Good morning as we near the end of the week and of the month; it’s Thursday, October 28, 2021 and National Chocolate Day (a good day; can you imagine the world without the cacao tree?)
The source of all chocolate:
It’s also Wild Foods Day, International Animation Day, Statue of Liberty Dedication Day, celebrating the day Lady Liberty was dedicated in 1886, and Separation of Church and State Day.
News of the Day:
*More trouble for the Democrats and Biden’s two spending bills, as reported by the Associated Press:
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi declared Wednesday that Democrats are in “pretty good shape” on President Joe Biden’s sweeping domestic plan, but hopes for a breakthrough quickly faded when a pivotal Democratic senator panned a new billionaires’ tax to help pay for the $1.75 trillion package.
Guess who the Senator was? You’ll know for sure when I tell you the “billionaire tax” was proposed to win over renegade Democratic Senator Kyrsten Sinema, who objected to an earlier fundraising proposal to abolish tax breaks on corporations and the rich, i.e., people earning more than $400,000. We’re going to need lots of dosh for Biden’s two bills, even if the social safety-net bill gets cut in half, and I’m curious where it will come from.
*A WaPo editorial by a former Russian journalist is called “Why should we care about Putin’s love life?” Good question. The answer involves money, power, and censorship, but see for yourself.
*Comedian Mort Sahl died on Tuesday at 94. His obituary/memoriam in the New York Times, however, is pretty critical, deeming him irrelevant after his prime but a forerunner of Dave Chappelle, which author Jason Zinoman does not consider a compliment.
*In a long article, the BBC describes a phenomenon I call “bonk shaming”: a lesbian who wants to have sex only with cisgender (natal) women (alternatively, a gay male wants biological rather than trans males). A variant is the straight person who wants to have sex only with cisgender people of the opposite sex, and is not attracted to trans people of the opposite gender. You can’t really control to whom you’re attracted, but these people are increasingly derided as transphobic. This is not uncommon:
Jennie is a lesbian woman. She says she is only sexually attracted to women who are biologically female and have vaginas. She therefore only has sex and relationships with women who are biologically female.
Jennie doesn’t think this should be controversial, but not everyone agrees. She has been described as transphobic, a genital fetishist, a pervert and a “terf” – a trans exclusionary radical feminist.
Another instance:
One of the lesbian women I spoke to, 24-year-old Amy*, told me she experienced verbal abuse from her own girlfriend, a bisexual woman who wanted them to have a threesome with a trans woman.
When Amy explained her reasons for not wanting to, her girlfriend became angry.
“The first thing she called me was transphobic,” Amy said. “She immediately jumped to make me feel guilty about not wanting to sleep with someone.”
She said the trans woman in question had not undergone genital surgery, so still had a penis.
“I know there is zero possibility for me to be attracted to this person,” said Amy, who lives in the south west of England and works in a small print and design studio.
“I can hear their male vocal cords. I can see their male jawline. I know, under their clothes, there is male genitalia. These are physical realities, that, as a woman who likes women, you can’t just ignore.”
*CNBC News reports that Trump’s Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos was soaked by Elizabeth Holmes into investing $100 million (!) in Theranos. (h/t Thomas). Things aren’t looking good for Holmes, but the defense hasn’t put on its case yet:
A representative for Betsy DeVos’s family office told jurors in the Elizabeth Holmes criminal trial that the former Theranos CEO provided misleading financials and details about the company’s technology in soliciting an investment.
. . . [Lisa Peterson, DeVos’s representative] told jurors that Theranos shared financial projections, showing the company would have revenue of $140 million in 2014 and $990 million in 2015. Peterson said she didn’t know that Theranos had no revenue in 2012 and 2013.
Holmes also said that the blood tests were being processed on Theranos’ homegrown technology, when in reality the company was using third-party systems.
The prosecution has now proffered lots of evidence that Holmes lied about her firm, Theranos. Will her lawyers plead mental problems due to abuse from Sunny Balwani, the other alleged fraudster?
*Hacker attacks candy corn factory! Food & Wine magazine reports that Ferrara Candy in Chicago, the biggest maker of this vile sweet, was attacked by hackers in October. But it was too late—the candy has been on the shelves for months already—and that’s where it should stay. (I suspect candy corn will last for decades.) I feel about this the way I feel about Elizabeth Holmes and Betsy DeVos: in each both sides acted badly and should suffer. (The manufacture of candy corn should be a felony.)
*Finally, today’s reported Covid-19 death toll in the U.S. is 741,277, an increase of 1,395 deaths over yesterday’s figure. The reported world death toll is now 4,990,013, an increase of about 8,700 over yesterday’s total.
Stuff that happened on October 28 includes:
- 312 – Constantine I defeats Maxentius, becoming the sole Roman emperor in the West.
- 1492 – Christopher Columbus lands in Cuba on his first voyage to the New World, surmissing [SIC!!!] that it is Japan.
- 1520 – Ferdinand Magellan reaches the Pacific Ocean. (Note the date below when he discovered the Strait.)
He reached it by rounding the Strait of Magellan (soon to be renamed) at the tip of South America. Here’s a map of his voyage. (Magellan was killed by indigenous people in the Philippines, and only one of his five ships made it back to Spain.
- 1636 – The Massachusetts Bay Colony votes to establish a theological college, which would later become Harvard University.
- 1726 – The novel Gulliver’s Travels is published.
A first edition of this puppy will cost you $98,000 (two volumes):
- 1886 – US president Grover Cleveland dedicates the Statue of Liberty.
This purports to be a photo of the dedication, but I swear that the Prez looks like Franklin Roosevelt. The clothing is too modern for 1886 and Cleveland was portly and had a moustache.
- 1919 – The U.S. Congress passes the Volstead Act over President Wilson’s veto, paving the way for Prohibition to begin the following January.
This ranks among the worst ideas ever turned into law.
- 1922 – Italian fascists led by Benito Mussolini march on Rome and take over the Italian government.
Here’s Mussolini with his blackshirts parading into Rome. He’s the guy with the sash on his shoulder:
- 1948 – Paul Hermann Müller is awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discovery of the insecticidal properties of DDT.
- 1962 – Cuban Missile Crisis: Premier Nikita Khrushchev orders the removal of Soviet missiles from Cuba.
And so the crisis ended. My dad told us he didn’t have to go away (he was in the Army), and we were all relieved.
Notables born on this day include:
- 1466 – Erasmus, Dutch philosopher (d. 1536)
This portrait of Erasmus, by Hans Holbein the Younger, was almost certainly painted from life; they lived in the same place and were contemporaries.
Of Holbein’s portraits of Erasmus, this is the most ostentatious, and not just because it is much larger. The background of the interior is furnished with a splendidly decorated pilaster and a shelf with books and a glass carafe, all of which help to ennoble the sitter. On the edge of the book reclining on the shelf is a Latin couplet composed by Erasmus, which asserts that Holbein would sooner have a slanderer than an imitator. That seems to mean that his outstanding art could scarcely be imitated and therefore criticism from the envious is more likely than imitation.
- 1903 – Evelyn Waugh, English journalist, author, and critic (d. 1966)
- 1909 – Francis Bacon, Irish painter and illustrator (d. 1992)
I like Bacon’s paintings but many people don’t. One, the famous “screaming pope” is below. On the right is Bacon’s “Study after Velazquez’s portrait of Pope Innocent X (1953), on the left is Velazquez’s original.
Here are the contents of Bacon’s London studio as they were when he died. They were moved in their entirety to Dublin (where he was born), with every item placed exactly where it had been in London:
- 1914 – Jonas Salk, American biologist and physician (d. 1995)
Salk is my hero. Unlike the acquisitive biologists today who seek to profit financially from every discovery, Salk refused to patent his polio vaccine. Here’s his famous response to Edward R. Murrow asking Salk, “Who owns the patent on this vaccine?”
- 1949 – Caitlyn Jenner, American decathlete and actress
- 1955 – Bill Gates, American businessman and philanthropist, co-founded Microsoft
- 1964 – Peter Coyne, Australian rugby league player
Another Coyne whom I don’t know. Could he be related?
- 1966 – Matt Drudge, American blogger and activist, founded the Drudge Report
Drudge seems to have largely dropped out of sight, and I couldn’t find a recent picture. Here’s one from 1996:
- 1967 – Julia Roberts, American actress and producer
Who can’t love Julia Roberts, who, along with Sandra Bullock, ranks to me as “America’s Sweetheart”. Here are some scenes from her first big hit, “Pretty Woman” with Richard Gere. The original ending was not a happy one, showing Gere tossing money at her and driving off, but fortunately they changed it for the final version. Her best movie? Erin Brockovich, for which she won a Best Actress Oscar.
Those who flatlined on October 28 include:
- 1627 – Jahangir, Mughal Emperor of India (b. 1569)
- 1818 – Abigail Adams, American writer and second First Lady of the United States (b. 1744)
- 1998 – Ted Hughes, English poet and playwright (b. 1930)
- 2007 – Porter Wagoner, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (b. 1927)
Dolly Parton was part of the Porter Wagoner show from 1967 to 1974, and eventually left under difficult circumstances to start a solo career. She’s written over 3,000 songs, and this is one of the best, “I will always love you.” It was her farewell to Porter Wagoner when she left his show, and here’s her first public rendition on that show, ca. 1974. Wagoner, as always, wears a flashy country suit from Nudie’s of Hollywood.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Kulka is being sneaky. When I asked Malgorzata what Hili meant by “show her,” she replied, “Well, Hili says to Andrzej that if Kulka dares to come closer she will do something not nice to her.” Oy!
Hili: I will show her!A: Who?Hili: Kulka, she is sneaking up on me.
Hili: Ja jej pokażę!Ja: Komu?Hili: Kulce, ona tu się skrada.
From Bruce. They’ve been trying to reach you!
From Nicole:
I’ll slip in a Gary Larson cartoon here, though I try to use them sparsely. But they’re all over the Internet now, and perhaps he doesn’t mind:
A loon says the liberal media wants to kill her:
Marjorie Taylor Greene says "January 6 was just a riot at the Capitol" and media outlets "would do anything to cause someone like me to be killed." pic.twitter.com/YSUqRAnEy4
— David Edwards (@DavidEdwards) October 26, 2021
From Masih, more trouble in Iran. These hackers are risking their lives.
Going viral in Iran.
A group of hackers have hacked into billboards and gas stations in the country as the second anniversary of #BloodyNovember approaches. The regime had killed more than 1500 protesters in Nov 2019.
This hacked billboard says "Khamenei, where's our gas"? pic.twitter.com/Lnznlv9qPp
— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) October 26, 2021
From Simon: A very good reason to get your jabs (Simon works on prostate cancer).
Urologists United For Vaccination Education #SaveTheFutureBoners — Home https://t.co/6EXQDHCR8w @UU4VE @AshleyGWinter @drrachelrubin @ranjithramamd @DrMohitKhera @SexMedLA @RenaMalikMD @alextatem @justindubinmd
— Amy Pearlman, MD (@AmyPearlman1) October 26, 2021
From Ken. This is so unbelievable that I had to check, but it seems to be true.
If you’re wondering why this ad never mentions what the scary book was that she wanted to ban or what course it was used in, well, it was Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel Beloved and the class was senior-year AP English. https://t.co/UVRH7my7Fb
— Kevin M. Kruse (@KevinMKruse) October 25, 2021
Tweets from Matthew, the first linking to a cool article about aposematic (warning) sounds produced by toxic moths to avoid bat predators. The bat predator, of course, has to kill at least one moth with a new mutant sound to learn that it’s associated with toxicity, but then will subsequently avoid moths making that sound. This might have evolved by kin selection: the relatives of the eaten moth, who are toxic and may share genes making the warning sound, could be nearby and their genes benefit from predator learning. (As you might expect, natural selection has acted on some edible moths to make them produce the warning sounds; the latter are Batesian mimics. From the article:
Here, the researchers show that most moths use ultrasound to communicate with their bat predators, advertising their toxicity. The researchers found that the majority of the moths that produce ultrasound were indeed toxic, suggesting that ultrasound production has evolved as a means of aposematism: that is, the moths are signally distastefulness to the bats, warning them not to eat them. Several other moths have also converged on this acoustic signal, yet are not toxic, indicating that these moths are faking to the bats that they are toxic, despite being perfectly edible, in an evolutionary process known as Batesian mimicry.
Screaming your toxicity: ultrasound production in moths as a warning to bats massively more prevalent than previously thought By @drtomneil @BaheerathanM https://t.co/UKFyvJc2pS pic.twitter.com/oZt6c1gPJd
— preLights (@preLights) October 27, 2021
Matthew and I are softies:
Tiny tabby kitten befriends the wild deer who visit her yard — and ends up snuggling with them 💗 pic.twitter.com/0ZaLgnVHgW
— The Dodo (@dodo) October 27, 2021
Haven’t I maintained that foxes are Honorary Cats®?
For being a Canid, Fox are an awful lot like Cats. They have vertical slanted pupils, They walk like Cats, grey fox can retract their claws and climb trees ;-). Fox also have sensory whiskers, stalk and pounce like a Cat. pic.twitter.com/tGxjM2ncz7
— AltYellowstoneNatPar (@AltYelloNatPark) October 27, 2021
Matthew said it took him a while to get the joke, but I got it instantly. That is, unless the bottom sentence is also part of the joke:
Sorry/you’re welcome. pic.twitter.com/qwailyNJha
— Sarah Bernstein, MD, MHA, FAAP (@sbernsteinmd) October 26, 2021
The vitriol from the trans activists is because: (1) this highlights the absurdity of trans ideology (the claim that what matters is “gender identity” rather than “biological sex”, the former being real and the latter not real); and (2) men who transition to living as women are realising that few people then want to date them, and yet they feel entitled to sex. Most of them are sexually attracted to women, and so think that lesbians should feel attracted to them, the fact that most aren’t is then a denial of their “identity”, and trans ideology is centred around the demand that everyone must “validate” a trans person’s “identity”.
By the way, the first time I encountered the claim that lesbians should feel attracted to “girl dick” (this was way back on FtB if I recall), I thought it was a Titania-McGrath-style parody, seeking to discredit trans ideology. But they actually meant it!
Indeed. I remember the tweet “Just because a woman has a penis doesn’t mean that she can’t be a lesbian.”
I thought it should be obvious that no one is entitled to sex, no matter their gender situation. I’m sure there are plenty of “traditional” lesbians who are attracted to women who just don’t happen to be attracted to them…it’s the sort of thing that happens to everyone for a potentially limitless number of reasons.
To try to harangue someone into having sex with someone they’re not attracted to is at best manipulative bullying, and could be considered sexual harassment and even a form of sexual assault. It strikes me as a far worse offense–in the criminal sense, this time–than the supposed transphobia of not being attracted to a trans-gendered person who claims to be the gender to which you are attracted, but who has not even undergone any surgical adjustment, or whatever the term is. It’s reprehensible.
If someone’s “identity” requires people to have sex with them though they don’t want to and aren’t attracted to them, that identity is “rapist”.
What it looks like to me is a small sub-group of biological males that have found yet another way to pressure females into having sex with them, by accusing their refusal as being morally reprehensible. And worse, working to normalize the view that refusing to have sex with them is morally reprehensible.
This is of course completely opposite from the main argument of the earlier gay/lesbian acceptance ‘movement’, which was that people should be free to have consensual sex with whoever they want. Now this sub-group of the Trans community are explicitly denying this freedom to biological females.
This is not the only argument they’ve completely flipped around. What really stands out to me is that these views that they have come to deny tend to be thoroughly decent while their opposites, at least as they use them, are thoroughly indecent. My reaction is to believe that these people are being despicable. They may be hurting, they may be lonely for intimacy, and I believe these are very serious issues and sympathize with anyone experiencing them, but that does not excuse or justify the coercion they are engaged in. And it seems very unlikely to help them get more sex with the partners they want.
(Channeling J.K.Rowling) We used to have a word for forcing women to have sex against their will…..What was it now? Rope? Ripe?
It’s getting similar to the Incel movement, isn’t it?
I guess this means we’re all pedophobes. We must actively hate and be bigoted against children to not be sexually attracted to them.
Yes, the Incel movement is exactly what I thought of too.
Exactly, I don’t recall gay men accusing straight men of homophobia for not sleeping with them …
Yes, and I do not fail to notice that this notion of entitlement is very much un-feminine behaviour.
It reminds me of these small male orangutans, they look like females, but they rape.
The screaming pope looks like he is surrounded by crime scene tape.
L
That is, in fact, a picture of FDR at the Statue of Liberty. He was there on October 28, 1936 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of its dedication.
Yes, definitely FDR. In addition to identifying him by his face, another give away is that he is holding onto the arm of the officer next to him. Something he did any time he stood in public, necessitated by his polio.
I did not check this, but the officer may be one of his sons. It is my understanding that they appeared with him on many occasions for that purpose.
Another clue is the military uniform. The uniforms of the 1880s were little changed from the Civil War. The uniforms in the photo are from the 1940s.
Sometimes the easiest person to scam is a scammer herself. The DeVos family made its billion$ in Amway, a multi-level marketing outfit, which is polite language for a pyramid scheme.
Amway has been around for so long but I rarely hear the name these days. When I was 18, me and my friend went to one of their recruitment sessions as we needed a summer job. We decided it wasn’t for us and, gladly, we got jobs shortly after working at a hotel in Avalon on Catalina Island, just off the Los Angeles coast. I consider that a bullet dodged.
The political ad with a parent talking about Toni Morrison’s book is one of several scare ads being run by the Republican candidate Youngkin against the Democratic candidate and former governor Terry McAuliffe. Youngkin is a huge Trumpster, which his base knows, but he has quietly not mentioned in order to explicitly pick up independents. McAulliffe has spoken against a certain level of individual parents determining curriculum as there is already plenty of parental involvement at the state board level and the local board level with open board meetings and public hearings all supported by Virginia’s freedom of information statutes. But we have seen these tactics work well in the past and I am very concerned for Terry and AG Mark Herring come election day.
I would think it would be good to have every parent, indeed every taxpayer, involved in school boards. They are a fundamental institution of local government.
Yes it would and I think the VA Freedom of Information Law encourages this. Local School boards, which make policy for local school districts are elected by parents/taxpayers. Our local board welcomes citizen comments at the start and at the end of each monthly business meeting and also holds public hearings for big issues several times a year. Generally a citizen can buttonhole a board member before or after a meeting, send an email (email addresses for board members are on the school district website), or at the local shopping center. Generally board members will set up a Starbucks or the like meeting for longer discussions. I say generally because we always have some members who for some reason have stood for election but do not want to do the full job. Of course some citizens are single issue people and the board must make decisions involving many moving parts, leaving some citizens really unhappy. When I served on the board in the 80’s and 90’s, generally after a conversation, the citizen would either agree or agree to disagree, but very rarely just go away mad. High bandwidth conversations with people were always very helpful…both to them and to me.
I nominate “surmissing” for accidental neologism of the year — a mistaken deduction, such as Columbus’s that Cuba was in fact Japan.
Here’s the NY Times’ obit for Mort Sahl, which is I think a fair take on him and his comedy:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/26/arts/television/mort-sahl-dead.html
A Brobdingnagian price tag for those of us with Lilliputian means.
A
🙂
We seem to be in an age of manifestos. An important one has been published simultaneously on the New Republic site and the Bulwark site. It is a scathing attack on the Republican Party for undermining democratic elections and, hence, democracy itself. The signers are from the both the left and the right including Noam Chomsky and Bill Kristol. Most are well known to those who follow politics and society. John McWhorter has also signed! There are two key paragraphs:
“Because liberal democracy itself is in serious danger. Liberal democracy depends on free and fair elections, respect for the rights of others, the rule of law, a commitment to truth and tolerance in our public discourse. All of these are now in serious danger.”
“The primary source of this danger is one of our two major national parties, the Republican Party, which remains under the sway of Donald Trump and Trumpist authoritarianism. Unimpeded by Trump’s defeat in 2020, and unfazed by the January 6 insurrection, Trump and his supporters actively work to exploit anxieties and prejudices, to promote reckless hostility to the truth and to Americans who disagree with them, and to discredit the very practice of free and fair elections in which winners and losers respect the peaceful transfer of power.”
https://newrepublic.com/article/164153/open-letter-defense-democracy
The fact that such a diverse group of people, with widely varying political philosophies, would sign this document is indicative of the perilous times we live in.
I can only hope it has some positive impact.
In my childhood home the name “Jonas Salk” was spoken with the reverence reserved for secular saints by my parents, who had been children during The Great Depression, when the sight of people with polio walking the streets was a commonplace, and it was among parents’ worst nightmares that their own children would be stricken with the disease.
Ken, the reaction in my home was the same as yours. I have a vague memory of an incident that happened when I was very young (perhaps five years old). My parents were on a vacation at a Catskills hotel. Apparently, there was a polio outbreak there or at least a rumor of one. My parents immediately left. I have a memory (It may even be accurate) of my father carrying me as we returned to our apartment house. They had zero hesitation in getting me the Salk shot.
How times have changed! If Salk had developed his vaccine today, he would be reviled by a third of the country for reasons as irrational as the people that would utter them.
Indeed, I just watched freshman congressman call Fauci a “demon doctor” who has forsaken his Hippocratic oath for “the mantle of unchecked power” amidst a call to prosecute him for his ‘role in the creation of the virus’. It’s bonkers.
The Grauniad also has an obituary for Mort Sahl:
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2021/oct/27/mort-sahl-obituary
Wikipedia :
“… lawyers from the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis did look into the possibility of a patent, but ultimately determined that the vaccine was not a patentable invention because of prior art.[4]”
From citation 4:
“As pointed out by Robert Cook-Deegan at Duke University, “When Jonas Salk asked rhetorically “Would you patent the sun?” during his famous television interview with Edward R. Murrow, he did not mention that the lawyers from the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis had looked into patenting the Salk Vaccine and concluded that it could not be patented because of prior art – that it would not be considered a patentable invention by standards of the day. Salk implied that the decision was a moral one, but Jane Smith, in her history of the Salk Vaccine, Patenting the Sun, notes that whether or not Salk himself believed what he said to Murrow, the idea of patenting the vaccine had been directly analyzed and the decision was made not to apply for a patent mainly because it would not result in one.”
Citation 4 : https://www.bio.org/blogs/real-reason-why-salk-refused-patent-polio-vaccine
In other news:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/oct/28/indian-police-arrest-seven-for-celebrating-pakistan-cricket-win
You really couldn’t make it up.
Another downside of Jonas Salk, in this interview with my former dep’t chair Julie Youngner, who was part of Salk’s team and who was apparently responsible for perfecting the cell culture necessary in development of the vaccine (and which apparently hastened the advent of the vaccine by a couple years). The relevant part starts from about 41:00.
Your sentence is incomplete. What’s the downside of Salk? Or do you expect us to blindly click on a link to find out?
If I added “can be found” after “Salk,”, would that make a difference?
And yes. It’s about the “Cutter Incident”.
Today I learned :
1. HeLa cells were used to develop the vaccine
2. It was claimed in the magazine I read that only white doctors would take biological tissues from only black people without permission/consent.
3. This precipitated all the consent / privacy upgrades at NIH and elsewhere in the past so many years.
Also, humorous now, but the very first thing that everyone would know about the Salk Vaccine was almost the vehicular homicide of a little Italian gardener.
So, the inheritors of the Amway billions are upset because someone misled them about a scheme they then invested in.
My violin, it is tiny.
Ah, scooped by Ken! Cynical minds think alike.
What was even better was their reason, when asked why they did not do more due diligence – they thought that they would be disinvited to invest. In fact, if I recall the testimony correctly, they doubled their proposed investment.
On a related note: my wife was taking a walk along Hamilton Avenue in Palo Alto yesterday, and the Halloween decorations in one yard included gravestones for Theranos, Juul, and WeWork. I believe the last two are still alive (Philip Morris owns Juul), but they’re certainly not flying high.
Say hi to Palo Alto for me. Used to live on Homer Ave., and before that, on Ramona.
Francis Bacon was one weird character. He was sex obsessed, and a masochist and liked his boyfriends to beat him up. Once his face was badly torn open and he was told by his MD to see a plastic surgeon. He refused and insisted his MD stitch him up without anesthetic. Quit a brilliant artist though.
A sadly late friend was a pathologist who wound up being the Chief Medical Examiner of SW VA. I once asked him if he’d ever treated any live patients – he said that during his internship he stitched up a prostitute’s face after some brawl. She returned a month or so later to thank him for saving her career.
Hey, let’s not start with the kink-shaming! 🙂
🐾🐾
You have to look at many Gary Larson cartoons closely to see all the gags. In this one, I especially like the Sabertooth Chicken exhibit in the back and the spiky heel spurs of the big “dino-chicken” skeleton.
I thought those were vampire chickens, like the black plastic vampire lawn flamingos I sometimes see around Halloween; but I think you’ve got it right.
Vampire lawn flamingos? Now I’m going to have to drive around the neighborhood until I find some.
can you imagine the world without the cacao tree?
Somewhat relatedly, can you imagine a world without root beer with a foamy head, the ingredient for which is provided by the Chilean soapbark tree?
That probably seems insignificant until you learn that the ingredient for that is also the adjuvant for the promising but yet-to-be released NovaVax vaccine.
Cool story.
Youngkin appears to be doing his best to portray himself as just a non-crazy GOP politician but this ad shows he is all-in on the Trumpian worldview. With any luck, Trump himself will succumb to the Lincoln Project’s goading and come to VA to campaign for Youngkin, something Youngkin wants to avoid. This stuff would be as funny as hell if it wasn’t our democracy at stake.
“Constantine I defeats Maxentius, becoming the sole Roman emperor in the West.”
And then proceeds to turn Christianity into the ruling religion of the Roman empire. A sad day in history.
In honor of Porter Wagoner’s deathday here’s one of his best murder ballads (he was a master of the form), “The First Mrs. Jones”:
I remember Helen Mirren spitting feathers over Pretty Woman’s romanticisation of prostitution and dubious message to young impressionable girls- come to Hollywood, be a hooker and catch a millionaire. I think the original script was much darker, but then it would have been quite a different film.
Oh, and Screaming Toxicity- got all their albums!
WRT those urologists:
“MEN who have had COVID…”???????
Shouldn’t that be “Bodies with penises who have had COVID…”?
Obvi, every one of those doctors should be cancelled, fired immediately, and driven out of the medical profession for committing a major thought crime!
Having loved the study and exercise of Animation since the release of The Little Mermaid in 1988 on November 17th it has always been a source of fascination to me that scientifically things look like they’re moving with still images.
Piece of trivia about The Little Mermaid her hair moving underwater was inspired by Sally Ride