Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Roe is not about choice. It is about freedom.

Bad people in a position to do bad things will do bad things because they are bad people. End of story.

We’ve had enough carrots to last a lifetime. break out the sticks.

Lick the third rail, it tastes like chocolate!

Speaker Mike Johnson is a vile traitor to the House and the Constitution.

Make the republican party small enough to drown in a bathtub.

Come on, media. you have one job. start doing it.

Disappointing to see gov. newsom with his finger to the wind.

Technically true, but collectively nonsense

Dear Washington Post, you are the darkness now.

Republicans are the party of chaos and catastrophe.

President Musk and Trump are both poorly raised, coddled 8 year old boys.

There are more Russians standing up to Putin than Republicans.

I really should read my own blog.

If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.

Take hopelessness and turn it into resilience.

Consistently wrong since 2002

A snarling mass of vitriolic jackals

Giving in to doom is how authoritarians win.

I am pretty sure these ‘journalists’ were not always such a bootlicking sycophants.

There is no compromise when it comes to body autonomy. You either have it or you do not.

Nancy smash is sick of your bullshit.

One of our two political parties is a cult whose leader admires Vladimir Putin.

You don’t get to peddle hatred on saturday and offer condolences on sunday.

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Happy Festivus

Reader Interactions

92Comments

  3. 3.

    geg6

    My grievance this year is with Samsung. Got a new tv and the instructions were completely worthless. Just pictures…no text, no list of tools/accessories such as types of cables required and the pictures were more than somewhat less than clear and comprehensive. Took me about 2 hours to get it going and hooked up to the satellite box. Still can’t get into WiFi as Verizon informs me my modem sucks. New modem supposed to be here tomorrow or Wednesday. Why does all new technology have to be such a pain in the ass? Why does never make life easier?

  6. 6.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @geg6:

    That’s a PITA for sure, but did you at least end up getting the TV you wanted at the price advertised, after all that kerfuffle the other day?

  11. 11.

    Mayim

    Limited mobility from the non-weight-bearing cast for a broken foot bone is incredibly exhausting… Two friends helped me ‘crutchify’ my apartment but everything takes so much time and tires me out.

    And, on top of that: cancer stinks, One friend just moved out west to be near her family as she starts hospice care, and another close friend is being moved in the next day or so from the local hospital to a hospice facility for comfort care.

    Not very cheery at the moment :-(

  12. 12.

    Pogonip

    @geg6: We still have picture-tube TVs. I dread the day they die.

    I think you can hire a geek to make a house call and hook up your new technology.

  13. 13.

    NotMax

    @lamh36

    Ben Whishaw is excellent. If you have Netflix, London Spy with both him and Jim Broadbent starring may still be available. Screen charisma by the bucketload.

  16. 16.

    lamh36

    @NotMax: the entire series was really good. Winishaw was fantastic. Randomly, I swear though, I spent much of the movie I was obsessed with trying to figure out if he had on lip gloss or not during various scenes but then I googled some pics of him and realized nope…his lips are kinda rosey.

    LOL

  17. 17.

    ruemara

    I’ve been cleaning & baking for the past 2 days and I still haven’t hit the bathroom. Holidays are stressful AF.

  18. 18.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @ruemara:

    I’ve been cleaning & baking for the past 2 days and I still haven’t hit the bathroom.

    That’s amazing. You must have camel ancestry.

  19. 19.

    Amir Khalid

    May your grievances be few, that you be done airing them before the Festivus dinner gets cold.

  20. 20.

    NotMax

    @lamh36

    Like the actor who plays Phillip in Travelers. On close-up shots it looks as if he’s wearing Helena Rubinstein Streetwalker #9. But he’s not.

  27. 27.

    Pogonip

    @Amir Khalid: When we get instructions in Korean, we are lucky; we can get my aunt to walk us through step by step (she has to translate in her head as she goes, so speaks s-l-o-w-l-y, but her translations are worth the wait, they make a lot more sense than the translators Samsung hires).

  32. 32.

    MomSense

    @Mayim:

    Fuck fucking cancer.

    @zhena gogolia:

    I adore his facial expressions while he sings.

    @ruemara:

    I scrubbed my bathroom today and then had to take a shower myself. These holidays are crazy with all the shopping, cleaning, and baking. Tomorrow morning I’m making orange coconut scones. I promised them to the kids and neighbors.

  33. 33.

    Ohio Mom

    @Mayim: How long until your foot is healed? Just the thought of crutches makes my arms ache.

    Sorry about your friends. Hope they have easy transitions.

  35. 35.

    Gelfling 545

    @Mnemosyne: I don’t do cable so no TCM for me. I do have the DVD of that version though and plan to watch it when I fininsh this round of gift wrapping. I had to stop for a bit to rest my back.

  36. 36.

    James E Powell

    Cookie baking marathon. Done with everything except the ginger snaps. Tomorrow is another day.

  37. 37.

    ?BillinGlendaleCA

    Madame got a new Samsung TV a month or so ago, so I’m familiar with the pictorial instructions. The satellite was easy to hook up(HDMI to HDMI), the old DVD player was never going to connect(no HDMI) so she’s getting a new Blu-Ray/DVD player for Christmas.

    @MomSense: I’m making curry puffs as an appetizer for Christmas dinner, fortunately I don’t have cook the whole meal this year.

  38. 38.

    Mnemosyne

    @Mayim:

    I spent a good 3 or 4 months on crutches after I re-tore my ACL last October, so I feel ya, believe me. They’re exhausting, especially if you lack upper body strength like I do. But don’t try to rush it or else it won’t heal right and you may get stuck having surgery on it like my mom did when she wouldn’t listen to her doctors.

  40. 40.

    ??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)  ??

    @Mnemosyne:
    I am, thanks to you. “There’s more gravy than grave about you!”

    I’ve always loved that line by Dickens

  41. 41.

    NotMax

    @James E Powell

    if you’ve never tried it, mix a little finely ground black pepper into the cookie dough. Always get kudos for ginger snaps made that way. Swedish holiday custom, where they’re called Pepperakor.

  45. 45.

    dww44

    @geg6: This multiplied many times over. My disgust with technology and how the real change is that companies are able to use it to their advantage and make US the customer/consumer do all the work for them: Go paperless and save the company the cost of printing statements, postage, and have customer spend her time printing, storing, buying paper and cartridges.

  46. 46.

    Pogonip

    To be fair to Samsung, Korean and English aren’t the easiest languages to translate between. If I remember right, DOD classifies Korean as one of the hardest languages for English speakers to learn. After all those years with my aunt and nephew, my uncle still can’t read or converse in Korean, though, oddly enough, he was fluent in German, the language which foxed Mark Twain, in 6 months.

    I myself had trouble with Spanish. Learning Japanese by ear was MUCH easier, and I was even doing well with the syllabaries, but after falling off Mount Kanji several times I concluded I could never be literate in Japanese and gave up.

    Mentioning Japanese reminds me. If you play Neko Atsume, be aware (as I wasn’t) that the Cafe Remodel, unlike all the other remodels, HAS NO INSIDE AND NO OUTSIDE. Meaning you can’t protect the expensive foods from Tubbs. He snorked down a bowl of expensive Sashimi 5 minutes after I put it, as I thought, inside, and then the cheeky fat bastard only tipped me one fish. So if you have the Cafe Remodel, stick with Thrifty Bits.

    I had renamed Tubbs after Tunch of blessed memory, and I’m not changing it back, but I’m pretty annoyed with him.

  48. 48.

    ruemara

    @MomSense: I think I’m making red wine cupcakes for the village feast and a puff pastry dessert for the Christmas dinner. And I still have to put the garlic in the roast tomorrow and make the rice & peas. I haven’t stopped cooking for 2 weeks.

  51. 51.

    Martin

    @Mayim: Yeah. I busted my foot earlier this year and it was a pretty shitty month. If there’s ever a time to splurge on Postmates and Amazon Fresh, it’s now. Lots of places offer a 30 day trial or some discount on your first month. If you expect to be back on your feet in a month, grab all of the offers and cancel when you’re off your crutches.

  53. 53.

    ?BillinGlendaleCA

    @Amir Khalid: You’d be surprised. I was up at the observatory a few months ago and a young woman was asked where she was from, she said Seoul. Listening to her English, she could have been raised in Pasadena.

    @Pogonip: At least Korean has an alphabet. (I took a year of Korean as well as a year of Chinese.)

  54. 54.

    Martin

    @Baud: Porn is always the first into any new medium – video tapes, internet, VR, etc. Because the industry has so many publishers, there’s real competition to find the novelty of a new medium and make the most of it. In the case of the internet, it was immediacy, and while they had some benefit of e-commerce, it was really Apple and Amazon that cracked that one. Porn was the canary in the coal mine for publishers. Porn went ad-supported almost immediately. Again, because there are so many publishers, it commoditized. Same with the news, opinion, etc.

    @A Ghost To Most: And yeah, nobody could keep up. A friend of mine was at a video hosting startup. It was 50% Disney and 50% porn. An outsized volume of the porn went to Utah.

  58. 58.

    Mnemosyne

    Ah, Ernest Theisiger as the undertaker. One of my favorite character actors, with one of the movies’ most distinctive noses.

  61. 61.

    Yarrow

    @lamh36: Loved A Very British Scandal. The whole cast was wonderful.

    Baking done for the day. Been baking since just after breakfast. Way too many cookies.

  62. 62.

    Martin

    @Pogonip: It is. There’s a large Korean community here where I live and I have a lot of Korean students, and English instruction is fairly common there.

  63. 63.

    ??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)  ??

    @Mnemosyne:
    I’ve always thought the ending of A Christmas Carol was bittersweet. Scrooge has seen the light but only at the very end of his life.

  64. 64.

    MomSense

    @ruemara:

    My kids requested a ham this year which is less work than the usual. Not sure about sides though. I bought some collard greens and carrots. Maybe I’ll make some fancy Mac and cheese.

  65. 65.

    Tazj

    @Mnemosyne: “I always know.”
    And that does it for me. Though I’d like to continue watching,my husband insists I change the channel because he doesn’t like it. He thinks it’s too dreary but he likes to watch Forensic Files before bed. Yuck! Nightmare fuel.
    At least I have at on DVD somewhere in the house.

  66. 66.

    NotMax

    @Mnemosyne

    Character actor Miles Malleson milks every last drop from his scenes as Old Joe the rag man.

    Long and varied career in film as both actor and writer. Wrote the screenplay for the Sabu The Thief of Baghdad.

  67. 67.

    ??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)  ??

    @zhena gogolia:
    It’s too bad. I liked Victoria when I saw the first few eps. I’m a sucker for period pieces and historical dramas. I loved most of Boardwalk Empire, for example. I’d hope that Victoria would be able to show the negative effects of her reign on the Irish and other peoples around the globe.

  68. 68.

    Amir Khalid

    @?BillinGlendaleCA:
    That wouldn’t actually surprise me. Once in a while you do run into people like that, who speak/write a language not their own way better than the typical native speaker. Some are gifted that way. The people who get jobs writing user manuals for TV sets, maybe not so much.

  70. 70.

    Mnemosyne

    @??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)  ??:

    As someone who’s old enough to be your mother, I now find the message of “It’s never too late to do better and be happy” to be comforting. Even just a few years of being happy and loved and doing good for other people is better than nothing.

  71. 71.

    Patricia Kayden

    @chris: That dog is in heaven. Too cute!!

    No grievance worth sharing. Things can always get much worse. At least, we’ll have adults in control of the House come January. That’s worth something.

  73. 73.

    pat

    @Mayim:

    I’ve seen appliances, for want of a better word, where you kneel on a rolling type of wheel chair. Jeez, why can’t I describe this better? No crutches, just wheel this thing around with your knee on the seat. Surprised you don’t have something like that.

  74. 74.

    Mnemosyne

    @NotMax:

    One thing I liked about the Seymour Hicks version was that they showed Scrooge’s old flame, Alice, married and happily surrounded by her children and grandchildren. There’s something about post WWII-movies where the women always end up as pathetic spinsters if the protagonist doesn’t marry them (see also “It’s A Wonderful Life”).

  76. 76.

    NotMax

    Hmm. Wonder if the actor billed as playing the Ghost Of Christmas Yet To Come is related to Steve Kornacki. Same last name.

  80. 80.

    Pogonip

    @pat: I had one of those when I had foot surgery. The pad you kneel on is slippery, suggest covering it with rough fabric like a towel.

  83. 83.

    Mike in NC

    Donald Fucking Trump will declare the year 2019 to be when he airs his endless grievances against the rest of the world.

    And why isn’t his picture yet on the $1 bill?

  86. 86.

    ??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)  ??

    @Mnemosyne:

    Even just a few years of being happy and loved and doing good for other people is better than nothing.

    That’s true. It’s still sad that he wasted so many years, though.

  87. 87.

    Amir Khalid

    @?BillinGlendaleCA:
    The standard of English instruction in Asia is generally higher than it was a generation ago, and so is its frequency of usage in urban parts. I think I once mentioned here a guy from Cleveland, who complained to me that he never got to practice his Malay conversation because everyone here in KL uses English all the time, dammit!

  88. 88.

    HalfAssedHomesteader

    @Stuart Frasier: It’s not even faint praise. Just completely twisted logic. It’s like giving someone credit for resolving their debts because they killed their creditors.

  89. 89.

    FlyingToaster

    We (WarriorGirl & I) baked the 6 dozen gingerbread cookies. HerrDoktor pronounced them “Oh, you made the ‘good’ cookies”, and then cut the tips off of all the gel decorating tubes for WG. Who can now manage about 3/4 of the tasks (running the mixer, measuring everything except the flour and the blackstrap molasses; mixing the separte parts and then combining them in the mixer). She can’t quite manage the rolling pin (I gave her the choice of the small or large pins, she fortunately chose the small), but she cut out most of the cookies.

    I have to bake some “good” bread tomorrow am, which is likely to be potato bread, if it’s not Challah. Very few grievances other than we’re living in the bizarro timeline. I’d better go boil the fucking potato(es).

  90. 90.

    Ladyraxterinok

    @Pogonip: In the 90s German teachers in the US were told that the 1st foreign language So Koreans learn is English, the 2nd German.

    Also German language teaching professionals claimed that in many countries German is taught by starting with the student’s knowledge of English (either to those with English as the native language or to those with English as an as already learned language.)

  92. 92.

    Pogonip

    @Ladyraxterinok: My uncle learned it by being abruptly transferred to Germany and having to sink or swim. Lucky for him, there were plenty of bilingual Germans holding out oars.

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