Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Balloon Juice, where there is always someone who will say you’re doing it wrong.

When the time comes to make an endorsement, the pain of NYT editors will be palpable as they reluctantly whisper “Biden.”

Dear Washington Post, you are the darkness now.

The arc of the moral universe doesn’t bend itself. it’s up to us.

Fight for a just cause, love your fellow man, live a good life.

Maybe you would prefer that we take Joelle’s side in ALL CAPS?

The willow is too close to the house.

They love authoritarianism, but only when they get to be the authoritarians.

I see no possible difficulties whatsoever with this fool-proof plan.

Can we lighten up on the doomsday scenarios?

Is it negotiation when the other party actually wants to shoot the hostage?

Donald Jessica Trump found guilty as fuck – May 30, 2024!

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

How any woman could possibly vote for this smug smarmy piece of misogynistic crap is beyond understanding.

We are builders in a constant struggle with destroyers. let’s win this.

People are complicated. Love is not.

Whoever he was, that guy was nuts.

Fight them, without becoming them!

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

Even though I know this is a bad idea, I’m off to do it anyway!

We won’t go back.

Tide comes in. Tide goes out. You can’t explain that.

It’s a new day. Light all those Biden polls of young people on fire and throw away the ashes.

It’s a good piece. click on over. but then come back!!

You are here: Home / Balloon Juice / Saturday Morning Open Thread: Who Let the Serfs Have *Opinions*?

Saturday Morning Open Thread: Who Let the Serfs Have *Opinions*?

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152Comments

  1. 1.

    different-church-lady

    At first I thought your headline said “options” instead of opinions. Which, when you think about it, would make the sarcasm even sharper.

  2. 2.

    Baud

    The top row are both unambiguously literal owners of capital, so yes.

    And they vote.

  3. 3.

    mrmoshpotato

    It’s still a real job even if Bruce Springsteen hasn’t written a song about it, guys.

    Hahaha!

    There be a secret message here!

  4. 4.

    debbie

    Kind of offensive that price increases have to be explained. What a stupid species we are. And now Fox is complaining about the class of people they insist be born. WTF did you think would happen, Tuck?

    We’re evolving backwards, it seems.

  5. 5.

    different-church-lady

    You can tell the jobs report was really good by the way the WaPo’s top headlines moved from “Everyone thinks Biden sucks” to “Here’s the right way to erase a hard drive.”

  9. 9.

    different-church-lady

    The bottom row is people trying to make their own lives less miserable, and the the top row is people trying to make other people’s lives more miserable.

  13. 13.

    OzarkHillbilly

    An Alaska family had given up hope of finding their blind, elderly golden retriever who wandered away from their home three weeks ago, but a construction crew found Lulu in salmonberry bushes after initially confusing her for a bear.

    Lulu was barely alive after being found Tuesday, but she is being nursed back to health and is back home with her family, the Daily Sitka Sentinel reported.

    “She means everything,” her owner Ted Kubacki said. “I have five daughters and they’re four to 13 years old, so they’ve spent every day of their life with that dog.”

    The Kubacki family searched for weeks after Lulu wandered off June 18.

    “She’s just so helpless, and you kind of imagined that she can’t get real far because she can’t see,” he said.
    ………………………..
    Lulu’s condition has markedly improved with medical care, food and rest.

    “Slowly but surely she started eating and she was kind of able to pick her head up,” Kubacki said. “But then yesterday, she propped herself up on her front paws by herself, like nestled into me and gave me a kiss and wagged her tail and it was just so great.”

    A day later, she was able to stand on her own.

  14. 14.

    Ken

    @OzarkHillbilly: I was going to mock the crew that thought a blind elderly golden was a bear, then remembered: There were two groups of people living a million years ago, those who assumed any rustling in the bushes could be a bear, and those who did not pass along their genes to us.

  16. 16.

    Soprano2

    @debbie: Well, I saw people making fun of the idea that chicken wings would be sold as “market price” by people who had no idea that the price of them was rising rapidly. The price of things like rubber gloves and fryer oil are more than double what they were in February 2020, and show no sign of dropping. Even though people shop and know what the price of gas is they still complain about rising restaurant prices, so yeah you’ve gotta explain it sometimes. I heard an interview with a restaurant manager who said he got rid of printed menus because it was too hard to keep up with the price increases!

  18. 18.

    lowtechcyclist

    @Baud: ​
     

    I erased a hard drive this morning.

    “Close ‘B’ clothes mode.”

    (Let’s see if anyone gets that.)

  21. 21.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @Ken: I am the last person in the world who would mock anybody at any time in any place for mistaking an aged blind golden retriever for a bear.

    in a whisper, (because I once did) (in my case at least, it was dark)

  23. 23.

    Dorothy A. Winsor

    I’m out of town, visiting a friend. I just checked twitter, and it says I have been permanently banned. Hmm. I think I’ll wait until I get home to try to figure out what happened there.

    We went to see the new Top Gun movie yesterday, and we both really liked it, despite objecting to Tom Cruise as a really weird guy. In life, I mean, not in the movie

  24. 24.

    Immanentize

    @debbie:

    Fox is complaining about the class of people they insist be born

    It seems to me that FOX is complaining about the fact that a million people died in COVID and our immigration policy is so terrible that we have drained our country of available workers.

    Where did all the workers go? They died.

  25. 25.

    Kropacetic

    So, the poster of “top row/bottom row” clearly is either a member of or identifies culturally with top row and doesn’t think the folk making his morning coffee deserve a livelihood.

    Do they think people take jobs for fun? For their health? Are baristas engaged in a hobby?

  27. 27.

    pajaro

    Gee,

    I wonder where (in the whole wide world) we might find workers, if it were true there is a shortage?

  28. 28.

    Immanentize

    @Soprano2: Inflation is a rate of increase. Besides spot commodities like gas, there is not going to be deflation. Maybe a bit of relief if supply loosens? But the prices you have now will generally remain and are already baked in.

  31. 31.

    mrmoshpotato

    @Geminid:

    Maybe it’s time for a new musical genre: Serf Music. 

    If everybody worked an estate across the USA?

  32. 32.

    Kropacetic

    @Immanentize:

    It seems to me that FOX is complaining about the fact that a million people died in COVID and our immigration policy is so terrible that we have drained our country of available workers.

    Our immigration system should be efficient, comprehensive, and flexible.

    I’m all for the mission of knowing everyone who shows up within our borders, but our immigration system is slow and creates massive disruptions for small oversights.

    Of course people try to go around the ordinary process. The ones who say we can’t have reform until there’s border security have it exactly backwards (and are lying about their willingness to talk reform after security improved if the Obama administration is any guide).

    If we increase our ability to process immigrants through the system, accept more people generally, and create avenues for people to fix lapses in the process; it will fix a lot of problems, not just with immigration, but providing a bigger workforce we need and that will help us grow.

  34. 34.

    Pete Mack

    Very few truck drivers actually own their rigs anymore. Trucking is a huge racket nowadays.

  35. 35.

    Dorothy A. Winsor

    @Immanentize: I know! Maybe it’s just a mistake. I’ll wait and see if it fixes itself. That’s my policy on many things that break down

    ETA: Re your additional info, oh good. Maybe I had more than one account. I’ve been on twitter a long time

  36. 36.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @Kropacetic: but providing a bigger workforce

    STEALING THE JOBS OF HARD WORKING AMERICANS!!! You must be some kind of ivory tower elitist snob.

  37. 37.

    Kropacetic

    @Ian R: It’s the downstream effect of obtaining money that stops us from starving in a ditch, not an inherent quality of working. Loads of people work, but can’t get adequate food or shelter. Top row guy seems ok with this as long as the local Starbucks employees can’t live off the one job alone.

  38. 38.

    p.a.

    @Dorothy A. Winsor: 
    I got suspended for telling Ted Cruz to suck on a tail pipe in response to one of his “covid is a lie” tweets (of course, he suffered no ill consequences), and never went back even after my suspension ended. One of my better decisions this decade.
    Now I get weekly emails from twitter: “we miss you. wouldn’tyou like to comment on something?”
    Uh… no.

  39. 39.

    NotMax

    Anecdata.

    Needed to make a sojourn into town yesterday and while there. although did not have any need to stop in for fueling, took notice of posted gas prices while tooling around taking care of business. Historically the prices vary, if at all, by no more than a penny or two from station to station. But that was then.

    Passed one station selling regular at $5.72. Two blocks further up the street was another station selling it at $6.18. (In my own neck of the woods a dozen or so miles outside of town there is a choice of two stations, identically priced at $5.85.)

  40. 40.

    Kropacetic

    @OzarkHillbilly: You must be some kind of ivory tower elitist snob.

    I’m based out of a basement cubicle that I’m typically too busy to set foot in.

    Eta: And I thought OP said we have more jobs than unemployed.

  42. 42.

    Dorothy A. Winsor

    @Kropacetic: I read recently that most refugees (which I realize is a very specific group) now give Canada instead of the US as their preferred destination. Can’t say I blame them

     

    ETA: Btw, here in Bettendorf IA, gas is $4.88

  43. 43.

    narya

    @OzarkHillbilly: Hard disagree. He always seems to be playing the same role in the same way. Obviously my mileage varies.

    One of the things I love about the Jorts feed  is the uninhibited enthusiasm for all the folks who are unionizing. And the support for farmworkers.  Jorts (or his supervisor . . .) has been really following and celebrating the CoffeePlace unions, which have spread like wildfire.

    Favorite Springsteen working-a-shit-job line: “I work down at the carwash/where all it ever does is rain.”

  46. 46.

    Immanentize

    BTW I am not trying to brag too much but I predicted on this here almost top 10,000 blog that Musk would never go through with the Twitter deal.

    First it looked like a pump and dump — which failed. But more than that, the tell was the share price. Musk didn’t decide on 54.20 per share because it was a sober analysis of likely share value. No, it was that price because he was making another in a long string of his weed jokes. Now he will pay (probably a couple billion).

  47. 47.

    Ben Cisco

    Republicans suck at cause and effect. Take any issue affecting our country, analyze their position (based on what they DO, not what they say), and it becomes crystal clear.

  49. 49.

    gene108

    @pajaro:

    Employers aren’t hiring the first idiot through the door with a pulse. The “shortage” hasn’t made them that desperate.

    There are usually multiple applicants looking to change jobs in the positions I’ve looked at. Employers are still able to pick and choose who they hire.

  51. 51.

    germy shoemangler

    This thread is somewhat reassuring:

    Just a friendly reminder. Despite what you might hear, there has yet to be a variant that isn’t susceptible to the vaccines.

    Let’s stop the misinformation and look at the data, shall we? Yes, this includes BA.5. Let’s talk about that. ⬇️

    — Chise (@sailorrooscout) July 8, 2022

  54. 54.

    Argiope

    Last evening I went to a local candidates’ night attended mostly by folks in their 70s or above, because apparently that’s who can be arsed to show up on a Friday night in July.  One of these senior women reminded us all during the opening that it’s important to sign up to be poll workers.  After the candidates did their 3-minute stump thing, there was final applause and this lady yelled “Work the polls!”  I do not think she meant it how I took it, but homonyms are funny.

  56. 56.

    SFAW

    @lowtechcyclist: ​

    “Close ‘B’ clothes mode.”(Let’s see if anyone gets that.)

    Would your real name happen to be Uh Clem? You bozo.
    [No, I don’t know what they were riffing on when they wrote/spoke that line.]​
    OK, it’s back to the shadows, again, for me.​​​

  57. 57.

    gene108

    @Kropacetic:

    I’m all for the mission of knowing everyone who shows up within our borders, but our immigration system is slow and creates massive disruptions for small oversights.

    Of course people try to go around the ordinary process. The ones who say we can’t have reform until there’s border security have it exactly backwards (and are lying about their willingness to talk reform after security improved if the Obama administration is any guide).

    Ending the country quota system for Green Cards would speed up legal immigration immensely. Some categories of family sponsorship Green Card applications from Mexico are backlogged 20 years. The backlog’s about 8-10 years for employer sponsored Green Card applications for Indian nationals.

    I’ve heard of cases from Mexico where people decide to hell with waiting, because they want to be with their families and come here and stay illegally.

  59. 59.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @Ben Cisco: Republicans suck at cause and effect.

    Not at all. Take tax cuts for the rich.
    They increase the deficit.
    Don’t do a damn thing for the economy.
    Their rich friends get richer.

    They talk a lot about the first 2 ahead of the act, but the only effect they are looking for is the one they never speak of.

  60. 60.

    mrmoshpotato

    @Benw:

    I’m starting a Serf Music band called The Circumstances. Do you play the zither? 

    No, but I can learn.  I’ve always wanted to get people into a dither.

  61. 61.

    Immanentize

    @germy shoemangler: That is reassuring. But should I get shot 4 now or wait until a better vaccine is available this Fall? Or both?

    By the way, I am not worried at all about the Monkey pox, but the Monkey Paw Pox?
    Yikes!

  62. 62.

    narya

    @Immanentize: I went with “both.” I was eligible for a fourth shot awhile ago, so I got it in early May, figuring it would help with summer activities (yes, mostly outdoors, yes, still masking, but still).

  63. 63.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @SFAW: I read somewhere that whenever he is standing next to a woman who is taller than he (so about 90% of the time) they will put a box down for him to stand on.

  64. 64.

    germy shoemangler

    @Immanentize:

    I don’t know what to tell you about waiting vs. getting a booster now.

    I suppose it depends on your level of outside activity.  Do you often find yourself indoors with crowds of strangers or do you tend a lighthouse in Portsmouth Harbor?

  65. 65.

    SFAW

    @Ben Cisco:

    Republicans suck at cause and effect. Take any issue affecting our country, analyze their position (based on what they DO, not what they say), and it becomes crystal clear.

    But do they really? They usually get the results they want (i.e., harming The Others, reducing rights and benefits, etc.). I mean, it’s just that the results they want are so antithetical to non-wealthy humanity.​

  66. 66.

    Geminid

    I ran into some very sad news on Twitter last night. Ardent Democrat and “Proud Afro-Latina” Lindsey Vargas-Lamin passed away in her sleep Tuesday night. She tweeted as @lynnv378. I really respected her point of view as a New Yorker removed to the Poconos, and her honesty about her own vulnerabilities. LynnV’s joy at her son’s high school graduation last month was infectious, and it was hard to believe she is gone just a month later.

  67. 67.

    SFAW

    @OzarkHillbilly: ​
     
    “Do you know me and Alan Ladd are exactly the same height?”
    [Tag line from Robert Blake’s magnum opus, Electra Glide in Blue.]
    I think Alan Ladd was something like 5-foot-4.

  70. 70.

    mrmoshpotato

    @Immanentize:

    but in my nascent serf band, I do play the stick slapping mud. 

    What’s the musical (beans? suggestive text, you’re weird on a Saturday morning.) range of that?

  71. 71.

    germy shoemangler

    @OzarkHillbilly:  I read somewhere that whenever he is standing next to a woman who is taller than he (so about 90% of the time) they will put a box down for him to stand on.

    Why not simply dig a hole for the woman to stand in?  That would seem to be the republican way.

  73. 73.

    Danielx

    @Immanentize:

    I got the fourth shot a while back and came down with Covid four to five weeks ago. Got sick, didn’t run a fever but had sinus congestion, bad cough, BAD fatigue, etc. Still have a cough. I’d say get the shot now, the way cases are rising. You might still get it but severity will be lower. I figure it kept me out of the hospital.

  74. 74.

    Doug R

    @Soprano2:

     

    I heard an interview with a restaurant manager who said he got rid of printed menus because it was too hard to keep up with the price increases!

    This is where it makes sense to print up fresh ones daily or in front of the customer, waitstaff could then slide them into a recycle bin after ordering. Helps with COVID control as well.

  78. 78.

    Matt McIrvin

    I watched some TV news on the exercise machine at the gym. The right-wing political ads are all pushing the same line: “inflation is eating your paycheck; [liberal opponent] will make it worse.”

    The best counter-message I can think of is “the right’s anti-inflation plan is to take away your job.”

  81. 81.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Immanentize: I say get the shot now, if you’re allowed. Avoiding it in the hopes of getting a better version later is banking on too many uncertainties. If there’s a substantially better shot in the fall, they’ll probably let you get it after some reasonable interval.

  82. 82.

    NotMax

    ‘@Doug R

    Time was when chi-chi restaurants had two different menus.

    The version given women omitted the prices.

  83. 83.

    Doug R

    @Dorothy A. Winsor:

     

    I read recently that most refugees (which I realize is a very specific group) now give Canada instead of the US as their preferred destination. Can’t say I blame them

    With the shenanigans in 2016 and this Supreme Court, I’m kinda glad my grandfather picked Canada back when he took his family and fled Ukraine before the Holodomor

  86. 86.

    mrmoshpotato

    @Matt McIrvin:

    The best counter-message I can think of is “the right’s anti-inflation plan is to take away your job.” 

    And your Medicare, Social Security money, and then they’ll tell you to go fuck yourself for good measure.

  87. 87.

    OzarkHillbilly

    A good profile:

    ‘If I’d not got help, I’d probably be dead’: Jason Kander on PTSD, politics and advice from Obama

    This cracked me up:

    When someone suggested that he lower his sights and run for mayor of Kansas City instead, Kander grabbed the chance to ease the pressure. He was comfortably ahead in the polls and in fundraising when, on 1 October 2018, he walked into the Kansas City Veterans Affairs medical center and acknowledged suicidal thoughts going back 10 years.

    He was duly put in a windowless cell with pale-green walls and dressed in dark-green scrubs that were about five sizes too big. “So this was suicide watch,” he writes.

    Most of the staff instantly recognised him but a young resident psychiatrist did not. For half an hour, Kander bared his soul about the night terrors and his consuming fear of someone hurting himself and his family. Then the psychiatrist asked: “Do you have a particularly stressful job or something?”

    Kander said he was in politics and explained: “I almost ran for president, but then decided to run for mayor instead, and tomorrow I’m planning on calling that off.”

    Confused, the psychiatrist said: “You were going to run for president? Of what?”

    Kander told him: “Of the United States.”

    The psychiatrist asked: “Who told you that you could run for president?”

    Now irritated, Kander said: “I don’t know what to tell you, man. I mean, I spent an hour and a half talking it over one on one with Obama in his office, and he seemed to think it was a pretty good idea.”

    The psychiatrist sat back in his chair and remarked: “Barack Obama told you that you could run for president? So how often would you say you hear voices?”

  89. 89.

    Danielx

    Note: had a stent put in on May 9, so I’ve had a lot of conversations with health care workers of late. Jackals being (in my experience) smarter than the general populace, I doubt there are any here who are unvaccinated. I can tell you for an absolute fact that health care workers’ sympathy/compassion for the unvaccinated ranges between slim and none, and slim is out of town.

  90. 90.

    Dorothy A. Winsor

    @Doug R: My father was Canadian and my mother American. They chose to live in the US where I was born. In the last couple of years, I’ve sometimes wished they’d made the other choice

    @WereBear: Imm says it’s a mistake! Which I do too

  92. 92.

    sab

    @Geminid: I have a twenty year old t-shirt I love with ” Serfs up”. 19th century French peasants from Jean-Francois Millet paintings up on surfboards.

  93. 93.

    WereBear

    @Dorothy A. Winsor: My Canadian Twitter friends have Alberta and Calgary while we have Texas and Florida. Britain is a mess. Australian PM let their continent burn while he went on a prayer retrieat.

    This is a global problem. I don’t blame anyone deciding their life would be better elsewhere. It’s that politically the world is fragile and weird, and guessing ahead will be difficult as a result.

  94. 94.

    satby

    @Immanentize:  This.
    And a million in excess deaths too, so the true toll is closer to 2 million. Not only people in nursing homes: healthy young doctors, nurses, aides, service workers.
    May the Murderers Murdochs rot in hell forever.

  95. 95.

    Doug R

    @Dorothy A. Winsor:

     

    My father was Canadian and my mother American. They chose to live in the US where I was born. In the last couple of years, I’ve sometimes wished they’d made the other choice

    Both my parents ended up being Canadian but I was born in the USA when my dad was working on a degree. They did the “registration of birth abroad” so I had dual citizenship when we came back to Canada when I was 4. Lived in BC with some times in Alberta ever since.

  96. 96.

    sab

    @OzarkHillbilly: Back when I lived in Northern California the nature writer in our local paper laughingly recounted his photographing a cougar that turned out to be a golden retriever.

    ETA He was sure it was a cougar u til he saw the developed photo. Oops.

  97. 97.

    kalakal

    @realbtl: Yep, very true. SGs have the same scale length as Les Pauls, ES335 etcetc 24.75 ins. Strats & Teles go for 35.5 ins. . Heavy metal types such as Schecter get longer still. It is noticable how the neck is positioned relative to the body as Amir says. The center of gravity of a LP vs a Strat is definitely a thing and SGs were designed as an answer to Strats

  99. 99.

    Baud

    @OzarkHillbilly:

    The psychiatrist sat back in his chair and remarked: “Barack Obama told you that you could run for president? So how often would you say you hear voices?”

     
    That’s why I don’t go to shrinks.

  101. 101.

    sab

    @Immanentize: I have noticed that in our grocery store cashiers and baggerrs that had been there for twenty+ years aren’t there anymore. There used to be not much turnover, and now everyone is new.

  105. 105.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @Baud: I went to a shrink for depression once, but it was too depressing when I realized he didn’t have time for me.

  110. 110.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @Immanentize: The other pieces may well have been fractured by the shock wave. Even if cracks were not obvious they might develop over time.

  112. 112.

    raven

    @raven:

    Just after 4 a.m., an individual left an explo- sive device at the Guidestones that exploded, destroying one of the wings of the monument. Later in the af- ternoon, the Elbert County Board of Com- missioners, who owned the property, made the decision to demolish the entire structure due to “safety reasons” and after a request from the Geor- gia Bureau of Investigation.

     

    “Until I see a video that shows me any- thing but what looked like lightning or the hand of God moving on a situation, I’m going to believe it was God,” Taylor said in the video.

  117. 117.

    Immanentize

    @raven: but demolish? No matter what, it had significance. Why not take it to a basement somewhere and a museum later? Lots of folks made their living off that tourist trade. It bums me out as I feel it was a Xian hit job and the police are complicit.

    There is footage from a security cam of the car leaving. They must have viddy of the car arriving and the person placing the bomb.

  120. 120.

    kalakal

    @realbtl:  I’m more of a Strat fan myself. Partly it’s because when I play sitting down Strats balance nicely on my right leg whereas LPs  with the shorter neck are trying to tip off to the right. Haven’t played an SG in years, I remember liking one but it got stolen and I didn’t have the cash to replace it at the time.

  126. 126.

    Jager

    @Pete Mack:

    The woman. who has been cutting my wife’s hair since we moved to California 18 years ago, her husband is a truck driver. He and his co-driver keep the truck moving 20 hours a day, 7 days a week. The hours it isn’t moving, they are fueling, showering, etc. He gets 4 days off every 3 weeks, the days off are spent wherever the truck is…it pays 9ok a year, good benefits, but it really sucks.

  130. 130.

    HinTN

    @Danielx: Did you test positive? I’ve had the second booster (late April) and just had all the symptoms with no fever and tested negative twice. Lasted about two days ???

  131. 131.

    WaterGirl

    @Immanentize: I put myself through college working as a grocery store cashier.

    Big freeze in Florida in February!  Price of citrus fruit goes WAY up because of the freeze!

    Hint: prices never come back down.

  132. 132.

    gene108

    @OzarkHillbilly:

    read somewhere that whenever he is standing next to a woman who is taller than he (so about 90% of the time) they will put a box down for him to stand on.

    They’ve been putting boxes down for leading men to stand on, so the men won’t be towered over by leading ladies since time immemorial in Hollywood.

    Cruse isn’t the first and won’t be the last this trick is used for.

  134. 134.

    Immanentize

    @raven: big. But they were broken, and certainly the gov’t has warehouses! Like in Raiders of the Lost Arc? :-)

    ETA reminds me of the most insightful of all your comments about the Taliban destroying the Buddhas….

  136. 136.

    Immanentize

    @Raven: OK, How about DOT, those guys have massive garages! At least here where we have to store snow equipment?

  137. 137.

    Geminid

    @raven: Also, most of the capstone was still left. That must have been a couple of tons by itself.

    I hope they get whoever did this. The local DA is talking a lot of prison time if they do. I noticed there was surveillance video of the explosion. I wonder if there’s video of the guy placing the charge.

    The Guidestones seem like a New Age project. I knew people in the 1970s who would have gotten behind it.

  138. 138.

    James E Powell

    @realbtl:

    I started out on a Les Paul Deluxe so I thought the heft of it was normal. Played them for most of my younger days then morphed into a Telecaster guy. I had LPs, but rarely played them. Sold them, bought one of them back, sold it again. I sometimes have dreams where I’m playing it, but no real desire to have another one. If I had that free cash, I’d get something else.

  140. 140.

    kalakal

    @gene108: Hollywood had that problem with Audie Murphy. With a truly incredible combat record (he was awarded every combat medal for valor) stereotype expected a 6ft4in mound of muscle with a face like a rock. Instead he was baby faced, 5ft5in and 112lbs. He totally blew the cliche of what a tough guy looks like out of the water.

  145. 145.

    Geminid

    @Immanentize: No need for a garage. But taking the stones down safely would have entailed a very powerful crane and some challenging rigging. The mystery man who had the Guidestones put up in 1980 is off the scene, apparently, so there was no one to pay.

    I’m kind of sorry they demolished the remaining stones so quickly, but I can see why they did.

  146. 146.

    geg6

    @HinTN:

    Somewhat the same here, but I tested negative 3 times and it lasted almost a week.  Three days of which were part of my week of vacation. Finally feel somewhat human today.  Been told by friends and relatives that this is a nasty summer cold that’s going around.

  148. 148.

    Matt McIrvin

    @danielx: PCR tests are way more sensitive and will continue to test positive for quite a while after you’re no longer contagious.

  150. 150.

    Matt McIrvin

    @gene108: Reminds me of the Monty Python sketch with Carol Cleveland as the actress who always acts in a trench. “I played Mrs. Galileo in a groove and I played Mrs. Jesus Christ in a geological syncline!”

  151. 151.

    Soprano2

    @gene108: Employers aren’t hiring the first idiot through the door with a pulse. The “shortage” hasn’t made them that desperate.

    This year, no, there are more applicants. Last year, our manager hired some people we normally never would have because we needed people and there were few applicants.

  152. 152.

    Ruckus

    @debbie:

    “We’re evolving backwards, it seems.”

    WE are not evolving backwards.

    The right is devolving backwards. They want what they are comfortable with, the early 1900s. Or earlier. They like unearned power, they like controlling the money, they like controlling everything. What they don’t like is actual democracy, where people other than them, the monied class, have any power/say in their lives. They want production, not democracy. They want their bank accounts to grow, they want the working class to always be owing/uncomfortable/subservient.

    And that is not what a democracy is all about, not what this country supposedly stands for, not democratic values. They want the lower classes to be in poverty, so they have the control and money. Think Russia, where the upper class live in mansions, are massively rich, control everything and all the pions that make them rich have an average wage of $20K. People ask why a number of them went to Russia on the 4th of July that year. It’s because they want to be like Russia. What a fucking delight that wouldn’t be.

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