By David Futrelle
I‘m having a lovely unplanned migraine vacation today (not a vacation from migraines but a staycation with a migraine) so instead of a regular post. which would require a working brain on my part, here are some creepified pics of the younger generation of Trumps (plus Jared).
Ok, a few more that might be even creepier.
@Amy
Much sympathy, that’s a shitty situation
@Jesalin
Hurray!
Hell yeah Jesalin! I’m really happy for you!
CN: Discussion of self harm
So, me:
Something awful happened last week. I went in a store to look at clothes, saw myself in four or five full-body mirrors by accident, started melting down, spent $70 I couldn’t afford to spend on food I didn’t need but that would make me feel better, felt much worse, realized shit was going badly and where I’d be headed, so I drove slowly home, trimmed my fingernails, stopped my mom from hugging me, and ate finger foods for two days. And it worked! I did not hurt myself. I have to put special effort into what most people consider baseline norms.
On the plus side, I emulated Heather Chandler’s attitude at rehearsal later that week, so even the resident neo-nazi couldn’t get me down. I was also frankly brilliant at getting the new props and blocking we’re apparently doing down. Not even when my habit of just not eating almost made me faint a few times and I had to stop at a fucking 7/11 for literally anything at 2 AM. I do qualify not eating as self-harm now, so…maybe I can do better. Maybe.
And this week, my mom told me that if I went to the dentist and did whatever needed to be done for my teeth, she’d help with the laser hair removal I want on my face. I tried to turn her down cause I should be doing the dentist anyway, but she insisted. And then she somehow got me an appointment literally tomorrow and I am freaking out now.
Also, I now have a tumblr and will be getting a diary so I can spew my irrelevant thoughts into the void in more places.
Oh, and I have a cat! Princess Kathryn, who hid in the wall for a week and now won’t get out of my lap. I love her, she keeps me moving. And claws my hands, face, and legs.
So, sorry I’ve been gone a few days. It’s been rough and I’m doing the best I can.
@Oogly, PeeVee, epitome, Dali, IgnoreSandra
Thanks!! ~^.^~
@PeeVee
In my case it’s a combination of my middle and last names. I use it online partly because it’s an awesome name that sounds awesome, and partly because my first name verges on unique so I very rarely ever use it online.
@IgnoreSandra
(Would you mind if I drop the Ignore part in the future?)
*hugs*
Aww, sounds a bit like my Aurora. ^^
@PoM,
That…could be what they were talking about in the article I linked to. Lexington has much better parking and such to handle crowds in the thousands of people range than Columbus can hope to handle. On the other hand, those guys did state they wanted to open branch offices in every town in the Midwest, so possibly they could be planning something in both areas.
D:
OT distraction for those who need it: what should you do if a bat decides to show up in your
belfryobservatory one day?https://www.cloudynights.com/topic/591773-a-bat-in-the-obs/
ETA: does anyone have a pattern for that toy poodle moth? I like that thing. (Plus the real moth too, but I doubt I have the resources needed to keep one of those guys alive as a pet, so toy it must be.)
@Jesalin
*hugs* indeed.
Sure! You can shorten it to Sandra if you like.
I’m keeping the “Ignore” part though because I like the mythological reference.
Aurora is such a great cat name <3 I know I have a picture of Princess Kathryn somewhere…
https://imgur.com/a/L0Rxz
Ah, yes. This is when I was trying to go to sleep after rehearsal last Friday. I’d been awake for 16 hours and eaten basically nothing all day, and she just wouldn’t get off me. She’s a sweetie.
Okay. I have no idea what the hell I’m doing with images. I’ll figure it out someday, but that ain’t today.
Sandra’s lovely kitty
To get the image to embed, you should open it in a new tab. That should end in .jpg
@PaganReader
Ah. I’ll make sure to open in new tab in the future. Thanks a bunch.
@IgnoreSandra
I’m glad to hear that you’re engaging in some awesome self-care. Keep it up!
Your kitty is gorgeous.
Anyone mentioned this yet? First I’d heard that the BBC was working on Good Omens was this tweet:
https://twitter.com/BBCTwo/status/909705467450023937
David Tennant as Crowley! Is that great or what?
That’s not how I expected Crowley’s hair to look.
All the congrats, Jesalin. Take your time recovering. I hope it goes smoothly.
Just speaking about sucky health stuff, in addition to colds slowing me down, I’ve had a liver condition called primary sclerosing cholangitis (PSC) since I was 7. PSC narrows the bile ducts to the intestines and can cause a whole host of complications, chiefly liver cancer. The fact that I’m still here with the same liver a quarter century later is something I’m grateful for every day, because apparently my parents were told I would probably need a transplant before 18. For me, it’s stayed in the small bile ducts and has left the larger ones alone. However, it has progressed to cirrhosis in recent years and the impact on my energy level has been palpable. So far, it’s the only symptom, but it’s a doozy of a symptom that leaves me feeling sapped of energy the day after strenuous activity.
I was never a high-energy guy to begin with, but I miss being able to go out and do stuff spontaneously without feeling exhausted afterwards.
The liver’s an amazing organ, but when it’s faulty, it really messes you up. Killed Walter Payton after all. The accompanying IBD sucks too.
Certainly gives you an appreciation for how medical science has advanced in the field though. When I was a kid, the fear was my liver wouldn’t be big enough before I needed a transplant. Transplantation is now one of the most viable solutions for end-stage liver disease. So yay science!
Yay science indeed.
Without it, I might be also dead at 34, from the appendicitis I got earlier this year. The diagnosis/surgery was routine by modern standards, although apparently more difficult than average appendicitis.
Also, yay public healthcare.
This has got nothing to do with anything, but I’ve recently been baffled by a local vegetarian restaurant’s perfectly brand-destroying social media strategy.
Background: It’s a fairly pricey vegetarian restaurant that works off 5-course and 7-course menu suggestions. We’ve never actually eaten there, but we almost went for our anniversary this year.
So, a week or two back this restaurant made a FB post about one of their chefs. It had some info about the chef’s current and upcoming projects. It also featured a large photo of the chef in question, proudly holding up a slaughtered pig.
Obviously, they were flooded with comments from disgusted vegetarians. The response from the restaurant was, basically, that while this restaurant is all vegetarian, the chef is not. He cooks using meat elsewhere.
Okay, fine, but maybe don’t plaster pictures of dead animals on the FB page of a vegetarian restaurant? Why would their customer base want to see that?
After a few days of confusion and silence on their part, the restaurant then decided to follow up with an exceedingly snarky FB post, suggesting that their customers might want to apologize by booking a table for a 7-course dinner. Customers were also encouraged to tip generously.
Now the restaurant is drowning in 1-star reviews and negative comments on all social media platforms.
WHY would they do this to themselves? I can’t imagine this place will still be in business by next year.
@Arctic Ape
Ditto on the public healthcare. If there’s one thing that having two chronic illnesses since childhood gives you an appreciation for, it’s the value of testing for health monitoring. This is what baffles me about the health care debate in the US: the way that diseases are spoken of, it’s like they’re acts of God that you just wake up one day and have because you’re too old/fat/drug-addled/poor/unlucky. I realize that heart disease and cancer are two of the biggest killers around the world so that tends to be the lens through which health care gets discussed, but even those can be caught and treated early with regular testing. Cuz the docs are the first to tell me: after having Crohn’s and PSC for a quarter-century, my risk of colon and liver cancer are much higher than the rest of the population, so I get regular scopes and MRIs to test for that and catch it before it progresses to something that costs a lot more to treat. Costs me nothing out of pocket and I have peace of mind that my illnesses haven’t progressed too far.
Other countries have figured this out long ago. America seems intent on subjecting its citizens to worse health outcomes and higher costs… for what? Greed? Arrogant pride? I don’t understand the societal roadblock that exists… in any other society, I would expect universal coverage to meet with equally universal support. It’s like the American People (TM) would rather get sick and die than to have to share the money they won’t be taking with them to the afterlife with those they deem unworthy of it. Bizarre.
IP, that’s…exceedingly stupid. This reminds me of the Imagine Vegan Cafe in Memphis debacle.
Don’t double down on the stupid, folks…it rarely turns out well.
Just seen Trump’s UN speech. I wondered if he’d stuck to a script at first, then gone way off it as his rhetoric veered straight into inflammatory.
Trying not to panic about the possibility of nuclear war…
@Imaginary Petal
Ach, I’m vegan, and I’d be so ticked off at that, too. I’d wonder who is in charge of the social media account, if it’s the non-vegetarian chef in question himself, or another non-vegetarian, and if anyone vegetarian running the restaurant is even aware how the account is being handled – call them, maybe? My sister works in social media management, and from what I hear, some businesses just do not understand social media, and fail to choose someone who will stay appropriately on-brand to be in charge of managing their account. She says that you have to remember a companies’ social media presence might be basically one clueless intern. Even big companies can mess up this way, I was baffled and cross when Alpro included meat as part of a balanced diet on their twitter, but they at least apologised properly and quickly. Which I was glad about because I love their products and didn’t want to have to boycott.
As I’m sure you know, some of those who eat meat just have a huge problem with vegetarians/vegans, so I’d suspect the person at the restaurant who made the Facebook posts might be one of them – it sounds more like intentional passive aggression, not just like an accident they compounded by doubling down on. It isn’t even as though many people who do eat meat actually especially want to see slaughtered animals, it bothers a lot of people. Some, though…I’ve had some meat-eating people literally go off at me just because I casually, totally non-confrontationally, mentioned I was vegetarian, back when I was, in a context when it was relevant, such as ordering food or politely turning down something offered.
You also get the odd vegetarian who responds to all the attacks they get from that type of meat-eater by internalising it -internalising maybe isn’t quite the right word but it’s very similar- and who takes their side as a kind of self-defensive strategy. If they’ll be verbally abused for not wanting to see slaughtered animals, then they’ll go out of their way to avoid being seen as one of those ‘bad’ vegetarians who doesn’t want to see it. Etc. So even if a vegetarian staff member made the Facebook posts, I’d wonder if that chef has been throwing his weight around…
Off topic, but this article popped up on GamerGhazi and I felt like sharing:
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2017/09/19/please-education-is-not-a-horserace/
Been a fan of PZ taking a hammer to the usual band of jokers surrounding discussions of skepticism, and as usual he knocks it out of the park, breaking down another one of those “just so” attitudes people have toward education. But it’s particularly rich coming from a repeated plagiarist like Margaret Wente. Why she’s still writing columns for The Globe is beyond me. In a just world, she would have been fired years ago.
Seriously, where did this attitude that institutions aren’t supposed to aid their student’s learning come from? Shit, my grandfather was a geology prof at U of T and he was famously available to his undergrads if they needed a hand. He didn’t have to be; he could have had his TAs do that and focused on research, but he cared about his students just that much. If it takes a therapy dog, or some extra time after class, or a private room for the exam to feel comfortable enough to absorb the material, why the fuss?
It’s like these people think that post-secondary institutions have to be as cruel and uncaring as the workplace or else these students won’t be “prepared” (for what?). Says more about how those people see their occupations than anything.
Ugh, Wente… just… just go away already.
@Sandra
Yay for self care! Go you!
@Gussie Jives
Racism. White America flatly refuses to take any steps that might benefit brown people in any conceivable fashion, and is willing to accept massive hardships in this cause.
Yet another bad earthquake in Mexico
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/sep/19/mexico-city-earthquake-anniversary-1985
To all Mammothteers who are contacing their congresscritters about the latest stupid “health care” bill, thank you from the diabetic stroke survivor who doesn’t have the spoons to do it for herself.
While I agree that racism is a huge part of the problem, there’s also this mindset in the US that everybody should be able to take care of themselves, and if they don’t, they’re guilty of some moral failure.
I have a hypothesis about where this notion comes from. It was inspired by a quotation from Nicholas Cresswell, an Englishman who settled in the American colonies in the years leading up to the Revolution.
Well, why was that? Because, unlike in England, there was plenty of good farmland for the taking. A subsistence farmer could live decently, by the standards of preindustrial times. (Naturally, there are asterisks; the land was only free for the taking once the native people were driven out, and the farmland really wasn’t that good in Appalachia or the Piedmont, but I don’t think Cresswell went near the highlands or the frontiers of Indian country.)
The country had a “frontier line” of territory not settled by citizens until as late as 1890, so up to that time there was still land for farmers to settle on. Now, especially during that final phase of settlement from about 1860 to 1890, the settlement of the frontier was government-supported, what with the Army’s wars against the peoples of the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains. But under the Homestead Act, people only had to farm a piece of land for a few years before it became theirs. From their perspective, they earned that land with the sweat of their brow. I think that history bred the rugged-individualist mentality that plagues the United States to this day, even as our expectations for a decent life are a lot higher than they were for 19th-century subsistence farmers.
Rural farmers also banded together at times to fight for benefits for themselves, most notably with the Grange, but I think the notion that people are usually able to support themselves had its start in the early days of settlement.
That doesn’t explain why Canada isn’t nearly as badly afflicted, though. My guess would be that the individualist myth has always interacted poisonously with America’s history of racism, as Dalilama says, and since the Reagan era it’s been cultivated, weaponized, and spread by the resurgent political right. Canada’s closer ties to Britain and France may also make a difference. Americans are remarkably uninterested in copying successful ideas from other countries; it’s like we’re trying to make all our policy decisions in a vacuum.
Semi OT:
Stumbled across this on Yahoo News! a bit ago. Not sure what to think about this:
https://www.yahoo.com/sports/hate-speech-isnt-crime-small-town-football-team-faces-question-012344100.html
Basically some members of a small-town football team was caught burning a cross and dressing in white hoods. However, since they weren’t aiming it at any specific minority (aka they seemed to be doing it “for the lulz”), there’s now a question of whether it should be seen as a crime or not.
Is it too much for some of these idiots to grow a brain, let alone use it once in a blue moon? >.<
That’s the good ol’ Protestant work ethic dialed up to 11. Also, don’t discount the psychological connection in Americans’ collective minds between “the poors” and “the blacks.” Whenever you see something that references poverty, just sub in “black people.” Even though the majority of people who are in poverty are white, poverty is seen as a black problem in the US, and black people are stereotyped as having bad work habits therefore: poor (see again: Protestant work ethic). This stereotype goes all the way back to slavery – enslaved black people were seen as hard working and honest because they were enslaved, while free black people were lazy and criminally inclined. Read some Southern anti-abolitionist fiction sometime and you’ll see it in plain English. That stereotype has never gone away.
@Vicki
Thanks for reminding me. Was out all day. Left some messages 🙂
@D
Literally, exactly, verbatim what @PoM said
@Redsilkphoenix
I was unaware you had to be particular to be hateful. Pretty sure bigots don’t hafta specify the object of their prejudice to be bigots
@D, regarding Canada:
The usual joke is that the difference between Canada and the U.S.A. is that the U.S.A. was born in a bloody revolution about being told what to do, and Canada was born as a political compromise that didn’t make anybody happy, and both countries have kept on that way ever since.
There’s a certain amount of sheer nationalism/jingoism involved as well. Canada, by virtue of being right next to the U.S., lives by being compared to the U.S.; that makes it a lot harder for the ‘we’re the best!’ attitudes to take hold because we always seem to be in second place.
I still remember a letter to the editor I saw in the Toronto Star (I believe this was back in 1992 while Bill Clinton was using health care as one of his campaign planks) where somebody who had spent half of his life in each country, and figured that gave him some justification for commenting on the differences, said ‘Americans may not believe they’re perfect, but they believe they’re closer to it than anybody else, and thus any problems they haven’t solved must be insoluble. And they will gladly shoot any messenger who tries to tell them otherwise.’
We also have to remember that Canada’s national health care plan has only existed since 1966. There are lots of people still alive who predate that. While it’s true that pretty much every industrialized nation has such a thing now, some of them got into the game a lot later than others.
(Germany’s Otto von Bismarck created a national health insurance law back in 1883. And some of the Italian city-states apparently set such systems up back during the Bubonic plague centuries earlier.)