Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

I’m pretty sure there’s only one Jack Smith.

T R E 4 5 O N

… among the most cringeworthy communications in the history of the alphabet!

Hi god, it’s us. Thanks a heap, you’re having a great week and it’s only Thursday!

Historically it was a little unusual for the president to be an incoherent babbling moron.

Imperialist aggressors must be defeated, or the whole world loses.

The GOP couldn’t organize an orgy in a whorehouse with a fist full of 50s.

Republicans are radicals, not conservatives.

Republicans are the party of chaos and catastrophe.

Technically true, but collectively nonsense

Today’s GOP: why go just far enough when too far is right there?

This has so much WTF written all over it that it is hard to comprehend.

Republicans seem to think life begins at the candlelight dinner the night before.

A last alliance of elves and men. also pet photos.

American History and Black History Cannot Be Separated

Bark louder, little dog.

You don’t get to peddle hatred on saturday and offer condolences on sunday.

In short, I come down firmly on all sides of the issue.

A sufficient plurality of insane, greedy people can tank any democratic system ever devised, apparently.

Jack be nimble, jack be quick, hurry up and indict this prick.

A consequence of cucumbers

Teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.

It’s time for the GOP to dust off that post-2012 autopsy, completely ignore it, and light the party on fire again.

Stamping your little feets and demanding that they see how important you are? Not working anymore.

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Respite

Respite Interlude Open Thread: October Project

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Can’t say this grabs my attention the way Ariel or Bury My Lovely did, but that was sooo many years ago (and Mary Fahl‘s voice is irreplaceable).

This is nonetheless pleasant, and the pictures are well matched to the lyrics…

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Good News Open Thread: That’s A Big Boy

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Just a few fun tidbits I’ve gathered the past week. (Just a note, this was all supposed to run yesterday, but breaking news pushed it to another day).

The entire thread was a great mood lifter (can’t be said about much of twitter these days)

Good News Open Thread: That's A Big Boi

Brian definitely has resting annoyed-face.

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You Will Thank Me Later

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This post is apropos of not much at all.

But hey–a little literary fun never hurt anyone, amirite?

So here goes:

Sunday afternoon I was looking for an off-center way to help my students make the transition into writing longer, more explicitly narrative non-fiction about science–longer and more story-like than straight news.

I started poking around the endlessly enjoyable neighborhood of very short fiction, and stumbled across an example that begins like this:

The short essay on “The Improbability of the Infinite” which I was planning for you yesterday will now never be written. Last night my brain was crammed with lofty thoughts on the subject–and for that matter, on every other subject. My mind was never so fertile. Ten thousand words on any theme from Tin-tacks to Tomatoes would have been easy to me.

You Will Thank Me Later

That was last night. This morning I have only one word in my brain, and I cannot get rid of it. The word is “Teralbay.”

Read the whole thing (it’ll take you all of five minutes, with a headwind).

I loved a lot about this little story. For the my classroom, I wanted the students to see how cleverly much the story wasn’t about its plot–and how skillfully its themes were woven through character, and all the character development (all eleven paragraphs of it) came via action. The author never belabored the reader with explicit description–which is to say, never told the audience what or how to think about what was going on.

That’s something the young writers I’m working with this time find it very difficult to do: how to avoid the urge to make it REALLY CLEAR what they mean and why it matters. This piece shows that such explicit telegraphing of intention not only isn’t necessary, but actually gets in the way of the convincing the reader.

There’s some very nice structural work going on in it too, a nice play between exposition and action, stuff that if you squint just right you can map onto recognizable narrative non-fiction approaches.

But all that, of course, is the sort of stuff I’m supposed to notice and like. But if I’m being entirely honest, I will say that what I loved most about the piece was the way it gave me a very new read on its author, a much slyer and gleefully less nice figure than the one I’d imagined. Much more fun, and a much more interesting fellow with whom to (imagine) downing a brandy and soda (not all the soda, Jeeves). Guess before you look.

Utterly, randomly open thread. Have fun, y’all.

Image: Catherine M. Wood, Still life with onions and tomatoes 1891

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Respite Thread: Laughter is Good

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geg6 posted this on her FB page and I had to steal it.

Albatrossy sent me this one:

These are all me, LOL

 

I think someone sent this to me, but I didn’t make a note when I bookmarked the video. Identify yourself!

Zookeepers at Denmark’s Odense Zoo thwarted an escape attempt by a flock of their penguins after following a trail of wet footprints. The zoo joked, “Perhaps our penguins [have] seen ‘The Penguins of Madagascar’ too much?” in a statement posted with the video on November 10.

I am off to the Botanic Gardens for their Halloween event and then out to dinner. I’m hoping there will be some ice cream involved somehow. Have fun and share some videos/stories that make you laugh. So I can come back later and enjoy some more smiles.

 

 

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Friday Respite Open Thread: “In Search Of A Hot Pink Bitch Named Breakfast”

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Before y’all get judgey, I once dyed my first dog glitter blue for his doggy obedience-class Halloween party. He didn’t find the dye (which washed out right afterward) nearly as annoying as the strap-on butterfly wings and the light-up deelybobbers… he was a Papillon! (And a bodhisattva, but that’s a longer story.)

“This hot pink bitch was named breakfast!!!” is a string of words and punctuation that’s just barely coherent enough to communicate its subject matter (a magenta dog that is named after a meal) and just crazed enough to inspire intense devotion. The sentence was written, possibly for the first time in history, in a March 22, 2018, post to “Dogspotting” by Katie Dawson along with a blurry snap of a roseate Pomeranian.

In Dogspotting, the 1.8 million-member Facebook group, people post pictures of dogs they’ve spotted and assign them semi-arbitrary point value. It was a mid-2010s internet triumph: one of those rare low-stakes, positivity-only outposts on an increasingly sour and combative internet…

But Breakfast is, at least by the standards of viral animals, underexposed. Unique among internet-famous pets, Breakfast has no curated online presence, no brand deals, no intention to be anything other than a hot pink bitch. Breakfast presumably doesn’t even know they are hot pink, as dogs are colorblind and pink is not a color they see.

A few weeks ago, after I saw a periodic repost of the photo, I realized that the photo was four years old, and that’s about 30 percent of a Pomeranian’s lifespan, which made me sick with fear that Breakfast might have died. I’d lose my breakfast if I lost my Breakfast!

So I cracked my knuckles, opened a new tab, and started my quest for Breakfast. First, I tracked down Katie, Breakfast’s original spotter who now lives in Arlington, Va., and works in partnerships at a philanthropy organization. The Dogspotting Facebook group has an ironclad rule against posting dogs you know, so it was unlikely that Katie and Breakfast had a long-established relationship, but I hoped that maybe she had stayed in touch with the dog’s owners. I mean, they’d presumably struck up a conversation when they told her Breakfast’s name. I pestered Katie with a few messages and eventually she replied to say that she did not know Breakfast’s whereabouts. “Pretty wild that I still get people reaching out about this when I took that picture close to five years ago,” she added, making it clear that she’d moved on. I, unfortunately, had not…

We asked each other, “If you were a hot pink bitch named Breakfast, where would you be?” The answer, instantly obvious, is Instagram. Reed and I looked through the hashtags #breakfastdog and #breakfastthedog, which turned out to be mostly galleries of egg-topped hot dogs or dogs eating bacon, until we found one blurry shot of a Pomeranian by a couch. A bit of sleuthing revealed that Breakfast’s owners had been in an NYC-based punk band—making them the exact type of people you’d expect to dye a dog hot pink, I suppose. Soon enough, I was on the phone with them.

“We got him in 2012 and first dyed him pink in 2013,” Sofia, 33, told me while she was making dinner for her human toddler. In this moment, I realized that Breakfast was a he—a hot pink bro, as it turns out…

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Late Night Respite Open Thread: Animal Urges

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Cherish joy!

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Respite Open Thread: Great Dane Love

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I heard through the grapevine that from now until election results are known, some folks need some extra respite. I’m here to oblige.

Friends and family all sent me this, so I have to share. Trixie has been showing signs of a false pregnancy and I’m grateful her symptoms have subsided without us having to add to our brood. She’s scheduled to be spayed in Dec (when I’ll be home for the entire month for her recovery). It’s a bit early, but she’s had a difficult time with her hormones since she was about 6 months, so early seems prudent. For those that don’t know, large breeds need to be at least a year, preferably 18 months before they are neutered – they need those hormones for bone and joint health.

Let me tell you, those last 6 months are very challenging. Very. Challenging.

And here’s another Dane being an awesome foster…

 

Bixby was great with fosters. My friends’ fostered puppies after they lost their dog and weren’t ready to adopt yet. When each litter was ready, we’d bring Bixby over, and he would do his thing. And his thing was giving these little ones confidence. He would let them play on him, chase him, and when they would attack him, he’d roll over like they’d conquered the intruder. For most, it was what they needed to become more outgoing and, thus, more adoptable. And I had a good time, too. Puppies!

 

Respite Open Thread: Great Dane Love

Scout pretending I’m not there. (And thanks to Watergirl for solving the mystery of how to get the photos to enlarge, click to embiggen).

I gave the dogs beef bones yesterday. The first time since Jasper arrived. I was concerned about disagreements but had the time yesterday to supervise. Jasper behaved himself like the gentleman that he is, and it was clear from his joy, he had never had such an awesome treat before. He’d come inside for a little while and then would want to go back outside to relish his treasure. It was a very peaceful afternoon. LOL

This is a RESPITE open thread…

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