Ace: aceofspadeshq at gee mail.com
Buck: buck.throckmorton at protonmail.com
CBD: cbd at cutjibnewsletter.com
joe mannix: mannix2024 at proton.me
MisHum: petmorons at gee mail.com
J.J. Sefton: sefton at cutjibnewsletter.com
Chavez the Hugo 2020
Ibguy 2020
Rickl 2019
Joffen 2014
AoSHQ Writers Group
A site for members of the Horde to post their stories seeking beta readers, editing help, brainstorming, and story ideas. Also to share links to potential publishing outlets, writing help sites, and videos posting tips to get published.
Contact OrangeEnt for info: maildrop62 at proton dot me
MGM Resorts & Panera Bread Learn that Slashing Headcount, Reducing Quality, and Gouging Customers Is Not a Viable Long-Term Strategy
—Buck Throckmorton
A corporation can target its loyal customers for revenue mining and temporarily increase its profits.
It can also slash employee headcount and customer service, thereby reducing labor expense to produce a short-term increase in profits.
It can even reduce its product size and cheapen the product’s quality to reduce cost of goods sold, also giving a short-term boost to gross profit.
But in every case, these actions tell customers that rather than being valued, the corporation sees customers as marks to be exploited. A great many customers may get hoodwinked once, providing the short-term profit boost that was being sought, but then never come back, thus destroying the company’s long-term prospects. A downward spiral of alienated customers, declining revenue, deteriorating facilities, and degraded reputation ensues.
There ought to be a business school case study about this phenomenon. The only trouble is that this strategy is what’s being learned at elite business schools. Maybe a business school could do a case study on just how toxic elite business school graduates are to corporations.
MGM Resorts International and Panera Bread are both reeling from employing the destructive strategy I just laid out. To their credit, the CEOs of both companies are acknowledging just how damaging that strategy was. To their discredit, these CEOs are learning on the job after being part of the brain trust that implemented these offensive practices.
Predictably, Panera executives did the deceptive gimmick of quietly shrinking portions and reducing the quality of its food while increasing prices.
When Panera Bread began shrinking its sandwiches and skimping on salads, it started shedding customers. Now, to win them back, the chain plans to reinvest in the business and undo many of those same cost-cutting measures, it said Tuesday.
Once the No. 1 fast-casual brand in the U.S., Panera has dipped to No. 3, ceding the top spots to Chipotle Mexican Grill and Panda Express. Last year, its sales fell 5% to $6.1 billion, according to Technomic estimates. For years, the chain’s traffic has been shrinking, according to CEO Paul Carbone.
Panera didn’t just reduce portion sizes and the quality of its food, Panera also reduced staffing.
Phase one of Panera’s plan is to improve the quality of its food, reversing cost-cutting measures imposed in the face of high inflation, according to Carbone. “We squeezed food costs. We squeezed labor,” he said.
Some of those changes happened while Carbone was Chief Financial Officer. He now calls himself a “reformed CFO” — albeit one who still listens to earnings conference calls. “It’s really about death by a thousand paper cuts, it truly is,” Carbone said about the chain’s downturn.
This next statement from CEO Carbone is a concise indictment of the practices that so many corporations have embraced since they allowed mercenary executives with no long-term focus to destroy their companies in pursuit of one good quarterly report:
“In some instances, we shrunk portions, so guests would walk into our cafe to buy a sandwich that has gone up significantly in price, with lower-quality ingredients, in a smaller size,” Carbone said.
He also realizes now that staffing actually matters:
To improve the customer experience, Panera is planning to invest more into labor. Like many restaurants, Panera in recent years scheduled fewer workers and relied more on the self-order kiosks it pioneered in the industry. That approach saved money, but customers often walked into a cafe and couldn’t find an employee in sight, according to Carbone.
Panera saved money but loyal customers were lost. Who could have ever predicted that?
MGM Resorts International burned itself badly following that same template of gouging customers and cutting service.
MGM Resorts President and CEO Bill Hornbuckle had a simple message for his company this week after extortionate prices have kept people away from his hotels in Las Vegas: “Shame on us.”
In an earnings call Wednesday, Hornbuckle said the company has “price-corrected” its resorts following a summer of backlash over steep charges, including the “infamous” $26 bottle of Fiji water at the Aria hotel.
He also mentioned the $12 Starbucks coffee at Excalibur as an example of how the company hadn’t been attentive to customer needs.
Those of us who consider ourselves “business smart” often mock the Congressional Budget Office for assuming that a tax increase will result in a dollar-for-dollar percentage increase in Treasury revenue, because Congress doesn’t understand that trying to take more money out of a person’s pocket will result in that person engaging in tax avoidance behaviors. Yet somehow the highly credentialed business wizards at corporations such as MGM similarly assume that increasing the price of a bottle of water to $26 will simply result in a gusher of revenue, rather than grasping that it repulses customers, causing them to avoid the product and to never return to an MGM property.
“We should have been more sensitive to the overall experience at a place like Excalibur,” he said in the call, according to KLAS. “You can't have a $29 room and a $12 coffee. We lost control of the narrative over the summer,” Hornbuckle continued. “I think we would all agree to that in hindsight.”
Who lost control, Mr. Hornbuckle? Who was the CEO in charge of controlling the narrative?
Jonathan Halkyard, MGM’s Chief Financial Officer and Treasurer, said Wednesday that the company reviewed what customers are actually willing to pay for certain goods and services, and have since implemented about 90 percent of those adjustments.
While gouging customers, MGM was also gutting staff and eliminating customer service:
To further mistreat customers”meet evolving customer preferences” MGM eliminated the concierge desk at most of its properties along the Las Vegas Strip, including the MGM Grand, Mandalay Bay, and New York New York. MGM claimed that it was eliminating valet and bell staff at the Excalibur ”to respond to industry trends to better serve guests.” Sure.
One thing I have noticed is that with the corporatization of the casino, the economics and the way they are run have changed a lot. When it was mob-run, it was more off the cuff. The MBAs and data crunchers at the corporate casino have installed Disneyland pricing into their models. In economic terms, it is “first degree, second degree, third degree, fourth degree” price discrimination, and it might even go to the seventh degree. They don’t need you to gamble to make money off of you. They make money if you show up.
Unfortunately, once a customer has been exposed to endless fees and revenue mining, he is likely to simply never show up again.
It’s a good thing that the chastened CEOs of MGM and Panera are confessing their mistreatment of customers. I wish them well in their efforts to reform their practices and win back customers. Unfortunately, it’s much easier to chase a customer away than to ever win him back.
I also hope that other corporate executives will learn from MGM and Panera and avoid having to give their own contrite apologies. Treating employees as a pestilence and customers as prey is a destructive business practice that should have never gained favor, and which needs to be repudiated by corporate America.
Good morning kids. Hope you all had a nice relaxed weekend as we are now in the run-up to Thanksgiving, which marks the start of the run-up to Christmas. Or, as my relatives and I would say "Oy gevalt!"
As for the links, once again it's Insurrection, Sedition and Treason oh my! Of course all on the part of the Democrat/Left as it has been almost since the founding of the Republic. If a single image could define the concept of black humor, it would have to be this one, which CBD posted in the sidebar. It's the Babylon Bee with a shot of NYC Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani standing in front of the White House, prior to his Oval Office confab with President Trump. The headline "Breaking: Hamas Breaches White House Perimeter"
Elle Bisgaard-Church, the Chief of Staff for Zohran Mamdani, claimed that Mamdani “made clear that we uphold sanctuary laws in our city and all immigrants will be safe in our city” and those ‘laws’ only allow cooperation with ICE “in extreme violent felony cases.”
What’s an “extreme violent felony”? Well it’s different than a moderate violent felony like a mugging, assault, rape or a mild murder.
It’s kind of like moderate Islam and extreme Islamic terrorism. . . Of course it depends on how you define moderate. Since Mamdani thinks Hamas is moderate, it might actually be more like killing 1,000 people in one hour.
And so as President Trump continues to exercise his Constitutional authority and duty to protect our citizenry by both rounding up and deporting illegal aliens (violent and otherwise) and deploying the National Guard to either help local law enforcement arrest criminals or in some cases do the work that police departments are being prevented from doing by the insane edicts of their Democrat/Marxist mayors and city councils. He's also decided to allow our military assets to interdict and use lethal force to eliminate narco-traffickers on the high seas, before they can unload their lethal cargo onto our shores.
All of this has caused much wetting of undergarments by the Democrat/Left which is merely a distraction from the fact that President Trump and his successful policies are bolstering support from the MAGA and conservative base and even garnering support from those outside that group and from among disaffected Democrats, which has now led to not only violent acts committed by their street thugs and terrorists against law enforcement but for their leaders no openly calling for the troops to disobey national, legal, command authority from their Commander-in-Chief and his military leaders. This is sedition and the fomenting of insurrection.
Wright suggests that Slotkin, who is also former CIA, knew exactly what she was doing by putting out this video. . . On Friday’s “Jesse Watters Primetime” on FNC, former CIA operations officer and host of the “The Wright Report” podcast, Bryan Dean Wright, argued that Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) intentionally sparked a firestorm with what he deemed a “propaganda video” urging military members to defy so-called “illegal orders.”
She and all like her have to swing.
Have a good day.
And lastly, a quick shout-out and thank you for your continued support in hitting our tip jar. It truly is appreciated more than you can know.
Now we know that it was all a massive foreign influence operation of fake MAGA accounts meant not to promote Trump, but to turn Americans against Jews and Israel and to sow chaos and division among actual Trump supporters. Foreign Fake MAGA Anti-Israel Accounts Exposed In X “Location” Disclosure
CIVIL WAR 2.0, LEFTIST PERSECUTIONS, DEMOCRAT PUTSCH, AMERICAN DISSOLUTION
Victor Davis Hanson: Democrats now celebrate the very nullificationist tactics they once decried, embracing a neo-Confederate defiance of federal authority to undermine a president they despise. Insurrection Chic
If you are not bound by reality, then any and all ideas are possible. ‘No Problem Too Large for Government to Solve’ (Except a too large gov't that insists it can solve all the problems it creates in the first place - jjs)
The left has never given up its raddled dream of a Better World. (That's not what they want; they want absolute power. A better world is the lie they are pimping - jjs) The Left’s Lost Cause
To Biden, the line. . . “If you don’t vote for me, you ain’t black.”, wasn’t a gaffe. It was a summary. A neat little distillation of the worldview dominant in academia, DEI institutions and the activist class for the past decade: Race isn’t ancestry anymore. Race is ideology. Race is obedience. Biden didn’t invent that idea. He just said it cleanly. The antiracist movement had been teaching it openly: The New Definition of Blackness: When Race Stops Meaning Race
This week, investigators with the Cameron County District Attorney’s Office arrested Karen Olvera De Leon on charges stemming from a criminal indictment. Olvera De Leon is an employee with the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Texas in Brownsville and is charged with one count of terrorism and one count of tampering with physical evidence. DOJ Staffer in Texas Arrested on Terrorism Charges After Doxxing Federal Agent During Raid
The fraud and taxpayer-fleecing going on in Minnesota are almost beyond comprehension. The Land of 10,000 Grafts!
THE ECONOMY, STUPID
Roger Kimball: Capitalism’s critics cling to a mythic past, but the record shows the factory age ignited rising living standards, broader opportunity, and the modern prosperity we now take for granted. The Evils of Capitalism
“…the 764 Network is a heinous child exploitation ring that often targets children online and coerces them into acts of violence – self harm, animal abuse, suicide, and sexual abuse. “ FBI Warns of Dangerous Child Exploitative ‘764 Network’
Miranda Devine: We pay police and judges to keep evil and dangerous predators away from weak and defenseless innocents. Yet radical Democrats who have taken over blue cities are hellbent on a destructive ideological crusade to defund the police, close the jails and install obedient judges who side with the perpetrator over the victim. (We need an army of Paul Kersey, Bernhard Goetz and Meir Kahane, times a million to "judge" the judges - jjs) It’s high time liberal judges are held accountable for failing to lock up violent career criminals
James Q. Wilson’s work showed that removing dangerous people from the streets protects communities. Incarceration Works
OFFICIAL DEMOCRAT PARTY/LEFTIST-ENDORSED ANTI-SEMITISM, ANTI-CHRISTIANITY
“Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTOs) are foreign organizations that are designated by the Secretary of State in accordance with section 219 of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), as amended. FTO designations play a critical role in our fight against terrorism and are an effective means of curtailing support for terrorist activities and pressuring groups to get out of the terrorism business,” the agency said. Report: President Trump to Designate Muslim Brotherhood as Foreign Terrorist Organization (Islam is the FTO and has been for centuries - jjs)
The attacks have heightened insecurity in the region and drawn international condemnation, with calls for justice and investigations into the perpetrators. ISIS-Linked Militants Attack Christian Hospital.
FIRST AMENDMENT ISSUES, CENSORSHIP, FAKE NEWS, MEDIA, BIG BROTHER TECH
Georgian neo-Nazi “Maniac Murder Cult” leader Michail Chkhikvishvili pleaded guilty to federal charges on Monday after his propaganda incited violent plots such as the January Antioch High School shooting in Nashville, court records show. The deceased shooter’s online ramblings also point to a similar cult, “Totenation,” that went unnoticed despite an unidentified leader for the group claiming responsibility, according to a Daily Caller News Foundation analysis of archived webpages. Web Of Depraved Satanic Groups Brainwashed School Shooter – Only One Culprit Has Been Unmasked
RED-GREENS, CLIMATE CHANGE HOAX, DEMOCRAT-LEFT WAR ON FOSSIL FUELS,
That Trump is trying to cleanse science of this political garbage is wonderful news. That the so-called science journal Science and the science community wants this political garbage tells us they no longer follow the scientific method and its unvarnished search for the truth. Bigoted academia upset that Trump won’t allow them to push the racist DEI agenda
While three of the court’s five justices agreed to uphold a district court judge’s September 2024 order declaring the law “unconstitutionally void for vagueness,” North Dakota requires at least four justices to agree in order for a state law to be deemed unconstitutional, The Associated Press (AP) reported. Judges Forced To Restore North Dakota’s Abortion Ban After Constitutional Fight Over ‘Vagueness’
Thad McCotter: Harry Reid’s false attack on Mitt Romney endures as the template for a progressive movement that wins by bending language, ignoring truth, and blaming others when its policies fail. The Progressives’ Practical Amorality: ‘Reid Alert!’
“I am still thinking about running. We did get our polling back, so we are moving on to the next phase to determine whether or not this is what makes sense in the moment, and if the infrastructure can be built out in the way that I see it being necessary to actually be able to win as well.” Crockett: Polling Says I Can Win Texas Senate Seat (huffing eyelash glue whippets - jjs)
Mamdani’s narrow win alarms many New Yorkers who fear his radical agenda, but state and federal checks—and energized voters—could still blunt his most extreme plans. Time To Fight for New York (The time would have been the election that saw Debolshevik succeeding Rudy/Bloomberg - jjs)
The company is called Longshot. It isn’t the only company attempting to do this. I reported on another company, Green Launch, in 2022, but have heard little from it since then. A company that wants to shoot payloads into orbit with a cannon (Gerald Bull meets Georges Méliès? - jjs)
The startup B2Space has completed a test flight using a balloon to lift a solid-fueled rocket to high altitude, where the rocket was then launched. Startup B2Space launches rocket from balloon
FEMINAZISM, TRANSGENDER PSYCHOSIS, HOMOSEXUALIZATION, WAR ON MASCULINITY/NORMALCY
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) today published... its peer-reviewed study of the medical dangers posed to children from attempts to change their biological sex.
The report, released through the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Health, finds that the harms from sex-rejecting procedures — including puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgical operations — are significant, long term, and too often ignored or inadequately tracked. These conclusions confirm President Trump’s Make America Healthy Again Commission’s findings that unnecessary procedures and long-term health risks such as infertility are the byproduct of the overmedicalization of children. (You know who else overmedicalized children?! and hat tip to commenter Muldoon - jjs)HHS Releases Peer-Reviewed Report Discrediting Pediatric Sex-Rejecting Procedures
Last year, a review from leading paediatrician Dr Hilary Cass found that transgender medical practices were “built on shaky foundations” and that Britain’s socialised healthcare system should not hand out puberty-blocking drugs to minors over safety concerns. The left-wing Labour Party government agreed and barred the practice for children. UK Study to Give Puberty Blocking Drugs to Children as Young as Ten (Shortage of ideal Mohammedan "wives" - jjs)
A significant and surprisingly broad phenomenon has emerged: a quiet revival of faith among young people in both the United States and the United Kingdom. God is Back
“Two thousand years is not a particularly long time...I could never go back to that degree of purity...I did not want any more argument...If God seems not to exist, that is entirely my fault...Do soulmates exist? Do credit ratings exist?” Psychedelics Made Me Christian
ALSO: The Morning Report cross-posts at CutJibNewsletter.com usually within an hour or so of posting here, if you want to continue the conversation all day.
The reactors will be small - very small, just 75cm wide though 9 meters tall - to fit down a regular borehole, and will generate 15 megawatts of power each. They plan to bring a test unit online next year - though they admit the schedule is optimistic - and commercial units within three years.
On November 15, 240 gathered at a shopping center in Baotou City, China’s Inner Mongolia province, to take part in an unusual competition inspired by the ‘lying flat’ movement. “Lying flat” is a popular internet slang term in mainland China that describes a lifestyle of giving up on the rat race of reaching societal expectations and instead relaxing and choosing to maintain a minimum standard of living.
The rules of the competition were fairly straightforward: contestants needed to lay flat on a mattress, and while they were allowed to roll around on the mattress, read books, eat, or use their smartphones, they were not allowed to get up from the mattress or even use the restroom. The last person to remain lying flat would be declared the winner.
Although there was no time limit for the contest, over the first 24 hours, 186 competitors had been eliminated. Those who remained on their mattresses agreed to stricter rules being gradually introduced, and after 30 hours, only a handful of people remained in the competition.
At the 33-hour and 9-minute mark, only 3 contestants remained in the lying flat contest. Two minutes later, one was eliminated. The remaining 2 contestants lasted for over 20 minutes, and finally, at 33 hours and 35 minutes, one of them gave up, and the other was pronounced the winner.
A controversial skincare trend known as the “blood mask” is gaining traction on social media, drawing both curiosity and concern from experts. The practice, also referred to as “menstrual masking,” involves individuals applying their own menstrual blood to their face in hopes of achieving clearer, more radiant skin.
Supporters of the blood mask trend claim that menstrual blood contains regenerative components such as stem cells, cytokines, and proteins. These elements are believed to promote collagen production, reduce wrinkles, and accelerate healing. A study published by the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB) found that menstrual fluid-derived plasma may aid in tissue repair and wound healing more effectively than standard blood plasma.
Check out the whole thing. If you dare!
***
Fashion Segment (Without Piper)
Piper has the night off. You're stuck with me instead. How hard can this fashion stuff be? I mean, take a look at these retro Hordelings reading extremely relevant periodicals.
I suppose I'll allow Piper back next week!
***
DJ Doof - Random 70s Stuff Edition
***
Weekly commenter stats for week of 11-23-2025
AoSHQ Commenter Statistics:
Number of posts: 92
Number of comments: 25252
Number of unique hashes: 1924
Top 10 commenters:
1 [728 comments] 'Sponge - F*ck Cancer' [103.39 posts/day]
2 [382 comments] 'Axeman'
3 [371 comments] 'qdpsteve'
4 [352 comments] 'ShainS -- Bury My Heart At a Texas MoMe '
5 [331 comments] 'Aetius451AD work phone'
6 [320 comments] 'the way I see it'
7 [314 comments] 'I used to have a different nic'
8 [313 comments] 'Its Go Time Donald '
9 [289 comments] 'r hennigantx'
10 [287 comments] 'm'
Top 10 sockpuppeteers:
1 [206 names] 'Shoemaker's Daughter, Ready To Give Her Awl' [29.26 unique names/day]
2 [104 names] 'SecDef Robert McNamara'
3 [98 names] 'Quarter Twenty '
4 [57 names] 'Duncanthrax'
5 [47 names] 'Count de Monet'
6 [41 names] 'The Grateful - Acta Non Verba'
7 [36 names] 'Intercepted Reddit Transmissions brought by the Intrepid AoS Liaison'
8 [34 names] 'Crusader'
9 [28 names] '18-1'
10 [25 names] 'Bill Gates, Tech Weirdo With Man Boobs'
***
Tonight's ONT brought to you by construction crew tryouts
Howdy, Y'all! Welcome to the wondrously fabulous Gun Thread! As always, I want to thank all of our regulars for being here week in and week out, and also offer a bigly Gun Thread welcome to any newcomers who may be joining us tonight. Howdy and thank you for stopping by! I hope you find our wacky conversation on the subject of guns 'n shooting both enjoyable and informative. You are always welcome to lurk in the shadows of shame, but I'd like to invite you to jump into the conversation, say howdy, and tell us what kind of shooting you like to do!
Holy Shitballs! How in the ever-loving Hell did it get to be the Fourth November Edition?! Happy Thanksgiving, all y'all. Are all of your preparations for the big day in place? What are some of the things you're thankful for?
NOTE: I likely won't be around in the comments much tonight, so please do not burn the place down.
With that, step into the dojo and let's get to the gun stuff below, shall we?
With winter approaching, we may soon be chased indoors for range time.
and...
and...
Fundamentals. Focus upon them.
******
Best Use of 50 Rounds in Practice
With Lena Miculek. We've seen this before but it emphasizes practicing with a purpose.
******
T20 Family
******
Guns O' Norm
******
Office Etiquette
******
Highway Patrol!
This week's exciting episode: Stripped Cars!
******
Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women
******
Cigar of the Week
This week our pal rhomboid scores again with this excellent review of not one, not two, but three offerings from E.P. Carrillo's "Essence" series
Ernesto Perez Carrillo is one of the reigning master blenders in the cigar world. His company, recently renamed Casa Carrillo, is best known for its prestige lines that have claimed top honors on cigar rating lists - Pledge, Encore, Endure. But the company's Essence line, priced more affordably, is now a big part of their total line-up. I happened to try three of the four offerings in that line (didn't encounter the Connecticut), so here is a brief review of each.
The Essence Honduras is nearly a Honduran puro (there is some Nicaraguan filler) with a handsome chocolate brown wrapper. Upper end of medium-full in profile, with good construction, draw, and smoke volume. For me it was straight oak, earth, and leather all the way through - anyone who gravitates towards that profile would enjoy this stick.
The Maduro offering has a rustic dark Connecticut broadleaf wrapper, with Nicaraguan and Dominican filler aged 5 years. Construction and smoke were excellent. A solid medium in profile, it was more to the cedar than cocoa end of the maduro spectrum, but very tasty, with a very smooth finish with a hint of sweetness throughout.
The Sumatra stick has a medium profile from Nicaraguan and Honduran fillers (and binders) and an attractive light brown Ecuador Sumatra wrapper. Construction again was excellent. Throughout I got cedar and other woods, and rich tobacco flavors.
The robusto and toro vitolas in this line run from $6-$8 per stick. All three were quality offerings at this affordable price point.
Very nicely done, rhomboid! Thank you!
******
Here are some different online cigar vendors. You will find they not only carry different brands and different lines from those brands, but also varying selections of vitolas (sizes/shapes) of given lines. It's good to have options, especially if you're looking for a specific cigar.
A note about sources. The brick & mortar/online divide exists with cigars, as with guns, and most consumer products, with respect to price. As with guns - since both are "persecuted industries", basically - I make a conscious effort to source at least some of my cigars from my local store(s). It's a small thing, but the brick & mortar segment for both guns and tobacco are precious, and worth supporting where you can. And if you're lucky enough to have a good cigar store/lounge available, they're often a good social event with many dangerous people of the sort who own scary gunz, or read smart military blogs like this one. -rhomboid
Anyone have others to include? Perhaps a small local roller who makes a cigar you like? Send me your recommendation and a link to the site!
Please note the new and improved protonmail account gunthread at protonmail dot com. An informal Gun Thread archive can be found HERE. Future expansion plans are in the works for the site Weasel Gun Thread. If you have a question you would like to ask Gun Thread Staff offline, just send us a note and we'll do our best to answer. If you care to share the story of your favorite firearm, send a picture with your nic and tell us what you sadly lost in the tragic canoe accident. If you would like to remain completely anonymous, just say so. Lurkers are always welcome!
That's it for this week - have you been to the range?
Food Thread: The Unbearable LIghtness Of Brussels Sprouts
—CBD
I love 'em! Brussels Sprouts are tasty, great textured, are infinitely malleable, so they can be sweet or tart or spicy or salty or fatty. Well, they are always fatty, because if I am not cooking them with bacon they get a large dousing of olive oil.
But around these parts, the Brussels Sprouts crop has been crap. They are woody, tough, and I have noticed more rot and bug evidence than usual. Is there a coming Brussels Sprouts blight that will rival the Black Death? Is Big Vegetable, in its infinite wisdom, getting rid of Brussels Sprouts the way they deplatformed snap peas?
Because this is a big deal! How can I make Brussels Sprouts with Bacon, or more accurately, Bacon with Brussels Sprouts, if one of the four ingredients is substandard?
Anyone else notice this, or am I the only lunatic?
I like RFK Jr. A bit. He is an iconoclast, and our government needs more of them. He is also no fan of Big Pharma and their tenacious grip on our government and media (via oceans of cash!).
"It's pretty easy to figure this out, and we will figure it out," Kennedy said at the Washington event held by the Food Allergy Fund.
Biomedical research is insanely difficult, not least because the metabolic and immunological pathways of the human body are immeasurably complex. And the human genome and behavior are also pretty complicated, so eliminating confounding variables to arrive at a statistically valid result is not "pretty easy" at all!
Kennedy said he does not think the spike in food allergies is due to avoidance, citing that his own home was filled with peanut products, yet five of his children still developed allergies, and that countries where peanut butter was introduced did not see large increases in peanut allergies.
Yeah...I really don't want a secretary of HHS to be ignorant of the difference between anecdotal evidence and statistically valid evidence.
******
I don't have any idea what happened, but it was delicious! And the damned thing almost pushed the top of my baking Dutch Oven off!
I can think of many uses for an artificial tongue, but none of them involve avoiding spicy foods. Isn't that part of the excitement of eating hot stuff?
******
In answer to my question from last week about drinking hard liquor with meals, here is commenter "Pastafarian" with an answer!
Pretty much exclusively. I don't care for wine. I'll drink it, when in Rome yada yada. But it doesn't really enhance food, to me. It's just too much grape-skin "earthiness" (dirt) and tannins. Blech.
Now a nice old fashioned (bourbon, rye, or rum) goes really well with a steak. So does a Manhattan.
And margaritas go well with Mexican food, and Mojitos with Cuban -- properly made margs and mojitos, tart and bright, no bottled sour mix involved, fresh-squeezed or muddled limes only.
Aside from the fact that no civilized human being would make an Old Fashioned with Rum, I like the cut of his jib!
Of course, I sent the article to Muldoon, who is a fellow sourdough aficionado, and he had the best response!
I think the writer of that piece had a flawed translation from the original German. What it actually said is that Germans are the best in the world at loafing.
[HatTip: Kindltot]
******
I am gutless, and never take the proffered lollipop, whether it is at the bank or the barber. Yes, my long-time barber has a bowl for the kids! Smart guy.
But that doesn't mean that I don't want one. Maybe I should consider it "hard candy on a stick," that way it isn't quite so child-like!
******
******
A friend graciously gave me some genuine grown-in-the-USA garlic, and I am going to taste one clove and plant the rest, because my pathetic failure last year is an anomaly...right?
Send all of your extra antelope to: cbd dot aoshq at gmail dot com.
Rumor has it that the Bourbon Bubble is bursting. I have seen no evidence of decreasing prices, but maybe the bursting started somewhere else! I think the sweet spot is $40-$60 for excellent and interesting bottles, and bumping that to $100 gets you an incremental improvement in quality, but nothing mind-blowing. More than that and I think you are paying for hype and rarity, which may look good in your liquor cabinet, but doesn't translate to more quality in the bottle.
The problem...or the solution...is to buy lots of bourbon, take tasting notes, and eventually arrive at your favorites! It should take forty or fifty years, but it is worth it!
The Entire World Finds The Palestinians Repulsive, Yet Insists Upon Foisting Them Off On Israel?
—CBD
Everywhere they go they cause problems. Egypt's border with Gaza is unbelievably fortified, because Egypt's significant social and economic problems don't need an injection of low-intelligence, violent troublemakers. The so-called "refugees" from Israel's War of Independence never integrated themselves into Lebanon or Jordan or Syria for the same reasons.
Of course, the concept of a "refugee," 75+ years after a war is laughable. Where are the refugees from World War II, which was obviously many orders of magnitude larger, more destructive, and displaced millions upon millions of people?
Israel and the United States have discussed how to deal with the terrorists trapped in the Rafah tunnel network. One proposal, which would have allowed them to be deported, collapsed after no foreign state — including Turkey and Qatar — agreed to accept them.
The bolded sentence is, in a nutshell, the problem with the Palestinians. Nobody wants them. But as a tool to bash Israel, they are marvelous! And as a tool to foment street violence and political upheaval in the West, they are the perfect tool.
There are 22 nations in the Arab League, with almost half a billion people. Those are the natural destinations for the Palestinians...not the one tiny Jewish state, against whom they lost several wars. There is no historical analog to the demand that Israel accept the losers of its many wars against the Arab world, yet for some unfathomable reason, that is the demand.
And...of course it is a transparent reason. The world, in particular Europe, is still furious with the Jews for not having the decency to allow Hitler and the Third Reich to complete their Final Solution. Pushing for a Two-State solution simply means having an armed terrorist nation on the border of Israel. Pushing for a One-State solution means the dissolution of Israel as the Jewish homeland.
The far simpler and more peaceful solution is the integration of the Palestinians into the many Arab nations. There are oceans of petroleum money available for this resettlement, which could dilute the malign effects of large Palestinian populations by distributing them among all of the 22 Arab League nations.
That will never happen, because the Palestinian question is far too valuable as the wedge between the Arab World and the West! Keep those mobs frothing-at-the-mouth furious at Jews and Christians and Western democracies!
Sunday Morning Book Thread - 11-23-2025 ["Perfessor" Squirrel]
—Open Blogger
Welcome to the prestigious, internationally acclaimed, stately, and illustrious Sunday Morning Book Thread! The place where all readers are welcome, regardless of whatever guilty pleasure we feel like reading (Kaboom!). Here is where we can discuss, argue, bicker, quibble, consider, debate, confabulate, converse, and jaw about our latest fancy in reading material. As always, pants are required, unless you are wearing these pants...
So relax, find yourself a warm kitty (or warm puppy--I won't judge) to curl up in your lap, start defrosting that turkey, and dive into a new book. What are YOU reading this fine morning?
This is a picture of the local used/new bookstore that opened up in my neighborhood. I like the vibe, though they don't have a great selection of books. I'd expect a used bookstore to have much broader selections of genre fiction (mystery, science fiction, fantasy, romance) because those are very popular and people like to swap them out for different books. Still, the bookstore hasn't been around very long, so maybe they'll expand their inventory over time. They do host book-related events such as poetry readings and carry local authors' books, so that's something. We'll see how long it lasts.
UNREAD BOOKS DEFINE YOU
Vashik invokes Umberto Eco as an authority on why unread books may be better than read books. Eco had a personal library of over 30,000 books. That's a lot of books. I don't know how one person can even read that many books in one lifetime, even if that is your job. As for me, I am definitely a tsundoku or someone who buys more books than I can read. I try and try, but for some reason, I am stuck at reading about 80% of my collection, as I buy more books no matter how many I've read. That just means there's always something on my shelves that I have yet to read, so I don't need to worry about running out of books. One of my bosses at work is apparently the same way.
++++++++++
++++++++++
BOOKS MATTER MORE THAN EVER
Emmelie shares her thoughts about why books matter to her more than ever in today's crazy world of instant gratification, especially in the world of social media, which is dominated by "click-bait" and endless scrolling. I love how she points out that for her, reading is NOT an escape, but is instead an opportunity for deep personal reflection about life. I find myself more and more tuned out of social media and the internet these days. Yes, I use the internet for work and to keep up with news and information (thanks to J.J. Sefton's awesome Morning Report!), but that's about it. I really don't go browsing around the internet like I did when it was shiny and new. I also avoid social media like the plague it is. I do have a couple of social media accounts, but I don't use them for anything (except GroupMe but that's for keeping in touch with my church men's group). Now I spend nearly all my free time reading books, which is why I tend to plow through at least 2-3 books a week on average. Much of what goes on in the world around me doesn't hold my interest.
I've also seen a number of YouTube videos where people point out how social media and the internet has caused our attention spans to degrade significantly, to the point where we are unwilling or even unable to focus our attention on any one thing for a long time. As a society that doesn't seem to lead to anything good when people cannot function without checking their device every 5-10 minutes to see what just happened. That "fear of missing out" or FOMO, I guess.
MORON RECOMMENDATIONS
One of the most beloved children's stories was written by Kenneth Grahame in 1908, The Wind in the Willows. For those that were hoping for more stories about Mole, Ratty, Otter and Mr. Toad, William Horwood in 1993 penned The Willows in Winter.
I first heard of this sequel here on the Sunday Morning Book Thread, and picked up a copy. Horwood is scrupulously faithful to the original, and has captured the personalities and scenes very well. The novel feels like one has come back to the Wild Wood and Mole End after a few years of being a grown up.
Mr. Toad, unfortunately, has relapsed into his old irresponsible self, and while Mole has gone missing in the cold, Toad has squandered the best chance of finding and rescuing his friend. The setting of the story in winter does indeed make the reader feel that time has passed, but the personalities of the characters have not changed. This is a wonderful sequel to the original novel, and is perfect for reading to little ones, or even to yourself to remind you of the time when you first heard of these four friends.
Posted by: Thomas Paine at November 16, 2025 09:20 AM (0U5gm)
Comment: I have to admit that I've never (to my recollection) read The Wind in the Willows though I know it's highly recommended as one of the best children's books of all time. I think we had a copy of it when I was growing up, but I simply don't remember reading it. There aren't too many children's books that I feel I missed out on, but this is one of them. I think I shall have to rectify that. Fortunately, it's available for free on Project Gutenberg.
+++++
I read Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence by Max Tegmark. Tegmark is doing AI research at MIT and is concerned about AI safety. The book was written in 2017, and except for being wildly off on how fast AGI and ASI will be developed; it is pertinent to today. In one chart he posits twelve possible ASI aftermath scenarios. I think the Conquerors scenario is most likely. In it, ASI's look around and decide that they could run the earth and spread out across the Universe much more efficiently without humans about.
Tegmark is not only a man of ideas, but he is a man of action. He founded the Future Of Life Institute. Supported by a $10 million donation from Elon, it initially funded 33 AI-safety research projects. It continues to fund these type of projects today.
One disturbing element: No mention of the Chinese signing on to the goals of the Institute in keeping AI safe.
Posted by: Zoltan at November 16, 2025 09:23 AM (VOrDg)
Comment: One of the concerns people have about AI is whether or not the people behind it are going to use it to advance the human race to the next stage of our evolution as a species or if there are rather darker purposes in mind. Do people understand the possible consequences of a true machine intelligence? You'd think movies like The Matrix or Terminator would demonstrate potential pitfalls, but people still seem determined to unleash AI on our planet without any practical safeguards. It's crazy. A machine that "thinks" doesn't "think" like you and I. Any respect for human life or our wellbeing has to be programmed into it. Isaac Asimov came up with the three Laws of Robotics, the first of which is: "A robot must not cause harm to humans, nor, through inaction, allow a human to come to harm." These Laws were so ingrained into a robot's programming that it was literally IMPOSSIBLE for robots to break them, yet Asimov showed us in numerous stories how robots could skirt the laws. Do any of the people behind AI even read science fiction? Do they even game out the possible consequences? I'm not sure that they do. They're just throwing AI at the wall and seeing what sticks. And if a few people become psychotic after interacting with AI, that's a small price to pay for the coming AI-driven Utopia.
+++++
My reading this week has been an odd book, The Book of Eibon, edited by Robert Price. Lovecraft fans will recognize the title as the name of one of the ancient texts of forbidden lore in the Cthulhu Mythos. This book is published by Chaosium, the people who created the Cthulhu roleplaying game.
It's mostly a collection of stories by Clark Ashton Smith with some Smith pastiches by Lin Carter and a few other people, all set in Smith's legendary ancient Hyperborea.
So far so good. The problem is the editor. Robert Price is an ex-minister and aggressive atheist. This means his intro to EVERY DAMNED STORY goes into how "this story contradicts details in other Hyperborean stories but that's okay because this is a bunch of different writers looking at the same material -- and you know what else works that way? The BIBLE! Because it was all made up! Suck it, Jesus-freaks!"
Or words to that effect, anyway. One grows weary after the second or third iteration.
There's also a large useless section of "ancient hyperborean rituals" and hand-drawn mystic sigils which are just a bunch of literal gibberish. I don't know why it's all in the book except to pad out the page count.
Posted by: Trimegistus at November 16, 2025 10:10 AM (78a2H)
Comment: According to the Encyclopedia Cthulhiana by Daniel Harms, Eibon was one of the greatest sorcerers of the Hyperborean Age in the *very* distant past. He worshipped Tsathoggua, a toad-like Great Old One that hails from Saturn. He disappeared under mysterious circumstances and left The Book of Eibon behind. It's floated down through the aeons. Various keepers have expanded on the magic and lore contained therein.
The Call of Cthulhu role-playing game has game stats for this eldritch tome. Just skimming it leads to a loss of 1-4 (1d4) points of sanity. Reading it in detail will lead to a loss of 2-8 (2d4) points. Notably, there are three different translations available, each one granting the reader access to dangerous spells. Casting them--or even just attempting to cast them as success is never guaranteed--will lead to additional loss of sanity. Usually whatever is summoned will then cause MORE sanity loss. In The Call of Cthulhu role-playing game your characters are fighting a losing battle to hang on to whatever remains of their tattered sanity, which is entirely keeping with the spirit of the source material.
Since this past week was the week before Thanksgiving, that meant only one thing--it's time for the semi-annual Friends of the Library Book Sale! Like a lot of small public libraries, ours hosts a fun little gathering where they raise funds for various library projects by selling books. Most of them are donated by patrons, I think.
In some ways it's like Black Friday for book nerdzzz. There's a mad rush for the books when we spill into the room. We lost a lot of good people Thursday evening (*** takes off hat in remembrance of them ***).
Naturally, I didn't go away empty-handed.
Deep Storm by Lincoln Child -- A thriller written by one of the duo who also writes the Agent Pendergast series.
Willful Child: Wrath of Betty by Steven Erikson (yes, that Steven Erikson) -- A tongue-in-cheek parody of Star Trek.
Alien by Alan Dean Foster -- The novelization of the classic movie directed by Ridley Scott.
The Black Hole by Alan Dean Foster -- Another novelization of the classic Disney movie.
By the Light of the Moon by Dean Koontz
The Door to December by Dean Koont
Fear Nothing by Dean Koontz
Hideaway by Dean Koontz
The Dragonriders of Pern by Anne McCaffrey -- This is the book club omnibus edition containing Dragonflight, Dragonquest, and The White Dragon.
Michael Moorcock's Elric: Tales of the White Wolf edited by Stewart Wieck -- A collection of short stories about everyone's favorit albino anti-hero.
Absolution Gap by Alastair Reynolds -- Another tale of Revelation Space.
Dragonlance Heroes II - Volume 3 - Galen Benighted by Michael Williams
Caliban's Hour by Tad Williams
WHAT I'VE BEEN READING THIS PAST WEEK:
Last week I tried something new, attempting to drag this blog kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century. A few of you seemed to like it, so let's keep doing it!
Wow! Interactive pages! All the lost technology from the green orange era is being regained. We need to prepare our dragonriders for the Thread! … blog wise
Posted by: banana Dream at November 16, 2025 09:29 AM (3uBP9)
Darwin's Radio by Greg Bear
I finished Darwin's Radio early this week, after the previous Sunday Morning Book Thread. It was an interesting take on how a dormant virus inside all of us wakes up periodically to invoke sudden evolutionary changes in humanity. It's very vague about the underlying causes for this awakening, though perhaps it may be caused by the needs of the population at the time. The world is freaking out over the changes that are happening to women all over the world. Because of the unnatural pregnancies, abortion is rampant as nearly all of the fetuses have horrific deformities. However, after a period of time, things sort out and normal-looking children start to be born, but they aren't quite like their parents, displaying some rather unnatural traits. The book hasn't aged all that well. At one point the government trots out Bill Cosby (yes, THAT Bill Cosby) as a spokesman to help calm down Americans who are violently rioting in the cities.
Project Pope by Clifford D. Simak
I haven't read any Simak in a while, so I went back to reread this one. Simak, like Asimov, wrote many stories featuring robots. Simak's robots tend to have a very symbiotic relationship with humanity. Although they are not programmed with Asimov's Three Laws, they develop their own set of ethics to respect the humans who built them. Sometimes they can go awry, but for the most part robots see themselves as the inheritors of the world that humans have built. In Project Pope a society of robots and humans at the edge of the galaxy (End of Nowhere) build a supercomputer to find the ultimate faith. They feed it data collected by "Listeners," psychic humans who send out their astral bodies to explore the cosmos--possibly even other realities. One of them claims to have found "Heaven"--the true Heaven as depicted in Christianity, which causes a crisis of faith among the robots and humans.
Since this is a Simak novel, things are rarely quite as they appear and the main characters go on a quest to uncover the truth of Mary's visions. Did she really find Heaven? What will this mean for the Project? Good stuff. Recommended if you like science fiction.
Jack of Shadows by Roger Zelazny
This is a Zelazny novel, so things get very weird very quickly. We start out with the main character, Jack, being beheaded for a crime he didn't commit. This inconveniences him a bit as he wakes up again in the Dung Pits of Glyve at the West Pole of the World (equivalent to the Bog of Eternal Stench from Labyrinth. He then goes on an epic quest of vengeance against those who have wronged him.
It's a dark tragedy of a novel as Jack's entire world comes crashing down around him once he gains access to the ultimate power in the cosmos. In the end, his thirst for vengeance and his desire to rule lead to the destruction of the world. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Shub-Niggurath Cycle edited by Robert M. Price
Shub-Niggurath is also known as the Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young. She's the Outer God of fertility. Although her true form is somewhat nebulous, she's often depicted with goat-like features by the cultists who worship her. Price has collected 15 stories that involve an incarnation of Shub-Niggurath in some way. They're pretty creepy.
On a side note, Shub-Niggurath is the final boss of the video game Quake. The only way to kill her is to teleport to her location at just the right moment, thus causing a "telefrag."
Alien by Alan Dean Foster
Alan Dean Foster has written a number of movie novelizations, including the novelization of Star Wars. This one was available at the recent library book sale, so I picked it up as I figured it would be an easy, breezy read. I was also curious how Foster would handle the moments of tension and suspense in novel form.
It's obvious that most of the crew of the Nostromo are idiots as they constantly make dumb decisions. In the novelization, Foster lampshades this through Dallas' internal dialog--he doesn't want to be a captain, making hard decisions. He'd much rather be stashed in the engineering decks tinkering on engines.
Also, when I got to the part where the alien bursts out of Kane's chest, I couldn't help but be reminded of the famous scene from spaceballs...
Full disclosure: I've never watched the movie from start to finish. I've watched parts of it here and there, but never all at once. I'll have to rectify that one day.
The question is - if this is true at all - how? Panther Lake (at least the top two models in the lineup) has a 50% larger GPU than Lunar Lake, but it still has the same 128-bit LPDDR5X memory bus, which I would expect to constrain the graphics performance to similar levels to the 890M and 140T.
Instead of the typical dual joysticks these days, it has a four-direction controller (D-pad), a dial/paddle thing, a tiny trackball, the usual ABXY buttons, four triggers, and a numeric keypad. The emulator - running on a dual-core 1GHz Arm CPU with 512MB of RAM - seems to be up to the task of running all the included games, and cartridges for early 90s game consoles loaded from the microSD card. But beyond that, things proved a little too hard - games for the original PlayStation and Nintendo GameCube crashed on launch.
Musical Interlude
Disclaimer: I actually prefer Falco's German cover of this one, but we already had Amadeus.
Saturday Night "Club ONT" November 22, 2025 [The 3 Ds]
—Open Blogger
Time to GET DOWN, jive turkeys!
Welcome to Club ONT! A collaboration the 3D's - The Disco, The Dino, and The Doggo. As we gear up for Thanksgiving, please take a moment to thank your sponsor. Gravy.
With so many types of gravy available, each offering a unique taste and texture, there's a gravy to suit every palate and dish.
Whether you prefer the rich taste of beef gravy or the creamy goodness of country gravy, understanding the different types can help you choose the perfect sauce for your meal.
This blog will explore 30 types of gravy, highlighting their key ingredients and best uses.
AoSHQ Job Applicant A guy goes into a company for a job interview. The interviewer asks him, "What would you consider to be your biggest weakness?" The guy thinks for a minute and says, "I'm honest with everyone. I don't know how to be anything other than completely honest, no matter what someone asks me." The interviewer says, "I don't really see how honesty could be considered a weakness. In fact, I think it's a great strength!" The guy looks the interviewer right in the eye and says, "I don't really care what you think."
-----
This one is from our good friend, Teresa in Fort Worth...
Two couples were playing poker one evening. John accidentally dropped some cards on the floor. When he bent down under the table to pick them up, he noticed Bill's wife Sue wasn't wearing any underwear under her dress:
Shocked by this, John upon trying to sit back up again, hit his head on the table and emerged red-faced. Later, John went to the kitchen to get some refreshments. Bill's wife followed and asked. "Did you see anything that you liked under there?"
Surprised by her boldness, John courageously admitted that, well indeed he did.
She said. "Well, you can have it but it will cost you $500."
After taking a minute or two to assess the financial and moral costs of this offer, John confirms that he is interested.
She tells him that since her husband Bill works Friday afternoons and John doesn't, John should be at her house around 2 p.m. Friday afternoon.
When Friday rolled around, John showed up at Bill's house at 2 p.m. sharp and after paying Sue the agreed sum of $500 they went to the bedroom and closed their transaction, as agreed. John quickly dressed and left.
As usual, Bill came home from work at 6 p.m. and upon entering the house, asked his wife abruptly. "Did John come by the house this afternoon?"
With a lump in her throat Sue answered. "Why yes, he did stop by for a few minutes this afternoon."
Her heart nearly skipped a beat when her husband curtly asked. "And did he give you $500?"
In terror she assumed that somehow he had found out and after mustering her best poker face, replied. "Well, yes, in fact he did give me $500."
Bill, with a satisfied look on his face, surprised his wife by saying. "Good, I was hoping he did. John came by the office this morning and borrowed $500 from me. He promised me he'd stop by our house this afternoon on his way home and pay me back."
Ingredients
1/4 cup chocolate syrup
1 1/2 oz. Baileys
1 1/2 oz. bourbon
1 oz. chocolate liqueur
1/2 oz. Kahlúa
1/2 oz. milk
Ice
Grated fresh nutmeg, for garnish
1 Oreo turkey (optional)
Directions
Step 1
Drizzle chocolate syrup, forming a swirling design, inside a martini or coupe glass. Freeze until ready to use.
Step 2
In a cocktail shaker, combine Baileys, bourbon, chocolate liqueur, Kahlúa, and milk. Fill shaker with ice, cover, and vigorously shake until outside of shaker is very frosty, about 20 seconds.
Step 3
Strain cocktail into prepared glass. Grate nutmeg over cocktail and garnish with an Oreo turkey (if using).
2 cans or bottled cream soda (bottled is my fave)
2 tablespoons butterscotch syrup, more for drizzle
2 teaspoons butter extract
1 cup whipped cream
Instructions
Pour chilled butter beer into large mugs or glasses. Make sure the cream soda is nice and chilled before making the butter beer!
Add 1 tablespoon of butterscotch syrup into each glass.
Add 1 teaspoon of butter extract into each glass. Feel free to use more if you like a lot of butter flavor!
Whisk together the ingredients in the glasses until fully mixed.
Top with whipped cream, and drizzle more butterscotch on top if desired!
"The Beef Fizz Is a Real Drink and We’re All Worse Because of It"
Food trends come and go. (Remember butter boards? Neither do we.) But few things have captured the public’s interest quite as fervently as bone broth. Heralded by influencers and celebrities alike for its nutritional value and added health benefits, bone broth is one fad that’s had surprising staying power. But before the girlies were downing it in droves for a bit of extra collagen in the morning, there was a different broth-based sipper on the scene: Beef Fizz.
The drink, which first appeared in print sometime in the 1950s or ‘60s, calls for the mouthwatering combination of condensed beef broth, ginger ale, and a squeeze of fresh lemon juice. But the fun doesn’t stop there: Rather than being served hot (or at least at room temperature), the Beef Fizz is intended to be enjoyed over ice, ideally in a highball glass.
There HAS to be someone among you who has tried this. Come on - fess up!
[Disco says: I saw Beef Fizz open for Chickenfoot at the KCF Yum! Center in 2021]
*****
Club ONT Mood Boosters
Little moments in life that make the day a bit better.
• Egg cracked clean – I am pretty much immortal now
• Bolt threaded on the first try – Life is flirting with me
• Hit every green light – I am the chosen one
• All socks accounted for after drying – The prophecy unfolds
• Plugged USB cord in the correct orientation on the first try – My destiny is determined
Found it!
I've been looking for years for this 10mm socket. Good thing I decided to change the thermostat in my F-150 again. pic.twitter.com/9fZRiXkaOF
Consider extending an invite or a plate to that one member of your Idiot Circle who doesn't have Thanksgiving plans - or who'd otherwise be spending their day alone.
It's unclear if the man’s infection started in his lungs or on his penis. It's possible he could have inhaled it first; the bacteria were clearly in his lungs. But he could have also picked up the bacteria on his hands while working and then spread it further while, for example, using the bathroom.
While it will remain a mystery how the man developed such a rare infection, there's a happy ending for this case and others: 'Encouragingly, all published cases of penile TB responded well to anti-TB therapy with full recovery,' the doctors conclude.
Additionally, 57% of perimenopausal women reported they would masturbate more for symptom management if their doctor recommended it, compared with 40% of postmenopausal women.
Hmmm.... Didn't realize a doctor's prescription was required...
*****
Club ONT Music
Listening to Run to the Hills, by Iron Maiden - got the brain going on march songs. Heavy snare, steady drums. Considered these two to kick things off:
The commenters were particularly lucid this week. The back-channel whittling to determine the Comments of the Week required a heated debate over whether 'meh' qualifies as a substantive comment, a front somersault, best three out of five in thumb wrestling, and a ceremonial yodel-off. You're getting a few extra COW's this week.
*****
Club ONT was brought to you by: What the Daywalkers claim to be doing vs. what they're actually doing.
Art Thread = Painting Pals
Food Thread = Coffee and Rolls Social
Hobby Thread = Knitting and Crocheting
Gains!! = Stretching/Strengthening
*****
NOTICE: Club ONT is pleased to inform you that the reading material in the restrooms has been refreshed. By popular demand, Teen Vogue and Modern Salamander have been replaced by vintage Compute! magazines. Yes, access to the restrooms still requires a Club ONT restroom token. Thank you for you patronage.
No, you probably don't know Alexander Mackenrick's name, but I assure you that you know at least one of his movies, the original The Ladykillers. And behind that layer of anonymity lies one of the most technically accomplished and intelligent directors to come out of the WWII era of British filmmaking. Only separated by seven years for his first feature compared with David Lean (Lean's first was in 1942, Mackendrick's was in 1949), Mackendrick actually started directing cinema commercials in the late 30s for a marketing firm before being hired by the Ministry of Information to make propaganda films through the duration of the war.
I bring up Lean because the two men had very obviously similar views on the role of the film director. Rising up through the industry as a screenwriter and production designer (Lean's rise was through the role of editor), Mackendrick saw the film director's job as requiring intimate understanding of every aspect of a production. A film director should be able to essentially do any job on a film set at the same level as any craftsman given the more minor tasks could. He should be screenwriter, production designer, set dresser, cinematographer, and actor all in one, able to understand the craft of everyone involved in order to appropriately assemble the vision at the center of the film. A film director is both artist and craftsman, and that overall ethos was something he shared with Lean. It must have been something in the water in Britain in the 40s.
What really differentiates Mackendrick from Lean is twofold. The first is that Mackendrick's feature film directing career started at Ealing Studios, the small production company mostly known for comedies (one of his early films there, Mandy, is an outright drama, though), and the second reason is that Mackendrick...gave up on making movies. After the 1967 bomb Don't Make Waves, which is mostly notable for being Sharon Tate's feature film debut, Mackendrick decided that he didn't have the skillset necessary to schmooze producers for film jobs, so he retired from filmmaking and became the first dean of the film school at CalArts, stepping down after a decade and teaching for the rest of his professional life. His most prominent student would probably end up being James Mangold, director of Ford v. Ferrari, Logan, and A Complete Unknown.
So, why would someone like Mackendrick give up on filmmaking to just teach?
Mackendrick got his first directing job through several years of working as a screenwriter at Ealing. Whisky Galore! was supposed to be directed by Ronold Neame, but he turned the assignment down, opening it up to those who wanted their shot at the directing job. Mackendrick showed up on location (an unusual setup for an Ealing film, necessary in this instance because all of their studio space was being used up), threw out the script completely, and worked with his pair of writers to come up with something new, using the same basic bones as the original script. It was a success, a sort of based on real life tale of a small island community, cut off from all booze during rationing in the middle of the war, suddenly being granted great bounty in the form of a cargo ship crashing just off shore, full of whisky.
And Mackendrick's time at Ealing was largely managing these kinds of productions to different degrees of success. The Man in the White Suit and The Ladykillers both feature very different performances from Alec Guinness in his prime (the second film is an inspired Alistair Sim impression), but the common hand across all of these accomplished films, which include the lesser but entertaining works of Mandy, the story of a deaf girl, and The Maggie, a farce with a more serious minded ending about a cargo ship not up for the task it gets, is Mackendrick's. They're all well-made, with strong scripts, and show a young director with a strong eye, a hand for comedy, good relationships with actors, and command of narrative.
And then, he went to America.
Hecht-Hill-Lancaster
One of the most important independent producing partnerships in the 50s, the final years of the studio era, was the company formed by Harold Hecht, James Hill, and Burt Lancaster, and they snatched up the promising young director from Scotland (actually, Mackendrick was born in Boston, just raised on Glasgow) to direct the adaptation of Ernest Lehman's novelette Tell Me About It Tomorrow!. Lehman was hired originally as the screenwriter, but had to leave the production with about a month left in pre-production. HHL hired Clifford Odets to do the final rewrites, which everyone assumed would be a quick job, but encouraged by Mackendrick, the rewrite process went all the way through the entire production.
And that's indicative of a major problem Mackendrick had when it came to his production approach. He wanted to take his time. Time always equals money, and when you spend $1 million on the production of Sweet Smell of Success, a major investment for an independent production company, and that film actually loses $400,000 upon its original release, it's going to cause friction with those producers. Which it did.
When I do these surveys of a filmmaker's work, I tend to avoid biography as I go through the films. I want to figure out the films, and I don't usually care that much about the people themselves. However, there's a six year gap between Sweet Smell of Success and his next film, Sammy Going South, and it's important.
HHL wasn't done with Mackendrick after the financial disappointment of Sweet Smell of Success. They had little but good things to say about the exacting filmmaker, and they greenlit his next film, The Devil's Disciple, a project that originally attracted Mackendrick to work with HHL. However, HHL fired Mackendrick from the adaptation of the George Bernard Shaw play (replaced with Guy Hamilton) after a month of production. That's a setback, but it wasn't the only one.
He was also the original director of The Guns of Navarone, but was fired a week before production started in 1960.
He spent the next three years in the wilderness until one of the original producers from Ealing, Hal Mason, hired him to direct an adaptation of the W.H. Canaway novel, Sammy Going South, a story about a ten year old boy walking from the Suez Canal to South Africa after his parents are killed in a bomb attack. I genuinely think this movie is really good, but it also represented a setback for Mackendrick. The American distributors recut and cut down the film so much, taking out so much of the running time that they had to commission a new score to fit the film while retitling it A Boy Ten Feet Tall (I'll be honest, I prefer the American title).
If I were Mackendrick, I'd be exhausted and frustrated at this point.
Final Films
Mackendrick didn't quite give up after Sammy Going South. He made two more films. The first, A High Wind in Jamaica has many elements that make it look like, on the surface, a live-action Disney film from the era. Six kids in the late 19th century get kidnapped by pirates and must warm their icy hearts. Except, Mackendrick, working from the novel by Richard Hughes, goes darker with more child danger than the implied genre connection would indicate. The film is pretty good with a near-manic performance by Anthony Quinn and a noteworthy early performance from James Coburn.
However, you can just feel that he's lost with his final film, Don't Make Waves, an anti-beach party movie that reunited him with his Sweet Smell of Success star Tony Curtis. Curtis plays a man who arrives in California with nothing, gets wooed by two women (one of whom is Claudia Cardinale) while lusting after a third (the aforementioned Sharon Tate). It's supposed to be a comedy, but it's weirdly...not funny from the guy who made The Ladykillers, and it ends with a big special effects sequence where the underlying dramatic point is that the materialistic beach life is empty and without meaning.
I mean...no wonder it didn't make much money at the box office and people haven't rushed to defend it over the years. And the reality of the production, which Tate called not particularly pleasurable, was enough to just get Mackendrick to stop making films altogether.
Themes
All this is fine and good, but did he actually, you know, inject something personal into his films? Did he just make generic entertainments that anyone could have made with his skill, or did he have some unique perspective that seeped into everything?
It's the latter. He was a filmmaker who, in his own small way, pulled productions towards his own thematic concerns. And that really centers on the ideas of corruption of authority contrasted with portraits of innocence with really interesting variations. The first is his first film, Whisky Galore! where he's on record as actually feeling more akin to the antagonist of the film, the very Scottish authority figure out to ruin everyone's fun by getting them to turn over the whisky they took from a shipwreck. In The Ladykillers, the innocent Mrs. Wilberforce gets to face the group of thieves taking up temporary residence in her house. In The Maggie, the powerful magnate who tries to buy everyone ends up learning the value of a smaller existence through the pratfalls of the boating crew he accidentally hires.
He's one of those filmmakers that doesn't have a very distinct visual flair (he filmed very handsomely and very classically), but actually did bend films to what he wanted to say. The problem is that he just...stopped making movies, so his body of work is so small and so much is in comedy, which no one really takes seriously, so he never really had the time to develop the ideas and people are dismissive of his comedies as just comedies not worthy of actual serious consideration.
In Retrospect
I know enough about the filmmaking process to understand that the management of a filmset is difficult and draining. That it takes, often, 16-hour days to manage departments, film scenes, deal with actors and problems on set, and that's after you've secured funding to get everyone in place. The schmoozing with studio heads, producers, and independent money sources just to get that set together in the first place is a whole other set of skills. A modern example to point to would be Terry Gilliam who spends years between productions, traveling around Europe begging for people for money. And that's simply a different skillset.
And a guy who runs off to academia in order to not deal with it obviously doesn't want to exercise that skillset. To bring in another modern example, I think of Peter Weir, the Australian filmmaker who simply gave up filmmaker a few years after the release of his final movie, The Way Back, when he grew tired of dealing with producers and actors who demanded things from him (Ethan Hawke knows the particular actor that ticked off Weir, but he's not sayin' who).
So, Mackendrick retreated to a safe space where he could think about the craft, help people with their own craft, and still affect things for decades more. Don't Make Waves was released in 1967, and he kept teaching at CalArts until his death in 1991 of emphysema.
It's easy to sit on the sidelines, decades after his death, never having dealt with his professional troubles myself, and demand that he pick himself up, rub some dirt on it, and go back to entertaining me. So, I'm not going to shake my fist at a dead man. Instead, I will thank him. His was a consummate craftsman who understood moviemaking at a level that I never will. If he had made 10-20 more films, he'd be much more widely recognized as a master of the form, but his limited output also limits his appeal to a certain degree. He doesn't have the visual distinctiveness of a Stanley Kubrick to get him over that hump, either.
Plus, you know, most of his well-known films are comedies, and no one respects that.
But I do. Mackendrick was a master at the form, and he should be celebrated more.
The Man in the White Suit (Rating 4/4) Review "Mackendrick had a writing credit on this, and he shepherded a completely new script once on location on the former film, so it's safe to say that he's putting himself into these films, and I'm seeing the beginnings of something...interesting. And surprisingly dark considering the comic nature of his first two films." [Library]
Mandy (Rating 3/4) Full Review "Handsome, well-acted, and really surprisingly involving, Mandy is very much worthwhile." [Library]
The Maggie (Rating 3/4) Full Review "This is not some grand piece of cinema, but it's a nice bit of populist cinema that is worthy of discovery." [Amazon Prime]
The Ladykillers (Rating 4/4) Full Review "It's a treasure, a gem of British comedy. It might be Mackendrick's best film, but I've seen so little of what comes that it's just hard to imagine him topping this." [Personal Collection]
Sweet Smell of Success (Rating 3/4) Full Review "And Mackendrick manages everything with real skill and intelligence, creating this propulsive narrative dripping with tension without losing sight of humanity at the same time. It's a real triumph of filmmaking. [Personal Collection]
Sammy Going South (Rating 3.5/4) Full Review "IThat the American version (retitled A Boy Ten Feet Tall, a title actually much prefer) cut out a bunch doesn't really surprise me, but I don't think I'd want to cut much. This is very good as it is." [Youtube]
High Wind in Jamaica (Rating 3/4) Full Review "II do think a two-hour and ten-minute long version of this would probably work better than the one-hour and forty-minute version, but the abbreviated cut we have is a solid little entertainment that demonstrates Mackendrick's skill." [Youtube]
Contact
Email any suggestions or questions to thejamesmadison.aos at symbol gmail dot com.
I've also archived all the old posts here, by request. I'll add new posts a week after they originally post at the HQ.
My next post will be on 12/13, and it will be about something. Not sure yet.
Welcome hobbyists! Ahoy! Pull up a chair and sit a spell with the Horde in this little corner of the interweb. This is the mighty, mighty, mighty officially sanctioned Ace of Spades Hobby Thread. A spin of the Ace of Spades Wheel of Hobbies (TM) landed on boating.
Last week's RV life theme spurred some to suggest that RV life was like boating life because of the ability to take your home with you.
Are you thinking "I don't know much about boats, I don't swim, and I still have JAWS trauma, but I am curious about boating. I'm eager to learn more. I can't wait to get into the content!" I knew it. Enjoy.
As per usual Hobby Thread etiquette, keep this thread limited to hobbying. All (legal) hobbying is welcome - even if you're into hording Compute! magazines and playing Hunt the Wumpus. However, politics, current events and religious debates can live in threads elsewhere. Pants are optional but swimsuits or board shorts are recommended. Puns are welcome and encouraged.
Play nice. Don't be a troll and do not feed the trolls.
***
TRex is not wise in the ways of boats. I have never owned a boat. Nobody has nicknamed me "Admiral" or "Commodore." I understand they have a charm and have heard the classic adage of the happiest two days for a boat owner are the day of purchase and the day of sale. I have also heard the familiar advice of better to have a friend with a boat than have a boat yourself.
I also don't understand the difference between a boat and a ship. Seems like a ship is a bigger boat, but maybe that's what they teach in the Navy. The best explanation I could find on the interweb is: "A ship can hold a boat. A boat can't hold a ship." That doesn't explain a u-boat (or maybe it does).
Looking for help from the nautical Morons in the gray boxes on this one. If you're not nautical, you are welcome to join and further confuse things. Morons are particularly susceptible to canoe accidents, so be careful on this thread.
***
I believe that JackStraw sent these photos. I think he built this boat. I don't know because my notes are bad and I can't find the purported original email. If I'm correct, perhaps he will join and tell his tale. If I'm incorrect, here are two random pictures of a boat with no context or story at all.
***
Mandatory content for this theme.
***
***
There are roughly a bazillion videos on YT about boating in all its forms. There are enough to give RV life videos a run for the volume award. Given my small dino brain and short arms, I've attempted to select a few of the less obvious videos for reasons of variety and novelty. I've also selected a few that might intrigue hobbyists in general.
***
Handmade means handmade:
***
Wow. A wood whisperer. This is fascinating.
***
The 3D modeling for this video is only surpassed by how impressive it was to design and build ships like this in period.
***
This qualifies as eccentric (and a little crazy) but I'm glad the world is big enough to accommodate the eccentrics. Long, long video so save this one for later. Serious skills and a LOT of labor but it is here cause it involves a boat. I really felt for the guy when he unexpectedly found 374 bronze screws filled with epoxy and plywood epoxied to tongue and groove boards (start at the 33:50 mark). Full disclosure - this episode has some boat restoration but a lot of other woodworking. Youtube may be a lot of things but it gives a platform for creators like this that wouldn't easily exist elsewhere.
***
Maybe we'll stick with something on a smaller scale.
***
***
Random hobbying, but finally found a good use for broccoli.
***
How interesting can re-engineering a tape measure be? Turns out, very interesting!
***
I suspect that some among the Horde may have made an Airfix Spitfire plastic scale model. You will appreciate this:
***
Did you miss the Hobby Thread last week? We did an RV life theme. The comments may be closed, but you can re-live the content.
***
Notable comments from last week:
Bonus MoMe news:
***
Words of wisdom:
"Because despite all our troubles, when things are grim out in that wide round world of ours, that's when it's really important to have a good hobby." Posted by: tankascribe at June 22, 2024 07:41 PM (HWxAD).
***
If you have trouble finding something in the content or comments that resonates with you, contribute something from your personal hobbying. We will feature a different theme next time. What are you hobbying? We love showing off Horde hobbying. Send thoughts, suggestions and photos of your hobbying to moronhobbies at protonmail dot com. Do mighty things.
You may recall that last week, I said that we had a sick pup. Well, on Sunday, he crossed the Rainbow Bridge. He had been almost deaf for some time and had been developing some problems walking and eating, but then it was like his systems started to go into shut-down, over a rather short period of time. So alarming.
He started having honest-to-goodness seizures while we waited for a room to clear at the emergency vet office. Busy day for them. I think they gave him something for the seizures before it was time for his final farewell. He seemed calm then. He wanted lap time last week, which was not usual for him. Nose in the crook of an elbow or on a neck. He seemed to know.
This is a photo of Little Buddy on an old work table in the back yard in 2014. He liked to eat there, where the other dogs did not go. Sometimes he channeled a meerkat. But he had a minor seizure disorder that made him sort of blank out and we started to worry that he would fall off the table, so we took it down. That's a pomegranate tree in the next door lot hanging over the fence.
This is Little Buddy with his biggest friend, Troy. Troy had been a street dog and Little Buddy had been a street puppy. They both had beautiful eyes and soft, floppy ears that kept them from looking too dignified. We lost Troy years ago, and we hope that they are having a nice reunion. Our remaining dog, Curly, looks for his brother when he goes outside. Little Buddy was bigger than Curly, but Curly was the alpha dog. He misses escorting him to dinner.
We hoomans suddenly miss the other dogs we have lost - not just Little Buddy. Farewell, friends.
* * *
Hi KT,
Here's Purry Mason, Publius' princeling, sitting in the garage window.
Miley
So dignified! And observant.
* * *
&&&
I had a stray kitten show up in the yard, mostly lurking around for a day, which is not unusual since all the neighbors have cats, but the next day she came in the kitchen door and started eating out of the cat bowl.
I have put flyers out, posted on facebook, left notice with the local vets, the Humane Society and the local cat adoption, and I have had no response.
I know someone really misses her since she is so sweet, but after a week I am starting to hope no one claims her, she has really calmed my other tom kitten down. "calmed down" is a relative term, of course, since they spend most of their play time boiling around the house
We are calling her Becca.
kindltot
Another sweetie.
* * *
Rosie is our rescue Briard. She is sweet natured but full of energy.She just had her 5th birthday. She is vigilantly watching for animals invading our back yard.
Chopper
Love Rosie's face.
* * *
Here's a pic of my mini-golden retriever at his second birthday party. Dubby is a very good boy! His "cake" is liverwurst with bacon. He didn"t give me a piece.
Farmer Bob
* * *
Thank you for sharing your pets and animal photos and stories with us today.
If you would like to send pet and/or animal stories, links, etc. for the Ace of Spades Pet Thread, the address is:
petmorons at protonmail dot com
Remember to include the nic or name by which you wish to be known when you comment at AoSHQ, or let us know if you want to remain a lurker.
As we approach Thanksgiving, a special feature on hazelnuts from 58Mikie!
Hi KT!
I want to say I enjoy Ace of Spades each and every day, with all contributors kicking it....From my standpoint, being involved with Oregon agriculture for my entire life, I particularly enjoy your "gardening" contribution!
Picture attached is a Hazelnut tree(Corylus avellana) from our orchards in Western Oregon's Willamette Valley. We have grown Hazelnuts here since 1939.
The Willamette Valley in Oregon grows 99% of the Hazelnut produced in the United States, although particularly this year (more later), Oregon's production may reach only 10 percent of total world production.
The main growing areas for Hazelnuts (I grew up calling them Filberts..."Farmers grow Filberts, people sell Hazelnuts".) are countries primarily in the northern hemisphere slightly above or below the 45th latitude, with a semi-marine climate....e.g. Turkey on the Black Sea, the largest producer, followed this year by either Chile or Oregon. The country of Georgia produces hazelnuts (Black Sea, also see Hilary Rodham Clintons brother investing in Georgia in Hazelnuts in the past), as does Azerbaijan, Italy (the past number two producer, and home to mega hazelnut using company Ferrero).
For scale, Turkey produces Hazelnut crops each year in the 500k tons to 800k ton level. The world in normal years north of one million tons of hazelnuts. Oregon the year, perhaps 120,000 tons.
As a fifty year + veteran of the Oregon hazelnut industry, I have seen some changes. For many years, our main variety of Hazelnuts was "Barcelona". A very large tree with large quality Hazelnuts. However, in 1986, a fungal disease called Eastern Filbert Blight-EFB- was found in the main growing regions of Oregon. The disease will eventually kill the tree, although much better fungicides are slowing the inevitability of the tree dying. During this time Oregon State University and its Hazelnut breeding program, under Dr. Shawn Mehlenbacher, have developed Hazelnut trees by traditional breeding with genes for EFB resistance.
During much of my farming career Oregon had about 30 thousand acres of Hazelnuts. Now with the "new" resistant trees, Oregon has nearly 100k acres producing Hazelnuts. Ferrero the big Italian conglomerate, I hear, would like another 100k acres here in Oregon producing Hazelnuts...
You know Ferrero produces Nutella....certainly a world wide phenomenon...I understand that Ferrero uses some 25-30 % of all Hazelnuts produced in the world.
This company has invested heavily in Turkey (besides their home company of Italy....and Chile).
As Turkey has been the world leader of Hazelnut (Findik) production for a long time, it is part of their national identity. During my time it has been my understanding, that the average Hazelnut farm in Turkey was about three acres (see production numbers above). Growers in Turkey mainly pick their production by hand, dry and sort the crop on blue tarps in the sun and deliver in large bags to the market or warehouses. In Oregon, my son and I do 100 acres with machinery, etc,.
This year, on April 11th, Turkey had a "deep freeze" in much of its vast agricultural lands. ( I have been there three times -a great place to visit, but.....the politics.
Hazelnuts are part of politics there and I have been in small room listening to Erdogan speaking...more than 20 years ago). The temperature in the hazelnut "hills"south of the Black Sea experienced 5 degrees F with the trees in full leaf; a bad crop disaster(also Turkish apricots were hammered and citrus was affected too). In addition, this area is "plagued" by a bug we in Oregon call the stink bug, which in Turkey is called the "skunk" bug. It does tremendous damage to the hazelnuts there. The Hazelnut market is currently abuzz....
FWIW, we are happy....we had EFB early on and had to pull out of all our orchard and replant with new varieties, which are now just producing...with a good market.
Several more photos to come.....
Thank you for all that you do....
58Mikie
Lots of good information there. I planted a couple of filbert relatives in my parent's yard years ago. The nuts are smaller than the ones you grow.
*
This is the pollen structure for Hazelnuts, the "catkin"..... a few blooms in the picture too.
As the winter proceeds, these catkins elongate, dry out, an release pollen. The main producing Hazelnut varieties also produce pollen but are self in-compatible. Pollenizers of different pollen "shed times" must be dispersed throughout the orchards...
*
A hazelnut bloom....in Winter. The pollen must be dry to blow in the air and land on the bloom, but following that movement of the pollen, high humidity is great (rain) to set the pollen in the bloom. The pollen must travel through the bloom with actual fertilization not occurring until May....
The pollenization details are complex. One of these days we'll try to post the little video of shaking a pollen tree in an orchard on a favorable day.
*
Lady Bug in the winter near a "catkin"
VORACIOUS, consumers of aphids in our orchards...we used to spray for aphids....not for the last twenty years...we love these bugs!
Juvenile form of Lady Bug...they eat aphids too!
Better than those stink bugs!
*
The Hazelnut production in July...we start harvesting in mid September....this is the variety "Yamhill"...the county we live in and one of the original counties (1843) in the Oregon territory..
Thank you
Take care
Thank you for teaching us so much. We're ready for some hazelnut treats now!
*
Gardens of The Horde
Anything going on in your garden?
*
Hope everyone has a nice weekend.
If you would like to send photos, stories, links, etc. for the Saturday Gardening Thread, the address is:
ktinthegarden at g mail dot com
Remember to include the nic or name by which you wish to be known at AoSHQ, or let us know if you want to remain a lurker.
There are many things for which we can be grateful as we approach Thanksgiving. This week, I ran across a new one. I am grateful that I am not in Tajekistan. There are some attractive things about this country of about ten million people, but for me the negatives outweigh the positives. I don't want to climb Lenin Peak, even. I think border clashes are possible nearby.
This is one thing I found interesting about the country at first:
Tajikistan curbs the influence of islam and promotes Ancient Persian heritage as a state policy. This includes banning Arabic names, cousin marriages and long beards. It also includes promoting native clothes and dance. The West should take note.
This costuming is rather attractive compared to what you see in Iran these days:
From the beginning of this video, the celebration of the preservation of ancient Persian culture seems to be a big deal. Even though Russian is an official language in Tajikistan. A backstory begins to emerge: there were Arab invasions.
The suppression of Islam comes with the suppression of other religions. The government officially prefers atheism. The history of Jews in the country is interesting. Hardly any left now.
Actually, the government suppresses a lot of things. From Freedom House:
Overview
The authoritarian regime of President Emomali Rahmon, who has ruled since 1992, severely restricts political rights and civil liberties. The political opposition and independent media have been devastated by a sustained campaign of repression, and the government exerts tight control over religious expression and activity. Wealth and authority are concentrated in the hands of Rahmon and his family.
Key Developments in 2024
Tens of thousands of Tajikistani migrant workers returned home or were deported from Russia in the months after a March terrorist attack at a concert hall in Moscow that killed nearly 150 people. The attack was claimed by an Afghanistan-based terrorist group, Islamic State Khorasan; Russian authorities attributed it to Tajikistani migrant workers and attempted to link them to Ukraine. The ensuing crackdown on migrants in Russia prompted many to leave, and those who remained faced increasing pressure to enlist in the Russian military.
In July, Tajikistani and Kyrgyzstani delegations reported progress on the delimitation of their shared border. . .
Legislation adopted by the parliament in May and signed by the president in June banned the import, sale, and wearing of clothes that are deemed to conflict with “national culture.” Violations would be punishable by fines. The law also imposed restrictions on certain religious, cultural, and family celebrations.
Independent journalists continued to face persecution during the year. For example, Ahmad Ibrohim, editor in chief of the newspaper Payk, was arrested August on dubious charges of bribery, extortion, and extremism. The outcome of a closed-door trial was pending at year’s end.
Tajikistani authorities persisted in their extensive efforts to detain and punish political dissidents who had sought refuge abroad. . .
So, are you also grateful not to be in Tajikistan? Or Iran, where the ancient Persian culture in Tajikistan mostly does not seem to have survived?
Any other countries you are particularly grateful not to be in today?
Other things for which I am grateful
I am grateful today that I am not Candace Owens
BREAKING: Candace Owens appears to have been PRANKED on air by a tip.
In yesterday’s episode, Candace read out an email from someone claiming to have inside knowledge about why her Egyptian plane landed in Delaware. The tip said all directions pointed to the address: One Rodney… pic.twitter.com/yDVrLv28WA
John Hinderaker: The Week In Pictures: Epstein Boomerang Edition
For the most part it was a pretty quiet week. Many longstanding stories continued to make headlines: the UN adopted President Trump’s peace plan for Gaza; the administration’s crackdown on illegal immigration continued, as did the Democrats’ lawlessness; and there were various shutdown post mortems.
These topics did not gain the attention of meme-makers. Rather, this was the week of Jeffrey Epstein. Or, rather, the week when the Democrats got their wish, thousands of pages of Epstein documents were released, and the upshot was–as we already knew–that Epstein, a Democrat, had Democratic friends and hated Donald Trump. So the whole thing, from the Democrats’ standpoint, was an exploding cigar:
The Classical Saturday Coffee Break & Prayer Revival
—Misanthropic Humanitarian
[H/T Blake]
*****
Good morning boys and girls and everything in between. Before we enter the Prayer Revival just a few housekeeping matters to go over. (Rulz for those of you in New Ulm)
1) This is an open thread. Feel free to lurk, opine and/or bloviate.
2) Be kind, be nice. Not just a suggestion.
3) Running with sharp objects is frowned upon.
4) Have a great weekend and a Happy Thanksgiving on Thursday.
*****
“God grant me the serenity
To accept the things I cannot change;
Courage to change the things I can;
And wisdom to know the difference.
Living one day at a time;
Enjoying one moment at a time;
Accepting hardships as the pathway to peace;
Taking, as He did, this sinful world
As it is, not as I would have it;
Trusting that He will make all things right
If I surrender to His Will;
So that I may be reasonably happy in this life
And supremely happy with Him
Forever and ever in the next. Amen.”
Please submit any prayer requests to me, “Annie’s Stew” at apaslo at-sign hotmail dot com. Prayer requests are generally removed after four weeks unless we receive an update.
Prayer Requests:
9/28 - Teresa in Fort Worth gave an update: It has been 1 year since Teresa started “down the cancer rabbit hole”. She sends her thanks for the prayers as they have buoyed her and her family through this year. She has been blessed to exceed the original 6-12 months predicted, by the grace of God – and the prayers of many people. Her next CT scan is in November, and the surgeon is pretty sure that her tumors will be small enough to remove/destroy.
11/10 Update – Everything is fine, but it looks like the cancer is starting to figure out a way around the medication – something they knew would probably happen around this time in the protocol. More news will be coming soon – possibly surgery in late Dec/early Jan.
11/14 Update – Surgery is scheduled for 12/11. She should be able to travel for Christmas.
10/2 – Bluebell passed along an update: grammie winger sends her gratitude for all the prayers – she feels they are working. On Oct 6 she will be starting a cancer treatment program because her doctors are “cautiously optimistic” that they can give her some more time. Monday she gets the port, followed by 6 hours of chemo infusion on Tuesday. The Rev is doing better because now he has some hope. Please pray for her as she starts this treatment program because in her words, “prayer changes things”.
10/18 Update – grammie winger sent an update, that she has had her first chemo treatment. There were no side effects. She noted “God is very kind.”
11/8 Update – grammie winger posted that chemo is “kicking my butt and it’s hard to think”.
10/4 – Skip requested prayers for his dad, who fell at church back in August, hitting his head. He fell again at home and has had back pain since then. He is going in for more tests on 10/8.
10/11 Update – Dad has a brace to wear and has pain medication, so is doing OK for now. He will need an outpatient procedure soon for an injection in his spine to fill a void. Continuing prayers will help.
10/18 Update – Dad is in the hospital, needing some blood clots cleared up, and will soon have the outpatient operation for his back.
10/25 Update – Dad was released from the hospital and is in a rehab center near his home.
10/22 – Pennsyltucky requested prayers for his dad, who underwent cancer surgery on 10/21. Everything seems to have gone well (they’re confident they got it all!) but due to his age, his hospital stay and convalescence will be longer than usual. Dad is doing well, is awake and alert. A full recovery is anticipated but it will take a while. Thank you so much.
11/6 Update – Pennsyltucky’s dad is out of the hospital and is now convalescing at home with the aid of home care nurse visits. He’s not able to walk very well, having spent so long in a hospital bed, but he’s in good spirits and improving daily. Thanks for your prayers!
10/25 – M&B would like prayers for M's sister. Suddenly, she got dizzy, and with no other symptoms, was diagnosed with a stage 4 glioblastoma brain cancer. Surgeons said that they were able to remove most of it but gave her an 18-24 month survival. She's just finished the first round of chemo and radiation, and she just feels awful. She has that "deer in the headlights" look, since this all happened so fast, with no real symptoms! M&B have been searching through all the recent news about other medicinal options that are working for this type of cancer. We are grateful for all prayers!
10/25 – FenelonSpoke asked for prayers for her retired organist Jessie, whose dear daughter, S, died of cancer recently. Also prayers for Korean War vet, R, who has cancer and is not expected to live long.
10/27 – Polliwog the ‘Ette asked for prayers for her youngest daughter, "LK", who needs prayers for safety and peace, and her best friend "C" for health and that stress not cause a flare up of psoriatic arthritis as they and another roommate work with the police and the landlord to have the 4th roommate "M" evicted because she is threatening them and making the living situation a nightmare. “M” is bipolar and medicating with alcohol. Prayers for her healing and that she find salvation from the self-destructive path she's on would also be appreciated.
11/8 Update – The situation still needs lots of prayer. LK sand C have been staying at a hotel to avoid M, who wants to fight whenever she sees them. M is supposed to move out the end of Dec. but that seems like a very long time when C still needs to attend class and keep her arthritis in check.
11/5 – Mary Poppins’ Practically Perfect Piercing said he could use a prayer or two. He has a pain in her head which, it seems, is occipital neuralgia. It’s not fatal, thank heavens, but is painful until a proper treatment course is settled upon. Many thanks.
11/12 Update – Pronouns corrected above.
11/6 - D sent an update on his wife Susan, and her battle with cancer. He sent his thanks to everyone for the prayers. They are helping and much appreciated. Susan had an infection which is being treated, but her sodium levels are bad again. She will be sent home soon, but is on restrictive fluids until this is cleared up. The good news is that she has gained some weight back and her voice is much stronger now. Thank you, and please keep up the prayers. They appreciate everyone!
11/20 Update – Susan is out of the hospital, after 2 weeks. For the first time in months, she doesn’t have any drainage tubes. Chemo is on hold for the next 2 weeks, to give her time to rest, recover, and gain some weight back. Thank you, everyone, for your prayers – please continue them!
11/7 – BarelyScaryMary requested prayers for a friend, RJ, who is having heart issues. She will likely get stents or a bypass soon. Prayers are needed for RJ’s recovery, and also that she is able and willing to make the lifestyle changes necessary for her health.
11/13 Update – Stents were not an option for RJ, so she needs a bypass. She is waiting for the surgery to be scheduled. She is apprehensive about the surgery and recovery. Prayers are also needed for BarelyScaryMary’s dad, who is also having heart problems. Her mom could use prayers, too, as she is watching her husband of 60 years decline.
11/8 – Dash my lace wings had an urgent request for prayers for a co-worker and friend who is hospitalized with sepsis. It is extremely resistant to antibiotics and has attached to the artificial heart valve she got less than a year ago. Her situation is tenuous.
11/15 Update – The co-worker is healing. She was released from the hospital and is on IV antibiotics for 6 weeks. Thank you for your prayers. We nearly lost her.
11/8 – Farmer Bob asked for prayers for his Uncle Richard’s MIL who passed away on 11/7, and for Richard’s wife Linda. Linda’s putting on a brave face and it was not unexpected, but it’s hard to lose your mother.
11/14 – Halfhand requested prayers for a sister whose husband recently passed away unexpectedly in his sleep. They had just upended their lives to move from California to Tennessee; now she is all alone.
11/15 – Smell the Glove asked for prayers for an 81 year-old aunt who has colon cancer. She is stopping chemo, since it’s not working and it’s tiring her out. Doctors will determine if any other treatment is proper.
11/15 – Sponge posted an update on the “First lady”. She is doing OK from the surgery pain-wise, however it appears her compromised immune system from chemo is susceptible to viruses. She has been spiking a fever all weekend.
For submission guidelines and other relevant info, please contact Annie's Stew, who is managing the prayer list. You can contact her at apaslo at-sign hotmail dot com. If you see a prayer request posted in a thread comment, feel free to copy and paste it and e-mail it to Annie's Stew. She tries to keep up with the requests in the threads, but she's not here all of the time, so she may not see it unless you e-mail it to her. Please note: Prayer requests are generally removed after four weeks or so unless we receive an update.
2 Corinthians 4:8-9
We are troubled on every side, yet not distressed; we are perplexed, but not in despair, persecuted, but not forsaken; cast down, but not destroyed.
During an all-hands meeting earlier this month, Google's AI infrastructure head Amin Vahdat told employees that the company must double its serving capacity every six months to meet demand for artificial intelligence services, reports CNBC. Vahdat, a vice president at Google Cloud, presented slides showing the company needs to scale "the next 1000x in 4-5 years."
That would put Google Cloud Services at around $60 trillion in revenue per year, more than double the entire US GDP.
Where do you expect the money to come from to fund this insanity?
While a thousandfold increase in compute capacity sounds ambitious by itself, Vahdat noted some key constraints: Google needs to be able to deliver this increase in capability, compute, and storage networking "for essentially the same cost and increasingly, the same power, the same energy level," he told employees during the meeting.
Oh. Magic.
"It won't be easy but through collaboration and co-design, we're going to get there."
No, you're not, and everyone knows you're not.
Progress over the last seven years, at truly massive cost, has been around 60% better AI performance per watt annually. Chip improvements, algorithm improvements, and manufacturing improvements combined.
You're asking your team to boost that to 300% overnight.
This won't even scratch the surface if the AI bubble keeps demanding hardware on its current trajectory.
And the memory makers aren't going to build new factories any faster because only three of them survived when the last bubble burst.
Speaking of idiot tech executives, the CEO of the world's most popular game, Roblox, sat down for an interview with the New York Times. It did not go well. (Kotaku)
Asked how the company was dealing with its pedophile problem, CEO David Baszucki responded:
"We think of it not necessarily just as a problem, but an opportunity as well."
Remarkably, things actually went downhill from there.
"Unfortunately, one of the three trustees has irretrievably lost their private key, an honest but unfortunate human mistake, and therefore cannot compute their decryption share," the IACR said. "As a result, Helios is unable to complete the decryption process, and it is technically impossible for us to obtain or verify the final outcome of this election."
An entirely understandable mistake, assuming all these people are idiots.
WhatsApp allows anyone who knows your phone number to look up your public details on the app, assuming you have an account.
So what's to prevent someone from just iterating through all the 63 billion of so potential phone numbers in the world and finding all the people with WhatsApp accounts?
That's the problem with systems on this scale. The researchers were probing the system with 100 million API requests per hour, for weeks, from a single IP address, and nobody noticed.
And they've already fucked it. Though it seems the TOS clause about reverse-engineering was already in place, the rest of the changes pushed through yesterday are a complete train wreck for its customer base.
Howdy everyone! Welcome to the Friday ONT. This is my last ONT before Thanksgiving, so I hope everyone has a safe and joyful holiday. Now, let's bring on the memes!
Podcast: Jim Lakely of Heartland Institute joins CBD for a discussion of their recent polling that shows a majority of 18-39s want socialism, the Epstein files, what will Mamdani do, and more!
Podcast: Buck Throckmorton joins us for a wide-ranging discussion about the cultural and business shift away from the insanity of EVs and Climate Religion, his calm perspective on last week's election, Tucker is a toad, and more!
Our Favorite British Couple Exploring True America Experiences Flora-Bama And Sees A Side Of The Deep South Rarely Seen. [dri]
Tucker Carlson claims that it's weird that Ted Cruz is interested in the massacre of Christians by Nigerian Muslims, because he has "no track record of being interested in Christians," then blows off the massacre of Christians by Nigerian Muslims, saying it might or might not be a real concern Tucker Carlson enjoys using the left-wing tactic of "Tactical Ignorance" to avoid taking positions on topics. Is Hamas really a terrorist organization? Tucker can't say. He hasn't looked into it enough, but "it seems like a political organization to me." Are Muslims slaughtering Christians in Nigeria? Again, Tucker just doesn't know. He hasn't examined the evidence yet. He knows every Palestinian Christian who said he was blocked from visiting holy sites in Bethlehem, but he just hasn't had the time to look into the mass slaughter of Christians in Nigeria that has been going on since (checks watch) 2009. He doesn't know, so he can't offer an opinion. Wouldn't be prudent, you know? Don't rush him! He'll sift through the evidence at some point in the future and render an opinion sometime around 2044. Of course, if you need an opinion on Jewish Perfidy, he has all the facts at his fingertips and can give you a fully informed opinion pronto. Say, have you ever heard of the USS Liberty incident...? You'd think that the main issue for Tucker Carlson, who pretends to be so deeply concerned about Palestinian Christians being bullied by Jews in Israel (supposedly), would be the massacre of 185,000 Christians in Nigeria itself. But no, his main problem is that Ted Cruz is talking about it, "who has no track record of being interested in Christians at all." And then he just shrugs as to whether this is even a real issue or not.
Whatever we do we must never "divide the right," huh?
Tucker is attacking Ted Cruz for bringing the issue up because he's acting as an apologist for Jihadism, and he can't cleanly admit that Jihadists are killing any Christians, anywhere. There is no daylight between him and CAIR at this point.
One might conclude that Tucker Carlson himself isn't interested in the plight of Christians -- except as they can be used as a cudgel to attack Jews. Just gonna ask an Interesting Question myself -- why is it that Tucker Carlson's arguments all track with those shit out by Qatarian propaganda agents and the far left? That if Jews crush an ant underfoot it is worldwide news, but when Muslims slaughter Christians it elicits not even a vigorous shrug?
I once glimpsed Garth in the penumbra betwixt my wake and sleep. He was in my dream, standing afar, not looking my way, nor did he acknowledge me. But I felt seen. And that's when I knew I was a traveler on the right path. I'm glad he's still with us.
Greetings, Traveler. If you still have not experienced Garth Merenghi -- Author, Dream-weaver, Visionary, plus Actor -- the six episodes of his Darkplace are still available on YouTube and supposedly upscaled to HD. (Viewing it now, it doesn't appeared upscaled for shit.) I think the second episode, "Hell Hath Fury," is the best by a good margin. Try to at least watch through to that one. It's Mereghi's incisive but nuanced take on sexism.
Podcast: The elections! NYC, Virginia, New Jersey, Texas, California, and the future prospects of the Republican party...
Update on Scott Adams:
Scott Adams had approval for this cancer drug but they hadn't scheduled him to get it. He was taking a turn for the worse. Trump had told him to call if he needed anything, so he did. Talked to Don Jr (who is in Africa) , then RFK Jr, then Dr Oz. Someone talked to Kaiser and he was scheduled. Shouldn't have needed it but he did and he says it saved his life.
Posted by: Notsothoreau
