So, I got a trap to capture the feral cats an irresponsible neighbor feeds* so I can have them spayed/neutered and returned to the ‘hood, which is the way such situations are handled in my county (i.e., at taxpayer expense and with no enforcement of existing regulations). This dude showed up for the Fancy Feast instead, and now the fucker won’t leave my trap!
At first, I was thinking, “Oh, poor thing! Maybe his tail is caught or something,” but he has turned around inside the trap multiple times and does not seem to be injured. Several times, he’s faced the open end of the trap with freedom just inches from his pointy little snout and humans completely out of sight (but watching from the window). He hisses and bares his teeth when approached, but he doesn’t seem inclined to leave. Somehow, this is a metaphor for my entire life.
*I’ve got no problem with people feeding feral cats if they also take responsibility for the resulting colony, including the obligation to trap, neuter and release the cats so the population doesn’t get out of control. The neighbor in question does not, so I have to take on the expense and time involved instead. This makes her a terrible neighbor, IMO.
Update: Now he’s moved to the end of the trap and is sort of using it as a sun porch:
He’s never going to leave, is he?
UPDATE 2: He skedaddled!
Elmo
What’s he doing out in daylight?
Roger Moore
Not until the food runs out.
Eric U.
no good deed, &etc
Gelfling 545
Saw a video on FB yesterday saying they are really very sweet animals!
brettvk
Put more food out away from the trap?
Dorothy A. Winsor (formerly Iowa Old Lady)
I blogged about what one librarian called the four doors into a book: character, setting, language, and plot. A book with big readership has more doors open wider.
ETA: As someone who paid a guy to trap 13 raccoons, a baby possum, and a squirrel, I sympathize. Five of the raccoons lived in my attic. The other critters cruised in from the neighborhood and got caught in the sweep.
brettvk
They’re stubborn little buggers. I’ve had to practically move one out with a gently-applied shovel to get it away from my cats’ meals – it was coming up on the patio when I came out to feed them. I’m okay with them if they leave me alone but they can be persistent and very stand-my-ground. Floridian, you might say.
Betty Cracker
@Elmo: We don’t see them during the day that often, but it’s not unheard of, especially on a cloudy, somewhat chilly day. Maybe one of the 10K feral cats flushed him from his daytime hidey hole…
Gravenstone
Possums are a pain in the ass, and have very, very thick skulls. I learned the latter years ago when I accidentally caught on in a leg trap. Tried putting him down (broken leg) by smashing his skull with my walking stick. Stick snapped and he was just annoyed.
ruemara
Slap a building number and just let him have it as a condo. Problem solved.
Frankensteinbeck
We know how this ends. Introduce your new pet to Rosie slowly, okay? Opossums react to the hunting dog chase instinct with disproportional, cuisinart force.
The Dangerman
Trump?
Roger Moore
@Dorothy A. Winsor (formerly Iowa Old Lady):
Another genre where setting is vital is historical fiction. People read it in large part because they want the feel of what it was like to live in another time, and the more the author can evoke that feeling the better it will do. Practically any genre set well outside the reader’s culture needs a good setting to pull the reader in.
Interestingly, that includes books written by people from other times and places, which will only connect to readers here and now to the extent they can connect to their setting. I suspect this is a reason not every book does as well outside its original cultural context as it did in it. Books that assume the reader’s knowledge of the setting will lose people who lack that knowledge.
Furloughed Fed
Congratulations on the new pet!
Today you have really become Florida Woman!
donnah
Don’t like possums. We had a cellar with some old clothes stored in cardboard boxes and when I heard scratching coming from one of them, I dragged it outside and dumped it over. Out scurried a nasty large possum, which ran a few feet away and then turned around and snarled and bared it’s teeth. yuck
scuffletuffle
I will take him if BJers can relay him to Western MA//
Snark, sort of….
trollhattan
Homliest chicken, ever!
laura
Florida Woman makes cover of Cat Fancier Magazine.
Bobby Thomson
On the bright side it will eat the ticks the cats are bringing in.
trollhattan
@Furloughed Fed:
She’s not Florida Woman until she dons overalls and teaches him to dance on the front stoop.
tesslibrarian
Maybe he’ll cut down on the crazy giant flying cockroach season that’s right around the corner. Unlike the neighbor being irresponsible with feral cats, possums are good neighbors.
brettvk
@Betty Cracker: I’m the person in my hood who’s been taking the ferals to the local low-cost clinic, which is why there are cats and possums dining on my patio. I have a few unapproachable old toms who show up occasionally but I’ve had great success with catching youngsters, even two females. Unfortunately for my conformity to local ordinances, they’ve ceased being feral.
encephalopath
That’s an invasive species on the west coast. Animal Control says, “Euthanize it.”
Heidi Mom
@Bobby Thomson: Yes! And they very rarely carry rabies.
Frankensteinbeck
Ha! I saw a ‘This animal forced its way into my life’ post and assumed it was Cole. Sorry, Betty. YOU will be able to resist the temptation of that sweet face.
Elmo
@tesslibrarian: Not if you have chickens, they’re not.
jeffreyw
You gonna need to step up your possum quarters or the possum homeowner’s association will see you in court!
brettvk
@Furloughed Fed: I actually had an acquaintance who kept one as a pet of sorts – rescued a baby possum (they are really cute) and kept feeding it as it matured. It was never really tamed but I think they only live four or five years at best.
Feebog
Two words; garden hose.
Mary G
Possums seem to freeze up when threatened, or at least the ones I’ve had do. I have an apple tree that’s not supposed to thrive in zone 10, was planted before 1968 and lives most of the day in shade from the neighbor’s McMansion. Nevertheless, it flowers and gives a couple of bags full of eatable green apples every year.
A possum from the canyon one street over shows up, trundles along the top of the wall despite thunderous barking from two neighbors’ dogs and about a million lumins of light from their motion detector lights, and eats them if we don’t pick in time.
Perhaps a trail of kibble from the cage to the neighbor’s feeding spot would keep him in food?
joel hanes
spray bottle filled with ammonia
aim for the tail
Marmot
Ha! The exact same thing happened to me! Eventually the possum left.
debbie
@Dorothy A. Winsor (formerly Iowa Old Lady):
I like your doors. I’ve found that if one of them shuts, I will put the book down and not pick it back up. Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom is one example of that. He followed up a beautiful and lyrical description of the countryside with the sentence (paraphrasing due to failing memory), “Neither could decide which of them had first decided they should fuck.” I found that to be a very jarring shift in tone.
Betty Cracker
@Elmo: True! The chickens are under house arrest at the moment.
@brettvk: Bless you for doing that. I resisted the idea for a long time because it’s a huge pain in the ass. Honestly, I hate having all these cats around because they’ve injured my dogs, menaced my (wild) birds, destroyed property, etc. But there was talk in the ‘hood about 2nd amendment solutions, and I’d hate to see it come to that.
Roger Moore
@Betty Cracker:
You should check to see if there’s a group around that will cover the cost of the “N” part of TNR. This video on a group spaying and neutering over 200 cats in one day is interesting.
Gravenstone
@Frankensteinbeck: Made be double check that this was indeed a B-Crack post. Although the image of cranky Jack Russel Terrorist meeting equally cranky possum was entertaining.
Aleta
Hopefully he’ll leave in the night. Couldn’t hurt to put some more food and water out in front of the trap? (Or, you would get two, they would have their babies inside the nice new house …)
Once I put out a have-a heart-trap with some dry cat food to get a raccoon. Before very long, I heard something thumping around in it and went out to see I’d caught my cat.
lamh36
So they opened the ticket request system for Will & Grace today at 2pm (CST)…I’d been checking my phone all day for updates (which is a no no in the lab…but I was doing it covertly) so when the page finally rebooted, I requested my ticket..and…
UGH….waitlisted!!!
I initially requested 2 tickets, but once I was waitlisted, I decided to edit the request and make it for 1 because I figured, hey, if they opened up the waitlist, then I may have a better chance of getting one ticket rather than trying for 2.
Fingercrossed that I am able to get tickets…I have been trying to get #WillAndGrace tickets since the reboot was announced, but I was never availalbe, I’ll finally be in LA…at the same time it’s taping, so everyone send good vibes and cross your fingers for me too!
What I decided to do while I was waiting for the W&G tickets to open up, was request tickets for the same day for shows that had open request status and weren’t sold out. So I ended up requesting tickets for The Steve Harvey Show (which…eh…I don’t much like Harvey lately), Jimmy Kimmel LIVE, and The Real (one of the newest all female talk shows), and I initially got waitlisted for all of them. But then this morning I got emails from The Real and Steve Harvey Show, and I was moved up on the waitlist for both.
They both happen near the same time, but if I had to chose I’d go to see The Real before seeing Steve Harvey.
So…no Will & Grace tickets..YET (I say yet, because I am CLAIMING IT IN THE NAME OF JESUS as they say) but I did get Steve Harvey…eyerolll
wE HAVE POSSUM VISITORS
We have wild possum visitors to the cat food buffet pretty regularly. I think our cats feel sorry for the homely critters, and just humor them. My wife has raised a few possum babies, and they will litter train and get along with the the rest of the furry crew, plus they have super soft fur. Their vision sucks, though – they cant see clearly but a few yards.
raven
@tesslibrarian: Did you go to the Rose Bowl? We had a ball.
debbie
Anyone else troubled over Mike Pence’s remarks to the Knesset, particularly this bit:
It’s really bugging me, and not just because it came out of Pence’s evangelical mouth.
AndyG
We had the same thing years ago when trying to trap skunks who had taken up residence underneath our house. All we ever trapped were possums. I’m convinced it was the same damn possum each time. Fucker.
raven
@Betty Cracker: A couple of years ago our tenant knocked on my door and said one had been hit by a car and it was still alive. She didn’t know what to do so I grabbed my flat shovel and went to see what the deal was. The poor thing was mangled but still struggling, I knew I couldn’t shoot it in town, so I killed it with the shovel. It took a couple of intense blows and it sucked but no one else was going to do it.
JPL
@lamh36: I hope you get your tickets to Will and Grace.
Mike in NC
That’s one fine looking possum. Might it even be a Possum Queen?
p.a.
Thought down there it’d end up as dinner…
;-0
ruemara
Here in California, you just trapped a possum in a $900 studio apartment. In NYC, that’s a $1500 studio.
@lamh36: I will burn something glitter & gay as an offering to the ticket gods for you.
opiejeanne
@donnah: We owned a house that a previous owner had removed a tiny powder room near the front door and installed forced air heating system in the space. We didn’t realize that it was open to the crawl space and one cold day we heard a scratching sound. There was a medium-sized opossum curled up in the pink fiberglass insulation (makes me itch just to think about it). He blinked at us sleepily and we quietly shut the door. He left after a couple of days when the weather warmed up, then we closed the hole so it didn’t come back. Meanwhile, our kids entertained their friends by showing them what was in our heater closet.
opiejeanne
@tesslibrarian:
If you keep hens, not so much.
geg6
What the hell is Sarah Huckabee Sanders doing in a trap in your yard, Betty?
Dorothy A. Winsor (formerly Iowa Old Lady)
@Roger Moore: I also like books set in a place I’ve been. Paris, for instance. And I read a series of mysteries by Donna Leon set in Venice just because the setting is so fascinating. Also the food.
Dorothy A. Winsor (formerly Iowa Old Lady)
@debbie: I missed that one! I don’t mind plain jane language. It’s much better than fancy language that fails.
opiejeanne
@debbie: People will die as a result of this. I wish I didn’t believe that.
opiejeanne
@ruemara: Probably about $1100 studio in Seattle although the price is finally starting to drop according to an article by someone I’m unfamiliar with.
ruemara
@geg6: HA!
@opiejeanne: still more reasonable than CA.
trollhattan
@geg6:
Heh. Betty can take a tablet out back and show the critter an SHS video. “My queen!” It’ll fall over, frozen and she can scoop and drive it out-country.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@Dorothy A. Winsor (formerly Iowa Old Lady): I have been looking for that article for a while now. Thank you!
debbie
@Dorothy A. Winsor (formerly Iowa Old Lady):
I like plain and fancy both, but a transition would have helped smooth the shift!
debbie
@geg6:
SNL’s parody of Sessions often has him declaring, “Why, I’m a grateful ‘lil possum!”
different-church-lady
Could be worse.
cain
So our media is gleefully posting about how liberals are saying Dems have betrayed them. How.. not surprising. This is exactly the kind of shit that they love to talk about. Soon everyone will be talking about liberal anger, and how they won’t be coming to the polls etc and what does it mean for the midterms because democrats are WEAK! Thanks Time Magazine.
Fucking media.
Baud
@cain:
If the Dems controlled the government, and the GOP used their minority power to shut it down in order to extract concessions to get the Dems to address an issue that the Dems didn’t want to deal with, all the people who are now saying that the Dems are weak would be saying that the Dems are weak.
Fuckem.
zhena gogolia
I hate Trump.
trollhattan
Could it be, everyone but the old dudes is learnin’?
Wish it were November right now.
different-church-lady
@cain:
In other words, Monday.
Baud
@different-church-lady: You saying they’ll be saying anything different tomorrow?
Dorothy A. Winsor (formerly Iowa Old Lady)
@zhena gogolia: Well put
different-church-lady
@trollhattan:
Me too. Because then next month wouldn’t be February.
Baud
@trollhattan: Sigh. Better late than never.
lollipopguild
@Baud: You are correct. Certain people and there are many of them will always hate elected Dems. Clinton and Obama could have held hands and walked on water and certain people would have complained that neither Clinton nor Obama could swim. To quote a certain Balloon Juice comentater “Fuckem”. and the horses they rode in on.
Jay Essel
@Mary G:
Years ago, my husband called the dog to come inside one night, and noticed he had a big piece of fiberglass insulation in his mouth. Except it had a tail. Told the dog to drop it, which he did, and we scooped up the poor dead possum and put him in the trash can. Next morning, dog is inordinately interested in the trash can – took off the lid and there was one pi**ed possum glaring up at me as if to say “I was PLAYING POSSUM, dumba**, get me outta here.”
Roger Moore
@Baud:
Yep. Democratic weakness is part of The Holy Narrative and must not be contradicted. It helps that everyone wants to believe. Conservatives want to believe because they hate the Democrats. Leftists want to believe because they Democratic betrayal is the only justification for paying attention to them. Even Democrats want to believe because they seem to feed on despair. Nobody wants to hear how the Democrats actually got a good deal.
different-church-lady
@Roger Moore:
Baud
@Roger Moore: I wouldn’t go so far as to declare victory yet. Hopefully the end result is saving the Dreamers, but there’s still work to be done. But I’m not in the all-is-lost category.
I hope the details come out soon. I’m hearing different things when it comes to CHIP.
Kay
@cain:
Conservatives do this too, though. It’s just that political media never amplifies it. They’re mad a lot at their congress people, there’s all the same “caving” language and threats to leave. I don’t know why it doesn’t get attention outside Right wing sites but it doesn’t. For all of Obama’s tenure the far Right base were mad as hell that he “won every round” – that’s where all the nonsense about how authoritarian he was came from. That’s why we were always confused about how pundits treated him as if he were weak but conservative politicians got the crowd all riled up with stories of his massive power. There were two different tracks running at the same time.
SiubhanDuinne
Comments like this are why you have such a devoted following, BCrack.
Shana
@donnah: Yeah, but Pogo is pretty cute.
Fair Economist
@Roger Moore: So far the Democrats have done very well, considering they’re the minority in everything. They blocked Obamacare repeal and the wall, have minimized other Republican legislation, got CHIP reauthorized, and have kept DACA alive so far. Tax deform is the one major initiative they haven’t been able to block and being able to stop everything except one is a better record than any minority party I can remember.
woodrowfan
@Roger Moore: check with Alley Cats Allies
https://www.alleycat.org/
Kay
@Baud:
Democrats can’t do this because the numbers don’t work and they’re in the wrong position to use it as leverage, but SCHIP is popular and Republicans need to fund it too. Politically they need that. In certain states and areas of the country they absolutely need it as much as Democrats do. I wonder how one would do this, there has to be a way to use the reliance of GOP voters on safety net programs as leverage against Republicans. We have these programs they need politically and yet they use them as bargaining chips against us.
There has to be a way to restore the “third rail” idea with these programs, because in areas of the country (like Ohio) they are very much a “third rail” and Republicans won’t win swing state senate races without them. Exhibit A, Rob Portman, serial liar on safety net programs. Pretends he doesn’t need them but oh, yes he does.
Instead of thinking of them as something to protect think of them as something to wield against Republicans, maybe in a state like Missouri. Claire M should come out swinging and make her opponent admit he needs to keep CHIP and Medicare and Soc Sec because he does. If he wants to win he does. Then they can fight about something else, something people don’t have already.
Fair Economist
@trollhattan: A few days ago we were talking about the difficulty in finding an offended group that could make enough of a difference to give national Democrats the power the nativist assaults on Latinos gave to California Democrats. A 21-point shift with white women could do it.
It would behoove us to cater to that shifting group, which may be why the MSM is so studiously avoiding talking about them in favor of Cletus safaris.
Baud
@Kay:
That’s why I’m interested in the details of the bill with respect to CHIP. How Republicans would fund it would be very different from how Dems would fund it.
Patricia Kayden
@donnah: I would have fainted dead away. Dang!
SiubhanDuinne
@Dorothy A. Winsor (formerly Iowa Old Lady):
Oooh, I really like that four-pronged approach — and of course I’m evaluating the thesis through the lens of my favourite fiction writer, and certainly the one I know best: Dorothy L. Sayers. Language and characters are gimmes. Her plots run from plausible to utterly unbelievable (and/or there are holes big enough for the proverbial Mack truck), but you don’t care because the other elements are so strong.
Where she really shines, I realise afresh on reading your blog, is setting. In a few sentences, she captures absolutely a picturesque Scottish fishing village, the dreamy spires of Oxford, the bleak gen-country in winter, London slums and London clubs. I will have to pay much more attention to “setting” as a crucial element, in Sayers’ novels and others’.
Kay
@Fair Economist:
I am a white women so I feel I can say this (complain about this) but I don’t feel “white women” as a group are any kind of reliable voter group. I can’t tell you how many times this group has just utterly failed me :)
OMG, Bush, 2nd election. They were all about safety. Tear my fucking hair out. They were (supposedly) mad at the 2010 GOP takeover and the crazy scenes like all-male panels ‘o clerics on birth control and then they voted for the pussy-grabber.
WaterGirl
@Gravenstone: The possum that was in my yard would hum to himself as he ambled slowly in front of the sliding doors, even with me pounding on the glass and two dogs barking at him. Pretty sure he was flipping me off, too, but I could never catch him at it.
Rhubarb
De-lurking to engage in a bit of pedantry. If you use the phrase “this mitigates against…” please stop. The word you want is “militates.” To mitigate means to ameliorate or make something less bad, not to oppose it. Thank you. Hissy fit over.
WaterGirl
@lamh36: I think you’ll get your Will & Grace tickets. Crossing my fingers for you.
SiubhanDuinne
@Frankensteinbeck:
You do know that the author of this post is Betty Cracker, not John Cole, right?
Right?
ETA: Just saw your #25. My bad for not reading all the comments before weighing in.
Kay
@Baud:
Good point. This same thing happened with Medicaid expansion. Democrats had to be the “only” people supporting that which was just a flat-out lie. In a weird way we’re running interference for them with their own voters. I resent being the Party with no power who keep GOP politicians safe on health care because I’m constantly defending the programs THEIR voters rely on. It’s not my job to keep Rob Portman safe.
I want to make Republicans defend them. That’s only right. It’s also how the “third rail” operated for 40 years. We didn’t have to defend all these programs because Republicans knew they needed them too.
Patricia Kayden
@lamh36:
You can ask him how meeting up with Trump at Trump towers to talk about helping “inner city kids” worked out for him. Stopped watching his show or listening to his radio station after that stunt. Couldn’t believe that Harvey had the nerve to claim that President Obama told him to meet with Trump or some nonsense. Please! Just say that you met with Trump because you thought you could make some $$$ off him.
? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?
@Kay:
The trouble is that Republicans don’t believe that anymore. In the meantime, while programs like SCHIP are allowed to wither on the vine, real damage and pain is inflicted on real people. As much as I would like to see the GOP get its just desserts that’s not worth young poor children dying from lack of treatment.
SenyorDave
@trollhattan: When white women voted for Trump over Clinton I lost faith. I understand that the Republicans did a masterful job demonizing HRC, but for Trump to carry any demo of women still boggles the mind. He admitted to being a serial sexual predator! After the election I came to the conclusion that AA women and non-orthodox Jews were two standout groups with common sense (I believe AA women v0ted for HRC by about 98% and non-orthodox Jews were in the mid 80’s).
I’ll have to see the change to believe it for white women. Full disclosure – white Jewish male, non-orthodox.
Baud
@Kay: That’s a sweet idea but we live in a time of the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
um…
There’s video.
Dorothy A. Winsor (formerly Iowa Old Lady)
@SiubhanDuinne: Oh good point. I like Sayers too. With her, the period is also part of the setting, as Roger Moore suggested above.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@trollhattan: If they were on board with the explicit racism and misogyny of the Trump campaign, what is it supposed to be that has tipped white ladies away from Trump?
Baud
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Schumer is amazing.
Litlebritdifrnt
I used to have a family of possums visiting the cat feeder outside. At one point I was going through pounds and pounds of cat food per week. Occasionally I would forget to fill it up and the large male would come in the back through the dog door and snaffle the dogs food as well. Sometimes the dogs would wake up and catch him whereupon he would “play possum” and the dogs would lose interest. DH would take a shovel and lift him out of the front door in the morning and he would amble away none the worse for wear. One day I was pruning the wisteria at my front door and I yanked a particularly stubborn vine down that had grown up over the trees on the pathway. Thunk, thunk, thunk and down came the possums, they must have all been sleeping in the tree during the day. It was so funny but yet again they were no worse for wear. I sort of miss my possums.
SiubhanDuinne
@ruemara:
Obligatory, I guess.
Baud
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: Taxes? Obamacare repeal?
schrodingers_cat
@SiubhanDuinne: I don’t know whether you saw the medley I linked to the other day. It had some traditional Bengali music, which reminds me of Rabindranath Tagore’s compositions.
Amit Trivedi’s Sounds of a Nation
First is Kashmir, Bengal starts at about 1.22, then there is Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Gujarat, and of course Punjab!
The dorky guy in the red tux is Amit Trivedi, who is the composer of all the numbers in medley. I love his voice
Mike in NC
Steve Harvey has a Sunday night show where he brings out talented kids. My wife watches. Last night there was one about 5 or 6 who recited the Gettysburg Address from memory. Trump would screw it up reading from a teleprompter.
jl
All the wild swamp creatures big and small fall in love with Lady Cracker, and it breaks their hearts to leave her enchanted jungle compound.
But… we all knew that.
Dorothy A. Winsor (formerly Iowa Old Lady)
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: I haven’t read any research on this, though off hand, I’d guess racism. I wonder if there’s some overlap with age too. Like white men, white women are on average older than the general population. (I think)
Chyron HR
@Ceci n est pas mon nym:
They thought there was going to be a pivot.
David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch
Pivot!
Roger Moore
@Kay:
The underlying problem is that the Republicans’ big donors and their voters have very different priorities when it comes to safety net programs. The donors pay attention to what the Republican officials do, not just what they say, so the officials try to do the donors’ bidding and lie to the public in the hope they won’t notice. That isn’t going to change until it stops working.
chris
@Kay:
Except in Kentucky. I have no words for this cruelty.
Fair Economist
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Senator Wicker is up in 2018, in a state (Mississippi) normally out of reach – but maybe not with the size of the special election swings.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: @Dorothy A. Winsor (formerly Iowa Old Lady): I think a lot of soft trump voters, I suspect a lot of them white women (and almost all of them white people), the type who were tipped by Comey, gave themselves permission to vote for trump (for tax cuts) by telling themselves he wasn’t really like that. He was a showman, he’s a New York liberal, a “businessman”, he couldn’t have a daughter like Ivanka if he were really like that… Now we know, he really is like that.
David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch
@trollhattan:
We all owe a big debt of gratitude to [Expletive Deleted] for setting women straight.
SiubhanDuinne
@Baud:
I assume you know that you have now given efgoldman blanket permission to appropriate “The NYTimes is garbage” any time he fucking well feels like it.
Fair Economist
@Litlebritdifrnt:
I don’t miss mine. They made our back yard into a latrine. Yuck.
Litlebritdifrnt
Oh and totally off topic (wait isn’t this an open thread? Never mind). Anyway today they announced the engagement of Andy and Sarah’s daughter Princess Eugene. It was all very formal “The Duke and Duchess of York are pleased to announce, etc. etc., etc.” (She is marrying a former barman by the way, the wedding is in the Autumn) Anyhoo of interest to no one but me and probably some other anglophiles is that everyone seems to have conveniently forgotten about the divorce. Like it just disappeared down the collective Royal Family memory hole. Even the official Royal Family twitter feed has been retweeting the announcement. Of course Andy and Sarah didn’t help by refusing to actually separate and continuing to live in the same house as each other (cover story, separate suites in the house – yeah right). I just find it incredibly amusing. Sarah misbehaves, tabloids go nuts, DEMAND that they divorce. They do, then in a big FU to everyone go back to living their lives together. Sounds exactly like them.
Baud
EricNNY
I’m currently housing a possum in my hayloft. I had to relocate him from my chicken coop. I couldn’t bear to toss it out in the cold so I made a hay bale house for the little critter and am feeding him cat food.
SiubhanDuinne
@SiubhanDuinne:
The bleak fen-country, not gen-country. Sometimes autocorrect amuses me (why I keep it around), more often it just issues me off.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Christ, I saw that earlier today. It’s almost as if the Universe wanted to remind everyone who the real enemy is. We’ll see if said reminder does any good.
Roger Moore
@SiubhanDuinne:
Of course those same four doors apply to other forms of fiction beyond writing. I had something of an “aha” moment when watching BBC America’s Copper. The characters were mildly interesting, the stories were so-so at best, and the dialog was nothing special, but it was still engaging because it did a fantastic job of portraying Civil War era New York. The idea of watching a TV show just for the setting was novel to me, but once I felt it myself I could see that there’s a whole genre of BBC period dramas that are motivated by the same goal. And, of course, setting is a huge factor in Science Fiction, where people constantly talk about “world building” as a more grandiose way of saying the same thing.
SiubhanDuinne
@Dorothy A. Winsor (formerly Iowa Old Lady):
Yes indeed, but she wrote about her own period. To me, that makes her depictions of the ‘twenties and early ‘thirties really authentic in a way that few 21st-century writers could hope to capture with the same honesty, no matter how painstaking their research.
FlipYrWhig
Regarding “liberal” “activist” “outrage,” two things. One, journalists have to get the fuck off of Twitter. It’s like judging a restaurant by only the worst Yelp reviews. Two, I think I’m the only person who remembers how dismayed the LGBT-osphere was when Don’t Ask Don’t Tell repeal was handled with a kludgy approach involving different certifications and the detachment of one vote from another and sundry other procedural niceties, and they rehashed everything from ex-gay Donnie McClurkin singing at an Obama event to a DOJ memo that was deemed insulting for juxtaposing same-sex marriage to inçest, and the anger was quite real… and then nothing bad actually happened. So let’s chill the fuck out please.
Mnemosyne
Send me courage. I start editing the first 6,000 words of my novel tonight to send it in for an RWA contest. ?
SiubhanDuinne
@schrodingers_cat:
I missed it, so thank you very much for reposting. Have fallen seriously behind in BJ thread-reading. (Not wanting to get into long complications, but find myself rather reluctantly responsible for the finances and recovery of my cousin, who fell and broke her hip last week. Have spent an inordinate amount of time arranging for PT, home care, dog sitters, house cleaners, etc etc usw and so on and so forth.)
You know I greatly admire Tagore, so this is cool!!
Corner Stone
@SiubhanDuinne:
Nice.
SiubhanDuinne
@Corner Stone:
Ah jeez
Dorothy A. Winsor (formerly Iowa Old Lady)
@Mnemosyne: Go! We have faith in you.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Baud: OT: I tried hyperlapse while visiting the Huntington, the results were disappointing.
schrodingers_cat
@SiubhanDuinne: A. R. Rahman got the best musicians in India and did his version of India’s national anthem, written by Tagore, its from the early aughts. Some of the musicians featured are no longer with us.
Brachiator
@Roger Moore: This preference or admiration for “world building” represents new audience expectations, especially in SF and fantasy, and I think I kinda hate it. A critic admitted that a recent Frankenstein reboot was crappy, but then went on to say that he loved the world building and would like to see another movie set in that universe. Why? If the setting is not an essential part of a story, what’s the point?
There are some exceptions. I know that there are a bunch of Wizard of Oz stories featuring new characters, but it’s stuff to make new stories in the same world compelling.
Mnemosyne
@Dorothy A. Winsor (formerly Iowa Old Lady):
I’m still annoyed that the editor from Avon who told me a year ago that I needed to cut the prologue I loved was right all along. Feh.
But her emails!!
@Kay:
It doesn’t work that way now.
1. Republicans offer up a bill to support a popular program, but which also includes harvesting and selling the organs of the poor to generate revenue
2. Democrats oppose the bill along with a few Republican Senators and Representatives who are upset the organ harvesting mandates the use of anesthesia.
3. Republicans blame Democrats for ending popular program.
4. Right wing media blames Democrats for blocking popular program
5. Main stream media regurgitates Republican talking points, blame both sides. New York Times publishes articles about how the Republicans have a point.
Josie
@Mnemosyne: I will think encouraging thoughts for you. I just finished doing that same thing (a synopsis and first 10 pages) for a Writers’ League of Texas contest and sent my entry in last week. For a fledgling writer, it takes all the courage one can muster to put your stuff out there. When is your entry due?
opiejeanne
@ruemara: All bets are off in the SF area, but I don’t know, $1100 is still more than $900 in the math I learned . My kid had a basement (dungeon) apartment for that amount; I’m convinced there was black mold in the walls and you had to climb over their bed to get to the bathroom. The floor started giving out about a month ago, I mean, it broke and one of her feet went through. I don’t know how that place was ever deemed habitable.
But! she just got a 3rd floor walkup apartment with an actual bedroom, and a bathroom that you don’t have to climb over the bed to get to. And there’s no evidence of black mold! so maybe even though it cost more than the dungeon the prices are starting to fall a bit.
These asshole managers demand a non-refundable deposit of at least $50 to apply for an apartment whether they approve of you or not. I hope they aren’t doing that in LA.
opiejeanne
@trollhattan: Did you see the SNL skit this past weekend? The Possum Queen on there looked way better than the real one.
Jager
Mrs J was taking a pee one morning in her bathroom, heard a noise and discovered a baby possum in the waste basket. She almost… (no I’m not going there) I had taken the screens off the french doors in the bedroom to get them repaired and the little possum made his way into the bathroom through the open door. She picked up the waste basket and turned it on its side on the 2nd floor porch. Of course she fed him and left a bowl of water. I got home about 7 hours later and the little bastard was still in the basket, sound asleep or he was just playing possum. I hauled his little ass down to the garden and he was gone in the morning. They really stink, I asked our vet about that, he said they make that pee smell to discourage bigger animals from eating them. I caught her tossing chunks of French bread to a god damned raccoon who moved in under our side porch. Life up in the canyon.
Mnemosyne
@Josie:
The contest officially closes on 2/14, but they take a limited number of entries and will close if they reach their goal before the deadline, so I want to be done by Friday.
I emailed the coordinator and she said they’re in the “mushy middle” where they got a flurry at the beginning and will get a flurry at the end, so I’ll probably be okay if I send mine this week.
Josie
@Mnemosyne: Sounds good. I hope the editing process goes easily for you. Having a deadline is sometimes helpful, at least for me, because at times I need something or someone to kick my butt and make me get to work.
mike in dc
Trump apparently digging the obstruction hole all the way to China. Turns out he and Jeffbo Sesh pressured Wray into firing McCabe. Wray reportedly refused and threatened to resign.
Mary G
@Jay Essel: Playing possum, that’s the phrase I couldn’t think of, thank you. That’s a great story; your dog is more obedient than the ones I know. Is she or he a hunting dog?
Brachiator
@David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch:
How could Ivanka possibly be competent enough to handle this task? The ways of Trump are strange. Makes you wonder who’s the real nut job.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Brachiator: All of them
KatieBrachiator.Chyron HR
@Brachiator:
She shares half of her father’s incredible, godlike genes. What task could she possibly not handle?
misterpuff
@Shana: We have met the enemy and he is us.
Amir Khalid
@Brachiator:
Remember, Ivanka’s competence to do anything at the White House isn’t presumed by President Daddy based on any knowledge or experience; she has none, and he doesn’t care about these things. She’s his favourite child, that’s all that matters.
Emma
@Mnemosyne: Go for it!
Yarrow
@Chyron HR:
Prison.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
as we start to talk about trump, Jefferson Beauregard and the FBI again, do you think any TeeVee people, even the MSNBC primetime people, will remind their viewers that the FBI put trump in the White House?
Brachiator
@Fair Economist:
If there were a significant shift here, it would really be dramatic. But recent political history says that this still might be a tough sell. As a recent WaPo story notes.
White women are not a monolith. Hillary Clinton did better with younger, college educated, unmarried white women than she did with other parts of this demographic.
p.a.
@Brachiator: @?BillinGlendaleCA: @Chyron HR: @Amir Khalid:
Future historians will have work to do revealing the documentary evidence and filling in the nooks and crannies, especially about DoJ, Sessions, Kobach, but the sad truth is the best analysis of this misadministration is available now at 11:30pm Eastern Time and in comedy clubs around the nation.
efgoldman
@Baud: Y
Purity ponies gotta’ stay purity-er than thou.
Of course not a fucking one of them has a clue how to win a goddamned election.
Even their Vermont avatar can’t win out of state, and none of his candidates can win anywhere.
(Maybe some smart analyst could consider who does worse: people that Wilmer endorses or people that Hair Furor endorses
opiejeanne
@Brachiator: I saw an analysis, and wish I’d saved the link to it, that cast a bit of doubt on the belief that the majority of white women had voted for Trump. I think it questioned how that information was compiled.
opiejeanne
@efgoldman: What’s-her-name Sarsour was making claims about the Women’s March today on Twitter and giving Democrats advice on how to do things. People were pushing back in the comments pretty hard.
I am totally sick of these people.
Argiope
@chris: You know, having lived and worked in SE KY for almost 5 years, I see a strange sort of opportunity from this. It will take real pain inflicted by an R governor to ever break the Republican stranglehold over those rural White counties. Hal Rogers has held his seat in KY 5 for 36 years running, and the last time a Democrat won in KY 5 was 1963. In 2016 he ran unopposed, and according to ballotpedia, no Dem has filed to run in 2018 and the deadline has passed for the primary. These are the poorest, Whitest counties in the country, and they split 70s/20s R to D, over and over again, whenever anyone bothers to run against Hal. They are also overwhelmingly dependent on Medicaid–about 60% of the population of Clay County, for example. So it will be really interesting to see what happens next.
schrodingers_cat
@opiejeanne: Same here, I am going to trust Congressional Ds over the Twitterati.
Alternative Fax, a hip hop artist from Idaho
@Rhubarb: Thank you. That’s an important point. Some of us premier pedants just ellide it visually, or we’d be much noisier about it. You don’t mitigate against.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@opiejeanne: She was just on the Hayes show talking about her outrage with…. Democrats. No mention of Dean Heller, Martha McSally, Marco Rubio, Cory Gardner,Ted Cruz, candidates in minority-majority districts currently held by Republicans, incumbent Rs in flippable House districts…
Brachiator
@opiejeanne:
Again, nationally the data has been pretty consistent. A majority of white women consistently vote Republican. But this is not true when you look at specific states.
Baud
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: If the Dems save the Dreamers, I’m confident that all these people will be first in line to thank them.
Heh. We all know they will argue in a Trump like fashion how they could have negotiated a better deal.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: Look at all the thanks they got for ACA.
Baud
@schrodingers_cat: I’m still a little pissed at the people who disapproved of the ACA because it didn’t go far enough. It kept the ACA in the red forever, until the GOP threatened to take it away.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Baud: Single Payer or Bust! Good times Baud, good times.
Aleta
@David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch:
Got no time to work–they’re fighting over reality.
Kay
@But her emails!!:
I’m serious about this. I want us to look at this a different way. We’re in a rut. There has to be another way to approach this. Even a dumb way, whatever, try something different. What’s the worse that could happen? We don’t have any power so now is the time to think about these things. Explore some options.
You’ll come around to my way of thinking if I repeat it a thousand times :)
Baud
@Aleta:
Baud
@?BillinGlendaleCA: Bust always wins.
Gin & Tonic
@Baud: Kind of assumed you were a leg man.
Aleta
@Brachiator: I wish they would divide those ww T voters into straight wh women vs gay wh women. And then ask the straight married ones if they voted the same as their husbands.
Adria McDowell
@Baud: Maybe they are just trying to keep Ted Cruz from voting. /s
Seriously, though, anyone paying attention knew this was coming.
opiejeanne
@Brachiator: It just makes me cringe, is all. I feel like someone has slapped me every time I read that white women did this. It feels really personal.
My white female neighbors who did vote for Trump shocked me, as did the Jewish family around the corner, and they STILL love him. I get this from my other neighbor, the nutty one that I love. She knows them better than I do, I only ever talk to them when they wave and say hi as they walk their dogs and we pull weeds and plant stuff, but the Jewish family is no more shocking to me than the divorced realtor who is barely scraping by. They’ve always seemed very pleasant but I can’t wrap my head around their voting logic.
Adria McDowell
@Aleta: What a fucking maroon. If his numbers are this bad with low unemployment (thanks Obama) and the economy doing well (ditto), what does he think is gonna happen when that stock market bubble bursts (and there are more people saying it will).
I’m a certified moron, and I’m smarter than any of the jokers in or near this White House.
Patricia Kayden
@geg6: Lol!! But how dare you insult possums?
opiejeanne
@Aleta: I did, or maybe my husband voted the way I did. Hard to tell which of us despises Trump more.
Peale
@FlipYrWhig: if I recall correctly, one of the benefits of that outrage was that I was forced to flee the comment section of salon and took refuge here.
Aleta
@opiejeanne: That is shocking, no way around it.
Patricia Kayden
@chris: Appears that in nine Republican-controlled states, Medicaid recipients will have to work to receive benefits. Sad but that’s how Republicans roll. I suppose that poorer people don’t vote in those states so I do feel sorry for them.
Patricia Kayden
@Brachiator: 63% of White women voters in Alabama supported Roy Moore. Given the accusations against him, that was a bit surprising even though I understand that they lean Republican.
chris
@Argiope:
Interesting and sad, people will die.
Aleta
@opiejeanne: I realized after I wrote that it sounded like a question about married women. My mistake. Pretty normal to be aligned with who we love and live with (except if they support T and then may their walls crumble and fall).
Argiope
@chris: Definitely sad, and so unnecessary. I just wonder if there will be any shifts on what happens electorally as a result of this kind of cruelty, or whether even the effects of this kind of policy won’t make a difference. Honestly, I have no idea. Seems like voting Republican has been such a habit for so long that it’s baked in, and I have no idea what kind of calamity would be required to shift it. Guess we’re about to find out.
Mnemosyne
@FlipYrWhig:
I remember getting into many arguments with a commenter here who was freaked out that Obama was going to betray GLBQ people and throw them under the bus and why oh why didn’t he do an executive order?
Then Obama and Congress actually managed to get the DADT repeal passed and, fortunately, the fever broke and that commenter went back to being his normal, sensible, Obama-supporting self, a happy ending that happens all too seldom these days.
(I would say who it was but my memory for names ain’t great, it was almost 10 years ago, and I’m afraid of naming the wrong person.)
opiejeanne
@Patricia Kayden: The thing is that Democrats have been so demonized in the South that the ones who voted for the Democrat felt like they were voting for the devil, and that really shouldn’t be the case. I will add that I just about hiss when someone says they voted for certain Republicans and I can hardly stand to talk to some of my neighbors, even though they’d do just anything for us..
chris
@Patricia Kayden: Yeah, no doubt the governor’s cousin will be in charge of the new department dedicated to keeping the moochers off Medicaid. I despise these people.
opiejeanne
@Aleta: It’s true, though. It hasn’t been that long since I saw a woman declare in the letters to the editor that she was so glad she didn’t have to worry about how to vote because her husband told her how to vote. She was a Mormon but I know there are other ninnies like that. The funny thing was the number of Mormon women who slapped her down.
Matt McIrvin
@Brachiator: I saw a video about the weird Star Wars fan backlash against The Last Jedi in which the guy argued that many fans of these big complicated franchises seem to see movies not as movies but as “canon delivery systems”. I thought that was a great phrase.
Matt McIrvin
@FlipYrWhig: Remember Choire Sicha’s Obama Still Hates Gay Marriage, No Matter What You Want To Think? It appeared literally the day before Obama endorsed gay marriage.
Brachiator
@Matt McIrvin:
I didn’t know this. Talk about bad timing. Were apologies ever offered?
FlipYrWhig
@Matt McIrvin: @Mnemosyne: I don’t remember particular commenters/commentators either here or elsewhere, other than Jon Aravosis, who was a thing once. But it was really stunning that the reaction was brutal and angry and caustic and an explosion of pent-up frustration by a mix of activists with good points and self-aggrandizing jerkwads who hate everything all the time… and then it got fixed, and nobody said anything about it ever again. Just like no one remembers how Sherrod Brown was supposedly the insider establishmentarian squeezing out True Progressive Paul Hackett at the behest of, I dunno, Rahm Emanuel or someone. That was conventional wisdom at DailyKos for like 6 months.
We’ve been through more than a few freakouts from “the left” about everything. A lot of these kerfuffles just float away, and yet the next one will be as fierce and impassioned as ever, as though the last one never happened. I suppose it’s an old joke and in questionable taste but I associate it with a high school friend: “Irish Alzheimer’s: all you remember is the grudges.”
Brachiator
@Matt McIrvin:
Yep. Great phrase. And I think very accurate with respect to many fans.
jimmiraybob
The possum is the Ninja of the jungle.
Robert Sneddon
@opiejeanne:
It takes time and costs money to verify references and previous tenancy history, employment status, run credit checks etc. Doing it for free would be silly. Even running some filters on Facebook, LinkedIn etc. (“Hey, look at the pics of this wild party we held at our place before the landlord threw our drunken stoned asses out in the street! Those stains are never gonna come out.”) is a sunk cost.
J R in WV
@Jay Essel:
We had a friend who rescued several baby possums from their deceased mother’s pouch and raised them up, she would have them in her hair, peeking out at you. Strange woman!
At a large party quite a while back (’80s) one of the kids in attendance came up to around 10 pm and said “The chickens are making a lot of noise!” so I grabbed a flashlight and went to look. Up on the roosts, reaching out with one hand was a big ole possum, frozen in the glare of the light.
I had to go back to the house to get something to deal with Mr Possum, and figured out the least dramatic way to deal – at a party a gun was not the right tool. So I got my pair of fireplace/welding gauntlet gloves. When I got back to the coop, possum was still immobile, so I snatched him up by tail and back leg, and he locked up stiff as a board.
Then I tossed him to the large group of party-attending neighborhood dogs, who very promptly resolved the issue. Bernice the Norwegian Elkhound, who was only a few days from having a litter of puppies, took control of the possum remains and went home to stash him near her intended lair for birthing the puppies, under a car hood from a 40s car. She felt like even though Pablo and MA fed her regularly, it was in the best interest of her coming litter to have a stash of food handy, a great mom indeed.
Sounds mean, but that’s part of a country dog’s mission, to protect the chickens.
Original Lee
Oh, Betty, our neighbors must be twins. My Cat Lady neighbor feeds and waters the feral cats because they give her Bambi eyes if she doesn’t. (Seriously.) She also feeds the birds but has had the wit to move the bird feeder to the opposite side of their property from the cat colony. I have tried to persuade her not to feed the cats, on the premise that hungry cats eat more squirrels, which she does not feed because they eat her tomatoes. About five years ago, another neighbor called Animal Control while Cat Lady and her husband were on a month-long vacation, and Animal Control came and trapped almost all of the cats. Naturally, they missed 2 or 3, but it seems to me as if the colony has not rebuilt itself yet. I’m sure we’ll know soon. The Spouse and I didn’t do too much about the original colony because we preferred to try to stop the feeding, or at least, cut it back to wintertime only, so Cat Lady remains cordial to us, as opposed to the passive-aggressive crap they dump on the neighbors that called Animal Control. *Sigh*
David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch