We are officially one week away from my wedding so I am busy as all get out. Joelle is arriving on Saturday evening at midnight, so I have about 45 hours to get the house ready and it is nowhere near it. But that is ok because even though I quit drinking coffee, I still have an espresso machine if needed. And let’s not even talk about the back yard, please.
At any rate, I need to work with Watergirl and start getting those of you who are interested a link so you can watch the zoom feed of the proceedings, which I have been assured will last no more than twenty minutes. Joelle got her hair did yesterday and is doing something with her eyelashes today and I wish I could tell you more about what she is doing but my eyes glazed over when she talked about the process. Something about not having to use fake eyelashes because she hates them and I didn’t even know there is something wrong with her real eyelashes, but this is not an area I think I am going to invest a lot of thought into. Do what makes you feel pretty and happy, kid. I’m not gonna say no either way.
In other news, there was a small anti-ICE protest hosted by the local college’s political science club held at my local church (yes I am an atheist/agnostic/unaffiliated but it is still my church because reasons), and we had a decent little turn out of townsfolk and students. My folks even rode up on Freddie (the golf cart) with Callie in tow.
You can actually see the front of their golf cart to the far left. It was nice to see a good mix of folks I know are politically active and some normies (like my parents). I have no idea how I bluepilled or whatever the fuck it is I did with my parents, but I am super delighted and completely aware of how fortunate I am they were radicalized in this direction, especially after hearing how so many of my friends have gone basically no contact with family.
In other news, Mayor Shirley Kemp’s last term ended this summer and the new Mayor, Mr. Furbee, asked if I would be willing to sit in on the town council for someone who stepped down, and I told him the same thing I told Mr. Eisenhauer- “Of course, and I won’t be offended if you come to your senses and find someone else.” So we will see what happens.
I know you all know it, because you are not fucking morons, but I am really not sure if folks in the MAGA movement are aware that over 55% of the military (according to latest data) are non-white. So it is really fucking bizarre to me that they keep putting out just purely racist policies:
The Army is preparing to roll out a new policy that could lead to soldiers diagnosed with a chronic skin condition that causes painful razor bumps and scarring to be kicked out of the service — an issue that disproportionately affects Black men.
The new guidance, expected to take effect in the coming weeks, would bar permanent shaving waivers and require medical personnel to craft formal treatment plans for affected troops, according to multiple service officials and internal documents reviewed by Military.com.
I will never forget the smell of the chemicals a lot of the black dudes in my unit used instead of shaving. And it was really awful what shaving did to some of those guys- massive infected ingrown hairs, painful rashes, just awful. That’s why they had shaving profiles (the army term for a medical excuse to not shave), and I am here to tell you that it did not impact readiness at all. As a side thought, it is only later on in life that I realize how fucking lucky I was that the majority of the people in my platoon were black or hispanic, because as a white person from WV I don’t know if I would have learned so much from and about those communities.
Black people are 18% (thereabouts) of military personnel. But don’t worry- they have a plan:
Pentagon leaders are considering a new recruiting campaign that would encourage young people to honor the legacy of assassinated conservative activist Charlie Kirk by joining the military, according to two officials familiar with the planning.
The idea would be to frame the recruiting campaign as a national call to service, the officials said. Possible slogans that Pentagon leaders have discussed include “Charlie has awakened a generation of warriors,” according to the officials.
Anthony Tata, who serves as undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness, is leading the effort, the officials said.
As part of the potential new campaign, Pentagon leaders are considering using chapters of Kirk’s political organization, Turning Point USA, at schools across the U.S. as military recruitment centers, the officials said. That could include inviting recruiters to be present at events or advertising for the military at the chapters, one of them explained. President Donald Trump has credited Kirk and Turning Point USA with helping him win the 2024 election.
Drive out brown people and directly recruit brownshirts, heckuva plan. Except the numbers aren’t there. The Turning Point shit and the people they are targeting are on college campuses, and those people aren’t going to say fuck it and go enlisted after getting a college degree.
The only upside to this nonsense is they are not going to have enough people to pursue their wars of choice.
The Disney fallout continues as expected. Everyone is outraged and nothing will happen, but I cancelled my shit and am writing an actual physical letter. He asked me why and I said “no money for nazis.” The dark irony in all of this is if Bob Iger or whoever runs Disney had any fucking courage whatsoever, Disney already has a shitload of anti-Nazi propaganda in the vaults- WWII saved Disney. I used a bunch of their films in a propaganda course I taught 20 years ago or so.
I feel like I had something major to say but am forgetting so I reserve the right to babble more later on. Oh- two questions:
Why does everything raccoons do look like a heist? And it can’t just be the bandit masks:
And also, if we win the upcoming civil war, can we finally fucking convert to metric?
War for Ukraine Day 1,302: A Brief Thursday Night Update
comrade scotts agenda of rage
Upcoming *hot* civil war. We’ve been in a cold civil war for at least 15 years and one could argue longer.
Alquitti
Wait a minute we’re going to replace brown skin with brown shirts? Ok fine
different-church-lady
You can pry imperial measures out of my cold, dead hands.
zhena gogolia
When is this zoom wedding? I must attend.
Baud
One week. Wow. Time flies.
MattF
You do realize that what you call the ‘metric’ system is actually Système international d’unités. I.e. it’s French.
cain
lol – these people are also not going to die in some cooked up war either. I believe he wants to go back to Afghanistan.
Let them try for the all white army – let them also die in whatever useless, ridiculous conflict out there.
I’ll be curious to know how some of the black marines and others who have a lot of white friends/company and are totally MAGA themselves. I know a few. Should be fun.
cain
@zhena gogolia:
I’m totally attending! :) My wedding is also on youtube if anybody is curious lol. :)
Matt McIrvin
Ok but I’m going to keep spelling it “meter”. MURICA
SpaceUnit
Mister Furbee? You made that up.
Jackie
We’re Zoom-invited?!? YAY!!!
Ooooh! I must go shopping for an outfit suitable to wear to a zoom wedding! ;-D
Baud
Mr. Bemused Senior
Converting feet to meters
satby
whoo boy.
Josie
Everything that raccoons do looks like a heist because it is a heist. I lived near a tribe of raccoons some years ago and they were relentless – digging up my outdoor pot plants, opening the cage of my son’s rabbit and kidnapping him, trying to get into my aviary. I could go on and on.
Lyrebird
Thanks for fitting in this post even as the preparations get overwhelming!
But sounds like you are coping, and yes the metric system – I remember my elementary teachers telling us we’d be converting to that real soon now…
Baud
Dude. That’s probably what will cost us the victory in the Civil War.
WTFGhost
You know what’s important? Telling her to go to her hair/nail/etc. appointments, if/when she is feeling tired, sick, and sick and tired of feeling tired and sick. You don’t need to know what she does to her eyelashes, so long as you let her gush, but, don’t forget to remind her to make herself look pretty, the times when she doesn’t feel *as* pretty. It’s more important then, you see?
I feel badly that I didn’t tell GhostWife to get her hair done earlier, and now she’s even doing her nails, which she’s never had (nail-biting problem). Me, I don’t get it – I don’t care what I look like, because I hurt too much to care. But I feel bad that I knew she cared, but I didn’t think about it, for as long as I did, when she needed reminding.
Mai Naem mobile
Cole i hope you bought the coffee for the espresso machine before the tariffs hit.
mrmoshpotato
Sure, Dump-humping Jan.
So these assholes have destroyed the military recruitment offices too?
zhena gogolia
@Baud: Whew!
WaterGirl
@Jackie: A suitable wedding attire top, at least. To go with your shorts and flip-flops or whatever.
Jackie
@mrmoshpotato: Outside of MAGA yoots, I don’t see a rush of college kids rushing to join Hegseth’s macho macho military. Is Turning Point USA allowed on high school campuses? I sure the hell hope not!
HeleninEire
Send me the Zoom. Please.
Jackie
@WaterGirl: Ya, I was chuckling as I typed that! I was definitely thinking of Baud :-D
Betty
I just saw that Disney is asking for for a meeting with Kimmel. I also read that they are concerned about the boycotts affecting the parks and cruises. So the protest may be having an effect.
HeleninEire
@Baud: It does. It always does..except for right now. My retirement is on March 1st. I’ve been planning for a year (well maybe 30 years. 😀) And it seems like it’s taking forever.
But all is well.
prostratedragon
Nice turnout by your church, John.
Imo, 1 ft > 30 cm, for example, to get a quick concept. Liters and quarts are close enough, but when several of them are involved, gallons are more convenient. Kilograms are too big for most everyday shopping. Metric for science and engineering, though.
mrmoshpotato
@Betty:
Got any more info?
Hope it affects their bottom line.
Sandia Blanca
@Jackie: Yes, we are wondering if Baud will show his face, and preferably NOT his pantlessness!
mrmoshpotato
@prostratedragon:
But great for coke. Ask American Psycho Don Jr.
JerseyBeard
So Charlie is sending them “woke” warriors?
This timeline is so tiring.
Melancholy Jaques
@Betty:
The fact that it did not lead to mass cancellations of Disney+ is evidence of how weak our side really is.
TS
@Betty:
Much hoping that he doesn’t make any type of full or half assed apology – he doesn’t need this job to survive – unlike so many others who have lost jobs for their wrong thoughts.
Baud
@Jackie:
@Sandia Blanca:
I had assumed it was going to be a one way zoom where we could only watch the ceremony unseen.
Central Planning
@Melancholy Jaques: I cancelled mine tonight.
TONYG
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: Oklahoma City in 1995. It’s been a hot civil war for at least a generation.
TS
@prostratedragon:
Australia converted early 1970s. Have to admit I still think of height in feet and inches, everything else in the imperial measures I have almost forgotten but not entirely – all the recipes I use that came from my mother use the old weights.
– many things come in grams – to make life easier 1lb items converted to 500gm (exact is 454) which means you buy more – at an increased cost – when using those old recipes
satby
@mrmoshpotato: Their parks are already suffering from the lack of foreign tourists.
kindness
Trumpers think they can get white kids to sign up for the army. I swear to god that bunch of people is higher on their own supply than any group I’ve heard of. Sheer lunacy.
geg6
No, we cannot convert to metric. I’m too old at this point and when I was still young enough, I was in a cohort they tried to convert (was it in high school? I think so) and it caused nothing but confusion. It was supposed to go nationwide and they dropped it Iike a hot potato. I still do not understand the metric system because I cannot picture it. I can pretty accurately estimate a cup or a foot or a mile. But I haven’t the faintest what a liter, a meter or a kilometer looks like or even what they are, really.
lowtechcyclist
I really didn’t care about metric v. our current system until I tried to explain measurement to the kiddo when he was old enough to learn that. There was no way to look away from just how complicated, silly, and just plain stupid all our system of measurement is, and it made me wish we’d already switched.
Citizen Alan
@Melancholy Jaques: Or perhaps a symptom of the fact that most normies aren’t engaged in either current political events or corporate structures. What percentage of the average people who casually follow Jimmy Kimmel understand the circumstances of his firing and also understand that disney owns ABC?
Ruviana
What in the name of God made you decide to quit drinking coffee, John?
JoyceH
Hegseth is convinced that if he could just achieve his all white and all male military, he’d have his Warrior Culture with all the necessary Lethality. What he’d actually have is a pathetic collection of dullards and incompetents. The amount they’d have to lower their recruiting standards to make up for the loss of women and blacks would get us to where many of the troops would not only be illiterate, but would be incapable of learning to read and write. And these show deployments that Trump is sending them on is going to cause reenlistment rates to crater.
geg6
@JoyceH:
From what I’ve been reading, the reenlistment rates have been cratering and there is much unhappiness among the rank and file Guards.
lowtechcyclist
@JoyceH:
Truth.
JoyceH
@lowtechcyclist: and to add to the confusion, Brits still express human body weight as a measure of “stone”. A stone is 14 pounds, so someone who weighed 140 pounds would say they weighed 10 stone.
Harrison Wesley
I don’t think DOD’s new Kirk Kommand is projected to fight foreign wars. It will be used to crush protests in Merkin cities.
lowtechcyclist
@geg6:
Under normal circumstances, I’d be concerned about that. But since Trump wants to declare war on cities like Chicago and Baltimore, the fewer troops he has, the better.
JoyceH
@lowtechcyclist: MAGA loves all this talk about Warrior Culture and they will cheer loudly from the parade route. JOIN the military?! MOI?!
lowtechcyclist
@JoyceH:
I’m happy to leave that bit of confusion an ocean away from me.
Matt McIrvin
@kindness: He wants to recruit the burgeoning mass shooter demographic so they can go back to their home communities and do what they’re hankering to do under official US sanction while wearing a uniform.
Jackie
@Baud:
I’m sure it is, too. Just having some fun – and a little giddy we actually get to watch our JC and Joelle tie the knot! And, it’s always fun to rib you a little ;-)
Viewing only will allow me to bawl happy tears without witnesses.
WaterGirl
@HeleninEire: I thought we decided you were waiting. :-)
WaterGirl
@mrmoshpotato: See the post that went up 9 minutes ago. :-)
Wapiti
@kindness: Dang, I thought I’d be able to get some white kids to do the actual labor around here. /Some American farmer
Soapdish
I *need* to know what their ransom was.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@satby: And the right-wing was boycotting Disney for a while. That hurt them.
Ohio Mom
Please tell me the wedding is not scheduled for 10 am, I have an appointment with my rheumatologist I absolutely cannot miss.
I am strangely relieved to hear Mom and Pop Cole have been “blue pilled.” That news makes me feel like if this blog was a movie, the credits would be starting to roll.
Soapdish
@Betty: Wife just went to cancel Disney+/Hulu, and was prompted for a 70% off for a full year subscription.
Cancelled it anyway.
TONYG
@TS: Jimmy Kimmel has a net worth of about $50 million. He can afford to tell Disney to go fuck themselves. I hope that he does so.
@TS:
Soapdish
At one level I agree, but there are 200 people under him that have *also* lost their jobs. Tough call.
dnfree
I got married at age 21-1/2. (Yes, I used to include the 1/2 because it made me seem more mature in my own mind.). That was 58 years ago; do the math. It was a common age to get married then, but still it made me very nervous to be making such a big commitment. We’ve had to change and adjust with each other all through the years. I’m thinking of you, John, getting married and already having been through many life changes, and I don’t know whether that makes getting married more scary or less scary. I just wish the very best for you and Joelle, and many years of happiness.
TONYG
@Soapdish: When my kids were little in the nineties, I’d endured taking them to see the annual formulaic Disney movie. I was glad when that phase was over.
Soapdish
Feature, not a bug.
Matt McIrvin
Like a bunch of people here, I was trained as a scientist so I got a pretty good handle on many metric units that way. Since I’m American, I still primarily think in US units (not Imperial; the fluid measures are all different) for a bunch of everyday uses.
But rough conversions aren’t too hard. A meter is about a yard. A liter is about a quart. A kilogram is about a couple of pounds or the weight of a liter of water.
I think of land distances in miles, but kilometer conversions are helped by an odd, meaningless coincidence: the ratio of a mile to a kilometer is very close to the golden ratio, so good approximate conversions are given by successive Fibonacci numbers. (If you are a software developer subjected to Agile story pointing in project planning, you know Fibonacci numbers.) It gets more precise as the numbers get bigger, up to a point. 2 miles is about 3 kilometers, 3 miles is about 5 kilometers, 5 miles is about 8 kilometers, etc. You can usually find a ratio that divides your number well enough to estimate.
For some things, though, the US units are still alien to me. Small measurements, particularly, where metric shines. I honestly never got a good intuitive sense of an ounce (fluid or weight). I understand grams and milliliters (aka cc). For everyday lengths much smaller than an inch I think in millimeters.
dnfree
@Melancholy Jaques: It HAS led to a lot of cancellations of Disney+. Mine and other people I know in real life, and here. Why do you think the cancellations haven’t been significant?
dnfree
@geg6: I learned the metric system in science class, and it’s not that hard to get a sense of it. An inch is 2.54 centimeters, so 4” is about 10 centimeters. A meter is 39.3 inches, so a few inches more than a yard. Temperature is where I have no straightforward sense; I have to calculate the conversion every time. But I do know that Fahrenheit and Celsius are the same at -40 degrees! That seldom comes in handy.
Soapdish
@TONYG: My wife and I do not have kids, but we’ve dressed as Anna/Elsa for Halloween in the past. And it was AWESOME.
Pete Downunder
@Matt McIrvin:
When I moved to Oz I found it did not take long to convert from US to metric and I really prefer metric. Carpentry is much easier, everything in millimeters not all those fractions of an inch (not that I do any serious carpentry). I still feel sophisticated at the deli ordering 100 grams of salami or whatever. Also, since the rest of the world is metric, Europe and Asia are easy. I had not realized about the Fibonacci sequence – that’s very cool. Learn something new every day.
RevRick
@different-church-lady: Our driver on the way to the Munich airport was doing 150 kph on the autobahn. How fast is that in real numbers?
Origuy
@RevRick: 100 kph is 62 mph, so 150 kph is 91 mph. I was just in Spain, so i’m fairly comfortable with kilometers. Temperature isn’t too hard, every 10C is 18F. 0C is freezing,10C is cold, 20C is mild, 30C is hot, and 40C is Vegas summer.
glc
@prostratedragon: And furlongs. Can’t use a GPS without furlongs, kilometers don’t convert properly.
Josie
@Soapdish:
As you may have guessed, that rabbit is pining for the fjords. We just didn’t say that to my small son.
kwAwk
My thoughts for today start with congrats to John and Noelle on the wedding. I hope you find happiness and health.
On to more political thoughts, it really does seem like MAGA folks are hurting over this Charlie Kirk thing. If they’d only felt a quarter of the hurt over the deaths of Trayvon Martin, George Floyd or the kids at Sandy hook, you could almost feel sorry for them.
I’m getting a weird vibe, and maybe I’m off base here, but Charlie Kirk would have turned 35 on October 14th, 2028, and the feeling I’m getting from this is that they had him pegged to be on the ticket in 2028, either directly as Trump’s political heir, or at least as Maybelline Man’s running mate. Going from the oldest President in US history to youngest President in US history would seem to be on brand. And Kirk’s wife is a very attractive lady, that would be on point for Trump’s way of doing things.
Unfortunately though, Charlie Kirk ran into someone who was even more extreme and hateful than he was, and it has upended their plans. It would be interesting to be a fly on the wall in upper MAGA conversations. They’ve been telling Trump since Butler that God saved him, because God had great plans for him. God, however, didn’t save Charlie though, he must have been done with Charlie. Those of us who are atheists recognize this as confirmation bias, but I’d like to hear how they explain it.
It has been at least a bit entertaining for the past few days as Trump awakens to the truth that Putin just isn’t as into him as Trump thought he was. And Benji just isn’t in the mood to help Trump get that Nobel Peace Prize.
On the Kimmel topic though, we need to push back a little bit on part of this, because as with Butler, the shooter was indeed a small town white boy. Prime MAGA territory. I kinda figured once I saw the shooter was wearing Chuck Taylors that his motive was coming more from the left, but this man was born and raised in MAGA country. He wasn’t an indoctrinated Harvard/Stanford liberal.
Timill
@glc: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FFF_system
scav
Horrors! Spirit and wine bottles are often sold in whole-number metric quantities! How do Americans cope?
Kayla Rudbek
@MattF: systeme infernelle was how we referred to it in physics…
Melancholy Jaques
@Citizen Alan:
I’m not talking about normies, I’m talking about soi disant opponents of that asshole. With over a 100 million subscribers, I figures 30 or 40 million have to be actual Democrats. They should all cancel. But I’m sure there’s some show they like.
When the right-wingers decided to take down Bud Light, their side wasn’t worrying about normies or making excuses for them. They were boycotting Bud Light. And I’m sure a lot of them actually liked Bud LIght, but made the sacrifice for something they believed more important. What’s our side’s excuse?
Kayla Rudbek
@cain: I remember Heinlein commenting in the 1970s-1980s about the average military commissioned officer being white, the average NCO (sergeant or Petty Officer) being Black, and the average enlisted soldier/sailor being Hispanic/Puerto Rican. Not sure how much has changed since the 1980s besides adding a lot more women and LGBT people (and I think some more Muslims, Wiccans and Pagans as well? Although you’d never know it with this maladministration, it’s more that you have to look at the tombstones in the VA cemeteries)
And as a military brat, I know that the NCOs run the military from day to day, keeping the idiot wet-behind-the-ears lieutenants and enlisted alike out of trouble. Kegstand wants to run the military without Black people? Dream on!
Melancholy Jaques
@dnfree:
Because I haven’t heard any howling. Also, Wall Street hasn’t said a word. That is a publicly traded company and the chatter was every day when they went to war against that asshole in Florida.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
Matt McIrvin
@dnfree: For scientific purposes, of course, Kelvin is usually what you want. The freezing point of water, 0 degrees C, is 273.15 K, so 300 K is a round number for an everyday temperature (actually kind of hot, about 80 degrees F).
I briefly messed around with some stuff near absolute zero in a grad school lab course, makin’ metals superconduct. I hated that one, probably my least favorite experiment, dealing with liquid helium is absolute finicky hell.
Melancholy Jaques
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
Concerned is what Susan Collins does. Firing somebody is what Bud Light did.
Disney regards us with contempt because they have never had to suffer for shitting on us. This is an opportunity that is being allowed to pass. But I guess I’m alone on this one.
Matt McIrvin
@Kayla Rudbek: If all you want is not an Army but a Klan in camo sheets, it’s fine.
Kayla Rudbek
@Mr. Bemused Senior: weirdly enough, I can think in metric for distance or length or mass (all the bicycle riding of metric centuries and half metric centuries, and all my yarn having metric measurements of length and skein weight) and I can remember that 25 deg Celsius is about room temperature, zero is freezing and 100 is boiling. Bottles of soda are liters or two liters, yarn is like crack because they sell it by the gram (usually 50 grams or 100 grams per skein).
Volume for me is much more difficult (not enough time in the chemistry lab for decades now)
But metric I think falls down on human-sized measurements (nobody uses a decimeter = 10 cm as a common measurement even though it’s closer to a foot than a centimeter or a meter) and Celsius doesn’t have fine enough divisions between degrees to be useful in terms of measuring temperature variation throughout the day in my arrogant opinion.
kalakal
I grew up with imperial with progressive switches to metric in Britland from the mid 60s. I’m fine with either but prefer metric with a couple of exceptions,
body weight but I need to do it in stones and pounds
weather forecasts 21.1 or 26.7c mean nothing in terms of how ir feels to me. 70 or 80f does . On the other hand I can’t handle the freezing and boiling points of water not being 0 and 100*
The thing is most of you have used a decimal currency all your lives so you ought to be happy with a consistent base 10 system I grew you with pre decimal English currency, now that was fun.
Britland has a very, very long history with Metric units
*When I left the UK about 15 years ago my brother and sister would express weather in fahrenheit, now they look at me as if I’m speaking Linear B when I do
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Melancholy Jaques:
I mean it’s only been a day
Kayla Rudbek
@Matt McIrvin: for distances, I also remember that 5k runs are 3.11 miles, a 50k bike ride (metric half-century) is 31.1 miles, metric century bike ride is 62.2 miles. I don’t know if the non-American cyclists refer to the 100-mile rides (160 kilometer ride) as imperial centuries or not.
Anne Laurie
Think of them as big, fat weasels with hands. (Yes, technically raccoons are only weasel-adjacent, but close enough.) There’s a pseudo-folktale about raccoons having those masks because the Trickster God caught them
poaching on his territorystealing from their innocent woodland neighbors & lying about it. (This is also, per Thornton Burgess, why the blue jay cries Thief! Thief! Thief!)JCJ
@Origuy: my daughter found a German explaining why he preferred temperatures 🌡 in Fahrenheit. His base thought was that 100° F is hot, 90° is 90% hot, 80° is 80 % hot, etc.
Easy reference
0° C= 32° F. 10° C = 50° F. 20° C = 68° F
30° C = 86° F. 40° C = 104° F
MinuteMan
@MattF:
French, uses the word “international” and had the approval of Jimmy Carter: the Magats will loath it. Maybe if we called it the “American System of Units” it might smooth things out a bit and we can get out the dark ages unit-wise?
jame
And end Daylight Savings Time
Sally
@MattF: As a working scientist, I always called it “Système Indiscriminate”. Some of it was less than intuitive.
Sally
@Kayla Rudbek: I love that – better than mine!
Msb
Wishing you and Joelle a long and happy married life, John.
And thanks for your continued service to the country.
lowtechcyclist
@Matt McIrvin:
Thanks for this tip! Despite being a math geek, I’d never noticed that – and the Fibonacci numbers are like old friends, too. So 55 miles would be ~89 km, etc. Cool!
lowtechcyclist
@dnfree:
Fahrenheit is the one scale where I think non-metric measurement really wins. 0-100 on the Fahrenheit scale is the range of temperatures that those living in temperate zones typically encounter. Less than zero, or above 100, are extremely cold and hot, respectively, and those of us living at middling latitudes rarely experience them. A scale of -20 to 40 Celsius seems kind of arbitrary to apply to the temperatures of normal life.
And for those of us not doing science, there isn’t much meaningful interaction between temperature scales and other measurements like distance, weight, and volume. So even after converting everything else to metric, us normies could continue to think of temperature in Fahrenheit without any difficulty.
KayInMD (formerly Kay (not the front-pager))
I’m very late to comments, and there’s lots in this post I’d like to comment on anyway, but on the metrics issue: I’m a YES, except for temperature. I cannot get celsius at. All.
gluon1
@WaterGirl: Surely flip-flops and cargo shorts are the only appropriate attire for a JG Cole wedding. Perhaps with a mustard stain on the shirt?
Paul in KY
@Josie: Did the rabbit then live with them a get a black mask, etc.? Sounds like a good plot for a kid’s movie.
Paul in KY
@JCJ: I just think Fahrenheit is more granular.
Rugosa
it is only later on in life that I realize how fucking lucky I was that the majority of the people in my platoon were black or hispanic, because as a white person from WV I don’t know if I would have learned so much from and about those communities
Well there ya go. Get the black and brown people out of the army and you’ve shut off one avenue by which Americans learn to live and work with others of many varying backgrounds.
Rugosa
@Josie:
A neighbor told me a story about racoons raiding his trash. He had trash cans that had a thick wire loop to hold the lids on. One evening, he saw a mom racoon sitting on top of one of the barrels, with a litter of kits watching. She pushed the wire loop down to unlatch the lid, jumped down, and knocked the barrel over. The loosened lid fell off and she and her kits had a fine dinner that night.
iKropoclast
Yes. Worth noting, however, his show supports 200 jobs. I, too, hope he doesn’t issue some grovelling apology or, worse, bribe those fuckers. But I trust his judgment and know he cares about his people.
Also, if they’re threatening to pull FCC licenses for criticizing the President, it is everyone with an FCC license’s duty to bury that man in criticism.