JeffreyW’s cat Bea wonders what y’all are up to.
Open thread.
(This kind of feels like when I worked as the weekend DJ at a little radio station)
Countdown to a flurry of posts…..
ETA: For rikyrah
Kid has good taste.
Reader Interactions
81Comments
Comments are closed.
trollhattan
Holy fvck, those are habaneros. I grew some one year, at least that many, and managed to use three, IIRC.
Germy Shoemangler
One thing I envy about cats is how they can make themselves comfortable almost anywhere.
SiubhanDuinne
What a great picture! Pretty kitty, pretty flowers.
EDIT: Not flowers, I guess, but habaneros.
Cats are genius, aren’t they, at finding the perfect background? When they want to disappear, they find camouflage. When they want to look all special, they find something high-contrast and flattering.
JPL
@trollhattan: A few weeks ago, I dehydrated mine and then ground them into powder, seeds and all. You don’t have to use much to season a dish. My bush is full again. I am thinking about roasting and freezing whole.
Pesky rabbits leave them alone.
trollhattan
@SiubhanDuinne:
And classy and YOUUUUGE.
SiubhanDuinne
@trollhattan:
Oh, of course. Goes without saying.
schrodinger's cat
I can has Meowranda rights?
ruemara
Trying to write a statement of qualifications before I go off to kickboxing class. Then I come back, send the script out to the actors and … I know there’s something else to do this weekend for the film but I’m beat.
sm*t cl*de
That is the classic “Don’t let me take up any more of your time. No, really, you can go now” expression.
Mike in NC
We planted hot peppers in our garden when we first moved into our townhouse in Alexandria, VA years ago. One of the cats ate one and the results were not pretty.
Phylllis
More rain, oh goody. No school tomorrow due to the condition of secondary roads in the county. No evacuations or shelters open in our neck of the woods at least.
the Conster
This is Bernie Sanders’ black outreach person.
JPL
@Mike in NC: Did your area have heavy rain? I have a friend on the GA side of Lake Hartwell and she has a four inch rain gauge, that she emptied yesterday and today.
sacrablue
For some reason, my son planted one each jalapeno, cayenne, habanero and trinidad scorpion. All are producing like crazy. Many have been ground, others dried. We have a lifetime supply and then some.
Poopyman
@the Conster: “Boot lickers”? Seriously? How are we to take him seriously when he uses Tea Party language.
Ok, Ok. The “how are we to take him seriously” question has been rhetorical for years now. Shame, really.
Germy Shoemangler
quote of the day:
Armaments, universal debt and planned obsolescence — those are the three pillars of Western prosperity. — Aldous Huxley
debbie
@the Conster:
I hope Obama saves a chapter in his post-Presidency for Cornel West.
JPL
My favorite peppers from this years garden, have been my banana peppers. They are yummy sliced and added to salads. The green peppers are okay because they are easy to freeze.
Poopyman
For a couple of years I planted hot peppers, and we used exactly zero. Then I planted a single jabanero in the hope they wouldn’t go to waste. They did. Sigh. We actually like spicy foods, but it turns out we cook very little of it ourselves.
jeffreyw
Toby is miffed that Bea gets all the attention.
redshirt
@debbie:
Please. West is not worth even a mention.
jeffreyw
The habaneros are mostly for show, they can really be striking additions to a garden, but the jalapenos are really must haves for the kitchen.
BruceFromOhio
Holy cow, the Dawgs tied it with a 2-pt conversion. Chargers are in it to win it, alas.
ruemara
@Mike in NC: I’m a bad person, because this made me laugh.
RSA
@SiubhanDuinne:
What I like is that a cat might be scrawny or fat or cross-eyed or funny-looking or whatever–it doesn’t matter, they’ll walk around like they’re the Queen of England. Humans could take a lesson from that.
SiubhanDuinne
@RSA:
No body-image issues for kittehs.
JPL
@jeffreyw: If you have a dehydrated that you can use outside, dry them and grind them into a fine powder. You don’t need much to flavor beans.
Cervantes
@Germy Shoemangler:
That’s from his Utopian novel Island (1962), and the character goes on to say:
Five decades later we’ve only gotten worse.
Amir Khalid
@the Conster:
Cornel West, as I recall, bears a grudge against Obama over some minor personal slight, and tends to magnify his sins out of all proportion. What, if anything, did Obama do this time?
Amir Khalid
Could someone here have a go at surfing to the BBC and CNN sites? For some reason I’m unable to load either site, although I can load any other site’s front page just fine.
ETA: Never mind. Normal service has resumed at both sites.
Schlemazel
@JPL:
HA! I grew a bunch of peppers years ago and thought I’d dry them in a low oven. About 10 minutes in we started coughing and hacking. That was a bit of a mistake, if you are going to dry them DO NOT do it in an oven in your house!
jeffreyw
@JPL: I have about a pint of ground habaneros, should last me until next century.
Cervantes
@the Conster:
Is that West tweet from last November? Was it connected to what happened in Ferguson?
Is it in the news again?
Russ
OT
60 Minutes
Patrick Kennedy
Imagine the pain being hostage to the family code and alcohol was ……….
I feel so sorry for him.
What’s he burnishing?
Keith G
@Amir Khalid:
I think that we should spend no more time reflecting on that than the President does.
Mike in NC
@JPL: Lots of rain here. Several roads closed and some low-lying neighborhoods evacuated due to flooding. Mayor declared a curfew from 8 PM tonight until 7 AM Monday.
Schlemazel
@Russ:
Its all a cam to raise awareness of alcoholism and mental illness. He even walked away from his Congressional seat to form a charity trying to help. Don’t fall for it! The next thing you know he’ll expect you to treat mentally ill people the same as real people.
Seriously? Burnish?
schrodinger's cat
@jeffreyw: Actually, I prefer serranos or Thai bird’s eye chilies. jalapenos are usually not hot enough or flavorful enough.
Eric S.
Ha! Ozzie is a big fan of my pepper plants as well.
Kathleen
@the Conster: Why do I get the feeling that Bernie’s supporters will cut him much more slack when the inevitable disillusionment sets in than they ever will for Obama.
JPL
@Russ: He’s still trying to find his way. I know that his mom has been in and out of treatments centers for years. It was a sad interview, for sure.
Cervantes
@Kathleen:
Is that a question?
jeffreyw
@schrodinger’s cat: Mmm… serranos make a fine giardiniera.
Elizabelle
@Russ: Thanks for the head’s up. It’s a great 60 Minutes segment on Patrick Kennedy.
ETA: He looks more like PJ O’Rourke’s kid than Ted Kennedy’s …
rikyrah
Ok Everyone,
Peanut wants to perform in her school’s talent show. So, I ask her what song she wants to sing, and she goes ‘ that love song.’
I’m like, ‘ um, there are a lot of love songs.’
Peanut: “you know the one – they spell out love in the song. ”
She wants to sing Nat King Cole’s L-O-V-E.
My heart just stopped. I am like, good music is universal.
Who would think that a seven-year-old in 2015, would want to sing Nat King Cole?
Just printed out the lyrics for her to read and memorize.
We spent part of the afternoon, just wandering around youtube. She heard some Jackson 5 (“Michael Jackson sang when he was a kid? He had brothers?”); ABBA (she likes Dancing Queen); YMCA (we were standing in the living room, doing the YMCA together – do you remember being so naive when it first came out and you had no clue that it had anything to do with being gay?); Ella Fitzgerald (I can thank the show A.N.T. Farm for this – they had a ‘back in the day’ episode, and the Black girl played Ella Fitzgerald), and Aretha Franklin (because she sang for Pope Francis-Peanut goes to a Catholic School).
I had a good afternoon with Peanut.
Elizabelle
@rikyrah: I L O V E to think of Peanut singing that song. Classy kiddo.
the Conster
@Cervantes:
It’s been re-circulating on twitter. There is deep anger against Bernie’s supporters from Obama supporters, and BLM.
Eric S.
@Mike in NC:
Ozzie likes to chew the leaves. Many of them look quite lacy. He’s never gone after a pepper to my knowledge.
Roger Moore
@debbie:
I’d much rather seem him dismissed in a sentence or two, or perhaps ignored completely. It’s more appropriate for his actual importance in the grand scheme of things. An extended rip would only inflate his sense of importance.
Libby's Person
Previous thread, Debbie asked about Nikki Haley’s 1,000 year rain statement. Haley was talking about something real, but mangled it some. It’s supposed to be a probability statement – in any given year, there is a 1 in a thousand chance of having a rain of this magnitude. It does NOT mean that the last time it rained this much was 1,000 years ago. The problem with her mis-statement is that it gives people the erroneous idea that it’ll be 1,000 years before it can happen again.
rikyrah
Slavery in America was much worse than you probably imagined
Steven Rosenfeld, AlterNet
03 OCT 2015 AT 09:58 ET
This August, when Hillary Clinton met with Black Lives Matter protesters, they told her that ongoing violence and prejudice against blacks was part of a long historic continuum where, for example, today’s prison system descended from the old Southern plantations. Slavery, Clinton replied, was the “original sin… that America has not recovered from.”
But how much do modern Americans really know about slavery in colonial America? In the genocide of Native Americans? In the War of Independence or the drafting of the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights? Or afterward for decades until the Civil War? Chances are, not very much. Not that slaves, for example, were money in the antebellum South—currency and credit—which led to the enforced, systematic break-up of black families in generation after generation. There was no national currency, and little silver or gold, but there was paper tied to slaves bought on credit whose offspring were seen as a dividend that grew over time.
That’s just one of the riveting and revolting details from a new book, The American Slave Coast: A History of The Slave Breeding Industry, by Ned and Constance Sublette. They trace other telling details that are not found in traditional American history books, where slavery is usually described as an amoral but cheap labor system. For example, have you read about the rivalry between Virginia and South Carolina, which had competing slave economies?
Virginia was the epicenter of a slave breeding industry, in which enslaved women were expected to be constantly pregnant, were sold off if they didn’t produce children, and sometimes were force-mated to achieve that end. The offspring were sold to newer settlers and those migrating west. Charleston, South Carolina, in contrast, was colonial America’s slave importing and exporting port. In the late seventeenth century, Carolina exported captured native Americans as slaves to Caribbean plantation islands, gradually replacing them with imported laborers. As the South was emptied of native Americans and American plantations grew, South Carolina became the major slave importer in the colonies and in the early republic. Virginia eventually won out when Congress, at President Thomas Jefferson’s urging, banned slave importation as of January 1, 1808—protectionism, say the Sublettes, for Virginia’s slave-breeding industry, and sold to the public as protection against the alleged terrorism of “French negroes” from Haiti. After that, a new interstate slave trade grew, propelled by territories and new states that wanted slavery, and by the breeders who wanted new markets. Thus, the slave-breeding economy spread south and west, driving the expansion of the U.S. into new territories.
Slavery, as the Sublettes describe it, wasn’t a sidebar to early American history and a new nation’s growth. It was front and center—protected by law and prejudice, custom and greed. The enslaved were unloaded, sold, and taken (women’s necks tied with rope, men’s necks put in chains) via major roads, steamboats, and passing through cities and villages to their destination. Newspapers, owned by Benjamin Franklin, sold advertising for buying and selling slaves. All of this unfolded in full sight, with prosperous settlers assuming that slaves were a necessity for daily living and accumulating wealth. For generations, the property value of slaves was the largest asset in America.
http://www.rawstory.com/2015/10/slavery-in-america-was-much-worse-than-you-probably-imagined/
Baud
@the Conster:
Is that snark? Is it really?
the Conster
@Baud:
I don’t think it’s official, more that he’s self-appointed after Ferguson.
SiubhanDuinne
@rikyrah:
Relevant and chilling every time:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5joRRYNypKM
Keith G
@the Conster:
Is this quantified anywhere? Is there an organized voice expressing this? Leadership?
It is always interersting to look at the origins of intraparty factionalism.
germy shoemangler
Historic flooding has caskets floating to the surface in South Carolina:
http://mashable.com/2015/10/04/historic-flooding-caskets-south-carolina/#POlaE5k78sqc
trollhattan
@schrodinger’s cat:
For whatever reason I have a perennial serrano plant so have salsa chilis year-round, rather than replanting each spring. This makes me happy.
trollhattan
@Roger Moore:
I’d be okay with, “And in April that year I had the West Wing sprayed for Cornels.” and nothing further.
germy shoemangler
@efgoldman: The original poltergeist was about suburban sprawl invading old native american burial grounds. Realtors and land developers scarier than ghosts!
the Conster
@Keith G:
Lots of Obama supporters I follow on twitter, with lots of followers. Bernie’s supporters have gone up their ass sideways.
PurpleGirl
@RSA: Cats remember that they were once considered gods in Egypt. The attitude is hard to let go of.
trollhattan
@germy shoemangler:
The historic Sacramento cemetery–the one hosting Crockers, Stanfords, et al–is the highest part of the city’s original footprint and if flooding becomes truly dire, is where locals are supposed to head. Evidently they had enough experience with surfing coffins during early floods to move it there. There’s a neighborhood ironically called Poverty Ridge with grand old mansions from the same era, sited on another bit of high ground.
During years we have actual rain I keep an eye on the river level, which can reach the mid or upper-twenties MSL, and ponder my house at sixteen.
rikyrah
MEDIA ALERT:
Don’t forget Doc McStuffins, the First Lady will appear on the animated show Monday, October 5th at 9am EST on the Disney Channel.
Cervantes
@the Conster:
Wait. Year-old tweets are re-circulating on Twitter?
Year-old tweets by Cornell West are re-circulating on Twitter?
O, that way madness lies; let me shun that!
No more of that!
Mnemosyne (tablet)
I was talking to my mother in law on my husband’s cell phone, and it suddenly cut her off. The universe was clearly trying to tell me something.
(I kid. I kid — I get along fine with my MIL. But she does have a bad habit of engaging us in calls that last 2 hours or more, and I think the cell tower cuts you off after more than 1 hour, because this isn’t the first time this has happened.)
Baud
@the Conster:
Ok. Thanks.
rickstersherpa
These “thousand year” events, whether floods, storms, or droughts seem to be happening with a bit more frequency. Perhaps the climate is changing and becoming more energetic. I wonder why? https://www.google.com/search?q=Thousand+year+storm&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8
Keith G
@Cervantes: I assume whatever we have of rational political conduct will survive this initial stage of connectivity, but I am not sure what the odds are.
Elie
Great photo of Jeffrey W’s cat. Very cool!
redshirt
I assume sleeping within a habanero bush is great protection as most insects and animals won’t touch the habanero.
RedDirtGirl
@trollhattan: NICE!
benw
Atsa spicy kitty! My bad back has gone out again. Not catastrophically, but I’m hobbling around and counting the minutes until I can take a blazing hot bath.
MomSense
@rikyrah:
Music is such a great gift to share!
I watched an especially funny episode of whose line is it anyway with my youngest. Made the mistake of taking a sip of wine right before laughing so hard that it almost came out of my nose. I haven’t done that since I was a little kid and milk doesn’t sting like wine does.
Kay
Some say.
It’s even more nuts than that, because I think Issue Two makes any future ballot question nearly impossible unless they just don’t know how to draft, which is entirely possible. But Issue Three really does seem like a cartel, so maybe both issues should fail and they should just start over.
KS in MA
@RSA:
I could name a few humans who have taken a lesson from that already.
Mike J
@Kay: Washington had contradictory initiatives on guns in 2914. Happily, the good side won on both,
burnspbesq
@SiubhanDuinne:
Did you make it to yesterday’s Live at the Met? If not, be sure to catch the replay. Hvorostovsky was amazing, and Netrebko wasn’t far behind.
burnspbesq
@Amir Khalid:
Lobbied John Henry for the retention of Brendan Rogers, I believe.
Henry should have listened. This is going to come back and bite LFC in the butt, big-time.
Another Holocene Human
@Mike J: Florida’s gonna run competing solar ballot measures but we know the second one announced is just shit from the utility lobby.
The first one seemed weird, though, when I read the language. I did sign it but I want to know more before I vote for it.
Yatsuno
@Mike J: I forget if that was Eyman shenanigans. For the I-591 side. I-594 closed our gun show loophole and freedumb is still out there.
Another Holocene Human
Got to hear all three Dem Senate candidate for Florida stump tonight. Went in preferring Patrick Murphy, went out definitely supporting Patrick Murphy.
Alan Grayson is a narcissist and I don’t trust him. Pam Keith is a nutjob, and more power to her. Patrick Murphy is a guy who has won tough elections and I believe he can do it again. Murphy is not a very good speaker, at least not compared to the previous two, who worked the crowd masterfully. But he was in fact very genuine. And you can just look at his record vs Grayson in terms of getting elected in tough districts.
I don’t want to go on and on. Murphy was not one of those boring, cerebral speakers. He’s just not super good at it. Both Grayson and Keith were attorneys which probably taught them better public speaking skills. Btw, Grayson’s pander is Olds, Olds, Olds. It works for Bill Nelson and obviously it will sweep him to victory too, right? Murphy touched on the older generations, his own grandparents quite touchingly, but also talked about engaging youth in the Democratic party.
I’m sorry, but the more Grayson talked, the more I hated him. Keith is crazy, but she would make a great street corner agitator (even though she is not particularly well informed on a vast array of issues … kind of cringe worthy). But Murphy had me sold by the end of his speech.
My 2c.