You guys need an open thread. Thanks for the kind words in my book thread!
HumboldtBlue sent this to me:
When you want to be Barack when you grow up…🤣🤣🤣 pic.twitter.com/E2Jgg2tbs6
— 🌻🌊🇺🇸Mr. Resister🇵🇷🌊🌻 (@MisterResiste12) April 19, 2023
And this morning, Steve Hartman brought all the feels:
What’s everyone up to today? I was going to do some gardening after I walked the dogs, but now I think I might nap instead.
This is a completely open thread
TaMara’s New Book – Recipe for Murder!
frosty
Been out walking looking at birds and now I’m thinking a nap would be much better than balancing the checkbook and filing three months worth of financial crap. So I’m off!
Baud
CRT has gone too far!
Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg
Finally got home from South Africa. The flight from Johannesburg to ATL is 16.5 hrs.
Baud
@Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg:
Pfft. I had a three-leg 30 hour return flight through Europe from SA.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
Doing a lot of laying around this weekend. My excuse is that I had a couple of vaccinations on Friday and they wiped me out.
Also did a lot of bookkeeping this past week. Don’t judge me, but while preparing my ’22 taxes (or rather filing the extension) I discovered that I’d never filed ’21 after getting the extension. Just totally slipped my mind. So I spent much of the week working on and filing those.
Uncle Sam owes me, not vice versa, so I’m pretty sure I’m not going to jail.
Sure Lurkalot
@Baud: Did you book that 30 hour itinerary to save money or did an airline do that to you? 30 hours of canned air must’ve been hard!
Baud
@Sure Lurkalot:
Money.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@Baud: Yikes.
We’re such self-indulgent softies that our flight to Europe at the end of summer will have two overnight layovers.
JWR
Alito is to reason as Thomas is to ethics, and vise versa.
lurker
@Sure Lurkalot: 3 hours of canned air is hard … 30 hours even harder …
fortunately, they do mix in atmospheric air with the recycled air in the cabin, or we would eventually suffocate …
but anyone who has been on a long flight can recognize the way the recycled air develops unique scents…
raven
@Baud: Fly from Ft Knox to Ft Lewis in a C130 and get back to me!
Baud
@Ceci n est pas mon nym:
Where? Aircraft carriers?
WaterGirl
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: You guys had a lot going on. No one is going to judge you here!
bbleh
@Baud: and now race-transitioning! It’s wokeness squared!
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@Baud: Hah!
No, we’re going Icelandair for reasons. They had us going Philly to Boston, Boston to Reykjavik and then Reykjavik to Frankfurt. I didn’t like the timing so decided to book us overnight in Reykjavik, sleep in a hotel instead of a plane.
Then they just told us the Philly-Boston flight (on Jet Blue) had been rescheduled. The new arrival time in Boston was 90 minutes AFTER the departure to Reykjavik, so I thought that connection might be a little hard to make. We said the hell with the short flight, we’ll take the Acela up to Boston the night before.
I was formerly a frequent Amtrak commuter and have so many points stored up that I basically ride Amtrak for free.
Ksmiami
@Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg: omg
Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg
@Baud:
I did that before while mining for miles. That sucked, too, but this was def the longest single leg I ever did.
Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg
@Sure Lurkalot:
You can build a fuckton of freebie and upgrade status with the psychotic accounting the airlines have on putting together an unpleasant number of segments. If you have some extra time, you can get really creative on putting those together with partner airlines.
mrmoshpotato
@Ceci n est pas mon nym:
With the security/check-in at the airport, taking Amtrak is probably less time too.
Kay
The original plan was to pass a ban at 15 weeks and therefore own the libs who would have to vote against it, but the polling must be absolutely horrible so the new plan is to ….run away.
Dangerman
Flew into the OLD Hong Kong airport (Kai Tak?) circa 1996. Outside of the one (and, thankfully, only) near miss (that was in Ontario, CA), most wild landing ever.
First, you go through a canyon between skyscrapers and, I shit you not, you could look in and see what was on the TV. Maybe not in detail, but it was clearly visible …
… but when the pilot comes on and warns “now, just before touchdown, we are going to turn hard right; this is planned, please don’t panic”, well, I’ve confessed that I don’t like to fly and this was enough to need a change of clothes.
This video captures it fairly well.
Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg
@Kay:
Hey, if it a nationwide ban is done judicially, they can claim “it wasn’t my fault”.
Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg
@Dangerman:
Fuuuuuuuuuuck……
Kay
@Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg:
I don’t think that works for them. They spent 50 years branding as the anti choice Party. If their courts ban abortion they’ll be blamed. They own anti choice at the state level, at the federal level, in the courts…
The sort of elite Catholic anti choicers who are in the lead here thought that’s how it would play out. They would ban it in the states they control and those bans would be popular and create a national shift. It didn’t happen. They were just wrong- I think because they live in absolute Right wing bubble but opinions vary I guess as to “why”.
mrmoshpotato
@Dangerman: Wow! Yikes!
Kay
@Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg:
They didn’t pass a House ban prior to the 2022 election and they had the anti choice drag anyway. They’ve already failed at blaming it on courts.
Jeffro
@Kay: they not only caught the car, they got ahead of themselves in legislature after legislature, and it’s killing them electorally.
(links not necessary; you all have seen the stories)
These people went BERSERK and now Alito’s like “you blew it…we were supposed to quietly keep chipping away at reproductive rights while (most importantly) NOT LOSING ELECTIONS! All my hard work!”
mrmoshpotato
@Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg: They can’t run away from this after 50 years of jerking off about banning abortion rights.
Fuck ’em! -efgoldman
Sure Lurkalot
@lurker: I edited the 3 to 30 just in time!
I do my best to choose the shortest itinerary I can because anecdotal or not, long haul flights make me feel like shit. It’s the air and the cramped and the insomnia and the odor and…and…and. The last long one I did was an 8 hour from Oahu to Denver and it was miserable.
Since I can’t sleep, no way could I do 30 hours.
Ruckus
@Dangerman:
That is a pretty hard turn with wheels and full flaps down. And then to drop in over homes and a major highway, in almost a dive. Wow. I’ve flown a lot of miles and into some rather crappy approaches but that one is I believe, the worst.
WaterGirl
@Jeffro:
We’re not even going to make exceptions for the life of the mother who might even still be a child herself.
Jeffro
@WaterGirl: I knew I missed one.
Still…look at that list! Any one item is nuts; the list is completely insane.
Mike S. (Now with a Democratic Congressperson!)
@Sure Lurkalot: I could never sleep on planes either, but on our 12 hour red-eye flight from Santiago, Chile to Newark, NJ in Dec 2019 I finally got to sleep with my noise canceling headphones, a hat pulled down over my eyes * AND a high enough foam neck support (bought in the airport in Punta Arenas, yay!)
Any other suggestions from anyone are welcome for future flights. We’re thinking about South Africa too!
WaterGirl
Sure Lurkalot
@Dangerman: That is frightening! I flew into Jackson Hole a couple of times and it was similarly terrifying. Before you land, you see the ground out of one window and the sky out of another. Box canyons…yikes!
WaterGirl
@Jeffro:
They are like the kid who goes off to college and implodes because they don’t know how to handle their new-found freedom.
I can drink! I can smoke! I can get high! I can have sex with anyone I want! I don’t have to go to class!
Ruckus
@Kay:
Why?
To be blunt (and yes I am so equipped) it is that they feel their penises are losing power and they have to assert the last vestige of dominance. Equality? NO DAMN WAY. They have to control something and they have lost skin color, job entitlement, and now, being equal to a person that doesn’t have one? That is against the last straw. They think any pregnancy is at least half theirs and to retain control they have to not allow woman to have any agency whatsoever. It is of course bullshit but then that’s never stopped a shitty person with an outie in any way before. They are old men with a possibly no longer working johnson so everyone else is going to have to pay for that.
Geminid
@Jeffro: I noticed that Virginia Republicans would not put their proposed 15 week abortion ban to a vote by the House of Delegates last session. They pointed out that that it would only get stopped in the state Senate, but that factor did not stop them from passing all kinds of other stupid bills.
Republicans have a 52-48 advantage in the lower house. I wonder if they had 50 votes for the ban. Or maybe some delegates told Speaker Gilbert that their reelection was looking tough enough already even without that vote.
Sure Lurkalot
@Mike S. (Now with a Democratic Congressperson!): The only time I slept on a flight was using Lunesta on an 13 hour to New Zealand. Unfortunately, that drug doesn’t agree with me but I guess I wouldn’t rule it out for the future.
Lately, my wanderlust and my hatred of air travel are at war and I’m not sure what’s going to win.
JWR
@Kay:
I saw a few clips of Pence this morning and he said that Mifepristone should be banned nationally, (because of all the murdered children), so this push by House Republicans to give up on a national ban might not sit very well with him.
Eh, let ’em fight. They’re much more useful this way. ;)
Sure Lurkalot
@WaterGirl:
Did you teach my Latin 101 class?
Kay
@Jeffro:
I was reading some mainstream article about a 6 week ban and it said “effectively a complete ban” which is true. I was amazed it was in there. Must have slipped past the censors.
Ruckus
We are seeing the last vestiges of the actual concept of the original founders and many of the signers of the constitution. And that is than the old white, landowners/leaders/conservatives know better than anyone else about everything and are going to control everything.
This is why the senate is a 6 yr/2 per state position and the house is 2 yrs by district, and why a while back the house was limited in membership to a fixed number. The set up of our government is about control by old white wealth. Of course the population is a bit more now the states are often a lot bigger and more populated than the entire country was (and yes I live in a county that is more populous than 40 states, so my representation is a bit different than someone from say Kansas.)
Baud
@WaterGirl:
Sadly, the generation that should feel a little bad about this is millennials.
Baud
@Kay:
Since it was never to going to be a national rule guaranteeing 15 weeks, it was ludicrous from the get-go.
WaterGirl
@Baud: Say more?
EmbraceYourInnerCrone
@raven: I will whine more! Fly in a C-131 from: McChord AFB in Washington state, to Nebraska, to Elmendorf Alaska, to Japan (I forget which city) to Seoul, Korea. Nothing like flying facing backwards, facing your luggae and equipment which is on a pallet, in tin can with one window on each side of the plane. You (as you know) get earplugs handed to you when you board cuz it’s hella Loud. I did like that at each place when we reboarded they handed us a box lunch (sandwich, apple, juice or water. Good times…
Baud
@WaterGirl:
They’re a more numerous and older cohort, and at least as liberal, as Gen Z, but Gen Z is where the action is at.
At least older generations have the excuse that a lot of their members are conservative.
WaterGirl
@Baud: Ah.
frosty
@Mike S. (Now with a Democratic Congressperson!): Lan Chile gave all their overnight passengers a flight kit that included an eye mask, toothbrush, and toothpaste, and a comb. No earplugs though, a major requirement for me.
delphinium
Gee Mike, by that logic then we should ban guns and ammo nationally too right? And funny how letting women die due to lack of health care because of their legislation is never considered murder by these fucking wankers.
AlaskaReader
@Baud: Those older generations failed by making excuses for, and giving air to their so-called conservative members.
Baud
@AlaskaReader:
Sounds like younger people need to do something about that.
Dan B
@delphinium: Well, since Pence probably believes that fetuses are pure and innocent that once born they’re sinners so dead schoolkids is sad but not the tragedy of killing an innocent. Pretzel logic.
delphinium
@Dan B:
Yep, I get that is the belief of many pro-lifers. But Pence said “children” and a fetus is not a child.
Jackie
@JWR: Pence and his pious bleating about “protecting the sanctity of life” to ban abortion nationally – yet justifying shooting a 16 yr old teenager for knocking on the wrong door and shooting a young woman for using the wrong driveway to turn around. The sanctity of life apparently also doesn’t apply to little children getting gunned down while in school… 😡😤😡🤯
AlaskaReader
@Baud: Nah. That’s just laying off the problem on others.
Seems to me it should be on those older people who should have stepped up to that responsibility long ago.
Matt McIrvin
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: We just flew from Barcelona to Newark and our connection to Boston was cancelled because of the terrible weather down South (the plane was grounded in Miami, I think). Ended up renting a car to get home, because half the flights on the East Coast had been cancelled, all transport and hotels were jammed, and our experience sleeping in an airport terminal a few years ago was not something we wanted to repeat. Had a nice dinner at a diner in Paramus, New Jersey.
Baud
@AlaskaReader:
Can’t go back in time. So either young people take on the responsibility or they can explain to their children how it was someone else’s fault.
Matt McIrvin
@Dan B: But if they’re pure and innocent, they’ll go straight to Heaven! Let them be born and there’s a nonzero probability of them being damned to Hell, so the expectation value of utility of letting them live is negative infinity. Therefore, everyone should be aborted as soon as possible.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
Pascal’s Wager in your face!
kalakal
@EmbraceYourInnerCrone:
Luxury! . A C-47 from Jakarta to Prabumulih Still fully kitted out to WW2 levels of comfort.
And that was after 38 hours from Manchester to Jakarta ( admittedly on BOAC so at least comfortable)
Matt McIrvin
@Dangerman: The Kai Tak Heart Attack! There was a hill with a big checkerboard marked on it as a visual marker for the turn.
AlaskaReader
@Baud: Don’t have to go back in time.
Boomers right now can stop being so tolerant of the ‘conservative’ members of their age group,
…they can stop giving them air,
…and they can begin to determinedly show them the scorn they deserve.
You know, make up for all the apathy that allowed this crap to fester to the point we’re at now.
Bonus: Start now setting better examples for those who suffer because of boomer apathy.
Baud
@AlaskaReader:
Sure, but we can’t make anyone do anything. I’m certainly not going to wait for “boomers” to get better. Whether anyone else does is up to them.
Gen Z seems to have chosen they don’t want to wait, and I applaud them for that.
AlaskaReader
@Baud: Nobody has to ‘wait’ for others to do better.
Queen of Lurkers
@Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg: Dubai to DFW is 16.5 hrs. Or Doha to DFW — same difference on different airline. For those of us of S. Asian extraction, this is a common route and usually prefaced by another 4-5 hr flight from one of the Indian cities. It’s a bit less time going east. This summer, I am traveling the European route. More time, but easier on the body. Overnight layover in Helsinki on the return leg, which I am excited about.
Baud
@AlaskaReader:
Right, they don’t have to. It’s a choice. I applaud those who choose to act.
AlaskaReader
@Baud:
I’m not proposing going back in time, I’m proposing that people start now being less tolerant of conservatives and start showing them the scorn they are due.
Much of todays problems were exacerbated by the lack of willingness to confront the hypocrisy and hate. The lack of soundly rejecting all those who gave that hypocrisy and hate room to grow.
This apathy, this very real problem is alive today, each time someone makes excuses for the right wing and right wing supporters. Each time someone gives the right air.
I’m thinking it’s better if people explain to themselves that they can do better from this point forward.
No one among us isn’t guilty of giving conservatives a pass.
There’s certainly no justification to ever do so in the future.
As you say, ….it’s a choice.
Baud
@AlaskaReader:
Seconded.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Baud:
Aren’t Millennials voting just as much? I remember it wasn’t that long ago that Millennials occupied a similar role as Gen Z in the late 00s and early 2010s with Obama’s election and re-election
UncleEbeneezer
First world problem for sure, but it is so annoying that when you try and find something good to watch by searching on your smart tv, it’s still damn near impossible because so many of the results that come up are for a streaming service we don’t have, or it requires an additional subscription or add-on. I swear I spent like and hour searching for movies that I have always wanted to watch and can now since my wife is out of town (mostly horror and stuff that she doesn’t love) and so many were either unavailable or I’d have to pay extra $ to access. Ugh.. /rant
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@UncleEbeneezer:
In the same boat with Amazon Prime. If it’s not on Prime ot Tubi, etc, I’m SOL. I really wanted to watch all of the James Bond movies recently, but they all have to be bought/rented : (
NotMax
@UncleEbeneezer
Extremely helpful is conducting searches on Just Watch. Shows streaming options segregated by free or not and easy to tell on which services the searched for programming is currently available.
anitamargarita
@raven:
or a c-140, non stop Christchurch-McMurdo-Christchurch, couldn’t land at McMurdo cuz the pilot couldn’t see the ground. Get up at 3 the next day to try again