Tab Clearing...

• Leftovers


• Being an informed voter, or "All politics is local"


• May the First?

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Meme Dump!

Dawning Realization...

I came to Heinlein late. A friend loaned me her copy of Stranger in a Strange Land in the mid Nineties and over the course of the next ten years I pretty much acquired and devoured everything he'd ever sold in print.

Not too long ago I made a point of re-reading most of it and found that, from a reading satisfaction level, his juveniles held up best for me. At least on balance, my feelings about them were generally the same as they were when I initially read them, whereas my opinions on a great deal of his later novels had cooled over the decades since my enthusiastic first brushes.

This morning, while performing my morning deep thought ritual, it hit me...

When I first encountered those juveniles, they were already hopelessly quaint, both from a science as well as a societal standpoint. They were science fantasy, The Chronicles of Narnia but with Midwestern kids with rockets and rayguns, rather than English public school children with swords and castles. On the other hand, Job: A Comedy of Justice and The Cat Who Walks Through Walls were on the spinner rack in the grocery store where I had my first W-2 job.

Coming back to those books after a twenty or thirty year hiatus can make one feel disconnected. I didn't remember them feeling so old-fashioned and now I'm like the hypothetical GenZ'er that William Gibson envisioned reading Neuromancer for the first time, getting about a chapter in and thinking "Where are all the smartphones? I bet the plot will be about what happened to the phones."

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Star Wars Day

As everyone's favorite Jedi, Mister Spock always said...

No, seriously, have some actual Star Wars memes.

Monday Morning Memes!

Automotif DCXX...

Spotted this whimsical Volkswagen New Beetle ute conversion while dog sitting in New Hampshire recently.

10/10, no notes. I would definitely rock this.

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Meme Dump!

Everybody's Meme-ing for the Weekend!

To all who celebrate...

Happy Beltane!

Hooray, hooray! The first of May!

Outdoor fucking starts today!

(But as usual it do rain
So we fucks off indoors again.)

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Pain at the Pump

Gas in Indianapolis went up another forty cents overnight. Statewide average is now $4.80 a gallon for regular, here in Indy it's $4.99 pretty much everywhere. Monday it was $3.99 a gallon, and that was already higher than it’s been in years, and now it’s gone up another 25%, with more increases incoming. Bobbi filled her tank with the required premium earlier in the week and it set her back over eighty bucks.

Bring this up on social media and you'll hear from your friends in London or Oslo how that's cheap compared to what they're used to, but so what?

First, people structure their budgets and lives around the prices and wages where they live, not halfway around the globe. Second, at this rate people are going to add a GoFundMe to fill their tank in addition to the one they already have for hospital bills. (To which your Euro friend replies "Hospital bills?")

Public transit, health insurance, lengthy suburban commutes, student loan payments, et cetera et cetera... It’s why comparing how many drachmas per dram gas costs between countries is kinda pointless.

Meme Dump!

Automotif DCXIX...

This lovely old 1962 Buick Invicta will get photographed every time it drives by.

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Over the Hump Meme Dump!

Meme Dump!