Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

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

That’s my take and I am available for criticism at this time.

Not all heroes wear capes.

Historically it was a little unusual for the president to be an incoherent babbling moron.

I wonder if trump will be tried as an adult.

Nothing worth doing is easy.

Bark louder, little dog.

Republicans are radicals, not conservatives.

Joe Lieberman disappointingly reemerged to remind us that he’s still alive.

Motto for the House: Flip 5 and lose none.

Just because you believe it, that doesn’t make it true.

Take your GOP plan out of the witness protection program.

Hot air and ill-informed banter

Incompetence, fear, or corruption? why not all three?

They think we are photo bombing their nice little lives.

If you are still in the GOP, you are an extremist.

We still have time to mess this up!

“Everybody’s entitled to be an idiot.”

It’s time for the GOP to dust off that post-2012 autopsy, completely ignore it, and light the party on fire again.

Everyone is in a bubble, but some bubbles model reality far better than others!

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

Despite his magical powers, I don’t think Trump is thinking this through, to be honest.

Come on, media. you have one job. start doing it.

Balloon Juice has never been a refuge for the linguistically delicate.

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Wednesday Evening Open Thread: Good News, Bad News

Wednesday Evening Open Thread: Good News, Bad News

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Any day where people are reminded that Roger Stone should be in jail is a good day…

On the other hand:

I have said before, and will no doubt say again, that Tara Palmeri is the journalistic equivalent of a botfly. I won’t be listening to the podcast she’ll be doing with some of the worst offenders against media integrity — and not just because I can’t deal with podcasts (mild auditory processing disorder) — but I’m sure her every tidbit will be endlessly recycled in print media. *Sigh.*

Reader Interactions

190Comments

  5. 5.

    MattF

    So… there was this documentary. The original title was ‘Ratfucker’. But that was eventually changed to ‘Pardon Me’.

  9. 9.

    HumboldtBlue

    Bill Simmons?

    OK, I see that outlet isn’t taking the election as anything other than a silly game to be analyzed in the most trite and simple-minded of ways, sprinkled with some folksy dunderheaded musings about how the Democrats won’t really succeed until they hire Larry Bird and adopt a slew of right-wing positions to be more accommodating to the dipshits.

    How fucking lovely.

  10. 10.

    Anne Laurie

    @Baud: I have never heard of Tara Palmeri before.

    I read some of her stuff at Puck, since I have a subscription so I can read Julia Ioffe.  And I’ve extracted some of Palmeri’s work on people like Ron DeSaster here, because she *does* have a gift for zeroing in on politicians’ weaknesses.

    The (situational) enemy of my enemies is not my friend, but I’m willing to use their ammunition when applicable.  One reason I hate this podcast idea is that, given what I know of Bill Simmons, she’ll be digging much more into Democrats & decent people, and neglecting the obvious Repub targets.

  12. 12.

    Captain C

    I saw Puck was involved and first thought of that bike messenger who was annoying and never washed from that MTV early reality show, “The Real World.”  That might be (a little) better than whatever crap this turns out to be.

  14. 14.

    lgerard

    I was watching Mike Lindell’s voting conspiracy hoedown online and

    Steve Bannon has gotten REALLY fat. I guess he is storing up calories for his jail term.

  16. 16.

    RaflW

    I don’t wish ill on any of our media betters. But far too many of them prance around covering the horse race and the optics and all that merde as if their necks won’t also be in the guillotine if the fascist takeover of our county suceeds.

    Sure, the gross consigliere types will probably survive. But we can already see the line-crossings whereby the whipped up wingers can turn on a dime and decide that this or that outlet or personality is now apostate.

    Fox settled their very expensive Dominion suit in no small part because their leaders admitted in texts that they are afraid of their viewers.

  17. 17.

    Honus

    OT, but when we’re talking about a phony patriot like Roger Stone, I think a word about the much recently celebrated Oliver Anthony (real name Christopher Anthony Lunsford) is apropo.  Anthony is from the town of Farmville, Virginia which sounds working class but is actually a… college town.  With not just one, but two schools, the public Longwood University, and the private, elitist all-male Hampden Sydney.  (Ok, HS is technically located in the town of Hampden Sydney, which is about two miles from Farmville, and consists of nothing else but the college)
    There haven’t been any miners in Farmville for nearly 150 years.  It’s mainly noted for furniture warehouse outlets.  So Anthony is just another phony republican populist playing at being a white working class hero

    And oh yes, one more thing: on the Circuit Courthouse lawn there is a marker and a plaque apologizing for the fact that in the early 1960s the county closed the public schools for three years rather than integrate, as part of the Massive Resistance movement.  Maybe Anthony should write a song lamenting what Rich Men East of Richmond in did in support of racism.

    And you may read that Anthony sold out his upcoming concert in three minutes.  The show is at the North Street Press Club bar in Farmville. I’ve been there (my son goes to Hampden-Sydney). It’s literally about the size of our living room, seats maybe 50 people.

  18. 18.

    Ken

    @Juju: What’s Ringer and Puck

    It does sound like a BBC mystery series. Ringer’s the detective, Puck’s his comic-relief sidekick.

  19. 19.

    Juju

    @lgerard: I’m not one to criticize a weight gain, but it’s not as if he was lithe before. He definitely has a rode hard and put up wet look about him, also an I desperately need a flea dip look as well.

  20. 20.

    Mike in NC

    Still hoping for Roger Stone to go to prison where some other inmate decides his Nixon tattoo would make a great souvenir.

  22. 22.

    Jay

    The day after California approved an expansion of driverless taxis, 10 of them came to a grinding halt on a busy San Francisco street, creating a gridlock that encompassed several blocks.

    The culprit? A music festival.

    “Cell phones were overwhelmed, and as a result, they were not able to take control of these cars — which is a pretty frightening systemic defect,” Aaron Peskin, president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors (SFBV), told As It Happens guest host Paul Hunter.

    Not only was there the 10-car back-up of Cruise-owned autonomous taxis in city’s North Shore neighbourhood on Friday, but on the other side of the city, closer to the Outside Lands music festival, Peskin said “there were also scores of them that came to a grinding halt.”

    “I got … tons of texts and emails and phone calls from pissed-off constituents,” he said.

    https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/san-francisco-robotaxi-traffic-jam-1.6938440

  23. 23.

    Steve in the ATL

    @Honus:

    the private, elitist all-male Hampden Sydney

    I was in the first coed class at private, elitist, previously all-male (240 years!) W&L. When we opened the time capsule at our 25th reunion, there was a bumper sticker in there that said “Women at W&L? What next—men at Hampden-Sydney?”

    Steve in Cereal City

  25. 25.

    HumboldtBlue

    @Juju:

    Simmons is a sportswriter/podcaster who, 20 years ago, was at the forefront of the changing media landscape and his admittedly insightful and witty takes on the NBA and in particular the Boston Celtics helped change how sports was written and spoken about.

    He devolved into a navel-gazing self-important bloviating buffoon at times who still had some excellent insight, but his voice became familiar and stale and his attempts at fresh takes became silly and vacuous.

  26. 26.

    LAO

    I watched Ari Melber tonight and the filmmaker said, during the interview, that Roger Stone had a complete meltdown on 1/20/221 when he was unable to secure a preemptive pardon (#2). I may have to watch the documentary.

  32. 32.

    NotMax

    Day one of his mongrel and one trick pony show.

    Describing the plan as his holy calling to save the country, Lindell insisted that people from all political backgrounds can agree with his ideas. However, he said that anyone who does not agree with the plan is part of “The Evil” — which he defined as the globalist, Uniparty, Deep State, Chinese Communist Party.

    “I’m going to refer to them today as ‘The Evil,’” Lindell said.

    The event had advertised appearances from Rudy Giuliani, who was recently indicted in Georgia along with Donald Trump and 17 others, and Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general currently facing impeachment charges.

    Early in the event Wednesday, Lindell revealed that neither would be attending. …
    [snip]
    Lindell said the current losses and challenges facing him and his supporters are a part of God’s plan to save the country through their actions.

    From the loss of the 2020 election to the Jan. 6 insurrection, Lindell insists that every failure happened so that his election plan could be announced and enacted now, prior to the 2024 elections. Source

  35. 35.

    Joseph Patrick Lurker

    @Ken:

    @Juju:

    Bill Simmons is a writer and commentator about sports who made a good documentary about the Red Sox ending their playoff drought with a 2004 World Series win.  He should stick to sports and leave coverage of politics to others.

  36. 36.

    Roger Moore

    @Ken:

    I see it as rank incompetence.

    I think of it as mostly gross overconfidence.  They really thought they were going to pull it off, and they wanted everything recorded for posterity.  They probably also figured they’d never be prosecuted if it failed.  I think they’re still surprised anyone went after them.

  41. 41.

    Brachiator

    @RaflW:

    Fox settled their very expensive Dominion suit in no small part because their leaders admitted in texts that they are afraid of their viewers.

    And Fox really hasn’t changed their news practices, although they may be a little more careful in the future.

  44. 44.

    Alison Rose

    No big surprise:

    Vlatko Andonovski, the head coach of the United States women’s national soccer team, has resigned, three people with direct knowledge of the situation said Wednesday, ending a relatively tumultuous tenure managing what was once the world’s pre-eminent team.

    The U.S. Soccer Federation plans to announce Andonovski’s departure as coach on Thursday, the people said, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the move publicly.

    Andonovski’s four-year contract was scheduled to expire at the end of the year. U.S. Soccer will appoint an interim coach for two friendly matches this fall but hopes to have a permanent replacement named by the end of the year in order to begin preparations for next summer’s Paris Olympics.

    I saw elsewhere that the assistant coach Twila Kilgore will be named interim coach. Will be interesting to see who ends up in the job.

  46. 46.

    Ken

    @NotMax: Lindell said the current losses and challenges facing him and his supporters are a part of God’s plan to save the country through their actions.

    Lindell lives long enough to see the utter repudiation of Trumpism and possibly the complete collapse of the Republican party. He dies and God says, “Yup, that was my plan, all right.”

  47. 47.

    Another Scott

    Meanwhile, … Science.org:

    Since his discovery 3 decades ago, nearly every inch of Ötzi the Iceman’s 150-centimeter-tall, 5300-year-old body has been scrutinized: his last meal (a feast of fatty ibex), his dental habits (bad, lots of cavities), and his many wounds (a paleo–murder mystery). Visitors to the Italian museum where his mummified remains are housed can also meet his reconstruction, a light-skinned man sporting luscious brown locks. But according to a new DNA analysis published today in Cell Genomics, the Iceman himself wouldn’t recognize the figure: Ötzi’s genes reveal he likely had dark skin and was balding at the time of his demise in his mid-40s.

    The study is “really, really amazing in terms of the quality and quantity of the data,” says Kendra Sirak, a geneticist at Harvard University who was not involved with the work. But Ötzi’s skin color and loss of hair perhaps shouldn’t be surprising.

    “If you think about the appearance of the mummy, it’s actually bald and it has dark skin—yet it was still reconstructed with lots of hair and light skin,” says study co-author Johannes Krause, a geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. “This reflects our own biases in assuming what a person from that time looked like.”

    […]

    Yes. Funny how that works that way so often…

    (Insert Far Side comic here.)

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  48. 48.

    karen marie

    How, if at all, does Trump’s December 23, 2020 “full and unconditional pardon” of Stone affect any prosecution for his participation in Trump’s election scheme?

  49. 49.

    scav

    @LAO: (cont)

    On Monday, a federal judge in Texas ordered Shry held without bond during a preliminary detention hearing. Magistrate Judge Sam S. Sheldon’s detention order noted Shry has been charged four times in the past year for engaging in similar conduct, including at least two cases that resulted in conviction and 30 days imprisonment. According to Sheldon, Shry was also charged on July 11 with misdemeanor threat causing fear of imminent serious bodily injury and was on bond in that case when she made the alleged call to Chutkan’s office in D.C.

    link

  52. 52.

    LAO

    @scav: I’m really hoping she’s prosecuted by the feds, I just don’t trust Texas.

    ETA:  I need new glasses. It’s in federal court.

  58. 58.

    Central Planning

    @Steve in the ATL: I’ll disavow all knowledge of Balloon Juice if I win this thing.

    The problem with trivia at a pub is that I feel like I should have just one more. Thankfully on water now.

  59. 59.

    RaflW

    @NotMax: “Lindell said the current losses and challenges facing him and his supporters are a part of God’s plan.”

    Let’s just end that though right there, shall we?

  61. 61.

    CaseyL

    I have a very vague memory that Bill Simmons is RFK Jr-curious.  I could be wrong.

    I’ve enjoyed his sports writing, and he was definitely shafted when Deadspin was sold, but his last few forays into public relevance have been very disappointing.  He seems to have become a cranky contrarian.

  64. 64.

    karen marie

    @LAO:   That was what I was curious about – was it an all-encompassing pardon or just for the specific matter that had him about to walk into prison.  I’ve seen now your previous comment reporting the documentarian’s report he had a meltdown, so I’m guessing it was just for the specific matter.

    Yay!

  65. 65.

    Timurid

    Elite opinion makers enlisting a sportswriter to cover the election is just a bit too on the nose.

    The biggest problem with the Savvy Crowd is that their understanding of existential issues… climate change, the rise of fascism, the possible end of the Republic… is purely aesthetic and sentimental. They engage with these problems in the same way that sports fans follow their teams. They may have deeply held opinions and preferences and will be deeply unhappy when the outcome is not what they hoped for, but there are limits to their investment. If Trump wins in 2024 some Very Serious People may cheer, but many others will be crushed and dejected, as if their favorite football team had just lost the Superbowl. But just like losing sports fans they will move on and get on with their lives… because that problem and all the other pressing problems of this moment are not existential for them. They (and the elites they represent) see those of us mere mortals who do treat these crises as existential… because for us they very much are… as just like the deranged sports fans who stalk their least favorite tennis player or burn down a police station because their soccer team lost. A sizable percentage of the column inches they produce is devoted to cautioning and scolding us not to behave that way… and if that fails, calling down the full weight of public opinion (and, if necessary, the law) on people who throw tantrums simply because their lives, freedom, careers, families and friends have been placed in jeopardy. To them it’s just a game, and it is our obligation to respect that judgment.

  66. 66.

    Roger Moore

    @karen marie:

    How, if at all, does Trump’s December 23, 2020 “full and unconditional pardon” of Stone affect any prosecution for his participation in Trump’s election scheme?

    It might possibly be stretched to cover anything he did as part of the scheme up to the moment the pardon was signed, but it won’t cover anything after that.  Pardons have always been retrospective; you can’t be pardoned for something you haven’t done yet.

  72. 72.

    Ghost of Joe Liebling’s Dog

    @NotMax: Apart from money, what distinguishes this guy from a fellow who has to open wide and say ahhh three times a day so that the nurses can verify he swallowed his meds instead of cheeking them, and thus is less likely to run amok in the occupational therapy room for the next hour or two?

  73. 73.

    Brachiator

    @NotMax:

    Describing the plan as his holy calling to save the country, Lindell insisted that people from all political backgrounds can agree with his ideas. However, he said that anyone who does not agree with the plan is part of “The Evil” — which he defined as the globalist, Uniparty, Deep State, Chinese Communist Party.

    Trump has spawned a number of serious nut cases. It will take years to get these loonies under control.

  75. 75.

    Honus

    @Steve in the ATL: as you know, I’m a fellow General (Law ‘95). I was also first year in the second coed class at the previously all-male UVA (1973)

    so you were just a year or two behind Ty Seidule

  79. 79.

    David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch

    😂 You’d think Stone would have learned from his idol Nixon not to tape his criming

    The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.

    ~ Mark Felt

  80. 80.

    Jeffro

    I looked through the whole thread and was surprised to see that no one had this as “Puck“!

    One of the greatest original members of the under-rated super-team known as Alpha Flight.  =)

  82. 82.

    NotMax

    Heh.

    Mike Lindell takes the stage as an “Election Crime Bureau” ticker scrolls behind him. He says this new election summit is not about evidence, they have enough evidence. He throws to a video and they play the wrong one. This all happens in the first minute of the summit. Source

  87. 87.

    Jeffro

    @NotMax: “It’s not about the ‘evidence’, you understand?  It’s about…about…well, something that I can’t quite explain.  But it’s definitely worth overthrowing the government of the United States of America about!”

    Sure thing Mikey!

  90. 90.

    Brachiator

    @Another Scott:

    “If you think about the appearance of the mummy, it’s actually bald and it has dark skin—yet it was still reconstructed with lots of hair and light skin,” says study co-author Johannes Krause, a geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. “This reflects our own biases in assuming what a person from that time looked like.”

    Yep. It is amazing how bias can creep into science articles. I recall a National Geographic article about a group of early humans where the accompanying illustration depicted light skinned persons even though the text clearly noted that the early humans likely had dark skin.

    And now that I think about it, I’ve rarely seen bald individuals represented in reconstructions related to human evolution.

    I have seen some flip flopping on whether some early Europeans from, say 5,000 to 10,000 years ago were light or dark skinned. And of course, some boneheads get butthurt when the evidence leans towards dark skinned.

  91. 91.

    Geminid

    @Anne Laurie: I remember Palmieri for the piece she wrote on Hakeem Jeffries last November, after Nancy Pelosi said she was stepping back from leadership. There was a flurry of anti-Jeffries agitation then, mainly on the left side of the party, and Palmieri’s article contributed to it.

  93. 93.

    Formerly disgruntled in Oregon

    @Timurid: A sizable percentage of the column inches they produce is devoted to cautioning and scolding us not to behave that way…

    This is perfect – the whole thing is dynamite. Outta sight.

  97. 97.

    PJ

    @Anne Laurie: Tara Palmeri is a solid Republican.  She started out writing for the right-wing Washington Examiner, before moving to the right-wing NY Post, before moving to the right-wing Politico.  Don’t expect any “even-handed” coverage.

  98. 98.

    El Muneco

    @HumboldtBlue: “[Bill Simmons] devolved into a navel-gazing self-important bloviating buffoon at times who still had some excellent insight, but his voice became familiar and stale and his attempts at fresh takes became silly and vacuous.”

    I’m a regular listener to his film retrospective podcast, and this pretty much nails it for everything he does – sports, pop culture, and politics.

    He’s not actively evil, but he’s an old-GenX/young Boomer who has never particularly wanted for anything, with all that entails. And as a result, he doesn’t really take anything seriously, as if everyone has a wiffle ball life like he does.

  100. 100.

    Gin & Tonic

    @NotMax: “Evidence”? Like the “evidence” he produced at the last such “summit,” which led to Lindell’s being ordered to pay $5 million to computer forensics guy Bob Zeidman?

  105. 105.

    A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)

    @Honus: Interesting to me from a family angle.  My aunt, born in 1921 and who grew up in Roanoke, VA, always referred to the college she went to as “Farmville”.  I wondered about what college it actually was (but obviously never enough to google it in the past), so thank you.

    My mother went to Virginia Intermont in the 1930s on the VA – TN border (Bristol), which is gone now. And then transferred to Cal Berkeley, which is how I ended up born in N CA instead of VA

  108. 108.

    geg6

    I’ll be the contrarian here and say I like a lot of what Simmons does.  But I don’t follow any sports but my local teams at all levels, so I’d barely heard of him and that was mainly about he got screwed in the Deadspin deal.  But, unlike dear AL, I love podcasts and I signed up for several at The Ringer.  I later learned that he created The Ringer, which he eventually sold to Spotify.  Good for him!  He still runs it and also has his own podcasts.  I follow his movie podcast, The Rewatchables, and he also does episodes on Winning Time (the HBO series about the Lakers Showtime years) on the network’s Prestige TV podcast.  And they have a Reality TV pod that covers my guilty pleasure, Survivor, and another fave, The Great British Baking Show.  I know Simmons also does an NBA pod himself, also.  But he only does a few pods and has a big staff of talent doing most of them.  He’s mostly running the place.  I doubt he’ll be a major presence on the politics pod (which I have no interest in as Josh Marshall fills that pod spot for me).  And just from listening to him on pods that are not in any way really about sports, he does not come off as any sort of right winger.  He’s done well for himself and, in the context in which I know of him, I generally like what he does.  It’s entertaining and that is mostly why I listen to podcasts.

  109. 109.

    Honus

    @A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan): Longwood was all female until the 1970s. Then of course there are the Sweetbriar Vixen just a few miles west, famous for cow-tipping.
    Anthony’s from a pastoral area populated by exclusive mostly private elite rich kid schools, not the post industrial wasteland where a white guy just can’t make it because of Rich Guys North of Richmond.

  110. 110.

    Ken

    @smith: I think it was Arthur C. Clarke who had a short-short sci-fi story along those lines.

    SPOILERS. The aliens show up, but they aren’t alien — they’re humans, from an advanced civilization that fled the planet when the Ice Ages began. Earth’s humans are descended from those that stayed behind, lost all civilization, and adapted to the changing climate. The aliens are glad to reunite with their distant cousins and share their advanced technologies — interstellar flight, fusion energy, highly advanced medicine. The punchline is “Oh, and if any of you are still white, we can cure you.”

  112. 112.

    El Muneco

    @geg6: I put my personal Simmons take above, but one thing I will credit him with – he is _very_ good at hiring good people. He’s generally the least interesting person on any of his pods, and that’s a good thing.

  113. 113.

    A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)

    @Honus: I think my aunt trained to be a teacher, which she hated and never actually did, so I think/thought “Farmville” was a teacher’s training academy at that time (as so many “Female Seminaries” were until, say, WWII).  My aunt got married in 1944 to a man who became a general contractor so she helped him run the business and they got rich.  My mother did become a teacher (HS English). I got the distinct impression that the career choices in the late 1930s were : marriage, teaching, or nursing, unless you were a very unusual, inspired young woman.

  114. 114.

    SixStringFanatic

    @geg6: You said almost everything I feel about Bill Simmons, better than I could have, except for one thing you got wrong.

    Bill Simmons was never involved with Deadspin.  He had nothing to do with it.  Simmons worked for ESPN for over a decade.  The last few years that he was there, they set up a mini-website for him to run that was called “Grantland”.  It was Simmons’ baby but ESPN always owned it.  When Simmons and ESPN inevitably parted ways (he had outgrown their role for him), they shut down Grantland.  He took most of the ideas that he had formulated there, and as many of the staff as he could hire away, and formed his own website, that he still runs though he sold it to Spotify a couple of years ago.

    Deadspin was a whole nother thing and the people who made that site go really did get royally hosed.

  115. 115.

    Brachiator

    @Ken:

    SPOILER FREE REPLY

    The aliens show up, but they aren’t alien — they’re humans, from an advanced civilization that fled the planet when the Ice Ages began. Earth’s humans are descended from those that stayed behind, lost all civilization, and adapted to the changing climate.

    I used to read a lot of Clarke, but didn’t know this short story, Reunion, from 1971.

    In searching for it, I found a post which insanely branded the ending as “racist and illogical.”

  116. 116.

    geg6

    @El Muneco:

    You’re not completely wrong and most of The Ringer pods I follow are with hosts other than him.  I do have to say that he really has surprised me with his takes on Winning Time.  I thought his Boston background would make his takes very biased.  But he analyzes it as a very interesting “prestige” show, with a real appreciation for the writing and acting, and his basketball knowledge mostly adds context and not necessarily criticism.

    ETA: Simmons does not speak well of the demise of Grantland.  There is some thinly veiled hostility about that when he speaks of it.  Which is rarely, as far as I can tell.

  118. 118.

    Rand Careaga

    @Brachiator: I have seen some flip flopping on whether some early Europeans from, say 5,000 to 10,000 years ago were light or dark skinned.

    It is half a century since my last college anthropology course, but as I recall, the thinking then was that in the overcast environment of Northern Europe there was a genetic selection for lower melanin (which serves, in the skin, to block sunlight) and hence lighter skin so as to avoid vitamin D deficiency, vitamin D being produced by exposure to light. In the tropics, with an abundance of fierce sunlight, darker skin not only protected against sunburn but also the consequences of vitamin D overproduction, which can be toxic. Genes gotta do what genes gotta do—that is, propagate themselves—and they don’t care what Eurocentric scholars might think.

  119. 119.

    geg6

    @SixStringFanatic:

    Sorry, you are correct.  It was Grantland.  My brain is not working at its best this week.  Freshman move-in week on campus, the busiest season for a financial aid administrator.

  120. 120.

    Brachiator

    @geg6:

    I’ll be the contrarian here and say I like a lot of what Simmons does.

    I had not heard of Simmons before, or had not paid attention. I just downloaded a couple of episodes of the Rewatchsbles and will see what they have to say about a couple of movies I deeply love.

  122. 122.

    bbleh

    @Jay: I saw a video of a botcar (can we call it that, instead of “driverless car”?  it’s easier to type) pileup in North Beach — several of them, at one of those intersections where several streets converge at different angles — and it was kinda funny (as long as you weren’t there).  “Driving around it” is very difficult in that area — it’s not like a grid where you can just take an adjacent street — and the silly botcars had their flashers on, and would occasionally (and unpredictably) lurch in one direction or another, and everything was at a standstill (and that’s a busy intersection) with everyone looking around wondering “wadda we do now?”

    Fkin things are at best an annoyance and at worst a hazard.  The state shouldn’t have allowed SF and elsewhere to be unwilling guinea-pigs in their experiment.

  123. 123.

    wjca

    @A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan):

     I got the distinct impression that the career choices in the late 1930s were : marriage, teaching, or nursing, unless you were a very unusual, inspired young woman.

    One other option was bookkeeper.  For example, one of the local department stores had a cadre of women working swing shift to update all the customer accounts, inventories, etc. every night.  My mom worked her way thru Cal working there in the late 1930s.  But for a woman with education, teaching and nursing were the two main options.

  124. 124.

    Brachiator

    @Rand Careaga:

    but as I recall, the thinking then was that in the overcast environment of Northern Europe there was a genetic selection for lower melanin (which serves, in the skin, to block sunlight) and hence lighter skin so as to avoid vitamin D deficiency, vitamin D being produced by exposure to light.

    Yep. That’s part of it. Nina Jablonski has some very good stuff on the evolution of skin color. A short video example here.

    These changes not only affected people in Europe, but also Asia and other areas.

  126. 126.

    BruceFromOhio

    Tara’s podcast sample:

    “[M]y ally is the Grifting Force, and a powerful ally it is. TFG creates it, makes it grow. Its energy surrounds us, binds us. Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter. You must feel the Grifting Force flow around you. Here, between you, me, the tree, the rock, yes, even between the land and the District Attorney of The State of Georgia.”

  127. 127.

    Jackie

    Rudy appealed to TIFG to pay his attorney fees. Could this be a “pay me or else I spill the beans”?

    ““With his attorney in tow, Rudy Giuliani traveled to Mar-a-Lago in recent months on a mission to make a personal and desperate appeal to former President Donald Trump to pay his legal bills,” CNN reports.”

    “By going in person, Giuliani and his lawyer Robert Costello believed they could explain face-to-face why Trump needed to assist his former attorney with his ballooning legal bills.”

    “Giuliani and Costello traveled to Florida in late April where they had two meetings with Trump to discuss Giuliani’s seven-figure legal fees, making several pitches about how paying Giuliani’s bills was ultimately in Trump’s best interest.”

    Sounds like potential blackmail to me!

  130. 130.

    Frankensteinbeck

    @Jackie:

    Could this be a “pay me or else I spill the beans”?

    As I recall, Trump couldn’t be bothered pardoning all the schmucks who went to jail for him while he was president until Rudy pretty openly and publicly said “Pardon me or I start talking.”

  131. 131.

    Another Scott

    @Brachiator: @Rand Careaga:

    The Science article continues:

    […] For one, his skin tone was much darker than that of present-day people of European ancestry. “The color could have actually been quite close to the mummy’s today,” says co-author Albert Zink, a biological anthropologist at the Institute for Mummy Studies in Bolzano, Italy.

    That could be due in part to Ötzi’s diet, says Nina Jablonski, an anthropologist at Pennsylvania State University, who notes that the evolution of light skin in people in Europe was a “higgledy-piggledy process.” Ultraviolet radiation at different latitudes played a role, but so did the amount of dietary vitamin D. When Europeans switched to a largely grain-based diet—which offers far less vitamin D than a meat-based diet—their skin pigment lightened to help absorb more of the nutrient from the Sun. But scientists think Ötzi and his ancestors still ate mostly wild game, which was rich in vitamin D. As a result, they retained darker skin. Based on similar analyses of other ancient people across Europe, including the United Kingdom’s 10,000-year-old Cheddar Man and 8500-year-old hunter-gatherers in Spain, Luxembourg, and Hungary, that was true for many of the continent’s prehistoric population.

    The researchers also found genetic markers that increase the likelihood of traits including curly hair, diabetes, obesity, and male pattern baldness. By the time of his death in his mid-40s, Ötzi’s hairline probably would’ve receded into a sparse crown—or nearly full baldness, researchers say.

    Neat stuff.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  134. 134.

    HumboldtBlue

    @El Muneco:

    He’s not actively evil, but he’s an old-GenX/young Boomer who has never particularly wanted for anything, with all that entails. And as a result, he doesn’t really take anything seriously, as if everyone has a wiffle ball life like he does.

    That’s an excellent point.

  136. 136.

    Kay

    @Honus:

    I think a word about the much recently celebrated Oliver Anthony (real name Christopher Anthony Lunsford)

    Give it a little time. Right wing sensation promoted by Elon Musk, Joe Rogan and the rest of the far Right online celebrities? The worst judges of character on the planet? I would literally bet – put money on- him having an online Nazi persona somewhere. Their heroes always turn out to be shitposters:

    “Lord, we got folks in the street, ain’t got nothin’ to eat/And the obese milkin’ welfare/Well, God, if you’re 5-foot-3 and you’re 300 pounds/Taxes ought not to pay for your bags of fudge rounds.”

  138. 138.

    El Muneco

    @geg6: Yeah, I can’t speak to his sport takes specifically, as basketball is definitely my #5 US sport. I don’t doubt his expertise on that topic, as that does come across even in “The Rewatchables”.

  141. 141.

    danielx

    These fuckin’ people….

    It’s not The Gang Who Couldn’t Shoot Straight, it’s The Gang Who Doesn’t Know Which End The Bullet Comes Out.

  142. 142.

    Mai Naem mobileI

    I heard some coverage of the Hawaii fire(Biden was sunbathing at Reheboth Beach for 5 hours!!!!) and then the coverage of Hunter Biden….and then the coverage of the economy(gas is $4.50/ gal and eggs are $10/ doz!!!) which apparently ‘real people don’t feel the good economic numbers’ and, honestly, I am beginning to panic that Biden is going to lose next year. And you damn well know TFG is going to be sucking the oxygen out of the media with his court cases.

  143. 143.

    El Muneco

    @Brachiator: At this point, I’ve probably listened to half of the 301 “Rewatchables” episodes. As a white guy of pretty much exactly the same age and similar SES trajectory, I can say our pop culture experiences in 1985-2005 were both shockingly similar (he and his cohort are among the few people in the world who hold “Fletch” in as high a regard as I do, forex), and shockingly different (some of his most influential experiences are ones I bounced off entirely, and some of my most beloved he dismisses in a sentence).

    One thing that struck me about his analysis is that he is, surprisingly, fairly incurious about genre conventions and just misses some plainly obvious plot points which color his opinion and leave a lot of listeners shouting at their earbuds “What about…” or “No, it was…”

  144. 144.

    El Muneco

    @Alison Rose: Don’t forget “cornhole” – it’s pretty popular in the heartland, and I’ve heard that there have even been tournaments broadcast on ESPN.

  147. 147.

    El Muneco

    @Alison Rose: Our office manager came from the Midwest, and she legitimately doesn’t know about the other meaning. She organizes games for company picnics, etc. It’s legitimately precious.

  149. 149.

    Jay

    @Mai Naem mobileI:

    gas here is $1.49 a litre, low, 2 bucks lower than the high,

    eggs are $3.99 a dozen, way down from last year when over 2 million chickens drowned in the floods and another million died of avian flu, like $5 bucks,

    and Biden’s going to Hawaii now that it won’t interfere with rescue operations.

    Meanwhile, the Canadian Arctic is being evacuated because of forest fires.

    Funny that.

  150. 150.

    hotshoe

    @Jay: ​ Amazing, horrifying — twenty thousand humans in the area with two days notice still cannot stop the advance of the fire. Nature always wins. It’s difficult for me to comprehend that they can’t bulldoze a wide enough fire break around their city, but then I recollect that some wildfires in CA were throwing embers a mile or more to start new fires ahead of the main fire, so “wide-enough” is basically impossible.
    Also heartwarming news, in the face of this oncoming disaster, because the govt is going to help folks evacuate who don’t have cars or who have special needs. Buses, planes. Not leaving anyone behind.​ Oh Canada!​

  153. 153.

    Ruckus

    @A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan):

    Ran farther than just the late 1930s.

    Some of the change was the woman working on the production lines in WWII. But there was a still a lot of resistance and little way to push forward right after WWII. So I’d say the early 1950s really was the start, because when WWII was over those jobs didn’t stay and the men coming home went back to work.

  154. 154.

    Geminid

    @El Muneco: Cornhole, or “Bags,” is a simple, fun game that anyone can play. It bears a relationship to horse shoes similar to that between pickleball and tennis.

  156. 156.

    Jay

    @hotshoe:

    They have constructed.several 1KM wide firebreaks,

    all trees gone, all brush gone, all topsoil removed,

    the fires don’t care

    For a bunch of the people being evacuated from Yellowknife, this is their 5th evacuation

  158. 158.

    Mr. Bemused Senior

    @Frankensteinbeck: As I recall, Trump couldn’t be bothered pardoning all the schmucks who went to jail for him while he was president until Rudy pretty openly and publicly said “Pardon me or I start talking.”

    But wait… Rudy hasn’t been pardoned. Or paid.

  160. 160.

    Origuy

    @smith: The article says that light skin appeared in central Europe no more than 4,000 years ago. It probably started appearing much earlier in the north.

  162. 162.

    Origuy

    Fire season has finally started in California. A band of thunderstorms went through the far northern counties and CalFire is showing seven different fires in the area. There have been a couple of small fires in the Bay Area, but nothing major. There’s also a fire in the Mojave National Preserve, crossing the Nevada border.

  165. 165.

    wjca

    @Origuy:

    Fire season has finally started in California

    Most of California is still relatively damp from last winter.  Drying fast, but still not dried out to where it was this time the past few years.  However the northern tier, along the Oregon border, didn’t get as much rain as the rest of the state.  Certainly not as much as it usually sees. (To the extent that “usually” is meaningful any more.)  So that’s where the initial fire activity is. September and October are likely to be a different story.

  166. 166.

    hotshoe

    @Jay: ​
     
    yes, a kilometer is not enough. Can you imagine?
    saw a photo of one big barn/industrial structure in the middle of bare dirt — looks to me to be football field length of empty ground. At first I thought it was a photo of “this is how to save your barn: plow the ground bare all around.” Then I saw that it had actually burned.
    What cost to attempt but then fail to stop the fire …
    I’m so sad for the folks who have had to flee and are losing everything.

  167. 167.

    NotMax

    FYI.

    Among those supporting Maui is the Republic of Korea, which has donated $2 million to support the recovery of Maui and its people. Of that money, $1.5 million in cash donations will go toward the Hawai‘i Community Foundation.

    “On behalf of my government and Korean people I’d like to express my deepest condolences to the people of Maui who lost loved ones and property,” said Lee Seo Young, Consul-General of the Republic of Korea in Honolulu, during a press conference this morning. “I hope people of Maui recover from damages as soon as possible.”

    Micah Kane, President and Chief Executive Officer of Hawai‘i Community Foundation, said this money will be the largest one-time contribution by any organization entity or country to date, adding it will have significant impact on the long- and short-term recovery efforts.Source

  168. 168.

    Jay

    @hotshoe:

    Like here, it’s not so much the Fires,

    the Arctic is burning,

    the Rainforest burning.

    Ecosystem’s that havn’t seen major fires in 500 years, are now matches.

  171. 171.

    Mr. Bemused Senior

    @Frankensteinbeck: ah.  I just watched the clip of Stone [not the whole documentary of course].  So there’s still some question of what he did after the Dec. 23 pardon.  “Stay tuned.”

  172. 172.

    Anyway

    @WaterGirl:

    What’s going on with Kellogg’s?

    Besides the fact that nobody eats cereal anymore? Anecdata – I  haven’t had any this century.

  173. 173.

    HumboldtBlue

    @Anyway:

    I haven’t had any this century.

    Same here, and it probably goes back 35 or 40 years. I recently bought some milk for baking, and after I made a chocolate cake I thought to myself that would be good with a glass of milk, so I poured a glass to drink with the cake, and I was stunned.
    It was terrible.
    How the hell did I actually eat a bowl of cereal and milk when I was younger?​

  175. 175.

    a thousand flouncing lurkers (was fidelio)

    @Honus: Speaking of annoying white men in country music, Jason Aldean’s dirty about small-town values dropped in Billboard’s listing from #1 to #21. Over at the site formerly known as Twitter, Tyler Mahan Coe explains what he thinks happened. I quote (for those not messing with that site):

    1. The song isn’t dropping because people got mad at it. It’s dropping because his team stopped buying all the artificial chart-boosting digital downloads they could afford to buy with the money they used to spend on payola.

    2. If you’re going to try to talk about this shit in these terms then you should really at least learn how it actually works. [He’s referring to a post from @CalltoActivism about the drop]

    3. This is not some kind of conspiracy theory. K-Pop stans know about this and take it upon themselves to do it for singles/albums of artists they love. In relation to the budgets for everything else happening in èAldean’s career the cost of doing this isn’t even that expensive.

    4. What is a single fact you’ve ever learned regarding the history of the music business that would cause you to think “oh, well, I guess since payola got made illegal then the entire music industry probably just stopped looking for ways to game the system and it’s all on the level”

    5. It seems like a ton of people reading this thread don’t understand it’s about the differences between:

    A – hearing a clip of a song on social media
    B – pulling up your free Spotify to listen to the song
    C – spending money to own a digital copy of the song

    VERY DIFFERENT THINGS

    6. Whatever impact you do or don’t believe “the controversy” played in the actual Billboard chart placement, I can promise you nearly everyone who knows this song exists only ever did A. Some took the time to do B. NEARLY NOBODY DID C and that’s the one that matters the most.

    7. Buying bot streams on Spotify is also a thing. You do that so the # of plays on the song look appropriate for the people who do go find it there. Buy fake followers on social media for the same reason. Buy mp3s to boost chart placement. It’s all for sale.

    8. Why would anyone do all of this without there being an inherent return on investment? Because we’re talking about the difference between paid marketing and PR. Paid marketing is not cool. Those are the ads you see on social media. PR is supposed to generate “cool.”

    9. PR is the art and science of generating a story around a product. The best PR makes it look like everyone is talking about the same story because it’s the most interesting thing to discuss. Buying that is a gamble on seeing greater and more long-term returns than an ad campaign.

    10. Now before you think “I should try this,” know that the thing paid marketing and PR have in common is they are both just the top of the sales funnel. Going viral does not guarantee sales conversions, let alone a significant audience of lifelong fans.

    11. There is no shortcut to building a sustainable career. In fact, “going viral” can make it difficult to circle back around and try to build something real. That’s why so many one hit wonders exist. Anyone can start a fire to get attention. They don’t all become famous chefs.

    12. Where the astroturf thing usually goes wrong is when you eventually have to throw a real party and hope enough real people show up. Aldean has obviously had a real career for a long time so he’s just doing this to hit refresh on his story. Best example of a bomb is Iggy Azalea.

    (Link to original post or tweet or whatever they are this week)

    So, yes, the music industry is as grimy and conniving as you suspected, dear jackals, but it’s still constrained by the difficulty we can sum up with this: What if there is no there there?
    Well, your new, expensively-promoted song can drop in the charts like a rock, among other things…

  176. 176.

    Feathers

    @El Muneco: I enjoyed the Fletch films, but they were nowhere near as good as the books. Had high hopes for the recent Jon Hamm version, but I think the handsome PI with the ladies falling over themselves to help him solve the case may just remain stranded in the 1970s.

  177. 177.

    piratedan

    wonder when Las Vegas will post odds on the number of soon to be indicted US Senators….

    I’m guessing the over/under should be 5.5

    Guessing that all of those that coordinated with the Congress on the challenging the votes from the states (I believe that was Johnson, Cruz, Perdue, and Tuberville but I am not sure on those) plus Hawley, because he’s an ambitious shit and Graham are involved…. I would not be shocked if Blackburn, Lummis, Cotton, Rubio and Scott were included…

    The number of Congresscritters could easily be in the double-digits….

  180. 180.

    sab

    @Anyway:  Seriously? My 72 year old husband eats cereal for breakfast every single morning, and sometimes for dinner. Cereal aisle at the grocery is packed.

    I don’t eat boxed cereal because lactose intolerant. I wish I could. So convenient. I do eat oatmeal in winter.

  181. 181.

    sab

    @HumboldtBlue: Goldens need to be kept as multiples. They need other goldens, because no mere human can possibly meet their need to be part of a friendly pack.

    My first husband had six goldens at one time. We could just stuff them into his pickup truck like they were a litter of puppies and they were fine with it. They had each other.

  183. 183.

    Shalimar

    @Anne Laurie: Palmeri is the kind of person who willingly worked for the Washington Examiner, and Simmons is the kind of childish douchebag who would be swatting people on 8-Chan for the lols if he was a generation younger, so Republican bias is pretty much a given.

  184. 184.

    Ruckus

    @sab:

    Try oat milk. I am highly lactose intolerant and it has no lactose and, at least to me, tastes reasonably like milk. Plus it lasts a lot longer. There are a few brands available now, I buy Silk.

  189. 189.

    Bill Arnold

    @piratedan:

    Guessing that all of those that coordinated with the Congress on the challenging the votes from the states (I believe that was Johnson, Cruz, Perdue, and Tuberville but I am not sure on those) plus Hawley, because he’s an ambitious shit and Graham are involved….

    Senator Chuck should spend the remainder of his life in prison (being civilized here), if it is proved in court that he was directly involved in an attempt to remove Pence from the electoral vote envelope opening/counting so that Grassley could do the coup deed instead.

  190. 190.

    brantl

    I really wouldn’t mind seeing Ghastly in the geriatric ward of a prison. He could be “the old man of Sing Sing”.

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