Okay, well, the last time I made this joke it came true, so I’m going to throw some salt over my shoulder after I say it, but how about instead of that, we just give Russia about 20,000 square miles of Alaska. We can start with the entirety of the Aleutian Island chain (about 6,800 sq. miles), and then work out some chunk of the mainland for the rest. That seems reasonable.
And if that does come true, then by God I’m going to go out and buy a lottery ticket.
/nominativedeterminism
“If you build it, they won’t pull out when they come.”
Could they do the thing that airports do with geese, where they get a Labrador to run around and bark at the birds and the birds say, “Ehh… fuck this area” and leave of their own accord?
I haven’t used AeroPress, but I appreciate that the French press is equally useful for making both hot and cold brew coffee. Mine is all-metal and you could just about beat someone to death with it.
Electric kettle.
Bone conduction headphones.
Rechargeable head lamp.
Nice EDC knife.
Driving gloves.
A really good insulated cup.
French press.
Digital kitchen scale.
Slow cooker.
Conan the Barbarian (1982) has no right to be as good as it is. On paper, it’s a dumb sword and sorcery flick with a body builder who could barely speak English in the lead. But everyone involved does an incredible job, from the acting to the directing, to the score. It’s a crime that Destroyer trashed up the formula, and we never got Conan the King.
My mom made money as a lobbyist when I was a kid.
She lobbied on behalf of family farms that wanted to limit the use of bovine growth hormones, either because they had moral objections to pumping their cows full of steroids or because its use gave advantages to factory dairy farms over small family operations.
Lobbying is a disease on democracy, but there are moral cases for its existence in certain circumstances.
Fans of The The in absolute shambles.
Comparing the attacks and India’s response to 9/11 is apt because America’s response led to America wasting billions if not trillions of dollars fighting a series of wars that had the primary effect of making people hate us even more than they did before, and also led our national politics down an ever stupider road than we were on before and let us directly to the point where we have our own tinpot dictator.
If history should teach us anything, it’s that America’s response to 9/11 is the absolute opposite of what one should do when attacked, if one wants to have a better long-term outcome.
Boy asks Pope if his atheist father is in heaven.
Humility, patience, kindness, grace, and rationality. Would that we should have more leaders like him in the future.
I got cold-called by one of those “We’ll buy your house!” scam outfits one time asking if I was interested in selling my modest single-story, two bedroom / one bathroom house.
Me: Not really!
Them: Well, if you were going to, what price would you hope to get?
Me: You know what, let’s say five million dollars.
Them: Uh… is this the house at [my address]?
Me: Sure is!
Them: And… five million? You’re firm on that?
Me: Well, anything is negotiable, of course. I’ve got to go now, bye!
And I just really hope that I wasted a little bit more of their time that day, but if someone were to make a horrible paperwork error and accidentally offer me five million dollars for a house worth a fraction of that, that’s really on them, I’d say.
Aw, I remember hearing about these years ago and thinking that investing in a cask of booze sounded so much cooler and more real than investing hallucinatory financial instruments or whatever.
That doesn’t sound fair to Greenland if/when Trump loses.
/nottheonion
Named official envoy to… Romania, so that he can go back and pick right up where he left off, except now he’ll have diplomatic immunity.
Who’s got the quote from Discworld about the torturer?
Edit: Here it is:
It has to be said…there was little to laugh at in the cellar of the Quisition. Not if you had a normal sense of humor. There were no jolly little signs saying: You Don’t Have To Be Pitilessly Sadistic To Work Here But It Helps!!!
But there were things to suggest to a thinking man that the Creator of mankind had a very oblique sense of fun indeed, and to breed in his heart a rage to storm the gates of heaven.
The mugs, for example. The inquisitors stopped work twice a day for coffee. Their mugs, which each man had brought from home, were grouped around the kettle on the hearth of the central furnace which incidentally heated the irons and knives.
They had legends on them like A Present From the Holy Grotto of Ossory, or To The World’s Greatest Daddy. Most of them were chipped, and no two of them were the same.
And there were the postcards on the wall. It was traditional that, when an inquisitor went on holiday, he’d send back a crudely colored woodcut of the local view with some suitably jolly and risqué message on the back. And there was the pinned-up tearful letter from Inquisitor First Class Ishmale “Pop” Quoom, thanking all the lads for collecting no fewer than seventy-eight obols for his retirement present and the lovely bunch of flowers for Mrs. Quoom, indicating that he’d always remember his days in No. 3 pit, and was looking forward to coming in and helping out any time they were shorthanded.
And it all meant this: that there are hardly any excesses of the most crazed psychopath that cannot easily be duplicated by a normal, kindly family man who just comes in to work every day and has a job to do.
Vorbis loved knowing that. A man who knew that, knew everything he needed to know about people.
Take one of the most violently-contested parts of the Earth, a center of blood feuds that have been raging for, depending on how you count it, between eighty and six thousand years, a place that has become synonymous for “a location of endless conflict,” take that piece of real estate, enhance the violence, and then tell yourself you’re going to build a bunch of high-end real estate and invite rich assholes to move in.
What could possibly go wrong?