Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Putin must be throwing ketchup at the walls.

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

Republicans do not trust women.

SCOTUS: It’s not “bribery” unless it comes from the Bribery region of France. Otherwise, it’s merely “sparkling malfeasance”.

If a good thing happens for a bad reason, it’s still a good thing.

It’s pointless to bring up problems that can only be solved with a time machine.

If America since Jan 2025 hasn’t broken your heart, you haven’t loved her enough.

Accountability, motherfuckers.

Our messy unity will be our strength.

I see no possible difficulties whatsoever with this fool-proof plan.

The fight for our country is always worth it. ~Kamala Harris

Of course you can have champagne before noon. That’s why orange juice was invented.

Take hopelessness and turn it into resilience.

Let me file that under fuck it.

If you can’t control your emotions, someone else will.

Disappointing to see gov. newsom with his finger to the wind.

They fucked up the fucking up of the fuckup!

Nothing says ‘pro-life’ like letting children go hungry.

Do not shrug your shoulders and accept the normalization of untruths.

Fuck these fucking interesting times.

Anne Laurie is a fucking hero in so many ways. ~ Betty Cracker

When your entire life is steeped in white supremacy, equality feels like discrimination.

They want us to be overwhelmed and exhausted. Focus. Resist. Oppose.

If rights aren’t universal, they are privilege, not rights.

You are here: Home / John Cole Presents "This Fucking Old House" / Monday Night Open Thread

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133Comments

  1. 1.

    bbleh

    Yeah, have you read about the Thwaites glacier?  Maybe you wanna re-think that “being alive” thing!

    OTOH, as observed somewhere, the Harris campaign is “hitting on all cylinders,” and the Orange Guy seems to be, well, kinda deteriorating almost by the day.

    And the weather’s spozeta be nice later this week.

  2. 2.

    Mike S

    I found a new podcast that I think people here would like. Question Everything.

    Reporter Brian Reed re-examines everything about journalism, the profession he thought he knew. In the middle of making his second hit podcast, Brian got sued. Accused. Told the biggest story of his career — the Peabody Award-winning series S-Town — wasn’t journalism. Which meant he had to spend years proving that it was. Obsessing over the question, “What is journalism, anyway?”

    Q

  3. 3.

    MisterForkbeard

    I had a short interaction with a Trumper tonight online where the guy started off normal-sounding and then when challenged slightly when off on every insane conspiracy theory under the sun. And the dude genuinely believed it too, which is the really scary thing.

    The Tester v Sheehy debate appears to have produced a couple of good videos for Tester where Sheehy tries to get cute and just gets murdered. So that was nice.

  4. 4.

    msilaneous

    “Shambling corpse.” Read that description somewhere today and have decided to use it as my nickname on medical forms from now on.

  5. 5.

    bbleh

    @MisterForkbeard: I may be over-reading, but seems to me I had the same thing happen recently, and it made me wonder why they’re so, well, hair-trigger.

    Hypothesis: part of them knows damn well they’re backing the wrong horse, and indeed the wrong world-view, and they’re in a state of borderline panic such that any challenge at all sets them off.

    Further hypothesis: their leader is the same way.

    Discuss.

  8. 8.

    Jerry

    Pete Rose is dead. Does he deserve to be in the Hall of Fame? His stats say yes, but the fact that he bet on baseball says no. The rule is clear, no betting on baseball, but he did for many years and for many more years he lied about it. Fuck him and his kid diddling ways.

  10. 10.

    piratedan

    @bbleh: I think that’s a solid take.  Doesn’t mean we take things for granted and I have no illusions as to what those that support DJT would and could do… everything is on the table.  Overt fuckery at polling stations, violence, legal challenges, accusations galore… probably with no corroborating evidence because if you’re a Republican, you don’t need any apparently.

  11. 11.

    Kayla Rudbek

    Still recovering here.  My fasting blood sugar was below 90 this morning (I am not entirely sure if this was accurate as I now take it on my arm and I had trouble getting enough blood to measure this morning.) Mr. Rudbek is zonked out on the couch although he managed to get in a quick run at lunchtime. I think that taking the shot midweek works better with going out bicycling on the weekends.

  13. 13.

    karen marie

    Fuck the pumpkin spice sighting.  The manager at my apartment complex here in Arizona – where we had a record 117 degree day last week – put up Halloween decorations on the 27th of September.

    I can’t even with these fucking people.

  15. 15.

    satby

    I’m wide awake in my hotel just outside OHare Airport, and I have to get up to catch the shuttle in 4 hours, after wrestling a frightened cat into a small soft-sided carrier for the flight. She’s not going to be happy. I may not sleep all night 😂

  17. 17.

    Pennsylvanian

    Me too!

    Started new job today. Time will tell. Long day today and more ahead, but I am ready to contribute to the BJ bulb exchange or share.

    Anyone that was interested in perennial bulbs for the BJ bulb garden or bulb gift or exchange, please raise your hands. I’m ready to ship but I don’t trust the lot of you.

    Kidding! Can ship usps. Bulbs dug from multiple beds, so perennials spring eternal and will probably not be labeled. I’m not sure how all of this works so I will contact WG.

  19. 19.

    Jerry

    @Chet Murthy: wait what he was a pedophile too?

    Yeah, when he was in his 30s he had a girlfriend that was under 16, but claims they didn’t have sex until after her 16th birthday. When asked about it by a female reporter in the 20-teens, his response was that “it happened 55 years ago, babe.”

    He was just an all around terrible person. I’m sad for his family’s loss if he wasn’t an asshole to them either. Maybe he wasn’t.

  24. 24.

    HumboldtBlue

    @Chet Murthy: ​ 

    A woman says she had a sexual relationship with baseball legend Pete Rose that began in 1973 when she was 14 or 15 years old and continued for several years, according to federal court documents filed Monday.

    In response, Rose acknowledged that he had sex with the woman, who was not identified, but said he believed she was 16 at the time, old enough to legally consent in Ohio.

    The woman’s account was submitted by defense attorneys in a defamation lawsuit Rose filed last year against John Dowd, a well-known Washington lawyer who said in a 2015 radio interview that Rose had committed statutory rape by routinely having sex with underage girls during his baseball career. The lawsuit is underway in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.

    Dowd led a 1989 investigation for Major League Baseball that found Rose had gambled on games as a player and manager for the Cincinnati Reds. As a result of the investigation, Rose was banned from the MLB for life.

    Attorneys for Dowd, attempting to show his on-air remarks about Rose were essentially true, submitted a sworn statement from a woman referred to in court filings as Jane Doe.

  27. 27.

    BR

    @bbleh: ​

    All the authoritarians are going to just get more unhinged as the election nears: Trump, Bibi, Putin, Musk, and the no-name followers of these guys. They’re trying to gin up the anger and hatred — one last hurrah. And some people are falling for it. The way to win is to not fall for it.

  29. 29.

    Kayla Rudbek

     

    @Colleeniem: cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves make sense with ham, but blended in with cheese is questionable in my opinion. Even blended with the nondairy cheese I have to eat, it would be questionable. Now yogurt or sour cream would also be fine with a pumpkin spice blend. I think that sweeter spices need some sour to work against (coming from a person who sorts the spices/herbs by sweet aka baking and then savory aka goes into the main or side dishes, maybe with garlic).

  30. 30.

    HumboldtBlue

    @narya: ​ 

    He was an asshole, and he’s not alone. Baseball in particular has an outsized number of assholes of varying stripes and ilks.

    Wander Franco, who two years ago was tabbed as the next big thing in baseball — and for damn good reason, he’s a brilliant player — is now facing decades in prison for his actions regarding a 14-year-old girl.

  31. 31.

    frosty

    A couple of days ago I grabbed an IQ “nutrition” bar from a bin of peanut butter chip ones. When I went to peel the wrapper off a while later it was a Pumpkin Spice. Arrrgghh!!

  32. 32.

    Citizen Alan

    One of the ladies who works in  our office has a birthday coming up, and since I have developed the reputation as the office “dessert guy” I was asked to make something. I asked what her favorite flavors were. “Pumpkin Spice.” I nearly wept.

  33. 33.

    Citizen Alan

    @frosty:  I had a similar experience when I paid $20 for a jar of keto sugar free caramel sauce. Only I didn’t read the label careful and mistakenly picked up a jar of caramel Chai sauce. Blech!

  37. 37.

    Citizen Alan

    @Kayla Rudbek:  I imagine cream cheese would go okay with a pumpkin spice blend. But then, I’m of the opinion that you could mix cream cheese with motor oil and it would taste good.

  40. 40.

    satby

    via Mueller She Wrote, an incredible and heartening judgement from Georgia, where the six week abortion ban law was found unconstitutional. Read the whole thing!

    Women are not some piece of collectively owned community property the disposition of which is decided by majority vote. Forcing a woman to carry an unwanted, not-yet-viable fetus to term violates her constitutional rights to liberty and privacy, even taking into consideration whatever bundle of rights the not-yet-viable fetus may have.

  42. 42.

    narya

    @Citizen Alan: maybe a carrot cake with a pumpkin spice cream cheese frosting? I make my carrot cake with roasted carrots (to dehydrate them a bit), butter instead of oil, and pumpkin purée instead of some of the butter; much less heavy and gloppy.

  45. 45.

    CaseyL

    Pumpkin spice is a fad flavor that never seems to go away, possibly because it’s a seasonal fad flavor.

    Putting lavender in everything seems, fortunately, to be dying out. At least I hope so. I love the smell of lavender, but have yet to eat anything it improved the taste of. Wait, no, I have to take that back: I had a dessert at a fancy restaurant a few weeks ago, some kind of citrus-y lavender-y sorbet. It was actually quite good… for three or four bites. Then it was suddenly and irrevocably Too Much.

  46. 46.

    Auntie Anne

    I work as an online shopper at a grocery store.  I cannot believe the number of people who buy pumpkin spice everything. Pumpkin spice ice cream sandwiches, anyone?  Ick.

  51. 51.

    Kayla Rudbek

    @Citizen Alan: yeah, the nondairy cream cheese varies by brand, but all the plain flavors would benefit from some spice in my opinion. I should probably sit down one time and do a taste test and review of the various brands available now.  I tend to prefer Daiya for calcium and Violife or Mioyoko’s for flavor. Tofutti is also a classic

  53. 53.

    HumboldtBlue

    @Anoniminous: ​ 

    And it’s the one that stands out for me, not always to my liking.

    It’s a conflict between the nose and the palate. Similar to the conflict my nose and palate have between really good tequila and back of the bar cuervo only good for bar shots.

    They smell almost identical, but the moment it hits the tongue the really good tequila shines, it puts you off balance.

  54. 54.

    Gloria DryGarden

    @Kayla Rudbek: kite Hill does an almond based cream cheese, and they have a chives flavor..

    I mostly like them, or daiya. The violife  (auto predict changed that to cookie) has corn in it, so I try to avoid, but it does taste good. None of them are good protein sources, unlike cheese, drat it…

  55. 55.

    Prescott Cactus

    @msilaneous:

    I always put “Rocco” as my preferred name on doctor forms. Only 2 ever have called me that. My wives eyesight was horrid before her surgeries and I always put “Tinkerbell” for her when I filled out her forms. No one ever called her Tinkerbell.

  57. 57.

    mrmoshpotato

    Fuck off, Jon Stewart.  I can humorlessly bitch about the orange shitstain too.

    What an absolutely shit show tonight.

  58. 58.

    Chet Murthy

    @mrmoshpotato: i’ve seen enough clips of Jon Stewart being stupid that I don’t watch his monologue anymore.  But for all that, he is nurtured a large stable of excellent comics who are also very good at getting the truth across.  I think immediately of Jordan Klepper, But really there are manyMore.

  59. 59.

    MisterForkbeard

    @Citizen Alan: Just make her a pumpkin pie and look surprised when she’s disappointed

    Alternately. make some caramel and drop the pumpkin spice in it. Good enough.

  62. 62.

    cckids

    @satby: :( poor baby, I’m getting all the cat stuff ready here. Found a sweet heating pad she should love as it gets colder, and fixed her up a “hiding” space she can use until she gets used to me.

  66. 66.

    Prescott Cactus

    If you have a few free moments, keep Taiwan in your thoughts. Typhoon Krathon is not going to play nice.

  67. 67.

    Anoniminous

    @HumboldtBlue:

    Really!  That’s interesting.  I’ve never had that reaction to a dish and I use Herbes de Provence a lot.

    According to some lavender is not a traditional ingredient, shouldn’t be added, and is an “American bastardization.”  My friend in Lyon puts lavender in his mixture.  Also many restaurants in Lyon use lavender when making duck confit and I dare anyone to tell the head chef, to his face, his Confit de Canard is an Americanization.

  68. 68.

    prostratedragon

    @Citizen Alan:

    “I imagine cream cheese would go okay with a pumpkin spice blend.”

    Yep.

    “But then, I’m of the opinion that you could mix cream cheese with motor oil and it would taste good.”

    Yep.

  70. 70.

    HumboldtBlue

    @Anoniminous: ​ 

    I have a confused palate. Toss some fresh cilantro on top of something, I won’t eat it and will hunt down every pernicious leaf. Put fresh cilantro in salsa or some other mashup of flavors, and I’m fine, I get why it’s there.

  71. 71.

    prostratedragon

    @HumboldtBlue:

    I never can get tiktok on this phone, but do you mean this, whivh has been going around?

    Biden: He’s lying and the governor told him he was lying. I’ve spoken to the governor.. I don’t know why he does this and the reason I get so angry about it, I don’t care about what he says about me, but I care what he communicates to the people that are in need. He implies that we’re not doing everything possible. We are. I assume you heard the Republican Governor of Georgia talk about that. He was on the phone with me more than once. So that’s simply not true.

    Biden makes a great point. The most despicable part of Trump’s lies is that he is making the victims think nobody is going to help them and causing them more pain and stress with his lies. He’s the worst human being to ever serve as president.

  76. 76.

    Melancholy Jaques

    @HumboldtBlue:

    Baseball in particular has an outsized number of assholes of varying stripes and ilks.

    I feel like you’re not giving football – college & pro – its due.

  77. 77.

    Splitting Image

    I’m still alive. That’s something.

    So is Jimmy Carter, and he just turned 100.

    Many happy returns, Jimmy!

  80. 80.

    Anoniminous

    @HumboldtBlue:

    I’m one of the 14% who taste cilantro as soap.  I don’t “think” it tastes like soap, it bloody damn well tastes like soap.  Cooked, uncooked, hiding in the salsa with lime, doesn’t matter – I can still taste it.  So I understand your aversion to lavender.

    Have you seen Délicieux? If not I highly recommend it. It’s a film set just before the Revolution about the first French restaurant to offer gourmet food to anyone who can pay. The film is a delight and the cinematography is a feast for the eyes. Also the first spoken words are “More Butter!” so – hey! – what can go wrong.

  84. 84.

    prostratedragon

    L-l-or-duh! I sure hooe Tester beats this guy.

    It’s honestly beyond parody at this point. Another huge bio lie from Sheehy:

    Tim Sheehy claimed he lived “below the poverty line” when he moved to Montana.

    He had **$400,000** in the bank.

  89. 89.

    trollhattan

    [Checks calendar] Yay, October. [Checks weather] WTAF?

    Tuesday
    Sunny and hot, with a high near 100. Northwest wind 3 to 5 mph.
    Tuesday Night
    Clear, with a low around 63. Light and variable wind.
    Wednesday
    Sunny and hot, with a high near 100. North northwest wind 3 to 6 mph.
    Wednesday Night
    Clear, with a low around 64. Calm wind.
    Thursday
    Sunny and hot, with a high near 98.
    Thursday Night
    Clear, with a low around 65.
    Friday
    Sunny and hot, with a high near 98.
    Friday Night
    Mostly clear, with a low around 64.
    Saturday
    Sunny and hot, with a high near 97.
    Saturday Night
    Mostly clear, with a low around 63.
    Sunday
    Sunny, with a high near 94.
    Sunday Night
    Mostly clear, with a low around 60.
    Monday
    Sunny, with a high near 93.

    Thus endeth “yay.”

  94. 94.

    Lily

    @Citizen Alan:  Perhaps just cinnamon, coriander, nutmeg, lemon zest, maybe  almond or  vanilla or extract  – – instead of ‘pumpkin spice’.  (Which always has clove that imo is how everything gets turned into that uniform overdone flavor of boredom)  Nothing against clove itself  (elsewhere) though.

  95. 95.

    I gotta get out of this place

    @Gloria DryGarden: Roy Wood Jr has a new hour long “news” show on CNN Saturday nights at 9pm (this is from memory so time may be off). Two shows so far, highs and lows but I liked the 1st one better.

  100. 100.

    Shalimar

    @MisterForkbeard: I had a similar interaction in a restaurant with a relative i intentionally never see.  Lots of dumb conspiracy theories, the worst of which was that Willie Brown wrote an op-ed in May of 2020 where he confessed that VP Harris had been his personal whore in the 90s and he passed her around to hundreds of friends.  Supposedly he was trying to keep her from being the VP pick since he knew how unqualified she was.

    I knew nothing like that had happened, but I did look up what Brown actually wrote in 2019 and 2020.  He was bragging about helping Harris get ahead (along with Pelosi, Newsom, et. al.) and wanted her to get the VP nomination because it proved how great he was.  A real piece of work, but not in the way the relative who apparently hates women was claiming.

  101. 101.

    Gloria DryGarden

    @Quinerly: I had no idea he’s been living with cancer, nor that such immunothérapies were so successful. Very uplifting to read about that. I guess they think he’s cured. Astonishing

  105. 105.

    JCJ

    @Gloria DryGarden:  It is really something what can happen with some of the newer therapies.  I will be retiring in May after almost 32 years of being a radiation oncologist.  Stereotactic radiosurgery for limited brain metastases, immunotherapy, various inhibitors (tyrosine kinase inhibitors, CDK 4/6 inhibitors, immune checkpoint inhibitors) and other things really can be quite impactful.  My brother is a medical oncologist who keeps working at age 70 because of the recent improvements in his field.  These don’t always work, but when they do they can be quite beneficial

  106. 106.

    stacib

    @prostratedragon: I had a co-worker who was raised in Winnetka with their own section of beach.  Lots of loot there, and he had Money Market accounts (plural) in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.  He moved to a basement apartment on the Northwest side of Chicago (nice neighborhood), made a moral decision to not use his accounts, and he thought that made him identify with being poor.  The guy was also an actuary, with Blue Cross, so he was making hella dollars as salary, too.

    Same guy also said to me, a black woman, “my parents aren’t prejudice – they have black servants” with an absolutely straight face.  If I live to be 100, I’ll never forget that statement.

  109. 109.

    schrodingers_cat

    @stacib: Its worse than a crunchy lib telling me, oh you must be spiritual, you are from India

    Or oh I love immigrants, they have great food

    I have had this said to my face more than once by people who think they are  being nice to me

    Clueless morons.

  112. 112.

    Gloria DryGarden

    @JCJ: That is so great, that you and your brother have been involved with this. For jimmy carter to have metastatic melanoma, and get just 6 months of the immune therapy and be alive 9 years later, amazes me. I’ve lost a lot of my family to cancer, and friends, too, so it’s good to hear there is so much hope nowadays.

    in my massage therapy days, I had a client with what turned out to be melanoma. I knew looking at it, that it might be, and I knew how notoriously aggressive it could be. I had to really stick to my guns to get her to go into the doctor.
    Poor lady, I refused to massage that part of her body until she could bring me a note from her doctor. I knew it was pretty urgent, it was classic, and I had to urge her every time for weeks, please go in tomorrow, have you gone in yet? I was afraid about refusing her, and she was angry with me for awhile. Once the doctors did their surgery and biopsy thing with her, she realized.

    Thank you for helping so many people! You probably know all about those immune drugs in quinerly ‘s article above. That must be so uplifting for your brother, now that there’s so much help.

  118. 118.

    bjacques

    Open thread, so the Bitcoin Number Go Up Travelling All-Stars road show comes to Amsterdam next week. Past featured speakers included Stella Assange and Ed Snowden.

    ”Experience Amsterdam in the autumn “. Bwahahaha!! It’s cold, windy and pissing down rain. Autumn was last week and you missed it.

    https://b.tc/conference/amsterdam/speakers

  119. 119.

    opiejeanne

    @Citizen Alan: I’m generally not a fan of pumpkin spice unless it’s in a pumpkin pie, but when I was a kid there was a cake called a spice cake that used the same spices as pumpkin pie and was very good. You will be able to find a recipe for it online, and Duncan Hines still makes the mix.

  122. 122.

    David_C

    @TBone: Sounds great. A couple weeks ago Giant Eagle put out their pumpkin spice two-bites and of course I bought a package. At one point I made a mean spice cake.

     

    Cold weather and clouds are here in MD and I’m all for it, except for the continuous on days when I have to commute to the office (35 miles) and the bus ride takes forever. Bad point: I haven’t been able to mow the law. Good point: my basil is growing like crazy and I’m making and freezing hand chopped pesto every two weeks.

  123. 123.

    coin operated

    G’morning.
    After 3 blissful months on the Oregon coast, where the high temps never got above 75F, we are back in Vegas and triple-digit temps. Blech! I would have stayed another couple weeks, but mrs coin scheduled a bunch of medical appointments that need to be dealt with. We will definitely refine our appointments, departure, and return dates next year.

    If you’ve never towed a 39′ fifth-wheel RV through the Nevada desert, it is not for the feint of heart. The RV has the aerodynamics of a cinder block, and a moderate crosswind makes for an interesting driving experience.

  124. 124.

    Gloria DryGarden

    @schrodingers_cat: I buy gluten free cake mixes at my health food store and often they are also dairy free. I think some of the wheat based mixes at my store also have some without dairy. It just involves reading the ingredients lists on a few boxes.

    cake from scratch is pretty doable, but you need a recipe, and you have to measure. But you can make any substitutions you want. The last time I made a pumpkin bread or spice cake I think it called for molasses, but it was worth it.

  125. 125.

    lol chikinburd

    The only “Texas Cheesecake Massacre” I have been able to find in an admittedly lazy search is a freaking tea sold on Etsy.  This will not do.  I need a cheesecake made with jalapenos and cheap beer, stat.

    Also, fuck a cloves.

  126. 126.

    sab

    @coin operated: How about a 24′ U-haul truck with a station wagon on a trailer behind, with a german shepherd riding shotgun and blocking the right side rear view mirror? I did that from Vegas to Ohio. Never again. The Rockies through Colorado were an especially interesting experience, trying to maneuver all that through a gas station.

  130. 130.

    Uncle Cosmo

    @karen marie: Fuck the pumpkin spice sighting. The manager at my apartment complex here in Arizona – where we had a record 117 degree day last week – put up Halloween decorations on the 27th of September.

    BFD. The Lidl at Northwood Commons here in Bawlmer loaded an entire aisle with Halloween-themed candy well before I left for Prague on 11 September. (IMO it’s mostly a function of no holiday between Labor Day and Thanksgiving The Great American Pig-Out to hang a marketing campaign on.)

    (FTR on the planet Awwreckus, bka Dung, the spice rules everything. Pumpkin spice, that is. Whatever the Pumpkin Growers of America paid the Mad Man who dreamed up that ad campaign, it wasn’t near enough…)

  132. 132.

    TBone

    @David_C: I’m surprised no one commented on the deliciousness of Sweetzel cookies.  Dunked in milk.  Are they an only in Philly thing?

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