Not in this post, true, but in pretty much all her other ones.

But they do? Along with any other animal that happens to be nearby.

That is the one insect I will go out of my way to kill.

I’d say yes… except he does it to smart and digital watches too.

My snake likes to wrap around and ‘strangle’ watches. Not bracelets, just watches.

I always thought the fact that turning our heads too fast can give us strokes was rather inconvenient.

Yeah, but at least most of those still have multiple toes to spread the weight around. Horses decided to get rid of that completely.

He did get owned - but just to put things in perspective, conservatives who saw the video think he owned the kid, saying the ‘kid didn’t know what to say and so just walked away’.

These guys are so deep into their fantasies that they don’t see things the way sensible people do. At all. It’s important to keep in mind when talking to them that they are living in a totally different world.

Holy catfish, though, to some of the other stuff in there.

The Jan. 3, 2020, prayer was led by televangelist and White House spiritual adviser Paula White. She later came under fire after remarks she made about “satanic pregnancies” and miscarriages. Her words were: “We command all satanic pregnancies to miscarry right now.”

Then later she complains she was ‘taken out of context’. Sweetheart, I’m not sure that would be a rational statement even in context.

True, but wannabe ‘alpha men’ (I can never type that without snickering) do consider it a problem, for some reason.

The problem is there are no easy safe bike paths directly there; he would have to either ride out of his way to one or travel part of the way on narrow fast roads that have a lot of box-truck and semi-truck traffic. Or get on the freeway for a stretch, which is also bad in different ways.

The bike paths that there are, are pretty nice, but they’re more geared towards ‘enjoy a ride along the river’ and less towards ‘get from the inner city out and back again quickly’.

But yes, when he is willing to take those risks, it’s about a half-hour or so to get to work.

I’ve noticed this a lot in industrial areas; no-one seems to think you’d want to ride a bike there, so they don’t bother with infrastructure. Unless it’s in the inner city, but in that case it’s more a thing of happenstance since there are bike paths already surrounding the area so it’s less work to add a few connecting paths.

But that would disproportionately hit poor people. Generally they have to live farther out, where rents are cheaper, and in much of the US public transit is a pile of shit.

Hell, even in places where it isn’t it’s still painfully inconvenient. I live in a fairly transit-friendly city, and it takes my husband 45 minutes to an hour to get to work by transit, or 10-12 minutes by car.

Overly Sarcastic Productions did a great little piece on him and his work a while back.

He also put Dijon mustard on a hot dog once! The horror! The horror!

Seriously, I don’t know what’s worse: that they even made such a big deal of those ‘controversies’, or that both actually gained traction.

I dunno, maybe if they larp it hard enough they actually will become good people.

There used to be decent republicans in office; I’m old enough to remember some of them. Our former state treasurer was pretty awesome, for example. Sadly, even his daughter has been bit by the looney republican bug. So now we have a democrat in that position.

I probably would despise Star Wars too if I tried to make a good movie in that universe and kept getting micromanaged into the ground at every turn by clueless Disney execs.

He is a very good director, as his other films show. The problem was and still is in no way with him.

I hope every time he gets out of bed he steps on a Lego. And when he hops off it in pain, he hops onto another Lego. Every time he goes barefoot, he steps on a Lego. For the rest of his life.

On February 8, 1975, following the lineups, police arrested Simmons and Roberts, and they were charged with capital murder. However, Simmons testified that on December 30, 1974, he was in Harvey, Louisiana and spent the day playing pool with friends. His alibi was confirmed by four witnesses.

In January 2023, Simmons’s attorneys Joseph Norwood and John Coylefiled filed an amended application for post-conviction relief which cited the failure of the prosecution to disclose the police report which said that Brown had initially identified other two men and noted that in fact Brown had identified four other individuals during the eight lineup procedures. The motion also noted that in addition to the four witnesses who testified at the trial that Simmons was in Harvey, there were two other witnesses present who were to testify similarly but they did not after Simmons’s defense lawyer denied their testimony as cumulative. The petition included affidavits from five more people who said that they saw Simmons in Harvey at the time of the crime.

So convicted despite plenty of eyewitnesses saying he was somewhere else at the time. In addition, even the trial prosecutor thought he may have been wrongfully convicted:

In 1995, Robert Mildfelt, the trial prosecutor, wrote a letter to Simmons saying that the only witness [Brown] who identified him had wanted to think about the identification “overnight.” He wrote that Brown had described Simmons as more than six feet tall and over 200 pounds, “a physical description greatly different from Mr. Simmons [sic] stature at the time.

No word on why he put the man on trial with no evidence putting him at the scene and plenty of evidence putting him miles away. But really, we can all guess the reason.

Honestly? More education (and possibly more exposure) and less fetishization, although I’m not quite sure how to achieve the second one.

Back when my parents were in school, schools had shooting teams (my high school apparently had an award-winning women’s team), and my dad even brought a gun to school once to show to a teacher (it was an older gun and the teacher was a gun collector). They spent the whole of lunch period talking about how cool that old gun of grandpa’s was.

Because back then a gun was just a tool, and one more people had access to, since a lot of people were still out on the farm and such. My dad learned from a young age that guns were dangerous, and how to properly handle them, and pretty much all his classmates did too.

But then the Republicans started the, ‘we have to regulate!’ and the ‘but think of the children!’ nonsense because that was when the Black Panthers started going around armed, and a bunch of white people were suddenly uncomfortably aware that minorities could defend themselves from racial violence if they wanted to.

And then the Republican Party turned around and started making guns an ‘identity’ thing, so suddenly they became a symbol of Republican so-called ‘values’, and people began obsessing over them like they were rare jewels or some such nonsense. It didn’t help that the Democrats were happy to jump on the bandwagon as the ‘we’re totally against guns so you can tell we’re different from them!’ group to provide a pearl-clutching counterpoint.

And so now we’ve got, well, all the fetishized and forbidden-fruit bullshit. Guns are kind of seen almost like cigarettes on steroids: the cool and dangerous thing that all the rebels and ‘strong independent types’ have.

I’m a bit In despair as to how to get us to stop doing that. Certainly other nations, like Switzerland, have lots of guns and gun access and don’t have our problems. But they definitely don’t build identities around firearms either.

Edit to add: of course Switzerland has actual functional health care, including mental health care, so I imagine that helps.

They’ve done studies, and have found that guard rails actually make the problem worse. Gives people a sense of security and a false sense of bravado.

My grandmother was beaten in school for using her left hand. Then they tied her hand behind her to force her to write with her right hand. Being left-handed was the sign of the Devil in those days.

As a lefty myself, I’m glad they don’t do that anymore! Now they just leave us alone with our terrible smeared handwriting.