I'll never order a lemonade & ice tea blend the same way again.

The op-ed and political pages at the Washington Post and New York Times have been laboriously "sanewashing" the former president's speeches, translating his rambling, discursive weirdness into something resembling policy positions in the interest of trying to present somewhat normal coverage of a typical quadrennial political horse race.

Yesterday at a rally in Pennsylvania, though, the Donald finally said something too weird for the WaPo to try and spin it into normal political dialogue.

Seventeen days from the election, here in arguably the most decisive swing state, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump spent the first 10 minutes of his speech without mentioning politics.

Instead, he delivered a long tribute to Arnold Palmer, the late golfer who was born here and is the namesake of the airport where Trump was speaking. Trump’s soliloquy about Palmer included an account of how other athletes reacted to seeing him in the showers.

“Arnold Palmer was all man. And I say that in all due respect to women and I love women. But this guy, this guy, this is a guy that was all man. This man was strong and tough. And I refused to say it, but when he took showers with the other pros, they came out of there, they said, ‘Oh my God, that’s unbelievable,’” Trump said.

That was a dong too far for the Post's writers...

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Zero to jackboots...

We tease the Germans about their love for elaborate compound words, but they can be remarkably concise when they want to be. This AfD poster, for example, condenses fourteen English words down to four German ones.

"It's not a Nazi salute! They're just making a protective roof over their darling, pure-blooded Aryan children!"

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Landlords From Hell

What happens when a pack of internet investors buy your apartment complex?

Things started to fall apart, though, sometime after the first months of the pandemic. Tenants moved out in the dead of night as if they didn’t want anyone to see them; eviction notices would show up on their doors long after they’d left. The gym and pool shut down for “safety” reasons; when the building was sold the summer after COVID hit, the latter turned green. According to McMullen-Clarke, phantom surcharges began showing up on every rent bill, but when she called the front office to discuss them the phone would ring and ring; she later learned they’d stopped paying the phone bill. The new management charged $40 a month for “valet” trash service, but canceled its contract with the company retained to pick up trash every evening, so the same overworked maintenance guy who did everything else on the property had to pick up trash as well, and only when he got around to it. “There was garbage everywhere, it was really tragic,” McMullen-Clarke says.

[SNIP]

Weeds grew, in which new tenants would let their dogs shit without picking it up. Management would shut the water off throughout the entire complex for hours constantly; once a week at first, then just about every other day. But when the water was on, it would leak from 100 different spots and attract ever more pestilence. The rat population exploded, eventually taking up residence in the ceiling above McMullen-Clarke’s bedroom, where they scratched and fought and made it hard to fall asleep. One day as she was ascending the stairway, she noticed a rat sitting contentedly on the handrail for which she’d been reaching. “I took a deep breath and said to myself, OK, one of us is leaving.”

RTWT

The Zombie Internet

There's a great article up at 404 Media about the tidal wave of bot-generated AI glurge that's swamping social media:

All of this, taken together, is why I think we should not view Facebook’s AI spam through the lens of the “Dead Internet.” The platform has become something worse than bots talking to bots. It is bots talking to bots, bots talking to bots at the direction of humans, humans talking to humans, humans talking to bots, humans arguing about a fake thing made by a bot, humans talking to no one without knowing it, hijacked human accounts turned into bots, humans worried that the other humans they’re talking to are bots, hybrid human/bot accounts, the end of a shared reality, and, at the center of all of this: One of the most valuable companies on the planet enabling this shitshow because its human executives and shareholders have too much money riding on the mass adoption of a reality-breaking technology to do anything about it.

You should click through and read the whole thing.

Way Too Much Information

Didn't we kill an awful lot of redcoats specifically to ensure that I wouldn't have to endure television newspeople telling me the condition of the king of England's junk before the breakfast hour?

I realize that RAF Typhoons are doing yeoman's work helping us bomb Houthi launch sites further back into the stone age right now, but if splashing a couple of them in an egregious blue-on-blue incident would get the talk of the royal package off my morning TV news, I'd be at least moderately in favor of it.

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Tacos Con Carne Y Cabello

I know people who, on roadtrips through the hinterland, insist on sticking to national chains on the theory that they are less likely to get some exotic sort of food poisoning that way, but that's not always a guarantee of anything either.

I've pulled off the interstate into a drive thru in Meth America, looked around at the condition of the grounds & parking lot, and decided to dine on a Slim Jim and a bag of pizzeria-flavored Combos from the local Gas & Sip for lunch rather than taking my chances on a Big Mac and a side of ptomaine.

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Point of order...

"The babies weren't beheaded, they were just killed and some were set on fire" isn't the slam dunk rebuttal some folks seem to think it is.

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Ugh.

Yesterday afternoon and early this morning I was one of the world's leading producers of mucus.

My cough wasn't just "productive", it was downright overachieving. Every void in my skull was full of the stuff and when I'd blow my nose my head would creak and groan and make weird popping noises like a Russian sub changing depth. My upper molars felt like they might pop out like champagne corks from the pressure.

Only the mildest of fevers and never lost my taste or smell, so it's probably a bad cold or a very mild flu and not the 'Rona. That, and I'm already feeling a lot better than I did late last night.

Discount Depression

Dollar General is not a place I normally shop. I'm only in one on rare occasions when I'm on the road and in a small town where there's literally no other alternative.

I can remember maybe one or two that were reasonably clean and orderly, but they always struck me as absolutely soul-crushing places to shop.

I'd thought that was just me being hopelessly bougie, but apparently not...

"Sometimes the problems compound each other, OSHA records suggest. Pest control couldn’t service a receiving room in Minnesota; it was too cluttered. Stolen HVAC systems in Arizona went unreplaced for weeks because management “had not received the OK” to get new ones. When an Iowa store’s water pipes burst on Christmas Eve, a plumber refused to fix them, because of asbestos. Asbestos was also a worry at another Iowa store, where workers experienced respiratory problems. But state officials said the latter store’s likelier culprits were mold or “stains on the wall that were bat feces.”

Along with bats and birds, workers say, the stores are home to spiders, ants, mice, rats and squirrels. Employees have been cut on the arm, leg, torso or neck by rusted or faulty metal moving palettes, or “rolltainers.” Broken heat or air conditioning has forced workers to don five layers or line their pants with ice packs. In Georgia, former employee Shantay Millsap says she broke out in hives from the constant heat and caked dust; the company responded by cutting her hours. In South Carolina, employee Tiffany Gettle says the 109F heat in her store has made produce wilt and colleagues vomit, but a manager dismissed it by saying, “The more you complain, the worse it makes it.” (In its statement, Dollar General said it has “various cleaning protocols,” works with pest control firms and will sometimes take other steps to “ensure a healthy and safe environment.”)"

The article details some eye-popping stuff. The store in Apache, OK (pop. 1,400) where the birds had gotten into the ceiling and were nesting in there and crapping all over the merchandise, and... Well, go read it for yourself.

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Ugh.

One souvenir from this past weekend is a double handful of turbo itchy chigger bites under my socks.

I tried to stay on gravel as much as possible, but apparently I strayed into enough grass to get a few of the pests on me. I also found a tick, but killed the little bugger before it could bite me. I used the classroom table as a mortar and my Sabre Red canister as a pestle to make tick paste.

Sabre Red: Works on all sizes of varmints!

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Always wear your safety gear...

A man who fell into Omaha’s sewer system was swept on a nightmarish journey beneath downtown city streets for 1½ miles over 1½ hours Friday before somehow extricating himself from the rushing water just before it dumped into the Missouri River.

Apparently two workers were swept off their feet by a wall of water that roared through the pipe in which they were working, but one was wearing a safety harness and didn't wind up...er, up shit creek, as it were, like his coworker.

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Thoroughly Postmodern Apocalypse

My friends, the entire country to the north of us is on fire and blanketing us in smoke, while our heartland is beset by literal shit storms.

And yes I know what "literal" means.

Behold the turd tornado:

I'm not sure which seal of the apocalypse releases the manure tornadoes, but it's very on-brand for the current year. https://t.co/OPG8QSZT40

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) June 29, 2023

Creepy.

You know those dystopian cyberpunk sci-fi novels where the superrich oligarchs have themselves cloned so that they can use the cloned bodies as sources of organs for transplanting, in order to stave off aging?

Yeah, this is way too close to that.

I’m not saying that too much money tends to turn people into freakish weirdos, but anecdotal evidence certainly leans in that direction. https://t.co/8NKLCDAtW2

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) May 23, 2023

Cocaine Hippos Redux

Remember those four hippos that Pablo Escobar had that were left to roam the wild in Colombia after he got iced by the feds?

Well, there are over a hundred and fifty of the things roaming Colombian bottomlands now.

And you can forget going down there and bagging a trophy because when the Colombian government tried that, the public outcry was so bad that they haven't authorized any hippo hunts since.

You think wild pigs can make a mess in a soybean field? Imagine what something that masses five times as much as the legendary "Hogzilla" can do to your tomato patch. Also, hippo feces is doing bad things to the waterways, because each hippo creates a few dozen pounds of the stuff a day.

Fortunately they don't breed like hogs, but they have pretty much zero natural predators down there, so the herd just keeps growing.

Extraordinary measures are being taken.

[C]astrating an unpredictable 4,000-pound semiaquatic beast isn't as easy as it sounds. Cristina Buitrago, a veterinarian for Cornare, a state-sponsored environmental group, has worked with a six-person team that lures hippos in with 180 pounds of carrots, knocks them out with darts carrying enough sedative to down three horses, and then flips their massive bodies to perform a castration. The five-hour operation can "cost up to $17,000 in a country that struggles to finance health care for humans," the Journal says. So far, the team has "fixed" 11 males and two females. "It's dirty. There's mud everywhere. You're soaked in sweat," Buitrago said. "This is not a practical way to solve the problem."

Sounds horrifying...

An interesting piece on The Villages in Florida and their coming demographic crisis featured this creepy little tidbit:

I rented a golf cart during my visit, paying $25 for a day of puttering around. It was mid‑May, so already fairly hot. Presumably due to the combination of age and weather, there weren’t many people out. On the main cart thoroughfares, golfers would whiz past my speed‑regulated rental, prompting me to offer repeated apologetic waves. There are wide‑open gates at the entrances to the various villages, policed by local residents who nod everyone through. Most residential streets that morning were empty, treeless under a cloudless blue sky. Driveways were occasionally ornate and, to a house, clean, but nearly every house was shut up tight. People were watching, though; one woman with whom I spoke as she was watering plants assured me that she would receive multiple calls after I left to inquire about who I was and why I was there.

Gag me with an order!

After the release of the probable cause affidavit in the Delphi case, everybody involved started grandstanding in the court of public opinion, so the judge has (predictably) issued a gag order for all the players in the defense and prosecution.

Folks, all we know of the county's case for sure so far is what was in that PC affidavit, which was just for the arrest. It's not the entirety of the prosecution's evidence. Other than that, everything else is wild speculation.

There is an upcoming hearing in January to decide if the gag order will remain in place, and one in February where the defense will ask for bail reduction or for the accused to be released on his own recognizance pending trial. Defense also wants the trial moved at least 150 miles away from Delphi, to Evansville or Jeffersonville, citing the difficulty of getting an unbiased jury pool in Carroll County.

Pretty thin, but that's why there's going to be a trial.

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Cold Case Heats Up

The dude owns a car that matches the one reported by witnesses as being "parked oddly", admits being on the Monon High Bridge Trail that day, and also happens to own a Sig Sauer P226 in .40S&W...

On Oct. 13, 2022, investigators questioned Allen, who stuck to his story. He insisted he hadn’t seen anyone on the trail that day back in 2017 other than “the juvenile girls” near the Freedom Bridge. Allen said he owned guns, and that he kept them at home.

That same day, investigators executed a search warrant at his house and located “jackets, boots, knives and firearms, including a Sig Sauer, Model P226, .40 caliber pistol with serial number U 625 627,” the affidavit states.

Over the next five days, the Indiana State Police crime lab tested the weapon, and “determined the unspent round located within two feet of [the girls’ bodies] had been cycled through Richard M. Allen’s Sig Sauer Model P226.”

Allen was at a total loss to explain how an unused bullet [sic] from that very gun wound up beside two dead bodies.

On the one hand, proving that the .40 round had been cycled through that particular gun beyond a shadow of a doubt is going to be tricky. A lot of that sort of ballistic evidence has turned out to be science-y guesswork. On the other hand, that's an awful lot of circumstantial evidence.

There are bunches of .40 cal P226's out there, but the proximity of Allen's to the crime is pretty sketch.

Picture of .40 cal P226 for illustrative purposes. I sold this one a long time ago.

An auction you don't want to win...

So, imagine this. You're just some normal family in New Zealand, engaging in the perfectly normal practice of bidding on the contents of abandoned self-storage units, hoping to make a few bucks or find some hidden gems.

Among the goodies you get are some suitcases, and when you open them...you find the desiccated, dismembered bodies of two kids.

Congrats, you just won a crime scene!

But wait, there's more...

The ensuing criminal investigation pretty quickly zeroed in on the kids' mother, who had long since fled for South Korea.

Fortunately there's an extradition treaty in place.

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True Crime

This story out of Oklahoma is wild...

Today, the UAB remains active, still tied to gruesome homicides and big drug cases, according to court papers and news reports. In August, nine UAB-linked suspects were charged in the killing of a rival gang member who prosecutors say was lured out of his motel room, tortured and dumped in a ditch.

The missing people authorities have mentioned in connection with the Logan County case are mostly men with long histories of drug arrests and prison stints. One exception is 21-year-old newlywed Audrey Slack, who hasn’t been seen since Jan. 11.

That morning, Slack called her family from a motel outside Oklahoma City while on a road trip with her husband, Stephen Walker, who is more than twice her age and whose tattoos signal membership in another white-supremacist prison gang.

Slack said to expect the couple home by 8 p.m., but they never arrived. Their black pickup truck was found with a bullet hole and traces of blood and bleach on the interior, according to a search warrant filed Aug. 2.

Given some of the tales I've heard about those prison gangs, none of this story is particularly surprising to me, gruesome as it all is.

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Audience Capture

Influencer culture weirds me out...

"When influencers are analyzing audience feedback, they often find that their more outlandish behavior receives the most attention and approval, which leads them to recalibrate their personalities according to far more extreme social cues than those they'd receive in real life. In doing this they exaggerate the more idiosyncratic facets of their personalities, becoming crude caricatures of themselves.

The caricature quickly becomes the influencer's distinct brand, and all subsequent attempts by the influencer to remain on-brand and fulfill audience expectations require them to act like the caricature. As the caricature becomes more familiar than the person, both to the audience and to the influencer, it comes to be regarded by both as the only honest expression of the influencer, so that any deviation from it soon looks and feels inauthentic. At that point the persona has eclipsed the person, and the audience has captured the influencer."