The Rappahannock Tribe, in Virginia, has reacquired 465 acres of its sacred land — thank you Madame Interior Secretary for making this happen. pic.twitter.com/hCjcjf4b7B
— Lakota Man (@LakotaMan1) April 2, 2022
Only if you insist on framing it this way.
Sheesh. https://t.co/gD1TdLCXMJ
— Dr. Joanne Freeman (@jbf1755) April 2, 2022
New: Jan. 6 committee sources tell me one benefit of Jared Kushner testifying for more than 6 hours yesterday is that it might get other Trump officials worried about what he said — and get them to also appear
— Hugo Lowell (@hugolowell) April 2, 2022
peculiar that nearly every Claremont Institute guy seems real sad that Russia is getting pantsed. wonder what that’s about
— Christopher Hooks (@cd_hooks) April 2, 2022
J.D. Vance, despite his big talk at yesterday’s America Frist Con, once again writing checks he can’t cash:
Lol
If you're gonna try to link dumb culture war stuff and pop culture you should really hire an intern to create a cheat sheet of which corp owns what IP https://t.co/4bIgEss2ua
— Mike Black (@MikeBlack114) April 2, 2022
(Why hasn’t he cancelled his Disney subscription, since The Mouse owns Star Wars now?)
debbie
And yet, J.D. you said this:
ETA: Weird about the time stamp. Twitter says it was Friday night; here, it’s Saturday. ??♀️
germy
Kayla Rudbek
Open thread! Question for the hive mind: has anyone ever put DIY self-adhesive backsplash tiles on their kitchen wall? Arguments for/against? If I buy the tiles, they have a much better chance of getting put up than if I get paint.
The original microwave in our kitchen was far too large for us to see the oven controls, so we bought a smaller one when the magnetron went, and now I have a very visible unpainted area on the wall where the old microwave came down further.
We still have the original gray/cream Formica and the last owner painted the walls gray (I think they might have been yellow before), so I need something to coordinate with gray.
debbie
@Kayla Rudbek:
Unless you’re then going to grout them, I would think moisture could get in behind the tiles and cause rot, mold, etc.
mrmoshpotato
“I have a job I have to wake up for every day now! Thanks
ObamaBiden!”mrmoshpotato
MWHAHAHAHA!!!, shitstains!
Baud
It’s true. When white people are more financially secure due to Democratic efforts, they are more likely to vote GOP in the midterms. Just ask Obama.
NotMax
Sneaks up on me every year: World Party Day.
;)
germy
zhena gogolia
Protip: don’t read Adam’s posts just before bed.
Russians are going to be “damned for all time,” to quote Sir Tim Rice.
OzarkHillbilly
I haven’t, but in my experience, anything self adhesive has a limited life span. Considering that this is over a stove where *temps will vary quite a bit*, I would be even more reluctant to use them.
Tile cement is easy to apply (with a toothed trowel), just press the tile into it (use spacers between them), and the excess is a quick clean up. Grouting it can be a pain in the wrist and hands but it doesn’t sound like you are doing a whole lot.
Your biggest problem is going to be getting rid of the unused cement and grout, but that’s just a psychological thing. Once you close the garbage can you can forget about the waste.
**expansion and contraction
debbie
@zhena gogolia:
Agreed. I’m not sure what my brain was trying to work out last night.
Citizen_X
I’m all for a practical effects/cgi fight (I probably lean towards the practical effects, too), but old Yoda is a “more realistic”…what? He’s an imaginary alien from an imaginary species. Hell, we’ve only ever seen two of them, Yoda and Grogu.
I get snarly when people talk about “realism” in fantasy and science fiction.
Geminid
There was sunny weather yesterday in Wilmington, Delaware when President Biden formally commissioned the USS Delaware. This fast attack submarine has a crew of 136. It’s purpose is to seek and destroy enemy submarine and surface ships, and it carries Tomahawk cruise missiles. The Delaware is designed to operate for over 30 years without refueling.
This was a second, ceremonial commissioning:
I’m not big on ceremonies, but I wish I’d been there for this:
After the ceremony Joe Biden took a private tour of the ship.
From Politico.
Kay
@debbie:
Not a word from all these lovers of the working class about the Amazon organizing victory – the biggest labor victory in 20 years and JD Vance closes and opens with how a “biological male just won a womans swimming competition”.
Tim Ryan talked about Amazon 5 minutes into his speech- everyone in the room stood up.
Blah, blah, blah cancel culture, diversity training, critical race theory. They’re all such a fucking bore.
mrmoshpotato
@NotMax: When is Intimate Get-together Day?
debbie
@Kay:
Exactly. They cry out for “Right to Work” like that’s a good thing!
ETA: I did see that Ryan ad later last night, and I was wrong. It is a very good ad.
Anne Laurie
When we bought our house, the main bathroom had grey tile with black trim, and dental-pink fixtures.
Accents in dark red, dark green, and the shade of yellowish ivory that gets paired with burgundy / hunter green took the eeuch level down quite a bit.
O. Felix Culpa
@zhena gogolia: I’ve shifted to reading Adam’s Ukraine posts in the morning, partly because I can’t stay up so late and partly because I prefer to save my nightmares for the daytime. They remain must-reading, though.
Spanky
@OzarkHillbilly: Fortunately, your local big box home center has premixed mastic and grout in smallish sizes for putting up “real” tile. Your choice of grout color might be limited, but gray is common.
Spanky
@zhena gogolia: I dreamt of Ukraine. Uneasy sleep.
Kay
All day, every day. It’s all they talk about. They have entire forums now – 3 day events- filled with boring people who focus exclusively on “cancel culture”. There is now more paid commentary on cancel cuture than there is cancel culture.
Wasn’t the claim that their “ideas” were somehow being “cancelled”? So where are “the ideas”? It’s all whining over cancel culture.
tybee
@O. Felix Culpa:
same here.
OzarkHillbilly
What they mean is believable. Some things are more believable than others.
Kay
@debbie:
I haven’t seen the ad, but the extended version/explanation he gave in the speech was very good and very mainstream Democrat. He said the ad is intended to be part of a series – that it fleshes out with succeeding ads. I thought it was interesting that the Whaley and Ryan campaigns seem to be coordinating- no one said that- they didn’t say “we are coordinating” but they clearly seem to be. It’s good. Coordinated campaigns are the only way Democrats win in Ohio.
OzarkHillbilly
@Spanky: even better.
OzarkHillbilly
@Kay: No Chris, we just hate you.
sab
@debbie: A lot of my inlaws are Chinese so I am sensitive to this kind of thing. I also thought it was a good ad. I hope my sister’s family see the long form and not the abridged second hand version.
rikyrah
Good Morning, Everyone???
OzarkHillbilly
This is fun: Glen Campbell flat picks the William Tell overture.
Matt McIrvin
The Yoda situation is actually more complicated and interesting than that. “The Phantom Menace” used a puppet Yoda in its initial theatrical release, but it was a puppet styled to look a bit different from classic Yoda so he would look slightly younger (since it was a prequel), and… the puppet was bad. Just looked off. “Attack of the Clones” used a CGI Yoda, and then Lucas went back and reedited “The Phantom Menace” to replace the bad puppet with CGI, which was actually better, though nowhere near as good as classic Yoda.
I think they’ve replaced a lot of the character CGI in the movies over the years, too–the CGI Jabba the Hutt initially edited into the un-deleted scenes of “Star Wars” for the 1997 “Special Edition” was absolutely awful, and he’s been redone once or twice since then.
A classic-looking Yoda puppet returned as Yoda’s Force ghost in the (partially unfairly) maligned “The Last Jedi”. He looked great.
Kay
@OzarkHillbilly:
“They HATE you”
Oh, get over yourselves. Every stupid corporate training is a 5 alarm culture fire that has to be handled and managed and analyzed by these stupid fucking pundits. What if they just butted out? What’s the bad thing that would happen? Some employees at Disney would learn how to treat one another decently? Why don’t they mind their own business?
It’s control. They don’t 100% control every university and public school and corporation in the United States and THAT CANNOT STAND because they are The Smart People and they are entitled to run all “culture” and it must run exactly as it did in their own college years.
Citizen_X
@OzarkHillbilly: I know. It’s just that “believable” <> “realistic.”
A flat Earth in a geocentric universe is “believable.”
mrmoshpotato
@Kay:
How long until this trash complains about people hating the whiteness of his Klan robe?
zhena gogolia
@OzarkHillbilly: That’s fun.
OzarkHillbilly
@Kay: Whenever I run into one of these culture war freaks (which ain’t often, thank dawg) I always ask, “Why do you care?”
You’ll be surprised to hear that they usually just stutter and walk away.
Kay
So what if Disney did what they’re demanding? What if all new Disney content was identical to the content that these middle aged people viewed when they were 6? We all have to go along with this because time stopped when these people were born and all culture must be exactly the same as the cultural period they personally came up in?
What a bore. Don’t take this business advice Disney. Time passes. Because a group of cranky, conventional white 45 year olds with huge media platforms think they’re the center of the universe shouldn’t stop younger people from getting “new”.
Starfish
When it comes to diversity, equity, and inclusion, all the microaggression training has not shifted the percentage of people of color at most of these companies. There are failures in both recruitment and retention.
What the Republican realize only a little is that even if the dominant culture is racist, it is not this radical evangelist nonsense, and most white folks have gay relatives or gay friends who they like.
I think they realize this a little because they went after trans rights first, assuming that a lot of folks may not know trans people and may happily oppress them. However, that is the gateway for coming after the rest of gay rights, the way that is happening in Florida.
What is going on there is going to be deeply unpopular
I think someone here mentioned it before. It is all abstract until a teacher that you know and like is harmed by these rules.
Tenar Arha
@Citizen_X There’s somehow more solidity to the muppet version of Yoda especially when “interacting” with actors. It’s not so much reality as an object solidly in gravity which makes it easier for the actor to react to & the audience to “believe” which is easier to do with a real puppet underneath. (It’s why I think Grogu/Baby Yoda worked so well in The Mandalorian, it was a “real Baby Yoda”).
TLDR; what @OzarkHillbilly said.
sab
Here in NE Ohio we have had two competing NPR stations that basically offered almost identical programming for years and then fought for subscribers, Their local coverage was different (different reporters on different beats.)
I pledged to both, and the competition seemed pointless.
They just merged! Hurray! Keeping both sets of reporters on, so covering the whole area, and I won’t have to skip around between stations to get all the local news.
Meanwhile, they gave one of their local radio slots back to the Cleveland classical music station that has been in exile out of the radio area for the last 15 years. Yay!
I am so happy. I detest National NPR ( Morning Edition and All Things Considered) which is seriously damaging the brand, but the local coverage is good, and almost the only local coverage that we get on radio.
NPR isn’t just national. Remember that during pledge weeks.
Baud
@Kay:
If Tucker Carlson represents white people, then it would seem like being anti-white is being pro-American.
Anne Laurie
There’s a whole f/sf literature about the difference between veracity (that which is true) and verisimilitude (that which seems like it *could* be true).
Readers / viewers will accept ‘alien creatures with magical powers‘, but they balk if the aliens in question ‘don’t look real’.
Thing is… some (presumed) people don’t look as ‘real’ (Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel) as the puppet & CGI characters in Star Wars or the Lord of the Rings movies…
mrmoshpotato
@OzarkHillbilly: Do you also ask if they like their horse’s ass seasoned or unseasoned? Because they can all suck a horse’s ass.
Kay
@mrmoshpotato:
Always twinned in this “commentary”. They go RIGHT from “anti white” to “anti American” and that is not an accident. They’re not subtle, I’ll give them that.
Wah, wah, wah. I’m hoping people reject it not because it’s a disgusting ginned up moral panic but because it’s so incredibly whiny and self centered. Who raises these people that they believe they are the center of the universe? I think it’s over indulgent parenting, but I suppose that’s ust one theory.
lowtechcyclist
@debbie:
Workers of the world, unite! For the right to be paid a minimum wage that nobody can live on anymore, for the right to have your employers change your hours from one week to the next, for the right to be intimidated into working ‘off the clock’, the list goes on.
OzarkHillbilly
@mrmoshpotato: No way, most of them have a favorite way of preparing horse’s ass and that is just plain and simply TMI.
mrmoshpotato
@Kay:
Yup. It’s stopping just short of writing (or saying) racial slurs. Apparently you don’t have to be poor to be white trash.
mrmoshpotato
@OzarkHillbilly: Hahahaha! Glad they take pride in their horse’s ass. Good for them.
Another Scott
@Kay: The RWNJs can’t get enough of their Two Minutes Hate so Fox News and OAN and RT and all the rest give it to them for hours and hours every day.
1984 was supposed to be a cautionary tale, not an instruction manual.
:-(
Cheers,
Scott.
sab
@Kay: ” They go RIGHT from ‘ anti-white ‘ to ‘anti-American’.
That is one of the things that is most disturbing. Black people have been in America since 1619. The Constitution banned importing more. They are as American as anyone. And if you want to go by the the-longer-you-have-been-here-the-more-American-you-are then they win that hands down over even Boston Brahmins and Southern planters.
OzarkHillbilly
@mrmoshpotato: It’s a short trip from “‘possum gravy and grits” to horse’s ass.
debbie
@sab:
What I would like someone to point out is that it wasn’t the government who ceded industrial superiority to China (as the GOP would like us to believe). It was the businesses themselves who consciously chose to move overseas, abandoning their country and their workers. Now, these businesses are whining like bitches about the unfairness of it all. Where is that discussion?
Kay
@lowtechcyclist:
There’s a huge billboard against Right to Work along my regular county court rounds. It changes- always anti RTW – different ads, so someone is funding this thing and has been for years. It makes me smile.
That’s what you need. Over and over and over. It’s what the Right does.
lowtechcyclist
Not gonna link to Glem’s Twitter feed, but he’s already gone into full whatabout mode concerning the Bucha massacre. Apparently in his eyes, it’s not as bad as the U.S. was in Iraq, so it’s no big deal.
My shock and surprise can be measured in infinitesimals.
sab
@debbie: In my family, my Chinese brother-in-law has a sister who invented an amazing medical device that everyone wants. Siemans in Germany. The Chinese government. She lives and works in LA and wanted to make it in America. Less travel. Venture capitalists were all adamant that she produce in China. Otherwise no funding.
lowtechcyclist
@debbie:
Damned good question.
different-church-lady
@Kay: Like I said yesterday, this is all about keeping the supply of high-purity junk flowing directly into the MAGA veins.
Honus
SamIAm
JD Vance and the others are taking a page right out of Goebbels’ playbook. Keep repeating a lie and eventually it becomes “the truth”.
debbie
Read all 10 tweets in this thread. Stonekettle would probably punch me to the other end of Florida, but he is a national treasure:
OzarkHillbilly
@debbie: FREEDUMB!!!
sab
@debbie: Jane Timken’s husband sold most of his factory equipment to China and made his Ohio workers pack it up for shipping.
You know that. Non-Ohio jackals might not.
SamIAm
@zhena gogolia:
Adam’s last post was especially heart wrenching. I have nightmares about the suffering Ukrainians are undergoing for weeks after I read about it.
OzarkHillbilly
@Honus: He was damned good, far better than I realized at the time.
Sloane Ranger
Open thread, so reporting that Cambridge kept their winning streak by winning the womans race but, Oxford broke their losing streak and won the mens race!
Mixed result for me as I always support Oxford, since the university decamped to Northampton, our county town, during the Black Death and I prefer dark blue to light blue as a colour.
SamIAm
@OzarkHillbilly:
Exactly, I think they’re saying Yoda will look less like a plastic handheld puppet and more like a biological creature.
But I swore off the Star Wars franchise after suffering through episodes 1, 2, 3 in the theater. Yup, payed good money for those excretable wastes of celluloid.
Ohio Mom
@O. Felix Culpa: That is the approach I adopt most days. I suspect we are not the only ones.
sab
@Sloane Ranger: I always support the farthest( furthest) North team. Just because I did my junior year abroad in Durham, and I still have issues.
Silly choice. But there it is.
Honus
@OzarkHillbilly: we were all listening to Clapton and Hendrix. Meanwhile, Jon Hartford was learning licks from Glen
lowtechcyclist
Yeah, it was only after his death that I found out he’d been a top session musician before he became a star. And I’d always been a bit of a fan of his.
ian
Wasn’t CGI Yoda first created in the first sequel trilogies, produced by LucasFilms
edit-I see # 31 beat me to it
SamIAm
@Kay:
Control and to stir up hatred of the “Other”. The base has to be simmering in anger so they can be quickly brought to a boil when needed. See also January 6th, 2021.
Honus
@SamIAm: TBF, 1 was pretty good if you were a stoned 22 year old in 1977
eclare
@OzarkHillbilly: Wow! The orchestra too…surprised some of those strings didn’t combust!
Honus
@lowtechcyclist: watch The Wrecking Crew movie. It’s great on that and many other things.
lowtechcyclist
@SamIAm:
My wife and son and I watched Eps 1-3 on DVD at home, and I fell asleep during each one. So you can tell how impressed I was by them.
As far as I’m concerned, the original trilogy is canon, and the rest can go in the trash.
lowtechcyclist
@Honus: I will have to! Thanks for the recommendation.
Geminid
@lowtechcyclist: I read that it was Glen Campbell who played 12-string guitar on the Byrds’ version of “Turn, Turn, Turn.” I wonder if fellow “Wrecking Crew” member Carole Kane played bass.
gene108
@debbie:
Apparently he restricts who can see his Twitter feed. It’s unavailable for me.
zhena gogolia
@lowtechcyclist: I have his apartment in Ekaterinburg ready for him. His tweeting will be mightily curtailed.
zhena gogolia
@debbie: Excellent.
SamIAm
@Anne Laurie:
Oh Ann, those aren’t real people. They’re simulacrums, replicants, and androids. It’s most obvious when watching Zuckerberg. His manufacturers still haven’t properly programmed humanlike facial expressions. He’s still firmly wedged in the Uncanny Valley.
zhena gogolia
@gene108: Press control and click on the date, then open in an incognito window.
sdhays
@Kay: I always have to remind myself that the people who watch Tuckems are people who watched him complain about no longer being aroused by green M&M’s didn’t say to themselves, “Ok, this is some really weird shit. Maybe I need to take a break.”
I had to take a couple Lyfts on Friday. In the first Lyft, the driver was listening to some awful right-wing “news” radio station. What was the asshole on the air spending 5 minutes whining about? A headline in the Washington Post about “pregnant people” instead of “pregnant women”.
Because there’s nothing more important than making sure that people reading headlines are clear that pregnant people are women.
Kay
It’s all like this. The original claim was they were being “silenced” by a woke mob which led one to believe they had something to say they weren’t saying.
Nope. The entire subject matter is “we are being silenced by a woke mob”. That’s it.
At what point do we get the brilliant insights that the woke mob silenced? Where are the “ideas” we were told they had, but were forbidden to say?
Turns out the one and only thing that was being silenced was the endless, endless discussion of “wokeism” so we really weren’t missing much after all.
sdhays
@debbie: Why would Stonekettle “punch [you] to the other end of Florida”? I don’t know much about him.
OzarkHillbilly
@Honus:@lowtechcyclist: As a teen I found my way to folk and country, was a big fan of Doc Watson, Roy Clark and Buck Owens, Roy Acuff, George Jones, Earl and Randy Scruggs, Waylon and Willie, and Glen Campbell. But I didn’t appreciate how good Glen really was.
SamIAm
@OzarkHillbilly:
Oh, I thought everyone was referring to them being horse’s asses.
debbie
@gene108:
If you can’t get in as zhena’s suggested, I can paste them in for you.
debbie
@sdhays:
He gets cranky from time to time. I imagine he would not appreciate being called a “treasure.”
germy
@Kay:
OzarkHillbilly
@gene108: If you’re signed up with twitter, you can see it all.
Honus
@lowtechcyclist:
If you haven’t seen it, you’re in for treat. I’m jealous. Carol Kane in particular is wonderful. It’s mind of like finding out a neighborhood girl who was really nice played bass on all your favorite songs.
@Geminid: And I think she did. I remember thinking after seeing the movie that a lot of people owe the Monkees an apology.
sab
@Kay: They are being silenced because no one cares what they are saying?
Baud
@gene108: I just clicked on it and could see all the tweets. I’m not signed into Twitter.
Kay
When you finally, finally find an actual “idea” buried in the huge pile of whining about how no one allows them to state their ideas it’s always the most banal, simplistic, conventional “idea” ever:
Negotiations to end a war! God, why did no one else think of that? Also? His “first priority” is ending the bloodshed, unlike all of you, who of course are hoping the bloodshed continues.
Baud
@Kay:
Uhhh….if they tell you, the woke mob will get them. It’s like how you can’t tell anyone what you wished for or else it won’t come true.
OzarkHillbilly
@SamIAm: Why do you think I don’t want to know how they prepare horse’s ass?
germy
The answer is yes.
Baud
@germy: A wealth tax doesn’t make sense for a city because it’s too easy to move out of the city. Unless it’s a property tax on real estate, which a lot of places already have.
Honus
@OzarkHillbilly: Yeah, Glen was probably the equal of any of those guys, a real Chet Atkins/Lenny Breau type player. And at about the age of twenty. One of the most amusing parts of Wrecking Crew is when Carol Kane talks about how they heard Glen’s first single on the radio and they were all surprised that he could ding.
Baud
@Kay:
I would miss Adam’s threads.
I’m rooting for covid for similar reasons.
SamIAm
@Honus: That was episode 4.
Episode 1 was the Phantom Menace.
I saw the original 1977 Star Wars 13 times. Once for each year I was old at the time.
Kay
@sab:
“We are being silenced!” That’s the complaint AND the entire content.
I guess no one ever says “really? That seems bad. What is it you wanted to say?” What they wanted to say turns out to be “we are being silenced”. There’s nothing past the complaint.
Sloane Ranger
@sab: It’s as good a reason as mine is. So you were supporting Cambridge in this instance?
SamIAm
@lowtechcyclist: ‘xactly
zhena gogolia
@Kay: SMH, as the kids say.
germy
zhena gogolia
Just watched Hamilton again. Never fails to bring the three hankies.
Shalimar
J.D. Vance published Hillbilly Elegy in 2016. Disney bought Star Wars in 2012, which is almost twice as long as J.D. Vance has been a public figure.
MagdaInBlack
@Kay: If they’re being silenced why can I still hear them whining everywhere?
Geminid
@Honus: A musician friend, Mike Mulvaney, says that he saw Glen Campbell in concert. Mike said it was maybe the best concert he ever heard because of Campbell’s singing.
sab
@Sloane Ranger: Yikes! That is a bit far south. Points out how silly my choices are. Nothing for or against Cambridge. I don’t much like their duchess, but that has nothing whatever to do with the football team.
SamIAm
@MagdaInBlack:
That should be
tattooedbranded on their foreheads.Kay
@zhena gogolia:
Andrew Sullivan’s one “idea” is there is no systemic racism in the United States.
There’s an ENTIRE US political party that promotes and advances that “idea”, every single day. Couldn’t they all just join the Republican Party, where they’ll find their brilliant and original insights in every campaign speech and ad? Seems easier than starting and promoting a cancel culture panic.
zhena gogolia
@Kay: I’m reading the beginning of the 1619 Project book, and I have to stop every few pages and catch my breath because I feel so ashamed. They all need to read it. They’re afraid to because they know it’s true.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
“As Russian troops withdraw, photos of the of bound people who were executed, tales of teen girls raped and the reports of children as young as 10 being treated for vagino-rectal tears are being accepted as fact by mainstream media, and must therefore be discounted as pro-CIA mainstream propaganda which should be immediately decreed as false since it appeals to emotions.”
– by Glenn Greenwald (paraphrased)
“NSA retention policies potentially gives rise to your browser history and foreign emails being available by warrant, which is the worst possible thing ever.”
– by Special Ed Snowjob, somewhere in the Russian Federation
”Russian society is far more moral than you because we have no Satanic gay pride parades. Thefts and rapes and murders aren’t committed by our troops, may God be with them.”
– by “His Holiness” Patriarch Kirill (paraphrased)
”I love peace, personal freedom and the environment, which is why I support Vladimir Putin, who was a lovely dinner companion.”
– by Doctor Saint Homeowners Association President Jill Stein
”They are siphoning our precious bodily fluids with fluoride.”
– by Lt Gen Michael Flynn (RET)
Kay
@MagdaInBlack:
One of their really “out there” ideas that is being cancelled is they support standardized tests. Whoa! Now that’s new.
So like the huge testing industry and the entire federal government they support standardized tests for students.
One can go to the US Dept of Education right now and read the exact same “forbidden opinion”. Just right there on the “blog” written by some underpaid staffer. For free.
sab
@Kay: Trying not to get personal, but Aaron Tone is either an idiot or evil.
Another Scott
@Another Scott: I have to keep picking at this a little more.
I just found this CBC blog with comments from Margaret Atwood:
If I knew that, I’d forgotten it. I need to read it, er both, again. ;-)
Cheers,
Scott.
MagdaInBlack
@zhena gogolia: They know. That feeling you’re having is the one they refuse to face.
Matt McIrvin
@Kay: These are people who think of everything in zero-sum, race-war/gender-war terms. If a new non-white person shows up in some fun media franchise they start yelling about wokeness and feel attacked. The same people (or their parents) were upset about Lando Calrissian in 1980. It’s just the perpetual grievance of pure bigotry.
They also have this persistent belief that the vast majority of people agree with them, and every time something they don’t like does badly they yell “go woke go broke”. It doesn’t explain why, say, “The Force Awakens” or “Black Panther” were monster hits in spite of their disapproval, of course. Some movies or TV shows or theme parks do better than others. It happens.
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
@Kay: We don’t talk about Bruno enough around here.
opiejeanne
@lowtechcyclist: I have heard that Glen Campbell was the guitarist on “Tequila!”
I’ve also heard that one of the music teachers from my college was the director, but I don’t know if that’s true.
MagdaInBlack
@Kay: They’ve rediscovered the wheel and somehow believe they’re the first to ever see its uses and damn it no one wants to listen.
SiubhanDuinne
@SamIAm:
I saw the original Star Wars when it was released. I liked the music, and I thought R2D2 was cute. Have never seen it again, and never bothered with any of the sequels or prequels. Absolutely not judging your, or anyone’s, choices to the contrary; it just doesn’t speak to me. And I completely respect it as a cultural icon.
Kay
@zhena gogolia:
Why couldn’t they just let it happen? It would have been read and criticized and it would have been retained and assigned, or not. How long has Disney been in business? They’ve probably had new corporate trainings every 5 years since the 1960s.
But no. Our self appointed culture police had to jump in and direct traffic. “Culture” was heading in some unspecified direction that makes them uncomfortable! Pull the culture car over! Issue citations!
They’re the opposite of free thinkers. It’s rigid, grasping directing.
I loved the Wizard of Oz when I was a little girl. My grandaughter loves Finding Nemo. It’s fine. She’s permitted to see something new.
Mai Naem mobile
@Kayla Rudbek: others have already this – get the real tile. You can get some smaller mosaics so you don’t have to worry about making cuts but you’ll have more grout lines to clean so thats the downside. I don’t know where you live but because you’re doing a small area look on offer up, CL and you can find some really really nice well priced leftover stuff. Also the more expensive grout is easier to keep clean if you find it on offer up or a habitat restore store at a good price but I wouldn’t bother getting it otherwise because the regular price is ~$100.
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
@Kay:
Taibbi: “My first priority would be ending the bloodshed in Ukraine”
(…by letting Putin have whatever he wants)
Fuck Matt Taibbi
Matt McIrvin
@SiubhanDuinne: Some of the most toxic and entitled Star Wars fans seem to be people who came to the franchise during the early-mid 1990s when there were no new movies coming out and the big thing was the “Expanded Universe” franchise of books, video games, comics, etc.
Lucasfilm developed all of this intricate continuity and worldbuilding outside of the movies that the fans thought of as their special thing, since the general public mostly didn’t pay attention to it. Then the prequels, flawed as they were, actually built on that.
And when Disney bought the franchise, they threw a lot of this backstory out and started over with almost everything apart from the movies, which royally pissed these people off. It made both business and creative sense from Disney’s perspective since they were going to make new sequels that they didn’t want to be bound by the sequel books that already existed. But it was guaranteed to make enemies. And while I’m sure many of those fans were nice people, some fraction of them were also major-league “go woke go broke” blowhards.
stinger
@sab: When our company decided to off-shore services, we had to train our replacements.
sab
@Formerly disgruntled in Oregon: Their choices were quiet annihilation/ethnic cleansing or outright war. We in North America thought they had better choices. I don’t think they did. I think they know they didn’t have better choices.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Formerly disgruntled in Oregon:
Yup. After that, drum circles, giant puppets and multiple rounds of “Kumbaya” and “Michael Row the Boat Ashore” will teach him the error of his ways.
sab
@stinger: Yep. Happened a lot and nobody much noticed.
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: No need to hippie punch.
Betty Cracker
Remember this from the people who are currently peddling the “grooming” lie?
different-church-lady
@Betty Cracker: Look, you kind of understand what they’re upset about. Corporations are trying to groom kids to stop being shitty. No wonder MAGAs are up in arms!
Suzanne
What all the right-wingers complaining about Disney (and other LGBTQ-friendly companies) keep missing is that those companies are competing for talent. Those companies employ a lot of young people with college degrees and the job market for people with the skills they need is pretty tight. If they’re not LGBTQ themselves, their friends and family are. They don’t want to work at a place that hates them or their friends. Disney doesn’t want to lose its employees or become known as a place where only old people work.
Right-wingers, because they hate higher education, love to stereotype college graduates as all graduates of women’s studies and rich ultra-woke kids with useless majors, but that isn’t the reality. They do not get what the job market is like in urban areas for most college grads and thus the corporate behavior doesn’t make sense to them. There is not a cohort of conservatives with the kind of skills these companies are looking for. If they want to be catered to, they need to make themselves desirable in the job market.
different-church-lady
@Matt McIrvin:
They literally started over with the movies: episode VII is just a remake of episode IV with an even cooler droid.
Shalimar
@Matt McIrvin: I’m not sure it made creative sense to throw out all the book/gaming sequel material since what Disney replaced it with is considered at best corporately-produded mediocrities. But they own the properties now, so they were within their rights. And all the hundreds of books didn’t exactly produce one streamlined, never-conflicting history with no bad choices either.
different-church-lady
@SiubhanDuinne: Without the music, nobody today would be talking about Star Wars.
Baud
In fairness, I didn’t love Encanto.
different-church-lady
@Shalimar:
Oops. Time for a “Crisis in Infinite Galaxies”
SiubhanDuinne
@Matt McIrvin:
Thats really interesting, and a helpful context for me. Thanks.
Kay
@Formerly disgruntled in Oregon:
It doesn’t grant Ukraine agency. If Ukraine’s “first priority” had been avoiding bloodshed they would have surrendered. Not their first priority.
The Greenwald contigent are really in a pickle. As it turns out their only solution to “aggressor nation attacking smaller nation” is “smaller nation surrenders”. I don’t think smaller nations will go along with this plan, so it’s unlikely to “keep peace”.
eclare
@Suzanne: This, 1000%. Disney needs the best employees, whatever it takes to get them, it will do.
SiubhanDuinne
@different-church-lady:
‼️
Steeplejack
@debbie, @gene108:
Longer, non-Twitter version of Stonekettle’s thread. (He blocks Thread Reader and PDF generators.)
Kay
@Formerly disgruntled in Oregon:
Watching this with (admittedly) almost no background knowlege I’m not at all confident Russia would have stopped even if they had surrendered. I think they want to wipe them off the face of the earth.
WaterGirl
@debbie: I think that would be in violation of Stonekettle’s statement:
different-church-lady
@WaterGirl: This Stonekettle person seems a bit odd.
Timill
@gene108: Available as an essay at his website: https://www.stonekettle.com/2022/04/when-fascism-comes-to-america.html
Matt McIrvin
@SiubhanDuinne: It’s weird to me since as a kid who saw Star Wars on initial release in 1977 long before anyone was calling it “Episode IV: A New Hope”, what they’re nostalgic and indignant about is all still Johnny-come-lately to me. It’s clear to me that George Lucas was making a lot of this stuff up as he went along; I am pretty sure he did not even have the “Vader IS Luke’s dad” twist in mind in ’77.
Kay
@Betty Cracker:
James E Powell
@Citizen_X:
I just laugh. Like when people said the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park looked realistic.
Suzanne
@eclare: One thing that I noticed about the Right back in 2016 when Trump was running is that many of them do not understand anything about the world of work that many of us live in, the kind where it takes a lifetime to get really good at a career. They talked about the presidency like it isn’t a thing that takes years if not decades of preparation. They talk about “common sense” in order to make themselves feel better about not having a degree, as if it everyone who went to school is a dummy. Their world of work is one where people are doing what are essentially simple tasks (they may be difficult, but they’re simple) and workers are essentially interchangeable.
PJ
@Matt McIrvin: I miss the days when b-movies, comic books, science fiction, and fantasy were widely considered “trash culture.” That doesn’t mean that a lot of it wasn’t really good, because it was, and some of it was actually great, compared with mainstream “literature” or A-movies, but it did mean that it was more difficult for fans to take it so goddamn seriously.
It doesn’t help that the stuff that fans get most worked up about (Star Wars/Trek, Marvel/DC, Disney, Harry Potter) in general isn’t great, and mostly falls into the “eh, it’s passable” category, so the fans’ obsession with what is just product is even more unhinged.
Steeplejack
@Geminid:
I don’t think that’s right about Campbell. Roger McGuinn was one of the (few?) guitarists respected by the Wrecking Crew. In Echo from the Canyon (2018) David Crosby talks about how at an early recording session the Byrds were told to leave their instruments outside—with the exception of McGuinn.
The Wrecking Crew bass player’s name is Carol Kaye, not Kane.
PJ
@Matt McIrvin: Jesus, man, SPOILERS!!
In fact, Lucas was making it all up as he went along, and Star Wars itself didn’t really come into focus until it was edited.
schrodingers_cat
@different-church-lady: He is decidedly odd. But one is not supposed to question him or his takes because he is a veteran.
Betty Cracker
@different-church-lady: I don’t follow him because IMO, he’s got bizarre ideas about how social media works. A lot of people I do follow retweet his stuff into my timeline, and it’s often good. But FFS, it’s a series of tweets, not a stack of gold ingots.
schrodingers_cat
@Betty Cracker: Same here. He is most peculiar.
schrodingers_cat
BTW, they are here.
SamIAm
@SiubhanDuinne:
My excuse was I was a 13 year old geeky lover of Science Fiction. The original movie hit all the right notes at the time. I saw one of the reversions of the original as an adult and I recognized how awful the acting, direction, and script really were. The special effects still look spectacular and were the only reason it was a huge success.
John Dykstra, like Steve Wozniak (Apple), was the real genius behind its success.
ian
@WaterGirl:
I think that is a weak-sauce argument Stonekettle presents. “I want to draw attention to how evil these people are here and abroad, but only if you dweebs read it in my original tweet format!”
One would think the underlying message more important than the medium by which the message was delivered. I guess everyone has their tics…
stinger
@Suzanne: This.
eclare
@Steeplejack: I wondered about that. I kept thinking the actress played bass?
James E Powell
@Kay:
Not to be rude, but does Whaley have a snowball’s chance?
If my count is correct, we (I say we because I am from there) have had a Democratic governor for four of the last 30 years.
In all that time, I can’t think of a single thing Ohio Republicans have done to make the lives of ordinary people any better. And they have had some really large corruption scandals that don’t appear to have hurt their reputation.
What does a D have to do to get elected? Sherrod Brown’s way of talking can be copied, somewhat, but he’s been on statewide ballots since the 80s. His familiarity to voters cannot be copied.
eclare
@Suzanne: Experience gives you judgment, which can be invaluable. Knowing when something doesn’t “smell” right or when you can pass on something as minor.
At least in my field, which is tax.
eclare
@schrodingers_cat: Yay! What a rainbow.
PJ
@Suzanne: a lot of people (not just on the right) can’t wrap their head around the idea that being a politician is a job, and that it requires some competency. For them, it’s just like voting for homecoming queen or king – it’s about “who you like” than anything (eg, the whole weird “who would you rather have a beer with” thing that the press goes on about for politicians like W or Trump, who, in real life, don’t drink). It’s a personal statement reflecting your “values”, rather than deciding whom you think would be better at this particular job.
schrodingers_cat
@eclare: Thanks. Even the box is so pretty!
Baud
@James E Powell:
Realistic dinosaurs would have had feathers.
SamIAm
@PJ:
I invoke Sturgeon’s Law.
Also, too, sci-fi, fantasy, comic book fans have always been this way.
It just seems differently because the public Internet makes insipid debates more public. If you ever attended a convention back in the day you’d encounter the same thing. :/
Just One More Canuck
@Kayla Rudbek: the Tragically Hip song, “Wheat Kings” has this line – “the walls are lined, all yellow, grey and sinister”
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
I believe initially Vader was supposed to be Luke’s mother.
UncleEbeneezer
@zhena gogolia: Admitting the truth of 1619 Project (and Stamped From The Beginning and other similar texts) would be admitting that Racism™ is much more than just interpersonal forms and that the only way to fight it is through anti-racist policies. Policies that of course, all Republicans oppose because they desperately want to keep those systems in tact, while pretending that they somehow aren’t “racist” for doing so. This whole thing (the anti-CRT bullshit) is all about protecting the commonly held definition of racism that lets most white people off the hook as contributors and beneficiaries of White Supremacy. Republicans really don’t want to be seen as “racist” and they are petrified that more and more of our voters are thinking in terms of systemic racism, that by definition make Republicans complicit in the perpetuation of White Supremacy.
opiejeanne
@ian: I have seen several Twitter posts about the unroll apps being something to avoid, can’t remember why. Buggy? Invasive coding?
opiejeanne
@Matt McIrvin: I may be misremembering, but I’m pretty sure “Episode IV: A New Hope” was in the scrolling explanation at the beginning of the movie when I saw it in 1977. I remember wondering where parts 1, 2, & 3 were.
Geminid
@Steeplejack: Thank you for the correction. There was a singer (or actress?) named Carol Kane and I get her name mixed up with that of the bass playing Carol Kaye.
I read about Campbell and the recording of “Turn, Turn, Turn” long ago and the writer might have gotten it wrong. It’s possible, though, that Campbell’s 12-string electric guitar work was more polished and was used on this very prominent part.
SamIAm
@Baud: Some would, others wouldn’t.
Depends on what the Kardashiansaurus Regina was wearing…..
%-)
Steeplejack
@Betty Cracker:
I saw that earlier. Interesting snippet from the Federalist article:
“This practice has a long history.” The article has a link to a study at the National Library of Medicine: “We examined whether parental age difference at marriage was related to fitness in monogamous Sami from the seventeenth- to nineteenth century northern Finland.” Bit of a reach, eh?
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
Transcriptions of intercepted communications from Russian soldiers we’re supposed to be sympathetic to.
Looting of family goods. Rape of teens. Eating dogs.
https://twitter.com/poliitikasse/status/1510226515899863044?s=20&t=n4lFYsGFVLSEG3X6-ZeCFQ
I had a hard time with it.
Starfish
@opiejeanne: Threadreader app makes money by taking content from writers and displaying it on their website alongside their ads.
The writers are not benefiting at all from their written works when this happens. They may also be getting a less accurate number of impressions on their work if people are just passing around the Threadreader app link rather than reading on Twitter.
Because of that, some writers block Threadreader app.
Threadreader app is touchy when people accuse them of content theft, but professional authors do have a point in wanting to get paid for their work.
West of the Rockies
@Kayla Rudbek:
I have used them. They are easy, attractive, but about 20% fall off, or did for me. We switched to tile sheets either adhesive and grout. Had a handyman do it because it required a tile saw.
Kay
@James E Powell:
Oh, I don’t know if she has a chance. She has a low chance. What’s the alternative though? Just unchallenged Republicans?
They seem to THINK they have a chance since both Whaley and Ryan are top tier candidates- neither is a clown or a joke.
For comparison- 2014- this is the kind of candidate you get when they don’t have a chance:
Good people don’t run when there’s no chance.
trollhattan
@Baud:
Somewhere is a cutting-room floor scrap with Luke saying “But maaa-ah!” during their lightsaber duel.
Steeplejack
@eclare:
Multi-talented!
Spanky
@Baud: No no, wrong franchise. The Alien was supposed to be Ripley’s mother.
Matt McIrvin
@opiejeanne: Adding “Episode IV: A New Hope” to the opening crawl of Star Wars was, I think, the very first modification Lucas made to the movie after its initial release. It first appeared in a 1981 theatrical re-release, after The Empire Strikes Back (which was identified in the crawl as Episode V) came out.
“Episode IV: A New Hope” still sounds weird to me.
Steeplejack
@Starfish:
What you say is true. It also dilutes the writer’s Twitter footprint, which is important to some of them.
Cacti
Andrew Sullivan’s whole public career is based on trying to find a socially acceptable way to say non-white people are stupid.
Steeplejack
@opiejeanne:
That’s wrong.
Kay
@James E Powell:
I think there’s a fairly broad consensus among Democrats in Ohio that the state is currently further Right than it “should be”, that Ultra Far Right is not indicated by the makeup of the electorate. That’s why they still get good candidates. I think there’s truth to it. It just “should be” more toward the center. Still Right or Right leaning, but not nutjob Right which is what it is now.
Miss Bianca
@Honus: I second your recommendation of The Wrecking Crew – a must-see for anyone who loves great music and even greater musicians
@Geminid: Ahem. Carol Kaye, please, not Kane.
ETA: And I see that Steep got there first.
Matt McIrvin
@Geminid: I’ve seen people mix up Carol Kane and Carole King a lot.
Sister Golden Bear
Who’s gonna tell J.D. that Bsby Yoda is also a puppet, just the original Yoda.
Kay
@James E Powell:
Moderate Republicans say this too. On guns, for example. They think the gun laws are extreme- nutjob Right. They’re looking at a 2 term governor like Kasich and comparing to the present, so they have a point. I sometimes get quiet encouragement to run Democrats- they’re not comfortable this far Right. It isn’t how they think of the state.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
Gonna leap into the Star Wars convo with this:
Lucas’ universe makes no sense.
1. There’s no point to having human piloted craft when you’ve got plentiful sentient AI abundantly available.
2. The Republic Senate as conceived is stupid. Given the massive populations, at best, there’d be a much looser federation with worlds in regional bodies electing to higher tier bodies, etc. Even that would collapse of its own weight.
3. Does nobody have allergic reactions on other worlds, and are all those air mixes breathable by all?
4. What kind of dumbass sets up a farm in a desert?
Miss Bianca
@Baud:
@Kay:
The first rule of What We Would Say if The Woke Mob Would Let Us is…don’t discuss what we would say if the woke mob would let us.
debbie
@Betty Cracker:
He’s prickly. So what? Social media aside, his arguments are sound and he’s a great writer. Would you enjoy being tweeted at by countless Qnuts every day?
Matt McIrvin
@PJ:
Oh, there were apocalyptic fandom wars in the nascent science-fiction print fandom in the 1940s. It was just that hardly anyone outside the circle paid any attention.
The trash reputation of the field just made them more defensive and eager to claim that “fans are slans” (“slan” meaning “mutant master race”, from an A. E. van Vogt book).
zhena gogolia
@UncleEbeneezer: Yeah.
Matt McIrvin
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: I think Star Wars is best thought of as a loosely constructed science-fiction/fantasy hybrid, or a subtype of superhero movie. Considered as serious science fiction it has always been completely dumm. But there’s clearly a space for that.
Almost no screen SF holds together logically as well as the best of the print genre, but there’s a wide range of “hardness” in every medium.
Cacti
As far as the “more realistic Yoda” goes, the original Yoda looks like a puppet because he lacks facial expressions. The subsequent Yoda looks like a CGI character. Neither of them looks more realistic.
James E Powell
@debbie:
How is it that I never heard of this guy till now? Or maybe I had heard of him, but just forgot.
I read about ten posts. Takes me back to the early days of blogging.
debbie
@Starfish:
I did not know this. Thanks, I’ll stop looking for them.
WaterGirl
@ian: Yeah, I didn’t say I was signing on to his logic, but we do want Balloon Juice to be a place that shows respect (even if not agreement) when someone writes “don’t copy my stuff”.
And yes, I fully concur. We humans are all package deals and Stonekettle has a lot of good stuff to say that resonates with a lot of people, so he is definitely in the one-of-the-good-guys column.
debbie
@James E Powell:
I think maybe the latter. This isn’t the first time he’s been cited here. That’s probably how I found him.
Miss Bianca
@schrodingers_cat:
@Betty Cracker:
I like Jim Wright’s writing, even if he does go on and on a bit at times, and I appreciate his insights a lot – when he hits the bullseye, he hits it hard enough to destroy the entire target. But he is a bit cranky, ya.
WaterGirl
@opiejeanne: I assume they don’t like it because they lose the clicks, which affects their stats, plus then new folks aren’t coming to their site and seeing other stuff they are interested in. So they lose potential new people who might otherwise follow them, or at least stop by now and again.
debbie
@WaterGirl:
I had never seen that message before, but I wouldn’t want to not honor his request (or, more likely, his all-caps shout).
Suzanne
I am currently sitting at an indoor playground at the local mall because it is cold and rainy outside and I am braindead tired and my children are driving me crazy and I just need ten goddamn minutes of peace.
Betty Cracker
@debbie: The great thing about Twitter is that each of us get to curate our own timelines.
James E Powell
@Honus:
Fans of Glen Campbell & others who might be interested have to see I’ll Be Me, the documentary of his final tour, after he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. My father died from dementia and the film had some scenes that were close my family’s experiences. I cried quite a bit.
debbie
@Betty Cracker:
Agreed. I only read and follow; the constant fights and battles are wearying.
Matt McIrvin
@Another Scott: 1984 ends with an appendix about the structure of Newspeak that seems like it might be written from an in-universe perspective at a time after Oceania has fallen. But it doesn’t say this very explicitly, and there’s nothing about it in the main narrative, which ends on an utterly bleak and hopeless note. I think The Handmaid’s Tale does have an epilogue that is clearer about it.
Miss Bianca
@Cacti: ?? I recall the original Yoda puppet having plenty of facial expressions. That’s a Muppet thing. Even if I’m remembering wrong, Frank Oz’s voicing was enough to make me *think* that Yoda had facial expressions.
eclare
@Suzanne: That sounds like a perfect solution for everyone. Hopefully this will tire out the kiddos so that they go to sleep easily tonight.
Kay
@James E Powell:
Think of it like a stock with a high price or a piece of land where the location and size doesnt justify the asking price. They think the far Right is overvalued here, that it’s due for a correction.
So that’s the draw- that’s why they keep trying – they’re betting it returns to “fundamentals”.
Suzanne
I should also note that Youngest’s ponytail is cockeyed and messy and she is wearing the same shirt from yesterday even though it is filthy because she was having a meltdown about it. And my kids are the only ones wearing masks. EHHHHHHHH.
James E Powell
@Matt McIrvin:
I have no way of knowing for sure, but it certainly appears that the vast majority of white people do agree with them.
RobertB
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
George Lucas wanted to do his own “The Battle of Britain”. Then TIE fighters, X-Wings, etc, stuck.
There’s a scene at the end of The Last Jedi, where Laura Dern flies her ship through an Empire (or whatever we’re calling them) ship. Bang, ship is dead. Why isn’t this a weapon?
You can destroy an AT-AT with a piece of rope. You can literally outrun it on foot if you’re a decent runner.
Point is, verisimilitude isn’t a strong point in the cinematic Star Wars universe.
eclare
@Suzanne: The lack of masks is concerning.
As for yesterday’s clothes, a woman that I used to work with dressed all of her kids for bed in whatever they were going to wear the next day. Lisa was efficient!
Kay
@Suzanne:
This made me laugh.
Toledo used to have a mall with a play area and a merry go round and I wouldn’t buy my kids tokens for the ride. They can only play on the free stuff! This older lady took pity on them and bought them tokens. I felt so bad – like the Dickensian miser that I am. It was a bad merry go round! It barely moved. I hope they learned their lesson :)
Suzanne
@eclare: I’m wondering if I can give Younger (who is 11) my bank card and send her over to get me a coffee. Is that really garbagey parenting?
Kathleen
@Geminid: Media: “He’s in f*****g Delaware again. Booooooring!! At least we can’t mock him for visiting loved ones’ graves in cemeteries. Or can we? Could NYT or WaPo confirm that? Would be great if we could have a gratuitous cemetery swipe in on our next Tweet. Could you let us know by deadline? Thanks.”
eclare
@Suzanne: No. It is teaching responsibility. Do it
Your kid might get a kick out of being entrusted with something like that, look at how grown up I am!
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Matt McIrvin:
The universe of “1984” falls apart with mass disasters. A decent sized hurricane or earthquake or tornado outbreak rips out the guts of party control as people have to forage and do disaster triage.
Uncle Cosmo
@Kayla Rudbek: I’m all thumbs, so I had my handyman put up & grout a set of backsplash tiles during my last renov roughly 10 years back. Found them at Homey dePot, 1″ square tiles in copper/cream/dark brown,$5 for a 12″x12″ random mosaic; total cost <$200 plus labor. Inspired me to coordinate the whole kitchen in copper colors, and it still looks great.
It didn't seem to be all that difficult for even a modestly co-ordinated DYIer (which I am not). Good luck with yours!
Spanky
@Suzanne:
For that you came to Balloon Juice ???
James E Powell
@Kay:
I feel like it will take a politician with Obama level charisma to get Ohio to vote Democratic for state offices.
Kathleen
@Kay: That’s how Democrats won majority of City Council seats. They ran as a team. Dems always represented on Council but there were always Republicans/Charterites in the mix. Now it’s 8 Dems and 1 Republican out of 9.
debbie
@James E Powell:
You know there’s none of that crap in Ohio!
Suzanne
@eclare: I told her to do it and handed her my card. She looked absolutely terrified until I told her she could also get whatever she wanted for herself. Yes, I am that mom, the one who will let them Get Sugar in exchange for good behavior or whatever.
Kathleen
@sab: I didn’t know that. Good to know. Thank you.
Anyway
@Suzanne:
Yes! One of my pet soapbox complaints about Dolt4was that he was unfamiliar with a real workplace (especially a large one) because there are so many accountability checkpoints (esp for us drones). My work is constantly scrutinized during design review, various stages of testing and validation, any time there’s customer feedback. The kind of accountability-free secrecy with which he runs his companies is unheard of in the modern workplace. A lot of RW pundits don’t understand the workplace either.
eclare
@Suzanne: Positive reinforcement is a good thing! Hope you got your coffee.
eclare
@Anyway: When I worked in public accounting, I would not state the result of two plus two without a second review to verify.
Hyperbole, but just barely.
Suzanne
@Anyway: One of the things that I think made him appealing to his cohort was that he kind of had the aesthetic of a family businessman. No rules, no policies, just hire and fire and sexually assault who you want, no HR. And I think that’s part of why the accusation of nepotism didn’t really stick: there’s a lot of people in that cohort who get their jobs through their uncle or cousin or friend’s dad or whatever. The notion of “qualifications” doesn’t really resonate because essentially everyone has them.
Kathleen
@Geminid: Don’t know if you’re on Facebook but there is a page called WreckingCrewFilm.
satby
@gene108: Is also on his website: https://www.stonekettle.com
ian
@Starfish:
This
ignores the fact they are posting their stuff on twitter.
satby
@debbie: He doesn’t like his work being shared and quoted without attribution, which happens frequently online.
oatler
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
“plentiful sentient AI abundantly available.” Does that mean they’re humans made of metal? And that they’re routinely sold at slave markets? Come see me in my dorm room, you bring the weed.
debbie
@satby:
Understandable.
Kathleen
@Geminid: I love Glen Campbell. Wichita Lineman is one of the greatest pop records ever.
Matt McIrvin
@James E Powell: I think the majority of white people are racist in kind of a neutral and thoughtless way, and the median one will vote for Trump, but they are not particularly obsessed about how their childhood was raped because the Star Wars movie had some girls and a black guy in it. This is a specialized preoccupation.
Uncle Cosmo
And a lot of believability comes when unfamiliar technology and concepts are shown by the author to function in a manner that makes sense (for some threshold value of “sense”) to the reader. Much of Heinlein’s particular brilliance lay in presenting unfamiliar tech and ideas from an engineer’s POV:
I once reviewed a SF novel (by a local author) with an interesting premise that showed up around page 12: Corporations and shareholding and stock markets were as illegal as numbers rackets, all work requiring the coordination of multiple individuals’ effort to be done by ad-hoc collections of individuals. The author then proceeded to demolish his volume by inserting an 18-page dry-as-dust explication of everything that had (supposedly) occurred in the previous 100 years to produce that situation. You just can’t do that & expect your reader not to throw the book in the recycling bin in disgust.
NB I took great pleasure in metaphorically pounding him repeatedly with a railroad-spike-studded baseball bat in my review. And my editor let it stand. Don’t recall ever seeing another attempt at SF from the author. Maybe I managed to persuade him of a fundamental tenet of the genre:
Matt McIrvin
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: One of the things that comes up in 1984 is that the state really leaves the little people alone most of the time–they’re just grindingly poor, and suffer on that account. It’s the people with a bit of privilege because they’re part of the state/party bureaucratic apparatus who really have to be mentally brutalized all the time. The response to a major disaster might just be to wall off the area and pretend it never existed. But I suppose you’d run out of areas eventually.
Kathleen
@Kay: Did you watch the Cranley/Whaley debate? I’m not a Cranley fan but I thought he came across better than Whaley. I don’t think they differ much in their priorities and policies but as Cranley said at the end of the debate the most important factor was which one of them can win. I’m pessimistic about 2 SW Ohio mayors getting traction in the rest of the state. The one solid thing Cranley can sell is the strength of Cincinnati economy and the fact that we added people in the census. I still don’t know who I’m voting for. In my mind Cranley has a lot of baggage around his leadership style.
Kathleen
@Miss Bianca: I enjoyed that movie. Did you see Standing In The Shadows of Motown also by chance? One of my all time faves.
Matt McIrvin
@RobertB:
Lots of the angry angry fans who would accept all the other stuff got extremely upset about that particular point.
Why? I think it was because the Expanded Universe material they’d spent decades consuming included a bunch of fictional reference works that strained mightily to come up with spit-and-baling-wire explanations for all the inconsistencies and implausibilities that already existed in the Star Wars universe, and one of those was a wad of explanation about something called “pseudomotion” that already explained why you couldn’t use a ship jumping to hyperspace as a projectile. But this was a brand new implausibility that broke that bit of canonical exposition.
lowtechcyclist
@Baud:
They still do. Good thing they shrunk a bit. :-)
WaterGirl
@Suzanne: When I was younger than that, my mom would give me cash and send me to the store 2 or 3 blocks away for a gallon of milk.
Geminid
@Kathleen: It’s kind of fortunate that the two top Democrats on the Fall ticket will be from opposite sides of the Ohio. I remember how in the 1980’s Virginia Democrats liked to get a candidate from each of Northern Virginia, Richmond, and Tidewater for the three state offices. That doesn’t seem to matter so much now that the state has grown more homogeneous.
Matt McIrvin
@different-church-lady: John Williams’ Star Wars scores utterly changed how big-budget SF/fantasy movies were scored. Up to that point, science-fiction movies from the 1950s on had usually gone for the avant-garde, with lots of electronic music and atonal stuff to emphasize how out-there and freaky it was. Williams brought it back to old Hollywood orchestral scores, like Korngold had been doing decades earlier. In a way it was a regression. But the music is so good, I’ll happily identify it as the best thing about the whole saga.
And, of course, Williams was immediately on the hook to do that for everyone else, as were composers like Jerry Goldsmith and James Horner. Williams’ Superman theme is obviously derivative of his Star Wars stuff, but it’s so iconic in its own right, it’s the music you hear in your head now when somebody mentions Superman.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Another Scott: Actually the Oceania of 1984 certain to fall – as the book was observed the whole system runs on the leadership not believing the lies they tell everyone else and somehow keeping tract of reality threw the world of fantasy they create. Sooner or later the true believers take over and it goes to hell in hand basket. See the GOP.
Citizen Alan
@OzarkHillbilly: You mean like the only possible protagonist is a white male? That seems to be what most often triggers the “unrealistic fantasy” button in my experience.
Citizen Alan
@Kay:
Probably some variation on the N-word.
Kathleen
@Geminid: That’s a good point.
Citizen Alan
@SiubhanDuinne: I saw the 1st Star Wars movie in theaters at least 5 times when I was a little kid. It was a great movie, and Empire strikes back was a full magnitude better. Return of the jedi and every other movie since has simply been one long toy commercial.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
John Williams’ body of work is amazing. Words fail.
Citizen Alan
@different-church-lady:
Indeed.
Citizen Alan
@Matt McIrvin:
I think he probably knew that Vader was Luke’s father. But I can’t believe he knew at that point that Leia was Luke’s sister and still had them kiss on the lips twice.
O. Felix Culpa
@Suzanne: My sympathies. I remember days like that.
different-church-lady
@opiejeanne:
You are correct.
I remember thinking, “This sharp angle thing is kinda cool, but I can’t read most of it and the bits I can read don’t make any sense, so might as well just sit back and try to enjoy whatever this is about to be.”
Kayla Rudbek
Thank you very much to everyone above who had suggestions/concerns about the self-adhesive tile! So it seems like old-school grouted tile is the way to go, due to the oven and the sink being set on that wall and all of the moisture and heat effects that will put onto adhesive material. So now to go scout that out…
Matt McIrvin
@Citizen Alan: Leigh Brackett’s first-draft script for The Empire Strikes Back didn’t even have the twist in it–Darth Vader and Anakin Skywalker had been separate people. I think Kasdan’s draft put it in.