One of the things I hate about Groundhog Day is how thirsty it shows my state. It's embarrassing.
Ohio looked at all that publicity Phil and PA. get and decided we had to have the exact same thing, which is how we approach almost everything.
So, we have Buckeye Chuck, our own groundhog, who makes his own prediction about winter. Which all the state and local media have to cover but the national media doesn't give two fucks about.
Out here in the parched southwest, we use a rattlesnake and a desert tortoise. They are as bad at weather prognostication as any rodent of unusual size.
Hello to anyone who remembers me. I'm not a groundhog, but I am back from almost 2 months of hibernation due to a dead computer, illness, weather, and life happening. Miss all the Wonkers, and my updates from our lovely editrix. Hope to catch up on news, after my long unwelcome winter's nap.
If you're on a computer, go to the top right corner of your "Activity" page and click on your avatar or the three lines next to it, then scroll down to "Settings" and it gives you the option to edit your name. If you're on a phone, I'd like to know how you do that, because my phone gets hot and closes the site and won't let me interact at all.
>> Well, what if there is no tomorrow? There wasn't one today! <<
This is such a fantastic line. I. just rewatched that movie last weekend and am so glad I did. Thank you also for giving us the heads up about SNMM. I have watched a little and it seems fun. I shall watch more later.
I love, love, love it. But then again, I'd probably love watching Murray reading names from a phone book.
"The Razor's Edge" is another one that wasn't really popular but was awesome. A rare instance of the movie being better than the book, IMO. Murray once said that you do the "Ghostbusters" so you can get a chance to do obscure things like "Razor's Edge" that are a labor of love.
I have again failed when it comes to food consumption. I was greeted today by a charming, young woman and her mother who caused me to purchase 3 packages of Girl Scout Lemonades cookies.
It is minus fucking fifty degrees below zero here, or in scientifical terms, -50FC.
I will not be going outside to get drunk and pass out in the bushes while I wait for the marmots to come out of hibernation and tell us that we're going to have another six months of winter.
Is it too much to hope that the movie tonight will be Groundhog Day?
I have been reading some stuff about the recent airstrikes on Iraq and Syria. Apparently we struck sites associated with various Iran-backed militias, because these countries have militias running around that are only sorta-kinda controlled by the government. Iran is supplying them and funding them, and coordinating with them, but somewhat at arm's length, so that they can have plausible deniability in case one of them gets into trouble, as they have recently. Really what we're in is a proxy skirmish with Iran. Nobody on either side wants to push the big button and get into a 1-on-1 between the U.S. and Iran, at least not now.
OT, just want to vent - about old people, I guess.
Had lunch yesterday with my two oldest sisters. They're both over 80. One of them is a more reasonable person than the other, but she lives in a seniors' facility, plus she spends a lot of time online with her large group of friends, all old farts like herself. So she is subjected to nonstop nonsense from all sides.
Our city started a ban against single use plastics last year, plus other waste, so you can't get a plastic bag with purchases, you have to pay for paper bags, even at drive throughs, have to ask for napkins, no plastic straws, etc. You can imagine how well this has gone over with certain segments of the population.
And the conversation turned to that, despite my efforts to keep it well away. It went about as well as you'd expect, but I think the part that bugged me most was the "They". "They" want us to reduce our use of plastics, but "they" pack the kind of lettuce I like in big plastic containers. "They" won't give us free plastic bags at the store, but "they" make us buy bags to take our garbage out in. "They" won't tell us, oh, the many many many things that "they" are apparently not telling us, most of which are not actually true. And so on and so on.
And when I said "Well, it's not all the same "they". If you keep buying those big plastic containers of mixed greens (interjection of "and they're far too big, too, how am I supposed to eat that much before it goes bad!") and you don't complain to the store, and you don't complain to the manufacturer, how are they supposed to know you'd rather have it in a different kind of packaging?" The answer to that was "Well, they're pretty stupid then, aren't they? After all, they're trying to force us to cut down on plastic".
Sigh. And they're both pretty good, really. They're not above average racist, mostly, and they do care about the environment, and they are basically decent people. But the world has changed a lot, and they never really understood it all that well. Everyone around them is telling them over and over "Be outraged!" so they are. And there is plenty to be outraged about, but that stuff never makes into their increasingly smaller worlds.
Yeah, let's not blame "old." Unless someone has dementia, that's kind of bullshit. Plenty of old people are quite aware and informed, and lots of young people are fucking dumbasses.
In this case, honestly, I think it's "old". Life just getting smaller and smaller and scarier and scarier. "Why can't I just keep doing things the way I've always done them!?! It must be someone's fault."
Both my sisters vote NDP, which is further to left than the US Democrats. It's mostly out of habit, I think, though, because of supporting unions. They'd probably be conservatives, I figure, if they were capable of rational political thought. Which they were, in the past, but no longer. Their worlds have gotten too small.
Thanks, Oy! I'm 81 and a foul-mouthed, politically savvy Wonk who is totally in favor of whatever we can do to save the Earth we have so foully bespoiled.
Perhaps it’s “old”, but perhaps it’s also the degree of difficulty involved in dropping old expectations in order to form new habits that fuels the complaints. It’s hard because it takes commitment, a semi reliable memory, a bit of planning ahead to make sure those reusable shopping bags are with us as we go out the door.
My community doesn’t demand reusable bags; shopping with them is a choice I made for myself, but I still have to double check myself to make sure I have them, and I swear when I don’t — often : ).
It's been a couple of years here now, with the reusable bags, and we have all for the most part gotten used to it. But for some reason, not getting their hamburger in a paper bag is just infuriating people. And it's brought up their resentment about having to bring bags to the grocery store, all over again.
It reminds me a lot of the mask mandates, and I think mostly comes from the same place - it's not that it's a difficult thing to do, but that for many people it hits their "you can't tell me what to do" nerve. That's where I think the complaints about "They" come from - resenting feeling being pushed around.
I see what you’re saying. I’m trying to imagine a large unbagged fast food order piled on my lap in a drive through. That might make me testy, too, until I figured a out a way to handle it.
The “you aren’t the boss of me” nonsense about mask mandates during a pandemic is always going to be the prize winner for willful ignorance. I don’t understand it, but I still see a lot of it.
My little town in Oregon did the same thing and that's ALL I've heard from my older conservative relatives as well. I can relate to the mystifying amount of outrage they seem to have over silly things too and I totally blame things like fox News and their conservative bubble. It makes me a little sad because I love them so much and wish they knew they didn't have to be so unhappy all the time like that.
Right? A lot of it is fear - the world is changing very fast, and things they learned long to take for granted are now not so much.
My oldest sister is really quite amazing - she lived in the country her entire life, but when her husband died she sold the place and moved to an apartment in our reasonably big and quite diverse (at lest in the part where she and I live) city. Living alone for the first time in her life, taking the bus, interacting with types of people she'd never met before. When I and other younger relatives spend a lot of time with her, her natural openness and decency shines through, but if she's spending a lot of time with just the other people in the seniors facility, and online with her trumpy friends, she starts to think like them.
I think the same thing applies to all of us and who we end up having to spend our time with. Eventually it'll rub off on you if you're always with angry or sad people. I love my older relatives a lot. I have a lot of them in the 70-80+ demographic who lived nearby, and I try to contain my impatience with them because I realize that the world must be a scary place sometimes for them since it's changed so much. I admit that I have difficulty with the patience sometimes tho. Lol
I only comment to point out that on the 2nd one cable network showed the ''Groundhog Day'' film all day long.
This is just one sy,mpton of a country gone totally off its rocker.
Thank you.
One of the things I hate about Groundhog Day is how thirsty it shows my state. It's embarrassing.
Ohio looked at all that publicity Phil and PA. get and decided we had to have the exact same thing, which is how we approach almost everything.
So, we have Buckeye Chuck, our own groundhog, who makes his own prediction about winter. Which all the state and local media have to cover but the national media doesn't give two fucks about.
So cringe.
Out here in the parched southwest, we use a rattlesnake and a desert tortoise. They are as bad at weather prognostication as any rodent of unusual size.
Hello to anyone who remembers me. I'm not a groundhog, but I am back from almost 2 months of hibernation due to a dead computer, illness, weather, and life happening. Miss all the Wonkers, and my updates from our lovely editrix. Hope to catch up on news, after my long unwelcome winter's nap.
Glad to see you still exist!
Can't seem to change my name, though.
If you're on a computer, go to the top right corner of your "Activity" page and click on your avatar or the three lines next to it, then scroll down to "Settings" and it gives you the option to edit your name. If you're on a phone, I'd like to know how you do that, because my phone gets hot and closes the site and won't let me interact at all.
Edit: nevermind, it appears you figgered it out.
Thank you.
Thank you, a million times thank you. I had never tried to restore my old username and realized that I didn't know how on substack.
we had rain here for groundhog day but nobody was mad at it.
Looking at that sweet kitty makes me smile. I bet she's purring like a lawnmower.
definitety
Today’s AI image: Supergirl kissing backwards headed Supergirl.
https://substack.com/profile/1551934-wookie-monster/note/c-48765013?utm_source=notes-share-action&r=x9ha
Yeah but what if it *IS* all just a Commie plot like Tom Cotton says!!!??? 😃 |🇺🇸
.
𝙏𝙤𝙢 𝘾𝙤𝙩𝙩𝙤𝙣: "𝙃𝙖𝙫𝙚 𝙮𝙤𝙪 𝙚𝙫𝙚𝙧 𝙗𝙚𝙚𝙣 𝙖 𝙢𝙚𝙢𝙗𝙚𝙧 𝙤𝙛 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝘾𝙝𝙞𝙣𝙚𝙨𝙚 𝘾𝙤𝙢𝙢𝙪𝙣𝙞𝙨𝙩 𝙋𝙖𝙧𝙩𝙮?"
𝙏𝙞𝙠𝙏𝙤𝙠 𝘾𝙀𝙊 𝙎𝙝𝙤𝙪 𝙕𝙞 𝘾𝙝𝙚𝙬: "𝙎𝙚𝙣𝙖𝙩𝙤𝙧, 𝙄'𝙢 𝙈𝙖𝙣𝙙𝙖𝙡𝙤𝙧𝙞𝙖𝙣. 𝙉𝙤!"
.
"Tom Cotton Goes Full Racist, Badgers TikTok CEO on Whether He’s Chinese"
–https://news.yahoo.com/tom-cotton-goes-full-racist-204724626.html
.
(And yes, of course, Tom Cotton has endorsed the 2x impeached, 4x indicted, rapist POS)
Tom Cotton's a Harvard grad. Harvard evidently doesn't have a geography requirement.
Harvard cit it's geography department, so it's safe to say they don't have a requirement for it.
Harvard is not that impressive a school from the standpoint of undergrad education.
I’m from Pennsylvania and my sister’s birthday is on Groundhog Day. Between those two things, I’ve heard enough about that fat gerbil in my lifetime.
It has grown to be so fucking stupid that all the news networks feel they MUST show it.
Can't wait for them to pre-empt another mass shooting of children to watch some stupied giat rodent.
>> Well, what if there is no tomorrow? There wasn't one today! <<
This is such a fantastic line. I. just rewatched that movie last weekend and am so glad I did. Thank you also for giving us the heads up about SNMM. I have watched a little and it seems fun. I shall watch more later.
I know a lot of people who hated "Groundhog Day."
I love, love, love it. But then again, I'd probably love watching Murray reading names from a phone book.
"The Razor's Edge" is another one that wasn't really popular but was awesome. A rare instance of the movie being better than the book, IMO. Murray once said that you do the "Ghostbusters" so you can get a chance to do obscure things like "Razor's Edge" that are a labor of love.
I loved his version of "The Razor's Edge"!
I have again failed when it comes to food consumption. I was greeted today by a charming, young woman and her mother who caused me to purchase 3 packages of Girl Scout Lemonades cookies.
Oh no no no !!!! No failure! It was writ! Only a failure in life could have passed that up!
(I mean, no shaming! & Sadness for those who can't partake.)
So where's the failure? Eat cookies, food consumption accomplished!
You succeeded in consuming!
What is one to do? What else COULD you have done? (purchased all the Thin Mints, I suppose)
It is minus fucking fifty degrees below zero here, or in scientifical terms, -50FC.
I will not be going outside to get drunk and pass out in the bushes while I wait for the marmots to come out of hibernation and tell us that we're going to have another six months of winter.
Is it too much to hope that the movie tonight will be Groundhog Day?
I watched that video and now there's no unseeing it.
I have been reading some stuff about the recent airstrikes on Iraq and Syria. Apparently we struck sites associated with various Iran-backed militias, because these countries have militias running around that are only sorta-kinda controlled by the government. Iran is supplying them and funding them, and coordinating with them, but somewhat at arm's length, so that they can have plausible deniability in case one of them gets into trouble, as they have recently. Really what we're in is a proxy skirmish with Iran. Nobody on either side wants to push the big button and get into a 1-on-1 between the U.S. and Iran, at least not now.
I can't make sense of what is going on between Iran and Pakistan. It seems to be a dick swinging contest.
I can't enlighten you about that.
If Iran's arm's length is enough for deniability, then I guess the US is cool. We were a lot more than an arm's length from where those missiles hit.
Random Greek Cat is a sweetie.
I want to give her many ear-skritches
Random Greek Cat is an eye-catching, jaw-droppingly gorgeous feline.
OT, just want to vent - about old people, I guess.
Had lunch yesterday with my two oldest sisters. They're both over 80. One of them is a more reasonable person than the other, but she lives in a seniors' facility, plus she spends a lot of time online with her large group of friends, all old farts like herself. So she is subjected to nonstop nonsense from all sides.
Our city started a ban against single use plastics last year, plus other waste, so you can't get a plastic bag with purchases, you have to pay for paper bags, even at drive throughs, have to ask for napkins, no plastic straws, etc. You can imagine how well this has gone over with certain segments of the population.
And the conversation turned to that, despite my efforts to keep it well away. It went about as well as you'd expect, but I think the part that bugged me most was the "They". "They" want us to reduce our use of plastics, but "they" pack the kind of lettuce I like in big plastic containers. "They" won't give us free plastic bags at the store, but "they" make us buy bags to take our garbage out in. "They" won't tell us, oh, the many many many things that "they" are apparently not telling us, most of which are not actually true. And so on and so on.
And when I said "Well, it's not all the same "they". If you keep buying those big plastic containers of mixed greens (interjection of "and they're far too big, too, how am I supposed to eat that much before it goes bad!") and you don't complain to the store, and you don't complain to the manufacturer, how are they supposed to know you'd rather have it in a different kind of packaging?" The answer to that was "Well, they're pretty stupid then, aren't they? After all, they're trying to force us to cut down on plastic".
Sigh. And they're both pretty good, really. They're not above average racist, mostly, and they do care about the environment, and they are basically decent people. But the world has changed a lot, and they never really understood it all that well. Everyone around them is telling them over and over "Be outraged!" so they are. And there is plenty to be outraged about, but that stuff never makes into their increasingly smaller worlds.
Remember what trash cans were lined with back in the day? https://substack.com/profile/180721617-queroloustwo/note/c-48786920?utm_source=notes-share-action&r=2zlhox
Not sure if that is due to "old" as compared to "perpetually looking for something trivial to complain about" (aka "Republican")
😃
Yeah, let's not blame "old." Unless someone has dementia, that's kind of bullshit. Plenty of old people are quite aware and informed, and lots of young people are fucking dumbasses.
In this case, honestly, I think it's "old". Life just getting smaller and smaller and scarier and scarier. "Why can't I just keep doing things the way I've always done them!?! It must be someone's fault."
Both my sisters vote NDP, which is further to left than the US Democrats. It's mostly out of habit, I think, though, because of supporting unions. They'd probably be conservatives, I figure, if they were capable of rational political thought. Which they were, in the past, but no longer. Their worlds have gotten too small.
Thanks, Oy! I'm 81 and a foul-mouthed, politically savvy Wonk who is totally in favor of whatever we can do to save the Earth we have so foully bespoiled.
And you're right, there - it doesn't happen to everyone when we get old.
Perhaps it’s “old”, but perhaps it’s also the degree of difficulty involved in dropping old expectations in order to form new habits that fuels the complaints. It’s hard because it takes commitment, a semi reliable memory, a bit of planning ahead to make sure those reusable shopping bags are with us as we go out the door.
My community doesn’t demand reusable bags; shopping with them is a choice I made for myself, but I still have to double check myself to make sure I have them, and I swear when I don’t — often : ).
It's been a couple of years here now, with the reusable bags, and we have all for the most part gotten used to it. But for some reason, not getting their hamburger in a paper bag is just infuriating people. And it's brought up their resentment about having to bring bags to the grocery store, all over again.
It reminds me a lot of the mask mandates, and I think mostly comes from the same place - it's not that it's a difficult thing to do, but that for many people it hits their "you can't tell me what to do" nerve. That's where I think the complaints about "They" come from - resenting feeling being pushed around.
I see what you’re saying. I’m trying to imagine a large unbagged fast food order piled on my lap in a drive through. That might make me testy, too, until I figured a out a way to handle it.
The “you aren’t the boss of me” nonsense about mask mandates during a pandemic is always going to be the prize winner for willful ignorance. I don’t understand it, but I still see a lot of it.
My little town in Oregon did the same thing and that's ALL I've heard from my older conservative relatives as well. I can relate to the mystifying amount of outrage they seem to have over silly things too and I totally blame things like fox News and their conservative bubble. It makes me a little sad because I love them so much and wish they knew they didn't have to be so unhappy all the time like that.
Right? A lot of it is fear - the world is changing very fast, and things they learned long to take for granted are now not so much.
My oldest sister is really quite amazing - she lived in the country her entire life, but when her husband died she sold the place and moved to an apartment in our reasonably big and quite diverse (at lest in the part where she and I live) city. Living alone for the first time in her life, taking the bus, interacting with types of people she'd never met before. When I and other younger relatives spend a lot of time with her, her natural openness and decency shines through, but if she's spending a lot of time with just the other people in the seniors facility, and online with her trumpy friends, she starts to think like them.
I think the same thing applies to all of us and who we end up having to spend our time with. Eventually it'll rub off on you if you're always with angry or sad people. I love my older relatives a lot. I have a lot of them in the 70-80+ demographic who lived nearby, and I try to contain my impatience with them because I realize that the world must be a scary place sometimes for them since it's changed so much. I admit that I have difficulty with the patience sometimes tho. Lol