I started off with melons and coconuts but have switched to filling up old yogurt tubs with water and freezing them and then smashing the ice blocks. Less cleanup.

I bought a warhammer, and then I thought to myself, “You know what’s better than having a warhammer…?”

Look at the last handful of democratic presidential losses to see this in action:

Gore gets nominated due to familiarity. He has the charisma of a warm sponge. He loses (barely, and not the popular vote; by the way, FUCK the electoral college) to George W. “I’d have a beer with him and hey wasn’t his dad president?” Bush.

Kerry somehow rises to the top of the next democratic primary, a fact that I will never understand, because he also has the charisma of a warm sponge. Bush is familiar and a wartime president. He is re-elected in defiance of God and nature.

Obama comes along and is a once in a generation political talent. Things are pretty good for a while.

Hillary enters the primary and wins mainly based on name recognition. She presents herself as having the charisma of a warm sponge, when we all know full well that she has the charisma of a wood chipper, and since we’re pretty good at detecting artifice she loses.

In 2019 we’ve got a pretty good set of primary choices, but Biden gets into the ring and that’s pretty much fucking it, because, again, he has name recognition, so he blows past some better, younger choices and manages to leverage his name and Trump’s fuck-ups enough to win.

The pattern is that name recognition will get you a real long way, especially with low information voters, and that is a real goddamn problem when there are objectively better options who aren’t as famous.

So anyway, I think we need a constitutional amendment forbidding members of one’s immediate family from running for president after one has been president. No sons, daughters, husbands, wives, etc. Fuck dynasties. Fucking fundamentally un-American.

This is the way.

Conservatives heard Stephen Colbert say “Reality has a liberal bias” and concluded that the only solution was to declare war on reality.

New Colorado law will ban sales of dental floss, clothes, & other household products…

Me: Yo, what the fuck is going on in Colorado?

containing toxic “forever chemicals”

Me: Oh, that makes sense.

It’s a re-imagining and not a film of the play, but Scotland, PA is a very good dark comedy about Joe “Mac” McBeth taking over a fast food restaurant through less than ethical means. Christopher Walken appears as McDuff, an investigator looking into the goings on.

I was trying to watch the original Nosferatu but the version I was watching had dogshit Casio keyboard accompaniment. I muted it and had Spotify put on a playlist based on “Danse Macabre.” Much better. That said, a proper silent movie with live accompaniment is fucking fantastic. I saw Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall that way and loved it.

Wasn’t there a super simple experiment where they threw rocks at a tub full of dust and no matter what shape rock they threw or what angle or how fast, it always left a circular impact crater?

It’s true, that wasn’t an entirely fair comparison, but I was thinking about disastrous adaptations, and that one sprang to mind.

Say, for example, Kubrick and The Shining or Ridley Scott and Blade Runner or Jackson and The Lord of the Rings, as opposed to Shyamalan and The Last Airbender or Jackson and The Hobbit.

Honestly, if Jesse Eisenberg had just been doing a version of his Zuckerberg from The Social Network, it would have been fine. His whole twitchy routine was weird as fuck.

Proverbs 28:27

Those who give to the poor will lack nothing, but those who close their eyes to them receive many curses.

versus

Matthew 6:6

But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.

But they can’t be expected to actually pay attention to their own scripture.

Virtually anything with a Newberry Medal is highly likely to have a traumatizing beloved character death somewhere in it. Maniac Magee and Bridge to Terabithia were good examples from my childhood.

If you set up a location near a native elephant population where if an elephant brought you like a banana or something and you gave that elephant a handjob… I one hundred percent believe that the elephants would figure out the arrangement and you’d have a successful elephant brothel running in short order.

It’s been a process.

Hitler’s government was a popular government; the vast majority of Germans preferred the rule of gangsters to the effort of thinking and doing for themselves. They abdicated their franchise.

[…]

The former Berlin businessman I referred to earlier told me that he blamed his own group, people with the time and the money and the opportunity to know better, for what happened to Germany. “We ignored Hitler,” he said. “We considered him an unimportant fellow, not quite a gentleman, not of our own class. We considered it just a little bit vulgar to bother with him, to bother with politics at all.”

They thought of the government as “They.” The only possible route to a clear conscience in politics is to accept political responsibility, either as an active member of the party in power or as an equally active member of the loyal opposition.

—Robert A. Heinlein, Take Back Your Government

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