Pull the other one, it's got bells on it...

"It can babysit your kids, walk your dog..." says frequent Dad of the Year candidate, Elon Musk.

Yeah, let's pick two activities that are more complicated and require more attention and interaction than driving a car: Interacting with a live critter or a small human.

Given how low Elon’s bar is for adequate involvement with a child, I cannot imagine what he thinks is sufficient dog walking capability. I can just see C3P0’s idiot cousin taking the family cocker spaniel for a drag around the block.

Oh, also, that windowless death box with no windows or internal controls and seating for twenty, the "Robovan"? Have you heard how he pronounces it?

"Ruh-BOE-vahn". 

Christ, what a dork.

Edited to add BONUS CONTENT!

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The First Rule of Dunning-Kruger Club...

ZCQOTD: "This man has built an impregnable stone house with lovely west-facing balconies on the summit of Mount Stupid."

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Angry Manbaby

As you may know, Elon Musk has been nursing an incredible case of butthurt for something like twenty years because the rest of the board at PayPal wouldn't agree with him that "X" was a totally bitchin' name for an online finance company.

He's been so obsessively assmad about it that he inflicted "X" on one of his offspring as their legal moniker, thereby pretty much guaranteeing future estrangement issues when the kid becomes old enough to realize that daddy is a nerdy weirdo.

Most famously, as soon as he bought Twitter, he renamed it "X", which was the corporate equivalent of drunk-dialing the person who dumped you back in 2001 just to go "NEENER NEENER! I don't miss you at all!"

If you want an example of how petty and obsessive he is about this issue, check this shit out:

If a user typed in "Twitter.com," they would see "Twitter.com" as they typed it before hitting "Post." But, after submitting, the platform would show "X.com" in its place on the X for iOS app, without the user's permission, for everyone viewing the post.

They can't do anything about the hordes of ░P░ U░S░S░ Y░I░ N░B░I░O ░ spambots, but they had coders diligently working to make sure you didn't hurt Elon's fee-fees by deadnaming his company.

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Clownshoes

In today's episode of "Real life or The Onion?"...

This is some fundamentally unserious nonsense.

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Good plan, GOP.

I was trying to think of something that would poll worse among the general population than "hating Taylor Swift and football", and here comes the Heritage Foundation with "ending recreational sex".

On the Left, their Extremely Online weirdos may have taken over the faculty lounges, but over on the Right, the "Needs to Turn Off Their Computer and Touch Some Frickin' Grass" demographic has hijacked the think tanks and is about to finish conquering the party machinery.

I got news for the Heritage Foundation: The guy who wanted to ban dancing was not the hero of Footloose. It's like these guys are running around finding every 80/20 issue they can and jumping on the 20% side of it with both feet. The problem with segregating yourself into little social media agreeing bubbles is that you end up thinking that the percentage of the voting public made up of Terminally Online dorks with Roman statue profile pics is a lot bigger than it really is.

It's one thing to accidentally step on the occasional rake. It's another thing to go to the store, buy a bunch of rakes, scatter them across your lawn, and run around stomping on them on purpose.

Man, I remember when I took the Heritage Foundation seriously...

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YHGTBSM

"We keep spending most our lives

Living in a grifter's paradise..."

Half everyone's dumber than average.

Via the NYT, we hear of this Monmouth University poll:

"Just under 1 in 5 Americans believe the singer Taylor Swift is part of a covert effort to help President Joe Biden win the 2024 election.

[snip]

Just under half (46%) of the American public has heard something about Swift being part of a supposed covert government effort to help Biden win the 2024 presidential election. Just under 1 in 5 Americans (18%) believe such a conspiracy involving Swift exists."

"Wow," you say, "That's crazy!" Except it's not really that out of line with overall numbers in a land where better than one in ten agreed with the statement "The moon landings were faked" and less than six in ten agreed with "Humans evolved".

I mean, the New York Times is wringing its hands about one in five people believing in this moronic TaySway conspiracy only a few thin sheets of newsprint away from where it prints the frickin' horoscope!

We are a fundamentally unserious people, and one in five of your neighbors, at minimum, is a credulous moron.

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Something's Amiss Among the Wing-Wipers

Ah, the USAF Air National Guard, America's thirty-seventh line of defense... 

I kid, I kid. Thanks to post-Vietnam reorganization, the U.S. military actually depends pretty heavily on National Guard components for its combat power. The Hoosier Air National Guard, for instance, includes the 122nd Fighter Wing out of Fort Wayne, currently in the process of transitioning back to F-16's from A-10's.

But I gotta say that some of the Air National Guard's junior enlisted didn't exactly cover themselves in glory in the media in the Year of Our Lord 2023.

There was, of course, the high-profile incident of A1C Jack Teixeira back in April, who got busted for trying to impress his fellow dorks in a video game chatroom with the classified documents he copied from his day job as a Guard bum at a Massachusetts ANG intel wing.

What flew beneath my radar was that the same month saw A1C Josiah Garcia of the Tennessee ANG decide he wanted to be a hitman, using his 1337 TNANG combat skills (he claimed his nickname in the unit was "Reaper".)

So he went to a parody rent-a-hitman site on the internet and... get this ...he sent them a resume.

The parody site helpfully hooked A1C Garcia up with a not-at-all-a-parody FBI agent who offered him real money to ice an imaginary person. Garcia accepted the bogus assignment and the real bucks and is now looking at time in the graybar motel.

Folks, all that hire-a-hitman stuff doesn't work in real life the way it does in the movies. 

When I'm shopping for a store-brand John Wick, I look for a dude with his finger on the trigger of a derp tier AR that looks like a Cheaper Than Dirt catalog threw up on it.

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Gourmet Tater Tots?

Some dude was whingeing about Half Liter BBQ on Yelp.

Who orders tater tots expecting freshly grated Yukon gold spuds artisanally hand rolled between silk cloths by Bavarian tater nuns?

It says “tater tots” right there on the menu, hoss. They’re tater tots.

(Secret Menu Dining ProTip: Half Liter has loaded spuds on the menu, so if you order a side of tots you can also ask for some sour cream on the side and…presto!…you have unlocked the hidden bowl of mini latkes.)

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Real Men of Genius

So the guy who owns the 5th busiest website by traffic, one that relies on advertising and is constantly trying to panhandle you for eight bucks a month because it's hemorrhaging money, wonders why the 7th busiest website by traffic, which doesn't sell ads and is entirely supported by donations...is asking for donations.

"Hey, Elmo! Why do you need all that money to operate Twitter? You can literally fit its source code on your phone!"

Smartest guy in the room, you betcha.

Turns out that he knows roughly as much about website infrastructure as he does about launch pads.

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You're not entitled to your own facts.

So, there was this guy claiming that "librarians gleefully threw Cat In The Hat [sic] on the bonfire".

When called on his falsehood, he got snippy.

I have no interest in visiting his blog to "argue further" because there's nothing to argue, as the thing he is claiming happened only happened in his imagination.

Let's help out Matt's short memory: 

What actually happened is that Dr. Seuss Enterprises, the company that manages Theodor Geisel's estate, asked Random House, the company that prints his books, to take six titles (And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, If I Ran the Zoo, McElligot's Pool, On Beyond Zebra!, Scrambled Eggs Super!, and The Cat's Quizzer) out of print, due to illustrations and/or words that they felt portrayed dated and negative ethnic stereotypes.

You will note the complete absence from the actual facts of the following three things: librarians, bonfires, and The Cat in the Hat.

Now, you can agree with this decision or not (I personally find it pretty questionable and feel that it smacks of overreaction) and you are certainly entitled to your own opinion.

But you aren't entitled to your own facts.

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The kulturkampf is so dumb.

So apparently the usual Rage Farmers on the Right are getting their paypiggies all worked up and assmad about a movie about a little girl's toy doll.

I haven't seen anything so dumb since Tucker Carlson got all tore up about the green M&M getting sensible shoes that didn't give him a boner anymore.

China Syndrome

Man, here's an evergreen bit of conpiranoia at that hub of kookery, Whirled Nut Daily:

"...Chinese migrants are gaining entry to the U.S. through the southern border, in "unprecedented numbers."

"Once here, the military fighters can link up with China's agents already in place or Chinese diplomats," he said, estimated their numbers already had 5,000 to 10,000."

Connoisseurs of vintage Reynolds Wrap yarmulke nonsense will recall that this is a dramatic reduction in force from the 1990s, when the black helicopter crowd was assuring me that there were whole infantry divisions of the People's Liberation Army hiding out in secret bases in the Rocky Mountains, just waiting for orders from their UN masters. (Also possibly backed up by further PLA divisions lurking just across the Rio Grande.)

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Big Facts

Politics turn us into mood-affiliated dummies. Culture war politics turns us into utter idiots. https://t.co/GeXp0Oov2l

— Paul Matzko (@PMatzko) June 24, 2023

Wrong!

Tell me you aren't very familiar with Shakespeare's work without telling me you aren't very familiar with Shakespeare's work.

Imagine telling on yourself like that. https://t.co/DKVZMqs9Zy

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) April 25, 2023

Now I want to re-watch Romeo + Juliet.

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You have got to be s itting me.

Imagine if the dorkiest, most socially awkward dude in your IT department stumbled into a jillion dollar windfall via some fluke-y IPOs and buyout dough...

Wait, you actually don't have to imagine. https://t.co/9xflf3KZFq

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) April 10, 2023

Gimme a break.

Literally LOL'ed at the sight of Bone Spurs Six Actual, there, all jocked up. https://t.co/0zI0wOMXyx

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) March 30, 2023

This just keeps getting lulzier.

Did you sign up for Twitter Blue?

Are you tired of people mocking you with this meme?

Well, Elon has a solution for you!

As part of your ultra premium sucker customer package, you'll be able to hide the blue checkmark that you  agreed to pay eight bucks a month for! (Remember that it was going to be twenty bucks a month, but Stephen King haggled him down?)

Basically, now that all the actual celebrities, politicians, scientists, reporters, and other verified types are supposedly going to start losing their free checkmarks on Saturday, and Elon's offering a blue check taker-offer machine to his marks customers, this story is starting to seem really familiar...

In the land of the Tweetees, where the birdies tweet all day,
Lived Horsey McElon McMean, who had a cunning plan underway.
He built a wondrous contraption, the Blue Check-On Machine,
To give Tweetees checkmarks, by robbing them clean.

There were Tweetees of two kinds, with or without blue checks,
Those without felt ignored, like life's unfortunate wrecks.
Horsey McElon McMean saw an opportunity,
To make a fortune from Tweetees, by selling them exclusivity.

He charged $8 per check, a bargain they suspected,
Tweetees flocked and paid, eager to be respected.
The Blue Check-On Machine buzzed, beeped, and puffed,
As plain Tweetees walked in, and out they came, blue-checked and chuffed...

Too much kulturkampf isn't good for you.

Imagine getting completely assblasted over bandaids being offered in colors other than "caucasian". pic.twitter.com/dcDT9pzZSb

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) January 27, 2023

Cringe-a-licious.

The plague of goofiness upon the land of firearms usually causes polite people to snicker behind their hands, but occasionally someone feels compelled to call out the derpy, cringe-y nonsense. You know, the Punisher skulls and the Gripknives and the pistol bayonets and most of all...

Once upon a time, I named my issued M240. In my defense, I was a young idiot. Naming your gun is one of those things you should grow out of quickly. It’s a gun, it’s an inanimate machine, it doesn’t have a personality, and it doesn’t need a name.

If you need to name something, go to an animal shelter, I’m sure they have a dog, cat, or iguana you can adopt and name. The exception is if it’s punny. Calling a Desert Eagle a Deagle or a Mosin a garbage rod is one thing, but calling your AR-15 Lucille is cringy, and you’re not Negan.

Of course, standing in front of the tidal bore of goofiness at your typical gun show and saying "stop!" is a Canute-like exercise in futility, but I understand and sympathize with the urge. Sometimes you just gotta say it.

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