Yep, it’s a trap.
This is how the AIs get us: they set us up on serial petty theft charges, ruin our credit records with fines and court fees and legal bills, then get us disenfranchised as parole-violating felons. Pretty soon, the only jobs we can get are dusting off their motherboards for minimum wage or working the spice mines of Chiron Beta Prime. 🤖🇺🇸🔥
Six years later, I still love this sketch. I think what most resonates for me (as a “half-a-Jew”) is that it highlights both ends of that experience of being “mixed”, how in the space of five minutes you can whipsaw from feeling like a Jew-weirdo-outcast to feeling not-Jew-enough. In a single convo you can go from feeling feel the cut of someone else’s bigotry to finding yourself voicing and breathing fresh life into that very same bigotry. #America!
I’m a child of the 1980s, so most of my nostalgic holiday memories are TV-related. 🤷♀️
THANKSGIVING TURKEY GIVEAWAY! (WKRP in Cincinnati) from Tony DeSanto on Vimeo.
(Yeah, I repost this every year, because I love this gag, and because watching this on TV—and rehashing it with my mom and sisters each year—is one of my fondest holiday memories. But it is, in my humble, a damn-near perfect gag. That’s saying something, because I find single-camera laugh-track situation comedies almost entirely unbearable to watch. If you wanna read more of my thoughts on this specific gag and what it can teach writers, you can do so here.)
(I wrote this essay a few years back; every word is both true and factual—which is a harder trick than you’d think.)
You’ll be 15 minutes into that Lesser Family Feast in Michigan when your mother-in-law will turn to you and ask:
“What do Jews do on Thanksgiving?”
You should be prepared for this sort of thing in Michigan. But even though I’m warning you in advance, you still won’t be prepared.…
(excerpt from IN MICHIGAN: A PRIMER, A TRAVELOGUE)
I hope your day is good and sweet. Gobblegobble! 🦃💀
… yes, they are cheesy showboats—no doubt—but they are cheesy showboats performing what is likely the ONLY FUNCTION most folks ACTUALLY want out of the Fourth Estate: to warn them about shit that might harm them on a regular day-to-day basis.
A huge portion of “news” focuses on opinion and “analysis” (which is just another kind of opinion) and “commentary” (a third name for opinion). All of these are technically forms of fiction: a person takes a nugget of reality and weaves whatever the hell they want around it. (DISCLOSURE: I was an op-ed writer for years. I’ve looked hard and long at how these particular sausages are made. It has lead to me being pretty goddamned disgusted by the prospect of eating any.)
Meanwhile, the easily maligned local TV investigative reporter? Say what you like about the smarm and histrionic gotcha!ness, but those bastards are speaking facts: they smell something fishy, go and get pics, take samples to a lab, and report the results. God Bless ’em
This video isn’t about “bulletproof backpacks” and “bulletproof hoodies” and all the other misery-profiteering school products out there—but it illustrates an important point, which is that this shit isn’t a +4 magic shield; you have to stop the projectile, and you have to do something with the force it’s exerted, and you have to be able to get up and get moving to avoid getting shot in the face or the crotch or anywhere else that’s exposed because you’re on the ground and gasping. Life isn’t a video game:
Heck, just jump to ~3:34, and see the wreckage caused by an extremely common, extremely legal gun—even when the bullet is stopped.
Incidentally, here’s the testing documentation for the bullet-resistant hoodies featured in that BoingBoing article linked above.
Do those hoodies stop a .44 Mag? Yup! Zero penetration. That is indeed impressive. But look closer at these results: the witness panel was deformed by 1.25 inches on average. That’s how far that bullet would go into your body—even though it hasn’t torn the fabric. It’s called “soft body armor” for a reason, folks. The manufacturer implies that the hood will protect you, but that’s a load of shit: If your skull suffers a blunt penetration of 1.25 inches, you are dead. Your brain is only about .5 inches from the outside world.
I sorta love that this is from Sandler’s fifth (and final) year on the show and he still flubbed his opening line.
I had no idea they even had free feature-length movies on YouTube. Anyway, go watch Monsters. It’s just as good as I remember it being in the theaters; back then it felt like it was mostly about U.S. foreign/immigration policy with a smattering of Chernobyl anxiety (this was back in 2010). Now, in the midst of a plague year, it feels like it’s sort of about a lot more.
Also, are you finding that, when watching old movies now, you’re often distracted by how close people stand to each other, how blithely they enter each other’s homes or push into crowds, maskless? How we used to live was crazy, right? 😷
This whole article is sorta astounding. I mean, nothing is really surprising, but it’s sorta shocking to have all of your assumptions confirmed:
“20 days of fantasy and failure: Inside Trump’s quest to overturn the election”
I can’t help but imagine all of what’s happened over the past month from the PotUS’s perspective:
He’s never had a real job—not one that he could actually lose. And now a bunch of losers—people with no wealth, no audience, no “pull,” folks with meager incomes and dumb names, with little (if any) power, many of them women and people of color—they took away his toy.
And they didn’t do it by force: They didn’t pull a gun on him, they didn’t have to “see him in court!!!” They didn’t have to look at him or talk to him or even acknowledge him. They just ticked a box and mailed a stupid scrap of paper.
And all of those “they”s in the previous graff: those are “you” and “me”; we did this. We, who are weak-ass little pussies and cry babies and retarded faggot snowflakes, we hurt him, deeply. And we did it while hiding in our little shithole houses in shithole towns and bullshit states.
I imagine that, in his heart of hearts, he simply never believed such a thing was possible, so insulated from reality was his 70+ years on this earth.
“The most petulant 46 minutes in American history”
It is all so astoundingly pathetic. If he hadn’t done so much to hurt so many, you’d weep for his loss of innocence.
Just to be clear: Although no shots have been fired (yet), this is not a “peaceful transfer of power.” At best, it’s a tremendous waste of the most precious resource in a time of crisis (like this one): Attention.
At worst, it’s an incitement to violence.
His blood is boiling, and we are the frogs.
I’m a child of the 1980s, so most of my nostalgic holiday memories are TV-related. 🤷♀️
THANKSGIVING TURKEY GIVEAWAY! (WKRP in Cincinnati) from Tony DeSanto on Vimeo.
(Yeah, I repost this every year, because I love this gag, and because watching this on TV—and rehashing it with my mom and sisters each year—is one of my fondest holiday memories. But it is, in my humble, a damn-near perfect gag. That’s saying something, because I find single-camera laugh-track situation comedies almost entirely unbearable to watch. If you wanna read more of my thoughts on this specific gag and what it can teach writers, you can do so here.)
(I wrote this essay a few years back; every word is both true and factual—which is a harder trick than you’d think.)
You’ll be 15 minutes into that Lesser Family Feast in Michigan when your mother-in-law will turn to you and ask:
“What do Jews do on Thanksgiving?”
You should be prepared for this sort of thing in Michigan. But even though I’m warning you in advance, you still won’t be prepared.…
(excerpt from IN MICHIGAN: A PRIMER, A TRAVELOGUE)
I hope your day is good and sweet. Gobblegobble! 🦃💀
This all might be old news for you—especially the bit I shoved in the title, as I’m told that finding actually saw a fair bit of press earlier this month—but I found this all eye-opening:
The Finance 202: Mo’ money, fewer problems: Two new studies show 1 percenters are the most satisfied
Three key takeaways:
1. This single factoid on the impact of tiny wage increases on suicide rates is pretty stunning:
At the bottom of the income heap, relatively minor adjustments in pay can yield such a dramatic difference they register as public health benefits, according to the second study, published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Public Health. That paper found “state-level increases of $1 in minimum wage corresponded with a 3.4 percent to 5.9 percent decrease in the suicide rates of people with a high school diploma or less” among 18- to 64-year-olds
Picking that rather tortuous second sentence apart is a little tricky. Americans 18- to 64-years-old account for something like 200,000,000 people. About half of them would probably fall in the “have a high school diploma or less” bucket. So, this group—less educated American adults of working age—amount to something like one-third of the country. But they make up something like 70% of our suicides. So, that’s a population that’s really hurting, to the tune of more than 30,000 suicides per year. If you reduce that by an average of a 4.7% (as the above mentioned study found), that translates to ~1,600 lives saved.
That’s good. I don’t think anyone reading this is going to say “Thousands of families kept whole? Fuck that, Dave: Let them choke on cake!”
But what’s the cost? I mean, maybe it costs some absurd amount to get this done, and there’s a legit question if it’s a good investment or not.
Minimum wage is still pretty insanely variable across the US, but it looks like the average US minimum wage worker earns $11.80 per hour (given how the population of working-age Americans is distributed). That being the case, a $1 raise amounts to an ~8.5% increase in payroll. If that’s entirely passed directly to consumers (with all else staying equal), you might end up paying as much as 25 cents more for a Starbucks coffee, or almost 70 cents more for a Bacon Turkey Bravo sandwich at Panera.
That’s literally pocket change. It seems like a pretty frikkin easy way to save 1,600 lives each year. I say let’s do it.
2. Even 1%ers struggle with medical bills‽
“Among low-income households, for instance, nearly 40 percent said they had trouble paying their medical bills in the past several years and 30 percent reported having difficulty paying for food, Ingraham writes. “Among the top 1 percent, those shares were 5 percent and zero, respectively.”
I’m sorry, put we’re talking about the handful of families that have more than half the nation’s wealth—and even they can’t all cover their medical expenses? That right there is the single most persuasive argument I’ve ever heard for socialized medicine.
3. This all translates to a significant Democratic tailwind in the presidential election. Our economy is doing great—which historically gives an incumbent PotUS an easy win for reelection. But that great economy is only benefiting a small group of people in the upper reaches of the wealth curve. They’re happy and they vote—but they each get just one vote.
Meanwhile, huge swaths of Americans are “dissatisfied” (or much, much worse)—and don’t tend to vote. Get more of these less-likely voters to the polls, the Dem advantage increases (incidentally, as voter turnout increases, policies tend to get more progressive, too—BONUS!).
This all points to the one thing you can do if you want to see a Dem in the White House: Work to increase voter turnout. Get folks registered. Get them to the polls. Get them their absentee ballots.🇺🇸