Monday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Monday, September 26, 2022
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40 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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Thanks to all who extended their condolences to me yesterday. I truly appreciate it.
“Things are going just swimmingly, Vlad. Why do you ask?”
@CSK: I was not online yesterday so missed your news. I am so very sorry–thinking of you and your family.
@CSK: Just signed on after being off for the weekend and read the news. I am so sorry to hear about your nephew. Will be thinking about you and your family this week.
@CSK:
I didn’t see your post until this morning. My condolences to you and your family.
@CSK:
I’m sorry for your loss.
Yesterday I made the mocha yogurt jello.
Not a success. it tastes good, of vanilla, coffee, and chocolate, that worked as I’d hoped. But it turns out yogurt does not mix with gelatin, the thing did not set. it looks like chocolate-colored porridge.
There’s liquid yogurt one can drink. I’ll try that next time (I’ve used it to make jello before, too).
I also bought a jar of peanut butter, which I really shouldn’t have. I love it and tend to consume the whole jar within days. It mixes well with lots of things, like oatmeal and yogurt, and I use it on sandwiches and other things. yesterday I tried it with scrambled eggs with chorizo and cheese (pretty good).
So it got me thinking about making peanut butter jello. It might work. PB melts when heated. I’m thinking 1/4 cup PB added to some packaged jello suitable for use with milk.
This week is already starting swimmingly. My partner left for a trip to sunny CA to actually go into her office for a couple of days. She hates it.
The worst part however, is the kids and the pets are treating this as if she just set sail for the Undying Lands, never to return. The kids woke up weeping. Then the four of them (two kids, one dog, one cat) sat at the window forlornly willing her to return and save them from the misery of my parenting. To be clear, I am the fun parent that will let them do whatever they want provided they do their homework and go to bed on time. They are almost certain to whine to their paid grandparents that we are now living out a Dickens novel and that they should be allowed to sleep over for the week.
Then I get to deal with the CRABBIEST client ever. She’s not angry, just super crabby. On the Daddy Reynolds scale; where 1 is your average “My Little Pony” and 10 is Daddy Reynolds ranting about pronouns, she’s a 42. Her closing was at 10, at 9 she was bitching at me that I had screwed it up. She didn’t have to be there, just send the money. I finished the closing at 9:45. I’m not going to call her until 11:30 just so I have some quiet.
@Kathy: Mix prepared chocolate pudding with peanut butter and a splash of vanilla. Spread in a prepared pie crust. Chill. Very rich and fudgy.
@becca:
Pudding mix is one of those things we can’t get here. there used to be something similar, but I haven’t seen it in decades. Add my aversion to sugar, and it gets complicated.
@Beth:
How do you get the cat to do homework, and what do you have it do as homework? 😉
@Kathy:
He’s supposed to kill any of the normal creepy crawlies in the house, he’s terrible at that job. So instead his job is to be filled with ennui and scream. So much ennui, so much screaming.
DeSantis portrays himself as champion of immigrants’ welfare after backlash
Sure thing Ron, you were just trying to help them.
You want to buy some Florida beach front property from me? I’ll give a real deal on it.
@Beth: I have read that female cats are much better hunters than males. I know that our Miss Kitty is a mouser extraordinaire. She even killed a copperhead in our bedroom once. Now, if only I could teach her to dispose of the bodies…
Until this popped into my email this morning I had completed forgotten about them:
The Forward Party Wants to Disrupt Traditional Politics. But Can It Win Elections?
As a soulless technocrat myself I’m naturally attracted; however, for now, I’ll wait. Not pass. Just wait.
@OzarkHillbilly:
I can’t say Ramona ever caught or killed anything. She never brought corpses inside the house if she did. Of course, she eventually caught the string and toys she pursued relentlessly, but I also eventually let her. Even the elusive red dot. She couldn’t grasp it, but she did catch up with it.
What I do know is the pigeons that had roosted on our roof were gone a few days after the cat moved in.
@OzarkHillbilly: No, no, no. Bringing you the body is the same as when the hit man sends you the hand of the victim. It’s proof of service provided. What you do with the hand/corpse is your own business.
@Just nutha ignint cracker: I wouldn’t mind so much if she brought them to me. As is she just leaves them in darkened corners where I am sure to step on them in my bare feet.
@OzarkHillbilly:
That’s always the problem, isn’t it?
🙂
@Kathy: At one time we had four cats. Three would chase the red dot to exhaustion. The smart one, the black Burmese, would look at the dot, then look up at me like, “Seriously?”
@OzarkHillbilly:
Why is your bedroom infested with venomous snakes?
https://twitter.com/LEBassett/status/1574438025752645634
I am not seeing all that much difference between conservatism and misogyny.
@charon: YIKES!!! But no, there’s no significant difference that I’ve ever noticed between conservatism and misogyny until one is talking about one’s own daughters. My daughters are merely seeking their rightful place; the daughters of others are being uppity.
@CSK: I hate it when bad things happen to good people. May the memory of your nephew bring joy after the sting subsides.
@Gustopher:
Maybe it keeps the mice away?
@OzarkHillbilly:
My mom had a cat like that. Hardass female cat. Could probably take down an animal 3-4 times her size. She was pure fury and spite. She once pulled her own teeth out when she was old and they were bothering her.
My soft boi, Dr. Tinycat* is a lazy idiot. He was the runt of a litter born outside the front of my house. We took all of them and their evil hell beast mom in. Mom was eventually TNR’d. There was no domesticating her. All the other kittens were neutered and then given away. We kept Doc cause we’re softies and I hand fed him for the first week or so of his life. His siblings wouldn’t let him eat from mom. Now all he does is laze around the house and scream. Sometimes he’ll snuggle with me and I’ll put my hand over his face and he just melts.
* he overcame great adversity and graduated from Cat Medical School. Now he just mooches off his adopted parents, cause who wants to see a screaming cat doctor?
@OzarkHillbilly:
@Gustopher:
Thing is, being a Brit with no familiarity with American fauna, but some with US history, “copperhead” always makes me think first of the northern Confederate sympathizers from the Civil War.
Clever anachronistic murder-kitty!
@CSK:
Late to comments, but condolences from the Luddite family. May his memory be a blessing to all who knew him.
@Jim Brown 32: @Flat Earth Luddite:
Thank you both so much.
@Gustopher: We live out in the boonie woods. Encounters with copperheads and rattlers are not uncommon. As is, it only happened once. There is a crawl space underneath the bedroom and I had a hole in one wall to access some plumbing. I closed that up post haste after the invasion of the copperhead.
@OzarkHillbilly: Well, I can tell you that our male cat, rescued from the woods when he was about 1 year old, was a hunter supreme in his prime. There was no chance of making him an indoor only cat, so he has always had fairly free run of the local area. When he was young he would go out for hours and even a day or more at a time, stopping in once or twice a day to take one nibble of his dry food just to make sure it was still there, and then going out to catch his real meals. He ate everything, tip to tail, even most of the feathers as near as I can tell. Except for these tiny little dark green organs which he would deposit on the stepping stones we had leading out to the side gate, one organ per stepping stone, right in the middle.
Of course, at 14 he’s not so much interested in hunting anymore. Recently he spent all morning watching two chipmunks chase each other until one made a foolish leap, fell out of the tree and landed maybe three feet away from the cat. They stared at each other for a good 5-10 seconds and then the chipmunk ran back up the tree. The cat didn’t even blink.
@Scott: Definitely “c”.
Our cats were all avid hunters which meant every morning we would be confronted with a furry Somme on the doorstep….mice, voles, shrews, rabbits, chipmunks, squirrels….there was a certain tone in their voices if they wanted to come in WITH prey which we quickly learned to pay heed to.
That gave me a good chuckle.
My sister had an all white* male cat named Sydney**. Deaf as a post. Tore up the furniture so they had his fore paws declawed. My mother loved her birdies but Sydney was a stone cold assassin so she put a tether on him. He still killed the birdies, so she put bells on his collar.
Guess what?
Yep, he still killed the birdies.
Ma said, “Fuck it. If those birds are so stupid as to get killed by a deaf, all white, declawed cat with bells on his collar and connected to a tether, they need to die.”
*somewhere along the line we heard that all white cats are deaf as a rule. no idea if that is true or not. I suppose I could google it, but I don’t really care
** when my sister first acquired him, she couldn’t come up with a name so we just called him “Cat”. when she moved out and got an apt. and 2 college roommates, “Cat” went with her. One of her roomies, Ronnie, was from Australia. One day a phone bill arrived for several hundred dollars (this was the mid to late ’70s) It seemed somebody had been making long distance phone calls to Sydney Australia (amongst other places). When confronted, Ronnie swore she wasn’t making surreptitious calls home. The next month was the same. The issue just about tore them apart when one of them walked into the apartment and caught the cat dialing the push button phone.
That was how he came to be called Sydney.
You all may want to know NASA’s DART probe scored a direct hit on its target asteroid.
@CSK:
Oh no, I just read of your situation.
All I can do is wish you and your extended family peace and peace of mind.
@Kathy:
The detached a camera to record the impact. It is recording the ejecta now so it’s not transmitting. Soon we will have pics of the impact.
@al Ameda:
That’s so kind of you.
@dazedandconfused: Here’s the official NASA replay/
(Hope the YouTube link works)
The very last frame is spectacular.
@OzarkHillbilly: I have a similar attitude towards “poor little birdies” and one of our cats: if a bird can’t understand the danger from a 15 pound dark grey cat sitting right under the bird-feeder in the open with his mouth open, there’s not much you can do to protect them. Stupid birds.