It's a pretty rough time right now. It's going to be better in a month but it turns out there's no fast-forward button.
Best wishes. January is supposed to suck, I think.
2: I think that was the consensus at Valley Forge.
May better times come soon, George!
I was at Valley Forge in the summer and it was kind of miserable.
Amadea has covid again, and I've also come down with something very similar, although I've taken two home tests and they were both negative. I've spent most of the weekend in bed but I'm now at an urgent care place to get a PCR test.
I'm torn between assuming I'm invulnerable to covid and thinking I'm about to get covid.
It's been pretty mild, yeah, and I already feel a lot better than yesterday. Annoying though.
I'm testing negative for COVID now. Took me about 6 days from when I first tested positive, although I think I was sick a few days before I did test positive. I have a lingering cough/chest symptoms but otherwise, back to normal.
I don't know how many times I've had COVID. This was the second time where I very clearly tested positive, but I'm fairly sure it's the 4th time I've had it, overall. The first time was before they were testing in the UK--I was commuting through central London daily, and came down with a horrible cold in March of 2020 that left me with chest symptoms for a month or two after--and the second time, I went on a work trip with colleagues, we all came down sick right after our flights, they both tested positive for COVID, I didn't (PCRs aren't available here anymore, so I suspect my viral load wasn't high enough to trip the LFTs).
In other ways, things are quite good. First week of the Christmas break was horrible. Lots of family stress, and general malaise. But much better (covid aside) towards the end. I'm back exercising regularly, eating well, spent a lot more quality/fun time with wife and son, sleeping better.
10: We used to talk about the US exporting Democratic ideals/norms. I realize that a lot of that was BS, but we've moved all the way to exporting our model of fascism. They're pretty much copying the Jan 6, 2020 insurrection to a T.
13: because reptiles like Steve Bannon have been getting involved since before the election.
It's worth remembering that Brazil has a history showing they are perfectly capable of running a coup. Fucking it up was the Bannon touch.
I assumed it would be a more competently organized coup because Brazil, but it seems to have also copied the "lots of randos swarm in with no particular plan except to hang around until a larger force dislodges them" aspect of January 6th. Not sure if it heralds the military doing something more.
They even had their own Qanon shaman. I feel bad for the janitorial staff who no doubt will have to clean up a lot of poop.
They probably didn't have the one guy that went to my high school.
The Brazilian shaman was real? I assumed it was a joke photoshop putting Brazil colors on the US guy because reality can't be that stupid.
Hmm https://twitter.com/shayan86/status/1612196959208472579?s=46&t=yGw_jCNtLLQBqWnt6ZdP-A
I was assuming I'd post on this, but this thread seems to be doing just fine. Maybe I'll try to find a contrasting topic to throw up instead.
17: Neal Stephenson points out in his latest book that that isn't a shaman outfit - it's a Plains Indian war bonnet.
The ignorance of Native culture while appropriating Native culture makes it work better.
Can we kick Bolsonaro out of the U.S.? Should we?
I mean, would having him in Brazil make things worse there?
Can we kick Bolsonaro out of the U.S.? Should we?
Can we make him wait in line to sneak across the border with the rest of the asylum seekers, forbid him from having a drivers license or a work permit, and have him jump through years of hoops before his legal status is sorted?
I wonder if that was part of the reason he left before his term was up: so he could still enter on his foreign-official visa. It's "typically" canceled for someone whose term has ended, says WaPo.
Maybe we can send them both Bolsonaro and Santos.
28: Then we can boot him and give him a 10 year entry ban for overstaying his visa. Win-win!
The Love Conquers All version of Brazil was always the least plausible.
It's not quite to a T. On Jan 6, there was something to disrupt/prevent -- and I continue to think that if only guys pretending to be swat had entered the building, rather than Y'all Qaeda, it just might have played out differently. In Brazil, this seems to have been just a demonstration gone overboard. Have I misunderstood the context?
Holy shit, Bolsanaro is in the hospital again
Don't worry. In Florida hospitals, they use only the best surgical drills to let out the evil spirits.
32: Yes, I think the context you're missing is the internationalization of right-wing culture. They were looking at and inspired by January 6th, reveling in property damage from the get-go, and attacking at least eight journalists. Lula had been sworn in, but they could have impeded the new government if they kept occupying not only Congress but also the presidential palace & Supreme Court as they were - and they were sitting & lying down to try to stay, and with banners saying "Intervention", e.g., hoping their action would transition into a military coup.
Everyone thinks they're John Brown storming the armory when they're more likely to turn out to have been storming the beach at the Bay of Pigs.
We've all wanted to go to Kansas and shoot people.
I'm listening to a city council workshop, and the fire department is asking about installing a thing in apartment complexes that would let them override gates with a little infrared emitter gate system. Apparently the current system is that the fire and EMS just use little gate codes. And every time staffing shifts at these complexes, they redo all the gate codes and don't know to update the fire stations and EMS system. Then the emergency vehicles can't get in until whatever manual override or whatever it takes as a back up system. I'm horrified that it's 2023 and this is an ongoing problem.
They can wait for someone to come out, just like the porch pirates.
I'm eating leftover shrimp for lunch and one of the reasons I don't especially love shrimp is that I dislike touching my food with my hands, and so instead of pulling off and discarding the tails (or even the shells, when eating unshelled shrimp) I have to chew and swallow the whole thing. So scratchy.
40: it sounds like maybe you're a cormorant?
If they're shelled, what keeps you from stabbing the shrimp right above the tail and biting it off the fork? (Or doing something similar with chopsticks?) Shelling without touching the shrimp is harder, but maybe sacrificing a cloth napkin?
I mean, I'll eat apple cores out of laziness and not wanting to deal with disposal, but shrimp tails, if you're not enjoying them, seems like a lot.
Oh my god. I've been blogging with goats.
The State Department has given Bolsonaro 30 days to leave or apply for a different visa.
45- What's so baaaaaaaaad about that? For a while when having peanuts in shells like at the baseball stadium I would eat the entire thing but it causes issues on the other end.
They sell shelled and tail removed shrimp. More often smaller ones for use in salads but I recently got some medium sized ones (90 count).
I'm horrified that it's 2023 and this is an ongoing problem.
I'm horrified that your apparent complexes are gated. That isn't something you see much of around here.
If they're the same infrared things that change all the traffic signals for emergency vehicles I think they're pretty easy to get on the black market so some people might oppose them for access to gated communities.
Some people might, although I would expect "the fire department can't get through" to carry some weight.
Beware fire departments decreeing that every street must be wider than national standards because fire safety.
Never underestimate the willingness of people to prefer having their house burn down if it means the wrong kind of people might drive down their street.
I feel like 53 and 54 are on opposite sides, but they're genial as if they agree.
I think I got my negatives and conditionals mixed up. Anyway people are racist and wouldn't mind locking out the fire department if it means they also get to lock out undesirables.
Or if it means their taxes stay low. Probably seen as connected.
When I was looking for the above story, I found more recently the county is working on taking over the beleaguered district. So a larger, more urban tax base can subsidize all the exurban antitaxers!
36 Same result either way.
35 I get that. In Brazil they hoped for an actual military coup. Which is surely easier if the other guy hasn't been sworn in yet . . . Jan 6 wasn't ever going to be that; it was supposed to be Trump placing Pelosi under arrest and suspending the count.
My last apartment building had a gate on the driveway to the backyard where there were parking spaces. It was an old detached house converted into apartments rather than a building built as apartments. Anyway, the landlord eventually added an automatic gate with a gate code to replace the rickety old doors that required a bunch of steps to open and close.
He said the longest part of the installation process was working out the emergency override with the fire department. I never learned how it worked but it looked like a physical override (a button or switch behind a locked cover) that the department could engage. I don't think it was on a remote control. It might have worked with a specific type of key.
36 Same result either way.
But remembered quite differently over the years.
40, 43: If you have a knife and fork, you just use the fork to hold the shrimp in one place, cut through the top half of the shell and the body just above the tail fins, then use the knife to slide the shell off. That way you don't waste the bit of shrimp inside the shell. I thought this was generally known.
I have, at times, just removed the heads of unpeeled shrimp and eaten the rest shell and all, but those are a much bigger PITA to peel than the ones that are peeled except for the tail.
By people who think it would have been great if the Civil War had been triggered a little earlier in a way that would have led northern states to ally with southern states?
59- I'm guessing you didn't even take the opportunity to make a key master/ gatekeeper joke.
I know you know this, but there are people who think John Brown was a hero despite staging an invasion that had no chance of success. There might be family members of the Bay of Pigs organizers who feel the same about that one.
There doesn't seem to be any reason to continue on this topic so I'll leave it at that.
You're saying we should leave a mouldering in the grave?
My son has a runny nose, so maybe we will all get covid? I've been looking at the county covid-poop chart that had been reassuring me and I notice that the data only goes up to two week ago. So maybe I shouldn't be reassured by it.
40 and 47 imply that, in the absence of urple, two rival pretenders to his throne have arisen.
40 is not off-topic because the theme of this thread is clearly Inconvenient Artificial Obstacles.
I was up all night because the downstairs flooded. Our street is on a steep slope, which became a rushing river overnight. Now I'm eating Cheetos for breakfast, which honestly feels pretty good.
I buy a bag of Cheetos like once every few years, and I remember distinctly that last time I had Cheetos Puffcorn and thought they were so amazingly delicious, the best format of Cheeto I had ever eaten. So the other day when I was at the hardware store (buying material to try to stave off the flood, all ineffectual) I got a bag of Puffcorn in the checkout line and wtf, they are actually terrible. Like, undoubtedly the actual worst Cheeto incarnation. So now I'm wondering about my previous experience. Was I such a different person just a few years ago that I could have loved these awful foam pellets? I'm having an existential crisis. The downstairs is still filling with water.
I'm sorry. Hope you can get some relief from the flood.
I'm sorry to hear that. Pretty incredible amount of rain in the last couple of days.
I'm guessing that hardware store Cheetos might sit on shelves for a long time.
Aiee! Hopefully the damage won't be too bad once the water drains. Sally (in Oakland) is doing okay, flooding-wise, except that someone drove into their boyfriend's parked car and totaled it. Which may not have been weather-related but probably is.
71: Yikes.
Cheetos for breakfast sounds like a reasonable response to circumstances. I would think the best format of Cheetos would include jalapeno.
71: sympathy from a fellow member of the growing Unfogged Flood Caucus.
Sorry, jms! You've had a flood before, right? I hope this doesn't have a compounding effect. The state government really should be handing out rain barrels in packs of 5 at this point.
76: Had my basement drain back up on New Year's Eve. Had extraordinary luck that: 1.) the backup wasn't too bad and 2.) We got it repaired the next morning, so it only involved one night in a hotel.
Water is the worst. So sorry this happened to you, jms.
There are too many Cheetos varieties. They have really screwed up the brand. All I ever want is the good, regular, trustworthy, classic Cheetos, but they always get squeezed off the shelf by all their other bullshit gimmicks and flavors.
I've taken the blog's advice and have been packing the most important family stuff into Rubbermaid tubs. We also got a storage unit, so there's somewhere to put the packed boxes other than the hallway. My dad breaks down crying once or twice a day, but the fact that I'm here seems to help.
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NMM to Jeff Beck. Only 6 years older than me, which is sobering. We could have better spared Earache Claptout.
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re: 82
Yeah. Very sad. Still ridiculously creative into his old age. He was the only one from that 60s first wave of guitar heroes who still lived up to the name.
81: I'm so sorry. That's so hard.
The downstairs is still filling with water.
Ack!! This is so stressful! I'm so sorry.
Do you have a sense of the total damage yet?
My son just got his letter from Carlton College in Northfield, MN. I think they mailed me something every month when I was his age.
It's near to where my sister lives.
Basically, Iowa with fewer Iowans.
86: Weirdly a historical powerhouse in Ultimate Frisbee.
My son does thar, but not powerhousely.
92: The Sewanee of Ultimate, but not the ultimate Sewanee.