He has also made jokes with racial overtones. Shortly after Mr. Trump was elected president, Mr. Moore broke from a talk about health care to tell his audience a joke about the departing first family. “By the way, did you see, there’s that great cartoon going along?” he said. “A New York Times headline: ‘First Thing Donald Trump Does as President Is Kick a Black Family Out of Public Housing,’ and it has Obama leaving the White House. I mean, I just love that one. Just a great one.”
Take a big whiff of the 2019 Republican Party. Smart people with great values.
May 1st and I woke up to 5 inches of snow and 6 degrees. Guessing it ain’t gonna be a good gardening year for the arctic tundra of Wyoming, we’ll probably get snow in July!
And I’ll repeat myself here because I keep thinking about this quote.
I really cannot believe I used to fault people for not engaging with politics. For taking a look at this perpetual carnival of miserable bullshit and turning away.
-Osita Nwanevu
I’m not necessarily endorsing it, just pondering it. I’ve had to make conscious choices about my consumption of inputs.
This is a tweet from Chris Van Hollen, US Senator from MD:
Chris Van Hollen @ChrisVanHollen
On April 20th, I asked Barr, “Did Bob Mueller support your conclusion?” His answer was, “I don’t know whether Mueller supported my conclusion.”
We now know Mueller stated his concerns on March 27th, and that Barr totally misled me, the Congress, and the public. He must resign.
Assuming the dates are correct, and Barr was before the Senate and under oath, how is that not perjury?
I think Ted Lieu (yes, the same Ted Lieu who the right was excoriating and demanding an apology from after Trump was “exonerated”) said it best:
Why would Bill Barr flush his reputation & credibility down the toilet? I don’t care.
What we should care about is that he is still in charge of @TheJusticeDept. Bill Barr should resign and then apply to be the next White House press secretary, where he can lie all he wants.
Every person and thing that Trump touches turns to shit.
@Jax: Don’t fret, Jax. Further south on the Front Range, we don’t plant anything till Mother’s Day so there’s still plenty of time. But I feel ya…this time of year I can’t wait to get my hands dirty and the weather never cooperates.
@James Pearce: Our standard rule of thumb is Father’s Day for this area, but I wouldn’t even make bets on that this year. Two years ago our last frost was July 6th, first frost July 29th. Not even sure you could call it “first/last frost”, just “the year we didn’t have a summer”.
On the plus side, we rarely get above 90 when everybody else is sweltering.
The American Lung Association’s annual “State of the Air”report offers a valuable lesson about the limits of regulation to solve problems.
California has the toughest air-quality regulations of any state in the country. In 1967, the state passed sweeping new regulations in response to Los Angeles’ smog, and under the Clean Air Act, the state was allowed to keep it stricter standards.
…
But California is a glaring evidence that you can only regulate away air pollution so much.
This from Jim Geraghty at The National Review is a completely disingenuous take on California’s air quality. Thanks to the strict air quality laws, California’s air is far better than it was 40 years ago, or even 20 years ago.
True, regulation can’t prevent California from having high population and lots of sunny days, but implying that regulations haven’t drastically improved the air quality is ignorant at best, flat out lying at worst.
Here in north FL we don’t get late-spring freezes anymore like we did in my youth, so I had my Black Krim seeds germinating Jan 15, the plants transplanted outside by Mar 15, and now I’ve got 30+ tiny maters on 9 plants. By the end of the month I’ll have more heirloom maters than I can handle.
@Kari Q: Good post. Kevin Drum has a response to that dumbass liar too:
This is stone cold nuts. It’s true that there are reasons for California’s bad air. That’s why our regulations are so tough. And they’ve made a tremendous difference:
It’s been a weird late April here. When I woke up the other morning before sunrise, my weather app on my phone had the outdoor temperature at 31 degrees. That’s highly unusual for this late in April to say the least.
@Teve: I had some Black Krim a couple years ago in my greenhouse, then a volunteer plant sprouted last year! I love “mystery” volunteers!
I prefer Sungold and Golden Rave, then I usually experiment with a new variety. Mostly stick to cherry tomatoes, again, the growing season is so variable I sometimes have to heat the greenhouse in the middle of the summer to keep things going. I tried big tomatoes one year and it snowed a foot on July 4th, the roof fell in and everything was toast. If my youngest kid didn’t love tomatoes so much, I would probably not even bother anymore.
Last Saturday we were hit here in Chicago with a full day of snow. It mainly melted immediately; the stuff on the roofs vanished after a day, but boy did some of the trees look silly.
I shouldn’t be having to watch blooming apple trees through snow…..
@grumpy realist: I took some drone pictures this morning, I bet this is gonna melt off fast, too. I’ll use them in a “comparison” side-by-side when I can see the grass again! None of our trees have leafed out, but the grass was greening up.
@Kari Q: wow, basically all 8 comments were “I’m a conservative but there are these things called valleys and pollution from china and it’s way better than 40 years ago and this is dumb and you are dumb.” 😀
@Jax: This is my third year trying to grow the krims. First year, nematodes killed them all, last year it got too hot right before they fruited and I got 3 fruits total off 9 plants (insert murder emoji), and this is the first year everything’s working perfectly. If this pans out I’m going to try All the Varieties next year. I’m also starting about 20 Bell and Jalapeno peppers at the moment.
@James Joyner: Those sudden changes from cool to 90 degrees I find deeply unpleasant. No adjustment time!
We’ve been in the 40s and 50s here in NH, and will (allegedly) start seeing some temps in the low 60s starting Saturday. I hope it’s a gradual warm up rather than the “going from heat to A/C” conditions we’ve had the past couple of years.
@Teve: I’ve tried all kinds of peppers for years and years and just cannot get them to thrive. I don’t know what I’m doing wrong, but I gave up. Definitely try the Sun gold and Golden Rave cherry tomatoes when you get to experimenting….the Sun gold’s are really sweet and tart, and the Golden Rave….they’re a little bigger, but the taste is so light and sweet, I am tempted to try to make some kind of homemade wine with them.
@Jen: I’d say “that’s New England” but you gotta have the month of mud and rain in there somewhere (a.k.a. “Mud Season”) going from white stuff to roasting. Oh yeah, and there’s a short period of gorgeous weather which in other locations gets called “spring” because it actually lasts for a while.
(Spring in New England: take a nap and you’ll miss it, grumble.)
@Teve: I think I’m just too far north and it’s too damn cold. I quit trying to sprout them from seed, started buying them from greenhouses, and they never grow an inch. They put out a few small peppers, and that’s it.
Well, except for one hanging pot of Thai chili peppers one year. That was when the YouTube kids were daring each other to eat the hottest peppers they could find. My middle-school aged daughter took a bunch of them to school without telling me because the boys were bragging about how they could eat ANYTHING hot. She damn near killed off every boy in 6th grade. I mean, I did laugh when she was telling me about how their faces went white and around their eyes went red and a couple of them raided the lunch room for milk, but I wasn’t laughing at the call from the principal asking me to kindly keep my hot peppers at home.
Our kids are doing fantastic – crime, mortality, drug usage, teenage pregnancy, smoking, drinking – all of the “bad things” in my youth that were supposedly leading indicators of chaos and disunity and decay and ruin went in the opposite direction that we were told they were inevitably trending.
The kids are alright. And that’s with the 37th best health system in the world! Just imagine if American kids had the Netherlands healthcare system!
Besides, even if you’re of a fatalistic mindset – I offer an alternative: neo-fatalism (perhaps afatalism). Yes, we’ll all die, our lives will be unremarked in histories, out individual lives are puny and meaningless, and the universe will end in a Big Freeze or a Big Crunch or a Big Rip.
But that’s billions of years from now! You’ll be dead and gone waay before then. It’s not your concern.
Neo-fatalism is the realization that you will die and so fucking what. Embrace it. Do stupid, fun activities. Spend unwisely. Quit your job if you can. Be irresponsible. Cram as much enjoyable stuff into your life as fits and eschew the crappy bits while you still can.
And for Tyr’s sake, don’t die in a hospital hooked up to a monitor if you can help it. Go wink-wink “hunting” and find a stable ice floe to catch a nice view of the horizon. (The Inuit version of senicide – perhaps the Swedish Ättestupa which has more individual agency)
If we’re born just to shuffle off this mortal coil, shuffle well. Dylan Thomas was not telling us to be pissed that we’re dying, but that dying cuts off the opportunity to do more. Rage not against death, but inertia.
We have one shot, no save-scumming, no do-overs. Don’t waste it pissing about over meaningless bullshit. Have some some god damn fun.
I need new music. I’m about to spend the next 3 weeks or so on a tractor 12 hours a day.
Pigface is going on tour for the first time in many years….I like anything from them to the Decemberists, and maybe some Slim Cessna’s Auto Club thrown in. I do not like country unless it’s from the Johnny Cash era. (The rooster in my avatar LOVED Johnny Cash, and Ray Lynch)
Yay, Canada! Yay, Neko Case! That gal can belt! It’s no where near hard-core, but I like this song really loud anyway. It’s propulsive. I can go out and punch life in the dick after I’ve heard this.
Keeping with the belting theme – I propose Sinead O’Connor. Not what you think – no crying Prince cover. Not even Mandinka (great song, BTW), but The Emperor’s New Clothes.
Why? you say – this is the best I’m striding along song ever. I used to listen to this on an old school Walkman walking home from work where I put on a fake face and semi-fake personality to earn money. I used to know how many seconds it took to rewind to the start of it I listened to this so much. Downtown to The Wedge and to my place took about ~ 35 minutes normally, but with Sinead granting me super stride power I strode marginally faster – say 31 minutes, and I will punch you in the dick with the power of Sinead if you fuck with me when I’m striding home, thank you very much…
Pro-tip: Sinead is not actually playing guitar in this video.
Oh! When this came out I was living in a high rise – 20th floor (Unit 2001 actually, very Kubrickesque; we had house parties that played on this, there were 5 people sharing 2 bedrooms – how did that make any sense to earlier me?) and I was alone in my underpants in the middle of a morning vibing on Mandinka and a window washer dude descends down to my window in his harness and freaked me the fuck out because srsly – 20th floor who knew they did that?, interrupting my straight, cis-gendered, white boy dancing to Mandinka in my skivvies.
There is a guy, a drummer at 3:21 who poses and points directly at the camera with the drumstick which is a total dick move, but that dude looks exactly like Badger from Breaking Bad, so I forgive him. Besides, he’s Canadian so he may not know the rules.
“There is a guy” Hello, Pixies!
There was a guy. An underwater guy who controlled all the seas.
The Pixies / This Monkey’s Gone To Heaven https://youtu.be/5WdRwdPdAKw
If you’re gonna be on a tractor 12 hrs a day, you really can’t go wrong with The Pixies
When I was a whelp, my parents (and grandparents) decided that it was best if I spent my summer vacay not in in our shitty S Mpls neighborhood, but at my Grand’s farm in NW Wisconsin to help out. It simultaneously sucked so hard and was super awesome.
I was driving a tractor alone as a 12 yo, raking hay and alfalfa. With a manual transmission and the sloppiest steering this side of the 1950’s Soviet car factory. That was just the morning.
The afternoon was baling the hay and putting it up in the barn weather permitting. I never got to meaningfully drive the bailer. That was for the adults. My all-day drinky Gran got to drive it, mostly. It was bad-ass! Thing whipped up hay, chunked it into cow serving sized serving sections, wrapped two strands of twine around a bundle and literally catapult shot it into a trailing wagon like 30 feet back while moving. Genius engineering and seriously fucking bad-ass to witness in person. Boink goes the bale!
The crappy bit was we had to store the bales in the barn. That was the afternoon work. So they set up this elevated ramp with a mechanical conveyor belt to move the bales up to the loft from the wagon and we in the barn loft had to catch them and stack em. Hard, hot, sweaty, scratchy work. But I did get super buff. I was a 12 yo Adonis summer’s end. But I couldn’t tell my friends – that would be Farmer John shameful. I could only admit to visiting my Grands. Admitting to that I did farm work this summer would have been social death. Looking back I was stupid. None of my friends or classmates had as cool job or drove a tractor working at DQ or Dayton’s. I had the bad-assiest of all summer jobs (is it a job if you’re not paid) but I was scared to admit I was doing farm work to my city born friends.
If you drive a tractor 12 hours a day, you’re driving in a straight line for 8 minutes, doing a 180 and then driving back opposite for 8 minutes. Repeat until field is complete. Move to next field.
Here is my recco – Superchunk / “No Pocky For Kitty” and then “Here’s Where The Strings Come In”. No individual song, just the whole of both albums on a loop. If you hate your boss, hit repeat on Slack Motherfucker; if you hate your boss a lot hit repeat again and then maybe play it when he / she can hear the lyrics.
If you like music, you’ll probably hit repeat on Seed Toss too.
Julian Sanchez
@normative
·
13h
In the depressing sequel to The Stand, humanity quickly develops a cure for the plague, but half the population refuses to take it because of a video they saw on RandallFlagg69’s YouTube channel, and we’re wiped out anyway.
This from Jim Geraghty at The National Review is a completely disingenuous take on California’s air quality. Thanks to the strict air quality laws, California’s air is far better than it was 40 years ago, or even 20 years ago.
True, regulation can’t prevent California from having high population and lots of sunny days, but implying that regulations haven’t drastically improved the air quality is ignorant at best, flat out lying at worst.
Jim Geraghty along with many other contributors at National Review and Heritage are intellectually dishonest (or extremely disingenuous) hacks. I remember being in Los Angeles in the late 60’s and 70’s before emission regulations were fully implemented and I can tell you that the air quality now is better than it was then. There’s still plenty of air quality problems in CA but those regulations made, and continue to make a significant difference.
Weird fact I learned this week: Homer, the Greek poet, may have been the first person to use the “Who’s on first?” type comedy routine. He’s certainly one of the earliest of whom we have a record.
@de stijl: ROFL at the mental image of the window washer interrupting your white boy dance. 🙂
It’s not quite “straight line” (planting) season yet, it’s dragging meadows so the cow turds break up. Endless circles. It breaks up the monotony to think of it like a video game and get a good amount of speed going and see how high up in the air they fly when the drag hits them. It also pleases the OCD part of my personality to see the meadows look so nice and smooth afterwards. It is, however, incredibly boring. Music required. Thanks for the suggestions!
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
@AOC
·
5m
One of the things that genuinely surprised me in Congress is the sheer mediocrity of witnesses called forth by the GOP in hearings.
Yesterday they brought in a guy w/ a polka dot bowtie backed by oil lobbyists arguing that fossil fuels are “healthy.” HEALTHY.
Maybe. There was no baseball in Homer’s day, gods be praised. But the routine type involves misunderstanding names and pronouns, not necessarily related to baseball.
In the past few months, alt-meat foods from impossible & beyond meat have gone on sale at Burger King, Carl’s jr., Del Taco, tgi Friday, Kroger, Target, and several thousand other places.
In the last week one friend of mine in Texas said he’s had the Impossible Burger the last two nights in a row and it was really good, and a friend of mine in Atlanta just said that she’s had the beyond Italian sausage and thinks it’s better than the real stuff.
You can get an alt-meat Burger now in fucking Nebraska.
you know how big changes seem to take forever, and then they seem to happen faster than you expect? I wonder if this one is now happening.
Not just any white-boy dance, but a tighty whitey Mandinka induced everyone is at work and I’m all alone white-boy dance. It’s a subtle distinction.
—
I have a theory about Sinead O’Connor. You know how some people are super-tasters and react more than most to gradations of spice / heat / flavor? I suspect she is a super-feeler. Predisposed to feeling all of the human emotions only much more strongly and profoundly than the rest of us. It explains her lyrics and her life path. She was what? like 20 or 21 years old and suddenly she was famous – it must have been overwhelming. I cannot stand seeing me on video or hearing my recorded voice, and I’m fairly in the “I don’t really give a shit what you think” camp. For her, that would be sheer torture.
One of the things I like a lot about Sinead is that she is socially awkward and a performer. We need more of that.
She is the dorkiest dancer (oh crap, we’re back on the awkward dancing) in The Emporer’s New Clothes video and it is amazing. No fooling, watch Sinead O’Connor dance here https://youtu.be/yhfATC9baPo
For some reason, I bond with people who share as openly as she does.
Plus, it’s a great striding song. Sounded great on those old Walkman headphones too. And I would’ve punched you in the directly in the dick if you messed with my stride. (I wouldn’t have. I’m actually quite pleasant.)
Kurt Cobain had nothing on her. Soft loud soft loud wasn’t invented in ’91. (Black Francis also has a say here, too.)
… it’s dragging meadows so the cow turds break up.
Don’t make it sound so glamorous.
The neighboring farm had a poop lagoon. A square pond filled with cow poo and urine. There was a berm around it, I was kid so I could be mis-remembering the height, but it was 8 to 12 feet of sloped earth surrounding a pool of bovine effluent. Maybe 15 to 20 yards square somewhere in that region. It wasn’t small – it was a proper robust lagoon of poo and pee. God only knows how deep it went. It’s spooky to even contemplate the notion.
When OutKast came out with Stankonia, I laughed my ass off thinking about that square pond of poo.
First heard this playing GTA5 killing cops as Trevor. The disconnect between the carnage and G-L-A-M-O-R OUS pop trifle was glorious. It was B A N A N A S bananas. Aretha Franklin sends her RESPECT.
I do reject the “If you ain’t got no money/take your broke ass home” lyric. Quite classist.
It breaks up the monotony to think of it like a video game and get a good amount of speed going and see how high up in the air they fly when the drag hits them. It also pleases the OCD part of my personality to see the meadows look so nice and smooth afterwards.
You have no idea how much this mini-rant tickles me. You’re a good dude. Thanks for the laugh.
Minimizing spoilers, Odysseus tells the Cyclops his name is “Nobody.” Later the Cyclops has occasion to say “Nobody’s trying to kill me,” which fails to get him help from the other local cyclopes.
I picture a wild-ass dude bombing around a pasture on a tractor cackling gleefully with Superchunk cranked to 11 while repeatedly pulverizing the winter cow poop into submission.
wow, i’ll have to go to NR and read the comments, I just said for the first time in history.
Never get out of the boat. Absolutely God damned right.
This helpful fella named Chef from Apocalypse Now; he will explain the process to you. https://youtu.be/YbFvAaO9j8M
Today I Learned Frederick Forrest was married to Marilu Henner. Forrest is the guy in The Conversation. He and Cindy Williams literally have the conversation that is eventually revealed. I always liked that line reading of “He’d kill us if he had the chance.” It’s so matter-of-fact. Also, Gene Hackman was a stud.
James, can I suggest upping the open forum frequency to every other day? For may of us, our browsers are going to remember the link and so the Open Forum button takes us to an old one. And with you guys posting much more frequently (a very good thing) the current Open Forum scrolls out of sight very quickly.
I was living in Tampa when the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe happened, and tourism was obliterated because nobody wanted to eat seafood caught on the gulf. Some safety rules were put in place after that, to try to prevent a recurrence of the same kind of event. New York Times is reporting that the Trump administration is right now canceling those new rules.
628 days until the Party of Stupid is out of the Executive Branch.
@MarkedMan: I didn’t do any counting of threads, but it certainly seemed like when Open Threads were introduced, the front pagers started posting really frequently.
[I]t certainly seemed like when Open Threads were introduced, the front pagers started posting really frequently.
I’m on sabattical this semester and started posting more, although I need to pare back to finish up some projects. Mostly, Doug is back to something like full bore and it’s been a long time since both of us were heavily posting at the same time.
I do think the Open Forum posts have accomplished their goals of giving commenters a place to talk about things that front pagers aren’t posting on and minimizing off-topic discussions on the posts we do make.
@de stijl: Haha….”If the turds ain’t flyin, you ain’t tryin!”
Girl, actually. I know, I’m an oddity even around here. You have no idea how many times people tell me there is no way I can take over this ranch from my Dad because I’m a woman. My brother decided to do the Lord’s work and became a preacher (yes, I’m being snarky), and there is nobody else. So here I am, ranching my rebel heart out.
Jax is a nickname from all the way back in high school. My parents lovingly saddled me with a first name nobody can pronounce the first time, so everybody (even my Mom) has always called me Jax. 😉
The way I always keep my house cool during the hot of summer I two ways. First off I get the hot air out of my attic. I have a fan upstairs that blows out the hot air. Next, I open my windows about an hour before sunrise. This lets the cool night air in. After a time or until it starts warming up for the day I shut the windows and trap the cool air in my house. The house can actually stay cool at least until noon or mid afternoon. This saves on an air conditioner bill at least somewhat.
Take a big whiff of the 2019 Republican Party. Smart people with great values.
May 1st and I woke up to 5 inches of snow and 6 degrees. Guessing it ain’t gonna be a good gardening year for the arctic tundra of Wyoming, we’ll probably get snow in July!
And I’ll repeat myself here because I keep thinking about this quote.
I’m not necessarily endorsing it, just pondering it. I’ve had to make conscious choices about my consumption of inputs.
This is a tweet from Chris Van Hollen, US Senator from MD:
Chris Van Hollen @ChrisVanHollen
On April 20th, I asked Barr, “Did Bob Mueller support your conclusion?” His answer was, “I don’t know whether Mueller supported my conclusion.”
We now know Mueller stated his concerns on March 27th, and that Barr totally misled me, the Congress, and the public. He must resign.
Assuming the dates are correct, and Barr was before the Senate and under oath, how is that not perjury?
I think Ted Lieu (yes, the same Ted Lieu who the right was excoriating and demanding an apology from after Trump was “exonerated”) said it best:
Why would Bill Barr flush his reputation & credibility down the toilet? I don’t care.
What we should care about is that he is still in charge of @TheJusticeDept. Bill Barr should resign and then apply to be the next White House press secretary, where he can lie all he wants.
Every person and thing that Trump touches turns to shit.
the cannabis revolution comes to the capitol
@Jax: Don’t fret, Jax. Further south on the Front Range, we don’t plant anything till Mother’s Day so there’s still plenty of time. But I feel ya…this time of year I can’t wait to get my hands dirty and the weather never cooperates.
And, Jacob Wohl strikes again. Where is he getting the money to fund these attempts at slime-throwing?
@Jen: Why isn’t he in jail on several felonies yet?
Maybe one of the QAnon idiots has an explanation 😛
@James Pearce: Our standard rule of thumb is Father’s Day for this area, but I wouldn’t even make bets on that this year. Two years ago our last frost was July 6th, first frost July 29th. Not even sure you could call it “first/last frost”, just “the year we didn’t have a summer”.
On the plus side, we rarely get above 90 when everybody else is sweltering.
@SenyorDave:
Found this over at LGM:
Apropos Barr.
This from Jim Geraghty at The National Review is a completely disingenuous take on California’s air quality. Thanks to the strict air quality laws, California’s air is far better than it was 40 years ago, or even 20 years ago.
True, regulation can’t prevent California from having high population and lots of sunny days, but implying that regulations haven’t drastically improved the air quality is ignorant at best, flat out lying at worst.
I don’t know about the rest of the country but it feels more like March 1st than May 1st around here.
I don’t need hot weather, but some warmth and consistency would be appreciated.
Here in north FL we don’t get late-spring freezes anymore like we did in my youth, so I had my Black Krim seeds germinating Jan 15, the plants transplanted outside by Mar 15, and now I’ve got 30+ tiny maters on 9 plants. By the end of the month I’ll have more heirloom maters than I can handle.
@Kari Q: Good post. Kevin Drum has a response to that dumbass liar too:
California is a Poster Child for the Benefits of Strict Regulation
FFS we’ve got
photos of what LA was like 50 years ago
I may not see it in my lifetime, but I hope someday in the future conservatives decide to stop being the Party of Stupid™.
The best artist since Thomas Kincade strikes again.
http://jonmcnaughton.com/maga-ride/
@Teve: That joke is so sad. A stand-up comedian on the old Borscht Belt circuit in the Catskills wouldn’t use that joke. It’s just pathetic.
@Teve:
It’s been a weird late April here. When I woke up the other morning before sunrise, my weather app on my phone had the outdoor temperature at 31 degrees. That’s highly unusual for this late in April to say the least.
@Teve: I had some Black Krim a couple years ago in my greenhouse, then a volunteer plant sprouted last year! I love “mystery” volunteers!
I prefer Sungold and Golden Rave, then I usually experiment with a new variety. Mostly stick to cherry tomatoes, again, the growing season is so variable I sometimes have to heat the greenhouse in the middle of the summer to keep things going. I tried big tomatoes one year and it snowed a foot on July 4th, the roof fell in and everything was toast. If my youngest kid didn’t love tomatoes so much, I would probably not even bother anymore.
@Teve:
I read that article last week and I’ve been walking around grumbling about it ever since. I should have known K. Drum would have responded.
To their credit, the commenters at NR are having none of it. There are only a handful of responses, but they are critical.
Last Saturday we were hit here in Chicago with a full day of snow. It mainly melted immediately; the stuff on the roofs vanished after a day, but boy did some of the trees look silly.
I shouldn’t be having to watch blooming apple trees through snow…..
@grumpy realist: I took some drone pictures this morning, I bet this is gonna melt off fast, too. I’ll use them in a “comparison” side-by-side when I can see the grass again! None of our trees have leafed out, but the grass was greening up.
@Kari Q: wow, i’ll have to go to NR and read the comments, I just said for the first time in history. 😛
@Kari Q: wow, basically all 8 comments were “I’m a conservative but there are these things called valleys and pollution from china and it’s way better than 40 years ago and this is dumb and you are dumb.” 😀
@Jax: This is my third year trying to grow the krims. First year, nematodes killed them all, last year it got too hot right before they fruited and I got 3 fruits total off 9 plants (insert murder emoji), and this is the first year everything’s working perfectly. If this pans out I’m going to try All the Varieties next year. I’m also starting about 20 Bell and Jalapeno peppers at the moment.
@Jax: @Doug Mataconis: We’ve had a couple of cooler than average days here in Northern Virginia. At then it’s supposed to be 90 tomorrow.
@James Joyner: Those sudden changes from cool to 90 degrees I find deeply unpleasant. No adjustment time!
We’ve been in the 40s and 50s here in NH, and will (allegedly) start seeing some temps in the low 60s starting Saturday. I hope it’s a gradual warm up rather than the “going from heat to A/C” conditions we’ve had the past couple of years.
@Jen: Yeah, I’d prefer more gradual myself. I’d prefer Southern California’s weather but my job prospects are unfortunately in the greater DC area.
@James Joyner: 90 is too much. I would melt.
@Teve: I’ve tried all kinds of peppers for years and years and just cannot get them to thrive. I don’t know what I’m doing wrong, but I gave up. Definitely try the Sun gold and Golden Rave cherry tomatoes when you get to experimenting….the Sun gold’s are really sweet and tart, and the Golden Rave….they’re a little bigger, but the taste is so light and sweet, I am tempted to try to make some kind of homemade wine with them.
@Jax: here in north florida they go like gangbusters. I’ve had pepper plants last for 3-4 years easy.
Did John Stewart Elect Donald Trump?
Science tries to answer the question.
@Jen: I’d say “that’s New England” but you gotta have the month of mud and rain in there somewhere (a.k.a. “Mud Season”) going from white stuff to roasting. Oh yeah, and there’s a short period of gorgeous weather which in other locations gets called “spring” because it actually lasts for a while.
(Spring in New England: take a nap and you’ll miss it, grumble.)
@Teve: I think I’m just too far north and it’s too damn cold. I quit trying to sprout them from seed, started buying them from greenhouses, and they never grow an inch. They put out a few small peppers, and that’s it.
Well, except for one hanging pot of Thai chili peppers one year. That was when the YouTube kids were daring each other to eat the hottest peppers they could find. My middle-school aged daughter took a bunch of them to school without telling me because the boys were bragging about how they could eat ANYTHING hot. She damn near killed off every boy in 6th grade. I mean, I did laugh when she was telling me about how their faces went white and around their eyes went red and a couple of them raided the lunch room for milk, but I wasn’t laughing at the call from the principal asking me to kindly keep my hot peppers at home.
Everybody nowadays is too gloomy.
By any measure, we are in a golden age.
Our kids are doing fantastic – crime, mortality, drug usage, teenage pregnancy, smoking, drinking – all of the “bad things” in my youth that were supposedly leading indicators of chaos and disunity and decay and ruin went in the opposite direction that we were told they were inevitably trending.
The kids are alright. And that’s with the 37th best health system in the world! Just imagine if American kids had the Netherlands healthcare system!
Besides, even if you’re of a fatalistic mindset – I offer an alternative: neo-fatalism (perhaps afatalism). Yes, we’ll all die, our lives will be unremarked in histories, out individual lives are puny and meaningless, and the universe will end in a Big Freeze or a Big Crunch or a Big Rip.
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/how-will-universe-end
But that’s billions of years from now! You’ll be dead and gone waay before then. It’s not your concern.
Neo-fatalism is the realization that you will die and so fucking what. Embrace it. Do stupid, fun activities. Spend unwisely. Quit your job if you can. Be irresponsible. Cram as much enjoyable stuff into your life as fits and eschew the crappy bits while you still can.
And for Tyr’s sake, don’t die in a hospital hooked up to a monitor if you can help it. Go wink-wink “hunting” and find a stable ice floe to catch a nice view of the horizon. (The Inuit version of senicide – perhaps the Swedish Ättestupa which has more individual agency)
If we’re born just to shuffle off this mortal coil, shuffle well. Dylan Thomas was not telling us to be pissed that we’re dying, but that dying cuts off the opportunity to do more. Rage not against death, but inertia.
We have one shot, no save-scumming, no do-overs. Don’t waste it pissing about over meaningless bullshit. Have some some god damn fun.
@de stijl: Been waiting for you to check in. 😉
I need new music. I’m about to spend the next 3 weeks or so on a tractor 12 hours a day.
Pigface is going on tour for the first time in many years….I like anything from them to the Decemberists, and maybe some Slim Cessna’s Auto Club thrown in. I do not like country unless it’s from the Johnny Cash era. (The rooster in my avatar LOVED Johnny Cash, and Ray Lynch)
@Jax:
The New Pornographers / Letter From An Occupant
https://youtu.be/XBAUQaj6EJo?list=PLhePgkLrCXym3AwjxKcjVeiPW2_YE8-t7
Yay, Canada! Yay, Neko Case! That gal can belt! It’s no where near hard-core, but I like this song really loud anyway. It’s propulsive. I can go out and punch life in the dick after I’ve heard this.
Keeping with the belting theme – I propose Sinead O’Connor. Not what you think – no crying Prince cover. Not even Mandinka (great song, BTW), but The Emperor’s New Clothes.
https://youtu.be/_RXwe-v72rE
Why? you say – this is the best I’m striding along song ever. I used to listen to this on an old school Walkman walking home from work where I put on a fake face and semi-fake personality to earn money. I used to know how many seconds it took to rewind to the start of it I listened to this so much. Downtown to The Wedge and to my place took about ~ 35 minutes normally, but with Sinead granting me super stride power I strode marginally faster – say 31 minutes, and I will punch you in the dick with the power of Sinead if you fuck with me when I’m striding home, thank you very much…
(Go loud on this also.)
Abide the stride.
Mandinka, btw.
https://youtu.be/h08pCvyKfbs
Pro-tip: Sinead is not actually playing guitar in this video.
Oh! When this came out I was living in a high rise – 20th floor (Unit 2001 actually, very Kubrickesque; we had house parties that played on this, there were 5 people sharing 2 bedrooms – how did that make any sense to earlier me?) and I was alone in my underpants in the middle of a morning vibing on Mandinka and a window washer dude descends down to my window in his harness and freaked me the fuck out because srsly – 20th floor who knew they did that?, interrupting my straight, cis-gendered, white boy dancing to Mandinka in my skivvies.
I will stand by Mandinka as a song.
The New Pornographers / Letter From An Occupant
https://youtu.be/XBAUQaj6EJo?list=PLhePgkLrCXym3AwjxKcjVeiPW2_YE8-t7
There is a guy, a drummer at 3:21 who poses and points directly at the camera with the drumstick which is a total dick move, but that dude looks exactly like Badger from Breaking Bad, so I forgive him. Besides, he’s Canadian so he may not know the rules.
“There is a guy” Hello, Pixies!
There was a guy. An underwater guy who controlled all the seas.
The Pixies / This Monkey’s Gone To Heaven
https://youtu.be/5WdRwdPdAKw
If you’re gonna be on a tractor 12 hrs a day, you really can’t go wrong with The Pixies
Hey (Doolittle album version)
https://youtu.be/1nl8QHc3PxY
When I was a whelp, my parents (and grandparents) decided that it was best if I spent my summer vacay not in in our shitty S Mpls neighborhood, but at my Grand’s farm in NW Wisconsin to help out. It simultaneously sucked so hard and was super awesome.
I was driving a tractor alone as a 12 yo, raking hay and alfalfa. With a manual transmission and the sloppiest steering this side of the 1950’s Soviet car factory. That was just the morning.
The afternoon was baling the hay and putting it up in the barn weather permitting. I never got to meaningfully drive the bailer. That was for the adults. My all-day drinky Gran got to drive it, mostly. It was bad-ass! Thing whipped up hay, chunked it into cow serving sized serving sections, wrapped two strands of twine around a bundle and literally catapult shot it into a trailing wagon like 30 feet back while moving. Genius engineering and seriously fucking bad-ass to witness in person. Boink goes the bale!
The crappy bit was we had to store the bales in the barn. That was the afternoon work. So they set up this elevated ramp with a mechanical conveyor belt to move the bales up to the loft from the wagon and we in the barn loft had to catch them and stack em. Hard, hot, sweaty, scratchy work. But I did get super buff. I was a 12 yo Adonis summer’s end. But I couldn’t tell my friends – that would be Farmer John shameful. I could only admit to visiting my Grands. Admitting to that I did farm work this summer would have been social death. Looking back I was stupid. None of my friends or classmates had as cool job or drove a tractor working at DQ or Dayton’s. I had the bad-assiest of all summer jobs (is it a job if you’re not paid) but I was scared to admit I was doing farm work to my city born friends.
If you drive a tractor 12 hours a day, you’re driving in a straight line for 8 minutes, doing a 180 and then driving back opposite for 8 minutes. Repeat until field is complete. Move to next field.
Here is my recco – Superchunk / “No Pocky For Kitty” and then “Here’s Where The Strings Come In”. No individual song, just the whole of both albums on a loop. If you hate your boss, hit repeat on Slack Motherfucker; if you hate your boss a lot hit repeat again and then maybe play it when he / she can hear the lyrics.
If you like music, you’ll probably hit repeat on Seed Toss too.
@Kari Q:
Jim Geraghty along with many other contributors at National Review and Heritage are intellectually dishonest (or extremely disingenuous) hacks. I remember being in Los Angeles in the late 60’s and 70’s before emission regulations were fully implemented and I can tell you that the air quality now is better than it was then. There’s still plenty of air quality problems in CA but those regulations made, and continue to make a significant difference.
Weird fact I learned this week: Homer, the Greek poet, may have been the first person to use the “Who’s on first?” type comedy routine. He’s certainly one of the earliest of whom we have a record.
And Stephen Moore is withdrawn.
@de stijl: ROFL at the mental image of the window washer interrupting your white boy dance. 🙂
It’s not quite “straight line” (planting) season yet, it’s dragging meadows so the cow turds break up. Endless circles. It breaks up the monotony to think of it like a video game and get a good amount of speed going and see how high up in the air they fly when the drag hits them. It also pleases the OCD part of my personality to see the meadows look so nice and smooth afterwards. It is, however, incredibly boring. Music required. Thanks for the suggestions!
@Kathy:..“Who’s on first?”
So are you saying that Homer hit the first homer…
@Mister Bluster:
Maybe. There was no baseball in Homer’s day, gods be praised. But the routine type involves misunderstanding names and pronouns, not necessarily related to baseball.
I’m also uncertain whether Homer intended humor.
In the past few months, alt-meat foods from impossible & beyond meat have gone on sale at Burger King, Carl’s jr., Del Taco, tgi Friday, Kroger, Target, and several thousand other places.
In the last week one friend of mine in Texas said he’s had the Impossible Burger the last two nights in a row and it was really good, and a friend of mine in Atlanta just said that she’s had the beyond Italian sausage and thinks it’s better than the real stuff.
You can get an alt-meat Burger now in fucking Nebraska.
you know how big changes seem to take forever, and then they seem to happen faster than you expect? I wonder if this one is now happening.
Sad news. Peter Meyhew, who played Chewbacca in several Star Wars movies, has passed away at age 74.
@Jax:
Not just any white-boy dance, but a tighty whitey Mandinka induced everyone is at work and I’m all alone white-boy dance. It’s a subtle distinction.
—
I have a theory about Sinead O’Connor. You know how some people are super-tasters and react more than most to gradations of spice / heat / flavor? I suspect she is a super-feeler. Predisposed to feeling all of the human emotions only much more strongly and profoundly than the rest of us. It explains her lyrics and her life path. She was what? like 20 or 21 years old and suddenly she was famous – it must have been overwhelming. I cannot stand seeing me on video or hearing my recorded voice, and I’m fairly in the “I don’t really give a shit what you think” camp. For her, that would be sheer torture.
One of the things I like a lot about Sinead is that she is socially awkward and a performer. We need more of that.
She is the dorkiest dancer (oh crap, we’re back on the awkward dancing) in The Emporer’s New Clothes video and it is amazing. No fooling, watch Sinead O’Connor dance here
https://youtu.be/yhfATC9baPo
For some reason, I bond with people who share as openly as she does.
Plus, it’s a great striding song. Sounded great on those old Walkman headphones too. And I would’ve punched you in the directly in the dick if you messed with my stride. (I wouldn’t have. I’m actually quite pleasant.)
Kurt Cobain had nothing on her. Soft loud soft loud wasn’t invented in ’91. (Black Francis also has a say here, too.)
@Kathy:
You can’t just drop this casually and not leave a cite or a link!
@Jax:
Don’t make it sound so glamorous.
The neighboring farm had a poop lagoon. A square pond filled with cow poo and urine. There was a berm around it, I was kid so I could be mis-remembering the height, but it was 8 to 12 feet of sloped earth surrounding a pool of bovine effluent. Maybe 15 to 20 yards square somewhere in that region. It wasn’t small – it was a proper robust lagoon of poo and pee. God only knows how deep it went. It’s spooky to even contemplate the notion.
When OutKast came out with Stankonia, I laughed my ass off thinking about that square pond of poo.
Inconsequential pop fluff
Fergie / Glamorous
https://youtu.be/q0SyUgw98tE
First heard this playing GTA5 killing cops as Trevor. The disconnect between the carnage and G-L-A-M-O-R OUS pop trifle was glorious. It was B A N A N A S bananas. Aretha Franklin sends her RESPECT.
I do reject the “If you ain’t got no money/take your broke ass home” lyric. Quite classist.
@Jax:
You have no idea how much this mini-rant tickles me. You’re a good dude. Thanks for the laugh.
@de stijl:
I believe I just did.
But, it was on Jeff Wright’s Odyssey The Podcast, Episode 2: Cyclops.
Minimizing spoilers, Odysseus tells the Cyclops his name is “Nobody.” Later the Cyclops has occasion to say “Nobody’s trying to kill me,” which fails to get him help from the other local cyclopes.
@Jax:
I picture a wild-ass dude bombing around a pasture on a tractor cackling gleefully with Superchunk cranked to 11 while repeatedly pulverizing the winter cow poop into submission.
It’s glorious!
@Teve:
Never get out of the boat. Absolutely God damned right.
This helpful fella named Chef from Apocalypse Now; he will explain the process to you.
https://youtu.be/YbFvAaO9j8M
Today I Learned Frederick Forrest was married to Marilu Henner. Forrest is the guy in The Conversation. He and Cindy Williams literally have the conversation that is eventually revealed. I always liked that line reading of “He’d kill us if he had the chance.” It’s so matter-of-fact. Also, Gene Hackman was a stud.
John Cazale may be the most interesting guy who ever lived last century not named Einstein or Edison.
Raise your hand if you knew Cazale was Meryl Streep’s boyfriend.
James, can I suggest upping the open forum frequency to every other day? For may of us, our browsers are going to remember the link and so the Open Forum button takes us to an old one. And with you guys posting much more frequently (a very good thing) the current Open Forum scrolls out of sight very quickly.
I was living in Tampa when the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe happened, and tourism was obliterated because nobody wanted to eat seafood caught on the gulf. Some safety rules were put in place after that, to try to prevent a recurrence of the same kind of event. New York Times is reporting that the Trump administration is right now canceling those new rules.
628 days until the Party of Stupid is out of the Executive Branch.
@MarkedMan: I didn’t do any counting of threads, but it certainly seemed like when Open Threads were introduced, the front pagers started posting really frequently.
@MarkedMan:
I don’t see why not.
@Teve:
I’m on sabattical this semester and started posting more, although I need to pare back to finish up some projects. Mostly, Doug is back to something like full bore and it’s been a long time since both of us were heavily posting at the same time.
I do think the Open Forum posts have accomplished their goals of giving commenters a place to talk about things that front pagers aren’t posting on and minimizing off-topic discussions on the posts we do make.
@de stijl: Haha….”If the turds ain’t flyin, you ain’t tryin!”
Girl, actually. I know, I’m an oddity even around here. You have no idea how many times people tell me there is no way I can take over this ranch from my Dad because I’m a woman. My brother decided to do the Lord’s work and became a preacher (yes, I’m being snarky), and there is nobody else. So here I am, ranching my rebel heart out.
Jax is a nickname from all the way back in high school. My parents lovingly saddled me with a first name nobody can pronounce the first time, so everybody (even my Mom) has always called me Jax. 😉
The way I always keep my house cool during the hot of summer I two ways. First off I get the hot air out of my attic. I have a fan upstairs that blows out the hot air. Next, I open my windows about an hour before sunrise. This lets the cool night air in. After a time or until it starts warming up for the day I shut the windows and trap the cool air in my house. The house can actually stay cool at least until noon or mid afternoon. This saves on an air conditioner bill at least somewhat.