Meme Dump!

Brrr!

We’re stuck in an extended cold spell largely because of all snow to the south and west of us.

A couple days of southwesterly wind is what usually snaps us out of these, but wind out of TX/OK/AR is blowing across hundreds of miles of snow covered ground. Until they thaw, we aren’t going to get above freezing.

Depending on whose forecast you believe, it may be as late as next weekend before any of this starts to melt.

One thing I would not have predicted...

When I was five years old, if you told me that my opinions on Spaghetti-O's (actually Chef Boyardee products in general) and naps would swap places entirely, I would have thought you were fibbing.

These days, I'm a big fan of naps and not so much so with the Spaghetti-O's.

Meme Dump from the Frozen Wastes!

"At least it's an ethos..."

Employees at the surveillance company Palantir are apparently uneasy about one of the company's high profile clients:

In a Saturday thread on Slack discussing Pretti’s killing, Palantir workers questioned both the ethics and the business logic of continuing the company’s work with ICE.

I mean, given the company's entire portfolio is creepy-ass panopticon data mining stuff, it feels a little weird that this is the bridge too far.

“I mean, I’m proud to serve the White Hand,” said Ugluk the Uruk Hai, “The pay’s good and we get double rations of hafling tenderloin on Fridays, but nobody said anything about doing contract work for Sauron.”

It snowed some...

Fresh Market had cleared their lot and the surrounding sidewalks as best as they could, but temps in the low single digits really reduce the effectiveness of brine pretreatment and salt applied post-plowing.

I'd say that probably 70-80% of people had made at least a good faith effort at clearing their walks. Pretty decent, considering the volume of snow. If you don't want to shovel walks, why pay extra to live in a neighborhood where walkability is one of the main attractions? "We live in a society" and all that.

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Meme Dump!

Tab Clearing...

• The Spinner from Blade Runner, from the fertile mind of Sid Mead...


• Saudi Arabia is scaling back on Neom, their weird project to build a linear megacity in the desert.


• It's cold, y'all.

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Snow-Day Meme Dump!

Meme Dump!

Yet another one...

I got another punch on my Getting Older Card today. I feel pretty much the same as I did yesterday, though.

I presume it beats the alternative.

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Meme Dump!

Tab Clearing...

• I did not know that: Indiana has a statutory 12,000 mile limit on the total amount of highway INDOT is allowed to maintain. This has odd side effects.


• Deepfakes are doing serious epistemic damage. What do? (Related.)


• No, the green smoke you see the feds using in Minneapolis is not a chemical agent. It's not even from the older HC style smoke grenades that give off hexachloroethane as a byproduct (those are white smoke grenades and HC ones aren't used as much anymore.) They're just plain old green smoke grenades from DefTec. But people have been conditioned by comic books, TV, Hollywood, and video games to associate green clouds with poison, so...

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Quick! Stock Up On Eggs, Bread, Milk, and Memes!

Elsewhere...

• 1969 Dodge Charger R/T


• Nikon Df

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Meme Dump!

If I rolled my eyes any harder they might get stuck...

At a party in the nation’s capital last night, a group of Republican lawmakers dined on a cake shaped like Greenland and frosted with an American flag.

The dessert — an apparent nod to President Donald Trump’s attempt to acquire the Arctic territory — was served up at the Kennedy Center during an event hosted by Republicans for National Renewal, a right-wing group that has pushed the president to seek an unconstitutional third term.

“Come over here, take a picture and cut the cake,” the host appears to say at one point, video footage shows, describing the elaborate dessert as the “51st state.”

As partygoers gathered around the Stars-and-Stripes-draped cake, one person could be heard saying “It’s gonna be an international incident,” while another questioned: “Is it like prom?”

These edgelord dorks who got elected to congress to further their social media careers have made being cartoonishly evil into the GOP's party brand.

This is government by /pol/ and Right Wing social media influencers.

The edginess is the point. Life is a shitpost. “Are you triggered, lib?” is the GOP motto. 

“Is it like prom?” Jesus wept, these are fundamentally unserious people.

Let the Circle be Unbroken

The very first handgun that I bought new from an FFL was a P10, which was George Kellgren's first offering from his new company, Grendel Incorporated, back in the late Eighties.

It was a recoil-operated .380ACP pistol that had an internal fixed magazine holding ten rounds of ammunition. The magazine was charged through the ejection port either one cartridge at a time or using M16 stripper clips.

Nearly forty years (and one gun company) later, history repeats itself.

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Automotif DCIX...

The coolest thing about this MGC GT is that the owner drives it fairly frequently. It's nearing sixty years old, so that's pretty neat.

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Eyeroll...

An experimental all‑female nightclub concept made headlines [citation needed] this week after industry insiders revealed it shut its doors shortly after its first official night, with organizers blaming a complete lack of bottle purchases as the main reason for the abrupt closure. The venue [what was the venue's name?], marketed as a space dedicated exclusively to women and designed to create a safer, inclusive nightlife environment, opened with much fanfare in a major city [which city?] — but according to reports circulating on social platforms and nightlife forums [citation needed], the night ended without a single champagne or bottle service sale, a revenue stream most clubs rely on to stay afloat.

Two seconds of work with a search engine will show that this whole thing originated out of whole cloth as an Instagram post from a viral content mill back in September, and has been embroidered upon, had more clickbait buzzwords added, and been relaunched at social media grifter Lauren Chen's* FB page and has been repeated uncritically in social media from there.

"LOL silly feminazis! How could a bar exist without the mens?" It's like none of these gullible** people have ever heard of a lesbian bar.

* Lauren is apparently trying to get her grift spun back up after getting busted taking millions from the Russians back in 2024.

**Did you know that the word "gullible" isn't in the dictionary? If you don't believe me you can go look it up.
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Hall of Famer

As a Braves fan who can remember him as a young rookie, I was happy to hear that Andruw Jones was elected to the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown.

He used to draw flak for always having a big grin on his face, like it was somehow bad that he seemed to actively enjoy playing baseball.

My favorite Andruw Jones story was from early in his career, his second or third year when he was 22 years old, and rumors swirled that the Braves had turned down a trade offer from Seattle that offered the then-30 year old Ken Griffey Junior. Andruw told reporters that he was flattered but confused, saying "I'd trade me for Ken Griffey Jr."

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Hump Day Meme Dump!

Meme Dump!

The Problem of Evil is its Banality

A universe that would look at prominent evolutionary biologists and take away the charming and affable baseball fan Steven Jay Gould and leave us trapped in here with the increasingly cranky and unpleasant Richard Dawkins is not one that is run by a benevolent deity.

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Memes on Monday!

Lunatics running the asylum.

This guy graduated from the University of Florida and went on to obtain a Juris Doctor sheepskin from the same institution. He is on his fourth term as a Representative from Florida's 17th District.

So either he knows what contrails are and is saying stuff like this because he thinks his constituents are smoothbrained yahoos and will eat this stuff up, or else the University of Florida is handing out diplomas to smoothbrained yahoos who don't know what contrails are.

Neither of those things is really very good.

Holy Memes!

Meme Dump!

Tab Clearing...

• Children and Grandchildren of Immigrants Abduct a Native American


• This guy monitors the movements of the "shadow fleet" of sanctioned tankers from the rooftop of his home.


• ChatGPT wrote a suicide lullaby for this man based on his favorite childhood book, Goodnight Moon.

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Thank God it's Meme-day!