Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Wow, you are pre-disappointed. How surprising.

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

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

Sadly, there is no cure for stupid.

Innocent people do not delay justice.

I’m starting to think Jesus may have made a mistake saving people with no questions asked.

When you’re in more danger from the IDF than from Russian shelling, that’s really bad.

“Loving your country does not mean lying about its history.”

Never entrust democracy to any process that requires republicans to act in good faith.

The snowflake in chief appeared visibly frustrated when questioned by a reporter about egg prices.

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

“Until such time as the world ends, we will act as though it intends to spin on.”

Petty moves from a petty man.

If you don’t believe freedom is for everybody, then the thing you love isn’t freedom, it is privilege.

“Just close your eyes and kiss the girl and go where the tilt-a-whirl takes you.” ~OzarkHillbilly

This really is a full service blog.

A tremendous foreign policy asset… to all of our adversaries.

Thanks to your bullshit, we are now under siege.

Fear and negativity are contagious, but so is courage!

Too often we confuse noise with substance. too often we confuse setbacks with defeat.

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

This isn’t Democrats spending madly. This is government catching up.

Speaking of republicans, is there a way for a political party to declare intellectual bankruptcy?

When tyranny becomes law, rebellion becomes duty. ~Thomas Jefferson

You are here: Home / Music / Monday Morning Open Thread: Unwrapping

Monday Morning Open Thread: Unwrapping

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Best part when you finally get that toy you’ve been dreaming about is… stress-testing it!

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Probably not the best timing, but just in case, I’m front-paging this comment:

Glidwrith says:
December 17, 2017 at 10:39 pm (Edit)
OT: I am in Louisville KY for the week visiting family. Any Juicers game for a meet-up?

Anyone interested, leave a comment here, or email me at [email protected] and I’ll do my best to hook y’all up.
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Apart from party planning and other year-end hoopla, what’s on the agenda as we start another week?

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Speaking of feeling stressed…

Reader Interactions

32Comments

  2. 2.

    Elizabelle

    Good morning. Surprise overnight snowfall in Wiesbaden; soft white out there to begin the countdown to Christmas. Hope your week is off to a good start.

    NY Times: British Airways pilot/author Mark Vanhoenacker. At the Solstice, in Praise of Darkness

    …. I’ve always loved the dark. My mother often recalled that as a small child I would sometimes grumble, “I don’t want the sun to shine, I want the moon to shine.” I decided to become an airline pilot in part because I believed that aviators might enjoy a particularly pure experience of night. The glow of the Christmas rituals I still love best — lights, candles, hearths — would mean little to me without the shadows that embower them.

    …. while I hope to spend every Christmas at home by the fire, this is also my favorite time of year to fly. Night flights are often smoother, and they are almost always more sublime. Raise your window blind and you may be the only person to ever see how the moonlight falls on an ephemeral, rolling Narnia of cloud, while on a clear evening a city far below you may look exactly as we might most beautifully imagine it — as a shorthand for civilization, written in light on the pages of a darkened Earth.

    When you look up, familiar, crystalline winter ornaments like Orion and the Pleiades appear, while auroras may offer the sensation, sometimes for several hours, of sailing across a phosphorescent sea. To reclaim a phrase from “Game of Thrones” — a show, ahem, that hasn’t exactly burnished winter’s reputation — the night is long and full of wonders.

    …. The poet Annie Finch is the author of “Winter Solstice Chant” (“the edge of winter sky/leaning over us in icy stars.”). During a phone call from her home in Portland, Me., she pointed out how neatly the solstice accounts for late December’s rich spiritual bottleneck of festivities and traditions in so much of the ancient and modern world. However we may celebrate the return of light to our skies and lives, she continued, we might also wish to pause to honor the darkness that will give way to it: “If you don’t experience the darkness fully then you are not going to appreciate the light.” A pause, of course, is just what we’ll be given on Thursday.

    Ms. Finch also pointed out that the winter solstice, traditionally a time of introspection, can be a moment of warmth for communities small and large. “Darkness,” she said, “brings people together.”

  4. 4.

    satby

    @Elizabelle: Good afternoon to you! That’s a great article. When I was a road warrior for my job, flying on holiday nights gave me some beautiful views of the lights or fireworks below.

  6. 6.

    OzarkHillbilly

    “If you don’t experience the darkness fully then you are not going to appreciate the light.”

    My wife appreciates the light. Everytime she ends up in the dark she finds herself on her face or walking into walls. Seriously, the woman has no night vision whatsoever.

  8. 8.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    I still say Trump’s best defense is he lies all the time so therefor you can’t take his word as proof of anything.

  9. 9.

    Elizabelle

    @satby: Yes. I love flying at night; seeing the outlines of cities. Or as the sun sets; twilight. Beautiful time of day.

    I love looking up at a late fall/winter cold night sky, when the stars look about 5 miles above our heads and it’s dry and chill out there.

  12. 12.

    Mustang Bobby

    I’m a daylight person; ironic since I get up at 3 a.m. and leave for work at 4:30. But when I lived in northern lower Michigan, just above the 45th parallel, I hated the idea of sunrise at 8:15 a.m. and sunset at 4:59 p.m. At least here in Miami it’s closer to 12 hours of daylight most of the time. I truly believe I have seasonal affective disorder; at least I did up there.

    On the upside, summer twilight up in Michigan lasts until almost midnight.

  13. 13.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @Mustang Bobby: I have a good friend who definitely has SAD. I’ll stop by his house at 5 PM and he’ll still be in pajamas and bath robe. For his own sanity (and his wife’s) he will head south for a month or more every mid to late January.

  17. 17.

    satby

    @OzarkHillbilly: don’t know if she’s had, or been checked for cataracts, but that could also cause poor low light sight.
    Everyone, get regular eye exams. It’s the worst feeling to deal with people who blew off eye exams and then show up, only to learn that their vision loss is permanent, when earlier treatment might have saved it.

  18. 18.

    Glidwrith

    Hey, Anne Laurie, thanks for plucking the meet-up ask to the front page. I will try to mention on other threads as well. Last night we found an Ethiopian restaurant called Queen of Sheba that was incredible. Hoping to drag other Juicers to it.

  19. 19.

    satby

    @Mustang Bobby: I never had SAD until the last few years, and if we get a few sunny days it still doesn’t affect me that badly. But I also take high levels of vitamin D, and I think that helps a lot. And I love the long summer nights living in the north.

  22. 22.

    Mustang Bobby

    @satby: Petoskey is so far north and so far west in the time zone that sunset in June is after 9 p.m. and it barely gets completely dark at night before the sun begins to come up. I loved that. Too bad it only lasts a few weeks.

  23. 23.

    Glidwrith

    @satby: Thanks, satby. Too bad you are too far out-my eldest dragonet is enjoying your vanilla soap a lot and I think he would like to meet you. The younger managed to break her wing last Thursday, but she was so brave!

  24. 24.

    Anne Laurie

    @Glidwrith: The Comte sent me an email that he’s “slammed” this week, but might be able to squeeze in a lunch. Can he reach you at the email in your commenting name?

  26. 26.

    Luthe

    @satby: I recommend getting a sun lamp (I’m sitting in front of mine right now). Helps with both SAD and standardizing one’s bedtime (I’m a night owl, so I have to force my body into “office hours” somehow).

    Ones that are both cheap and good can be found on Amazon starting around $60.

  27. 27.

    Cheryl Rofer

    The video is disappointing. The music doesn’t coordinate with the visual. I was really looking forward to hearing how all that goes together. I quit about halfway through. Maybe it gets better toward the end.

  28. 28.

    SFAW

    @OzarkHillbilly:

    Seriously, the woman has no night vision whatsoever.

    Oh, bullshit. She’s just been blinded by your brilliance.

    And you can tell her I said so, and she should quit whinging.

  29. 29.

    satby

    @OzarkHillbilly: should be every year as you get older (for everyone really). A month ago I had a 17 year old kid in to get his contact lens Rx renewed, he had been going to a different doctor, but had been seen about 18 months earlier. Air puff test indicated he needed to be evaluated for glaucoma, unfortunately, his retinal photos showed optic nerve damage already. 17 and permanent optic damage, from something that’s treatable by eye drops.
    Most of this stuff doesn’t hurt until it’s already irreversible.

  30. 30.

    satby

    @Glidwrith: aww, I hope she feels better soon! Yeah, wish it was a bit closer, I have driven to Louisville and back in a day, and in winter, but not able to before the holiday. My son will becoming up from Lexington.

  31. 31.

    MLE

    @Cheryl Rofer:

    plus, its the piano guys, who played for the trump inauguration. and when called out on that, they put out a statement defending that decision which included the rather squicky line: “You know that we honor our relationships with our spouses more than anything else. You know we believe women are Divinely appointed to not only equality, but also respect and chivalrous deference.”

  32. 32.

    Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism

    @satby: Seriously considering changing eye doctors because my current one has switched from the air puff to a physical impact test. I can’t sit still for them to even get the device close to my eye.

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