Saturday, 11:30 am:Step one was finding a YouTube video explaining the process -- a slightly different model than mine, but it explained that they were all very similar.

Step two was realizing that one of the dissimilarities was in getting the casing open -- taking the chrome trim off worked fine, but the screws that were supposed to be underneath it to free the casing weren't there.

Step three was finding the manual for my model -- KSM5 -- online. Still not for my model only -- it has a list of model numbers, and the pictures are showing something slightly different from what I'm looking at, but it's closer. Opening it up requires turning it upsidedown, unlike the model in the video.

I am now attempting to free the planetary by hammering out the groove pin that secures it with the aid of what should be a drift punch, but is actually a small crochet hook that is never going to recover from the experience. This seems as if it may take a while. Updates as I make progress.

11:56: I literally need a bigger hammer. (A real hammer. I've been making do with a little 'hammer' that's part of a multitool Newt got for Christmas, but it's clearly not working. Time to rifle Buck's office.)

12:40: The bigger hammer has revealed that my improvised drift punches (exciting new vocabulary word) just bend when I hit them hard, without transmitting enough force to move the pin. The crochet hook bit it pretty fast, as did two nutpicks we never use. Now considering sacrificing a small Allen wrench.

12:59: The Allen wrench is standing up to being hit, but the pin is still not moving. I have wrecked the finish around the pin as various improvised punches have slipped off it. This is very clearly what the manual said to do, and god knows after seventeen years of use it has every excuse to be firmly jammed in place, but I'm starting to think I'm going to break the planetary before the pin comes free.

J, Robot writes: I know that we have a handful of scientists in the Mineshaft, and I presume that their Eureka! moments are just as expletive-filled.

Heebie's take: It's pretty charming! The researcher, not the shark. The shark is pretty manatee-like.

This local Fox new affiliate edited the protests in a Black Lives Matter protest as follows:

The chant went "we won't stop, we can't stop, 'til killer cops, are in cell blocks," according to C-SPAN footage. But WBFF cut the audio short and told viewers that the words were in fact "we won't stop, we can't stop, so kill a cop."

For god's sake, I don't usually go in for linking absurd right-wing media antics, but for god's sake.

LW writes: Excellent GIFs, done with the processing software package. I really like moving sketches like this, a nice way that new technology works to help people share a vision, rather than just broadcasting simulated explosions.

Heebie's take: I'm torn on animated GIFS. Sometimes they're super funny, other times they hurt my eyes.

My dad has always been a solid guy even if not a tall one, only 5'7"--he was a shrimper and sailor when he was young; lifted weights like crazy in his 30s; got his black belt in karate in his 40s, going to meets to fight and hitting the heavy bag all the time and beating on a damned stump in the yard wrapped with hemp rope to toughen his fists up. But he's been losing weight without meaning to for...a year? Eight months? I bullied him into going to the doctor this summer, and he went grudgingly and slowly and had tests done and all, with one more round maybe a week ago. He has the highest possible level of this carcinoma factor in his blood right now so he pretty much for sure has cancer bet you didn't see that one coming hahahah! My brother is in a slough of despond in WVa and I don't know if he'll even make it here in time for my mom's absence wi leave from the nursing home (the actual staff and rehab has been great; I'm just reporting them to the Feds when she's done.) He tends to get depressed at this time of year actually (um that gun turned out to be pretty sweet sometimes they take those old eastern bloc guns apart and frankenstein them, you know, but this... DARK HUMOR NO BACKSIES!) My house is a mess even after all this cleaning and as soon as my daughter arrived I had to take her to urgent care to be put on steroids because she couldn't breathe. BLERST Christmas ever.

What happens when you try to file a report from in front of a burning eight-ton pile of illicit narcotics?

Thorn: Since the traditional Crooked Timber post on DJ Earworm's United States of Pop 2014 is up, maybe we could have one too. Here's the video. After our complaints about how totally white it's been in the past, it's noticeably more diverse this year, though the line Moby likes(?) about how "your booty don't need explaining" gets elided. I mean, you've got Mara's beloved Nico & Vinz, who are Norwegian and black. There's Sam Smith, who's openly gay and still getting airplay for his love ballads. Plus I see tie-ins to prior posts from the year with John Legend, who ended up using some of the money he made being popular to feed protesters, both "All About That Bass" and Rude from heebie's pop culture shares, but also apo's "Turn Down for What." And Hozier's "Amen" strikes me as such an unlikely popular hit both because I'd expect Americans to be squeamish about religion=sex metaphors and because of the sound of his voice itself. So anyway, that, a non buzzkill post where the only sad part is that I have the uncoolest kids on unfogged and I let them listen to pop radio in the car.

Heebie's take: I don't think I posted All About That Bass, but I do think it's catchy. I'm totally over Rude though.

Sam Smith is the best though. On Hozier and Amen, which I also love, my initial thought was that this guy has no idea all the associations his audience is pulling to the table when it comes to church. I don't agree with Thorn's squeamishness line, though - the squeamish crew listens exclusively to Christian music and has very little clue that the song exists.

Poor Mr. Nungesser, the rapist behind the mattress-carrying Columbia art student. Clearly he is the victim of vigilante justice, but it's hard to muster any sympathy for him.

Let's embed them manually.

1. A reminder that NYC's police unions have repeatedly and opportunistically abused their power and shabbily attacked every recent mayor.

— David Firestone (@fstonenyt) December 22, 2014

2. In 1992, the PBA held a violent, vulgar City Hall rally against Dinkins, asking how many drug dealers he'd hugged. http://t.co/PIohwjJmuy

— David Firestone (@fstonenyt) December 22, 2014

3. In 1997, police officers distributed fliers demanding that Mayor Giuliani be refused admittance to their funerals. http://t.co/L63mUjZpBd

— David Firestone (@fstonenyt) December 22, 2014

4. The PBA ran ads against Bloomberg and threatened to picket the Republican National Convention in 2004. http://t.co/uRzC0VpSAh

— David Firestone (@fstonenyt) December 22, 2014

5. Exploiting their huge power over public safety, NYC police unions have historically behaved less responsibly than any other public union.

— David Firestone (@fstonenyt) December 22, 2014

[storify removed]

Hiiiii you guys.I'm getting everything in my mom's house steam-cleaned and sanitized and her bedroom special de-fogged and the air-conditioning system cleaned and the filter changed. My brother made me reschedule them the other day because they called and said "we're going to be late is that OK, we're only now headed up to Baltimore and I was like "fine wev I'm here all day" but then probably 15 minutes before they would have arrived my bro decided it was 'too late in the day' for all that to happen. By which he meant he was too stoned I guess since afterwards he just watched youtube videos of minecraft. I have a migraine and it's so loud and smells weird grrr. And he won't be here at the end of the day to help me put my mattress back on my bed because he's missioning to WVa for a day to get packages and clean up the cabin he's renting from his neighbors as construction finishes on his place. Eh. It's cool, we've all been doing our best around here, we need to stick together. (I've had this open for ages so they're done now. The guys were extremely nice. One of the men had his father murdered right before his eyes when he was 11 years old--he was a serious gambler and owed money to the wrong people, and ended up getting gunned down on the sidewalk by his house in broad daylight. The other of the two men was really interested in Narnia's governmental structure, harsh laws, and enforced housing integration, which he'd never heard of before, and we really spent like half an hour discussing whether such a system would work in America and why not if not.)

My mom was smoking three packs a day at the end, up from a pack a day for years. My fine-I'll-just-start-calling-her-my girlfriend-in-law asked her about it and my mom said, somewhat slyly, at the point where they were worried she was drinking again because of the way she was acting, that she 'wouldn't be able to for much longer.' So, some part of her knew even as the main part of her was convinced that with all of us having impossible-to-characterize sub-variants of lupus and crohn's and stuff she was immune to cancer (I see how it makes sense, don't ask.) She's scared about coming home and wanting to smoke, so we're trying desperately to get the cigarette smoke smell (which she now, naturally, is very sensitive to--she could tell once she went to get something out of her purse four days after surgery that the lining just stank of smoke) out of everything.

It was her birthday yesterday. Her old pc laptop was crippled with malware, so the three of us kids kicked in to get her a macbook air. We were going to get her the big new iphone six, but even with her on my sister's phone plan and shit the cost was getting so adjacent (like, heading towards $800?!) that we decided, fuck it, and went for the laptop. Then we thought, extra fuck it, her sight isnt improving, we'll get the 13-inch. Happily she mentioned twice in conversation just before we opened gifts how broken her old one was and how unhappy she was about it!

We're all behind the 8-ball on christmas gifts. My sister and I are going to buy my brother an AK-47, that's easy-peasy I guess. (He just got himself a new 9mm handgun and it is so hard to rack the slide that when he handed it to me I was like...it has...two safeties? It lessens recoil, but only if you chamber the round every time, thus making the gun...not be an automatic anymore soooo. Humorously it's got that brushed-nickel finish so popular on kitchen fixtures; I don't think of guns as having design fads, really.) I mean, she happens to know where to get one. I have something for my husband, a minor prezzie but because he's tripping out about finances he won't want me to get him anything anyway. But look, the IRS finally finished investigating my granddad's estate, and released the last money remaining from the sale of his house. My husband and I have two joint accounts, one here and one in Narnia. Joint. Accounts. My brother blanched, even. It is a gesture of trust and love. I feel like if I hand him a check in the high five figures he has to just zip it about how he's freaking out. But maybe he could say, you just made me spend $12,000 on plane tickets and computers and guns and jewelry so I'll freak out all I want. I bought jewelry for my sister already in Asia, she's super-easy to shop for. I'm made of fail wrt my girlfriend-in-law, mom, and children. Fuck, and my dad and step-mom. I'm going to order my dad one of those 'General Sherman heat a peach tour' t-shirts if I can ever get my most minor life motivations in order. Instead I am polishing silver and re-arranging china and decorating the mantelpiece with cedar rope and nandina domestica and red glass ornaments in clear vases, because that totally is not a neurotic way to avoid serious problems. Fuck cancer right in the ass, man.

E. Messily sends in links: gross "I can breathe" police solidarity shirts, more, and an opportunistic money-grubber.

Seems like a good place to throw in a conversation about the two cops recently killed in Brooklyn.

But I appear to have crippled my stand-mixer. Christmas cookies yesterday, and I had a big lump of hardened brown sugar that I thought I could manage by just throwing it in and letting the (heavy-duty KitchenAid) whack it around for long enough to pulverize it. Instead, it jammed immediately, leaving me with a big lump of hardened brown sugar now covered in my last pound of creamed butter. Because I don't know when to give up, rather than throwing it all out and starting fresh, I spent a remarkably long time trying to make the mixer break it up -- I'd chip away at the lump with a butter knife, turn the mixer back on and give it another whack like that, repeat ad infinitum. I figured I wouldn't do the mixer any harm if I kept on checking to see if the motor was getting too hot. Which turned out to be wrong.

The sugar did eventually break up, the batter worked out, the motor didn't overheat. But somewhere near the end of the process, I realized the mixer didn't have any torque any more. All the speeds still work if the beater is unloaded, but even a soft batter stops it. I can't quite visualize what I think is broken, but there's got to be a stripped gear someplace, enough left to drive the beater but not enough to keep it from slipping under pressure. (Although I'm really surprised I didn't notice a noise when it happened.)

Anyway, anyone have a diagnosis or a referral to the webforum where people discuss fixing household appliances? (There must be one.) I'm not going to do anything before Christmas, but I think the Boxing Day project is to go after it with a screwdriver and see if I can find the problem, which will allow me to discover that there's no way to obtain the necessary part. Really, we're going to end up getting a new mixer, but I hate to let the poor thing die after sixteen years of hard work without even trying to see what I can do for it; it's a nice solid piece of machinery.