Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

I’m sure you banged some questionable people yourself. We’re allowed to grow past that.

with the Kraken taking a plea, the Cheese stands alone.

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

We’re not going back!

If ‘weird’ was the finish line, they ran through the tape and kept running.

Our job is not to persuade republicans but to defeat them.

Live so that if you miss a day of work people aren’t hoping you’re dead.

Black Jesus loves a paper trail.

Dear media: perhaps we ought to let Donald Trump speak for himself!

“Joe Biden deserved better than he got from some folks in his own party.”

The US Supreme Court is on the ballot in november.

Bad people in a position to do bad things will do bad things because they are bad people. End of story.

Republicans don’t want a speaker to lead them; they want a hostage.

A norm that restrains only one side really isn’t a norm – it’s a trap.

Tick tock motherfuckers!

Don’t expect peaches from an apple tree.

People are weird.

Dear Washington Post, you are the darkness now.

“What are Republicans afraid of?” Everything.

I might just take the rest of the day off and do even more nothing than usual.

An unpunished coup is a training exercise.

Putting aside our relentless self-interest because the moral imperative is crystal clear.

Hey Washington Post, “Democracy Dies in Darkness” is supposed to be a warning, not a mission statement.

Wow, I can’t imagine what it was like to comment in morse code.

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Squishable New Year’s Eve Open Thread

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75Comments

  2. 2.

    Scout211

    (Reposted from the football thread).

    Happy New Year’s Eve to everyone.

    We are having a bit of a rough time here in NorCal for the past 24 hours with the first of two atmospheric rivers bringing rain, rain, rain and wind, wind, wind causing flooding, road closures and evacuations.  It’s been a long day.

    Here are some highlights on CNN. 

  7. 7.

    Chetan Murthy

    @Scout211: Here in SF, in Noe Valley (1.5mi from downtown, 1-4 story houses, cheek-by-jowl, so pretty dense) a big-ass tree came down.  I don’t know how to share a pic on this blog, or I’d do so.  Looking at the roots, it seems like basically the downpour loosened-up the roots (b/c not much root system there), and then it just tipped over.  I mean, not due to wind (I don’t think we’ve been having all that much wind — just a vertical wall of water).  Or maybe the roots were just rotten-thru.  For such a big tree, so little root bulb.

  11. 11.

    Damned at Random

    Watching the Peach Bowl and listening to the spousal unit and one cat snore. I swear when we got married he could stay awake watching football.

  12. 12.

    FelonyGovt

    Happy New Year! My hockey team lost in a stinker of a game I attended today. Now home for the evening, relaxing with some Prosecco.

  13. 13.

    CaseyL

    @Scout211: That’s awful for the people, houses, streets, and animals getting rained on – but hopefully (fingers crossed!) it will ease the drought a bit.

    I read some of the local reporting, and they are saying the heavy rains will ease a drought a little in some places, but there needs to be a lot more of this kind of weather to make a long-term difference.

    And I haven’t heard much about the rain getting as far south as the Salton Sea or  Mono Lake, which are in very, very bad shape.

  15. 15.

    Sister Golden Bear

    @Chetan Murthy: Down on the SF Peninsula* the rain is finally easing off (hopefully for a day before the next storm hits).

    Much of the SF Bay Area has clay soil, and thanks to prior rainfall the ground was pretty much saturated even before today’s storm, and we had a hard rain for hours. Lots of streets, highways and freeways closed due to flooding.

    My house got flooded as well — 3 inches of water in the front yard, 2 inches in the garage — because the sump pump for drainage system couldn’t keep up. Had to get a second pump to help, and then to injury to insult, while trying to deal with everything I slipped and messed up my knee. Fortunately, I see my PT on Monday.

    So at this point I’m more than happy to send 2022 on it’s way.

    *I’m near Palo Alto (Stanfurd U.)

  16. 16.

    Chetan Murthy

    @Sister Golden Bear: I read that low-lying areas were gonna get flooded; I thought instantly  of the Bayview district in SF, but forgot that down in the Valley, Palo Alto and Mountain View are pretty low-lying too.  Oof!  I hope you don’t get too badly — we need the water, but … up in the mountains, not down here!

    P.S. I live in Noe Valley, at the foot of Diamond Heights, so … everything flows downhill.  But for sure, there are some big-ass trees here, and I don’t relish the thought of one of them losing their roots.

  17. 17.

    Sister Golden Bear

    @CaseyL: The Salton Sea isn’t a water source because it’s so polluted from farm runoff make it undrinkable. Unfortunately the entire lake is pretty much dead, and evaporating bit by bit.

    As far as Mono Lake, the Mammoth Mountain ski resort, which is a little south, reports a 15-foot base (yes feet, seriously) and is expecting to get 12-18 inches tonight. The area normally has 30- to 40-feet of snow, so it’s , and the entire Sierra snowpack is doing extremely well as far. With it being a La Niña year, we’ve got several storms lined up during the next week.

  18. 18.

    Alison Rose

    @Chetan Murthy: I have a couple friends in the Santa Cruz mountains and I’ve been worried about them, but thankfully they both live at high enough elevation that they’re doing okay. Although there are downed trees not far away.

    I’ve been gloating just a touch every time I glance out the window from my 3rd floor apartment and see someone walking their dog in the courtyard. One point for the cat ladies!

  20. 20.

    Chetan Murthy

    @Sister Golden Bear:

    The entire Sierra snowpack is doing extremely well so far.

    That’s great news!  Thank for sharing that!  I always worry when we go so long during the winter months without rain.  If nothing else, it makes me worry for the fire season.

  21. 21.

    Wyatt Salamanca

    “This one is for the pedants.”

    For future reference, you should consider posting grammar and usage questions to English Language & Usage Stack Exchange https://english.stackexchange.com/ a question and answer site for linguists, etymologists, and serious English language enthusiasts.

    Happy New Year!

  23. 23.

    Sister Golden Bear

    @Chetan Murthy: Yeah, a lot area around Palo Alto area was former marshland. So it also had flooding during the recent King Tide.

    I’ve got 60-foot oak in my backyard, and a couple 40-foot trees in front, so during storms I always have a little anxiety about them falling over.

  24. 24.

    m.j.

    Everyone likes to talk about Christmas movies, but I just got done watching one of my favorite New Year’s movies , “The Poseiden Adventure,” from 1972.

  25. 25.

    oldster

    @mrmoshpotato:

    If you need “squishable thread” explained, are you likely to understand “bigfooted”?

    (I think I sorta picked them both up from context long ago, but I’d be hard-pressed to give a strict definition of either.)

  26. 26.

    JanieM

    @oldster:

    If you need “squishable thread” explained, are you likely to understand “bigfooted”?

    I can attest that it’s possible…

    ETA: Although I had never bothered to wonder if “squishable” meant anything I needed to grasp.

  27. 27.

    AJ of the Mustard Search and Rescue Team

    Huge gratitude to you all, Cole, WG, all the front pagers as we close out the year.

    Ty for helping me to stay sane ish in 2022 🙏🏻

  28. 28.

    mvr

    Happy New Year to all. This place has helped keep me relatively sane since the GWB years and I thank all the many generations of front pagers, posters, photo contributors, lurkers and Cole for that!

  34. 34.

    oldster

    @JanieM:

    Strange that neither has its own entry yet.

    I’d say that you and James E. Powell should lead the charge on this one — I have been content to muddle along without clarification.

  37. 37.

    Dan B

    @Chetan Murthy:  Trees have shallow roots spread out like a pancake. In urban settings lack of oxygen limits the roots oxygen so they can be further restricted but surprisingly the bigger stress is turf.  Grasses are alleopathic which means they produce toxins to limit tree roots.  It’s a rough world out there.

  38. 38.

    frosty

    @JanieM: ​The lexicon is a bit out of date. Someone should take a hack at it (as in “Someone by that man a beer!” shouted out in a bar.)

    “Someone” most definitely would not include WaterGirl!

  40. 40.

    Narya

    Or, for non-monagamous folks, Valentines’ Day…

    cannot stay awake any longer; good night, you jackals.

  42. 42.

    WaterGirl

    @James E Powell: Betty Cracker started it.  I think she uses it when she’s putting up a morning thread in a slot where Anne Laurie typically has a post up, but doesn’t that morning.

    It’s basically saying to the other front-pagers: Feel free to step on this post.

    I used it tonight because I was putting up yet another post today because there hadn’t been a lot of posting from others today.  But if someone else came along with something to post, they shouldn’t let my scheduled post stop them.

    edit:  mrmoshpotato said it better, and shorter.

    If something else comes up, this post can get bigfooted.

  47. 47.

    frosty

    Happy New Year jackals! I’m hoping for a better 2023, but thankful that politically 2022 wasn’t too bad.

  48. 48.

    frosty

    @WaterGirl: I for one am happy to know that “squishable” has a meaning, although I’ve liked it just for the sound of it.

    Of course Betty C would have coined it!

  49. 49.

    SiubhanDuinne

    Happy 2023, everyone!!

    Hadn’t planned to stay up this late, but I wanted to see the final OSU-UGA score, and I’m glad I did!

    And may not get to sleep for a while in any case. The fireworks have been going since 6:00 pm and haven’t let up, and the stroke of midnight merely encouraged more and louder.

  50. 50.

    Wyatt Salamanca

    @WaterGirl:

    I simply suggested it as an alternative resource for challenging questions of grammar and usage because it attracts many seasoned experts in the field.

  51. 51.

    MisterForkbeard

    Happy New Year!

    We have a weird tradition in our house. The girls are still pretty young, and they first started to get old enough to notice holidays at the beginning of the pandemic. We improvised and it stuck.

    So now, we celebrate New Years by watching the countdown in Animal Crossing, and then the girls watch the in-game fireworks shoe. And dance and holler.

  52. 52.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    @frosty:

    You and me both. I was bracing for Ultimate MAGA before November. It wasn’t until the last week before the election that I started to feel more optimism. Why, I can’t say. I guess it felt better to be hopeful. It helped writing post cards

  53. 53.

    frosty

    @SiubhanDuinne: Not as many fireworks here as there have been in other years. I think it’s from the rainy day. Nobody wants to go outside even though it’s fairly warm.

  55. 55.

    WaterGirl

    FYI:   The new BJ site was rolled out in mid-November of 2019.

    Anne Laurie – who wrote the first Lexicon – was planning to update the Lexicon in the new year, once the dust had settled on the new site rollout.

    Now if only I could think of something that happened early in 2020, shortly after the rollout, that might have taken up a lot of Anne Laurie’s time and thrown a wrench in that plan.

    Give me a minute and I’m sure it will come to me!  :-)

  56. 56.

    frosty

    @WaterGirl: Funny! I just looked at it, and at least through the Bs it’s not quite as outdated as I thought, as in not as many that should be deleted because Old News. I’m sure there’s some new stuff that should be added though.

  59. 59.

    Gin & Tonic

    @Alison Rose: I can tell you 2023 seems a lot like 2022 so far. And some morons somewhere in my area are setting off explosives (or firing guns) and our poor dog is petrified.

  62. 62.

    RaflW

    I’d like to squish this NYE (it’s 10:26pm here). My multi-vaxed partner tested positive for Covid today. We’re booked on a trip-of-a-lifetime journey to Kenya departing Jan 5. Ugh.

    The phone triage nurse at our clinic did say that if his fever breaks and his coughing is manageable in time, he could probably still go. I have to stay healthy, though. He self-banished to the guest room at 4am when he realized he was getting sick.

    We’re pretty careful, but he does go to the rec center to swim. It’s worked fine for quite a while. The pool area is huge and usually uncrowded. But there’s a short period in the shower/locker area where he can’t mask for obvious reasons. Dang.

    On the ‘upside’, we now have a fingertip pulse oximeter! (And, full disclosure, I had the ‘rona in August, caught from a fellow retreat camper, I operated on the false assumption that the screen dining hall was breezy enough to be ‘safe’.)

  66. 66.

    Fake Irishman

    @Sister Golden Bear:

    Sorry to hear about your predicament. One of my buddies threw out his back bailing water out of his basement in San Mateo this morning under similar circumstances.

  67. 67.

    TriassicSands

    @Sister Golden Bear:

    I have several 80 to 100+ foot tall Douglas Firs and Hemlocks in my yard. If one falls the wrong way, I’m a goner. Fortunately, the winds normally come from a direction that would cause the biggest trees to fall away from me.

    Whenever we get a wind storm the ground is covered with branches, but the most recent storm brought down some fairly large limbs. One of the smaller ones went right through my shop roof. It came from quite a height and had built up significant velocity by the time it hit.

    My earliest memory of Washington State is from my first visit here in the 70s. We arrived in a campground where two people had been killed a few days earlier when a large tree fell on their tent.

    Good luck with your trees.

  69. 69.

    NotMax

    Sounds like a war zone outside. At least the lawn isn’t bone dry. Stuff shot off doesn’t by any stretch of the imagination have to return to Earth in the same yard.

    Too early still but usually am “treated to” a rain of ashes and particles heard sprinkling on the metal roof at the appointed hour.

  70. 70.

    Chetan Murthy

    @NotMax:

    Stuff shot off doesn’t by any stretch of the imagination have to return to Earth in the same yard.

    Do you remember that NYE a few years back when they had that helicopter filming above LA, and it looked like a goddamn war zone down there?  Just fireworks going off from what seemed like every goddamn backyard.  Craaaaazy.  [I think it was NYE, but I’m pretty sure it was LA]

  71. 71.

    Hoppie

    @Alison Rose:

    In 1999 we visited friends on Maui so we could experience the last second of the 1900s.  I stayed up to watch the whole 24 hours from Kiribati to Hawaii.  History trivia:  it was the day Boris Yeltsin revealed Vlad Putin as his heir.

  72. 72.

    RaflW

    @Chetan Murthy: It’s not clearcut. Being over 50 it’s possible to get it, but he has low risk factors and if he rebounds in Kenya (rebounds are common, I think more so than is tracked, but that’s a hunch) it’s actually way more of a PITA there!

  73. 73.

    Chetan Murthy

    @RaflW: I’ve read that there’s some evidence that the way to treat a rebound is another course of Pax ?  Maybe you could get your doc to prescribe two courses, so you could take one with you on the trip?  [ok,  ok, I’m just clutching at straws here]

  74. 74.

    James E Powell

    @Chetan Murthy:

    One of the local news stations did a video of the Los Angeles basin when the Dodgers won the World Series – it was during a red flag, no fires period – showing fireworks going off all over from Pico Rivera to Downey to Long Beach to Hawthorne to Culver City. It was a major moment of abject stupidity.

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