Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Let there be snark.

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

The willow is too close to the house.

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

This fight is for everything.

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

I desperately hope that, yet again, I am wrong.

And we’re all out of bubblegum.

T R E 4 5 O N

Can we lighten up on the doomsday scenarios?

Imperialist aggressors must be defeated, or the whole world loses.

Democrats are back in array!

This must be what justice looks like, not vengeful, just peaceful exuberance.

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

Something needs to be done about our bogus SCOTUS.

Red lights blinking on democracy’s dashboard

Pessimism assures that nothing of any importance will change.

The current Supreme Court is a rogue court. Very dangerous.

Motown is Joe-Town!

The jury literally has a bell they can ring to force Trump to show up on command. Greatest thing ever!

Democrats have delivered the Square Deal, the New Deal, the Fair Deal, and now… the Big Joe Biden Deal.

…and a burning sense of injustice to juice the soul.

You can’t attract Republican voters. You can only out organize them.

The problem people have with Biden’s age is the color of the VPs skin.

You are here: Home / Elections / Biden For President / Monday Morning Open Thread: Memorial Day

Monday Morning Open Thread: Memorial Day

by | 196 Comments

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There will be serious posts from front-pagers more qualified to write them later. So I’ll stick to bricolage…


.

Speaking of “honor”, a treason-in-defense-of-slavery hissyfit, from “Assistant to the Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs (May 20, 2019)”:

Reader Interactions

196Comments

  2. 2.

    montanareddog

    imagine if you possibly can the unquantifiable personal sacrifice this man made in depriving himself of the grueling exercise sitting in a cart and foot wedging for three whole months

    Kilgore Trout underestimates the strain it puts on an anthropomorphic lardbag to live tweet Fox News from the crapper for 3 whole months

    And good morning, everyone

  5. 5.

    montanareddog

    @Baud: And thanks to Kilgore for teaching me a new expression (IANAGolfer). Henceforth, one of my new nicknames for that unspeakable man will be Foot Wedger in Chief

  8. 8.

    Aleta

    To be remembered as the last Memorial Day  of a president who was in charge as scores of veterans died in veterans homes and nursing homes underfunded by Republican tax cuts, who ordered churches to open but didn’t go himself.   Whose children and followers had botsforbrains.

  10. 10.

    germy

    The problem is that the media treats Republicans as a distant foreign nation, so to the extent things Republicans say get covered, it’s usually in a detached anthropological sense – “explaining” rather than “criticizing” https://t.co/PCiVcJgMOi

    — Will Stancil (@whstancil) May 24, 2020

    Or, perhaps the now extremely consolidated corporately-owned political press simply sees Republicans as clients for whom they perform public relations.

    And those required to overlook this transaction describe it as detached anthropologists.

    — Flatten the curve, not the webrant?——? (@web_rant) May 24, 2020

  12. 12.

    Ohio Mom

    I have many happy memories of summer days spent at Jones Beach but my, it looks chilly and in that photo. Those are dedicated beach people.

    Though probably the safest day for a long time to come to visit the beach.

  14. 14.

    Ohio Mom

    Raven: I went to old people’s hour yesterday. Have to admit I feel smug walking past everyone lined up six feet apart for the nine o’clock general opening.

  16. 16.

    Immanentize

    @JPL: He is doing well.  No word on his college yet — whether they will start a class come Fall.  Yesterday, we “Marie Kondo-ed” our old tech stuff — hardware, software, manuals etc.  He kept a sealed version of Windows 95 — Is certain it will be valuable someday.  He’s funny about and protective of old software….

    We had a great brisket feast last night. The house still smells like mesquite smoke.

  25. 25.

    Immanentize

    @Ohio Mom: When I was a pre-teen, my family went down to Jones Beach and we saw a production of Sound of Music at the playhouse on the water.  When the search scene came when the VonTrapps were on the lamb, they have motorboats with little Nazi flags on them circle the stage.  That’s a memory that won’t leave me….

    In the Alps or on the water, Rolf Gruber was a thorough Nazi villian.

  26. 26.

    OzarkHillbilly

    An aerial search in the Peruvian desert has revealed intriguing figures of humans and animals that predate the nearby Unesco world heritage site

    A faded decades-old black-and-white photograph was the only lead Johny Isla had when he set out on the trail of a sea monster. The Peruvian archaeologist spotted the image at a 2014 exhibition in Germany about the Nazca Lines, the vast and intricate desert images which attract tens of thousands of tourists every year. The photograph taken in the early 1970s showed a mysterious killer whale deity carved in an arid hillside. The figure bore some resemblance to others he knew but he had never seen this one before.

    Isla, now Peru’s chief archaeologist for the lines, spent hours poring through archives, before returning to Peru – armed with a drone and a lifetime of local field experience – to find it. After several false starts, it took just two weeks to find the 25-by-65-metre image which had been hiding in plain sight in the hills of Palpa, about 30 miles north of Nazca, in a huge expanse of desert in southern Peru.

    The design carved into the hillside depicts a terrifying mythological beast, part orca but with a human arm holding a trophy head and several more heads inside its body.

  27. 27.

    Chief Oshkosh

    I’ve been busy working and so am behind on news. What happened to Fauci? I don’t see him in the news anymore.

  31. 31.

    mrmoshpotato

    @Immanentize:

    He kept a sealed version of Windows 95 

    ??

    We had a great brisket feast last night. The house still smells like mesquite smoke.

    Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm Mmmmmmmmmmmmm Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

  32. 32.

    Ceci n est pas mon nym

    @Immanentize: I have a clean-out project going and have a number of such items I can’t bear to part with. Finally created a box labeled “Tech Museum”. 10M IOmega disk anyone?

    And I know there’s a box of floppies in this house I’ll run into sooner or later.

    i also can’t figure out what to do with the cassette and VHS recordings.

  33. 33.

    Immanentize

    @Ceci n est pas mon nym: Cassettes are all the rage, now.  Keep them.  The Immp is starting in on “mix tapes.” Ha!

    We ran into some actual 5″ floppies.  AND a floppy disk holder like a Rolodex, complete with the sleeves you put the floppies in.  I love the idea of “tech museum.” We decided that if they ever reopen the MIT garage sale this summer, we are going to buy floppy drives.

  34. 34.

    gkoutnik

    @Ceci n est pas mon nym: I’ve spent a good part of my retirement so far digitizing my and my wife’s extensive audio cassette collection.  You can do it at the same time you’re working at your desk.  We’ve gone through a bunch of these, but they’re cheap.

  36. 36.

    mrmoshpotato

    @OzarkHillbilly:

    A faded decades-old black-and-white photograph was the only lead Johny Isla had when he set out on the trail of a sea monster. 

    Every article needs to start like this.

  37. 37.

    Immanentize

    @gkoutnik: I’m a technology ahead of you — I just put all my CDs onto an external drive in .flac

    I do have some rare jazz music on cassettes that I really should digitize.  I had a really serious collection of rare and live reggae on cassettes once, but a burglar took all the cassettes (1989).  Such a huge loss.

  41. 41.

    Frankensteinbeck

    @germy:

    Or perhaps national news reporters and pundits, a career path and social group overwhelmingly led by rich, older white men whose primary job skill is to turn a lack of facts into a story, agree with Republican framing on most things.

    @OzarkHillbilly:

    Oh, Nazca.  You based your entire civilization on Furry Art.  Why was I surprised to hear it included Vore?

  43. 43.

    Immanentize

    @gkoutnik: ha!  The fact that we were on the top floor of the building that had access from the roof attracted them.  I am certain that they had no idea what the grabbed.  Most disturbingly, they took some clothes too, and left their dirties, including their smalls behind. But it was an awesome collection from my friend who was deep into the NY reggae scene in the 70s and 80s. That guy was such a pot head! But he shared. ?

  44. 44.

    trnc

    @Immanentize: We ran into some actual 5″ floppies. AND a floppy disk holder like a Rolodex, complete with the sleeves you put the floppies in. I love the idea of “tech museum.”

    I’m a techie. Years ago, we hired a new guy and set his desk up with several ancient pieces of equipment we had stashed away. He laughed pretty hard when he got there.

  46. 46.

    Immanentize

    @gkoutnik: I used Exact Audio Copy to rip the CDs.  .flac records the full spectrum (mp3 takes out a lot of the information).  It’s easy to use and like you said, I just did it while working at the computer.  You just need a CD/dvd/dvr in your computer and the EAC software.  Bob’s your uncle.

  50. 50.

    burnspbesq

    No confirmation from the family, and no NYT obit, but there are reports that the great jazz drummer Jimmy Cobb has passed away at age 91.

  51. 51.

    debbie

    @OzarkHillbilly:

    Sigh. I had a roommate who stole my stereo, sold it, and shot it up his arm before I even knew it was missing (I had gone home to visit my dying father). Doubt he was able to get high more than a couple of times with the proceeds, but still, it sucked.

  52. 52.

    NotMax

    Repeated for daytime crowd. General media tidbits.

    1) The trailer gives me some pause that it slants too much in the revisionist direction of Ron Chernow’s tome (he’s an executive producer); note that a three part series on Ulysses Grant begins tonight on the History Channel.

    2) Found on Prime, a not unworthwhile, albeit mercurial, curiosity, Turnover. Observations:

    An eccentric brew of comedy and pathos. The secret to the eponymous pastry is flakiness; the film celebrates flakiness as well – caressing the awkward (not always successfully) while avoiding derision.

    Several times finds itself on shaky footing, even brushing against the border of caricature, but manages to continue to recover.

    Almost bites off more storylines than one movie ought to chew, ending up thematically in a key quite different than it was scored at the start.

    Curl up with a favorite beverage and a serving of snackage, kick off your shoes and spend a couple of hours in indie movieland.

    3) Is it a good movie? No. Is it a bad movie? No. For whom was it intended? Your guess is as good as mine. A dystopian dance to an idiosyncratic beat.

    Whaddaya get if John Carpenter and Ridley Scott collaborated on frappeing Barbara Stanwyck and Sigourney Weaver in a blender, dispensed the concoction into a tumbler and garnished it with a twist of Eve Arden? Hotel Artemis, available on Prime. Consider it a diversion studded with cinematic flailings interspersed with flashes of brilliance.

  53. 53.

    burnspbesq

    @Immanentize:

    until very recently, Music/iTunes wouldn’t play FLAC files, so my library is saved as Apple Lossless files.

    Offsite backup of your music library is ESSENTIAL. I know a lot of folks who use iCloud, but that’s not an option for me with a 3.6Tb library. I use Amazon Drive.

  54. 54.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @debbie: She sold it to the ex-husband of a friend of mine soon after we separated. My friend and he put 2 and 2 together. He offered to give them back to me but I was pretty well living out of a p/u at that time with no stereo and no likelihood of that changing for a while so I just said to forget it, enjoy the music for me.

  56. 56.

    khead

    I have some old Atari stuff (2600, 400, 800) in the garage for the tech museum. I think there’s an Intellivision in there somewhere too.

  57. 57.

    Ohio Mom

    Immanentize: off-topic but everytime I see your name in a thread I think of that short interlude when you were debating whether or not to go through with your cruise. I think of that time as our last collective moments of innocence.

  58. 58.

    montanareddog

    @trnc: A not-so-tech-savvy colleague of ours went for lunch and left his PC unlocked. So we flipped the display orientation of his monitor 180 degrees (used to be a key combination for this -something like Ctl-Shift-DownArrow).

    We came back from our lunch and he was balancing the monitor upside down on its top edge with one hand while calling tech support with the other hand to explain that he thought he had a virus.

  59. 59.

    debbie

    @OzarkHillbilly:

    Bastards both. I dragged a couple hundred albums around with me (for a while, just used roommates’ systems or when stereos got too expensive to think about purchasing, I spent hours taping my favorites) until 1995 when I just put them out on the street. How sorry I am now, now that the prices have gone down!

  60. 60.

    RAM

    My Memorial Day piece this year is about one of my favorite local historical personages. He escaped from slavery, came north to Illinois, enlisted in the 29th U.S. Colored Infantry Regiment, was wounded at the Battle of the Crater, recovered to fight again, came back to our little corner of Illinois after the war, went back south and retrieved his kids and brought them to his home, and joined and became an officer in one of the county’s Grand Army of the Republic posts. His grandkids became the first Black kids to graduate from high school in our county and his descendants became teachers, college professors–and at least one federal judge.

  62. 62.

    laura

    It’s our anniversary today – 24 years and counting. We renegotiate the contract every year mostly agreeing to extend the current terms though one year it resulted in a kitchen remodel. We’ll go for a tootle in the vw bug early because we’re in a hot spell. I’m planning some time in the hammock and a really nice dinner with a green salad twice baked and splitting a rib eye. If spouse’s birth certificate arrives in tomorrow’s mail, we’ll send off the pension application forms because this girl’s retiring at the end of August. I’m negotiating my last two contracts and prepping my last arbitration hearings and calling it a career.

  63. 63.

    LightCastle

    @NotMax:

    I quite enjoyed Hotel Artemis when I saw it as one of about 14 people in the theatre.

    I think “flailings interspersed with flashesof brilliance” about covers it. It seemed very much a labour of love from someone who really dug that vaguely cyberpunk-ish genre.

  65. 65.

    WaterGirl

    @mrmoshpotato: Dear Mr. Potato,

    I regret to inform you that I felt it necessary to remove several of your letter M(s).  I have learned from experience that formatting of a single line that goes outside the boundaries screws up the thread on mobile devices.

    Most sincerely, WG

  67. 67.

    StringOnAStick

    @debbie: We’re in the early stages of downsizing in preparation to move to a new state when my husband retires early next year.  We’ll be getting a smaller place so the old fashioned cabinet full of stereo components is not coming with us.  We bought a nice portable Bluetooth speaker that can be plugged in or use its internal battery and has an option to plug in and charge your phone.  I take it to wherever I am in the house or garage; it is the perfect solution and for about $300 we’re in the position to get rid of a lot of stuff And a big piece of furniture.

    a different question for any Kindle users out there: I have an older one and I use it a lot as a browser, are the newer ones significantly better performing at that?  Especially when using the typing function, which IMO sucks incredibly?

  68. 68.

    StringOnAStick

    @laura: Congratulations!  I retired 8 months earlier than planned because of the virus but husband is done as of the end of next February. You’re gonna love it!

  71. 71.

    tybee

    @Ceci n est pas mon nym:

    10M IOmega disk

    dayyum. :)

    about 8 or 9 years ago, i gave away my 110 baud acoustically coupled modem. sigh. damn near teared up over that.

  72. 72.

    MomSense

    @OzarkHillbilly:

    My mom got rid of my album collection when we moved.  They were in a box in my room with everything else I owned but somehow she decided that if I didn’t carry them out of my room I didn’t want them.  I didn’t carry anything in that move because I was on crutches.

    She just didn’t like them.

  77. 77.

    Immanentize

    @debbie: stereo system prices have gone down while the price of some vinyl has soared.  I’ve picked through piles by the curb like that.  I thank you collectively.

  78. 78.

    debbie

    @MomSense:

    Similarly, my mother decided to toss a lot of my stuff when she moved from her house to an apartment, including my collection of Watergate-era political cartoons (like Paul Szep who appeared in the Boston Globe), old history papers, etc. I was bedridden with a bad back, so there wasn’t much I could do.

  79. 79.

    WaterGirl

    @MomSense: My mom threw out all my stuff when I was in college.  It was very upsetting.

    She was given 6 months to live, and she asked me every time I came home to visit to PLEASE take my stuff.  As a clueless 20-year old, I didn’t understand the urgency and how the one thing she could control was to put everything in order before she died.

    She never spelled it out for me, so that was a learning experience, but I lost a lot of my treasures.

  83. 83.

    Immanentize

    @tybee: Visicalc — another dinosaur Mac user?

    ETA Ok, I remember Visicalc versus Lotus arguments — but I just looked it up and some credit visicalc with causing IBM to develop the PC. If so, I salute you, Visicalc!

  85. 85.

    WaterGirl

    @Immanentize: My parents owned a local neighborhood tavern, and we lived upstairs.  They had a jukebox and when the vendor changed out the 45s, we got to keep them.

    We kids played A Town Without Pity so many times in a row that my mom came back to the “den”, our playroom, took the song off the record player and broke the record in half.

  87. 87.

    khead

    @mrmoshpotato:

    M.U.L.E. and Seven Cities of Gold for the Atari 8-bit systems are two of the greatest games of all time.  Dani Bunten did a LOT with a little bit of memory.

    Also, I will see your Pitfall and raise you a Kaboom! and Stampede.

  88. 88.

    Immanentize

    @WaterGirl: Well, I can kinda see why she might. When my brother was learning to play the clarinet, the only song he practiced was “Yesterday.” He was sent to the basement to practice.

    I finally broke all of my father’s last nerves playing “Roxanne” by the Police. And this was a guy who loved Bebop!

  89. 89.

    laura

    @StringOnAStick: will soon be red X-ing calendar days. It feels very very unreal and the guilt of privilege and luck is A Thing. So about those components… I’ve got my dad’s backyard stero sub woof and speakers (all bluetooth and with an ipod dock) and I’ve excavated my old Technics Q5 close n play turntable from back in the day and bought a receiver back in the before times. One day soon, but not today, were setting it up and pulling crates of records from all the closets. Some will go, some will stay and most will spin! I’ve also got 100’s of CD’s of dad’s jazz. Heavy on the West Coast cool, bebop, all the Ladies with the vocals. Verve, Vanguard and the like. Anyone needing some music? Happy to ship.

  90. 90.

    NotMax

    @Immanentize

    Now sitting in boxes (had it set up in my store when that was running) is the stereo system I purchased back in the 70s.

    Newly received tax refund check metaphorically in my sweaty palms, stopped off while on the way back to the Poconos from NY at Crazy Eddie’s to finally shell out and get a decent rig.

    Happened it was the day a heckuva blizzard hit the area, so it turned out I was the only customer who crossed their threshold that day. Salesman was ecstatic that anyone had come in.

    Gave him a rough idea of my budget and he pointed out one or two shelves of components. “Other than those, put together a system with anything else in the store and you can walk out of here with it at your price.” Ended up with a mix of components which on any other day would have been but a pipe dream. To this day have friends who half in jest ask me to bequeath the speakers chosen then to them.

    Would that had the space to unpack it and set it up at home, but c’est la vie.

  91. 91.

    NotMax

    @Immanentize

    Gawd, I miss Corel WordPerfect.

    Have a Zipdrive salvaged from a previous PC which once in a blue moon my friends who run a computer repair service ask to borrow.

  93. 93.

    NotMax

    @Immanentize

    Not entirely pleasant memories of being banished to the basement or garage to practice the theme from Charade on clarinet.

    ;)

  94. 94.

    MagdaInBlack

    @WaterGirl:

    A good friends father worked for a company that changed out those 45’s.  He had a steady supply of Billboard and all the best music.?

  95. 95.

    OldDave

    @Ceci n est pas mon nym:

    “Tech Museum”

    I sadly discarded some ancient items when my work moved to a new location.  While I kept a few 8″ floppy disks, I tossed the matching drive.  I did keep an LSI-11 board, and a core memory board for a (wait for it) 24-bit computer.  I might even have a few punch cards left, which were perfect for keeping “punch list” notes on.

  96. 96.

    BC in Illinois

    In the midst of all the nostalgia for computerware of the last century, may I put in a word for my beloved Kaypro-II.

    My kids still have fond memories for the absolutely primitive games, which ran using the letters on the keyboard. No videos. No access to any other pixels. Just what Wikipedia (from which all knowledge flows) calls “character-based games,” “arcade games re-imagined in ASCII” “including CatChum (a Pac-Man-like game) . . . and Ladder (a Donkey Kong-like game)”

    I still regret sending it to the computer recycling center.

  97. 97.

    Miss Bianca

    @Immanentize: This sounds like my place. I am staring at piles of old tech as I type. A Macintosh SE. An ancient IBM with a Mitsuba monitor. A Commodore Amiga 500 in its box. And that’s the just the tip of the obsolete tech iceberg!

  98. 98.

    Another Scott

    @Ohio Mom: +1.  I was naive to say that he should plan on going.  :-/

    My J had a Switzerland summer vacation planned with her twin sister.  Even though United canceled one of her flights, she had to argue with them for hours over several days, elevating to a supervisor, to get her money back (rather than a credit for some indefinite flight within a year from the original purchase date).

    Even though the US DOT says people are entitled to refunds.

    It was finally resolved (for both of them) within the last week.

    Grr…

    Cheers,
    Scott.
    (“Who has some blank Hollerith cards around here somewhere…”)

  100. 100.

    oldgold

    I live in the heartland  belly-button of the nation.  People are out partying this weekend. The Covidiots do not seem to understand the Wolf is NOW AT OUR DOOR!

    Here is a post from an ER Doctor at our local county seat hospital on Saturday night.

    • I am on call in x this weekend. Our ER is full of Covid – many young adults without risk factors are requiring advanced medical treatment and transfer. Both of our primary transfer hospitals are full of severe coronavirus cases and are no longer accepting transfers. Our own designated Covid designated beds for those less severely impacted, but who still require oxygen, are filling up. I am guessing our peak is 1 to 2 weeks away. We are on a sharp upward spike. ER is strained by more and more very ill people and I am pleading for people to be cautious because our resources are becoming more limited.

     

  101. 101.

    NotMax

    @WaterGirl

    At one time frequented a local watering hole in which the jukebox offered a selection which had mostly remained static for decades: polkas and Andrews Sisters 45s. Plus, for whatever reason, Simon & Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Water.

    Bartender had a master volume control behind the bar and whenever anyone choose that particular record he would crank it down to 1.

    @WaterGirl

    A fondly recalled cover version.

  103. 103.

    daryljfontaine

    @BC in Illinois: yessssss

    My uncle had one of these, and when I visited him in the summer of ‘87, I became quite good at the ASCII arcade games. Ridiculously fun for primitive games.

    Also got to noodle around with my programming skills on it, too.

    D

  105. 105.

    NotMax

    @Old Dave

    Punch cards were the perfect size to tuck in a shirt’s breast pocket and have handy as a ready substitute for a scratch pad.

  107. 107.

    Kirk Spencer

    @BC in Illinois: Ha, another one. That was my first computer and I too recall its steel case fondly. Though less so every time my back twinges while carrying a modern computer bag.

  108. 108.

    satby

    @StringOnAStick: My newest Kindle is going on 2 years old now, but I prefer it for 90% of my computer needs. I only open my laptop when I need to print labels, and my iPad is strictly for watching streaming media because I find it annoying for other tasks (other than Facetiming my exchange kids).

    I think the new ones have improved battery life and screen pixels mainly. I have a Fire HD8 6th generation. They’re up to 9th gen now. If I was in the market for a new device, I might consider the Fire HD 10″. I love my Kindles!

  109. 109.

    jeffreyw

    @StringOnAStick: The newer model Kindles let you load apps from the (Google) Play store so you can load different browsers.  The Samsung browser is very good.  Also, a bluetooth keyboard should pair nicely.

  110. 110.

    satby

    @laura: Hooray for you! I love being semi-retired! If we could travel, this was going to be the year I fully retired. Since I can’t go anywhere anyway, I’m sticking with my store for another year.

  111. 111.

    Kirk Spencer

    @oldgold: I’m afraid that every region, possibly down to city and county level, will have to face New York levels for it to be real to them.

    It seems far too many in the us cannot learn from being told or watching others but must pee on the electric fence themselves

  112. 112.

    RobertB

    @khead: M.U.L.E. might be the best Atari 800 game of all time, and still stands up today.

    Seven Cities was awesome back in the day, but I don’t think it would hold up now.  I remember it had a New Word designer, based on plate tectonics.  When you used it you’d end up with two egg-shaped blobs with mountains on the western side or the map.

    Kaboom was all about Zen and the Art of Catching Falling Bombs.  If you had to think, you died.  I have one of those “20 Atari VCS games for $20” game systems that has it, and I’m too old and slow to play it now.

  118. 118.

    Central Planning

    @Immanentize: we got family packs of barbecue from the Dinosaur BBQ (they are pretty much in all the big cities in NYS)  the other night for my 50th birthday. It was delicious. Ribs, pulled pork, chicken, and brisket. It’s making me hungry just thinking about it.

  119. 119.

    trnc

    @Immanentize: CRT screen?

    The biggest, ugliest one we had. ETA: Which, of course, was probably 14″ of screen, 10″ of bezel and weighed 50 lbs.

    Also, a 5 1/4″ external floppy drive that we couldn’t actually connect to the cpu because the scsi interface was so old.

  120. 120.

    Kirk Spencer

    @NotMax: to be fair I was working in a computer store at the time or I’d not have gotten one. (Vector graphics and syslogics, mostly. Owner added kaypros commoddore 64s, and later ataris to the floor that year.)

  121. 121.

    Roger Moore

    @oldgold:

    The underlying problem is that a lot of covidiots genuinely believe it can’t happen there.  They’re sure COVID struck the big cities because of something that’s different about them, and that difference will continue to spare the backwater they call home.

  122. 122.

    Ceci n est pas mon nym

    @Another Scott: I had hoped for a better customer service experience with Iceland Air. I had booked our tickets with a flexible fare (“Economy Flex”, something like that) and fairly early on in March we realized that the June trip was not going to happen. So I went to the website and cancelled.

    In early April they finally acknowledged my case and said they’re working on it. Last I heard from them.

    I was hoping for a refund but at some point on their website saw that they were giving vouchers good for three years and that would actually do it for me. I was really looking forward to the trip and to flying with them. Might even stay over a few days in Iceland if we ever actually travel.

    That’s if I ever get my passport issued. Therein lies another tale.

    For the last hour I’ve been fighting with the Home Depot voice system and going in loop after loop before finally concluding that there is no actual way in their system to actually say to any person or even computer, “hey, you didn’t deliver my stuff even though you think you did.”

    So Home Depot owes me $80 or preferably the tools I ordered and I have no idea how to pursue it but I think I’ve aggravated myself enough for the holiday and I’ll pick it up again tomorrow.

  123. 123.

    Villago Delenda Est

    Riding around in a golf cart from where you hit the ball to where it landed, then tossing it back onto the fairway, is not exercise, Donald, you morbidly obese fuck.

  125. 125.

    trnc

    @Miss Bianca: A Macintosh SE. An ancient IBM with a Mitsuba monitor. A Commodore Amiga 500 in its box.

    Mr Bianca: “I could have sworn we had more pictures from that big trip we took way back when.”

    You, staring at Mac SE: “Uh, oh.”

  128. 128.

    jeffreyw

    @Ceci n est pas mon nym:

    If you need to talk to a live person in Home Depot customer service you need to call 1-800-466-3337. This number is available 24 hours a day. To speak with a live agent, you need to listen to the main menu twice, then press 1 and stay on the line (typical waiting time is about 1-2 minutes).

  130. 130.

    Geminid

    @Roger Moore: Some people have to see something first hand to believe it. They see waves of Covid-19 hit other places and think it won’t hit them or theirs. But this pandemic is more like a storm surge, with waves on top, and it will flood everywhere. That will change a lot of skeptical people’s minds

  132. 132.

    WaterGirl

    @oldgold: I wonder if the horror of hearing about Italy – where doctors had to decide who got a ventilator and who did not, which really meant who got a chance to live and who got no chance at all – was part of why people were so willing to stay in at first.

    But, through the very act of staying in, we have mostly managed to dodge that particular bullet here in the US.

    Do these people have no memory of that from 2 months ago?  Idiots.

  134. 134.

    Ohio Mom

    JeffreyW:  did you get those directions from gethuman.com ? I haven’t used that site for ages but in the past have found their hacks to um, get a human on big companies’ customer service telephone lines very helpful.

  135. 135.

    Roger Moore

    @Geminid:

    I think it’s less about needing to see it to believe it and more about believing the old canard about cities being dens of iniquity.  Whether they say it in exactly those words, they believe that big cities are being hit because they’re morally inferior to small towns and rural areas.  It’s exactly the same way they’ve always seen drugs, unemployment, teen pregnancy, etc. as the result of urban immorality.  It makes them blind to the possibility that those problems could hit them, even as they’re suffering worse than the big cities are.

  136. 136.

    germy

    @WaterGirl:  Bridge Over Troubled Water borrowed heavily from Oscar Peterson’s Hymn To Freedom.  Paul Simon is a magpie. (Just ask the guys in Los Lobos!)

  137. 137.

    J R in WV

    @Immanentize:

    ha! The fact that we were on the top floor of the building that had access from the roof attracted them. I am certain that they had no idea what the grabbed. Most disturbingly, they took some clothes too, and left their dirties, including their smalls behind. But it was an awesome collection from my friend who was deep into the NY reggae scene in the 70s and 80s. That guy was such a pot head! But he shared. ?

    Friend and co-worker was with me at a tech conference in New Orleans some years back. One night we bar crawled up Bourbon street hitting a lot of music clubs, one was Dixieland Jazz with a tuba, German ompa band style, with big trestle tables and a happy crowd.

    But the best was last, towards the end of the commercial French Quarter, the first floor of a house, the owners could switch the ground floor living room from private to public. That night they had a Jamaican Reggae band. Keyboard guy was pretty much disabled, but for playing his keyboard. Girlfriend held his glass of soda for him.

    Wish I knew the name of the band or the members, or something to help recall that night. We shut the place down, participated in techy round tables on XML and data exchange the next morning.

    Was a great night — Zydeco, Cajun, straight jazz, dixieland, wound up for two sets of the best Reggae rock I have ever heard. Long ago now. Live music is the best !!

  138. 138.

    StringOnAStick

    @laura: Wow, what a jazz collection; worth some $ for sure.  My husband was collecting jazz for awhile (he’s a serious hobby guitarist) but got into one of his “purge” phases, MP3’d everything and sold the originals.  Lots of great stuff in your collection, no doubt.

  139. 139.

    WereBear

    I think it’s the day in question. I woke up in A MOOD. The kind I’ve been pretty good about avoiding.

    Taking it easy today. The contrast in the nation is staggering, from leaders on down.

  141. 141.

    FelonyGovt

    @BC in Illinois: The KayPro was our very first computer and I have fond memories of it. For word processing you needed to memorize weird key combinations, like Control KSQP to save your document and return to where you’d left off.
    we gave ours to the janitor at our office building, who was grateful to have a computer for his kid. Kind of wish we’d kept it though.

  143. 143.

    J R in WV

    @MomSense:

    My mom got rid of my album collection when we moved.

    My mom kept my music albums, but shitcanned my comics collection while I was in the Navy !!! Woulda been worth a lotta money eventually, but if I had to choose one or t’other woulda kept the music. Still have them in the basement!

    Also have my first computer, which I bought after graduating from my BsCs program, to customize resumes and cover letters for the job hunt. Kaypro with 9″ green screen and two floppy drives, one for the software and one for the data. Was luggable at 35 pounds. Dunno if I have any disks left…

  144. 144.

    Another Scott

    @RobertB:

    If you had to think, you died.

    Centipede on the Atari 1600 (?) was like that. I could only play it for a handful of minutes before my heart was racing like I was in the last mile of a marathon!!

    Slow down!!11ONE

    Hehe.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  145. 145.

    jeffreyw

    @Ohio Mom:

    I’m not sure of the addy, but I’ve used google to search for “how to get a human for XXX”  and had some success.  I plugged in Home Depot and blockquoted the first good looking result.

  146. 146.

    japa21

    My brother had a baseball card collection that included complete sets from the late 40’s and early 50’s.  Classic rookie cards, etc.  We think my mother either threw them out or gave to a cousin when he was in college.  Fortunately, he is independently wealthy without them, but I could use them.

    Also, my parents had a large collection of 78’s from the 40’s.  All the big bands, Sinatra, Garland and others. We have no idea what happened to them.

  147. 147.

    WaterGirl

    @Dorothy A. Winsor:

    No! It’s not talking to the voices in my head. It’s completely different!

    Are you sure?  Did you share the whole conversation with yourself?  :-)

    It’s completely different!

    No, it’s not!

    Yes, it is!

  150. 150.

    JAFD

    @RobertB: +++ Seven Cities Of Gold.  First thing I ran on my first computer (hadn’t had the hard disk (20 MB!!!) formatted or the OS (DOS 3.0) installed).  Would like somebody to do a remake with modern graphics.

    I still miss PC-Write.  Oneovdezedaze need to get my old WinXP system resurrected so can do editing with it.

    Happy Memorial Day, everyone.

  151. 151.

    Ruckus

    @Immanentize:

    Back in the early 80s I had a Unix box for some manufacturing software. The Unix box was fine, the software sucked donkey balls. I got my money back. But the best part was that I met the guy, through my part, (at that time) time professional sports gig, who was the supervisor for circuit board production for Masscomp, who had made the Unix box. It really can be a small world.

  154. 154.

    debbie

    @WaterGirl:

    The lyrics were on my high school yearbook page. The headmaster was sure there was a drug reference hidden in there somewhere. ??‍♀️

  156. 156.

    joel hanes

    @NotMax:

    Punch cards

    I have about 50 blank punch cards, still.  They make great bookmarks.

    Remember when every bill came with one that you were supposed to return with the payment ?  “Do not spindle, fold, or mutilate”

    Wish I’d saved the JCL deck from my account at university computing services 1980.   And the coiled yellow teletype tape containing my numerical analysis BASIC program for doing Newton-Raphson to find the zeros of a continuous function.

  157. 157.

    Immanentize

    @laura: Dear Laura,
    If you are still here?
    I see our friend from the north got there first, but any cool jazz — Pacific, west coast, verve, Clifford Brown like stuff — that you have, I would be grateful to receive and pay the postage to get it here. I have a bunch of Chet, but the other folks send me just as much as he does (I loved Chet before Chet was cool — again).

    Imm.

  158. 158.

    Immanentize

    @Another Scott: When I was in high school, I was both a mathlete and in band (to give you an idea of my social life then).  As part of the former group, we got to use the school admistration system computer — an Omni 8 — which was programed by optical reader cards — or punch tape!  That computer was larger than a refrigerator. I kept some of those spools of paper for years, then I realized — the Omni 8 was no more.

  160. 160.

    Immanentize

    @NotMax: When I was working for the death penalty group in Texas, we were travelling all over the state — and country — investigating cases that were so very poorly investigated the first time around.  We had purchase two Compaq “portable” SLT 286 computers. Someone described them as “luggable.” So heavy. Mini screen. But oooo the envy of all business travelers back then

  162. 162.

    JMG

    Here in Massachusetts, no golf carts on the course unless you have a handicapped exemption. Trump would have to walk and he wouldn’t finish three holes.

    My late Mom worked at an amusement park in eastern Pa. as a teenager and had an autograph book with most of the stars of the big band era. Benny Goodman, both Dorseys, Gene Krupa, Frank Sinatra, like that. My youngest brother requested that when she died and has it in his den.

  164. 164.

    J R in WV

     

    From my (free) FTFNYT news update:

    Long before the coronavirus, Americans’ trust in the federal government was on a slow but steady decline. In 2019, just 17 percent of Americans said they trusted it to do the right thing. The pandemic appears to be eroding their faith even more.

    No apparent clue that only 17% of Americans trust TRUMP to do the right thing – not necesarily the same thing as the federal government. So far, during the pandemic, we see agencies of the federal govt recommending a correct course of action, only to be swamped out by the megaphone of Trump’s idiocy amplified by FTFNYT doing what they do.

    Never will acknowledge that the FTFNYT is responsible in large part for Trump being in a position to betray the trust of the American People!!! Still, a source of compiled news for free. Will unsubscribe when they piss me off enough.

  166. 166.

    Uncle Cosmo

    @FelonyGovt: Ah, memories…

    One year in the mid-1980s my tech company was shutting down for end-of-year holidays & they let me borrow a KayPro (with Wordstar IIRC) for the duration. I’d used the word processor on the office network, but I was anxious to see whether a WP – even one with a 5″ screen that looked like its prehistoric oscilloscopic ancestors – would help me with short-story writing.

    Eleven days, a scruffy beard and an olfactory presence noxious to polite society later, I emerged with a complete draft of a 14,000 word novella (or novelette or somesuch). Turned out most of my writer’s block was the compulsion to find the perfect word before I finished a sentence, plus the fear that I’d have to retype the whole frackin’ MS if I found a better one – and now? Stick a placeholder in & come back fer crapsake, just keep typing!

    Needless to say, I went shopping for my first PC the first week of January…

  167. 167.

    Uncle Cosmo

    @StringOnAStick: Yeah? I filed Federal back taxes in mid-April (to beat a statute of limitations) & never received the return receipt I paid the USPS for – probably because all of the Infernal Revenooers had been sent home & there was no one left in the IRS offices to sign it. (Fortunately I have tracking data if they make an issue of it.)

  169. 169.

    trollhattan

    @oldgold:

    Do you have a Republican governor? Because he/she can make those COVID cases just go away. Feature, not bug.

  170. 170.

    WaterGirl

    @Sab: @rikyrah:

    This is what I want to have printed on the biggest billboard we can find.  It’s from a tweet rikyrah posted in the late night thread.

    I feel like I’m going *mad* watching the United States stumble through a mass death event, pushing aside elderly folks & poor folks & people of color in pursuit of normalcy, summertime, & instant gratification.  We are utterly grotesque.  This is horrifying.

  171. 171.

    Amir Khalid

    @Immanentize:

    “Luggable” was indeed what the PC trade called these machines. And they were luggable, if you were a weightlifter. Thank God the laptop came along around 1990.

  174. 174.

    catclub

    @WaterGirl:  so many times in a row that my mom came back to the “den”,

     

    They threaten to play Sergeant Somebody ‘singing’ the green Beret Song

    [Fighting Soldiers, from the sky…] to encourage fundraising  pledges on some public radio stations.  Appropriate for memorial day.

  175. 175.

    Just One More Canuck

    @laura: Big on the west coast cool, but anything is great – let me know about shipping costs, although this may require some negotiation with my wife

  176. 176.

    Cheryl from Maryland

    @BC in Illinois: We also had a Kaypro-II and a daisy wheel printer that saw me through graduate school, my husband through law school, and his sister through undergrad.  We finally said goodbye to it after 10 years of loyal service.

    At that time, I was working at the National Museum of American History which had set up a computer history division about 5 years before.  The curator, who was a thorn in my side for years, didn’t want to collect it as it was “unmemorable.”

    We had Zork and loved it.

  179. 179.

    FelonyGovt

    @Uncle Cosmo: Yes, WordStar! Couldn’t remember the name of the word processing program. And they didn’t do very much else either…

  180. 180.

    PST

    @Immanentize: How about old hardware? I still have a TRS-80 Model I. That was the one that had components connected by a ribbon cable with tin contacts that quickly oxidized. You had to have a pink pearl eraser to clean them when the system started to spontaneously reboot. Programs were loaded from a tape cassette player, but eventually a floppy drive was available. Just talking about it makes me want to describe how many miles I had to walk to school in the snow, up hill both ways.

  182. 182.

    Immanentize

    @catclub: Sargent Barry Sadler.  I think I have that 45 in the basement somewhere….  My oldest brother bought it.  Big hit at the time and was held up as “anti-hippy” music.

  183. 183.

    FelonyGovt

    @Yutsano: They’re really good. Lincoln’s heartfelt, eloquent and (to our ears) quaint words of condolence make a striking contrast to the words and actions of the Malignant Moron. Without ever showing the MM or even mentioning his name.

  184. 184.

    BC in Illinois

    @Cheryl from Maryland:

    a Kaypro-II and a daisy wheel printer that saw me through graduate school,

    I was working on a Master’s thesis after hours in the early 1990s, when a senior book editor came up behind me, placed his hand on my shoulder, and said “Let me tell you about doing a doctoral dissertation . . . using carbon paper.”

  185. 185.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    so trump, trying to sell the country on the idea that Joe Biden is senile, mangles the Memorial Day speech that he couldn’t be bothered read through even once before getting up at the podium cause he was busy whining on twitter because people noticed the golf outings he staged to look tough and confident (or something) during a pandemic

    “hollowed ground“

  186. 186.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    In anecdotal evidence land, one of my friend’s hard right, life time Republican parents now hate Trump with a passion to point they won’t shut up about it .

    So this what Trump’s been shitting his britches about, the elders are angry that Trump is throwing them and their grand-kids to the wolves?

  187. 187.

    Immanentize

    @FelonyGovt: Yep.  Kaypro w/Worldstar.  My first word processing experience.  And I forgot the keystroke madness commands.  Each station had a long typed list because they were too complex to remember all of them.

  188. 188.

    Cheryl from Maryland

    @BC in Illinois: Was he complaining about the noise of the daisywheel or trying to one-up you?  As for the printer, we had to limit when we could use it as it sounded like a howitzer.  That was actually a good thing as it limited my husband’s ability to procrastinate.

  189. 189.

    Bob7094

    I still have my IMSAI 8080, including the 8″ floppy drives as seen in War Games, as well as drives that actually worked reliably.

  191. 191.

    Kelly

    @Another Scott:I used to have a magnetic core memory board from an ancient PDP-8 (or 11?).

    The first computer I programmed was a PDP-8 at my high school. Some had coded a program, savedon paper tape that used the RF from the cores to play “Mary had a little lamb” on a radio sitting on top of the machine.

  192. 192.

    BC in Illinois

    @Cheryl from Maryland:

    At the time, I was working for a publishing company. If you wanted to get one-upmanship competition going . . . [ “You think THAT’s bad ! Let me tell you about the time! ” ] . . . just mention carbon paper in the presence of the long-term secretaries.

  193. 193.

    PST

    @tybee:

    i gave away my 110 baud acoustically coupled modem. sigh. damn near teared up over that.

    I was sorry to lose my USRobotics Courier. That was truly the modem of the gods. Bulletproof. But what would you do with one?

  194. 194.

    frosty

    @Ceci n est pas mon nym: I bought tickets on Southwest for our sons to join us in SoCal in April (didn’t happen). Less than two weeks later the same tickets were 1/3 the price. I bought the Wannagetaway fare specifically so they’d be reusable for a year – SWA added a couple of months so they’re good until July 2021.

    We’ll find some trip to use them on. Maybe Hawaii will let us visit without a 14-day quarantine in the next year?

  195. 195.

    James E Powell

    @Immanentize:

    A couple of my pandemic projects involved reviewing every week’s Hot 100 from Jan 61 to Dec 1970. Many long forgotten songs were rediscovered.

    Ballad of the Green Berets made it to #1 the week ending March 5 1966 – bumping These Boots Were Made for Walkin’ – and stayed there until the week ending April 9, when The Righteous Brothers took over the top spot with (You’re My) Soul and Inspiration.

    Ballad of the Green Berets probably prevented 19th Nervous Breakdown and/or Nowhere Man from reaching #1.

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