Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Fuck the extremist election deniers. What’s money for if not for keeping them out of office?

I’d try pessimism, but it probably wouldn’t work.

It is possible to do the right thing without the promise of a cookie.

The most dangerous place for a black man in America is in a white man’s imagination.

If you thought you’d already seen people saying the stupidest things possible on the internet, prepare yourselves.

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

Usually wrong but never in doubt

It’s not hopeless, and we’re not helpless.

There are consequences to being an arrogant, sullen prick.

Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn.

Insiders who complain to politico: please report to the white house office of shut the fuck up.

Tick tock motherfuckers!

Republican obstruction dressed up as bipartisanship. Again.

Prediction: the gop will rethink its strategy of boycotting future committees.

Republican also-rans: four mules fighting over a turnip.

SCOTUS: It’s not “bribery” unless it comes from the Bribery region of France. Otherwise, it’s merely “sparkling malfeasance”.

I really should read my own blog.

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

Too often we hand the biggest microphones to the cynics and the critics who delight in declaring failure.

American History and Black History can not be separated.

Joe Biden can go out like FDR, not by dying in office, but by crushing the fascists.

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

They think we are photo bombing their nice little lives.

No Justins, No Peace

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Sorry Bout the Oscars Thread

Sorry Bout the Oscars Thread

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I was preoccupied with other things. We’re having wicked windstorms around these here parts, and the boys are staying the night again tonight. I kind of like having them around. Baked some BBQ chicken thighs, made mashed potatoes, peas, and cornbread for dinner, then they watched some movies and are off to bed.

I think maybe I should start thinking about fostering for real.

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70Comments

  2. 2.

    Jerzy Russian

    Baked some BBQ chicken thighs, made mashed potatoes, peas, and cornbread for dinner,

    That is just what you need on a cold night.

  4. 4.

    satby

    There’s always a need for foster parents, especially for older sibling groups and boys. I can honestly say my bio-kids and I got as much out of it as we gave, if not more. Go for it.
    If you want to do a test run, host a high school foreign exchange student. They revert to normal teenage behavior within a month or so, so you can experience the day to day within a commitment of 6-9 months. You have to pass almost all the same background checks too.

  8. 8.

    Grover Gardner

    Yes, you should. We have a friend, a childless, middle-aged divorcee, who started fostering teenage boys and she’s absolutely brilliant at it. To date she’s adopted two of them. The boys adore her and would do anything for her. We regularly send her requested items for the boys who come through her house. Duffel bags for their stuff are apparently near the top of the list, which is kinda sad, but they’re much nicer than garbage bags and help them feel organized.

  9. 9.

    satby

    @Ohio Mom: the third time it blew over my porch rocker I just left it. It’s a good sized wooden rocker and I had put a 20 lb bag of potting soil on the cover to make it stay. Still flipped over ?

  11. 11.

    opiejeanne

    We are having a new adventure. We are in a nice Hampton Inn next to the freeway and the power is down in this part of town. The hotel has lights in the hallway and probably some basic lights the lobby but everything else it’s down.
    My computer has an 8 hour battery and I’m using the phone as a hotspot for the internet.
    It’s kind of funny. We left home to get away from the snow, and it’s been snowing like mad since Eugene, Oregon.
    We’re in Roseburg for the night, we have the phones for a hotspot and an 8-hour battery in the computer. I brought a little pocket flashlight, but we always do. Took us over 3 hours to drive 70 miles, so by 5pm we were ready to stop, especially after watching other drivers getting a bit panicky and seeing the guy ahead of us slide out of the lane. There are two cars in the parking lot that are stuck in the snow, spinning their wheels and sliding around.
    It’s still snowing hard, so we won’t run out.

  12. 12.

    eemom

    I was preoccupied with other things.

    Oh my God. You are a sick man John Cole. Sick sick sick I tell you. I wouldn’t be surprised if even now you are failing to rend your garments and gnash your teeth over whatever the fuck won best film.

    Have you no decency, sir? Have you, at long last, no sense of DECENCY?

  16. 16.

    opiejeanne

    @Major Major Major Major: Heh. We’re reading and occasionally getting up to wonder about which car is now spinning its wheels. We think there might be three vehicles stuck now. Dave says there’s a car in the road that’s stuck, maybe two more besides. We’re on the 3rd floor, can see that the restaurant where we had supper closed up early and sent everyone home.
    One of the stuck cars just got unstuck a little and managed to drive under the canopy in front of the lobby. There’s a car trying to drive up the driveway across the road that keeps sliding back into the street. Luckily it’s not a busy street.

    We might be stuck here tomorrow if the snow doesn’t let up tonight. Oh no! We’ll have to subsist on the wine and snack food in the lobby! The restaurant within walking distance doesn’t have a generator.

  17. 17.

    opiejeanne

    @Jay: Yes. If we are able to leave tomorrow morning we’ll charge up. Otherwise, I may just shut everything down because it’s dark and I may get sleepy soon.

  19. 19.

    jacy

    That’s it, Cole, I’m going to send my children to you for a couple weeks. That will cure your fondess of children. (Grumble. I asked them eleventy times to clean the kitchen and the living room and take out the trash, because I have a metric shit-ton of work to do and I have literally been working all day, and I have to drive all over creation tomorrow to run errands I don’t really want to run, and I went into the house and they are both in their rooms and everything looks like a bomb went off. I love them, but they are lazy little monsters sometimes.)

  20. 20.

    opiejeanne

    Dave says the signals at the corner are dead and the overpass lights are out too. I called it when the lights went out for a minute at the restaurant, and I’m sorry that I was right. It was exactly the way we lost power at home last week, a short outage followed a while later by everything going down. This is ok. We’re warm and safe and there are granola bars in the car.

  22. 22.

    West of the Rockies

    Just now saw Adam Lambert’s performance with Queen tonight. YMMV, but he is NO Freddie. I thought George Michael was a much better stand-in.

  24. 24.

    Jay

    @opiejeanne:

    Rule #1 for snowdays, can you drive, steer and stop safely?

    Rule # 2 for snowdays, is everybody else driving, steering and stopping safely?

    If either question has a no, Stay.

    Many many years ago, in a snowday in Vancouver, most people left early, but as the snow kept coming down, I listened to the spinning tires, the traffic reports, and stayed late.

    I left work at midnight, when almost everybody had given up on driving. Other than having to push abandoned cars off the Knight Street Bridge by myself, to clear a lane, driving home didn’t take much longer than a normal commute.

    With nobody on the roads, it was a lot safer.

  25. 25.

    Mike J

    The city decided to fix up our dock this week, so I spent the day moving the contents of our dock boxes onto our 27′ boat using it as a storage bin and moving our dinghies to a secure facility so the dock is clear and they won’t be stolen. My arms still ache from coming in last in yesterday’s race when I was trimming the jib, The good part of that is “last” was 4th, so we came in ahead of everyone who didn’t want to race on a rainy day in February. Since we won the first two races (out of five) and one was cancelled due to snow, our community sailing center may win our neighboring yacht club’s winter series.

  29. 29.

    Mnemosyne

    Now that you’re not drinking anymore, it’s a much better idea than when you first proposed it. Satby seems to have a pretty good idea at #4 for how you can test the waters without a full-on commitment by getting an exchange student first.

  30. 30.

    NotMax

    @West of the Rockies

    It was a jab at Hollywood in general. For a time Cage was announced as being in, on the cusp of signing on or alone at the top of the list to be cast in just about everything. There was quite serious chatter of casting him as Superman, fer Pete’s sake.

  31. 31.

    Villago Delenda Est

    Cole, don’t sweat it. The Oscars have been sucking boar tit for the last quarter century.

  32. 32.

    opiejeanne

    @Jay: We’re not newcomers to driving in heavy snow but thanks for verifying my prejudices about when not to drive. We are prepared to wait if we have to. We also came prepared in case we got stuck on the freeway: blankets, water, granola bars, etc.
    mr opiejeanne is fascinated, watching people try to navigate the icy parking lot. Cars are stuck and new people keep coming to check in and we are wondering where they’re putting them. They must be sleeping in the lobby by now. I can’t imagine that they’ve been driving through this crap after dark, as bad as it’s been snowing since 2pm. Our windshield wipers were having trouble keeping up and my side of the windshield was blocked by the time we pulled in.
    The snow is just as bad to the south, we were told by a couple checking in earlier. When I called the desk at 4 there were 40 rooms. By the time we got here I think she said they were down to a dozen left.

  35. 35.

    Jay

    @opiejeanne:

    Good to know you are “geared” up.

    People used to tease me about putting on studded snow tires, loading in shovels, chains, food, water, sleeping bags, salt, gravel, weights every November 1st, when I lived in the Lower Rainland.

    On the other hand, 1/4” of snow would cause chaos on the roads, ( actually just a heavy rain) and every other year, it was a lot more than 1/4”. I remember a year when the streets in Coquitlam went unplowed for 2 days, because they couldn’t dig the plows out of the sheds.

  36. 36.

    Mike J

    @Jay: A 150%, non-tailing winches. It was sunny with blue skies and 7 kts wind, then rain with 12, hail with 15, sunny with 0, rain with 12 all in one race.

  37. 37.

    NotMax

    @NotMax

    Shan’t inflict the video on y’all, but for those who don’t remember or were too young at the time, a printed look back at the debacle.

    …17 Hollywood heavyweights — among them Paul Newman, Gregory Peck, Julie Andrews and Billy Wilder — signed an open letter deriding the telecast as “an embarrassment to both the Academy and the entire motion picture industry.”

  40. 40.

    Mnemosyne

    @opiejeanne:

    Yikes! But you’re probably right that you’re better off in a hotel where rescuers know a bunch of people are than being isolated in your house. Just make sure to tread carefully if you do venture outdoors.

    A friend of mine is in northern Washington with three kids under the age of six all stuck at home because the schools have been closed. She’s about to go all Jack Torrance. ??

    “All work and no play make Mommy … something something.”

  43. 43.

    Jay

    @Mnemosyne:

    Kids these days. When I was a kid, on snow days, the dryer was the hardest worker in the house. Once, we ran out of mini-marshmallows and Mom “had” to cut up the big ones.

  47. 47.

    opiejeanne

    @Jay: We usually don’t see the snowplows for seven days after a snow, because they’re all busy in Seattle. A little over a week ago we had about 16 inches of snow. When it gets close to 12 inches we stay put. We have a Subaru but there’s only so much you can expect from it. I think the deepest we’ve driven in was 8 inches and that was just our driveway, but it was exciting. The road in front of our house usually has the tracks of at least one over-achiever so if we drive in their tracks to get off the hill and down to the 202, we’re good.

  49. 49.

    opiejeanne

    @Mnemosyne: There are a lot of bottles of wine in the lobby. I think those and the candy bars will help us survive until help arrives.
    They feed us breakfast here but if the power is still out in the morning it will be a bit sparse. Maybe some of those inadequate little danishes and …. wait, they may have to chuck the eggs and bacon if the refrigerator isn’t on their generator. We certainly won’t get waffles.

  51. 51.

    opiejeanne

    Good night. I’m tired and I am watching the freeway from my bed. Still a few people driving but it’s mostly semis going down the road. It’s very bright out but there is no moon nor streetlights, just a lot of the white stuff and it’s eerie.

  53. 53.

    Mike J

    @opiejeanne: I was conslutting at Compaq in Houston when hurricane Alison hit. My brand new (stupid, indulgent, wouldn’t do it again) sports car was in the parking lot with the waters rising and I was wanting to go to the city I didn’t live in but my girlfriend did, and her name was Alison too.

    The hotel was on a very small hill that was just enough to keep my car dry and the girlfriend thing sadly didn’t work out. At least insurance would have paid for the car.

  54. 54.

    Mike J

    @West of the Rockies:

    I just looked that up on YouTube and lasted less than a minute.

    I looked too. I wanted to say, “please kill me,” but I knew I had done nothing wrong. It was the people that had written that abomination that deserved to die.

  55. 55.

    Jay

    @Mike J:

    Ah, the mythical shore lift.

    I did some single handed racing, but wasn’t happy with it. They either under rated my boat or over rated it. Eg. I replaced the sodden barn door foam and fiberglass rudder with a NACA 14, carbon fiber elliptical blade, 9 inches narrower than stock, 1 1/2 feet deeper than stock. Columbia 26 MkII’s were notorious for weather helm and losing bite when heeled past 15 degrees, and that fixed it.

    It didn’t help that I boarded and templated the hull and keel, used a hard bottom paint polished, with a sloughing paint overtop.

    I found it a lot more “fun” to sail in heavy weather up and down the Salish Sea, by my self, than racing.

  56. 56.

    Mike J

    @Jay: One of our members was trying to talk me into R2AK this year, but I’m hoping I can next year. I’m still trying to hook up a Swiftsure ride.

  57. 57.

    Jay

    @Mike J:

    Did a couple of Swiftsures, did a couple of Transpacs, as crew when I was younger. We broke a ULDB, I think is was the 3rd or 4th on the Wet Coast in one of the Transpacs.

    I learned it’s really hard to put a good crew together, trimmers are primadonna’s, deck apes are meatspace and helmsmen think they are god.

    I learned that I much preferred to sail alone, or with other people as ballast and coffee fetchers.

    In the winter, on long weekends, I used to head out in the evenings, from Eagle Harbour, track out past Victoria, through the Straight, and out into the Pacific, then turn around at the half way mark, time wise, and head home, sailing day and night.

    Clear star filled skies, grey days, water on deck.

  59. 59.

    Jay

    @Mike J:

    The most “fun” I ever had with/as crew, was in my early 20’s.

    Our “gang” would rent some rich man’s boat through one of the charter companies, big boats leased back for all but three weeks of the year, like a time share.

    Then we would take it out into the Gulf from Grandville Island and sail it like we stole it. I still remember a Benateau 456 that we were hammering with a 150 genny up, right along the line, until it “broke” and the 456 wound up doing donuts. 15 assorted hoodlums clinging to the lifelines and laughing our asses off.

    Good times.

  60. 60.

    Mnemosyne

    @West of the Rockies:
    @Mike J:

    I saw it in real time. I think we all had a moment of, “Wait, did someone spike our sodas?”

    (I was a teenage film nerd with nerdy friends, so underage drinking was not a big thing in our social circle.)

  64. 64.

    Rafael

    I have a friend who works recruiting hosts for exchange students and she tells me they look for hosts in every state. Like they said upthread, it could be a good trial run for having an unknown teenager in your house. Most are in high school and they are easy to work with, they just need a place to sleep in and food. This is the company she works for. https://iseusa.org/ Send me an email if you’re curious, she gets credits for referrals. :)

  67. 67.

    The Very Reverend Crimson Fire of Compassion

    I can’t tell anyone what they “should” do in regard to foster kids, but it’s one of the best decisions the SO and I ever made. Good foster parents are ridiculously hard to find.
    For what it’s worth, I think you’re a natural candidate.

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