kentucky fans for whatever reasons keep our heads down here, but damn.

    @Corner Stone: You win this round.

  68. 68.

    jl

    @matt: Yeah, the rows of the tidy little houses along the hillsides in that area are cute. Sort of like high class shot gun shacks built over a garage. Interesting to look at from a distance.

    Used to be able to walk down some paths from Daly City to the beach, but the cliffs are so messed up from landslides they are all closed now. Except, local fisherman know some secret ones.

  69. 69.

    Ruckus

    @Mnemosyne (tablet): SFO does that at least for all the major chains. And they have a overhead train that picks up at the terminals and takes you right there. Avoids the buses and lessens the traffic at pickup.

  70. 70.

    Betty Cracker

    @SectionH: I didn’t really give a shit about the game. Didn’t even watch it. It just struck me as funny that right when I was reading all these anti-Wildcats comments, two of that maligned species happened to walk by my car, hundreds of miles outside their native habitat.

  72. 72.

    SectionH

    @Betty Cracker: Fair enough. The West Coast variety sighs and forgets it.

    I hardly ever pay attention. Mr S & I have always confronted people we’ve had to interact with that we’ve always been happy for the separation of church and state in Kentucky, because otherwise, we’d have always had to have attended a basketball game every weekend.

  73. 73.

    poptartacus

    Fuck the NCAA and the way they treat their “student athletes”. They should be paid and well paid . Most wont get to the pros and wont get a decent education.

  74. 74.

    Tissue Thin Pseudonym

    @poptartacus: Just to play devil’s advocate here, in an actual free market, the vast majority of NCAA athletes wouldn’t make anything, probably not even what their scholarship is worth. That’s true for all Division II and III athletes, all women athletes, and all male athletes in every sport except football, basketball, and ice hockey. Every other sport loses money.

    In fact, that’s true at most schools even in the revenue sports. Basketball might be profitable at most Division I schools, and football at about 40 of them, though even that relies upon conferences splitting TV revenue equally even though its only some of the schools that draw sufficient ratings to support that. So at most schools there aren’t any profits at all that the athletes could share in.

    And even at those few programs that do make money, only a small number of the players are sufficiently good that they could justify a salary higher than what their scholarship is worth. A very small number of them (measured in the dozens, not thousands) would see gargantuan salaries. A few hundred would see something substantial above their scholarships. The rest wouldn’t get anything and might actually get less. I suspect that, if the schools end up required to pay athletes, what you’ll see is a small number of them getting more money and a bunch of non-revenue teams disappearing in order to fund that.

  75. 75.

    Groucho48

    @Mnemosyne (tablet):

    It’s been a LONG time since I watched the movie, but, from what I recall, it wasn’t that the movie validated the killer’s POV, it was more that it tried to be ambiguous about morality and good vs. evil. Something that a fair number of books and movies back then tried to do. I mean,he was a REALLY creepy guy and he did kill a couple of women. He tries to justify what he did, but, I don’t think his justifications are presented in a way that we are supposed to be sympathetic to them.

  76. 76.

    Bobby Thomson

    Duke’s fans are just as bad. There’s a reason they’re a meme on Fark.

  77. 77.

    Joel

    Haven’t watched any college sports this year. Probably never will again. Not missing much.

    Still hope Duke loses, though.

  78. 78.

    Joel

    @Tissue Thin Pseudonym: Many of the players don’t get scholarships anyways.

    I’d like the coaches to receive tenure-track scale salaries, which is more than most of them are worth anyways.

  80. 80.

    jake the antisoshul soshulist

    I was pulling for Wisconsin, and will be at work Monday night, but will pull for them again. Kentucky may win the obnoxious fan National Championship, but Duke fans are perennial contenders. Some of my best friends are Kentucky fans, I don’t really have a choice living here in Kentucky. Unless, they were Louisville fans, whose highest aspiration is to be as obnoxious as UK fans.

  81. 81.

    kc

    Re online trolls, I don’t understand how y’all know that the guy you’re trying to get fired is the same one behind those accounts.

  82. 82.

    Duke of Clay

    @Bobby Thomson: I have extensive experience with both Kentucky and Duke fans, and I can assure you that Duke fans aren’t even in the same league with Kentucky fans. When I first moved to Kentucky, I became a Kentucky fan. It quickly became obvious to me that these were NOT people I wanted to be associated with. While the majority are just partisans, they tolerate an exceptionally high percentage of incredibly nasty and hateful people in their ranks. So I always look forward to their defeats in men’s basketball. That said, “On, Wisconsin!”

  83. 83.

    Kathleen

    The refereeing in the second half of that game was disgraceful. But after it was over I remember the best thing the late great Al McGuire ever said on live television. He was doing color (and his color was uniquely colorful) on some big-league basketball game to Billy Packer’s play-by-play and there was a particularly awful call. Billy said something weasely about how he “wasn’t sure he agreed with that” and Al said, “well, don’t worry. If they’re merely incompetent it evens out.” Then there was some 15 seconds of absolutely dead air…Billy just couldn’t think of what to say next.
    So last night’s refs, in my opinion, were “merely incompetent” and it did even out, in that the better team (not to mention the better coach) won.
    By the way, I am no fan of Calipari, but Duke’s sacred Coach K has a rape scandal of his own about which little is being said, plus he may have more “one and done” players this year even than Kentucky. So I guess that’s okay now.
    Go Badgers…even though I went to Marquette.

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