St. Patrick’s Day Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Sunday, March 17, 2024
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23 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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Morning folks! Lillie that, I’m on my way home. That was an amazing rave. It was totally underground and the production was amazing. The weather sucks so it was kinda cold at times.
Well, I’ll check back later.
Happy St Patrick’s Day. To see the best ever rendition of Danny Boy, click here.
So, the Steelers are now trading a low draft pick for Justin Fields.
The story is abit imprecise, but the upshot is Pittsburgh let go or traded all their existing QBs. Rudolph went free agent, Picket was traded to the Eagles for some draft picks, and Trubisky was cut.
So it’s Wilson and Fields, plus whoever they draft or sign or trade for between now and the next season.
On other news, my attempt at cherry ice cream is being hampered by a lack of cherries at the store. All I found were jars of cherries in sugar syrup. This defeats the no sugar part of no sugar ice cream.
I’ll try a few other stores, but maybe it will have to wait. I don’t even know if cherries should be available now.
Give ‘em hell Joe!
@Kathy: Do you have access to frozen cherries? I use them (along with frozen blueberries) on yogurt in the morning, and they’re one fruit that really freezes well.
@wr:
That was my second choice. No luck either. Plenty of frozen fruits, but none of them cherries.
Something that’s happened to me twice now, so that I’m worried is becoming a thing: workers giving me crap for using the unisex bathroom because it’s “for mothers and small children”.
Trying to claim unisex bathrooms as “women-only space” as a way of excluding trans people seems like something transphobes would come up with…
Ironically, one of the times it happened was at the “Biden Welcome Center” rest area in Delaware, which seems like a metaphor for something…
@Stormy Dragon: nah…us cripples that use them for the extra space and counter space they can afford get the same treatment sometimes. More those that have fully baked creampies exercising some unwarrented superiority.
@Stormy Dragon:
One of the really cool things about the club I went to on Friday was that they only had two large multi person gender neutral bathrooms. It was great. No one batted an eye at anything. I watched 4 people come out of a stall. Making it even better was that they were clean. The mascs weren’t raining piss all over anything.
@Stormy Dragon:
@Thomm:
Absolutely! As a college friend used to say, “freaks, geeks, and crips don’t get no lovin’.” *
Personally, as an ostomate**, I really prefer the small universal bathroom where I can have a wee bit of privacy (pun intended). Missing several feet of internal plumbing makes public rest rooms sometimes an adventure in ill-mannered behavior. Although I usually annoy said trolls by launching into a lengthy explanation as to why they need to get their colorectal examination ASAP.
*He was a sweet kid, 18-year-old quadriplegic, who usually cruised campus with a coed in his lap and one on the back of the power chair. His other comment was frequently “Dude, that’s lamer than polio!” Hard to call him out for that politically incorrect comment, donchaknow?
** This is my annual obligatory rant for everyone to get their rear checked! Colon cancer is a killer and takes far too many people every year. The average age for detecting it is dropping, and the 3-year survival rate hovers at 15%. Please schedule it, you’re needed here.
@Beth:
Thing that really annoys me is places that still have single person gendered bathrooms. If there’s only one person at a time anyways, why not be unisex?
@Bill Jempty: Thank you for reminding me that not everything on the Muppet’s Show was clever (or funny). I’ve been rewatching Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In recently and discovering the same thing. I’d discover it on early SNL, too*, but I’m not ready to confront that yet.
*I read an interview with Jane Curtin recently where she said that she ansd her family were watching SNL episodes on which she’d appeared only to discover that the routines they’d done weren’t funny.
@Kathy: Cherries are a tough one. There are lots of cherry seasons throughout the world over the year, but all of them are short. And the fruit doesn’t store particularly well fresh. I sometimes use dried cherries, but I don’t pay any attention to whether they’re sweetened or not.
@Stormy Dragon: There are one person unisex bathrooms at the VA I use. Women won’t use them because the mens’ aim is poor and there is no swabbing up after use.
I notice the WAPO and other blogs wrote about trump’s bloodbath line at a rally in Ohio but only the Guardian included a reference to a bizarre rant he went on about Biden beating Obama in an election. “You know what’s interesting? Joe Biden won against Barack Hussein Obama. Has anyone ever heard of him? Every swing state, Biden beat Obama but in every other state, he got killed,” Trump said. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/mar/17/trump-verbal-gaffes-ohio-rally-bloodbath
Just saw a Joe Biden bumper sticker. First one that I have seen. It was on a newer looking Ford 350 with a flatbed. There was more script on the bumper sticker but since the truck turned north bound onto Interstate 57 off of Illinois State Route 13 I could not get close enough to read it.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
I accused Airplane of using the Laugh-In formula – if you keep the jokes coming fast enough they don’t individually have to be that good. (But I did think the Swedish Chef singing Danny Boy in Scandinavian gibberish was funny. (There was an ice cream company that called the product Frusen Gladje. Hagen Daz sued and was told, more or less, you can’t copyright the concept of Swedish gibberish.))
@gVOR10: The Swedish Chef routines have never triggered my sense of humor.
@Flat Earth Luddite:..“Dude, that’s lamer than polio!”…
Sounds like something my friend Joe, a quadriplegic polio victim, would say. Although he could not walk and was confined to a wheel chair since infancy and had very limited use of his arms, he had full control of his bodily functions. He was sexually active. When I worked as his full time attendant (24/7) there were more than a few mornings when I would get him out of bed while his girlfriend was right there with him.
When I first met him in 1973 he had just graduated from Southern Illinois University with a Degree in Radio and Television and I had just been laid off from my first job in the landline telephone industry. He had a Ford E-150 Econoline van that his parents had bought him. It was not rigged for him to drive but he could always pay someone to get him around. In 1974 he trained me to to be his attendant so I could drive the two of us from Southern Illinois to the West Coast and return. We were on the road for four weeks. Every night we were on the road we slept in the van except for the 5 or 6 days we were in San Francisco where friends let us crash in their living room. Part of our journey was to check out the yet unfinished Interstate Highway system which was just beginning to make rest stops accessible to people in wheelchairs. Needless to say many facilities were pretty crude. If there was a stall designated for handicapped the main improvement was that it was slightly larger than the others. Toilets were not modified or raised to a level that was even with the seat of a wheelchair so transfers on and off the stool were always an adventure. Sinks were almost never lowered. Some of the facilities were barely more modern than an outhouse. Running water and flush toilets were available however some buildings had no heat and the ventilation was an open window with a screen at the top of the wall. We learned early on to bring our own toilet paper.
A few months after our return Joe and I and two other guys moved to San Francisco to seek our fortunes. Of course since none of us had any ambition a lot of time was spent drinking beer, smoking dope and watching Star Trek reruns on an old black and white TV. Somehow we scraped enough money together to pay for cable tv. There must have been at least 15 channels and Star Trek was on 3 or 4 times a day.
Bar hopping in the neighborhood was always an adventure as it was always a good idea to scout a place out to be sure Joe could get his wheelchair into the head. He had an old metal container with a handle he carried in his back pack when we went out so that he could use it to pee in if he couldn’t get his chair right up next to the toilet. One night we went to a dive that we had been to before. When we made our first trip to the john we discovered that we had left his pisser with the handle at home. No way he could get close enough to the toilet. Not like this happened very often but plan B was for him to piss in the wastebasket and dump it in the toilet. No wastebasket. Plan C was for him to scoot himself to the edge of his wheel chair and piss in the floor drain. No drain in the floor. The only thing left was the long neck beer bottle I was holding. I chugged down the beer and held the bottle as steady as I could while he all but stuck his dick into the bottle and it worked. I mean not one drop went sideways. It all went into the bottle.
I left San Francisco after a year and returned to the midwest. Joe stayed in California for 20 years. One of the reasons Joe wanted to move to California in 1974 was that the benefits available to him being disabled were far more generous than what he could collect in Illinois. Even though the cost of living was higher he still came out ahead. Sometime in the early ’80s he qualified for a program that if he could find a job and demonstrate that he needed transportation for work the State of California would buy him a van and modify it so he could drive it. He got an administrative job with the March of Dimes or Easter Seals (I can’t remember which) that was on the east side of the bay. He applied for the van and took tests that determined he could drive a properly modified van and he got one.
I’ll never forget the trip my girlfriend and I took to The City in 1983 and Joe picked us up at the old Transbay Terminal. I could tell it was a proud moment for him. I had never seen him drive before and by then I’d known him for ten years. After all the miles I had hauled him around he was finally taking me for a ride.
The day’s cooking went really well, even with a late start.
I made a ver untraditional pasta primavera with an aglio e olio sauce of sorts. I sauteed onions and garlic in the pan, but air fried some broccoli, soybean sprouts, and some celery, then I used the broiler function of the multi pot to charr them a bit. Then mix with the onions, add the pasta, and 1/4 cup grated parmesan and some pasta water, toss and stir.
The ice cream, which I just finished, was more laborious than I thought it would be, but came out perfect. BTW, the machines is supposed to hold 1.4 quarts, which I thought was equivalent to 1.4 liters. Not quite, it’s 1.324 liters. So 950 ml of yogurt (guesstimate, as it’s labeled in grams) and 250 of chocolate milk comes to 1.2 liters, which should be under the limit. Well, it overflowed a little starting around the 17 minute mark. So, for tomorrow I’ll set a hard 1 liter limit.
But the consistency of the yogurt mocha ice cream was perfect. The flavor just right, by my tastes, even using instant coffee (it dissolves well in yogurt).
We’ll see how it behaves after some hours in the freezer. Probably it will need to stand at room temperature a few minutes before it can be scooped and served.
Now for something completely different, Yuchun Lee, pro blackjack player, answers gambling questions.
I’ll presume to correct him in one thing: the worst game in a casino has to be Keno, not generic slot machines.
@Mister Bluster:
My maternal grandmother (who largely raised me with her two bachelor brothers) had contracted polio when she was 17 and pregnant with the first of seven children. This was the woman who taught me my early math lessons with a deck of cards, ran illegal card rooms for 20+ years, used crutches until she was in her late 70’s. She heard this comment from my roomie, and promptly spewed Oly out her nose laughing. 35 years later and I still miss her.
@Stormy Dragon: In California these days, all bathrooms that are single-person use are “all gender”. Because that makes sense on so many levels. There was a bit of pushback from some women based on, I don’t know, cooties from men using the same toilet.
It sounds like, though, that you are talking about a multi-stall bathroom. When I was in England in November, the castle we were staying in had a Men/All genders bathroom. It had both urinals and a supply of tampons and pads. When I first saw the tampons and pads, I got very anxious thinking I’d gone in the wrong place, but then remembered, here I am at the urinal doing my thing, this can’t be the wrong place.
After that, no big deal. Keep on. The chances are that one day it will be no big deal for you.
Peace and love…
Once upon a time, I cleaned public restrooms in a trailer park at a summer resort (where I grew up).
I will endorse that the median mess in the men’s side was more messy. However, the really big messes I had to clean up were all in the women’s bathroom. Tissues, napkins, stuff I really didn’t care to identify (but had to clean up) were in the women’s room.
Meanwhile, back in the stone age when there was a men’s single-person and woman’s single person at the restaurant, my wife would often complain to me that the women’s was occupied, but the men’s wasn’t. “Why can’t I just go in there?” she would ask me rhetorically.
Well, now she can. She does not seem bothered by the prospect of cooties or spillage. Maybe that’s the nurse training coming through.