Today is Sextidi the 16th of Fructidor in the year 233. Fructidor is the month of fruitfulness. Today we celebrate lemons. #JacobinDay More information on lemons
Ball and chain. Packers shareholder. Duller than you can possibly imagine. Personally wrecked Brooklyn. "A quality follow" -- Peter Kafka
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Today is Sextidi the 16th of Fructidor in the year 233. Fructidor is the month of fruitfulness. Today we celebrate lemons. #JacobinDay More information on lemons
In Madison, it was a cliche back in 1988 to hear Bob Marley's "Legend" coming out of some frat or house party every weekend. It was basically the soundtrack of everyday life here. I moved back to Madison a few years ago and I STILL hear it.
I'm not sure. when it was still urban legend, the story was that she would have them staffed and try on clothes etc. now it seems like she uses them for displays and to entertain.
do you know about Barbra Streisand's shopping mall in her basement? it was an urban legend for a long time, until she gave tours during promotions of her book. it even has a little sweet shop.
people love it when the doll hospital is the eccentric old shop between the real estate agent and the dry cleaners. less so when it's next to the knife shop and the bong shop.
oh shoot: the weird semi-random "dead mall stores" that take up space in a moribund mall are *exactly* the same sort of place that people miss as storefronts on a street because they give a neighborhood character.
weinrich building, oshkosh, wisconsin, 1988
the most malignant form of repression is the one that convinces you to inflict it on yourself. happy Labor Day.
if this is the case, why has it become increasingly popular in the land of the godmakers? because it's an effective form of social control among high-exit high-income workers. it signals a willingness to subordinate oneself to a higher goal. I'm not exaggerating. they'll tell you this.
the problem that isn't mentioned by its advocates is that you're not getting an 80% increase in output. you might not be getting a 40% increase in output. as a result, your overall productivity *drops*, because the amount of work you get done doesn't keep up with the time you spend at it.
the one I want to talk about is the nutty import of "996" culture into the modern Burned-Over District we call Silicon Valley. 996 means working from 9 AM to 9 PM, six days a week, to boost one's overall output. it's part of the new "grindset". and yes, it's an 80% increase in work time.
the United States has higher incomes than those nations mainly because we work more. there's also the quirk that the US would rather employ people with low labor productivity than to have them receive government support, which lowers the overall average. separate issue but I want to acknowledge it.
a Labor Day thread. American labor productivity is very high by global standards, a little less than that of the small rich countries of North Central Europe, but not by much. (Norway is considerably ahead, but as Norwegians will tell you, that's due to their oil.)
in terms of worries for the firefighters of Las Vegas, this house can't even break the top fifty. there are three dozen hotels on the Strip alone.
the foraging is always the tell. it might as well be in the definition of a bad faith argument.
I'd like to apologize to the Brits who scoffed when I called him PM Manchin. your dude is what I think Newsom will become.
I'm going to need four makeup artists, a Hong Kong stunt team, an Epstein impersonator, a smoke machine, a Herman Cain lookalike, Jenna Ortega as the spooky teenage girl, two bottles of AB smoke, six gallons of fake blood, two flying rigs, and folks... we need it all ready by the next full moon.
I hate the use of "leverage" as a verb in current technology business-speak, and I assumed it was a recent crappy back-formation, like "learnings" instead of "lessons", but no, I found an example of it in a 1984 paper on the history of superalloys. dammit.
I use an 8" by 8" pan and skip the parchment paper because I make this for coffee cake. somehow more than a cup of berries ends up in it, weird how that always happens. works well with any berry I've tried, including soaked dried cranberries. it's very forgiving. make sure the center is set.
principal-agent problem! the US produces 200 thousand MBAs a year and none of them have been able to fix this very basic issue.
I'm sure gonna have a hot time tonight with Con Edison's pay by phone service. I've heard it's fast and easy.
the operatic despair coming from the fanbases of other teams yet I will not be moved in my mild skepticism though their tears are sweet
too many people who should know better are acting like Mrs. Kravitz of the homeowners' association looking for evidence that the Stevens woman is a witch. it reminds me of the incel reaction at the other place to a video showing a day in the life of an attractive NYC influencer woman. not great.
the original poster is concerned with fire safety. how many of the reposts are by anyone who truly has concern for the firefighters of Las Vegas in this place?
this is how American conformism works. "the nail that sticks up gets hammered down"
discovered a new (to me) type of guy: "I don't like that chess problem because it's too artificial" dude you're playing a game with magical wooden horsies. lighten up, buttercup.
you know who else was a white vegan and racist
at the same time, we've dropped our homegrown religious proscriptions against even abusive interest. so... it's okay to buy something at 30% interest as long as everyone involved is morally untainted? what is the endgame here?
what if there's a third Devin Hester, Jr. biding his time
maybe I'm frequenting a more pretentious class of gutter, but the IQ bozos there are all about g-factor and twin studies and so on. still garbage, but a more polished form.
a lot of educated Americans believe in a folk theory of how moral culpability transmits itself by money like a very determined spirochete. it's Manichaeism without Mani. wild how a long-dead religion still pervades our everyday thought.
right? some of these bozos are trolling, but I think a majority of the people who repeat this craziness actually believe it. I suppose many of them mistake income for intelligence, a common enough American failing, but then why are they afraid of immigration?
man it's amazing how Western civilization went from "pecunia non olet" to "THE TAINT THE TAINT"
what an odd first paragraph. a cad might even think Giuliani was responsible for the domestic violence incident.
why is the US collegiate sweatshirt style, not affiliated with any actual institution, so popular abroad? do we still have soft power? (and how is this related to the prevalence of allegedly American hamburger places?)
I think I want to see a show now with humans in contact with trisexual gender essentialist aliens who keep insisting on speaking to the surrogate mother not these mere gamete-carriers
I finally caught up with Central Park's famous Budgie this morning! It was busy foraging for breakfast with a small flock of House Sparrows. Native to the open grasslands of Australia, it seems very happy here! 💚💛💙 #Budgie #CentralPark #birding
all-female wuxia epic with Bollywood musical numbers wait that's K-POP DEMON HUNTERS
Touching a Palantir and being brutally interrogated by Killer Bread Dave
Paul Klee, Southern Tunisian Garden, 1919
turning to the classics on a Sunday morning ... is that a gold crucifix coke spoon hanging from his necklace? man the seventies I don't know man there's a line in NEUROMANCER about office workers wearing glittering holographic vaginas on their wrists and honestly I'd find that less wild than this
Eugenics comes for you* all. (It was always already coming for some of us.)
Da’Realyst Clark kickoff return TD from yesterday. Heisman campaign starts now.
yowza
the stratification of the US is also feeding into the weird and shitty obsession with IQ, because those dorks have never known anyone with a general intellectual disability. and maybe it wouldn't help most of them, because these bozos have the empathy of a fossilized turd. but at the margin, yes.
The Cased Meat Celestials have come to pass judgement, just as Jack Kirby foretold
I know it's not the point, but imagine what would need to happen for that to occur. Oceania has the ability to manufacture hundreds of millions of television Zoom terminals thirty-plus years ahead of schedule, and distribute them to everyone on three and a half continents. starting from ca. 1948.
I have got so much use from the Bon Appetit raspberry ricotta cake recipe, judiciously modified with circumstances.
Bon Iver in his cabin studio working on a concept album about the concept of trades and watching old clips of Reggie White Frankensteining the quarterback
I now have Lil Wayne's opinion. three more to go.
replace "but" with "therefore"
I sincerely believe we would understand him better were his surname Brown or Jackson. The Kennedy moniker still confers prestige (gag). But he is a basic male disordered-eating eugenics-pipeline health influencer promoted beyond all his abilities or sense.
The early festival reviews for Chloe Zhao’s Hamnet have me ravenous to see it AND to hear the inevitable Podmadcast Blank Check mini on her career.
Mayor @leemankessler.com recently posted an interesting link how the love of money is defended in current sermons.
I once saw an ad in People magazine, over thirty years ago now, that did the pink hat/legs thing, and I still think wtf?
okay they're already calling Parsons Uno
Gonna crowdsource something: Can you send me links to your favorite “fellas, is it gay to [insert basic human activity]” Reddit etc posts? Earnest ones only. Please, I need evidence of men truly thinking wiping their asses or whatever is gay.
I want a study how so many evangelical churches rebranded themselves into nondenominational Mystery Babylon combination megachurch / café / childcare centers with zipline PowerPoint sermons and chyrons with game day scores
if the Goldstein account in Orwell's 1984 is true, the vast majority of the Western Hemisphere is much better off in its 1984 than in our history. you're in freaking rural Bolivia and you have a Dick Tracy TV! you have just experienced the wildest social transformation in history, and it's working!
I honestly can't tell. my gut sense is that it's resentment about potential mothers competing for breadwinner jobs -- e.g., Heinlein's psychotic reaction to his wife working -- but it seems to be driven by adult children now? I dunno, man. one of those tells I wasn't raised to American standard.
I don't think it's basal in David Hackett Fischer rootstock cultural terms, you know? it's an innovation, a malign one.
the degree to which American society really does not like mothers always surprises me. it's like that weird baby in that obnoxious cartoon.
somehow my insomnia rabbit hole once led me to a podcast interviewing a member of a 1970s climbing collective in California and it was... I think the old word "wack" is the best fit. apparently there was a plane filled with marijuana that crashed into a lake in Yosemite which they raided?
the other place practically coming in its pants when it seemed he might die from COVID
this is our second.
once upon a time, the names of fancy types of cloth directly evoked faraway lands. now we have pleather, which I think is named for a suburb of Birmingham. (either.)
current cultural critics talk up the Japanese (and more lately, Korean) influence on American culture, but THE THOUSAND AND ONE NIGHTS had far more influence on our predecessor culture than all the anime in the world today. we drink *coffee*. totally a cultural transfer from MENA.
collaborative projects are fun!
You know who really had faith we'd pull it together? John Sladek!
refried bean quesadillas topped with ajvar for breakfast. the beans are reconstituted from the last of a dehydrated can I got from a long-term food storage operation in Utah founded by a guy who sold his home to help Japanese Americans move out of the internment zone in California. they're not bad.
it is *important* to many of these people that an unintelligent rapist white felon be the most powerful person in the world. his criminality is the point! they know what he is, and they embrace it because it reestablishes the American great chain of being. which brings us to Vance, who is a punk.
it became very important to tastemakers that everyone stay in their lane, even though the tastemakers might be poorly socialized anonymous participants on social media. why? a collective anxiety that society had broken caste barriers, though people with education sometimes talked about a pendulum.
but Obama broke many people's brains nationally -- and again, I have to say this was across the political spectrum. any white crank could do better, and in fact, to reinforce the hierarchy of whiteness, the more outré, the better. and the worst man could do better than the most accomplished woman.
the return of an extremely conformist spirit to American culture is hand in glove with the return of heightened class distinctions and barriers. the old DC establishment, basically Virginian in worldview, couldn't stand Carter and his coterie, and it couldn't stand the Clintons and their coterie.
I think the American public is a lot more like a giant amoeba, swirls of cytoplasm changing its trajectory by extending tentative pseudopods in different directions. what controls its behavior? nutrient gradients, mostly.
I don't believe in the thermostatic nature of the American electorate, but if one were to do so, a Vance presidency might be the sort of off-ramp for "vulgar Trumpism" that many of his previous supporters would use to swing back to the unproblematic middle. "not that creepy Weeble-looking guy."
Chicago keeping art alive:
trying to get off farm time before late night entirely disappears you know what was fun? the mix of people in the last places open as everywhere else closed up. everyone is an eccentric at 3 AM. I'm not going to say someone's nighttime self is more authentic, but it's usually more *interesting*.
I'd love to know the results of a tox screen on Stephen Miller's urine. there's something very... erythroxylic about his recent statements.
well yes
Do you know about @clearwing3.bsky.social's book about The Onion? You should! I talked with her about the book's origins, interviewing fellow Onion staffers through the years, and much more! onion20.substack.com/p/interview-... #theonion
BRAIN: so, is cheese in the Redwall universe super fetish-y? ME: where did that come from
so many Bears influencers on Twitter are suddenly EXTREMELY CONCERNED that Jordan Love is not a good enough quarterback to lead the Packers to the Super Bowl it's really odd. are they all secret Packer fans? come on in, guys! even numbers get Kroll's East, odd numbers get Kroll's West.
I think there might also be a complex of semantic confusion around slowness and intellectual disability (related to the return of a certain slur). e.g., President Dipshit is fast to respond, so he can't be cognitively failing, but President Amtrak is slow to respond, so he must not all be there.
this has been utterly maddening to watch play out in national politics. older people are living longer, so you would think younger people would have more opportunities to experience this, but no, everyone is utterly stratified by cohort, ok boomer?
some kind of hotep at least
yes
an adjective noun stative-verbs totally different adjective nouns. adverbial phrase-ly.
"manskin fetches a fine price on the Dark Web, bucko"
it's not even *interesting* smut.
the modern Terminator has to go up against a Skynet that will bring about the extinction of humanity by overproducing anime porn, causing humanity to die of disgust
the Packer org chart has some weird dotted lines and I would love to hear its fixer's stories some day but it's probably one of those stone-faced Finnish guys who will take them to the grave, possibly someone else's
oh shoot I just realized that I do want to know celebrity Packer fan reactions to the Clark-Parsons trade like, I know Jodie Foster has an opinion. I know Harry Styles has an opinion. Tony Shalhoub probably heard early. Lil Wayne was probably in on the call.
Good morning friend! 🕷️🕸️
no, this guy is far more duck-like in appearance.
"Starheal"?
Philip Pearlstein's portrait (1967) is of the art historian Erwin Panofsky. A hero of mine, it is worth reading his essay on Michelangelo; it is as if he was the only artist in the world, and as if Panofsky were the only person to have seen his work.
I assume by the end they all die and Cupp goes to New Guinea scot-free
Yes!!! Ruby-throated Hummingbirds are back in Central Park. I captured this beauty feasting on jewelweed in Tupelo Meadow. 😍😍😍 #Hummingbird #CentralPark #birding
my takeaway is that this anti-science nonsense crosses party lines that should be deep chasms. RFKJR is probably who put Trump over the finish line. here's what else: those voters probably saw it as a sign of Trump's bipartisanship and moderation.