Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

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

Republicans: slavery is when you own me. freedom is when I own you.

Of course you can have champagne before noon. That’s why orange juice was invented.

I wonder if trump will be tried as an adult.

So it was an October Surprise A Day, like an Advent calendar but for crime.

Whoever he was, that guy was nuts.

T R E 4 5 O N

Despite his magical powers, I don’t think Trump is thinking this through, to be honest.

Hey Washington Post, “Democracy Dies in Darkness” is supposed to be a warning, not a mission statement.

People are complicated. Love is not.

You come for women, you’re gonna get your ass kicked.

… pundit janitors mopping up after the gop

Innocent people don’t delay justice.

Ah, the different things are different argument.

If you are in line to indict donald trump, stay in line.

We won’t go back.

Optimism opens the door to great things.

My right to basic bodily autonomy is not on the table. that’s the new deal.

Days Since JD Vance Insulted Women Across America: Zero

It’s a good piece. click on over. but then come back!!

We’re not going back!

We still have time to mess this up!

It’s all just conspiracy shit beamed down from the mothership.

We are builders in a constant struggle with destroyers. let’s win this.

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Monday Midday Open Thread

Reader Interactions

132Comments

  1. 1.

    different-church-lady

    It’s “alternate tax day”: the day your taxes need to be in if you file for extension.

    All my numbers are done, and I just have to put them on the forms. And I can’t get out of bed.

  5. 5.

    germy

    BALTIMORE — Maya Rockeymoore Cummings, a policy consultant and wife of U.S. Rep. Elijah Cummings, announced Thursday that she is joining the ranks of Democrats hoping to unseat Republican Gov. Larry Hogan, who is seeking a second term.

    Rockeymoore Cummings, 46, has never run for office before.

    “I am not a typical politician. In fact, I’m not a politician at all,” she said in an online video outlining her plans for Maryland. “I’m a change agent, with real-world experience.”

  7. 7.

    Major Major Major Major

    It’s still nobody-knows-what-the-fuck-is-happening-with-the-big-project-October in engineering at work, so I guess I’ll be twiddling my thumbs and working on my writing website today. I got a front-end whiz-kid friend of mine to agree to help with the UI yesterday so that’s great.

    Also, re yesterday’s writing thread, I re-read the Angry Robot submission requirements and don’t know if my book fits, but I’m still setting “done by January” as my reach goal.

    As an experiment, my husband stopped reading Twitter this weekend and got like ten times more pleasant to be around. It was remarkable.

  10. 10.

    different-church-lady

    @Major Major Major Major: Twitter is just as evil as Facebook, but there’s no single Golden Retriever Puppy-Human as the face of the company, so they don’t take nearly as much heat.

    (eemon will be along shortly to explain to us all how this opinion means I am deranged.)

  13. 13.

    different-church-lady

    @Major Major Major Major: I think they’re evil because they’re in the business of emotional manipulation for profit, and they don’t care about the collateral damage they’re causing to our society, never mind our politics.

  19. 19.

    randy khan

    I’ve always felt I was exactly the right age for that Batman series – old enough to get that it was intentionally jokey (I didn’t know the word “campy” at the time), but young enough not to entirely process just how cheesy it was. I still have a lot of fond memories of watching it.

    (And, yeah, there were lots of pretty funny labels – in retrospect, it was like they had no budget for props and just put placeholders up instead.)

  20. 20.

    Brachiator

    Doing the Neutron Dance!
    From CNN and other sources

    First-seen neutron star collision creates light, gravitational waves and gold

    For the first time, two neutron stars in a nearby galaxy have been observed engaging in a spiral death dance around one another until they collided. What resulted from that collision is being called an “unprecedented” discovery that is ushering in a new era of astronomy, scientists announced Monday.

    “We can now fill in a few more tiles in the jigsaw puzzle that is the story of our universe,” said Laura Cadonati, deputy spokeswoman for the LIGO Scientific Collaboration and professor in the school of physics at Georgia Tech.

    The collision created the first observed instance of a single source emitting ripples in space-time, known as gravitational waves, as well as light, which was released in the form of a two-second gamma ray burst. The collision also created heavy elements such as gold, platinum and lead, scattering them across the universe in a kilonova — similar to a supernova — after the initial fireball.

    No truth to the rumor that this story, especially the gamma rays part, was withheld until now to help market the upcoming Thor/Hulk movie.

    Also, the new Black Panther trailer is very cool. And it definitely was released to steal some of the fire of the upcoming DC Justice League movie.

  21. 21.

    Chris

    @germy:

    I know nothing about her yet, but politicians who run on the premise that they’re not politicians and that this is a good thing kind of trigger my bullshitmeter something fierce.

  29. 29.

    Jeffro

    @Brachiator: I saw that neutron star article just a bit ago – is that amazing or what? Saved the link to show my son when I get home tonight. Thanks also for the BP link, he will go apeshit over that as well!

  30. 30.

    Emma

    @Brachiator: I am not a fan of superhero movies but that is visually killing it! I would watch it just for the sets. (edit) And whatever hocus-pocus their special effects people get up to.

  31. 31.

    HeleninEire

    5pm here and it’s eerily quite. There are some gusting winds and some trees down throughout the city but the sun is out. The south is still getting hammered, 3 dead and 360,000 without power.

    We thought it would be over by 6 or so, but clearly Ophelia is taking her time to get up to Dublin.

    I actually just went for a walk. Needed to get out of the house. Everything is closed, except for a few pubs. Of course.

  33. 33.

    geg6

    So…I am anxiously awaiting a phone call from my John after his visit this morning to a specialist. Seems his usual doctor noticed that he was anemic during his yearly checkup and ordered some further blood tests. Those tests didn’t show any of the usual suspects such as iron deficiency, so now he has sent John to a cancer center for more tests. Not sure if this is related to his having had prostate cancer a few years ago (from which he seemed to recover quickly after radiation treatment) or some other cancer worry. And not sure why they jumped to cancer so quickly. So now we’ve been quietly freaking out for a week and I’m just hoping this all turns out to be nothing.

    Which, considering my luck the past year or so, is not at all likely.

  38. 38.

    JustRuss

    …the photo is from the @BatLabels Twitter feed

    I’ve never felt the need to be on twitter, but I must confess I am now tempted.

  40. 40.

    A Ghost To Most

    A federal judge ruled against Texas Gov. Greg Abbott‘s decision two years ago to remove a mock Nativity display from the Texas Capitol that advocated the separation and church state.

    U.S. District Judge Sam Sparks ruled late Friday that Abbott “violated [the Freedom From Religion Foundation’s] clearly established First Amendment right to be free from viewpoint discrimination in a limited public forum.”

    It all started in late 2015 when the Freedom From Religion Foundation placed a “winter solstice” display in the Capitol basement. The exhibit featured a cardboard cutout of the nation’s founding fathers and the Statue of Liberty looking down at the Bill of Rights in a manger.

    Abbott ordered its removal, calling it a “juvenile parody” and writing that the “Constitution does not require Texas to allow displays in its Capitol that violate general standards of decency and intentionally disrespect the beliefs and values of many of our fellow Texans.”

    small victories

  43. 43.

    A Ghost To Most

    A Florida Republican who’s running for Congress has in the past claimed that she has been the victim of alien abductions.

    The Miami Herald reports that Bettina Rodriguez Aguilera, a 59-year-old Republican who’s running for the seat currently held by retiring Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), claims that she has had encounters with extraterrestrials who have communicated with her telepathically since the age of seven.

    During a 2009 interview, Rodriguez Aguilera described being brought aboard a space ship and having conversations with aliens who let her in on key secrets about their visits to Earth.

    “I went in,” she explained. “There were some round seats that were there, and some quartz rocks that controlled the ship — not like airplanes.”

    Among other things, she says the aliens informed her that there is a cave in the island of Malta that contains 30,000 skulls that are “different from humans”; that the world’s “energy center” is located somewhere in Africa; and that the limestone Coral Castle tourist attraction in Florida is actually an ancient Egyptian pyramid.

    It’s not just Florida MAN

  45. 45.

    satby

    I was touching up my grey hair (shut up) and didn’t notice the glive had a broken seam. So now half of my left hand is a nice auburn shade to match my hair. And I have to go to work in an hour.
    No, chlorine bleach didn’t remove it, but it did get lighter.

  47. 47.

    Brachiator

    @Jeffro: There is a very good story, with explanatory graphics from one of the Gizmodo partners: “Observatories Across the World Announce Groundbreaking New Gravitational Wave Discovery”

    @schrodingers_cat:

    I think I know Laura’s husband! Small world is small.

    Very cool. I think that a number of different papers were held so the the announcement could be made today. Lots of good people worked on this. Such a fun discovery.

  49. 49.

    randy khan

    @HeleninEire:

    Everything is closed, except for a few pubs. Of course.

    Many years ago, my wife and I had the misfortune of being in Key West when a hurricane was due. It was the same there. In fact, there was practically no room in the bars, as everyone had decided that if they were going to go, it would be better to be soused at the time. (The storm missed, happily.)

  52. 52.

    Chris

    @different-church-lady:

    I mean, Obama ran on “hope and change,” so there’s that. More to the point, the idea that the system needs to change and that an outsider is the person to do that isn’t inherently wrong (the first part is just true, the second one more debatable). The idea that politicians are bad and that only a non-politician can do their job for them, on the other hand, kind of rejects the very concept of politics as something important, which is just crap and doubly so because the person going for the top spot is clearly a politician looking for a chance to do that full time.

  53. 53.

    geg6

    @Betty Cracker:

    I have a comment in moderation for no reason I can discern and would like it released. Hoping the medical minds here at BJ can calm my mind since everything I’m reading about my concern is making me more and more anxious.

  54. 54.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    Just flipped on MSNBC, and off, cause the Beast is yammering. but the subtitle said “Trump: No such thing as Obamacare anymore”. You got that right, Flabby, you now own people’s complaints with their health insurance as they await Something Terrific.

  56. 56.

    Jeffro

    Why don’t we just call them “Rip-Off Republicans“? That’ll work for 2018 and 2020 pretty well, I think.

    (with apologies as the full article paints John Kasich in a flattering light…but here’s the part I liked):

    Republicans are kidding themselves if they think they can escape blame when the exchanges crash on their watch. The Kaiser Family Foundation finds that “when asked whether they support Congress guaranteeing the funds to continue the CSR payments when the proposal is included in a bipartisan compromise that would give states more flexibility in the types of plan sold in their state’s marketplace, a majority of the public (69 percent) — including roughly equal shares of Democrats (69 percent), independents (70 percent), and Republicans (68 percent) — support such a compromise.” (This is essentially the Alexander-Murray bill.) Approval for the ACA is up (51 percent to 40 percent), a five-point improvement in the past month.

    …

    Anyone who thinks the past nine months will be forgotten because of the passage of a wondrous tax bill hasn’t been paying attention to what’s in it (massive, unpaid tax cuts for the rich that bust the budget) or to public sentiment, which is overwhelmingly opposed to massive, unpaid tax cuts for the rich that bust the budget. House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R), who used to fancy himself a wonk, now simply regurgitates talking points about tremendous growth without doing the hard work of presenting actual legislation with hard numbers, looking at what it costs and considering the distribution of the tax savings. He knows that a huge percentage of the savings goes to the wealthy but insists that it is a middle-class tax-cut plan. He must think voters are stupid.

    They ripped you off on health care.
    They ripped you off on taxes.
    They’re ripping you off on jobs, opportunity, and education…
    RIP-OFF REPUBLICANS!

  61. 61.

    Amir Khalid

    @different-church-lady:
    Agreed, “Change agent” is pointy-haired manager talk. (Please excuse the Dilbert reference.) Anyone who uses it should be regarded with suspicion.

    @Chris:
    I think the thing to look at is not so much whether the candidate is an “insider” or “outsider”, but whether they are equipped to work the system to bring about change, and intend to do it.

  62. 62.

    jeffreyw

    Making fig jam today, decided to order the jam making machine some here talked about. Watergirl? It’s the Ball machine that makes 4 half pints, hands free. https://i.imgur.com/9gdMv9R.jpg
    @satby: Yay satby! Today, I stir – tomorrow I eat fig jam on fig bread! I may make fig bread pitas and stuff them with jam. Nabisco, eat your heart out and bow down to the Big Boy Newton!
    –

  66. 66.

    Amir Khalid

    @craigie:
    They did that a lot on the show. They’d even put a KAPOW! or BIFF! on the screen to indicate when Batman had connected with a punch or kick.

  68. 68.

    Betty Cracker

    Carrie Fisher, ladies and gents:

    Carrie Fisher’s longtime friend Heather Ross says the late “Star Wars” actress stuck up for her when she was sexually assaulted by an Oscar-winning producer.

    “Carrie sent me a message online and she said, ‘I just saw blank at Sony studios,’” Ross told Tucson, Ariz.’s 94.9 Mix FM this week.

    Fisher added to her pal, “I knew [the producer] would probably be there, so I went to his office and personally delivered a Tiffany’s box wrapped with the white bow. It was a cow tongue from [LA haunt] Jerry’s Famous Deli with a note that said, ‘If you ever touch my darling Heather or any other woman again, the next delivery will be something of yours in a much smaller box.’”

    Ross adds, “If you don’t know what a cow tongue looks like, Google it.”

    Wow! [Source: https://pagesix.com/2017/10/16/how-carrie-fisher-stuck-up-for-friend-who-was-sexually-assaulted/%5D

  72. 72.

    Kay

    Donors who trekked to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, in support of House Speaker Paul Ryan were treated to a slide show late this summer to fundraise off those very fears, according to multiple attendees. Among the slides: An overview of the Democrats who would be tapped to lead key committees if the GOP loses control, including Rep. Elijah Cummings as the head of the House Oversight Committee.
    To some attendees, the subtext was clear. If Republicans forfeit the House, Democrats will almost certainly create a spectacle that will derail conservatives’ agenda and the remainder of Trump’s first term — a spectacle complete with a raft of new subpoenas, a spotlight on the Russia investigation and, many are convinced, impeachment proceedings.

    They’re just scaring their base, but I do get a kick out of how they know what a bad job they’re doing despite all the media fluffing and lies.

    It’s not that “truth prevails”- truth just sits there, stubbornly, piling up… :)

  74. 74.

    WaterGirl

    @geg6: I don’t have any knowledge or information that might be helpful, just good thoughts for both of you. So you’ve waited a week to see the specialist and will now likely have to wait a bit longer for results of any tests that were done. Hope you hear from John very soon.

  76. 76.

    catclub

    Tail end of Rubin’s WaPo opinion piece.

    Centrists on both sides of the aisle need to band together, make clear that they have no intention of continuing this charade and then lay out some parameters for legislating for the rest of the year. Any budget should include funding for the insurance subsidies and be accompanied by a permanent DACA fix. Otherwise, the centrists on the GOP side should tell the White House and their irresponsible GOP ideologues to find the votes for their own darn budget and for tax reform. It’s time for every thinking lawmaker to put his or her foot down.

    I thought the last line was amusing.

  77. 77.

    ThresherK

    Does the glue trap for mice predate this TV show?

    I don’t remember this villain, but the actor I also remember from The Mothers-in-Law, which I liked for the pairing of Ballard and Arden.

  78. 78.

    WaterGirl

    @raven: I love that, so clever and fun. Your tennies show up in that photo, and it kind of looks like your feet are what’s propelling the “car” forward. Very Fred Flinstone!

  81. 81.

    Kay

    It always makes me mad because that works with the GOP base- threatening Democratic investigations or oversight.

    It doesn’t work at all with Democrats. The minute I see it on the Dem side I think “well, THAT’s over, then- they’re going to lose”.

  85. 85.

    Timurid

    @Betty Cracker:

    The most disturbing thing about that story is [blank]. Even his victims/enemies protected and continue to protect the perp’s identity. Fisher apparently believed that committing a felony (terroristic threat) was safer than confronting the producer in public. When people fear their bosses more than they fear the law, things are badly broken…

  86. 86.

    Brachiator

    @Chris:

    I mean, Obama ran on “hope and change,” so there’s that. More to the point, the idea that the system needs to change and that an outsider is the person to do that isn’t inherently wrong (the first part is just true, the second one more debatable).

    There is this weird idea, which intensified after Marx I suppose, that changing the system inherently creates a better government and society. Uncle Bernie ran hard on this nonsense. The promise of soz ialism. As though no one could actually look at what was happening in Europe and see the good and the bad, not Instant Karma.

    This kind of thinking also ignores actual problems and the hard task of actually getting people together to devise solutions.

    The idea that politicians are bad and that only a non-politician can do their job for them, on the other hand, kind of rejects the very concept of politics as something important, which is just crap and doubly so because the person going for the top spot is clearly a politician looking for a chance to do that full time.

    Yep. Amazing that people insist on this myth. The Founders weren’t politicians, or weren’t full time politicians, but patriots who popped up when needed to create government and then retired to their homes and businesses. But I understand the frustration with slow moving, corrupt bureaucracy.

  87. 87.

    Mr Wu's Pigs

    I’ve called my MoC and asked them to support ACA’s CSR, among other things. I call almost every day about something.

  88. 88.

    catclub

    @Chris:

    More to the point, the idea that the system needs to change and that an outsider is the person to do that isn’t inherently wrong (the first part is just true, the second one more debatable).

    I am not sure that [any massive] change is required is at all obvious. Unemployment is 4%, the economy is growing slowly – and has been for the past 7 years.
    IN 1933 unemployment was 25% in the US and there was no revolution. In Greece these past few years it has been around that – and still no revolution.
    Germany in 1933 was 47% unemployment and they got Hitler – as a kind of last resort.
    Muddling along clearly looks like an option to me.

  92. 92.

    JCJ

    @geg6:

    I would guess that the testing is to evaluate more about the anemia. As to why the jump straight to cancer – it is drilled into your head in medical school that anemia in a male is cancer until proven otherwise. This is simply to make sure that evaluation is done to rule out the most significant causes before looking for a benign cause. Medical oncologists are almost always hematologists as well, so it is not unusual to have one of them get involved in even benign hematologic disorders. Autoimmune disorders are another possibility. Many non-cancer causes of anemia are easily managed.

  93. 93.

    catclub

    @Kay: The lesson of 2006 and 2008 may be that the Democrats can only win when the GOP voters are fed up with what they get from GOP government.

    I do agree that the messages that work for GOP GOTV are definitely NOT the same ones that work for Democrats to GOTV.
    I saw the thing about making Paul Ryan the GOP ‘enemy’ the same way they have done for Nancy Pelosi and thought “That’ll never work, Bullwinkle”

  96. 96.

    J R in WV

    @geg6:

    So sorry to hear about your guy. Your post got moderated because of the word “specialist” – which contains the banned spam word “cialis”.

    Blood work can have indications of stuff which could be various types of cancer, and radiation therapy can up your odds of getting those cancers, which is probably why they sent him to the specialized clinic for more diagnostic work. Way too early to get very upset so far!!

    Best wishes for him and for you…

  98. 98.

    rikyrah

    A story you may not have heard about:

    WASHINGTON ― A former Republican political candidate in Indiana who authored a right-wing blog was arrested this week for allegedly mailing a pipe bomb and a threatening letter containing a bullet to two of his political opponents. The pipe bomb exploded at a post office, leaving a pregnant postal worker with “cuts, abrasions and bruises to her head, legs, and feet.”

    https://twitter.com/ryanjreilly/status/919961310510702593

  99. 99.

    WaterGirl

    @MomSense: I thought the cap was totally adorable! But this second photo is cute too, as they are clearly looking around, enjoying themselves.

  100. 100.

    Peale

    @Brachiator:

    But I understand the frustration with slow moving, corrupt bureaucracy.

    LOL. Since we’re talking about myths…since no one has yet “disrupted” work processes enough to completely level the very bureau as the model for organizing large groups of people in both the public and privace sector, I’m not certain why the government bureaucracy gets slammed with the idea that they are uniquely slow. I’m surprised they still function at all given 30 years of conservative contempt and promises to blow it all up.

    Also, we’re probably sitting with one of the least corrupt bureaucracies in the world. At least the hoi-polloi like us in our daily lives. I think a lot of those complaints against it are by people of means who wish that they could bribe and grease more palms of some underpaid level 4 technocrat and get nowhere.

  101. 101.

    different-church-lady

    @Chris: It’s like saying, “Our last rocket blew up. What we need to do to fix this is turn the program over to people who have never worked with rockets before!”

  104. 104.

    MomSense

    @WaterGirl:

    I’m amazed he got the dog to wear a cap at all. I once did the christmas photo with the reindeer antlers on my dog and the roll of film was all dog shaking off antlers.

  107. 107.

    geg6

    Thanks for all the good thoughts. I’ll still be on pins and needles, though. Makes me nuts, the waiting and not knowing. All I can think about is why didn’t John and I meet when we were younger? If anything is really badly wrong, it’s so unfair that we’ve only had this short time together. Took me until my late forties to find the man of my dreams and to think we may only have had this short decade.

    Maudlin, I know, but at our ages (he’s 70), it’s only realistic.

  109. 109.

    different-church-lady

    CNN.com headline:

    Weinstein Co. may have a buyer
    Reeling from a sexual misconduct scandal, studio is in talks with a firm owned by a friend of President Trump

    “Wait, there’s a business where you get molest women? BUY THAT THING FOR ME!”

  112. 112.

    Peale

    @rikyrah: Well, they should. Additionally, so are Brazilians, Venezuelans, Iraqis, and even the Somalis. If Yemen wasn’t being taken apart bit by bit, they’d be laughing, too.

  113. 113.

    Jeffro

    @rikyrah: Of course they are. It’s almost unilateral surrender, having this moron as the country’s leader. It’s like we took a quality factory and turned it into a food-fight arena, or turned a great athletic program into an armpit-fart training camp. Something like that.

  114. 114.

    Chris

    @catclub:

    Wages are still stagnating, education is still getting more and more expensive, health care/insurance issues still haven’t been resolved… and that’s just the economy. Then you’ve got murderous police departments, mass incarceration of nonwhites, terrible treatment of immigrants, insufficiently protected voter rights, an undemocratic electoral system, an out of control military-industrial complex…

    I mean, if you’re saying “muddling along is an option” in the sense of “the powers that be can avoid change without provoking a violent revolution at least for quite some time,” you’re probably right, but in the sense of “this government isn’t doing right by its citizens and that needs to be changed,” which is what outsider reformers almost always at least claim to believe, that’s a premise I completely agree with. (And would in pretty much any society in the world. Even if I don’t agree with every reformer about how and in what direction to change things).

  115. 115.

    Tom Q

    @catclub: This is what made me crazy about the whole Bernie thing — Obama had the country in good shape (cosmically better shape compared to when he took office). Yet the Sarandons of the world talked about how we couldn’t vote for “the status quo”. When the quo is that status, you’re damn right you could, and should.

    I’m old enough to have lived through a bunch of cycles where Democrats have a chance to succeed Democrats and continue the improvements they’ve made. And each time, pie-in-the-sky leftists are there to tell us what we have isn’t good enough, we must push for something closer to left paradise; each time, it’s led to a GOPer taking over, and pushing the country further right. This was acceptable/understandable in 1968, when the war was horrific and seemingly never-ending, and it diidn’t make much difference in 1980, when Carter’s gestalt was so bad he couldn’t have won regardless. But in both 2000 and 2016, lefties looked at a winning hand and said, Screw this, if I can’t get even better, I’ll forfeit. It’s infuriating.

  116. 116.

    Mnemosyne

    @different-church-lady:

    I think they’re evil because they’re in the business of emotional manipulation for profit …

    That’s why I refer to the multinational as the Giant Evil Corporation — that’s exactly what our business plan is. Though we do at least make an attempt to use our powers for good these days, there’s a lot of bad history we’re trying to put behind us. ?

  117. 117.

    Mnemosyne

    @randy khan:

    I was re-watching it a few years ago and it holds up surprisingly well. Things like the giant labels are clearly meant to be in-jokes for the adults watching with their kids. It’s supposed to be a family show with something everyone can get, not just a kids show.

  118. 118.

    Chris

    @Tom Q:

    Well, there, the lie isn’t “we can’t vote for the status quo” – the lie is “voting for mainstream Democrats is voting for the status quo.” Hillary Clinton wasn’t running on “everything is awesome.” Hillary Clinton was running on raising the minimum wage, expanding the ACA to move further towards universal health care, increasing child care assistance, immigration reform, and campaign finance reform (among others). I could see the argument that we needed more reform than she was proposing, maybe, but those who argued that she was running to maintain the status quo were just flat-out lying.

  119. 119.

    Mnemosyne

    @geg6:

    FWIW, that’s what our vets did with our cat Annie — they investigated all of the worst possibilities first (i.e. cancer) and then started looking at the less-bad things. It turned out to be an autoimmune skin disease called pemphigus, which is no fun, but at least it’s not cancer.

  122. 122.

    Mnemosyne

    @Timurid:

    Even his victims/enemies protected and continue to protect the perp’s identity. Fisher apparently believed that committing a felony (terroristic threat) was safer than confronting the producer in public.

    Exactly. Please think about that for a minute. It was actually less risky for a woman as powerful as Fisher to physically threaten someone than it was to reveal his name.

    Now realize that it ain’t just the entertainment industry where that holds true.

  123. 123.

    geg6

    Okay, got a call from my John after the oncologist visit. They seemed to pooh-pooh the idea of cancer…not totally, but didn’t think this was the real concern. They seemed to be zeroing in on either a liver problem or possibly gall bladder. Next step is an MRI.

  124. 124.

    geg6

    @Mnemosyne:

    Hell, at least in the entertainment industry, there are at least a very few women in positions of power. Imagine working in a STEM industry.

  126. 126.

    Brachiator

    @Peale:

    I’m not certain why the government bureaucracy gets slammed with the idea that they are uniquely slow.

    Might ask Kafka (The Castle) or Dickens (The Circumlocution Office in Little Dorrit).

  129. 129.

    Uncle Cosmo

    @HeleninEire: You keep mentioning “flying debris.” Under normal conditions the only flying debris one needs to be concerned with in Ireland is composed of bottles & brickbats. And those are usually harmless so long as you’re not the person being “flown” at.

  130. 130.

    Betty Cracker

    @geg6: That sounds less alarming. FWIW, I have intermittent gallbladder issues, and anemia is a symptom, so it could definitely be something like that!

  131. 131.

    Ab_Normal

    @JCJ:

    Autoimmune disorders are another possibility.

    Yup, my anemia was caused by celiac, aka the only auto-immune disorder controlled by diet.

  132. 132.

    J R in WV

    @raven:

    Fabulous “float” for the parade, goofy propulsion guy is cute, dogs are the greatest. Theme is hilarious!

    Just got back from semi-annual doggy checkups, both behaved themselves, even when the Irish Woflhound came in! You don’ t have to bend over to pet one of those puppies!!! I will admit our elder dog, shy Miss Happy, growled softly, under her breath, when she saw the giant puppy come in, but shut up when I told her that girl could eat her with one bite, and whapped her on the head with my waiting room magazine, Fancy Cats.

    Best wishes,
    JR

Comments are closed.