Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Bad news for Ron DeSantis is great news for America.

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

fuckem (in honor of the late great efgoldman)

“I never thought they’d lock HIM up,” sobbed a distraught member of the Lock Her Up Party.

DeSantis transforms Florida into 1930s Germany with gators and theme parks.

Accountability, motherfuckers.

Red lights blinking on democracy’s dashboard

I like you, you’re my kind of trouble.

Everybody saw this coming.

A snarling mass of vitriolic jackals

The willow is too close to the house.

Within six months Twitter will be fully self-driving.

Seems like a complicated subject, have you tried yelling at it?

Putin dreamed of ending NATO, and now it’s Finnish-ed.

So it was an October Surprise A Day, like an Advent calendar but for crime.

Sadly, there is no cure for stupid.

My years-long effort to drive family and friends away has really paid off this year.

I wonder if trump will be tried as an adult.

Pessimism assures that nothing of any importance will change.

Authoritarian republicans are opposed to freedom for the rest of us.

When do we start airlifting the women and children out of Texas?

Thanks to your bullshit, we are now under siege.

Incompetence, fear, or corruption? why not all three?

We still have time to mess this up!

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Late Evening Open Thread

Late Evening Open Thread

by | 165 Comments

This post is in: ,

It looks like the flurry of posts for today might be over for the moment, and the previous thread is getting long in the tooth.

So I’m going to follow Tamara’s lead from last week with her Authors in Our Midst post, and bigfoot myself with the On The Road After Dark post in a couple of minutes.

After the recent discussion related to conjugation of the word fuck, Kattails sent me this screen cap blast from the past.

Auto Draft 38

Open thread.  Political or otherwise.

Reader Interactions

165Comments

  2. 2.

    Hildebrand

    edit – I absolutely blew my own comment because I thought the original post was from Baud.

    Best Emily Litella voice:  Nevermind

  5. 5.

    There are those who call me...tim... (Still posh)

    “Let’s drink to my fuck.”

    Frank Booth really took it to other worlds.

  6. 6.

    Ninedragonspot

    That word is the first thing I check whenever I look at a new dictionary.

    What other word in any language can be made to do this:

    ”The fucking fucker’s fucking fucked.”

  8. 8.

    PenandKey

    Or, in my favorite and oft used phrase lately, “fuck these fucking fuckers”.

    And yes, I grew up watching George Carlin as a kid. Why do you ask?

  9. 9.

    Hildebrand

    @WaterGirl: A spectacular comment fail – compounded by attempting to edit said fail and then hitting ‘post comment’ before I had actually typed anything new.

    Long story short – I fucked up.  lol

  10. 10.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    this, as they say, is a helluva lede

    Hiding from the rioters in a secret location away from the Capitol, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) appealed to Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser. Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) phoned Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter.

    and it leads to this:

    “He was hard to reach, and you know why? Because it was live TV,” said one close Trump adviser. “If it’s TiVo, he just hits pause and takes the calls. If it’s live TV, he watches it, and he was just watching it all unfold.”

  11. 11.

    WaterGirl

    Quick PSA:

    In case you missed John Cole’s Jackal challenge in his thread today, or if you are taking him up on his challenge and you want to refer back to the original post…

    You can find his post in the blue bar just below balloon man (on computers and tablets) and as the first hamburger menu item on mobile.

    You may now resume your regularly schedule programming discussion of the word fuck, and other things.

  14. 14.

    JanieM

    — One of my phases as a confirmed dilettante involved studying linguistics part-time at the University of Southern Maine. We spent a good part of one fun class examining the syntactic peculiarities of the word “fuck.”

    — As a little child growing up Catholic, with a very conservatively Baptist mother, I had the impression that bad words came in three levels of badness: “hell” was the least bad; even my mother said that one sometimes. “Damn” was a bit worse, but even my dad said that one in our presence sometimes. “Shit” was absolutely the worst. Then one evening my mother was chiding my little brother (about 5 y.o.) for doing something that had gotten a neighbor angry, and my brother said, “He’s an old fucker.” Somehow I knew the word existed, and that it was so bad that no scale of badness could encompass it. Don’t ask me where I had heard it before, though. I have no idea!

  19. 19.

    Debbie(Aussie)

    Thanks to SubaruDiane for a great chuckle. I must agree. It is my favourite word and has been getting a great workout. Started in 2002\3 when I started to become interested in US politics, slowed down (but only slightly) during the Obama years. And then 2015 happened. I think my parents are not impressed, but hey it helps blood pressure and I’m almost 60. ?

    What is happening in your country, inflicted by supposed patriots, turns my stomach. It also frightens the living daylights out of me. For where go the US goes Australia. You are all in my thoughts.

  23. 23.

    WaterGirl

    @Cathie from Canada: Everyone can embed a tweet, it’s just that if you’re not a front pager, the images don’t show. All that shows is the text and links in quote box.

    So for this tweet, it would make sense without the photos, so a link was the right choice.

  24. 24.

    NotMax

    Not a word I employ other than in the extremest of extreme circumstances, and even then reservedly. Of the school that it loses its wallop with frequency or repetition.

    Your effin’ mileage may vary.

    ;)

  25. 25.

    Laura

    Hmmmm…My husband and I sojourned for a while in a Gaelic speaking area of Ireland. ANd people did speak Gaelic there–of a sorts. It sounded like “Fuck! gaelicgaelic fucking cunt gaelicgaelicgaelic fuckers! Gaelic fucked gaelicgaelic cunt gaelic fucked Etc”

    Often the speakers were quite elderly.

  27. 27.

    Debbie(Aussie)

    @Pete Downunder: Oh my gawd yes. The article in the guardian yesterday had my blood boiling. Then Georgie interviewed him on ABC breakfast. She tried, I had to turn it off. Scratch an LNPer and you’ll find a white supremicist.

  28. 28.

    Luciamia

    But do they still know its origins in the misty linguistic past? Lots of countries claim ‘fuck’ as their own.

  32. 32.

    frosty

    I’ve always liked this sentence becuase it uses every one of the seven parts of speech except the pronoun and preposition:

    “Fuck! Fuck the fucking fuckers or they’ll fucking fuck us all!”

    “Interjection! Verb the adjective noun or they’ll adverb verb us all”

  33. 33.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    @Debbie(Aussie):

    What is happening in your country, inflicted by supposed patriots, turns my stomach. It also frightens the living daylights out of me. For where go the US goes Australia. You are all in my thoughts.

    @Pete Downunder:

    Our acting PM McCormack looks to be a real Trumper needs to be closely watched

    This is the point I’ve been trying to make for months; nobody should think their country is immune to this kind of breakdown. QAnon is spreading overseas

  34. 34.

    phdesmond

    “Fuck” could be a title for Siubhan’s poem, for so it is.

    That’s not a part of speech, but it counts as usage.

  35. 35.

    Debbie(Aussie)

    @frosty: Love it. Would this qualify as a tongue twister.

    As a very young child, about two, my son could not yet say truck. As you can imagine the word he did say (as per this post) had quite a few people either aghast or laughing ?

    edited because I not good at writing

  37. 37.

    Evap

    @Punchy: in 1992, while living in Germany for a year, we stumbled on Fucking, Austria while on a trip to Salzburg.  We have many pictures of the town signs including one with a slash through the name as you are leaving the village.  I’m not making this up!

    This was, of course, before the internet existed, and we had never heard of the place.

  38. 38.

    mali muso

    I second the History of swear words show on Netflix. Fucking entertaining.

    Is it really only Monday? It feels like each day is a week long.

  49. 49.

    citizen dave (aka mad citizen)

    These are the most threads I’ve seen on BJ in my 4 years here.  Responding to a post in the previous thread about Biden becomes president at noon whether the oath is delivered or taken.  It made me recall that time Pres. Obama did it twice because he and Roberts wanted to make no mistake in 2009: (at link is a picture of a lovely family plus a guy who grew up in a white enclave on Lake Michigan’s south shore who thought all the 1960s protesters were wrong):

    https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2013/01/20/169841828/obama-takes-oath-of-office-in-white-house-ceremony

  51. 51.

    MisterForkbeard

    On the topic of fuckers: I hear that the army Psyops captain just resigned her commission.

    Guess she figured out her career was pretty done.

  53. 53.

    FelonyGovt

    When I was in elementary school, someone had written “Donald Duck Is A Fuck” on the wall of our schoolyard. I came home and repeated that to my mother and she didn’t talk to me for a week.

    Then, when my daughter was little, we had a swear jar in which anyone who said a bad word had to deposit a quarter.

    And now I use the word “fuck” about as much as I use the word “the”.

  54. 54.

    mrmoshpotato

    @Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):

    ‘Trump said I could’: One possible legal defense for accused rioters: If public authorities give permission to break the law, defendants can often win acquittals

    As a private citizen, I give any judge permission to slap the shit out of anyone who uses this defense.

  55. 55.

    Pete Downunder

    @Debbie(Aussie): This is PM Scott Morrison and Peter Dutton without their filters on. For Americans, Australia has a right wing government whose principal party is misnamed the Liberals. Racist and beholden to wealthy corporations but on the surface more subtle and polished than the Trumpers but the same at heart.

  58. 58.

    Wyatt Salamanca

    NOUN: That stupid fuck

    See also Kimberley Strassel and Jonathan Turley:

    Kimberley Strassel – “Imagine how helpful it would be if @JoeBiden were to show some grace, call on Democrats to stand down, practice the healing he keeps preaching. Why won’t he?”

    https://twitter.com/KimStrassel/status/1348752749136023553

     

    Jonathan Turley – ”There was no call for lawless action by Trump. Instead, there was a call for a protest at the Capitol. Moreover, violence was not imminent; the vast majority of the tens of thousands of protesters present were not violent before the march, and most did not riot inside the Capitol. Like many violent protests we have witnessed over the last four years, including Trump’s 2017 inauguration, the criminal conduct was carried out by a smaller group of instigators. Capitol police knew of the planned march but declined an offer of National Guard personnel because they did not view violence as likely.”

    https://jonathanturley.org/2021/01/11/how-a-snap-impeachment-can-shatter-our-constitutional-balance/

  59. 59.

    Beautifulplumage

    Fuck is what I several times this afternoon when I learned that one of my coworkers passed from cancer this weekend. Only 29. Fuck.

  61. 61.

    Steeplejack

    Just returned from a pleasant evening of dinner and discussion at Sighthound Hall and can report from the gay community that the deplatforming of Trump, other Republicans, Parler, etc., goes even farther than we suspected. Lindsey Graham has been deplatformed from Grindr and Scruff!

    (Note for the unsure: joke.)

  62. 62.

    SectionH

    @Debbie(Aussie):  Hah! – dunno where in Oz you are, so I don’t know if you do, but I remember being in Melbourne in ’87 when Jeff Kennett was running for VIC Premier, and his campaign made a radio ad featuring a couple of what I’d called Yobs, who talked about how great they thought Kennett was. The big finish was one of them saying “Jeff rules! Jeff fucking rules!” That was A Thing suddenly, because over the airwaves. It went to court, where the judge ruled that “fuck” was no longer obscene. In his statement, the judge said (and I paraphrase) “I was at a dinner party this month with all the best people where Lady SoNso, who is 75, used the same word in conversation, and nobody blinked an eye.” Kennett still lost the election. That time anyway. We were vastly amused, me especially because I’ve “cursed like a sailor” since I was 14. Although not as constantly then as now… ;->

    I’m relatively optimistic about the immediate post-Jan 20th situation here, if we can survive until then.

  64. 64.

    SectionH

    @natem: Take your pick: Noun, with “all” being an adjective which modifies it OR “fuck all” is a compound noun, which probably should have a hyphen between the two words, or they should be run together as in “carryall.”

  65. 65.

    LeftCoastYankee

    I knew a fella from North Dublin (“fughin’ fugh the South-siders) who could use it as all of the above in one sentence.

    Although for that school of poets it’s pronounced “fugh”.

  70. 70.

    Kent

    @JanieM: There are, in fact, religious distinctions with respect to swear words.

    Vulgarity refers to “bad” words that that are coarse or offensive, and often related to bodily functions or body parts:  fuck, shit, cunt, bitch, bastard, etc.

    Obscenity refers to “bad” words that are especially vulgar or obscene.

    Profanity refers to language that desecrates that which is holy.  Or “takes the Lord’s name in vain”.  So God Damn, Damn it, Jesus H Christ, Damn you, etc. etc.

    Religiously speaking, only profanity will send you to hell.  The rest are just bad manners.  Of course my mother never made that distinction.  She brought the wrath of God down on me for any of them.

  71. 71.

    Beautifulplumage

    For the first few minutes of Four Weddings and a Funeral the only words spoken is “fuck” in various intonations.

  76. 76.

    Sister Golden Bear

    In the least fucking surprising thing ever, the Trump administration once again fucks over trans kids. Fuck them all.

    In one of her final acts as the Secretary of Education before announcing her resignation, Betsy DeVos decided to ensure that transgender students could still be targeted for discrimination in the American education system.

    In an internal memo sent by the Department of Education (DOE), DeVos’s staff once again laid out their policy of refusing to protect gender identity, despite the ruling of the Supreme Court in Bostock v. Clayton County, made in June 2020.

    Reed D. Rubinstein, deputy counsel under DeVos, wrote to Kimberly A. Richey, the Acting Assistant Secretary who oversees the Office of Civil Rights, wrote a 13-page memo dedicated to explaining that “for the reasons discussed… the term ‘sex’ with respect to these and other similar programs or activities should be construed to mean biological sex, male or female.”

    FYI, for those who haven’t been following closely, the “sex = biological sex assigned at birth” is part of a very deliberate attempt to prevent trans people from ever changing their legal ID to match their identity — and forcibly out them, exposing them to all the anti-trans discrimination they’ve legalized.

    May they fucking rot in fucking hell.

  77. 77.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    @Kent:

    Religiously speaking, only profanity will send you to hell.  The rest are just bad manners.

    But if you ask God for forgiveness then you’re all good! Just like Jim Baker and Tammy Faye!

  78. 78.

    Debbie(Aussie)

    @SectionH: I’m a Queenslander, born & bred (but not a redneck, I swear). Don’t remember that. We were suffering through Joe Bejelke Peterson. Terrible time.

  81. 81.

    chopper

    “fuck” is so perfect, so flexible a word that the wire was able to put together a whole scene with just that single word being spoken by the two characters, over and over again, and it made perfect sense.

  82. 82.

    JanieM

    @Kent:

    There are, in fact, religious distinctions with respect to swear words.

    Indeed

     

    ETA:

    Religiously speaking, only profanity will send you to hell.  The rest are just bad manners.

    The nuns who taught us hadn’t heard that news.

  88. 88.

    dirge

    ADVERB:  I am very fucking pissed off!

    I believe here it’s actually an adjective modifying “pissed off.”

    In @frosty‘s “…they’ll fucking fuck us…” it does appear to be an adverb expressing some combination of “definitely” and “severely.”

    The first adverb candidate that came to my mind was “Just fucking do it!” but I don’t think I really mean for you to “do it” in a fuckingly fashion, so much as I’m eliding the phrase “…get it the fuck over with and…” wherein it isn’t obvious to me what part of speech fuck plays.

    I fear I’ve reached the limits of my fucking pedantry.  Hoping there’s a bigger fucking pedant available to explain the fuck out of “just fucking do it.”

  90. 90.

    Amir Khalid

    Breaking news from Malaysia: His Majesty the Agong has proclaimed a state of emergency in the country until 1st August in light of the pandemic situation. PM Muhyiddin Yassin said there will be no restrictions over and above the movement control orders already in place, and administration and public services will continue as before. But Muhyiddin said Parliament and state legislative bodies will not be in session, and no elections will be held until after the emergency.

  93. 93.

    JanieM

    @dirge:

    ADVERB:  I am very fucking pissed off!

    I believe here it’s actually an adjective modifying “pissed off.”

    I don’t think so. Adjectives are modified by adverbs, not adjectives.

  96. 96.

    NotMax

    Old joke.

    (Very) lower class couple, in their trailer.

    She: “Heck if you aren’t frisky tonight. Slow down there a minute, tiger, the kids are listening. Whaddaya wanna do?”
    He: “Send them out to pee-ell-ay-wye and let’s fuck.”
    .

  98. 98.

    Leto

    @MisterForkbeard: I’m not exactly sure, as that’s officer side. Even with resignations, shit isn’t immediate and, as we all know, the military can slow walk shit for as long as they want. Maybe they’ll be happy to get rid of her and move along as fast as they can. Maybe they’ll want to investigate further and see how deep the potential rot goes. I know my circle of people are watching this.

  104. 104.

    sdhays

    @Amir Khalid: What do you think of that? Other countries have been able to conduct elections during the pandemic. Is there widespread trust that the actual reason for postponing elections is the stated reason?

  106. 106.

    Feathers

    I had a boss whose native language was not English. His co-owner once had to grab the phone from him, apologize to the person on the other end, saying he’d call back. There was then a conversation about how “I will fuck you” and “fuck you” mean two very different things, especially when screamed at someone. Meanwhile, everyone was laughing so hard we could hardly breathe. The boss actually called the guy back and apologized for being angry and his bad English. Correcting someone’s grammar on swear words is always interesting.

    But yeah, “I will fuck you!” became the standard curse there for quite a while.

    Don’t know if anybody’s posted it, but this supercut of insurrectionists being arrested set to “Layla” á la Goodfellas is a true source of joy: https://twitter.com/BL0NDAMBITION/status/1348415203092951043?s=20

  109. 109.

    SectionH

    @Debbie(Aussie): OMG Sir Joh! I’d forgotten about him. No worries, I have never equated ghastly governments with the people stuck with them – been there, hate that. I mean, shall I start with Nixon?  Or states I’ve lived in? Mr S esp really likes Brisbane.

  110. 110.

    Yutsano

    @Debbie(Aussie): The Army could still very much charge her from what I understand. She committed her offences while still active duty. She should still have to answer for that.

    EDIT: I can check with an officer friend.

  111. 111.

    Emma

    Ok, I think a day is long enough that I can now vent about the new All Creatures Great and Small. Was anybody else hopping mad at the way they vandalized the source material? I made fun of people pooh-poohing the trailer last year, but how I feel that they were secret time-travelers trying to warn me. Poor Siegfried and Mrs. Hall were done dirty! And Helen being on first-name basis with James within 5 minutes and giving him advice on dealing with his abusive boss??? Why, showrunners, whyyyyyy

  113. 113.

    MisterForkbeard

    @sanjeevs: Thank god we’re so solicitous of the white terrorists’ feelings on this matter. All the BLM protestors arrested for no reason and mistreated will be very happy to know things are improving.

  116. 116.

    Leto

    @Debbie(Aussie): @Sister Golden Bear: @MisterForkbeard: @Yutsano: Just so we’re all working off the same page:

    Army PSYOP officer resigned commission prior to leading group to DC protests

    An Army psychological operations officer who led a group during the Jan. 6 rally in Washington, D.C., that culminated in a deadly mob breaching the U.S. Capitol had resigned her commission several months prior to the event, according to a defense official familiar with the situation.
    Capt. Emily Rainey, 30, was still on active duty during last week’s protests. However, she had already been handed down an adverse administrative action for a separate incident and resigned her commission, the official told Army Times.
    Rainey’s involvement in the rally is currently under investigation by 1st Special Forces Command, which oversees her PSYOP unit, but there is no indication she acted against Army regulations or entered the Capitol during the riot.
    Maj. Dan Lessard, a spokesman for 1st Special Forces Command, clarified in a statement Monday afternoon that Rainey submitted her resignation request in October, it was approved in November and she is slated to separate the service in April.
    “It is unclear if she violated any laws or regulations, as the DoD encourages members of the Armed Forces to carry out the obligation of citizenship, so long as their actions are in keeping with DoD policy and do not impair the good order and discipline of the service,” Lessard said in the statement. “The investigation will determine whether further actions by the command are warranted.”
    “At this time there is no indication any other members of the command were present at the Capitol,” Lessard added.

    So, her resignation was approved but she’s not slated to retire till April. She’s still on active duty. She’s not a private citizen. Sucks to be her

    Edit: per the article, she lead a group of 100 people there. She can vouch that all 100 didn’t fuck up? That would be a first…

  117. 117.

    dirge

    @Evap: we had email but websites did not exist, as far as I remember

    Sounds pretty much right.  In 93 I was using gopher, Usenet, nntp, various ftp archives.  All definitely internet, but pre-world-wide-web.

    Can’t recall if we downloaded the Mosaic beta and started making html pages in 93 or 94.  Naturally, the first thing that happened was somebody published a collection of pages cataloging who was fucking who, it all ended in tears, and everyone agreed that documenting people’s social lives online is a terrible idea.  Clearly we had that right.

    A few years later a friend tried and failed to start an online advertising business, which I was convinced was a terrible idea of world historical proportions.  I stand by that assessment too.

    But of course it turns out that if you combine those two terrible ideas, the result is much, much worse.

  118. 118.

    Feathers

    @Emma: That was also the place where there was a guy who would always like to point out that he was the only one of us with a signed government document from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts certifying that he was sane.

  119. 119.

    Anya

    @Wyatt Salamanca: Jonathan Turley used to be on MSNBC and CNN when Obama was president to complain about Obama Admin’s lawlessness. But for some unknown reason he finds Trump totally acceptable.

  121. 121.

    Amir Khalid

    @sdhays:

    We’ve been in  a parliamentary crisis for much of the past year: the coalition that won the 2018 general election fell apart, and the current ruling coalition looks pretty shaky too. So there are some quarters agitating for a new election because they fancy their chances.

    Like most of the public, I share the Ministry of Health’s concern that campaigning in the traditional style will mean a month of superspreader events. The Sabah state elections were a contributing factor in the subsequent surge of cases around the nation in Q4/2020. And I don’t think much of the opportunists wanting a general election right away.

  122. 122.

    sdhays

    @dirge: Ah, gopher. I got to play around with that at a nearby university for a couple weeks during a summer day camp, I think in ’93. It was the first time I used UNIX, which was pretty cool. On the last day of the camp, they had us all in a room and wheeled in a single color Mac and showed off NCSA Mosaic. By the same time next year, our phone line was always busy and I was writing HTML.

  123. 123.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @Anya: there was a story floating around the internet a couple of years ago about a student of his pretending to be a radio interviewer to see if Turley would cancel a class for some random media attention. He did.

  124. 124.

    Debbie(Aussie)

    @Punchy: Ipswich, just a little SW of Brisbane CBD. It’s considered part of the metropolitan area. Noosa is beautiful. Had a few holidays in that area.

  126. 126.

    sdhays

    @Amir Khalid: I guess it’s also a bit different when there’s a creaky coalition that could collapse under real scandal rather a single bloc who could be seen as hoping to avoid losing their majority. More opportunity for pressure to keep them honest.

    Since elections are scheduled by statute in the US, it can be hard to reason about how postponing elections in other countries is viewed locally. Here, it’s just illegal.

  128. 128.

    NotMax

    @sdhays

    Don’t rightly remember what we used in 1980 or thereabouts on Apple IIs for what would now be called an online class, communicating between New York and Wisconsin.

    All text, of course.

  130. 130.

    SFBayAreaGal

    Let’s not forget one of my favorite subsitutes for fuck is frak. Frak is a fictional version of “fuck” first used in the 1978 Battlestar Galactica.

  132. 132.

    Amir Khalid

    @sdhays:

    Per the Malaysian Constitution, the hard deadline for a general election is the fifth anniversary of the previous one — which means 2023, so there is still plenty of time in that sense.

  135. 135.

    Emma

    @Kent: nope, it’s on PBS on Sunday nights, but it’s originally a Channel 5 production (UK). Channel 5 apparently has been making a killing this year with escapist fantasies in the northern English countryside, and the ACGS remake is part of that whole theme. Unfortunately, they turned the 2 most charming characters, Siegfried and Tristan (yes, I watched part of episode 2 on Daily Motion to see if Tristan could save the series), into the 2 most obnoxious characters. And they couldn’t let Mrs. Hall be a stoic badass, nooo, now she has to be a weird wife-mother combo to Siegfried??? Am I overusing question marks??? Yes, but I think I’m justified??

    Edit: also the Brexit-subtext-so-obvious-it’s-text bit where Siegfried bemoans the extinction of the shorthorn cows or whatever because of those darn furriner cows!

  136. 136.

    Amir Khalid

    @SFBayAreaGal:

    I know you in America like to say “fudge”, e.g. “what the fudge”, but over here we say “fish” e.g. “oh fish”. Fish is a healthier food.

  137. 137.

    Jay

    every police department is full of guys who fervently believe the internet’s most unhinged conspiracy theories.i didn’t quite get that until this summer, sitting handcuffed in a parking garage in the middle of the night being screamed at by a detective about george soros. https://t.co/9D6ai9AhGL— molly conger (@socialistdogmom) January 12, 2021

  138. 138.

    Martin

    @dirge: HTML was invented in 1994. HTTP started a few years later but wasn’t formally ratified until 96. 94 is the start of the web era.

    Just prior to that I was working on project to use SGML over gopher protocols to deliver HTML-like content, with a subscription structure. We had heard of HTML (based on SGML) but it didn’t quite meet our needs. I left to a different job in 94 but that project stalled out waiting for HTML/HTTP to mature to the level they  needed and that service launched in about 2005.

    Our project had an exceptionally narrow market, so it makes sense that we couldn’t squeeze it into HTML for some time which was much better suited for mass market.

    But it would have been cool to see it through.

  139. 139.

    Debbie(Aussie)

    @Emma: That sounds dreadful. Watched the original as kid with you Mum. We both really liked. Tristan was wonderful and then he became the DR.

  140. 140.

    NotMax

    @SFBayAreaGal

    Was originally spelled frack in that context. Later shortened, in the revised series, to make it an actual four letter word.

    First American movie released by a mainstream studio (Fox!) to distinctly include the unexpurgated F word was M*A*S*H, in 1970.

    Although if one squints the ears, can kind’a sort’a hear Barbara Stanwyck mutter “motherfucker” in 1931’s Night Nurse.

  141. 141.

    Martin

    @NotMax: Probably a dial-up BBS if we’re talking Apple IIs. They  were pretty fun. Lots of specific use cases, software piracy sites, game sites, chat sites. They were flexible enough to build an online classroom on.

  144. 144.

    Jay

    Another one found,……

    Thomas Tanase of Trumbull, CT is the chief information officer for @bowlmorlanes @BowlAMF, a richmond, va based company that operates 300 bowling alleys across the country.nothing says family fun quite like threatening to shoot up congress! pic.twitter.com/oR91Hg1RVV— molly conger (@socialistdogmom) January 11, 2021

    thomas tanase was arrested in 2011 after allegedly GOUGING A WOMAN’S EYES WITH HIS THUMBS and in 2013 for strangling a woman during a domestic assault.these are extreme red flags for future violence.https://t.co/Tpa1cNNWqehttps://t.co/Zh50ozV2Nz pic.twitter.com/p1Vk2J2SNv— molly conger (@socialistdogmom) January 11, 2021

  147. 147.

    karen marie

    @Sister Golden Bear: 

    I came across this interesting piece after reading the protest fail story you linked to:

    Salesforce has “taken action” to stop the Republication National Committee (RNC) from sending emails that could incite violence, though the company won’t say what that action is. The RNC is using ExactTarget, a Salesforce tool, for campaign emails.

    Interesting!

    in 2018, the Trump campaign reportedly had contact information for 20 million supporters.

    Is 20 million big for something like this?

    The RNC told Motherboard that it had ‘independently’ decided to stop its digital fundraising efforts on January 6th. The following day, another email service — Campaign Monitor — suspended the Trump campaign’s account. That alone would make it harder for the campaign to raise money.

    Would the RNC have civil liability exposure for a death that happened if they were found to have incited violence?

    To stay on topic: Fuckity fuck fuck fuck.

  148. 148.

    Emma

    @Debbie(Aussie): I think I found out about the ’70s series only as a young adult, but I grew up reading those books. My aunt studied veterinary science at University of Glasgow, so I like to feel that I have some 6-degree connection to the whole experience XD

    Anyway, yeah, I could rant on and on about all the ways they screwed up and how it feels like Channel 5 just used the ACGS name to lure in nostalgic suckers like me. I’ll just say that you’re better off not knowing the crimes the writers committed against Tristan’s character :(

  149. 149.

    NotMax

    @Martin

    Actually built a Sinclair ZX80 from the kit, which worked for maybe a grand total of 90 minutes. Backspace key was labeled Rubout.

    ;)

  153. 153.

    Feathers

    @SFBayAreaGal: Ireland has the wonderfully charming diminution of “fuck,” “feck.” As in “yah feckin’ idgit.” We live in Ireland when I was a kid, and my toddler brother picked that up as it wasn’t good language for a boy to be using, but as long as it wasn’t in front of Mother… It was long enough ago that my parents tried to replace it with “funny Indian.” I, of course, would remind him that what he meant to say was feckin’ idgit. I guess trying to explain that feckin’ was acceptable children’s swearing wasn’t an option. We all had thick Irish accents by that point.

  155. 155.

    SFBayAreaGal

    @NotMax: That was frakking interesting.? I read somewhere when the movie M*A*S*H came out it was not allowed to be shown on any of Army bases.

  156. 156.

    Kent

    @karen marie:Sister Golden Bear: Can’t the incoming Secretary (Miguel Cardona) send a memo around saying “scratch that”?

    Yes.  So it’s just asshole “virtue signaling” by DeVos

    And they are making Cardona repeal it so that they can go running to all their fundie churches and say “LOOK!!! The antichrist Biden has a clear pro-Trans agenda.  This is the first thing he did!  He’s anti-Christian!!”

    It’s positioning, posturing, and fundie fundraising and keeping them in line.

  157. 157.

    Jay

    My brother built a Heathkit H11,

    My first “computer” experience was in the late 80’s using an Apple II to track and forecast sales on simple spreadsheets, for a Muffin Company.

    Next major experience was sharing an apartment with my Brother, playing hours of Dark Tower, resaving lives, until, finally, I got to the top of the Tower.

    Took the Dark Knight 10 seconds to kill all my saved lives.

    9 months, 3 to 4 hours a day, wasted.

  159. 159.

    SectionH

    @Amir Khalid: LOL – I learned, maybe in Minnesota (I’ve lived a lot of places) that “fish” was the substitute for “shit” – as in, you drop a hot pan and get burned, or have a big mess of whatever dropped on you. Maybe it was my college roommate from North Dakota who taught me that usage. It’s gotta be “shhh…” sound that does it but wow.

    Not that I was about to adopt some other region’s feminine substitutes for words that I could use that would shock grown men then.

    My mother thought I shouldn’t swear so much because too frequent, devalues. She was right of course in the long run. (See my story above about “fuck” in Australia). Otoh, it’s still useful of those of us who use it, and there’s always the chance it really bother some fucking asshole  Republican.

  160. 160.

    SectionH

    @Emma: I am so sorry that shit has happened. As a lover of the books first, but a fan of the early TV show, I didn’t know what to make of your first comment + Steeplejack jumping in. Now, I’m just gonna say thank you for the warning.

  161. 161.

    sab

    @Debbie(Aussie): LOL.My stepson taught taught himself the word, after playing with the word truck, while held in his father’s arms at age two in line at the bank. The reaction around him was such that it became a prominent part of his vocabulary from that day to this, thirty years later.

  164. 164.

    Uncle Cosmo

    @zhena gogolia: @Gin & Tonic:  Forty-some years ago, at Schoenhof’s Books near Harvard, I obtained a copy of Christina Kunitskaya-Peterson’s modest pamphlet, International Dictionary of Obscenities: A Guide to Dirty Words and Indecent Expressions in Spanish, Italian, French, German and Russian, which retains a place of honor on my bookshelves to this day.

    Unexpectedly, I discovered that for sheer vileness, Russian took second place – Spanish was much worse, including this little gem:

    ¡Me cago en los veintiquatro cojones de los apóstoles de Jesús!

    (i.e., “I shit on the 24 testicles of the apostles of Jesus!” – loosely translated as Goddamn it to hell!)

    Scatology, coprology, blasphemy and numerology in one convenient packet that rolls right off the tongue….

    The book also answers, in Italian, the age-old question What are the four things most necessary to life?

     Acqua fresca, vino puro.
    Fica stresa, cazzo duro!

    & I’ll leave yinz to sort that one out on your own… :^D

Comments are closed.