Happy Birthday to our glorious Brooklyn Bridge that opened 142 years ago
H/t @KellyrKopp pic.twitter.com/Gq1UiDKaEM
— Wu Tang is for the Children (@WUTangKids) May 25, 2024
Honestly, America at its best tells everyone in the world, "Are you fleeing tyranny? Or maybe have drive and hustle? In that case, answer some test questions about George Washington, and congratulations, you're an American!"
If we keep this spirit, we'll own the 21st century as hard as the 20th.
— Andrew Reeves (@andrewsshi.bsky.social) May 23, 2024 at 8:39 PM
From MNPR News, “Inside Hmong Cornhole, the largest cornhole club in Minnesota”:
It’s Monday night at the National Guard Armory in northeast Minneapolis, which means it’s time for Hmong Cornhole.
A few dozen folks throw little bean bags into holes in rows of glossy wooden boards. They chat and fist bump and update scores on digital tablets. Kids occasionally run weaving through the boards, sometimes squirreling away bags from their parents.
“Picturing my life without cornhole before this,” Dia Lee says, “I didn’t know any of these people. I didn’t know anybody from this club or in this Hmong cornhole community, so this definitely has strengthened our community.”…
A handful of cornhole players in the Twin Cities Hmong community — Alan Lee, Kou Xiong, Sue Moua, Ger Vang and Toua Xiong — started the club on Labor Day in 2021. With about 120 players, Hmong Cornhole is now the largest cornhole club in the state.
Many of the club members clock at least 15 hours a week playing cornhole. Hmong Cornhole hosts weekly events, fundraisers and raffles, both at the Minneapolis armory, as well as the one in St. Paul near the capitol.
Sometimes they play at Unison, a Southeast Asian restaurant in Maplewood. On Memorial Day, they will host a tournament at Kingston Park in Cottage Grove for the 4th annual Hmong Memorial Sports Fest and Street Fair. Another tournament will be June 29-30 at the Hmong International Freedom Festival — what Alan Lee calls the “Hmong Olympics.” …
Alan Lee says after they founded their club, other Hmong Cornhole groups popped up in Wisconsin, Michigan, Georgia, Oklahoma, California and the Carolinas — all states with large Hmong populations.
Alan Lee says they started a club so the Hmong community could compete on an even playing field as cornhole is a predominantly white sport.
“Genetically speaking, we’re not as tall, we’re not as fast, we’re not built,” Alan Lee says.
Dia Lee and Houa Xiong say the Hmong community is very competitive. Many Hmong Cornhole players say the sport took off in the Hmong community because it’s a mental game first: Success relies on technique, strategy and repetition…
Alan Lee says they play at the armories because he’s a Chief Warrant Officer 2 with the National Guard, where he’s served for 20 years, so he was able to secure the space. Lee was first introduced to cornhole by a roommate in 2007 during his first deployment for Operation Iraqi Freedom.
“We played overseas so much that when I got home, I actually went and bought a $40 set from Target,” Alan Lee says.
“The Minneapolis armory has a lot of history with the Hmong community as well,” he adds. In the Nineties, he says this was the site where many Hmong Minnesotans, including himself, came to pick up gifts from Toys for Tots.
“A lot of the members from Hmong Cornhole really love the fact that this has come full circle of like childhood, hanging out here, now to actually throwing bags here,” he says…
Dia Lee, who is now one of the club administrators, is throwing bags. Cornhole, she says, has strengthened ties between the Hmong community and greater community, too.
“It expands your horizon, definitely,” she says. “I would have never imagined myself going to so many bars or VFWs, or just so many cornhole tournaments that I would have never been to and interacting with so many people and creating new relationships.”
Dia Lee encourages everyone to come play with them.
“You don’t have to be Hmong to be part of our family, we’re accepting of everybody,” Dia Lee says.” The Minnesota cornhole community in general — It’s a great community.”
You (your parents, your grandparents) sacrifice everything to come to a strange new land. You end up in the local army, for reasons. Your mates introduce you to a very local game, which you enjoy so much that when you go home, you introduce it to your whole family (neighborhood, network)…
and now I’m wondering how Hmong do hotdish
— post malone ergo propter malone (@proptermalone.bsky.social) May 23, 2024 at 9:00 PM
pork marinated in pepper dip (thai chiles, lime juice, fish sauce, cilantro) topped with tater tots & a drizzle of curried coconut milk
— chatham harrison is tending a new garden (@chathamharrison.bsky.social) May 23, 2024 at 9:09 PM
(You smirk, but the ‘traditional’ St. Patrick’s Day corned beef with cabbage was a recipe immigrant Irish servant ‘girls’ picked up from the upper-middle-class second-gen German Jews who employed them. Come back in a hundred years, hear the story of ‘traditional’ Hmong hot dish!)
mrmoshpotato
Hopefully everyone knows what the vibe is.
Kristine
I needed this today. Thanks, AL.
RevRick
My vote’s for Snicker Salad.
TBone
A friend of my brother’s gave up his formal career midstream when his homemade, custom cornhole boards business took off about 15 years ago. I didn’t think it was a smart move at the time. I was wrong! He followed his dream and somehow supports himself and his family (the custom graphics on his boards are awesome). I was dubious about the popularity of the game but I should have realized anything you can play while getting shitfaced was gonna be popular and spread like wildfire.
rafa
Heh, growing up, I didnt even know “carne bif” was not a Puerto Rican dish. And that’s just the Spanish pronunciation for corned beef. We mix it with anniato for color, sofrito seasoning, tomato sauce, and you get this: https://latinamommeals.com/puerto-rican-corned-beef-hash/ This recipe also adds corn but my grandma used olives.
schrodingers_cat
The path to citizenship has been much more complicated than this for at least a 100 years. For many there is no path at all
ETA: This is my first hand experience and experience of many immigrants that I know.
mrmoshpotato
@RevRick:
I’m afraid to ask…
TBone
@schrodingers_cat: the “America at its best” part is the clue.
Anne Laurie
Also, as mentioned in the article: Sports for those who are “not as tall, we’re not as fast, we’re not built”…
Starfish
@schrodingers_cat: Is it harder for people from India due to math involving the number of people from India and quotas of certain paths to citizenship?
Anne Laurie
@rafa: I would definitely eat that (preferably with olives, yum!)
RevRick
John Roebling basically invented the suspension bridge, by both inventing wire rope and by developing a technique for spinning cables in place. He first built a suspension bridge over the Monongahela in 1845-46, then a railroad bridge at Niagara Falls (1851-55), before being contracted for the project that made him world famous, the Brooklyn Bridge. He died in an accident during its construction, and the project was completed by his son Washington.
Fun factoid: there’s a plaque in one of the piers on the Manhattan side declaring it to be the location of President George Washington’s residence, which was demolished to make way for the bridge.
satby
My kids have played “bags” for decades, since at least their teens. I didn’t hear it called cornhole once. Not that I really paid attention. I was just grateful for an activity the teens wouldn’t consider childish during cookouts with my friends.
TBone
@Anne Laurie: 😆 exactly
https://www.popularmechanics.com/home/a37050504/gosports-scorecaddy-score-keeper-drink-stand-set/
RevRick
@mrmoshpotato: It’s Minnesota’s dessert made with cubed Snickers bars, vanilla pudding, Granny Smith apples and Cool Whip. The classier version uses real whipped cream.
schrodingers_cat
@Starfish: That does add a wrinkle for the employment based Greencards for Indian citizens. I am speaking in general. Getting greencard is not an easy task. Even if you are married to an American citizen you have to jump through many hoops. There have been movies about this. As Gin and Tonic about the hoops his DIL had to jump through.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@RevRick: Personally I like wurst salad.
(I learned that “salad” in Munich means you mix a few token bits of cabbage in the pile of wurst.)
RevRick
@satby: We called it bean bag toss in Connecticut. I was amused when I heard it called Cornhole when I arrived in Pennsylvania.
schrodingers_cat
@TBone: Most American citizens have zero clue as to how difficult immigration is to navigate. The tweet does not comport with the reality of the immigration system.
That said, most Americans are very welcoming towards immigrants and that is indeed something to be proud of.
TBone
@RevRick: I expect nothing less from my fellow Pennsylvanians. We always add local flavor!
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UbMV-RK8EyY
Anne Laurie
@mrmoshpotato: If you’ve spent enough time in the Midwest (or, I’m told, the South), you’ve been to a potluck or picnic or after-funeral meal where ambrosia salad was on the menu. Bits of ‘exotic’ (relatively expensive) fruit cut up in sweet pudding, whipped cream, and / or marshmallows; frequently introduced as ‘Aunt [x]’s famous ambrosia salad’ (with either a grin or a grimace, depending). Basically, something very sweet & vaguely ‘fancy’ that didn’t cost too much, could be made without too much time or effort, and that offset the salt content of the hot dish / fried chicken / brisket / ham biscuit dishes.
eclare
@satby:
See my comment 86 to you in the gray dawn morning thread. You’ve convinced me!
RevRick
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: My mom used to make hot German potato salad (sorry no Claudia Schiffer or Heidi Klum), which was vinegar based with parsley.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@satby: I learned about its existence and the name “cornhole” as an adult at company picnics. It took me a little while to realize that it wasn’t some weird joke, there was really a game called that, and they were rounding up players.
eclare
@Anne Laurie:
Gawd. Ambrosia. That and tomato aspic (basically tomato jello) were staples among my older female relatives here in Memphis.
TBone
@Anne Laurie: the banner desert of the early 70s! Ours always had shredded coconut.
Reminds me, I have a recipe for cream cheese, blueberry and crushed pineapple refrigerator pie. You soften the cream cheese, mix it with crushed canned pineapple, and spread it as the top layer over blueberries compote on a graham cracker crust. I can’t remember where the coconut goes. Maybe in with the pineapple, maybe on top.
E.
@schrodingers_cat: I feel the likelihood of someone using that tweet as an instruction manual for becoming a U.S. citizen is pretty low. But I guess it never hurts to warn people.
lowtechcyclist
@schrodingers_cat:
That’s because we’re not at our best, duh
RevRick
@schrodingers_cat: The usual rightwing bullshit with respect to immigration is that “my grandparents came here legally,” which conveniently overlooks the fact that before the 1920s, it was walk off the boat, register, and be on your merry way.
Barbara
It’s not always a disadvantage — the current reigning Olympic all-around women’s gymnastic champion, Sunisa Lee, is Hmong-American, from Minnesota.
OzarkHillbilly
If everything I have read and seen is to be believed, it was finished largely by his wife.
Barbara
@RevRick: Yeah, my father’s father stowed away on a boat leaving, most likely, Trieste or Livorno, sometime around 1900. The first record I could find of him was in the 1920 census, living in a boarding house in the Wasabi Range of Minnesota. People like himself comprised the majority of inhabitants of this very isolated community at that time.
OzarkHillbilly
Mine too, it was a favorite of mine.
Baud
I haven’t watched this, but this appeared on my YouTube feed recently.
RaflW
1996-200 I bowled in a Friday night league in the now bulldozed Midway Pro Bowl in St Paul. (it was a windowless basement under a Cub Foods – the land is now our mini-birdsnest pro soccer stadium).
Fri night saw our league at the easternmost lanes, then a much bigger Hmong bowling league in the middle, and the westernmost lanes were an LGBTQ bowling league. All in a then slightly scruffy, solidly working class neighborhood.
I loved that we all coexisted very happily, the beer line at the bar was always friendly, and at one point our league needed a couple players and we poached a couple Hmong folks (no reason to think we might not have poached a gay person, but that they were at the far end of the very large facility. I also did not quit my league and migrate west, though I did consider it when my work bestie quit the company and thus the ‘commercial’ league we were in.)
eta: Year round, except for a short time in June, the side of the far lanes featured a 10′ tall rainbow striped paper flower bowling pin and a slightly smaller bowling ball with a pink triangle on it. The Gay leagues would have a float in the Pride parade and needed a place to store these items the rest of the year. The alley owners were clearly pretty cool.
Honus
@RevRick: the Wheeling Suspension Bridge, hard by the blog father’s home, would like a word:
https://www.asce.org/about-civil-engineering/history-and-heritage/historic-landmarks/wheeling-suspension-bridge#:~:text=The%20Wheeling%20Suspension%20Bridge%20was%20the%20first%20bridge%20to%20span,bridge%20was%20rebuilt%20in%201856.
frosty
@TBone: I’ve never understood why this game is called cornhole. Has no one (besides you and me) ever heard of Beavis and Butthead?
Suzanne
@Ceci n est pas mon nym:
Yeah, I learned that lesson, too. Yuck.
Sorry not sorry.
Eyeroller
@lowtechcyclist: I’m an anti-nativist. I’d like immigration to be easier. (Though I’m not a fan of Matt Y’s “we could accept a billion people” premise.) Of course as we all know, Americans, not all of them white, simultaneously complain that it’s hard to find employees, worry about the birthrate, fear that there won’t be enough younger people to take care of them in their assisted-living facilities, and yet scream BORDER CRISIS OMG we must close our border! (BTW I just read that migrants are now coming from all over the world, and are no longer primarily from Mexico and Central America. Border Patrol agents are required to speak fluent Spanish but are now confronted with so many languages they have to use Google Translate.)
Baud
@Eyeroller:
Yeah, sometimes the hypocrisy feels worse than our nativist evil.
RaflW
@Anne Laurie: Hmong bowlers can f**ing kill it. I was always a duffer in my league, but at 6’2″ my form was sprawly and messy, not compact and rocket-like.
RaflW
@frosty: My made up answer, offered with midwest sensibilities: The game was probably a Sunday afternoon farm game. Home made. And the bags originally filled with dried kernels of feed corn.
WaterGirl
@RevRick: Yes, in Illinois and Michigan it’s called “bean bag”. Today is the first I have ever heard of it being called cornhole.
Learn something new every day.
Suzanne
@Eyeroller:
And yet, if you suggest that we could make preschool and higher education free, raise the minimum wage, and provide paid maternity and paternity leave, to help solve these problems….. they’ll call you a commie. LAWL.
Baud
TBone
When we were young (late teens, early twenties) my BF and his bestie and I would take spur-of-the-moment road trips. Just get some snacks and drugs and drinks and get in the car for the weekend. One such trip took us to West Virginia and we were mystified by the road signs that said ‘next town is ** miles away’. It was NEVER that few number of miles! We’d say “maybe if you’re in a helicopter! it’s 17 miles, but on this road, it’s at least 27!” We also thought that going to West Virginia was a waste once we got there – we have sections of DelCo (Lenni, PA) that are exactly like West Virginia. But that suspension bridge was cool. I remember it distinctly (a small miracle because we had really good drugs).
smith
@Eyeroller: I used to oversee research at a large public hospital, which, as with all urban public hospitals, takes care of a lot of immigrant patients. We were interested in developing consent forms in the various languages of patients who might be approached for participation. I asked the hospital patient services director for a list of languages they encounter that they supplied interpretors for. She came back with a list of 54 languages.
TBone
@frosty: it’s a matter of style. What self-respecting drunks would come out in droves for a game of “beanbags” ?
Suzanne
@smith: Mr. Suzanne is a bilingual speech-language pathologist (English and Spanish). He is often responsible for assessing students who come into the district to figure out if they require special education services due to developmental delays or disabilities, or autism, etc. Sometimes bilingual kids will have issues in one language but not the other. Anyway, he has had to assess students in something like 20 languages (that means their first language), including Aramaic.
WaterGirl
@RevRick: I don’t care for regular potato salad, but we had german potato salad growing up, too, and I liked that!
OzarkHillbilly
I believe the sacks are filled with dried corn and of course there is the hole you are trying to throw it thru.
schrodingers_cat
@E.: My comment was not an instruction manual as you put it for immigrants, but a note for the self congratulatory folks who don’t have a clue about what immigration actually entails, like the author of the tweet/bluesky comment that AL highlighted.
Honus
@TBone: The Wheeling Suspension Bridge is really cool because it actually sways back and forth in the wind. You could feel it driving over, and watch it from the street. I remember one afternoon in about 1973 I was helping set up sound in the Capitol Music hall and the band from out of town was at the window transfixed watching the Suspension Bridge swaying in the breeze.
And the road signs are accurate, it’s just that on West Virginia roads driving 17 miles seems like 27. That and the signs give the distance to the edge of town, not the center, like in Virginia.
zhena gogolia
One hundred fourteen years ago yesterday, my father landed on these shores from Austria-Hungary (Slovakia today). His aunt bought him a pail of beer and some ham for a nickel, and he said, “I will never leave the United States.” And he didn’t.
ETA: Very glad he’s not alive to see Trump.
OzarkHillbilly
@zhena gogolia: His ancestors on the other hand… Well, there is still time for them.
TBone
@Honus: ahhh, that explains it! At the time, I thought “they’re not taking elevations into account, they’re just skipping over the hills.” 😆
Geminid
@Barbara: Ah yes, the Wasabi Range of Minnesota. Was your grandfather a picker, or did he work in one of the mills where they ground the radishes?
More seriously, people could be drilling for geologic hydrogen in the Mesabi Range before too long. They’re only now starting to look for geologic hydrogen worldwide, but there’s a belt running through Minnesota and over into Michigan that could be promising, especially the areas rich in iron ore like the Mesabi Range.
Jager
@Barbara:
The Masabi (not Wasabi) Range not only produced iron, it was and is a hockey hotbed. When I was a kid I played hockey against the immigrant’s kids and grandkids. Our best player was the grandson of an Italian miner, our coach was from Virginia, MN, another Italian.
Robert Mondavi, the winemaker, was originally from Virginia, MN
UncleEbeneezer
Sure, it’s all fun and games until your Cornhole tournament turns into a violent brawl*.
*One of my favorite comedy podcasts (The Black Guy Who Tips) uses this audio as a sound effect, all the time, and it always cracks me up to hear the lady cry “This is STUPID. Cut the crap!” So much so that I find myself quoting it, myself, in countless, real-life moments.
mrmoshpotato
@RevRick: YUMM-O!
zhena gogolia
@Jager: Actually, Mesabi, to be exact!
TBone
@zhena gogolia: bless his memory 💙
schrodingers_cat
@RevRick: Bingo. Things have not been that simple at least since Ellis Island closed down. Also, to many of these people, their ancestors who immigrated were the last best immigrants, unlike the riffraff that immigrated later.
SiubhanDuinne
@schrodingers_cat:
True, but it’s an aspirational tweet (“America at its best…”) and the rhetorical example (“answer a few questions about Washington…”) is greatly simplified for emphasis. I doubt the author would disagree with you at all.
3Sice
Trump was heckled by Libertarians.
Why does everything predicted for Biden by our worthless fourth estate, end up happening to Trump?
zhena gogolia
@TBone: Thanks!
zhena gogolia
@3Sice: My husband thinks the press is wildly overestimating Trump and underestimating Biden. May he be correct. He usually is.
TheOtherHank
When I was in grad school (at the U of MN) one of my friends was an Australian post-doc who was getting married to one of the grad students in my program. He was working his way through the naturalization process. So we have two really bright people navigating the immigration bureaucracy. Every time they came back from an trip to the INS offices they were enraged at how difficult and petty the process was. All other issues aside, you’d think it would be in the interest of the country to welcome highly trained scientists, but nope it was nightmarish.
I think one of the root issues is nobody who uses the INS votes (not being citizens) so there is no lever that can be pulled to get Congress to make it better. But it’s easy to immigrant-bash and make it harder so we have an ever-worsening ratchet of hostility.
Barbara
@Jager: Duh. Masabi, of course! It’s still pretty isolated. He moved to Western Pennsylvania sometime before 1928, so that’s where my family is from. Otherwise I most likely wouldn’t be so confused about place names.
schrodingers_cat
@SiubhanDuinne: To my ears the tweet doesn’t feel aspirational it feels like a mockery of my lived experience and that of most immigrants since the 1920s when Rs put in place and excessively harsh immigration sysetem.
Things eased up a bit for immigrants after the passage of immigration laws that were part of the Civil Rights legislation. But since the passage of immigration bill passed by Gingrich’ Congress, things have been horrific with Trump years being among the worst.
I get it that I am not the audience for this feel good tweet.
O. Felix Culpa
@zhena gogolia: As I remember him, he was always an astute (and incredibly nice) guy.
eclare
@schrodingers_cat:
John Oliver’s take is the best I’ve seen
https://youtu.be/tXqnRMU1fTs?si=sRxF8gYPTlJ5krk2
TBone
I was just moved to look up the whereabouts of a female attorney who employed me at the time of the road trips I mentioned. She was really cool, now deceased. Well respected and really patient with me when I had not many years of experience under my belt. I learned a LOT and became a part time family counselor handling her disgruntled client phone calls. The biggest lesson I learned: don’t get married 😂Her obituary includes this tidbit:
https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/delawareonline/name/matilda-bixby-obituary?id=16966427
eclare
@zhena gogolia:
As people say, Joe has been underestimated his whole life. Fingers crossed that remains true til November.
schrodingers_cat
@TheOtherHank: The process to getting your intent to immigrate approved is the difficult part. I went to an immigration lawyer for that. All my other petitions I handled myself. After that it is pretty routine.
p.a.
There was a noticeable (not considerable IIRC) Hmong presence in Providence after our excellent VietNam adventure, with the usual new immigrant issues dealing w bigotry, acculturation, urban shock. I remember local news noting the movement to the north midwest as they sought to maintain their agrarian roots. I don’t imagine Laotian winters, even in the mountains, are like New England winters, never mind MinneConsin. Good on ’em. Anyone from the area: are they still on the whole rural farming people?
zhena gogolia
@O. Felix Culpa: Wait, what? You know my husband?
ETA: I guess I’ve been more indiscreet than I thought! Or maybe this is from a Zoom?
I think you went to the same undergrad, so it makes sense.
E.
@schrodingers_cat: Boy: It would be great if airplanes flew to the moon.
Astronaut: I have spent my whole life training to go to the moon it doesn’t work that way you ignorant boy.
Boy: ?
3Sice
@RevRick:
Washington got the bends (working those caissons is dangerous, and often deadly) and was bed ridden for the rest of his life.
Emily Roebling brought that project home.
zhena gogolia
@3Sice: As depicted on The Gilded Age (apparently in a somewhat exaggerated form).
Liminal Owl
@frosty: I had, and was therefore bemused when I first heard of the game.
Old Dan and Little Ann
My friend is a Cornhole junkie. He plays in as many tournaments as he can. He even organizes them once in a while.
TBone
I have a conundrum – another attorney I used to work for (wealthy, very Italian, dubious politics but he was also really cool, we used to smoke his weed when I started working for him part time at his home). I worked for him full time and left his employ when I moved to Galveston. He looked me up when I returned to PA the next year and rehired me. He’s contacted me several times over the last twenty years, once for a party at his top floor Wilmington penthouse in a skyscraper with all the wealthy, retired attorneys from the building that housed his P.I. practice. He called several days ago, broke up with his longtime live in housekeeper/lover (a really cool Black chick), moved out of The Villages in Florida, and is renting a house in Media again. He says “I’m not getting any younger! What are you doing on Sunday?” not realizing I’m 3+hours away from Media now. My problem is: this is the only person on the planet who makes hubby jealous. Even though he’s a lot older than me!
I told him I’d call him back…not sure what to do, hubby is not the jealous type normally.
TBone
@Old Dan and Little Ann: I prolly already like that guy!
mrmoshpotato
@frosty: Haha! We’ve always just called it “bags.”
Also, do you need TP for your bunghole?
Baud
@zhena gogolia:
Gogol is a memorable name.
mrmoshpotato
@Liminal Owl: I was able to build that pesto, sausage, garlic, basil, artichoke hearts pizza at Blaze Pizza a few months ago. It was most excellent.
TBone
@mrmoshpotato: I’ve been waiting all morning for some off color jokes in this regard!
zhena gogolia
@Baud: Yes, true. And he’s one of the greatest writers who ever lived, so people are hearing more and more about him.
Liminal Owl
@smith: I love that your hospital did that! I worked at a senior center in a large metro, where my clients were refugee Vietnamese seniors. Many of them spoke little English, but there was hardly any public funding for interpreters—the agency eked out a few hours’ worth a week to pay a slightly-younger member of the community for interpreting.
Several clients told me that their medical services did not provide interpreters at all, but relied on the patients’ children and grandchildren to accompany them and translate. The families found this extremely awkward, for privacy concerns as well as cultural issues
(I’m sure that metro area had many languages to contend with, too. But according to research from a decade earlier, our area had the second-largest concentration in the US of Vietnamese refugees. I still think they could have done better. OTOH, I lost my job when that division of the agency had to close down entirely for lack of funding.)
Liminal Owl
@mrmoshpotato: oh, good! Thanks for telling me.
bluefoot
@schrodingers_cat: Yep. It takes a LOT of time, money, patience and ability to navigate a ridiculous amount of bureaucracy. An Italian friend of mine (who is married to an American), just became American after *years* of effort.
mrmoshpotato
@TBone: Happy to be of assistance!
eclare
@TBone:
Don’t go.
eclare
@bluefoot:
That’s what John Oliver went through in the link I provided above. He married an American, and it still took him years. IIRC he said he cried when he finally became a citizen, he was so relieved.
O. Felix Culpa
@zhena gogolia: Oddly, I did know him. Oddly because I didn’t know all that many people. He was– and I assume still is–a memorably smart and interesting guy. Alumni info spilt the tea, but my lips are sealed. I’m a German lit major turned (blissfully retired) CPA, after all. :-)
kalakal
@RevRick: Fun fact, his great grandson Donald Roebling lived just down the road from where I do now. He was a very rich eccentric inventor and invented the amphibious tractor as a rescue vehicle after seeing hurricane damage. In WW2 the Marine Corps took one look at it, slapped on some armor and machine guns and thus was born the Amtrac
TBone
@eclare: that’s where I’m leaning. But my defiant side says fuck that, he might have just received a bad medical diagnosis and not be there anymore soon…so hubby best just get over it. I’m almost sixty and attorney guy almost EIGHTY. He’s always been really nice to me. The closest thing to a date he ever had the nerve to ask me to was a client’s South Philly wedding. He was a perfect gentleman and almost a father figure to me. He could have made a move years ago but he knew I wasn’t interested.
Tony Jay
The idea of a modernist, influential country where citizenship is available to anyone possessing the gumption to turn up and want it. rather than being a matter of “Send your application. We’ll let you know if there’s a vacancy” is incredibly powerful.
Yes, it’s a myth and the real process is constantly under attack from the Right, but so is everything else good in the world. The point is that it inspires people, because at one point that form of immigration was possible enough that a superpower was born out of it. It’s the best version of the American dream and that’s what Biden was talking about.
And hey, I thought disagreeing with the language used by the Democratic Party’s leadership to talk about divisive issues – just because the reality is a whole lot more complicated and leaves certain groups outside of the magic circle of applicability – was a total no no and borderline shilling for Republicans?
Maybe that’s not really so much of a cast iron rule. Good. That’s more in line with what democracy (and Democracy) is supposed to be about. Everybody gets a voice, everybody gets to plonk themselves on an imaginary throne and dictate their version of the rules to everyone else, but no one has to acknowledge them as the unelected voice of authority if they don’t want to.
What a country. Sounds great. Maybe one day I’ll move there.
TBone
@kalakal: that’s a fucking way cool anecdote!
zhena gogolia
@O. Felix Culpa: That’s so cool!
Baud
@TBone:
Can you really trust your hormones?
TBone
@Baud: 😆😆😆
Kay
gewhitmer
Whitmer started with this brand “I will fix the damn roads” and she has stuck with it. Even Right wingers who hate her will admit she fixed the damn roads.
Baud
@zhena gogolia:
He’s a regular Frederick Douglas.
TBone
@Kay: I love her, she needs a cape! Super Gretch!
Especially this: “ROAD TRIP!”
https://www.threads.net/@gewhitmer/post/C7T-zLpOPsP
She read my mind 😂
frosty
@TBone: You have a defiant side? LOLOLOLOL
Baud
@Tony Jay:
I’m sure prime minister Stamer won’t be that bad.
MagdaInBlack
@TBone: Tempting, ain’t it? You already know the answer tho 😉❤️
O. Felix Culpa
@Kay: Which was sorely needed. The Michigan roads were going back to nature, which in this case was not a good thing.
Kay
@TBone:
I drive a lot in Indiana, Ohio and Michigan. She has fixed the roads. I compare to Indiana – they sold their stretch of turnpike to a Spanish company and fully half the time I’m forced to travel thru the state the toll-taking process is broken. Was broken again Thursday, I guess in preparation for the busy holidy weekend. They had a single low wage employee handing out toll tickets – traffic backed up for several miles. It’s like that about half the time. It’s been like that for about a decade.
TBone
@frosty: If I try to tamp it down it just gets worse! Who the, what the, why I oughta…😆 Percolating defiance never has a good end result. Better straight out with it right off the bat!
TBone
@MagdaInBlack: *grumbles in acknowledgement…
MagdaInBlack
@TBone: 🤗🤗❤️
TBone
@Kay: that’s frustrating as all get out. Privatization is for suckers. Our PA Turnpike is another glaring example of corporate enshittification.
schrodingers_cat
@E.: I am sorry that I engaged with you.
TBone
@MagdaInBlack: ❤️ back!
🎶
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=K1jhxESO218
Soprano2
@zhena gogolia: Bill Maher had Kellyanne Conway on his show. They’re convinced TFG is probably going to win because he’s ahead in the polls now. They don’t talk about how he has no ground game, although to his credit Maher kept saying “It’s only May, it’s early”. She’s an expert at fillibustering, she talked a lot and he let her. It was a lot of bullshit, of course. I think they’re wrong, although the unhappiness with “the economy” worries me. Kellyanne didn’t have any ideas about how TFG would make “the economy” better. She tried to blame Biden for the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, and kept saying TFG didn’t have any wars. It’s a window into how they’ll campaign.
Ksmiami
@zhena gogolia: here’s hoping- all I know is all my crowd including mod Republicans hate Trump and will vote for Biden accordingly…
MagdaInBlack
@TBone: I’ve had my *Sunday wake’n’ bake, I’m headed out for grocery run. Thanks for the musical send off 🌻
*No it does not cause munchie shopping, instead it allows me to tolerate the other shoppers
Ksmiami
@TBone: Gretchen is an amazing Governor!
Kay
@O. Felix Culpa:
I don’t know if it’s still true but 30 years ago they were famous for still having hundreds of miles of unpaved roads. I can recall going down gravel roads lined with houses in Michigan in what used to be rural areas close to Toledo.
Lake Michigan had a very good summer season last year -you know, despite the “terrible” economy half of Chicago and all of Detroit came out to the Lake Michigan beaches to spend a fuckton of the money the NYTimes tells me they don’t have. Whitmer know how important tourism is to the state.
TBone
@TBone: oops wrong link error
I meant to post 🎶
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8avnD0EFdsc
mrmoshpotato
@MagdaInBlack: Stay dry! ⛈️
Jackie
@TBone: Take hubby with you.
Ruckus
@schrodingers_cat:
So many of us have immigrants in our family histories in our not all that long ago past. I do. One grandfather was from Sicily. I could not find out where the rest of the family came from but I’d bet if we go back 2 or 3 generations, they would all be. I would never likely be able to find out as I am the oldest of all the cousins and the oldest left in the family line.
Steeplejack
@zhena gogolia:
I think the Wasabi Range is in Japan.
Kay
@Soprano2:
I think all of media are convinced Trump wil win. The NYTimes is basically measuring the drapes. Maggie probably already has a book deal in the hopper. Maybe an HBO special – Maggie Haberman and Donald Trump, The Best of America.
Oh, well. Think how pissed of and resentful they’ll be when he loses. Fun for us! I love an upset.
TBone
@Ksmiami: I tell my cousin in Michigan all the time how jealous I am of her state government. Inclusive from top to bottom!
Tony Jay
@Baud:
Oh, yea of little faith. The ethos of newnewlabourinc might not be inspirational, but it has a great draw for those of heavy foot looking for jackboots to slip into.
And in Sir Plastic Easter Island Head, it has the kind of soulless figurehead all corporate franchises dream of. Unmoored, uncharismatic, unshamable.
TBone
@Kay: I’ll be disrupting the whole entire neighborhood with my celebrations. Possibly will be heard county-wide.
schrodingers_cat
@bluefoot: Its insanely difficult to get a long term visa too, like a student visa or a work visa. Especially if you are from a country that sends a lot of immigrants to the US. Like India, China and Mexico.
Kirk
Small side note to those saying immigration was simple until recent years (“since they closed Ellis Island” from (@schrodingers_cat is the phrase that sticks for me).
Only if you were European and/or melanin deficient. See for examples the 1803 negro and mulatto ban, the 1882 chinese exclusion act, the 1882 immigration act, etc.
O. Felix Culpa
@Kay: I remember fondly Lake Michigan vacations back in my Chicago days. It’s such a beautiful area.
On a completely other note, I’m getting my first foster kitten of this year on Tuesday! Kitten season has begun. I should have her for about 4-6 weeks, until she’s 2 pounds and ready to be neutered and adopted. Ms. O will ensure that we don’t have a foster fail, more’s the pity. ;-)
TBone
@Jackie: have considered that but attorney guy specifically said “just you.” Which is weird for him, uncharacteristic, and leads me to believe he’s having medical issues he wants kept private. I told him hubby has too many health issues right now but I’d call him when WE are next back in the DelCo area (we make road trips almost monthly). I dunno yet about “never the twain shall meet.” It seems like it’d be oil and water awkward.
TBone
@MagdaInBlack: you are my spirit animal for this weekend! 💙❤️💜
O. Felix Culpa
That’s a red flag.
That’s a clue.
Jager
@zhena gogolia: I’m old and my memory is getting shakey
Brachiator
@RevRick:
No Brooklyn Bridge without Washington’s wife, Emily.
An amazing family. An amazing woman.
Matt McIrvin
@schrodingers_cat: It seems to me that many Americans are very welcoming toward immigrants when they actually meet them but fear them in the abstract. And this is what keeps the barriers to legal immigration up.
(This is often true even when they, themselves, are immigrants.)
Kay
@Soprano2:
No one has been more wrong about politics the last 8 years than center Right, anti woke pundits.
I don’t know if I’m right but I know they’ve been consistently wrong.
I’m also amused Right wing celebrities like Maher and Musk still think smoking pot is somehow edgy and radical. Every Gen X Trumpster in this blood-red county is smoking pot. I’m hoping it’s self medicating to tamp down their irrational violent outbursts.
Harrison Wesley
@Tony Jay: I thought y’all were touting Rwanda as the immigrant’s dream of a land of milk and honey.
Anoniminous
@Kay:
Another piece of evidence that no matter how bad things are Republicans will make them worse.
Another Scott
@Steeplejack: Or maybe in the mountains of North Carolina.
Cheers,
Scott.
TBone
@O. Felix Culpa: I am completely aware that the entire situation could abruptly blow up in my face. I smelled a trap immediately. But the attorney is a very cool, very OLD gentleman who has never, ever made advances despite many situations where he could have and where many other attorneys did try to pull some shit over the years. I might set up a private father-daughter date for hubby in Media at a good restaurant to distract him while I visit with my former employer. I need to re-up my weed stash anyway, yeah, that’s the
ticket! excuse😆Brachiator
More on Emily Roebling, unofficial chief engineer of the Brooklyn Bridge.
Another Scott
@TBone: The fact that he broke up with his long-time help is a red flag, IMHO. I would be careful – there seem to be many potential downsides.
My $0.02.
Cheers,
Scott.
Kay
@Brachiator:
We read The Engineers Wife in book club. Terrible book but great real life story.
Brachiator
@schrodingers_cat:
Did you know about this film playing at the Cannes Film Festival?
Harrison Wesley
@Kay: Bill Maher is left-leaning? I assume they mean he has a balance problem, since I sure as shit don’t see much “left” about his view of society. At least, the way he expresses it on teevee. Maybe he’s a closet Marxist or something.
Baud
@Harrison Wesley:
Maybe he’s left leaning in the “even the liberal New York Times….” sense?
Helen
@RevRick: We called it ‘beanbag’ in Nebraska too. Never heard it called cornhole until a few years ago. In fact, we would have gotten in trouble just using the word ‘cornhole.’ Didn’t know why, just that Mom said it was a bad word (vulgar). Maybe from Midwest farm country?
Kay
@Soprano2:
Both of them predicted a red wave in 2022! Because of course they did. Did they mention that when making their 2024 predictions?
schrodingers_cat
@Matt McIrvin: Agreed.
O. Felix Culpa
@TBone: Obviously you’re not answerable to me or anyone else on this blog, so do what you think is right. One metric of that might be whether you feel comfortable informing hubby of the full plan. :-)
Matt McIrvin
@Tony Jay: There’s always been this tension between normative and descriptive concepts of “American-ness” among liberals. The United States has in fact always been a deeply bigoted, murderous and parochial country, since long before it was the United States, but we don’t want it to be one, even when we are *being* bigoted and parochial.
And the fact there even is this vision of a broad-minded and universalist America, which actually dates from the founding of the country in 18th-century Enlightenment liberal ideas, is powerful.
It gets shade from our left, and especially from international critics, because it’s obviously hypocritical and always has been. But hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue. To just give it up as a bad joke is to basically embrace Trumpism, the rule of the fist.
That said… one of the reasons we have racism as we know it is that Americans helped invent “whiteness” as a category broad enough that it could embrace this sort of pan-ethnic liberal generosity inside of it, and still be utterly exclusive and bigoted at the edges. And then you could expand your definition of whiteness just as far as is needed to maintain an electoral majority. And this process is still going on today. To construct a successful vision of American liberalism that doesn’t incorporate that is the work of generations and it’s still not clear that it’s possible.
Kay
@Harrison Wesley:
He’s another bitter old man who isn’t aging gracefully. They’re angry 20 year olds don’t think they’re funny.
Harrison Wesley
@Baud: True; I hadn’t considered that. It does give a bit of pause to realize that Our Liberal Media includes two lies and a questionable identification in three words. It isn’t “Ours,” it isn’t “Liberal,” and “Media” should not be freely used as a substitute for “Propaganda.”
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@TBone:
Having worked for the DOT mode involved with highways for 27+ years, you get a perspective on state DOT’s nationwide and how some states more than others buy into the bullshit, neoliberal privatization (or if that’s too bald faced, the infamous Public/Private Partnership which inevitably is just as bad) of roads in one form or another.
You also get a perspective on how well state DOTs are run. And PennDOT, nationally, is usually considered one of the worst, if not the worst, run state DOTs in the US.
The PA Turnpike Authority predates the Reaganomics bullshit by a generation. Nonetheless, we always joked that the main reason that I-68 was eventually finished was simply to allow everybody an alternative route to the Turnpike…which for a good 40 years was as mismanaged as anything PennDOT would do.
Something’s happened over the last 10 years tho with the Turnpike, it’s gotten better. I’ve not delved into why that might have been.
O. Felix Culpa
@Kay: Heh. I’m X times older than 20, and don’t find him funny either.
Barbara
@TBone: However great he was, I would be put off by what seems like a demand to see you on his own schedule and terms. I might go if we could meet in a public place, i.e., restaurant. But I don’t know him and you do. My antenna would definitely be up.
Steeplejack
@schrodingers_cat:
You got off the rails when you misread E. You said: “My comment was not an instruction manual as you put it [. . .].”
What E. said: “[. . .] someone using that tweet as an instruction manual for becoming a U.S. citizen.”
It went downhill from there, predictably.
Matt McIrvin
@Baud: Maher got that “even the liberal” label decades ago for supporting pot and animal rights. I think that was about it.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@O. Felix Culpa:
We always watched ‘Politically Incorrect’ back in the day. Maher back then would describe himself in the classic “embarrassed conservative” trope of “socially liberally/fiscally conservative libertarian.”
Turns out he was simply a misogynist asshole with sometimes decent writers.
Ruckus
@schrodingers_cat:
I’ve known a number of immigrants to this country over my lifetime, my family history, like many people my age, has immigrants not that long ago, like one grandfather. And yes the process is slow, difficult, maddening, and I’m sure has at least a slice of BS involved. I do ask, what are other countries like to immigrate to? Do any/many of them have at least relatively simple processes? I looked into emigrating to New Zealand a couple decades ago and it isn’t at all simple and may in fact be more difficult than here.
sab
So true. My sister’s first husband just had to marry the American girl. Her second husband had to jump through all kinds of hoops. He is a real asset to our coun1try, but I doubt if we would even let him in now. Now apparently all we want are sociopathic oligarchs.
Tony Jay
@Harrison Wesley:
Heh. Yeah. In pretty much exactly the same manner as y’all are calling for militarising the southern border and giving the pure, white macho-men of Russia a free hand in their restoration of True Christian Imperium.
As with y’all, us rootless cosmopolitans disagree with that version of y’allness on multiple levels.
schrodingers_cat
@Kirk: I know that. Considering the push I got for gently nudging the discourse towards reality. I didn’t want to launch into a full scale history lesson.
Welcoming immigrants and being hostile to immigrants are both as American as apple pie. And immigrants are not free of prejudice towards other immigrants either.
Harrison Wesley
@sab: We don’t really need to import any of those. We do a pretty good job of growing our own.
schrodingers_cat
@Ruckus: Canada is easier than US if you are a skilled immigrant. If you have a graduate degrees and/or other skills.
IDK about others.
Also my info about Canada is from the early aughts when I was considering Toronto.
H.E.Wolf
@schrodingers_cat:
I’m always glad that you made it past all the hurdles – and I’m wishing the same for others! We are the better for our many naturalized citizens.
Harrison Wesley
@Tony Jay: Oh – you mean the unity and brotherhood song from Tod Browning’s Freaks? “Gooble gobble, one of us!”
Tony Jay
@Matt McIrvin:
Excellent comment.
Nothing is simple. Nothing comes without buts. Nothing advances if it’s constantly explaining why it wants to take the good with it while leaving the bad to rot.
We’re humans. We stand on the shoulders of humans. There’s nothing pristine about us.
schrodingers_cat
@Brachiator: It was all over my time line, Rahul Gandhi congratulated her and she responded to gracious tweet.
Matt McIrvin
@schrodingers_cat: That book I mentioned a while back, Erika Lee’s America for Americans: A History of Xenophobia in the United States, does a good job of describing the deep roots. Anglo colonists were busy fearing an invasion of German immigrants before the United States even existed. I’ve got ancestors on both sides of that one.
sab
@RevRick: I just read your snicker salad recipe to my midwestern husband, in horror, and he says it sounds good and I should make it.
ETA In Ohio we used to be able to buy ambrosia salad at almost any grocery or deli.
Tony Jay
@Harrison Wesley:
I think I caught that on VHS once, but through a hazy cloud of hempage that leaves all memorage a mirage.
So, maybe? If it’s a good thing. If not, probably no,
schrodingers_cat
@Matt McIrvin: I have taught with Erika Lee in the 90s, wonder if she is the same woman as this author.
ETA: I remember reading a screed against German immigrants by none other than Mr. Founding Father Franklin. It was quite Trumpian, actually, with better grammar and sentence construction. And Mexicans replaced by swarthy Germans.
Barbara
@schrodingers_cat: As hard as it is It’s more possible here than almost anywhere else in the world. And no, I agree that the U.S. didn’t repeal human nature, and there is complexity to the experience of being an immigrant.
rikyrah
Good Morning Everyone 😊 😊 😊
O. Felix Culpa
@rikyrah: Good morning!
rikyrah
This prom send-off 😳😳😳
STUNNING
https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTLnJgQXp/
JaySinWA
@Tony Jay: Have you written anything about “Mr Bates vs the post office”? It looks like the January drama shook up the government so badly that they drafted a law that seems to effectively override the judiciary that took effect Friday.
I wonder what the perception about the drama and whether it was the real impetus for the law.
schrodingers_cat
@Barbara: I was comparing immigration present to immigration past. Not necessarily comparing US to other countries. I don’t know enough to make an accurate comparison. And agreed about your human nature comment.
Matt McIrvin
@schrodingers_cat: yes, I recall he went on about how Germans and Swedes weren’t really white like the English were. An excellent example of how elastic that definition is!
rikyrah
@schrodingers_cat:
Immigration gives this country the new blood it needs. We can’t turn our back on immigration and how it fundamentally sets America apart from the rest of the world. That you can come here and become an American. That entire premise was revolutionary.
There are those who have been and are still upset that the Civil Rights Movement ended the Jim Crow era of immigration also.
zhena gogolia
@Steeplejack: It’s next to the Sea of Miso.
Brachiator
@Kay:
It was also fun to see her contributions to the Brooklyn Bridge dramatized in a couple of episodes of the HBO series The Gilded Age.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
Runner up for the inscription on the Statue of Liberty.
zhena gogolia
@Kay: I am so fantasizing about that. 😂
O. Felix Culpa
@zhena gogolia: Lol! And not far from the Soba Valley.
zhena gogolia
@Jager: Me too. I was just always fascinated by that name, Mesabi Range. It sounds like something in Africa.
Brachiator
@schrodingers_cat:
And later by swarthy Italians and swarthy Greeks and swarthy Armenians. Immigrant bashing bigots just love hating on the Swarthians.
zhena gogolia
@O. Felix Culpa: Right!
Matt McIrvin
@Barbara:
Is it, or is that just an example of using western Europe as our basis for comparison?
Most of the New World has automatic birthright citizenship for anyone born on the country’s soil. Most of the Old World doesn’t, or only has a limited form of it. I recall having an interesting conversation about this with my old boss who was from the Dominican Republic–he wondered why the US insisted on that, when it wasn’t the case in a lot of countries. I opined that the US was unusual in not having a fundamentally ethnically based concept of nationality. But later, I looked it up… and it turns out that among countries in the Americas, the DR is the exception in NOT having jus soli citizenship. (Why they don’t is left as an exercise for the reader–you can probably guess!) Most of the countries in the New World do.
schrodingers_cat
@rikyrah: I agree they want to bring back the 1920s.
Steeplejack
@zhena gogolia:
I did the miso baths at the spa when I visited Tempura one summer.
Another Scott
@Matt McIrvin: Thanks.
It’s always good to remember that there really was no “golden age” for whatever policy one favors.
JewishVirtualLibrary.org:
There are various vile quotes by PS out there.
“The past is a foreign country.” It really is. What matters is where we are now and where we’re going.
Cheers,
Scott.
schrodingers_cat
@Matt McIrvin: Irish who are usually paler than the English were classified as not white enough IIRC because they were Catholic.
@rikyrah:
That’s what I love about America.
frosty
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: Having worked with DOTs you must know this, but I’m going to mention it anyway. The PA Turnpike isn’t part of PennDOT. It’s managed by the PA Turnpike Commission with its own funding. It maybe just as poorly managed as PennDOT, I can’t say. I just know that my engineering company based in Maryland had a hell of a time getting PA work.
Once I heard that we lost a bid with Capital Area Water because our Mechanicsburg office was on the wrong side of the Susquehanna. Very parochial state (Commonwealth)!!!
sab
@Kay: Kasich wanted to that to the Ohio turnpike.
scav
From my somewhat hazy recollections, passports weren’t really required until WWI and so a fair number of immigrants didn’t really bother with officially becoming American citizens right away. There was a rush among the resident Bohemians at least right at the outbreak of war because they didn’t want to called up for service in the Austrian-Hungarian army. Lots of reminders in the Czech language newspapers I’m pretty sure. Things were a lot looser.
Melancholy Jaques
@Kay:
Every time someone refers to Maher as liberal or left leaning, my blood begins to boil. He is an antagonist of liberals. The type of asshole who believes the needs of others are trivial and, to him, aesthetically unpleasing.
Matt McIrvin
@Another Scott: It *is* true that at one time, the United States had something close to open borders, and up to the 1920s, you could still just come in if you were any kind of European immigrant. However, you might well face intense prejudice and high barriers to entry into society’s institutions once you got here, and there were basically no protections against that.
The flip side to imagining a golden age of immigration is that conservatives’ insistence that without strictly regulated borders, you don’t have a country is completely ahistorical.
TBone
@Another Scott: thank you, I’ll be careful – I still haven’t completely made up my mind one way or another. That’s what keeps life interesting! Hubby may also surprise me and frequently does, he may have just been cranky that day. He knows to trust my judgement after all these years!
MagdaInBlack
@mrmoshpotato: Soaked to the skin. Sky opened up, of course.
Steeplejack
@Steeplejack:
Coincidentally, I just heard this song on SiriusXM: Kyu Sakamoto, “Sukiyaki.” I fell down a maudlin rabbit hole this morning because the Sixties Gold channel has been doing the top 60 Memorial Day songs of the ’60s. So many memories. Maudlin, maudlin memories.
“Sukiyaki” was #9. Surprised it was so high, but supposedly the list is based on listener votes. Anyway, the title is nonsense; it’s really called “I Look Up as I Walk.” Per Wikipedia, it’s about a guy who looks up and whistles while he walks so that his tears will not fall. “Sukiyaki” was chosen for the American release because it was short, catchy and recognizably Japanese. It topped the Billboard Hot 100 in 1963.
Kay
@Brachiator:
I was the moderator for that one and we start with the moderator’s opinion. Each member only does opinion one a year so I really prepare. I got myself ALL worked up over how bad this book was – I just had so much fun trashing the book. I now know why bad restaurant and movie reviews are so much more fun to read than good ones :)
Kristine
@TBone: The “I’m not getting any younger” phrasing is weird. a number of possible meanings. Maybe it’s just how he expresses himself—you’d know better than any of us.
TBone
@O. Felix Culpa: I’m terrible at lying, and can’t lie to hubby while keeping a straight face. I always giggle if I try to lie to him so I don’t even bother attempting it. Not even little white lies. I just blurt out the truth at all times, it’s much easier and he knows what he’s dealing with by now 😂 I already told him about my idea for the father-daughter private dinner date right after I got the phone call and he seemed to soften up a bit on the idea of us having a separate night out. We’ll see what gives in the next two or three weeks before I really have to decide…
Tony Jay
@JaySinWA:
I haven’t, really, no. Except that I feel I said something about it when it first came out.
Basically it boiled down to a recognition of how very, very British the unfolded scandal has been exposed as being.
For decades the Establishment (regardless of Party) knew how criminally the thousands of postmasters featured in the drama were being treated. The politicians knew it. The Media knew it. Even the legal fraternity knew it. There were brave truthtellers laying the whole story out there year by year (Private Eye, take a bow) but no matter how obvious the injustice was, it was beyond the capabilities of the people lounging drunk and comfortable at the prow of the HMS Great Britain to acknowledge it. Heaven forfend that anyone in the ruling elite disturb the affability of their Bridge foursomes by speaking up for a few thousand little people who were being victimised just to protect the profitability of a well-connected company’s I.T. contracts. What a naive suggestion. How sixth-form and childish. Ewwwww.
Then years pass. Most of the people involved in the crime move on to enjoy the fruits of their complicity. It gets written up as a TV drama and suddenly – so suddenly – all of these top-of-the-pile Establishmentarians who didn’t give a fuck five minutes ago are outraged and ‘something must be done’, while at the same time complicity and blame-assigning are handed over to a carefully managed public enquiry where guilt has to be proven beyond a certain level of doubt, and the guilty are allowed to shrug, weep and basically gurn their way out of acknowledging any responsibility.
That’s modern Britain to a tee. Shameless. Corrupt. Complicit. Cover-Up. And you will go along with it, or we will utterly destroy you.
Harrison Wesley
@Matt McIrvin: Indeed. I read a while ago that one of the biggest mass lynchings in American history was of Italians in New Orleans in the 1890’s.
TBone
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: traffic and road conditions may have eased a bit, but the toll increases are fucking ridiculous! To me, an outsider, PennDot always seemed like a big shit pot of nepotism combined with an insider trading deal on contracts. Just like most other Rethuglican-run agencies in PA. I salute your deeper knowledge of this subject!
Kay
@Melancholy Jaques:
When my 27 year old is at my house he watches comedies : It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Pardon My Enthusiasm and Abbott Elementary. He and his 20 year old brother also watch a Canadian on You Tube, Nathan something. It’s really not that he’s so woke he no longer has a sense of humor. He just doesn’t think Bill Maher is funny.
TBone
@Barbara: definitely will meet in a restaurant! I don’t miss out on the amazing food from my home turf if I have anything to say about it 😂
zhena gogolia
@Steeplejack: I recently thought about it because it was on Mad Men. Apparently he died young in an airplane crash.
TBone
@sab: we still can here in PA. Amish ambrosia salad is a thing here in central PA. Many different varieties also. Red, orange, purple, yellow, pink…
Steeplejack
@zhena gogolia:
Yes, he was 43. He died in 1985 in the “deadliest single-aircraft accident in aviation history”—a Boeing 747 crash that killed 520 people.
zhena gogolia
@Steeplejack: It’s a pretty song.
NotMax
@RevRick
Couple of historical pix.
Mind your step.
A rare glimpse inside one of the massive piers.
satby
@eclare: 👏👏👍
eclare
@Kay:
Holy shit! Wow. Physical tickets.
Matt McIrvin
@Baud:
“GIve me your hungry, your tired, your poor, I’ll piss on ’em
That’s what the Statue of Bigotry says
Your poor huddled masses, let’s club ’em to death and get it over with
And just dump ’em on the boulevard”
–Lou Reed, “Dirty Boulevard”
Brachiator
@Kay:
I don’t know the book. I have an interest in the biographies of people whose lives and achievements have not been properly acknowledged. It’s kinda sad when a person we don’t know much about is represented by a crappy book.
I don’t much care for relentlessly negative reviews unless they are very perceptive. My close friends and I loved going out to eat, and consequently were drawn more to restaurant reviews that celebrated an eatery than ones that were dismissive.
Eons ago, when I was jumping into the world of cinema, I would read a number of critics, including John Simon. I soon figured out that he had created a special niche for himself as a negative reviewer, but he was really nothing more than a tiresome snob with a disgusting habit of often bashing actresses for some aspect of their physical appearance. And it was always actresses, never male actors.
Matt McIrvin
@Kay: I remember relishing Michiko Kakutani’s book reviews in the New York Times because she was so entertaining at ripping apart the awful ones. I suspect they preferentially sent her awful books just to get those sweet dunks.
TBone
I am sitting in quintessential Americana – a 1950s style roadside drive-in restaurant with those trays that fit on your car window. This one is famous for its fried fish sandwich (fish being somewhat of a rarity here) and sits on a bluff on the banks of the Mighty Susquehanna so it’s a great view. Picnic tables lined up on the edge of the bluff overlooking the river for those who don’t want to eat in the car. The milkshakes here are dangerous!
eclare
@Kay:
Google and read Roger Ebert’s review of Pearl Harbor. It is scathingly hilarious.
MagdaInBlack
@TBone: Now you are MY spirit animal🏵️
Eta: Esp the milkshake part.
RevRick
@sab: Ambrosia salad was also available in Western PA, and was mandatory at church potlucks.
Matt McIrvin
@Tony Jay: The other side of the coin is that our far right has a dream of somehow making the United States a fundamentally ethnically defined nation, like most of the countries in Europe and Asia basically see themselves as being.
In my opinion it’s obnoxious wherever it appears, but at least in Europe, there’s some kind of history backing it up–you HAVE broadly defined ethnic cultures that have lived in one place for a decently long time, that the early-19th-century idea of ethnic nationalism could play on. Well, we have those here too, but they’re not the people who most of us are descended from! We killed most of them!
Though, of course, even in Europe that notion blurs out once you start to consider the history further back than a few hundred years.
Anyway, “ethnostate” nationalism applied to the United States is just incoherent, except possibly as applied to Native sovereignty, and that’s sure not what our right is interested in. American right-wingers who want the idea to work basically have to appeal to racism and expand it into something like white-English-speaking nationalism. And we’ve explicitly constitutionally rejected that as part of the fallout of the Civil War, as much as people want to believe otherwise.
eclare
Roger Ebert’s review of Pearl Harbor. It is a thing of beauty.
https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/pearl-harbor-2001
Ruckus
@Tony Jay:
Clap, clap, clap……
Life indeed does have it’s good moments and it’s hard and or difficult moments. Things can get simple when we get used to them, know the ins and outs of them. And some things never get simple. It’s humanity, in all it’s glory, all it’s bullshit, all it’s wonders and all it’s roadblocks.
RevRick
@NotMax: I read McCullough’s book about The Great Bridge. He provided great historical context.
Anoniminous
@eclare:
With a classic opening sentence:
“”Pearl Harbor” is a two-hour movie squeezed into three hours, about how on Dec. 7, 1941, the Japanese staged a surprise attack on an American love triangle.”
zhena gogolia
@eclare: He had me at “a two-hour movie squeezed into three hours” 😂
TBone
@TBone: WQSU radio is celebrating the next hour with the theme “America Gone Wrong” celebrating rebellious music. A song titled ‘Our First Train Robbery” is now playing 😆
Barbara
@TBone: The situation puts me in mind of a question to Carolyn Hax from a recently widowed man who was flummoxed by the negative reaction of his wife’s best friend to his proposition that they became friends with benefits. Shades of George Costanza — was that wrong of me?
The comments were full of stories describing similar encounters including some involving very elderly men.
TBone
@MagdaInBlack: ❤️💜❤️💜❤️💙🤩🥰😍 the fresh local ice cream is to die for!
schrodingers_cat
@H.E.Wolf: Thanks so much!
TBone
@Barbara: this guy knows me (meaning he knows he might draw back a nub if he tries anything!). Hey, where’s the end of my arm?
O. Felix Culpa
@Brachiator:
Quelle surprise. I remember reading Simon’s reviews back in the day, but don’t remember anything about them, forgetfulness being a (sometime) advantage of old age.
JaySinWA
@Tony Jay: Thanks,
So not that much different from American politics.
I find it interesting that there seems to have been a panic to put a plaster on the sore, perhaps to avoid dealing with the causes. I’m not sure we could get nearly as much action to redress problems here.
Maybe student loan forgiveness is a mild parallel, but without quite the visible malevolence. And that has a lot of political and judicial resistance here. Of course, you may well see buyer’s remorse set in as the subpostmasters try to collect on the latest set of promises made and the heat of the moment has cooled and the public eye is occupied elsewhere.
eclare
@Anoniminous:
It’s a classic.
eclare
@zhena gogolia:
Yep!
NotMax
@Barbara
“Once you go gray you’ll never stray.”
:)
twbrandt
@Kay: I like that the damn roads are getting fixed, but I wish the state paid much more attention to mass transit and rail connections between major connections than it does. This doesn’t seem to be of much interest to Whitmer.
Suzanne
@comrade scotts agenda of rage:
I moved to PA in 2020, and the Turnpike is fucken great. There’s been widening work going on the whole time I have lived here. The Turnpike is well-maintained, the service plazas are clean and open at all hours.
TBone
A refreshing plug for superstar Jasmine Crockett, in celebration of America Gone Wrong rebels! 😍😆
https://crooksandliars.com/2024/05/jasmine-crockett-mocks-erectile
O. Felix Culpa
@Suzanne:
That’s genuinely great to hear! We used to drive the turnpike regularly on our way to visit my (ex) in-laws in Philly. It was a freaking nightmare, especially in the winter. Glad to hear that they’ve improved it.
Anoniminous
@eclare:
Even more better is his review of North:
“I hated this movie. Hated hated hated hated hated this movie. Hated it. Hated every simpering stupid vacant audience-insulting moment of it. Hated the sensibility that thought anyone would like it. Hated the implied insult to the audience by its belief that anyone would be entertained by it.”
O. Felix Culpa
@Anoniminous:
I remember hating that movie too. (Sadly, old age did not completely erase that memory.)
I love Ebert’s closing paragraph, in which his feelings about the movie remain unhidden:
TBone
@Suzanne: there has been a huge widening of rising fees called tolls as well as nightmare stories about trying to deal with EZ Pass if a SNAFU situation happens. We don’t have humans in toll booths anymore. They take their toll money in advance out of our bank account periodically. I’m glad the road work is settling in but the financial gouging is endless.
Tony Jay
@Matt McIrvin:
All this. Yup.
The problem with knowing your history is basically, well…
Over and over and over again until the bullets start flying.
Soprano2
@Kay: Hell, I give hubby THC to help his appetite. He doesn’t know what it is, he hated pot. It works, he ate all his breakfast this morning. I figured what the hell, might as well try. He gained 2 pounds this week, he’s up to 120.6 lbs at 5 ft 4 in.
eclare
@Anoniminous:
Ooh, thanks! I haven’t read that.
Eta>Wow. What a cast and director! And I have no recollection of that movie.
Soprano2
@Harrison Wesley: He famously donated $1,000,000 to Obama. He’s obsessed with “woke”, though, and thinks because he does shows in the heartland he has his finger on the pulse of the “average” voter, who seems to be a white guy like Maher. 🙄🙄
Soprano2
@Kay: No, she didn’t mention that.
Ruckus
@Baud:
The United States has in fact always been a deeply bigoted, murderous and parochial country. (Matt McIrvin)
As has most of the world and many of it’s populations
We are like most animals, we want to protect our homes, whatever they may look like, nests in trees, caves, apartment buildings, single family homes, estates, etc, etc, etc. We band together when that’s necessary, as do many animals. We, like most animals like to know what is around us, be it microns away or hundreds of miles. Most of us want to stay alive for as long as possible, if for no other reason than we do not know what tomorrow actually brings, even as we invent concepts that it may be better. The next second, minute, year, century, we never actually know.
Barbara
@Matt McIrvin: It’s especially obnoxious because most of the ancestors of African-Americans came to these shores at least one hundred and usually more years than most other immigrant groups. My earliest known ancestors arrived in the 1820s, but most were considerably later, 1850s, all the way to 1910.
And as you say, that’s forgetting all about the indigenous population that was already here.
Kay
@Soprano2:
Oh, I’m glad. I stopped being so cranky about it because so many people I know are using it to self treat various ailments. I still think it’s terrible for teenagers, though, and the US should reduce the allowable potency.
TBone
After the Libertarian Convention (by goldengateblond):
Soprano2
@Kay: What’s interesting is that not all of them are like that. Colbert just turned 60, and he’s not like that at all! It’s not inevitable. Maybe it’s because he never thought he was super cool.
JaySinWA
@TBone: Librarians would have cut him a whole lot deeper.
TBone
@MagdaInBlack: I was gonna comment on the Antifa milkshakes connection, one of my all time favorite memes. One’s on official Antifa letterhead:
Two Point Plan to Defeat Rethuglican Party:
There is a big milkshake stain and splatter on the letterhead at the bottom of the Plan.
TBone
@JaySinWA: 💙😎❤️💋
rikyrah
@O. Felix Culpa:
Awe🤗🤗🤗
Please send pictures of the new foster to BJ
Matt McIrvin
@Barbara: And I didn’t even get into the fact that the “foreigners” we spend the most time fretting about are the ones who DO usually have some indigenous American ancestry, though it may not be from the territory now covered by the US.
NotMax
@Anoniminous
The week the Siskel & Ebert program reviewed North was a contest in which one loathed the movie more.
thruppence
Probably late for this, but since we’re talkin immigration, Gogol Bordello, Immigradiada:
https://youtu.be/aKpgb2WrGo0?si=ys4vIhCvfN58nNF1
Ruckus
@TheOtherHank:
I believe that quite a while back, the people in charge in DC decided that we had too many people. I believe that they sort of had the attitude that we were all going to be farmers or ranchers for ever and if new people emigrated we would have too many people to feed, because of course they didn’t have crystal balls to see the future. Here in SoCal we are seeing attached homes, 6-8 units per building, 2 sizes, 3 stories, 3 bedrooms, 3 baths, attached garage. I’ve been in one and they are not bad and a lot cheaper than a single family home on separate lots. They are finishing the last of 5 buildings across the street from me, a mile away they are starting on the last of 24 buildings if my counting is decent. That would be 188 homes on a piece of land that would have held maybe 20 or so single unit homes (one is on a smaller section so it’s only 4 units). There are a few other sites around me that have the same types of homes. New homes on single sites are just too expensive around here for the average family. It’s up not wider/deeper.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@TBone:
PennDOT’s rep has also been, as you allude to, an inherently corrupt organization.
@frosty:
Yeah, I know. Based on their “product” over the last 10-12 years, they’ve cleaned up their act b/c you go back before that, and they were as mismanaged as PennDOT was and is.
Ruckus
@twbrandt:
The population of all of Michigan is just barely over that of Los Angeles County! Would much rapid transit pay off there or work well in the winter? Because to work and pay for itself it needs paying customers. I imagine in some of the bigger cities and possibly surrounding areas it might and likely there are busses there already but the requirements for a state the size of Michigan (12+times the area of LA County and population less than 1million bigger) would make it cost a lot more.
Ironcity
@Suzanne: Yes, but the rest areas are not Howard Johnson’s in stone buildings with table service. And widening to even three (gasp) lanes up mountains so the trucks can’t go 2 abreast and block everything at 25 mph. Tunnels anyone? The best rest areas of yore were the Fred Harvey restaurants on bridges over the Illinois thruway.