Open thread and pet calendar reminder.
There seems to be some confusion, so hopefully this will help!
If you submitted pet pics for the calendar last year, those pictures are in the 2024 calendar that is for sale now.
If you want to be sure, check the pet calendar spreadsheets that are in the sidebar.
All of your pets will be in the same calendar, either A or B.
2024 Pet Calendars Spreadsheets
All proceeds go directly to Athenspets!
Order calendars here.
If you want any of your guys featured in the Favorite Dogs & Cats series – like we did last year – send me your pics! (click the link below if you want to be reminded of what that was)
And we can absolutely make your pet photo into a postcard for sale on Cafe Press, if you are interested. We just need a high resolution photo, and an image that works with the shape of a postcard – in either portrait or landscape.
Balloon Juice Pet Postcards can be ordered here. There are some really great ones!
Any questions?
Alison Rose
Got my calendar! Looking forward to hanging it. I love that it is spiral bound because that means the bottom half won’t stick out weirdly like some that are stapled together do.
2liberal
OT : Ohtani is a Dodger. Ten years, $700 million.
WaterGirl
@2liberal: I’m sure that would make sense to someone, just not to me. :-)
2liberal
@WaterGirl: japanese baseball player who hits 40+ home runs per year and is an elite level starting pitcher also (he won’t pitch in 2024 due to a surgery)
zhena gogolia
@Alison Rose: Yes, it’s really a very nice calendar.
I got mine yesterday — one each for me, one each for the mommy of one of the dogs, and one for another friend.
WaterGirl
@zhena gogolia: Oh, good, I always feel better when the calendars start arriving and people say they are good quality!
Baud
Biden
zhena gogolia
@Baud: 😂😂😂
CliosFanBoy
I just ordered mine.
CliosFanBoy
@2liberal:
And the rich teams get richer. Gad, I HATE the free agent market. Yes, it’s better for the players, but it sucks for the fans.
Josie
@Baud:
I don’t know how anyone can claim he is not mentally sharp.
Baud
@Josie:
Same way they claim the economy is terrible. Gaslight.
Dan B
@Baud: Food is a frontline measure of inflation for most people. Fossil fuels are another. Higher transport costs affect food prices. Funny how that works. / Housing costs are another frontline impact. Wealthy people are buying up real estate in many (most?) first class markets and leaving them empty. In states that have cap and trade laws gas prices are high. Discount gas in Seattle is $4.50 per gallon. The cap and trade premium is about $.50. Base price is $4.00. That’s $1.00 higher than red states / no cap and trade states. How does one prove politically motivated gouging? With great difficulty unless you can find the emails / smoking gun that’s buried in millions of documents.
Dan B
Bought my calender!
Alison Rose
@Baud: Got me cackling like a evil genius stroking a hairless cat
Baud
@Dan B:
There’s no economy where you can’t pick out problems affecting people. This economy is by all measures quite good given the devastation of covid and heading in the right direction. People will do what they want, but I’m not making excuses for them.
Baud
Science confirms what you all knew. Crazy cat lady is real!
cain
@Alison Rose:
Lol .. and now I’m going to put that in generative AI and see what that looks like !
Geminid
@2liberal: And Juan Soto is a Yankee. I don’t especially like the Dodgers or the Yankees, but I like Soto and Ohtani and I think those will be good places for them.
Alison Rose
@Geminid: I am genetically predisposed to loathing both teams but it’s also a puzzle, because I’m from the Bay Area and thus anti-Dodgers, but my mom is from New York and hated the Yankees…because she was a Brooklyn Dodgers fan.
Dan B
@Baud: It’s my experience that low income and lower middle class people focus on existential threats. In this economy jobs are one of the few areas where there is little to no existential foreboding. I worked with a minority led environmental group. They wanted greener housing but the costs to “green / healthier” upgrades would likely increase rents. Higher prices for gas would encourage EV’s but poorer people living in affordable suburbs would bear the brunt of high gas prices. There are workarounds like direct credits for EV’s and transit to low income people but the politics is very tough.
Dan B
@Baud: My partner feeds ten mostly feral cats at his house on the other side of Beacon Hill. He feeds two cats, former ferals, at my / our house. Where do I get thorazine and how much?
Geminid
@Alison Rose: I’ve been a Braves fan since they won the 1957 World Series. I was a kid living in Milwaukee, and those were my first sports memories: Warren Spahn and Hammerin’ Henry Aaron!
We moved, and then the Braves moved but they remain my team.
Was your Mom a Sandy Koufax fan? He was a great pitcher.The Dodgers had been in LA a few years before Koufax hit the Majors.
Barbara
@Dan B: My husband spearheaded an affordable housing project and he said it took a lot of effort to make people understand that investing in green techniques and technology made the most sense when it reduced the costs of living in the building, but was not otherwise necessarily compatible with the goal of affordability. At one point they were being nagged to use recycled bricks, which were many times the cost of new. Because projects like this require approval it’s an opportunity for people to advocate for their own goals as a condition of that approval. I think they ended up being LEED silver not gold.
Martin
@Baud: But the economy is purely a matter of cultural perception. If you (well, Ford and Fox News) convince people that a new F-150 is the basic cost of entry to the middle class, then the goodness of the economy is defined around that reality, and you either need to meet that reality or you need to make a convincing argument that it’s wrong.
I’ll observe that in most Trump voting places, people spend more money on transportation than they do on housing, which is fucking busted, but good luck convincing people that the problem is the auto industry and car dependency with all of the associated costs when it’s a lot easier to just bitch about Biden and gas prices. Even people in this community are not available to consider that their baseline evaluation of the economy may be highly biased toward their own conveniences, because cultural signaling on this stuff is so goddamn strong that nobody escapes it.
At the end of the day people are angry, and they’re going to vote on that anger. They attribute that anger to the wrong shit all the time, and we can ‘hey, that’s not fair’ but you have to actually engage with what they might be angry about. This is what leftists lose their shit over all the time because they point out the reason Democrats won’t work to realign the anger with the actual cause is because Democrats are also trying to provide cover for the actual causes. Joe Biden isn’t going to address the cost of transportation after he pushed through his signature legislation that only works by convincing people to buy new cars. Democrats instead of responding to the $17 McDonalds combo meal by saying ‘yo, McDs be greedy’ instead start talking about the prime lending rate and shit. Joe Biden is totally okay with the entry price of a truck being $50K, because he agrees to do this shit.
Alison Rose
@Geminid: Oh yes, of course — as a Jew from Brooklyn, she definitely loved him. Last year on his birthday, she wished a happy birthday to “the greatest Jewish athlete ever”. :)
Another Scott
@Martin: It’s a really big country with lots of simultaneous problems and Biden can talk about more than one thing at a time. Like, yesterday, investing in high-speed rail.
Cheers,
Scott.
Baud
@Martin:
Like I said, people can do what they want. I don’t have to endose it or rationalize it. I can fight them just like I fight the MAGA.
BR
Saw this post and thought of Cole:
https://beige.party/@the_etrain/111531412600886442
Geminid
@Alison Rose: Sandy Koufax might have been the greatest Jewish athelete ever, at least that we know of. I’d say he was the greatest pitcher of the 1960s except Bob Gibson might come and haunt me in a nightmare.
Martin
@Another Scott: You’re missing the point. When Biden endorses expensive vehicles as being normal middle-class vehicles, he endorses the increase of baseline expectations of the public. Inflation isn’t interpreted by the public as strictly the rate of increase of the basket of goods, but what it costs to live the middle class lifestyle. When you change that from an 800sqft house (1950s) to 2100sqft (now), you don’t get a free pass by saying ‘well, an 800 sqft house today hasn’t increased that much’, because that’s not the accepted norm. The accepted norm is 2 ½ times larger and wages better have kept up with that. If the accepted norm is an F-150, you can’t say ‘well, a Prius is cheap to fill’.
Part of the job of politics needs to be to keep the publics expectations in line with reality, because Ford sure as fuck isn’t interested in that. Or Apple. Or you local real estate agent. And I dare anyone to go to their boss and tell them you need a 15% raise because your community now has an expectation that your kid go to a private school. And if the publics expectations get out of whack, they’re going to blame the guy at the top every goddamn time.
Why the fuck is he out there promoting a $100K car? He should never have been seen in anything more than a Bolt or equivalent.
Martin
@Geminid: Mark Spitz.
David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch
Dodgers are ruining baseball
David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch
@Martin:
swimming isn’t a sport, a fish can do it.
BruceFromOhio
Received my calendars and they look great.
Geminid
@Martin: There we get into the question of fame. Spitz and Koufax were both at the top of their sports. Koufax was a star when baseball was still the premier sport in the U.S., so he was more famous than Spitz was. One could argue that Spitz was the better athelete, but Koufax was the greater.
And then there’s the question of the Jewish atheletes we have never heard of, or the ones we’ve heard of but do not know were jewish.
Jeffro
I have a hard time following baseball but love going to minor league games. =)
In other news, it looks like Casey DeSantis’ pleas for election fraud are putting the final nail in Mr. Charisma’s coffin. GOOD. I want him flushed a.s.a.p. and then I want GOP voters to feel the pain as they wrestle with their choices: the 91-felony-count-facing, insurrection-starting, dictatorship-promising, one-term loser…or…social-security-torcher and garden variety GOP anti-choicer Nikki Haley.
What a party!
Another Scott
@Martin: Biden’s a car guy. He likes new vehicles, especially new vehicles that have lots of horsepower.
He didn’t say that you’re a looooser if you can’t buy an electric Hummer or Lightning.
He’s trying to reward companies that are making the transition quicker by talking up what they’re doing. New, first of their kind, gizmos are always more expensive than the mass-market ones that follwo. Halo cars and trucks get people interested in the brand, even if they cannot afford the halo thing themselves.
Yes, telling someone whose rent went up 30% or groceries went up 25% that inflation has stopped going up isn’t really an answer to why they’re having trouble making ends meet even though their pay also went up. Biden knows that. I’m sure he and the Democrats and the people at the Treasury are working on ways to address that as best they can given all the constraints. Part of their way of addressing it is not letting the doom-mongers have all of the airtime.
Step changes are disruptive and can have bad consequences – this isn’t really news…
My $0.02.
Cheers,
Scott.
daize
Dear WG, thank you for the calendar reminder. Ordered ours today. Take care.
Tom Levenson
Ordered.
Alison Rose
@Jeffro: Between Casey and Ron, they have about enough brain cells to power a wind-up toy.
(Archive link since WaPo paywalls literally everything)
cain
It’s they just lurch from voting from one party to another. I bet there is probably a set of folks so fed up that they think maybe an authoritarian regime is the best – if you’re a white male – it is always going to cater to you to some extent – whether you are a leftist or a right winger – you’re ok taking the risks on going down that road.
cain
@Jeffro: wait – are we still supposed to go to the washington post?
Another Scott
@cain: The WaPo strike was 24 hours. I think it’s Ok now.
Cheers,
Scott.