time to diSruPt Thanksgiving wapo.st/497t7tv
— Alexandra Petri (@petridishes.bsky.social) November 27, 2024 at 3:41 PM
Alexandra Petri, at the Washington Post, “Make Thanksgiving Efficient Again” [gift link]:
… Elon Musk here. You might know me from the Department of Government Efficiency, a.k.a. DOGE (get it?), or from the fact that you are forced to think about me every day whether you want to or not. That’s peak efficiency, when people are thinking about me and working to my benefit.
I can’t wait to start doing to the federal government what I have already done to Twitter: removing all the parts that made it responsive to users, and replacing them with DOGE memes, tumbleweeds and a vague air of menace.
As a fun warm-up for my work on the government, I thought I’d start by tackling Thanksgiving. I’m a disrupter at heart. Whenever I see anything functioning as intended, a little something in me dies…
First, it doesn’t need to be in person. Thanksgiving should be mostly VR. Imagine if instead of sitting at a dining table with your relatives, you were fighting a virtual minotaur in the comfort and isolation of your home! Imagine if instead of eating lovingly prepared green beans and mashed potatoes in the company of human beings, you were eating a dense, flavorless nutrition pellet while sitting next to an animated AI rendering of the Mona Lisa! Much better.
By eliminating the in-person and food elements of Thanksgiving, we can maximize the value of the holiday: increasing everyone’s time for posting, where it can build value for me, Elon Musk!…
Next question: What is going on with all these cousins? I see many of these celebrations include at least three cousins, some even more than that? This number just seems too high. It’s also unclear to me what function a “cousin” performs, if any. Most of them are just sitting around watching football. One of them claims to have “set the table” (a made-up-sounding job).
I would slash the cousin count by at least 80 percent. The remaining cousins should busy themselves arranging nutritional pellets into an X, and spend the rest of the time making memes about how cool I (Elon Musk) am.
Or, if you want to have cousins, pay a cousin subscription fee of just $63.99 a month to me, Elon Musk, and I will let you keep your preexisting cousins, although they will all be required to install Neuralink implants. Relax; the monkeys’ bad experience with them was probably anomalous and is nothing to worry about!…
Many people at Thanksgiving complain about having to talk about politics with their relatives. They’re right. That’s a bad use of time. Instead, try posting about politics on X! This way, you can receive personal insults, threats and dangerous misinformation from all around the world, rather than just your uncles. Also, it creates value for me, Elon Musk!…
Nukular Biskits
Too much food.
Had to undo the button on my shorts to breathe.
bbleh
Sigh. I am SO looking forward to four (or more!) years of greedy, absurdly privileged, badly emotionally underdeveloped dorks systematically ruining pretty much everything for everybody, and occasionally reading and writing mordant posts about it. Maybe poisoning pigeons now and again to lighten the mood.
I think, as Agent K said, I need pie. (Not THAT kind…)
Baud
@Nukular Biskits:
I don’t have that problem.
Trivia Man
We had a community potluck in the plans, but when we showed up the building was dark. At least we have a huge pot of hot stuffing?
Nukular Biskits
@Baud:
Breathing, too much food, or pants?
Or some combination?
ETA: Added the Oxford comma to make it clear that I wasn’t asking if Baud had too much pants.
oldgold
Given the quality of the Orange Menace’s nominations for top agency managers, tomorrow I am expecting him to nominate
theBear’s Head CoachMatt Eberflus for Director of the Office of Management and Budget.Poe Larity
The best part is no part. So no part of Elon is needed.
mali muso
@Trivia Man: womp womp. At least you have one of the good dishes to eat for yourselves!
Baud
@Trivia Man:
Sounds like the beginning of a Halloween/Thanksgiving crossover movie.
Kristine
I will probably watch Glass Onion again tonight. I find it cathartic.
Over the last few months, I’ve excavated CDs from my basement as I slowly revert to old school music (refuse to stream, vinyl is also set up, maybe not the cassette tapes because tape wears out the fastest).
Anyway, played my CD of REM’s “Automatic for the People.” I think “Ignoreland” will be my personal anthem for a while.
Hope everyone had a good day.
Trivia Man
@Baud: worst part: no pie
Anne Laurie
Well, if you have a waffle maker, and some gravy, apparently you’re set for some good eatin’?
Yutsano
The saddest part is I don’t have a waffle maker. Otherwise that stuffing waffle sounds amazing.
Steve in the ATL
@Kristine: Automatic was the cook at Weaver D’s, a soul food kitchen in downtown Athens. My bad cholesterol level is still high from all the fried okra he served me!
”Automatic for the people!” was his catchphrase as he gave customers their orders.
Suzanne
@Kristine: Fun fact: On Christmas in 1992, I was 12, I got a small boombox from SuzMom. My grandparents got me “Automatic for the People” to play on it. I still have the CD and it is still one of my favorite albums of all time.
Spawn the Younger asked for a CD player and a bunch of CDs for Christmas this year. I looked at her list, and I probably have half of them. She made herself some bead bracelets this week that spell out NIRVANA and HOLE and I feel like I have been transported back to 1994.
cmorenc
@Baud:
At least when they got to the building with their stuffing and found it unexpectedly dark, they didn’t proceed to go in anyways – the classic initial mistake of teens in such movies. Now instead the plot can evolve around a theme of the alienation and deteriorating cooperation in modern society, leaving them all alone with the stuffing they’d made for the holiday potluck with the group who didn’t show up.
Trivia Man
@Anne Laurie: ha! I pitched that to her… no interest. I may try one for me, I like waffles a lot more than she does anyway.
Kristine
@Steve in the ATL:
Cool bit of trivia! I will save it.
Trivia Man
@cmorenc: or, and hear me out, go back home and work on my jigsaw puzzle while listening to a Harry James album! Up next, Thelonius Monk or Yuseff Leteef, or Vince Guraldi. So many choices in my CD collection!
Kristine
@Suzanne:
The ’80s is my music era, but I did like grunge, REM, U2, anything Bowie put out. Now I listen to a lot of ambient, mostly because I can’t listen to songs with lyrics while I work. My musical tastes are all over the lot.
citizen dave
I had/have Automatic. That was the album where I departed the R.E.M. train mostly, though still massively appreciate them. Have to admit I never understood or knew the lyrics of Ignoreland until a few moments ago. Rant on Michael Stipe! Righteously.
Chetan Murthy
It’s a little late for this, but has anybody here heard of this Jim Lahey no-knead bread recipe? https://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/no-knead-bread-56389453
I’ve made it 3 times so far, and it’s literally: “mix it up, wait 14hr, shape it into a boule, wait 2hr, then bake”. The easiest bread recipe I’ve ever found, and it’s actually really good! The crust is crispy/crispy/CRISPY, and it comes out with the mouth feel I remember from baguettes in Paris 30yr ago. I’m going to try to make baguette loaves out of it next time, just to see how that turns out. But ….wow, ROI is thru the roof on this recipe!
Steve in the ATL
@Suzanne: this Hole song has held up well
Trivia Man
@Kristine: Tangerine Dream works for me when I have work stuff that requires me to come up with words. Agree, lyrics can distract that brain function for me. My other go to is Big Band or heavy metal – for some reason the lyrics don’t trigger the word part of my brain for those genres.
mali muso
@Chetan Murthy: Yes, although I am more partial to the King Arthur version since they’re my go-to baking recipe place. Nice to be able to make tasty artisan bread with a minimum of fuss.
Nukular Biskits
@Anne Laurie:
TIL about stuffing/dressing waffles with gravy.
And I can now die happy.
Trivia Man
@Chetan Murthy: that sounds amazing – can’t wait to try it
Ruviana
Elon is going to have her arrested, isn’t he?
Gloria DryGarden
@bbleh: quick stream of consciousness on “Don’t let the Pigeon Drive the Bus” a favorite kids book. IYKYK.
BCS YOU SAID “pigeons”
already riffing on additional parallel headlines
dont let the ____. _____ the _______. Subject, verb, object
dont let the freak dismantle the agencies
don’t let the liar speak to the press
dont let the
dogsDoge ______ your ______.oh dear, one could go on and on..
i May need to eat a few of these dicks, but only if they’re salted please. And not a whole bag. Maybe just one.
in honor of disruption, my favorite typo ever, that got sent:
”I ‘m trying to get my dicks in a row “
Nukular Biskits
@Trivia Man:
This is what I listen to when working on reports or coding:
Gentleman ‘ Deep ‘ Radio | Deep House • Chillout • Lounge Music 24/7
Don’t ask me why but this really puts me in the concentration zone.
Jeffro
@Kristine: ‘Automatic’ is a gem straight through!
I still have one 30-cassette portable carrier’s worth of tapes (mostly old mix tapes). I’m hoping that at least a few of them will still be playable at the old folks’ house in a couple decades. :)
Chetan Murthy
@mali muso: Oh, nice! I see they say you can refrigerate it for up to 7 days, and it’ll get more and more sour. Gotta try that!
Gloria DryGarden
@Yutsano: thrift store often has waffle makers.
bbleh
@Gloria DryGarden: And of course, from the Latin illegitimi non carborundum, “don’t let the bastards get you down.”
Kristine
@Chetan Murthy: That sounds like something I need to try.
I made one no-knead recipe a couple of months ago, and liked it. I want to try duplicate the orange-cardamom bread that the closest-to-me Whole Paycheck used to sell. I loved that bread so much.
Kristine
@Jeffro: I have 30-40 cassettes, maybe a few more. Smiths. REM. Peter Murphy. INXS. Decent players may not be all that expensive.
My ’02 Forester has a cassette player *and* a 6-disc in-dash CD player (which at the time was pretty downtown). I swear I’m going to run that car until the engine drops out.
Kristine
@Nukular Biskits: @Trivia Man: That Deep House sounds a lot like the “Focus” tracks I listen to on brain.fm. I bought a lifetime membership ages ago at a deep discount, then promptly forgot I had it. I listen to it almost exclusively when I’m writing, along with Erik Wøllo, Timothy Wenzel, and other similar artists.
Kristine
@citizen dave:
It is so on the nose.
WaterGirl
Zoom has started!
p.a.
I just set up my old cassette deck 2 months ago. FF & Rewind are shot, but Play still works at the proper speed. Trouble is at least 1/2 of my cassettes have become defective. They bind up. Got some good ones still ok though: Katy Lied, Best of the Doobies, James Booker’s Classified.
I’m going to need a new car soon. I guess cd players as OEM are rare…
Ryan
Elmo is the worst human.
mrmoshpotato
I assume those two axes are for Melon’s head and dick.
Leto
Let me introduce everyone to The Stuffler. Make your own stuffed waffles.
mrmoshpotato
@Leto: Yes please!
Denali5
The only thing good about Elon is that he grabs space formerly allotted to TTICFFG. That is such a plus!
Leto
@mrmoshpotato: I’m 99.9% certain that Avalune and I will get one. There’s a lot of recipes on the manufactures website, and I’m sure I can devise quite a number as well.
catclub
@bbleh:
_wear_ you down
SiubhanDuinne
@Suzanne:
So I read that as “She made herself some bread bracelets” and I was only transported back to 2020-21 when everyone was stuck at home doing sourdough.
RaflW
Thanksgiving was quite traditional here, other than having two Australians as special guests. And also tradition, BF and I traveled so we didn’t have to cook much. I made part of brunch and mostly stayed out of the kitchen the rest of the day.
Also tradition, a 500 piece puzzle, most of which I did (I tend to Bogart puzzles, haha).
BF is now signalling that we’ve reached max family, time to head to the hotel for some sleep!
Hope all you Jackals had the Thanksgiving you wanted, too!
BellyCat
@Leto: I just helped Jeff Bezos out. 23% off Cuisinart waffle maker. Rated 4.5 stars with 23k purchases. $24.
I’ve got stuffing that shall NOT go to waste!
(Being a celiac, this should also open the door to waffles that’s been closed for 2 decades. Frozen GF crap is crap)
laura
@Suzanne: My So Called Life box set for Christmas. Just sayin’
scav
The “no-knead” bread I usually turn to is a variant out of Ken Forkish’s Flour Water Salt Yeast but they’re all generally similar. I only quoted the no-knead there because either Forkish recommends about three folds of the young dough before leaving it to rise or I added the folds to his proportions, honestly I forget. I liked the change in texture the minimal folds added. I think I emptied the library when experimenting and while similar, there’s a lot of leeway to play with. For example, it is possible to bake the things without prewarming the pots (handy if you’re in a hurry) and tossing things in the fridge to retard rising is useful for the opposite problem. Bittman & Conan’s Bittman Bread: No-Knead Whole Grain Baking for Every Day is handy because a) different grains and b) they sometimes explicitly spell out for a single recipe the different ways they do it. It also seemed the sanest about starter. TMI, but the wine was good at dinner.
Dave
@Denali5: Particular potential for entertainment when “he who goddamn I don’t want to name because amongst other things he is just exhausting ” realizes that the world’s most divorced man is taking attention away from him.
Kristine
@Leto: The great thing is that they freeze well. You can make a huge batch that will last for weeks.
Kristine
@scav: adding this book to my Buy list, so, not too much info.
Miss Bianca
@Steve in the ATL: Late to the party, but that was awesome!
Pal D pulled out a CD of Hole’s Celebrity Skin for me the other day while I was cooking and I said, “Holy shit, how was I not paying more attention to this one back in the day?”
I’m guessing it didn’t get a lot of airplay on Chicago radio compared to Live Through This.
Jeffro
@Kristine: that’s awesome!
I have a CD/cassette boom box radio in the kitchen, LOL