Monday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Monday, September 12, 2022
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94 comments
About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor of Political Science and a College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored
A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog).
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Good mornong form RDU. Looking forward to getting back to Cali.
Friday Houston.
Saturday Atlanta
Sunday morning Miami
Sunday evening Raleigh
Monday Los Angeles.
Well, Eddie, at least I’m not the only one awake at this ridiculous hour.
@Flat Earth Luddite:
Curse you oh fickle edit button. ETA Eddie, I’m sorry you had to take this voyage. Texas ugliness aside, it sounds like an ugly schedule.
Blech.
@OzarkHillbilly: Well said
Trump made a surprise visit to D.C. yesterday. I have no idea if he’s still there.
http://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-visit-dc-arrest-doj-1741915
And I’m off to see the wizards
The wonderful wizards of waallers
Because because becauuuuuse….
It’s granddaughter’s day in Hillbilly Holler!
@OzarkHillbilly: Yeah, I know. Don’t quit my day job.
Next time Trump whines about “weaponized DoJ,” remember it’s just another confession.
Trump Pushed Officials to Prosecute His Critics, Ex-U. S. Attorney Says
Today marks 5 years since I returned to the US from China.
Seems like forever ago.
(413 days to parity)
I saw the latest Thor movie over the weekend (literally over two days).
Meh.
No spoilers
I loved the idea of Mighty Thor, the notion of other gods outside of Asgard, and can see plainly that the God of Thunder his own self now serves a comedic role in the superhero literature, but the story struck me as pointless.
Literally. Had one character asked another for one thing, the movie would have ended a minute later. Oh, the need for the movie’s story can be rationalized, but Occam’s Razor (pat. pending) tells me I’m right.
@Kathy: I’ve always been fascinated by the things I can accept in a book or a movie and the things I can’t. Just one example: the Blues Brothers. When I saw it in the theaters when it first came out, I had no problem with the bazooka, the Penguin, the survival of multiple explosions, but I absolutely got taken out of the movie by a scene where they were driving fast on a city street. As a Chicagoan I immediately recognized it as Lower Wacker Drive. This was at the nadir of US cities and Lower Wacker was a obstacle course of axel breaking potholes. The idea of someone in a high speed chase was just ludicrous.
@Kathy: I went in with the expectation it would be a farce and I was not disappointed. In fact, I really enjoyed it. But again, I expected exactly what I got.
@Kathy:
I saw it last week as well. And I fully agree. “Meh”.
I’m one of about 6 people who thought that Ragnarock was absolute crap. Hemsworth is not a comedian, and Waititi makes Adam Sandler look downright Shakespearean.
Love & Thunder had some okay parts, but every time they tried to be funny, it made me cringe.
@Mikey:
BIG SPOILER ALERT.
Suppose at the end Thor reaches the cosmic wishing macguffin just ahead of the bad guy. But instead of wishing for Jane to live, he wishes for the bad guy’s daughter to be resurrected.
That’s what I actually thought would happen.
@OzarkHillbilly:
Wizards of wallers????
@MarkedMan:..suspension of disbelief…
I’ve seen TV commercials where cats and dogs speak English to promote a product. I find it annoying and I can’t buy it.
Who Framed Roger Rabbit
Toons and mortal humans side by side in the same universe? A talking Taxi Cab that can lift itself up over a police car full of weasels?*
I’m right there!
*I could have used one of those when I was driving the Sleepytown Yellow Cab in’71.
@MarkedMan:
I dunno, as a young idiot with a death wish I managed to get up to a pretty high speed on Lower Wacker. Both before and after the redesign. Also, Lower Lower Wacker has got to be one of the straight up creepiest parts of the city.
@CSK:
@Mister Bluster:
Wizards of weasels?
I am both bored and trying to avoid doing any work. Self-employment is grand. Anyway, a nice petty conspiracy theory for your day:
https://twitter.com/LillianaFuture/status/1568052439147810819
@Kathy:
But, did they include the god of it getting above freezing after a hard winter frost?
….
Thaw
🙂
@Beth:
I don’t think I’ve been on it since the Riverwalk stuff ended up closing it off from the river. It must be like a tomb now.
Funny family story. There is a scene in the movie where two Nazi’s drive off an uncompleted highway and for (reasons) fall thousands of feet to the city below. The original plan for filming was to drop the car from a helicopter onto the city itself, but the mayor (Jane Burne) told the producers they had to prove they could hit the target. They hired a barge out in Lake Michigan and proceeded to drop the car 3 times onto a target painted on its deck, at first light before there was too much traffic. Fast forward to my uncle coming home at the end of the day. “Anne, I swear on St. Paddy that I was driving to work this morning and a car dropped out of the sky and landed in lake Michigan.” My Aunt Ann assumed he was pulling her leg and proceeded to give him all kinds of grief about it.
@Beth:
I don’t think Ozark would refer to his grandgirls as weasels.
@MarkedMan:
Even after a lifetimes of training that in movies and TV no one ever encounters traffic on a high speed chase, and cops always find a parking spot right where it’s most convenient?
It takes a lot of effort not to suspend disbelief out of habit.
I’ve been reviewing old OTB open threads and COVID posts and comments, in order to review my mental history of post-vaccine COVID developments.
I had it mostly right. The Delta variant was both more infectious and more dangerous than the original strain and earlier variants, but it didn’t cause as many breakthrough infections as Omicron would a few months later. The idea of boosters, earlier on, was to lower the incidence of breakthrough cases among those vaccinated, in order to further contain the spread of COVID.
By “right” I mean my insistence that we might have ended the pandemic by now, or saved hundreds of thousands of lives, had more people been vaccinated with two doses by the Fall of 2021.
And my hope that vaccinating against Omicron will help bring the trump pandemic to a close sooner.
@Kathy: The point of the story was to provide one more potential item to add to the “reasons for “me” to order Disney+” list. There has to be an endless supply of “new content” to trigger FOMO. Without consumerism, the economy tanks and we go into recession yet again. If that happens…
…How does “President Ted Cruz” sound? (or DeSantis? or Hawley? or Abbott? or…?)
@Kathy:
Sure but do you really want to watch a film where 90 minutes of it are spent showing people parking?
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
All this year many of the cable channels on my favorites list show a “NO SIGNAL” when I try to watch them. Currently I can depend on BBC News, Food Network, and one of the Discovery channels (a good one with actual content). All others range from 33% to 0% chance of having a signal.
So, without streaming services I’d have very little to watch.
@Rick DeMent: Like a James Nguyen movie?
@Kathy: Just got off the phone with my doctor’s office. He always does an update of his own before putting callers on the phone tree. Today’s offering noted that the new Covid vaccines haven’t arrived in our community yet, but he’s not sure that how much it matters given that the vaccines have shown that they don’t work.
As to why I stay? It’s the only full-service clinic in town that is taking patients and he’s much better at hiring staff than he is at evaluating information that goes against his RED STATE biases. I get good care in spite of him and can simply laugh off the nonsense.
@Kathy: I have about 12 streaming services loaded on my TV at the moment. One charges a fee; the rest are gratis. I watch about 4 total. I watch almost no new content programming but have lots of things I never saw because I was in Korea and couldn’t get them. Watching only a couple of hours of TV on any given day except when I’m sick, I’m not sure I’ll ever run out of things to watch. But your cable situation must be frustrating.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
You should have seen it yesterday, when not a single sports channel had a signal on the NFL opening day.
I think you’ve mentioned your doctor before.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
I’ll take Costello for $200, Cracker. Seriously, even dead he’d be a much better president.
I don’t know how many European literature fans there are here, but Javier Marias has died, and he’s definitely one of the greats. Your Face Tomorrow is his big novel, but I would start with Tomorrow In The Battle Think On Me. Pretty simple plot: man goes to a married woman’s apartment for dinner and sex. Her husband is away but their young child is present. When the man–the narrator–goes to bed with the woman she dies in his arms. Instead of calling for help, he leaves the apartment and the two-year old child, and then finds himself drawn back into her husband’s life as her husband tries to understand who it was with his wife.
I splurged three credits on the latest Audible 2-for-1 credit sale.
I keep saving credits for such sales and either 1) I get too many books it will take months, or more, to get through, 2) get nothing because I found them on Scribd or found nothing of interest. Usually my backlog gets bigger.
So, I thought if I ever get to 10 credits unspent, I’ll pause or cancel the subscription until I reduce them.
IANAL. If I understand the reporting, in his latest filing Trump is not claiming that he declassified the documents in question but that it is up to the federal government to,prove that he didn’t.
Sheesh.
@CSK:
It seems he was there to play golf.
Dammit.
@Modulo Myself:
Yes, Marias was very good.
@MarkedMan:..@Beth:..LSD Flashback…
I think that this was realigned by 1986.
It was a real trip to drive.
@MarkedMan:
I think you understood it perfectly.
@CSK: And yet, created as a classified document and then unclassified by TFG is still not a personal document. Created as classified will always be a government document, and never subject to attorney/client privilege, and which TFG will never have a colorable basis to retain, particularly in light of subpoena for all documents marked as classified. Period. End of sentence.
In Ukraine, Russia suffers a serious defeat.
Meanwhile, on Planet Fox…
Douglas MacGregor:
Pass the bong, Tucker, ‘caus’ that must be the good shit.
@Mister Bluster:
I didn’t know about that one. I probably was on it, but I would have been like 8ish and I don’t remember much from then.
I’m much more familiar with the current Oak St. S-Curve.
https://goo.gl/maps/Tkj1ucrrdQBS48Wx5
https://www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news/lake-shore-drive-oak-street-s-curve-dangers/
People constantly plow into the wall there. Again, I once took that curve in my dad’s Mercedes 1994-ish S500 at like 80 mph. That heavy ass car made two 90 degree turns and I had to change my shorts. One wrong twitch and I would have launched that tank into the lake.
Inside me are two wolves; one wolf is desperately trying to kill me and one wolf is desperately trying to keep me alive. The first wolf has gotten close many times.
@CSK: Wizards of Waa-llers… I dropped the hyphen.
@Beth:
Ooh, that’s quite the tight curve.
Looks like it tightens the radius as you go into it as well?
Not the thing for a rear-wheel drive at speed if you’ve any slick on the surface.
Might be interesting to try in a good fwd, though. 🙂
But defs. some way below 80. LOL.
Mister Bluster:
Eek!
My word, that must have been “fun” in a Chicago winter!
Did they put nets out to catch those who didn’t make it?
@Beth:
The Mexico City to Cuernavaca highway features a tight curve known as the pear. It’s at the bottom of a slope, too. Signs warning of it and ordering one to slow down begin several hundred meters prior.
I don’t think it gets many accidents. The first time I drove in it, though, it seemed to go on forever.
@Beth: They should either straighten out that curve or put in some tighter curves north of it.
There’s a similar curve approaching Manchester NH from the north that I always have to remind myself to slow WAAAY DOWN for it. Heck, I refuse to take it at anything above 55 mph.
(I-57 has a similar “big bend” when approaching Kankakee. Yah. Those speed signs are there for a reason.)
@Joe:
Oh, I know. But this is what happens when you have no defense, even a vaguely plausible one. You start hurling dung around to see what sticks.
@Beth:
When I was in HS, I took a trip down to Ft. Bragg with a buddy who was finalizing his medical discharge from the Army. We were in a 1972 VW Bug that he had put a lot of work into. His standard rule of thumb for curves was to take the posted speed, double it, and subtract 5mph.
Somewhere in the mountains in Kentucky–on a road carved into the mountain side, no guard rails on the “fall off” side, and no shoulder on either side–we hit an S-curve. In the first turn, looking out the window, I couldn’t see road–just a 1,000-foot drop. On the second turn we were inches from taking out the driver’s door.
“Um… Dave?”
“I know!”
When we finally got out of the turn, he asked “What did that sign say?”
“Maximum safe speed: 20 MPH”
“Got it. From now on, we listen to it.”
😀
Some news items from Europe that may otherwise slide past:
France and Romania agree a plan to boost Ukraine grain exports, by building up north Romanian rail/canal/port infrastructure.
German opinion polls indicate 70% favour continued support for Ukraine despite energy price impacts.
Meanwhile, EU gas spot prices have dropped back to July levels. Still way up on last year, but better. Largely because buying for the bulk storage is tapering, and regulators and banks have been knocking heads together in the commodity dealer community.
And in Germany, Economy Minister Habeck announces removal of policies aimed at supporting trade with China.
Pretty certainly linked to Biden’s economic and diplomatic moves.
And also a sign from Berlin to Bejing the Germany is seriously verärgert about China’s diplomacy re. Russia/Ukraine.
In her new book, Confidence Man, Maggie Haberman says that Trump planned to barricade himself in the White House and refuse to leave so Biden could move into the premises.
In a way, I’m sorry he didn’t. The spectacle would have been hilarious. What would Trump have done? Piled up furniture against all the entrances? Stationed the Secret Service at the windows to shoot any interlopers? Have to be dragged out by the armed forces after they stormed the place?
I would pay to have seen the last.
@Beth:..8ish…
I don’t usually spend much time thinking about age differences. But somehow it just struck me that when the LSD S Curve was eliminated in 1986 I had been out of High School for 20 years.
I never lived in Chicago. Spent four years in the south suburbs (Homewood) til I left my parents home in ’68 to finish college. My earliest memories of the Windy City are from visits to relatives when my dad would take my brother and sister and me to ride on the recently opened Dan Ryan Expressway in our new 1960 Dodge Dart*.
Fourteen lanes wide! The road of the future!
*This sure looks like our car. 4-door. Same color.
The antenna is a dead giveaway that it’s not. Dad was too cheap to pay extra for an AM radio.
@Mu Yixiao: My rule of thumb for highways is that signs that tell you to slow down to 50 or 45 are really just saying, “Pay Attention!”, but signs that slow you down to 30 or below should be taken very seriously.
@grumpy realist:
I remember many moons ago, when learning to drive, the words of an uncle who used to do test driving for Jaguar:
“If in rain, or in doubt, slow in, fast out.”
But also: never be still on the brakes when you go into the turn.
Words of wisdom.
@Mister Bluster: Okay, now I gotta link to this. Saw them play it live when I was in high school…
We just dodged a small bullet a t work. See, Friday Sept. 16th is a holiday (independence day), and we even leave early Sept. 15th. A 3.5 day weekend. Sweet!
But a government agency put out a proposal today for delivery Monday 19th (breaking legal guidelines for deadlines in the process), which means we’d have had to finish it by the 15th. It takes a lot of work. So, sure, we’d finish it by then, and then be too beat up and tired to enjoy the holiday weekend.
Fortunately, the boss decided it wasn’t worth doing.
On other office related stuff, the FIFA World Cup has begun to induce fever at work. Current plan is to purchase a 50″ 4K TV between all of our department’s 25 people to see the games while at work. When the blasted spectacle is over, we’ll raffle it off and someone takes it home.
Since I would pay money in order to avoid watching even a microsecond of soccer (sucker?), and since I spent good money not a year ago on a new TV, I declined to take part.
They did this 4 years ago. as I recall, I declined then as well.
@Kathy:
That assumes that by vaccinating everyone, we would have prevented Omicron.
There’s no reason to think that is the case. Omicron did not originate in the US, so US holdouts would have been irrelevant, and there was not the infrastructure or supplies available to vaccinate every man, woman, child and animal reservoir on Earth.
Further, Omicron has better vaccine evasion, so it would zip through a vaccinated population pretty quickly once it got established somewhere.
The original hope was that natural R0 would be low enough, and vaccine evasion low enough (alternately, effective R0 with vaccination, which would cover both) that the virus would stop being able to escape small clusters.
Omicron changes both the natural R0 and the vaccine evasion. The assumed conditions for containment were not met.
I know you want to blame Trump. If the R0 and evasion remained at Plain Covid levels, then his failures would have prevented containment. As it is… he is responsible for a lot of death in the Delta wave, but going forward… not as much of a difference as you think.
If you want to blame him for antimask sentiment, than we can give him… 50% of ongoing cases (plus or minus), but the virus still wouldn’t be contained.
@Kathy:
I’m sure I have. He’s kind of a go to example of how calcification of thinking from living in a small, insular community virtually all your life happens and can affect people you’d hope it wouldn’t affect. He’s lived here all his life except for the time he was in uni and med school. And he took over his father’s practice on his return.
@MarkedMan: Hey now! Don’t go knocking that one! That’s the best argument his lawyers have come up with so far and is one that the Supremes can work with to let him off.
@Kathy:
That’s because the people of Mexico City are normal rational people. Chicagoans are anger fueled maniacs that have not found a traffic rule we can live with.
@Mu Yixiao:
I had a similar experience. A friend and I drove non-stop from Chicago to Phoenix in a Jeep Wangler. When we go to AZ we cut through the mountains on a road that rapidly became a dirt road. Well, it got dark as we were cruising through and I started to fall asleep at the wheel. For like the next two hours I would fall asleep, my friend would wake up and scream and I would jerk the wheel into the turn. He would promptly fall asleep again and so would I. I don’t know how we didn’t rocket off a cliff. There were no lights, no markings, no guardrails.
@JohnSF:
I’ve also learned that I can’t drive in the UK when I couldn’t control the Ford Fiesta we rented and drove across someone’s lawn and rocketed into a hedge outside of Glasgow. My friends kindly forcibly removed me from the driver seat when I exclaimed “This is just like grand theft auto!!”
@Beth: @Kathy: The road to Sa Colabra. It’s something else.
@grumpy realist: In Arkansas, they have signs that say, “Crooked and Steep”
“Next … Miles”.
Hwy 21 is notorious, gut wagons go off that road on a semi regular basis. The stench is other worldly.
@Kathy: That looks FUN!! Of course, the secret is to slow down enough entering the curve so the drift sets in and you can then accelerate through the other side of the turn. And the alternate (?) road’s curve is just as tight.
Does the final outlet turn have a chicane (narrowing) to it? It looks like it might. Another drift opportunity.
@JohnSF: “Meanwhile, EU gas spot prices have dropped back to July levels.”
Hope that makes for good news for the UK, too.
@Gustopher:
I did mean global vaccination. I know it wasn’t possible, under a regime where Moderna, and Pfizer/BioNTech did not allow others to use their patents to make vaccines locally. The AZ/Oxford team did.
Had we been able to do this, deaths due to Delta would have been fewer. And deaths of Omicron as well, seeing as the big three vaccines still offer great protection against severe disease and death.
As to preventing Omicron entirely, who knows. Variants are more likely with higher viral circulation (more chances of mutation given higher viral reproduction). But there’s some indication that Delta and Omicron might have come from immunocompromised patients, whose condition allow the virus a much longer time inside their bodies. That is, they don’t clear SARS-CoV-2 nor keep it in check as well as people with baseline immune systems.
I do recall plenty of reports of people with some immune deficiency or another being sick with COVID for weeks or months, almost as if it were a chronic infection like AIDS.
back to vaccines, I’m sure we’ll see the same problems with Omicron boosters. BTW, I’ve heard nothing of an AZ/Oxford Omicron shot as yet.
@CSK: I have to guess that the barricading in idea lost ground when the White House domestic staff indicated they wouldn’t be moving any furniture for his barricades and Melania said “HAVE YOU LOST YOUR FUCKING MIND???” when he asked her to do it.
(At no point, can I see FG dragging around chairs or sofas or whatever.)
@OzarkHillbilly: That came up as a wallpaper choice on my computer a couple of days ago. I’ve had pictures of that several times.
@Beth: Is it just my imagination, or do all Mercedes drive like tanks? (My only experience driving them has been using the diesel versions and boy are you conscious of the mass of the vehicle.)
@Beth:
Not by a long shot (not even me*). It’s well known, and there are plenty of signals and warnings.
@OzarkHillbilly:
Now, that looks like someone built a rollercoaster and ran out of money for the park.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
The “alternate” is a road for the supply depot/truck park the highway maintenance department has there.
*I know me too well.
@MarkedMan: My home roads have several such “25-30 MPH” curves and s turns, but knowing them like I do I can easily add 10 in my truck and 15 to 20 in my wife’s car. It really grabs the road in a way my p/u just doesn’t. If I am on a road I don’t know or haven’t driven in a while, I’m a lot more cautious.
@JohnSF:
You are not kidding, wow. I love this comment from the Twitter thread: “It’s amazing that actual Russian propaganda is more reality-based than Fox News”
I am still chuckling over this comment. At this point, if you watch Tucker Carlson and take him seriously, I feel sorry for such an individual. You do have to wonder at what point people just guffaw when TC opens his mouth and tell themselves that the jig is up, and they are no longer buying what Tucker is selling.
@Kathy:
New Mexico used to (might still have – been a long while since I’ve been there) a practice of placing next to the road a small white crucifix where there had been a fatal accident. Some corners are thick with things, a condition easily visible from half a mile away. Best warning system for dangerous corners…EVER.
@OzarkHillbilly:
I’m not familiar with that term. What’s a “gut wagon”? My first thought is that it’s carrying the offal from a slaughter house.
Around here, we have “honey wagons”, i.e., manure spreaders.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
Yes, spot price is common (with trivial difs,) over all Europe.
Still puts it at about four times what it was in 2021; so the state subsidy system govt. have introduced (Conservatives sorta seeing sense) will still be needed.
Current plan will see our prices double.
It will hurt, but it can be borne, given special payments for those worst off.
Plan for UK business still on hold, for time being.
Similar schemes in place across most of Europe.
Plus plans for emergency rationing etc.
Hopefully reserves now so full, and LNG shipping scheduled to the max. that rationing may be avoidable.
Putin f’cked up: he was greedy (again) and failed to decide (again).
He should have mobilized and cut the gas in Spring.
Train done gone, Vlad.
Just had to pop back in to share a new phrase I heard (I expect Ozark and Cracker will enjoy this):
“It’s flat-cat hot outside”
Indicating it’s so hot even the cats are laying spread out on the floor unwilling to move.
@Beth:
Genuine LOL.
You hooligan!
What did you hire, a Fiesta ST or something?
If so, those little beauts’ can hustle.
About on a par with my machine.
@grumpy realist:
Depends on your Merc model.
A diesel S class, or one of those daft juggernaut SUV’s, is a heffalump by any measure.
A petrol SLK or A-class is actually pretty nimble.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
Oh, I can’t imagine Trump hauling around furniture, either. But I can well imagine him frenziedly ordering his minions to do it.
@Just nutha ignint cracker: @Kathy: My wife is from Majorca so I’ve been to Sa Colabra a couple times. The google map shows the road but somehow or other doesn’t quite catch it’s true glory. At one point it actually loops on itself. As steep as that terrain is, it’s no wonder. I want to say it begins at a Roman aqueduct but I think I might be conflating a different crooked and steep Majorcan road with it.
Got to go canyoning in the Torrent de Pareis once. It begins just outside of Sa Colabra. It was December and I’m not sure how far we got up it before my wife said, “No mas!” because even with a 5 mil wet suit it was just too cold for her. A stunningly beautiful place.
Ding ding ding! We have a winner! Usually from chickens, but pigs are possible too I would guess. It’s an awful mess. Some friends of mine live on 21 and they run into such wrecks on a not infrequent basis.
@Mu Yixiao: Heh, I hadn’t heard that one before. I like it.
@CSK: And I can well imagine his minions lolling back on a couch and saying, “Fck you, fat man… Do it yourself if you want it done so bad.”
Just got my Bivalent Covid Booster and my flu shot.
This means I am protected against bivalves, along with the flu.
I suspect Timothy Snyder had more than a few things to say about Ukrainian history. It’s a great book, but a very hard read. I couldn’t read it all at once, I had to take breaks with other, lighter reads a couple times.
Ps: Be careful with the google, a lot of Russian trolls out there.
@OzarkHillbilly:
In show biz, the portable johns are known as “honey wagons.”
@CSK: We call them “Johnny on the Spots”, and if you’ve never seen one on a Sunday morning at an MVOR, you have no idea of the true meaning of the word “disgusting”.
I have opened the door, looked inside and said, “Uh uh…” because shitting in my pants was far preferable.
eta: think of it this way, a bunch of union carpenters, laborers, iron workers, pipe fitters electricians, etc are no where near as disgusting as 3 or 400 drunk cavers.
@CSK: Where I live, the company that leases them is called “Honey Buckets” and only the trucks that deliver them are Honey Wagons.
@OzarkHillbilly: Yeah. They gotta be serviced often enough or they back up real bad. Some people I’ve known think the containment unit is a septic tank, but no, not even close.
@Gustopher:
And now the world is your oyster.
🙂
@Just nutha ignint cracker: Cavers know, but somehow or other they always want to believe the 4 or 6 to JoS’s at the bonfire are more than enough and the pair here, pair there, will cover the campsites. I don’t know, but I can’t help but think there is a connection between the drop in attendance and a reluctance to shitting on a 2 foot pyramid of shit.
@MarkedMan:..great tune!
I tried to link to it in my post at 13:29 in this thread but I guess it didn’t work.
@Mister Bluster: Chicago really had a music scene in the 70’s – 80’s. Now it has math rock, which is great in its own way, but it will never go mainstream.
@grumpy realist:
I’m gonna say yes. My dad, in his infinite idiocy bought two of them (at the same time) in the mid-nineties. They were gasoline powered and felt like they weighed 20 tons. If you stomped on the gas there would be a good 5-10 second delay and then everything would look like you were jumping to hyperspace. We would take them out and street race other morons on Archer Ave. At a stoplight smaller lighter cars would always get about a half a block start; then we would blow their doors off like some sort of bizzaro tank/space shuttle hybrid.
@JohnSF:
I don’t remember. It was about 2005. They were really sluggish and the brakes felt like they were just plastic blocks. The only reason I was driving was because I was one of three people that could drive a manual transmission. It was before my now very close friends learned that I can take any simple task and turn it into a hilarious fiasco.