Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

A democracy can’t function when people can’t distinguish facts from lies.

A snarling mass of vitriolic jackals

Battle won, war still ongoing.

Putin must be throwing ketchup at the walls.

You can’t love your country only when you win.

No Justins, No Peace

The poor and middle-class pay taxes, the rich pay accountants, the wealthy pay politicians.

Balloon Juice has never been a refuge for the linguistically delicate.

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

The GOP is a fucking disgrace.

If you are still in the GOP, you are an extremist.

New McCarthy, same old McCarthyism.

And now I have baud making fun of me. this day can’t get worse.

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

🎶 Those boots were made for mockin’ 🎵

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

The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.

Meanwhile over at truth Social, the former president is busy confessing to crimes.

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

Accountability, motherfuckers.

“What are Republicans afraid of?” Everything.

Come on, man.

Teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Sunday Open Thread: Genius Ad Campaign

Sunday Open Thread: Genius Ad Campaign

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The person who creates their ads needs a raise. Makes me smile every time it pops up on my newsfeed.

Sunday Open Thread: Genius Ad Campaign

 

Fencing Academy of Denver
We have masks…we have gloves…we stab anyone coming within 6 feet of us! Fencing is still proving to be one of the safest sports. We are offering small group beginner classes (kids and adult) starting in June. 
Sunday Open Thread: Genius Ad Campaign 1
Looks like we need an open thread, so here you go.

Reader Interactions

102Comments

  3. 3.

    Kropacetic

    Fencing Academy of Denver
    We have masks…we have gloves…we stab anyone coming within 6 feet of us! Fencing is still proving to be one of the safest sports. We are offering small group beginner classes (kids and adult) starting in June. 

    They make a good case.  I’ve always been fencing-curious.

  4. 4.

    debbie

    I really wanted to take fencing in college, but the class had filled by the time it was my turn to register.  ?

  5. 5.

    bbleh

    Haven’t re-focused on COVID yet.  Still basking in the wreckage of the Tulsa rally.

    In fact, I caught myself literally eating popcorn.

    Schadenfreude — it’s a helluva drug.

  11. 11.

    Kropacetic

    @NotMax: “Curses, foiled again!”
    – COVID-19

    Touché

    That’s French for “I see what you did there,” right?

  14. 14.

    bbleh

    Re fencing, the Western cattle-range kind is also excellent for social distancing.  Outdoors, with gloves, often at least a bandanna, and miles from anyone.

  22. 22.

    Redshift

    My best friend and I started a fencing class on college, but we quickly realized we didn’t really want to learn fencing, we wanted to learn swashbuckling, and they didn’t have a class for that.

  24. 24.

    CCL

    TaMara – off topic.  Because of you and your post of several days (weeks?) ago, tried baking the King Arthur Potato Bread yesterday.  Yummm!

  25. 25.

    A

    Sabre fencing before it went electric and FIE banned the flèche was nearly a contact sport.  Loved it.

  27. 27.

    James E Powell

    @NotMax:

    Who, as best can remember, never once in the movies made use of a musket.

    When I was a child, that confused me to no end.

  29. 29.

    Barbara

    @Kropacetic: I fenced for about five years.  I took it up when I got bored with doing other activities.  It’s fun, but like a lot of things, to get better takes commitment. It involves more of a sprinting kind of pace — lots of quick movements that culminate in a point, followed by down time.  There are not many long rallies.  The muscles that are most used are your quads, specifically your dominant quad.  I took many years of ballet and had no problem picking up lunges.

  32. 32.

    Michael Cain

    Long-time off-and-on fencer…  they’re offering lessons, done under careful control.  Fencing masks aren’t going to offer any significant impediment to virus droplets.  In any sort of actual bout, people will spend part of the time huffing and puffing at each other from distances much closer than six feet.  That said, it’s much better exercise than most people think, one of the few activities that improves older people’s balance, and a mental as well as physical challenge.  What I miss during my extended “off” periods isn’t so much the actual stabbing, it’s the mental part of fooling people so that they’re easy to stab :^)

  33. 33.

    The Moar You Know

    I did six weeks of fencing in high school and that’s the hardest cardio exercise I have ever done.  Ballet and mountain bike racing were more physically strenuous but not as cardio heavy.

  34. 34.

    TaMara (HFG)

    @CCL: Oh, so glad to hear that! I made my standard flour. water, yeast and salt dough on Thursday. Used half to make hoagie rolls and the other half to make pizza. Mmm-mmm.

  38. 38.

    Michael Cain

    @Redshift:

    …we wanted to learn swashbuckling…

    HEMA and SCA both do rapier combat, which has fewer rules.  (I have had a chance to handle actual historical rapiers — swordsmen then had much stronger wrists and hands than I have.)  Theatrical fencing is its own thing, and has the primary goal of not touching your opponent with the weapon.  Many fencers have observed over the years that Errol Flynn was a much better swordsman in the movies when his back was to the camera.  His stunt double in most of those shots was a fencing instructor who knew what he was doing.

    I think the best Hollywood fencing story is George Takei’s.  When he interviewed for the Sulu role on Star Trek and was asked for something unusual and interesting about himself, he told them he could fence (he couldn’t).  At some point early on, one of the writers told him they were working on a story that would use him fencing.  So for a whole he was doing 12-hour days filming, then racing to the other side of Hollywood to take fencing lessons.

  39. 39.

    Betty Cracker

    @tom: Here’s a version for people who don’t want to get out of the boat:

    I watched a few clips from the rally today as I was soaking up the schadenfreude. It was like watching the most painfully flop-sweaty stand-up routine ever delivered. The amazing thing to me is that people have so little respect for themselves that they’d sit there and nod their stupid heads while listening to that asshole spend 20 minutes explaining away the two-handed sip of water and ramp descent.

    I get why Trump does it — he suffered a narcissistic injury from the coverage of the West Point photo-op, and the psychotic babbling last night is how his diseased mind attempts to repair the damage. But the 6,200 or so people who showed up for that shit-show? They stood in line, went through security, waited for hours…for that? They’re even more pathetic than Trump’s excuses.

  40. 40.

    Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes

    Fencing is awesome – it’s been a few years since I last did it, but I genuinely enjoy saber, and can fence from either hand (odd, because I’m not generally ambidextrous in any other activity).

  44. 44.

    Jeffro

    @bbleh:

    Still basking in the wreckage of the Tulsa rally.  In fact, I caught myself literally eating popcorn.  Schadenfreude — it’s a helluva drug.

    You too?  LOL

    Found out this morning that, unprompted by moi, Fro-ette was one of those couple hundred thousand teens who registered for a pair of tickets to trumpov’s rally.  What. A. Kid!  Totally made my Fathers’ Day.  =)

    Also went kayaking on a new river today – really nice.  That’s not a bad sport for social distancing either, come to think of it!

  46. 46.

    Jeffro

    @Betty Cracker: Oh my, that’s awesome.

    I hope Biden has those electric guitars cranking every time he enters a room or walks on stage.

    Go long on aviator glasses, peeps! ;)

  48. 48.

    trollhattan

    @Betty Cracker:

    Just, wow. He took a huge chunk of time to ‘splain away his weirdass West Point performance? Pro tip “sir”: you do not shine a beacon on your fuckups, you do new things to put the other thing to bed.

    The video treatment is brilliant. That folks can turn around something this polished overnight astounds me.

  49. 49.

    Kropacetic

    @Barbara: Thank you for sharing your experience with me.  It sounds like something that can help with my focus and as a physical outlet.  I looked up some fencing clubs today.

  50. 50.

    trollhattan

    @Baud:

    Not a chance. It looks like the one last week that compared Trump’s ramp performance against Biden and Obama jogging through the White House and drinking water–one-handed–when they were finished. IDK who does those.

  51. 51.

    Baud

    @Jeffro:

    I hope Biden has those electric guitars cranking every time he enters a room or walks on stage drives his corvette.

  56. 56.

    mrmoshpotato

    @debbie:

    That is an impressive turnaround on an ad. It was just last night! 

    So much material to choose from (what a whiny, orange bitch).

    Good on Hal Sparks, Charles Johnson and Evan Hurst who actually watched the shitshow.

  57. 57.

    LuciaMia

    As many others have noticed; its odd theres not  a hint of a tweet from Trump today. is he gearing up for a Twitter tsunami?

  62. 62.

    narya

    I have been fencing-curious for awhile (and archery-curious, for that matter).

    My kitchen reno starts tomorrow; I’m almost done packing and arranging. They are going down to the studs, so it will . . . be a Project. I’m not moving walls or plumbing, but they’ll need to pull some additional electric and take up the cork tile that is (I hope I hope I hope) covering the maple flooring. Kinda terrified to be doing this, even though I’ve been saving up for literally years, given the pandemic (though cases are dropping precipitously here), and changes at work (boss is leaving). But I haven’t had a functioning oven since about January. And I am hoping that gutting it will make it easier; it’s not a large space, so being able to do the floor and electric and walls w/o needing to go around things may help. I hope.

    Lotta hoping going on here . . . and still enjoying the schadenfreude with the rest of you all.

  64. 64.

    mrmoshpotato

    Blaming failure on meddling teenagers is literally what a Scooby Doo villain does.— Benari (@BenariLee) June 21, 2020

    Hey now! Scooby Doo villians weren’t traitorous Soviet shitpile mobster manbabies.

  65. 65.

    Michael Cain

    @Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:

    …and can fence from either hand (odd, because I’m not generally ambidextrous in any other activity).

    My experience is that most people can quickly learn to fence with their other hand, they’re just slow at first.  I had fenced for some time before I tried it left-handed.  Once I lined up left-handed to start, the reflexes for attacks and parries all seemed to be there without having to think about it, they were just slow.  I know a bunch of right-handed fencers who keep a set of left-handed gear so that they can fence even when their right hand/elbow/shoulder is messed up.  It seems to me to be a common enough thing that there’s a kinesiology PhD in there somewhere for figuring out why it works.

    My biggest problem trying to fence left-handed is that I’m tremendously right-eye dominant and I just miss seeing some things.

  68. 68.

    frosty

    @narya: That’s the way to go. We redid our kitchen several years ago. Demo’d down to bare studs on all the walls and tore out the ceiling too. It makes the electrical work a piece of cake. Also found out we had a leak in the waste stack from the bathroom and replaced the cast iron with PVC when it was open. MUCH easier than tearing the kitchen apart when the minor leak turns major.

  70. 70.

    JoyceH

    @bbleh:  “Still basking in the wreckage of the Tulsa rally.”

    What struck me about the Tulsa fiasco is that it’s yet another example of how Trump gets screwed up by hiring people to do things they don’t know how to do. Brad Parscale is his CAMPAIGN MANAGER and he doesn’t know how to run a campaign. He’s a data guy. He knows how to get clicks, how to get eyeballs onto a screen. He does NOT know how to get a ballpark estimate of how many people will actually move their physical bodies through physical space and show up in Tulsa Oklahoma. If you told the media that you were expecting 10K, then you could explain away 6K as mildly disappointing, due to pandemic, protesters, summer heat, etc. But when you flak *100K* and maybe more, make provisions for a huge overflow area, and schedule your principals to speak to the overflow as well as inside… well, there’s no way to spin that as anything other than a monumental flop.

    Why don’t they just hire people who know how to do what they’re hiring them to do?

  72. 72.

    mrmoshpotato

    @JoyceH:

    Why don’t they just hire people who know how to do what they’re hiring them to do? 

    Errrr…..we really don’t want fascists who know what they’re doing.  Shit’s horrible enough with this Soviet shitpile mobster manbaby and his band of traitorous trash.

  73. 73.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @LuciaMia: he’s golfing, I imagine the tweets will start on the drive back to the White House. I’m guessing Barron is celebrating Father’s Day with Grampa Knauss, and Don Jr is alone in his apartment having a make believe Father’s Day lunch with a trumpy bear

  77. 77.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @Betty Cracker: you don’t realize how long sixty seconds can be till you spend them listening to an addle-pated old man telling a story about how he survived a walk down a 3% slope

    “wait till I’m rescued… really, really, it’s like an ice-skating rink… General I may grab you….”

    But they think it’s macho cause he said a swear while telling it

  78. 78.

    Chetan Murthy

    @JoyceH:

    He’s a data guy. He knows how to get clicks, how to get eyeballs onto a screen.

    Actually, he’s not: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brad_Parscale#Career

    Parscale is what we in the biz call a “content guy”.  [in the 90s, his sort would read “HTML in 21 Days” and six months later be running a creative agency: it wasn’t his skill, but rather his hustle, that got him places.]  He learned -just- enough about web tech, to start creating content, and then moved on quickly to selling content and management services. Think of ad agencies: you got the guy at the bottom who actually create the ads, but there’s an entire pyramid (as in: “scheme”) of guys above them who sell the stuff to clients.  His kind of “web  content/ad management” is what the data-driven ad companies are about destroying.  And it showed in 2016: he had armies of consultants from the big web ad platforms (GOOG, FB, etc) come in and help him, b/c hey, he’s about webpages.  Sure he probably learned a little: but not that much, and it’s not surprising that he got rolled in so many ways.

    I attach the portion of his wikipedia page from college thru when he stated with Trump.  As you can see, there’s no evidence of -any- actual real learning about data, statistics, or even any CS/engineering.

    Parscale, who is 6 ft 8 in (203 cm),[6] played basketball in high school, then attended the University of Texas at San Antonio for one year on an athletic scholarship.[7] An injury sidelined his sports career early.[8] He later transferred to Trinity University in San Antonio where he earned a degree in finance, international business and economics in 1999.[9]
    Career[edit]
    Parscale moved to California for a few years following graduation from college. During this time, he immersed himself in the state’s burgeoning technology industry. Among the skills he acquired in California was a proficiency in a host of programming languages, such as C, C++, JavaScript, Java, and Perl.[citation needed][10][11] In 2004, he returned to San Antonio and started his digital marketing business with an initial investment of $500.[12][13] In 2011, Parscale joined designer Jill Giles to create the company Giles-Parscale, which specialized in high-end design, branding, and digital media work. The company has since been acquired by CloudCommerce.[14] CloudCommerce operates Parscale Digital and Giles Design as separate entities, for which Parscale remains on the board of directors.[15] He also co-founded SATechBloc, an organization focused on supporting San Antonio’s technology sector.[12]
    2016 Donald Trump presidential campaign

  79. 79.

    Amir Khalid

    Liverpool are playing their first post-lockdown competitive match, a Premier League Merseyside derby at Everton’s Goodison Park. (The derby at Anfield ended in a 5-2 win for the Reds.) Liverpool have been rather the better side so far, but it’s still nil-nil at halftime.

  82. 82.

    CaseyL

    @Baud: You can! Check to see if your area has a “period swordfighting” school. “Period” = historical era.  Most likely to be Renaissance era, with rapier and main gauche.  Seattle does – well, of course we do – but there may be one in your region as well, maybe through the auspices of the SCA (Society for Creative Anachronisms) or other historical cosplay group.

  83. 83.

    Martin

    @mrmoshpotato: Well, look at how Trump is responding to poor polls. He’s suing CNN for running a poll showing him -8.

    Parscale knows he can’t bring Trump a -8 poll, which is what would result if he did his job well. Parscale can’t bring Trump 6200 attendees (the official count from a Tulsa official) for a 19000 seat venue. So he brought him 300,000 and then 800,000. You think Trumps deep state bullshit is just him – who do you think Parscale and everyone else is blaming for their failures? I guarantee TikTok is being explained to Trump as a Chinese government run service designed to prevent his re-election. I’m expecting some effort to ban them, etc.

    They’ve invented a self-reinforcing cycle of failure, which, if you think about it is genuinely impressive. We have so many institutional as well as social and genetic mechanisms to prevent that from happening.

  85. 85.

    Roger Moore

    @Michael Cain:

    It seems to me to be a common enough thing that there’s a kinesiology PhD in there somewhere for figuring out why it works.

    I would guess a big part of it is that the mental side of fencing is harder to pick up than they physical side, and it doesn’t change when you fence with your off hand.  This is a bit similar to the way many baseball players can learn to switch hit; the part that’s really important doesn’t change just because you’re doing it with the other hand.

  89. 89.

    Geminid

    I saw that Rachel Bitecofer is now working with the Lincoln Project. She was denied a tenure track position at her university in May, so I guess she feels more free to play hardball politics. She is one perceptive political analyst. I learned a lot from her March 24 update of her 2020 electoral model, published by the Niskanen Center. And I also unlearned a some misconceptions about the electorate. It’s a long read; Bitecoffer doesn’t waste words, she just has a lot to say.

  91. 91.

    Origuy

    I joined a fencing club in high school and then the team when I started at Illinois. I never got into competition, but we won the Big Ten that year. The next year I was asked to be the manager. That meant handling the towels and the used football pants we wore in practice. I took that as a sign that I was never going to amount to much, so I dropped out. Just as well, sophomore year was a killer. I still have the foil and practice jacket.

  92. 92.

    Michael Cain

    @Major Major Major Major:  The Denver metro area has a surprising number of clubs.  I’m a member of Mile High Fencing Club.  We’re a pissant little rec center club (currently inactive because the rec center is closed), although a couple of members have medaled at Nationals in the 70+ age group.  We get a lot of people who say, “But Cheyenne is so serious.”

  93. 93.

    J R in WV

    @narya:

    My kitchen reno starts tomorrow; I’m almost done packing and arranging. They are going down to the studs, so it will . . . be a Project.

    You should give us a daily update, what happened today as planned, what happened today that wasn’t planned, ’cause you know that will happen too.

    We’re in our kitchen that was put in when we built the house back in 1994. New appliances since then, some repairs, but same old cheapest cabinets. I want to replace everything, but wonder how long that would take. New bamboo floor, new cabinets. So for you to do daily updates would be a huge help to me planning our rebuild.

    Best of luck, hope it works out just as you imagined it late at night!!!

  94. 94.

    Uncle Cosmo

    @Origuy: One of my uncles reputedly took up fencing during World War Two. Tires mostly. Ended up a multimillionaire.

    …Oh. Different sort of fencing. Zoot suit alors!

  95. 95.

    burnspbesq

    @Amir Khalid:

    Despite being the better team over 90 minutes, your lot were lucky to escape with a point. Davies’ shot could just as easily have gone in off the post as gone wide.

  96. 96.

    Just Chuck

    If you want to learn to fence for _free_ for as long as you feel like it, go hang out with the Society for Creative Anachronism aka the SCA.  You might even want to join, but you don’t even have to do that unless you want to do tournaments. Plus IMNSHO the styles of fencing they teach are WAY cooler both to do and watch.

    I just KNOW this ad has probably been posted eleventy hojillion times on the local barony facebook.  (wouldn’t know, I’m ex-facebook)

    Oh and the SCA is chock full of weird olds like us who are generally pretty liberal (with exceptions of course).  But do please bring the youts too.

  97. 97.

    Miss Bianca

    @Betty Cracker: LOL!! Oh, sweet little baby Jesus!

    Did Trump *really* fucking go on like that at the MAGAt rally? That is beyond embarrassing – that’s pathetic.

  98. 98.

    Miss Bianca

    @Major Major Major Major: I wish I could learn to fence without having to go all the way up to Denver from where I live! It’s a 3 hour drive. Wonder if there’s a decent place in Pueblo or Colorado Springs…

  99. 99.

    pacem appellant

    My bagpipes keep people way more than 6 ft away. No stabbing though. Maybe I should add bayonets to the drones.

  100. 100.

    Michael Cain

    @Miss Bianca: Don’t know what impact the virus has had, but Maciej Czyzowicz’s Rocky Mountain Fencing Academy used to run classes a couple of evenings a week in Colorado Springs.  Maciej’s a terrific guy.

  101. 101.

    Scamp Dog

    @Michael Cain: I used to fence there! Is Tom Raffey still involved?

    Looking at the Denver Academy of Fencing’s page, I see that I know two of their coaches, Tom and Greg, from before I moved to Denver. Small world, isn’t it?

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