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Hot air and ill-informed banter

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I’ve spoken to my cat about this, but it doesn’t seem to do any good.

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You are here: Home / Open Threads / Sunday Evening Open Thread: For What Do We Live, But to Make Sport for Our Neighbors…?

Sunday Evening Open Thread: For What Do We Live, But to Make Sport for Our Neighbors…?

by Anne Laurie|  June 19, 20229:59 pm| 64 Comments

This post is in: Open Threads, Pet Blogging

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How we thought 2022 would be: rocket car to the moon base

How 2022 is: using phone app to check cat’s blood glucose but still putting cat in a Lycra onesie to stop it from eating the attached monitor pic.twitter.com/jjcJwqCCsV

— ConstitutionalMischiefHat (@Popehat) June 19, 2022

The Austen quote in the title concludes “… and laugh at them in our turn?”

Popehat better sleep with one eye open, for the immediate future.

Fortunately he’s the smartest of the cats so he’s used to life being bullshit and is philosophical about it.

— ConstitutionalMischiefHat (@Popehat) June 19, 2022

I also hiss at my friends when they don lavender onesies.

— Evil Wilma (@EvilWilma) June 19, 2022

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Reader Interactions

64Comments

  1. 1.

    oatler

    June 19, 2022 at 6:06 pm

    “When one is in town one amuses oneself. When one is in the country one amuses other people. It is excessively boring.”

  2. 2.

    Baud

    June 19, 2022 at 6:08 pm

    How we thought 2022 would be: rocket car to the moon base

    So many people bought into Elon’s hype.

  3. 3.

    JWR

    June 19, 2022 at 6:15 pm

    Yeah, every time I wear my lavender onesie, people tend to avoid me, too.

  4. 4.

    CaseyL

    June 19, 2022 at 6:23 pm

    I should try wearing a lavender onesie, and see what happens.

    Maybe I’ll get a lot of people telling me I really need to retire; like, immediately.

  5. 5.

    JoyceH

    June 19, 2022 at 6:26 pm

    There are cat onesies?!

  6. 6.

    Baud

    June 19, 2022 at 6:27 pm

    @JoyceH:

    Wait till you see the catkinis.

  7. 7.

    JoyceH

    June 19, 2022 at 6:28 pm

    @JoyceH:  Replying to my last – there ARE cat onesies, just looked on Amazon. Of course, they’re technically called “cat surgery recovery suit’, but they include ‘onesie’ in the subject line so people searching on that can find it.

  8. 8.

    Anne Laurie

    June 19, 2022 at 6:29 pm

    @Baud: True story:  When I was in the fourth grade, there was a classroom assignment to write an essay on where we’d be in 20 years.  We were explicitly instructed to use our wildest imaginations.

    Since I was already a voracious sf reader, I wrote that I’d be living on my own private asteroid.  And I’d be a professional writer, because my robot editor would correct my horrendous penmanship and occasionally erratic spelling.

    After we all read our essays for the rest of the class, the teacher contacted my parents and suggested I might need psychiatric help.  Since my dad was also a big sf reader, her advice went unheeded.

    (The girl immediately before me planned to be a stay-at-home wife & mother, in a lovely suburban house with a white picket fence.  She had already picked out names for her four children, with her husband the insurance broker.  I did not fully appreciate at the time that, given our working-class urban Catholic neighborhood, *her* fantasy was only slightly less unrealistic than mine… but I do sometimes wonder where she eventually ended up.)

  9. 9.

    rikyrah

    June 19, 2022 at 6:29 pm

    the onesie on the cat.

     

    BWA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA

  10. 10.

    JoyceH

    June 19, 2022 at 6:31 pm

    @JoyceH:   EEEEE! Amazon also has a video of someone putting a very calm cat into its onesie. Something tells me that neither of my guys would be so calm about the process.

  11. 11.

    dmsilev

    June 19, 2022 at 6:31 pm

    @JoyceH: I think the real point of note is that people actually have survived putting their cats into onesies.

  12. 12.

    JoyceH

    June 19, 2022 at 6:32 pm

    @Anne Laurie:

    the teacher contacted my parents and suggested I might need psychiatric help.

    That teacher should not be a teacher. Bitch TOLD you to use your wildest imagination and that’s what you did.

  13. 13.

    MattF

    June 19, 2022 at 6:33 pm

    One may deduce that this is an open thread.

  14. 14.

    dmsilev

    June 19, 2022 at 6:35 pm

    @Anne Laurie:

    Since I was already a voracious sf reader, I wrote that I’d be living on my own private asteroid.  And I’d be a professional writer, because my robot editor would correct my horrendous penmanship and occasionally erratic spelling.

    In the glorious Real Future, the robot editors _introduce_ erratic spelling. How come SF never predicted that?

    Pity about the asteroid though. That’d’ve been nice.

  15. 15.

    Baud

    June 19, 2022 at 6:36 pm

    @Anne Laurie:

    Wherever she is, you ended up in a better place.

  16. 16.

    Mo MacArbie

    June 19, 2022 at 6:36 pm

    And now I have Lavender Onesie in my head as performed by the Dead Kennedys to the tune of “Chemical Warfare.”

  17. 17.

    zhena gogolia

    June 19, 2022 at 6:38 pm

    Cats always look so cute in clothes but they hate it

  18. 18.

    Spanky

    June 19, 2022 at 6:38 pm

    @Anne Laurie:

    I do sometimes wonder where she eventually ended up.)

    She drank herself into a divorce and lost custody of all those kids.

    The End.

  19. 19.

    Baud

    June 19, 2022 at 6:39 pm

    @zhena gogolia:

    I can relate!

  20. 20.

    zhena gogolia

    June 19, 2022 at 6:40 pm

    @Baud: I knew you were going to say that

  21. 21.

    WaterGirl

    June 19, 2022 at 6:42 pm

    @MattF: There is also an Open Thread tag!

  22. 22.

    Benw

    June 19, 2022 at 6:42 pm

    Wait you guys aren’t wearing lavender onesies in your moon bases right now? Huh

  23. 23.

    Baud

    June 19, 2022 at 6:43 pm

    @zhena gogolia:

    Thanks for the set up.

  24. 24.

    jnfr

    June 19, 2022 at 6:44 pm

    @Anne Laurie:
    Wonderful story. Thanks for telling it. It’s hard to remember how outrageous anything science fiction used to be in the broader culture. Things have changed!

    @dmsilev:

    Autocorrect rules our lives.

    I have no asteroid but I do play a nifty asteroid-simulated-physics game (Oxygen Not Included)  that has adorable little printed people and odd critters that you have to keep alive. It’s a good substitute.

  25. 25.

    prostratedragon

    June 19, 2022 at 6:44 pm

    @rikyrah:  And the expression on the cat’s face.

  26. 26.

    zhena gogolia

    June 19, 2022 at 6:45 pm

    @Baud: George burns taught me to be a straight man

  27. 27.

    Anne Laurie

    June 19, 2022 at 6:47 pm

    @Baud: Well, I do have my robot editor, which has greatly improved my legibililty and my (lysdexical) spelling!

    And with the current state of the internet, I can achieve *almost* as much privacy as I would on my imagined personal asteroid…

    I wouldn’t tell this story if I didn’t think it was funny, honestly.  I sincerely hope Diane achieved, if not her own picket-fenced fantasies, happiness & success in her life, too.

  28. 28.

    Baud

    June 19, 2022 at 6:47 pm

    @zhena gogolia:

    Say goodnight, gogolia.

  29. 29.

    Baud

    June 19, 2022 at 6:48 pm

    @Anne Laurie:

    And you have us!

  30. 30.

    JWR

    June 19, 2022 at 6:56 pm

    @Anne Laurie:

    The girl immediately before me planned to be a stay-at-home wife & mother, in a lovely suburban house with a white picket fence.

    Sounds like the Leave It To Beaver syndrome.

  31. 31.

    germy shoemangler

    June 19, 2022 at 6:57 pm

    Alyssa Farah Griffin, the former-Trump-aide-turned-CNN-commentator, said she heard former President Donald Trump audibly admit he lost the election to Joe Biden—months before he went on his denialism crusade.

    “He blurted out watching Joe Biden on TV, ‘Can you believe I lost to this guy?’” she said on CNN’s State of the Union. However, Griffin—who was interviewed by the Jan. 6 House Committee—doesn’t believe the admission will be enough to convict Trump of a crime.

    https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-blurted-out-can-you-believe-i-lost-to-this-guy-says-former-white-house-aide-alyssa-farah-griffin?ref=home?ref=home

  32. 32.

    Steeplejack

    June 19, 2022 at 6:58 pm

    @zhena gogolia:

    New Endeavour tonight!

  33. 33.

    WaterGirl

    June 19, 2022 at 7:04 pm

    @Anne Laurie: We had to do a similar exercise in first grade… what did we want to be when we grew up.

    My best friend said she wanted to be a prostitute.  No idea where she had heard the word, but the teacher Was. Not. Pleased.

    Did I mention that it was catholic school and the teacher was a nun?  :-)

  34. 34.

    zhena gogolia

    June 19, 2022 at 7:06 pm

    @Steeplejack: We skipped the entire last season, but we might try this one. We’re going to try Hotel Portofino first.

  35. 35.

    lowtechcyclist

    June 19, 2022 at 7:06 pm

    Had a good bike ride today, went about 20 miles altogether.  Good day for it!  For Spanky’s benefit, the NW end of my loop was at the intersection of Jewell Road and Wilson Road in southern Anne Arundel county.  At least, my map says that intersection is in AA, but as I was headed east from there on Jewell, I shortly encountered a “Welcome to Anne Arundel” sign.

  36. 36.

    Baud

    June 19, 2022 at 7:08 pm

    @WaterGirl:

    My best friend said she wanted to be a prostitute.  No idea where she had heard the word,

     

    The Mary Magdalene story?

  37. 37.

    Ben Cisco

    June 19, 2022 at 7:11 pm

    @WaterGirl: Record scratch moment for the ages…

  38. 38.

    germy shoemangler

    June 19, 2022 at 7:11 pm

    Pitbulls are so funny bc someone really walked in like "i would like the most dense fucking dog you can possibly manufacture. I'm talking 2x the amount of dog you can condense in the space of one dog. A neutron star of a dog. Compress that motherfucker. Make it stupid also."

    — giant sized baby thing (@tentinybees) June 18, 2022

  39. 39.

    Ken

    June 19, 2022 at 7:11 pm

    @WaterGirl: Maybe she’d read the Bible stories about Mary Magdalene and thought that she sounded pretty nifty?  And had unfortunately heard the slurs, not in the Bible, that Mary was a prostitute?

  40. 40.

    Dorothy A. Winsor

    June 19, 2022 at 7:15 pm

    My son’s third grade teacher had them write stories but told them they couldn’t write fantasy or science fiction. It had to be realistic.

    On another note: Someone on a reality show just referred to “the 40 to death” demographic.
    I feel seen?

  41. 41.

    MattF

    June 19, 2022 at 7:22 pm

    There’s a great song, ‘The Ballad of Mary Magdalen’, sung here by Dar Williams, with a hilarious first verse:

    My name is Mary Magdalen
    I come from Palestine
    Please excuse these rags I’m in
    But I’ve fallen on hard times
    But long ago I had my work
    When I was in my prime
    But I gave it up, and all for love
    It was his career or mine

  42. 42.

    Steeplejack

    June 19, 2022 at 7:30 pm

    @zhena gogolia:

    I’m iffy on Hotel Portofino. It looks like another entry in the “Let’s do a period thing like Downton Abbey” trend. Willing to be convinced.

    I think PBS Passport will drop all of the new Endeavour episodes after tonight, so I may speed through them this week. (All three of them—big deal.)

  43. 43.

    Starfish

    June 19, 2022 at 7:31 pm

    @JoyceH:

    @dmsilev: Are there any reviewers showing the injuries that they attained while attempting to put their cats in onesies? Like that swimsuit review where the woman talks about how the swimsuit was unscathed when she was attacked by a shark.

  44. 44.

    Starfish

    June 19, 2022 at 7:36 pm

    @lowtechcyclist: Oh wow. I did not realize how far south Anne Arundel County extended.

  45. 45.

    Anne Laurie

    June 19, 2022 at 7:43 pm

    @WaterGirl:

    Overheard in Chicago Institute of Art:

    Small child, reading description of painting: Grandma, what’s a brothel?

    Grandma, after enormous pause: it’s the place where they make soup.

    THIS IS BOTH THE BEST AND ALSO THE MOST RUIN-YOUR-LIFE-FOREVER ANSWER POSSIBLE

    – Andy Kesson (@andykesson)

    (from 2018)

  46. 46.

    Spanky

    June 19, 2022 at 7:43 pm

    @Starfish: You mean how low it could go?

    “Welcome to Calvert County, where the roads have no shoulders.”

    The libtards would just use ’em for bikes anyhow.

  47. 47.

    Another Scott

    June 19, 2022 at 7:51 pm

    @Anne Laurie:  Lots of land mines in the arts.

    “No, you don’t pronounce ‘Titian’ that way…”

    :-)

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  48. 48.

    Dorothy A. Winsor

    June 19, 2022 at 7:52 pm

    @Anne Laurie: When my son was learning to read, he was reading signs to me as we drove along. We passed a movie theater marquee, and he reads, “The Best Little…” “I don’t know that word,” he says.

    I took a deep breath and pronounced Whorehouse.

    He reads on, “Horror House in Texas.”

    Phew

  49. 49.

    Ohio Mom

    June 19, 2022 at 7:52 pm

    Ha! Ohio Dad has the same setup up as Popehat’s cat, well except for the leotard.

    It’s a fabulous tool for diabetes management, does much more for human (and I suppose cat) cat health and quality of life than car rockets to the moon could ever possibly do.

    But yes, hunan and car natures are eternally consistent. No getting around that.

  50. 50.

    PaulB

    June 19, 2022 at 7:57 pm

    The cat pic made me think of the purple jumpsuit from “The Lost City.” Sandra: “The jumpsuit is a character unto itself.”

  51. 51.

    zhena gogolia

    June 19, 2022 at 7:59 pm

    @Baud: we were supposed to learn a poem and recite it in seventh grade and my smartass friend chose The Harlot’s House by I think Oscar Wilde. The teacher made him go to the big dictionary and read the definition of harlot to the class

  52. 52.

    Cameron

    June 19, 2022 at 8:00 pm

    I was so devastated that nobody in Florida seems to appreciate 71-yr-old men in lavender onesies. Or maybe it’s just the place I live.

  53. 53.

    A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)

    June 19, 2022 at 8:04 pm

    @Baud: Well for me, I got my idea of the future from The Jetsons. The future isn’t what it used to be!

  54. 54.

    lowtechcyclist

    June 19, 2022 at 8:10 pm

    @Starfish: Yeah, I can’t quite throw a Frisbee into AA, but it feels almost that close.  If you take 261 north from the Twin Beaches, you’re in AA County pretty much as soon as you leave North Beach.

    While I live in northern Calvert, I do most of my cycling in southern AA for two reasons: first, it’s close, and second, it’s got a better network of back roads*.  Calvert and southern AA are trapped between the Patuxent and the Chesapeake, and the distance between them narrows as you go south, and widens as you go north.  So there’s a lot more room for more small roads to the north of me than to the south.

    * Even though they’ve got good shoulders, I really don’t like riding on Route 2, let alone Route 4, with all the cars whizzing by. I’ll take my chances with the back roads.

    Drivers in this area are quite tolerant of us cyclists, much more so than anywhere else I’ve lived.  At one time or another today, there were a couple dozen cars that needed to pass me on shoulderless 2-lane roads, and most of them had to wait at least briefly.  Not a single one honked or yelled or flipped the bird or tried to use their car to intimidate me.  And that’s been my unbroken experience in over two decades of cycling around here.

  55. 55.

    Geminid

    June 19, 2022 at 8:34 pm

    I picked up the Sunday Washington Post this morning and found a good article on January 6 Committee member Pete Aguilar. He entered Congress in 2014 by winning a formerly Republican district. Before that Aguilar was Mayor of Redlands, a city 70 miles east of Los Angeles.

    Aguilar told the Post reporter that when Speaker Pelosi asked him last summer if he would serve on the nine member commitee he first thought of the danger it could bring to his family- “I did not need the death threats,” he recalled thinking. He agreed to the Speaker’s request, though, and wound up spending six weeks poring over depositions and other evidence concerning Mike Pence’s role in the events of January 6.

    At age 42, Aguilar is (I think) the youngest of the nine Committee members. He is also Vice Chairman of the Democratic Caucus. That makes him the sixth ranking House Democrat. He tells his colleagues to consider him “a human suggestion box.”

    Aguilar, Caucus Chairman Hakeem Jeffries, and Assistant Speaker Katherine Rice are sometimes thought to be the next top leadership team for House Democrats. Jeffries entered Congress in 2012, while Rice won Ed Markey’s seat in the near suburbs of Boston after Markey moved up to the Senate in 2014. Aguilar is a member of the New Democrat Caucus, while Jeffries and Rice are both in the Progressive Caucus. Rice is also a member of the Cranberry Caucus, which sounds kind of cool.

  56. 56.

    Jay

    June 19, 2022 at 8:36 pm

    When the demand became too great to manage on her own, Booth asked friends and colleagues to help out. The Jane Collective came into being. Otherwise known as the Abortion Counseling Service of Women’s Liberation, the name Jane was chosen to reflect the experience of unwanted pregnancy that was as ubiquitous as it was stigmatized. In addition to sharing information by word-of-mouth, the Janes posted on bulletin boards and ran ads in underground newspapers and generally put the word out. Notices on community bulletin boards included a phone number and the message: “Pregnant? Don’t want to be? Call Jane.”

    With her little round glasses and direct demeanour, one of Jane’s original members Judith Arcana states matter-of-factly, “We were ordinary women trying to save women’s lives, but we were criminals. We were felons.”

    https://thetyee.ca/Culture/2022/06/17/We-Were-Felons/

  57. 57.

    WaterGirl

    June 19, 2022 at 8:41 pm

    @Anne Laurie: Heh.

  58. 58.

    Ksmiami

    June 19, 2022 at 9:00 pm

    @Anne Laurie:  Your living on your own private asteroid…

  59. 59.

    Ksmiami

    June 19, 2022 at 9:01 pm

    @lowtechcyclist: the family used to have a beach cottage in Cove Point and we sailed the Chesapeake so…

  60. 60.

    Gin & Tonic

    June 19, 2022 at 9:05 pm

    Didn’t want to shit on TaMara’s thread, but this is Father’s Day for some other people, thanks to russia.

    Father’s Day in Lysychansk pic.twitter.com/KNrPUTHS5G— Liubov Tsybulska (@TsybulskaLiubov) June 19, 2022

    Including a friend of mine and my dear wife’s, whose son was killed by russian artillery outside Mykolaiv this morning (the Tweet photo is not him.)

  61. 61.

    Steeplejack

    June 19, 2022 at 9:11 pm

    @PaulB:

    The Lost City is a wretchedly bad movie. I watched it a few weeks ago because the trailer looked interesting. Boy, was that a mistake. The jumpsuit might be the most developed character in the movie.

  62. 62.

    CliosFanBoy

    June 19, 2022 at 9:13 pm

    @Dorothy A. Winsor:  I still have a vague memory of seeing a spray-painted word on a wall in Miamisburg, Ohio, and asking my Mom “What does f*** mean?” I got the “I’ll tell you when you’re older” response, so I knew it was a “grown-up word.” I was about 5 so that’d make it about 1964.  How’s that for a candidate for “earlest memory”?

  63. 63.

    frosty

    June 19, 2022 at 10:58 pm

    @zhena gogolia: George Burns? You couldn’t have had a better teacher!

  64. 64.

    sab

    June 20, 2022 at 6:31 am

    @CliosFanBoy: My husband laughs about standing in line at the bank 35 years ago with his toddler in his arms. Kid was learning to talk and trying out new sounds.

    ” Duck… duck. Suck…suck. Truck…truck. Fuck…( gasp from lady in line behibd them) FUCk , FUCK, FUCK.

    New word that registered with adults. Thank you so much lady in line behind them.

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