That is pretty great.

The tooth chess set is really something.

Otoh my stepdaughter would probably like the Mrs Potts and Chip funko figures.

Now we know what to get you for Christmas.

The fucking Funko Pop things. Somehow the public schools had a run for a few years where they were constantly giving them away. Like our kids would come home with Funko Pop Lin Manuel Mirandas from Mary Poppins II. (Literally we've had multiple copies of that specific one.) I don't understand how the schools acquired so many to foist upon us.

They gave their funding to charter schools in exchange for them.

I hope the California people are safe from the quake.

It's the tsunami that'll get 'em.

I want the who let the dogs out pen.

Speaking of bad gifts, I'm thinking of getting my husband a t shirt that says, "as is."

I'm pretty sure I'm not your husband, but I would wear that t-shirt.

You can get boxers with it too.

5: Not yet. Abbott will ram that through this coming year. It's his fucking mission and we're going on 6 years of failure and him systematically picking off each of the people that voted against it.

Northern California has been inundated by notifications from emergency services but nothing else. I think all the warnings are cancelled now.

The list is great but I think the quoted one is the best - a lot of the others are just "lol horrible present". Ideally they need to be either incomprehensible and disturbing, like the Dasani T-shirt, or a clever trap that might conceivably be intended sincerely.

It's kind of similar to the original idea of the white elephant - everyone agrees it's a tremendous honour to be given a sacred white elephant by the king, but the problem is it's terribly expensive to keep it what with all the holy rituals and so on, so you have to leave court and essentially bankrupt yourself, which is why the king gave you one in the first place, because he hates you.

Does anyone remember when [Coke or Pepsi? one of the two] tried to introduce the Dasani brand in the UK? It was the late 90s and there was a mighty shitstorm over the discovery that it was in fact just water out of the tap, supplied in bulk by whichever the local utility was and bottled in a business park off the M25 somewhere in the South-East, and eventually they gave up and abandoned the project. It still doesn't exist here and I can't help sniggering about it whenever I see the brand in the US. This makes the shirt even funnier

There's lots of similar brands of bottled tap water in the U.S. Pepsi (I think) has a bunch of regional brands, but every grocery store has their own store brand bottles of tap water. The new thing is "Liquid Death", which is water in cans that look like beer cans.

And by "new", I mean from five or more years ago but I only recently noticed.

Liquid Death is great. I started drinking it because I was amused by the gimmick, but it turned out I actually liked the water.

Water is necessary for life though.

That's the genius of it. The water industry already had saturation coverage of the "wants to live" demographic.

Can't people who don't want to live keep drinking Hamm's, like always before?

Sure.

Is Liquid Death fizzy?

Death comes for us, riding on a pale bubble.

There are both fizzy and non-fizzy versions.

I know it from a bit of the Mountain Goats banter, from which I also learned that its slogan is "Murder Your Thirst."

https://archive.org/details/tMG2020-02-22/19_%5Bbanter%5D.flac

Seems insensitive. What if a CEO was named Kevin Thirst?

My "Do What Dasani Told You" T-shirt is raising questions that are in no way whatsoever answered by the T-shirt.

The owners and high executives of private health insurance companies are the fermiers générauxof today. Or will be if things go on more.

It's not exactly the same, since some of the FG used their leisure to invent chemistry and interior decoration.

Or? Pretty sure it wasn't the same guy for both.

If your inventing chemistry goes either very well or very badly, you may invent interior decoration as well.

4 is somehow charming in its incomprehensible and useless generosity. Vaguely reminds me of Leo Szilard's memories of Bela Kun's brief rule in Hungary, during which most foods were scarce or unavailable, except for, for some reason, ice cream, which Szilard ate three times a day for a month.

Something similar happened to my dad in the USSR in 1969; they started off serving enormous amounts of meat at every meal and then suddenly overnight it disappeared and was replaced by nearly nothing but tomatoes, huge quantities of tomatoes, day in, day out. The first bit was fairly obviously putting on the Ritz for the foreigners but then presumably the planned economy glitched and tipped them into World Of Tomatoes. As he says, it was an important lesson in that living there was probably that, all the damn time; the system could produce in quantity, quantity was its specialist subject, but what it produced was pretty much up to chance.

33: ha, yes, exactly the same thing happened to my mother but it was 1970 and cucumbers.

I'll have you know we're building Communism through the world's biggest incremental salad.

The reason that Soviet Communist industrialisation was so associated with tractor factories in particular (to the point where 2000 AD's go-to Soviet surnames were "Judge Riboflavin" and "Judge Traktorfaktori") is rather interesting.
First, the Russian empire in the first half of the 20th century basically consisted of a medium-sized wealthy industrial nation embedded in a vast morass of agricultural poverty. It's like how modern India is basically "France, surrounded by 900 million undernourished peasants". And one of its biggest foreign-exchange earners, at least back before the gas and oil boom, was wheat from the incredibly productive black earth soil of Ukraine. That's why Turkey joining the war in 1914 was so disastrous, and why the Gallipoli campaign was fought: keeping the sea route open for the grain ships was crucial. So modernising the ludicrously backward agricultural sector was always going to be a massive priority. Being Russian, they tried to do it in a way that unnecessarily killed hundreds of thousands of people, but they also tried to do it in more sensible ways by building tractors.

Second, the Stalingrad Tractor Factory was famous - imported whole from the US, where they knew how to build factories, in the 1930s. The Soviet Government actually hired in the Detroit architect who built Ford's factories, Albert Kahn, as a consultant, and gave him this brief: listen, you filthy capitalist lackey, you are now in charge of designing and constructing all factories in the entire USSR for the next two years. Go for it. From this they got, first, the Stalingrad factory, then its near-clone in Kharkiv, and then lots of others.

Third, they specified big heavy tractors, partly because Soviet terrain and roads are a bit challenging, partly because Soviet workers can't be trusted with small fiddly things, but also partly because if you can build a big heavy tractor, you're 80% of the way to building a tank.

Fourth, they sent the damn things everywhere after the war as foreign aid from the fraternal workers of the USSR.

36: I assume the Stalingrad Tractor Factory also retained its fame from the WWII battle.

I recently picked up a watch from the 80s made in Petrodvorets Watch Factory in St. Petersburg, so that's the only Soviet factory I know anything about.

37: yes indeed, at which time its full name was "Stalingrad Tractor Factory named after Felix Dzerzhinsky", than which it is not possible for a name to be more Soviet. It's now bankrupt and derelict and they're thinking of turning it into a shopping centre with flats above. Still got the statue of Dzerzhinsky outside, of course.