Sometimes you see something and it just leaves you basically speechless:
holy shit https://t.co/75MGZiexio
— Cake or Death (@Johngcole) March 17, 2019
This is the Republican party in 2019.
by John Cole| 27 Comments
This post is in: Because of wow.
Sometimes you see something and it just leaves you basically speechless:
holy shit https://t.co/75MGZiexio
— Cake or Death (@Johngcole) March 17, 2019
This is the Republican party in 2019.
This post is in: Because of wow., Dog Blogging, Open Threads, Sports
[Warning: Harry Smith’s audio is pretty loud]
Rookie musher @BlairBraveman is still racing in the Iditarod. Her followers, the #uglydogs, are supporting her and school kids as well. @HarrySmith has the story. #Igivearod pic.twitter.com/Uvjbcnyy5c
— TODAY (@TODAYshow) March 16, 2019
A favorite to win the Iditarod sled dog race has decided to drop out of the race — less than 200 miles from the finish line — after his dogs refused to continue when he raised his voice at one of them. https://t.co/gk7D0omDTU
— Chicago Tribune (@chicagotribune) March 13, 2019
Everyone who’s lived with multiple dogs knows this stalemate — although most of the time, the consequences are smaller:
… Nicolas Petit of Girdwood, Alaska, and his 10 dogs were just off the Shaktoolik check point on a stretch of Bering Sea ice when a disagreement between two dogs, a veteran and a younger dog, caused the sled to pause, then completely halt, when Petit raised his voice to discipline the animals.
The 38-year-old’s sled earlier in the day left Shaktoolik in the lead “like a rocket,” he told local television station KTUU. But then one of his dogs wanted to stop for a bathroom break and an older dog jumped on top of it in disagreement. Petit raised his voice and it spooked the rest of the team, which refused to mush.
“Everybody heard daddy yelling. Which doesn’t happen. And then they wouldn’t go anymore. Anywhere,” he said to KTUU.
Petit took his dogs back to a cabin at Shaktoolik to rest, but later decided to drop out of the race entirely for the good of his dogs.
“They’re all fine, they all ate good, no orthopedic issue. Just a head thing,” he said Monday.
Last year, Petit held a lead of several hours when his bid for first place was scuttled while on the sea ice. Lost in a snowstorm, he navigated off course and lost precious time. He ultimately lost the race by 2 hours 15 minutes. Petit, a native of France, made his Iditarod debut in 2011 when he finished in 28th place and was named rookie of the year. His highest finish came last year when he placed second overall and he had been a top 10 finisher in four consecutive races before this year’s event…
(Before y’all yell at me… I ended up in the hospital on intravenous antibiotics after getting bitten while breaking up a fight between two of my little foo-foo rescue dogs. And the one that bit me wasn’t even The Biter — it was an accident!)
One more Iditarod story, from the Washington Post, illustrating the old proverb, Take what you want, and pay for it:
Yotam Haber is an established composer and pianist, an assistant professor at the University of New Orleans, a former artistic director of New York’s MATA festival and winner of a Guggenheim fellowship and a Koussevitzky Foundation commission, among many other honors and awards. Since childhood, though, he has had another dream: to race sled dogs in Alaska.
Last week, Haber’s dream came true. On March 2, he got to ride through the streets of Anchorage in the ceremonial opening leg of the 2019 Iditarod, the legendary dog-sled race, on the sled of Blair Braverman, one of the most visible contestants in this year’s race. Haber had come to Alaska to help with Braverman’s sled dogs, as well as to record the sounds of runners on the snow to incorporate into a piece he was writing for the New York-based Argento Ensemble.
But the dream ended three days later when, dragged behind a tipped dog sled, Haber watched his right index finger snap off “like a twig,” followed by a geyser of blood.
“I told people on Twitter that I’m going to call my piece ‘Finger Lake,’ ” Haber said ruefully on Sunday from his home in New Orleans after surgery to reattach his finger. (Finger Lake is a stop on this year’s Iditarod course.)…
UPDATE: Reached by phone on Wednesday, Haber said that the surgery to reattach his finger had been successful and that his doctor was optimistic it would regain much of its function. He has already begun physical therapy — though unable to move his finger more than a millimeter — and even changed two diapers on his 1-year-old daughter.
On Wednesday in the Iditarod, Peter Kaiser won the race with a time of 9 days 12 hours 39 minutes and 6 seconds, 12 minutes ahead of last year’s winner, Joar Leifseth Ulsom, who took second place this year. Blair Braverman was still on the trail, in 35th place.
Dear #UglyDogs and #teamseveredfinger my excellent surgeon has successfully connected tendon and nerves. Started therapy today. Asked him when this surgery would have not been possible. Before circa 1973. Same year Iditarod began! Coincidence?
— Yotam Haber (@yotamhaber) March 12, 2019
Dear #uglydogs, heartfelt thanks for your many well wishes!! From the morning of my accident, this pure joy that I get to share with you. Like all of you, I am continuing to follow Blair’s courageous race at every turn. pic.twitter.com/JZZv60msPp
— Yotam Haber (@yotamhaber) March 9, 2019
Sunday Morning Open Thread: Arctic Adventure Iditarod TalesPost + Comments (165)
This post is in: Because of wow., Readership Capture
Front-paging a message from the indefatigable SiubhanDuinne:
HERE IS A NICE EFG UPDATE FOR YOU
Got a call a while ago from mrs efg, to let me know that our beloved efg was moved out of the ICU this afternoon (which came as a big surprise to me, as I guess I hadn’t realised he was in Intensive Care in the first place) and is now in a normal hospital room. He is such an intensely private guy that I don’t feel comfortable sharing any of the medical details. Suffice to say that he is vastly improved, even from a day or two ago, has regained some appetite, and is evidently returning to his curmudgeonly status quo.
He has already received several cards — THANK YOU, Jackals! — and would love to get more. Again, for those who missed or misplaced it, here’s the best address:
E. F. Goldman
c/o M. Ross
32 Anthony Drive
Cumberland, RI 02864I know a couple of people said in an earlier thread that they were planning to write to him, and I hope lots of you will. Postcards, greeting cards, casual notes, long printed-out screeds, anything and everything legal to send through the U.S. Mail — all lift his spirits greatly.
Happy to be able to share some good news, and may repost this when the night crew signs in.
As Adam would say: YOU KNOW WHAT TO DO, JACKALS!
This post is in: Because of wow., Open Threads, All we want is life beyond the thunderdome
Can’t stand the news anymore. The FAA, Boeing, and the Trump shutdown — enabled by the GOP Congressional Kopromat Caucus — all contributed to the deaths of the Ethiopian Airlines 737-Max. Trump, risibly, fantasizes about thugs crushing…well, you and me. 41 GOP senators saying, “yup. Let’s gut the Constitution and abandon the American experiment so that a wig-wearing, orange-faced, not-quite-good-enough-to-make-it-in-the-Mafia faux Don can dream walled dreams, all the while the world burns and the Trumpanzees seek only to throw coal on the flames…
Hell, the sheer erosion of my synapses is wearing me out.
Thus it was a relief to realize there is an alternative, a new leader to acknowledge and follow.
Ladles and Jellyspoons, my fellow jackals…
I give you Robot Cheetah, with backflips:
Happy Pi-day, everyone, from the omphalos of Nerdistan.
Open thread.
Image: A hunter on horseback, with a cheetah trained for hunt on the back of the horse (Detail of Khubilain Khan Hunting, painting attributed to Liu Guandao, about 1280)
I, For One, Welcome My New Robot Ninja Apex Carnivore OverlordsPost + Comments (23)
This post is in: Because of wow.
This is not surprising nor shocking:
Actresses Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin are among dozens of parents, elite college coaches and college prep executives accused of carrying out a national conspiracy to get students into prestigious colleges, according to a massive federal indictment.
Federal prosecutors said the scheme had two major pieces. In the first part, parents allegedly paid a college prep organization to take the test on behalf of students or correct their answers. Secondly, the organization allegedly bribed college coaches to help admit the students into college as recruited athletes, regardless of their actual ability, prosecutors said.
The documents also allege that some defendants created fake athletic profiles for students to make them appear to be successful athletes.
In all, 50 people were charged in the criminal investigation that went by the name “Operation Varsity Blues.” Those arrested include two SAT/ACT administrators, one exam proctor, nine coaches at elite schools, one college administrator and 33 parents, according to Andrew Lelling, the US attorney for Massachusetts.
I feel bad for the kids who did not know anything about this. I don’t know how they ever trust their parents again or deal with the humiliation they will experience from their peers.
Rich Buy Influence and Cheat, Film at 11Post + Comments (202)
This post is in: Because of wow., Excellent Links, I'm With Her
Since we’re talking about her anyways… Great piece from Molly Langmuir, at Elle:
… On the page, Mayer, a staff writer at the New Yorker since 1995, is authoritative and direct, and as a journalist, she is relentless. She’s waited outside the house of a CIA operative as day turned to dusk, hoping to question him about the death of a man he was interrogating. She uncovered a vast government-run domestic surveillance program in 2011, two years before Edward Snowden became a whistle-blower. “She’s the best investigative reporter in America,” says Daniel Zalewski, her New Yorker editor. “Not the best female investigative reporter.” In person, Mayer, who is petite with brown shoulder-length hair she usually wears down, the tips slightly flipped up, displays a confidence that has no visible fault lines. She also has a tendency toward self-deprecation. And while her mind often seems to whir with seamless elegance, this appears to fuel in her not impatience but curiosity. She has this way of holding her head—neck slightly forward, face tilted down, eyes up, eyebrows raised—that is the exact posture of receptive interest. At lunch, she maintains this stance as—in between answering my questions—she asks if my parents are still married, what I was like as a teenager, and whether my family is wealthy.
As for her next article, all she’ll tell me on the record is, “I’m focusing broadly on stories about abuses of power, threats to democracy, and corruption,” which she surely knows covers pretty much everything she’s written over the last two decades. “She thinks very carefully about what piece she’s going to pursue,” Zalewski says. “It’s like watching a rock-climber stare at a cliff, considering potential routes. And then she climbs.”…
… “She has Washington wired,” Farrow tells me. “It’s the kind of infallible crystal ball that only comes from years of putting in the work.” Over the course of her career, Mayer has written four best-selling books, and one quality they share, according to Michiko Kakutani, former chief book critic of the New York Times and a longtime friend, is that they “demonstrate uncanny historical prescience.”
Mayer’s first book, Landslide, cowritten with Doyle McManus in 1988 about the Iran-Contra scandal, revealed that President Ronald Reagan—later diagnosed with Alzheimer’s—was already displaying signs of mental unsteadiness in office, to the point that aides considered invoking the Twenty-Fifth Amendment. Even in 2015, the scoop remained juicy enough that Bill O’Reilly reprised it in his book Killing Reagan, without direct attribution. (Mayer considered legal recourse, then thought better of it. “I have so many enemies,” she says. “Bill O’Reilly is maybe one more than I need.”) In 1994, she and her friend Jill Abramson, the former executive editor of the New York Times, cowrote Strange Justice, about Anita Hill’s accusations against Clarence Thomas during his Supreme Court confirmation hearings. In 2008, Mayer published The Dark Side, about the CIA’s war on terror. Most recently, her 2016 book Dark Money and the New Yorker features that preceded it not only helped turn billionaires Charles and David Koch into household names but spelled out money’s influence on conservative politics so thoroughly that the left began using it as a how-to guide. “It had a big effect on progressive donors trying to create similar networks,” says Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, a Columbia University political scientist…
“It’s a great time to be a reporter,” Mayer says, before clarifying, “it’s an important time to be a reporter.” She also describes her job as like being an unwilling combatant in a war. In an essay Mayer and Abramson cowrote last fall for Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, they closed with a question: “Is the truth loud enough?” But is anything loud enough to be heard over an inferno?
This could be discouraging, but during the time I spend with Mayer, she never seems discouraged. “It’s a dangerous time,” she says. “But it’s a very exciting time to be on the front lines.” She is frustrated but also fascinated, and she returns again and again to a question that has come to preoccupy her. “I’m pretty obsessed with what happened with Trump. How did he get elected in 2016? It still doesn’t feel quite right,” she says at one point. “How did it get so divided, so ugly?” she says at another. “Trying to figure out how we got into this and how we get out of it—there’s no question right now that’s more interesting.”…
Mayer watched the hearings at home, alone. Despite her reporting, it was only then that she made up her mind about Kavanaugh’s eligibility. “Almost everybody was a jerk in high school in some way, right?” she says. “For me, what was much more important was how he deals with the truth about who he was. And the fact that he couldn’t means you’ve got somebody on the court who, I think almost certainly, lied under oath.”
What does Mayer make of the fact that this happened, regardless of the pieces she and others had published? In general, when I ask her this kind of question, about the impact of her work or lack thereof, she repeats a version of the phrase “It’s not resistance, it’s reporting”—her point being that journalism is meant to inform, not influence. “Some people say reporters are the last naïves,” she told the audience during a recent talk at the University of Vermont. “I think most of us believe if we give people information, democracy will work.” It’s an idea echoed by Hill when I call her in late October. “I refuse to believe nothing has changed,” she says. “The truth is what matters. It’s all that matters.” …
Excellent Read: “What’s Next For <em>New Yorker</em> Reporter Jane Mayer?”Post + Comments (31)
This post is in: Because of wow., Open Threads, Popular Culture, Sports
“Database connection error” strikes again… sorry this is late!
Per the Washington Post, “Lightsaber dueling officially becomes recognized by French fencing federation”:
… “With young people today, it’s a real public health issue,” Serge Aubailly, the federation’s secretary general, told the Associated Press. “It’s becoming difficult to [persuade them to] do a sport that has no connection with getting out of the sofa and playing with one’s thumbs. That is why we are trying to create a bond between our discipline and modern technologies, so participating in a sport feels natural.”
Instead of containing plasma, the lightsabers being used for duels here on Earth are made from rigid polycarbonate — not to be confused with carbonite, eh, Han Solo? — with LED lighting and, in some cases, proper sound effects built in.
To ensure action that resembles what fans have thrilled to in the movies, as well as to distinguish the dueling from its more traditional cousins, rules require participants to point the tips of their lightsabers behind them before attempting to land blows. While doing so, they are temporarily immune from attack, leading to clashes marked by sweeping movements.
The duels use a scoring system in which strikes to the head are worth five points; to the arms or legs, three points; or to the hands, one point. Winners are determined by the first to notch 15 points, or whoever is ahead after a three-minute round. Alternatively, if both competitors reach 10 points, the duel goes to sudden death, with the first to land a blow to the head or body becoming the winner.
Fighters wear masks and body armor, with the lighting appropriately low, all the better to make the glowing lightsabers pop.
“We wanted it to be safe, we wanted it to be umpired and, most of all, we wanted it to produce something visual that looks like the movies, because that is what people expect,” a French tournament organizer told the AP…
I’m sure there are a lot of Star Wars fanbois currently torn between booking the next flight to France and screaming MAH CHILDHOOD IT HAZ BEEN STOLEN!!! (because, and I say this as a first-gen Trekkie, this is how we roll). Kinda looking forward to fencer Charlie Pierce’s take…
Wednesday Morning Open Thread: A New (Bladeplay) HopePost + Comments (173)