A fifteen-year-old nephew once told me that he didn’t know how to boil an egg. I thank God that my mother taught me how to cook when I was still living at home. No big deal when I lived on campus and ate in the dining hall, but upon getting my first apartment I quickly realized that my roommates had no kitchen skills to speak of, relying instead on a lot of frozen dinners, mac & cheese and carryout. I found that I could get out of bathroom-cleaning duty simply by cooking up a big pot of chili and some cornbread for the apartment. Hell, I landed a girlfriend way out of my league just because I cooked her a decent Italian meal (okay, maybe the wine helped a little). It kills me that young people don't understand how powerful a good meal can be, or who think cooking well is something you can't accomplish without attending culinary school. Now I'm seeing adverts for a toaster oven with a barcode reader because today's young professional can't handle instructions like "bake at 375F for 18 minutes" without having a breakdown. I weep for the future.

A reminder that good intentions (Live Aid) lead to horrible results. I was discussing the Great Society's destruction of black fathers and black churches once, and may have insinuated that LBJ knew what he was doing when it came to keeping the blacks poor and miserable. My counterpart noted that sometimes "stupid" is more destructive than "evil," referencing Geldof as his example. I felt compelled to concede the point, given the evidence. Still not sure I'm willing to give the benefit of the doubt to that sonnuvabitch Johnson, though.

|| The progressive retail experience || Is it wrong that I'm thinking up ways to help these retailers recover some of their losses by setting up their shops for some live-action Saw scenarios to be distributed on pay-per-view?

...and just think of all the dog shit that will be put to good use instead of being left in the city park!

I was thinking red lights of an ambulance for the creep in question, but yes. I saw a Tweet replying to a "Don't Say Gay" thread where the man replying said, If I find out that you've been teaching 'alternative sexuality' to my 6-year-old, I will drive down to the school and kick your teeth out of your skull, right in front of your students and fellow teachers and everybody. The Florida bill isn't meant to restrict you, it's meant to protect you from parents like me. If you were honest, you'd relabel it the "Don't Lose Teeth" bill. I thought it was a rather generous interpretation. It certainly made me look at things in a new light!

|| With magnets and cold aliuiminiuim. || I physically winced at the end when he tried to play with the frozen magnets. Why would you think that a piece of metal at -200C would be any better for your fingers than a piece of metal at +200C?

Really good trap door on this one. And thanks for the video, MC. That was delightful!

23A if I'm just having some buttered toast with my breakfast. 24A if the toast has to carry anything substantial. 23B if the coffee is bad. (Though I'd really prefer a good cuppa tea, kthxbai.)

|| Urge detected. || Now I'm reminiscing on the long hours spent building caves and tunnels through the drifts and piles of snow in the front yard. If we had a properly snowy winter, we could build a tunnel along the edge of the driveway where the snow piled up from our shoveling chores, and another along the road where the snowplows piled it up. Where these intersected, we'd get really big mounds of snow that we'd hollow out and turn into forts. (I was seven years old when The Empire Strikes Back was released. It was an amazing time to live in the snowy north.)

in Minneapolis I believe they would in fact not allow steel gates on retail because it would give the appearance of crime. I'm late to the party, but I figured I'd confirm that Mpls City Council overturned the ban on security shutters in December 2020 following the mostly-peaceful protests. I can also confirm that most businesses on Lake Street continue to maintain the impromptu mutual-aid groups they formed when they realized that the cops were never going to protect them.

Piercing and tattooing your face, dying your hair blue... I remember back in the 80s, asking the goth girls in high school why they looked the way they did. "To be different," was the obvious answer. But because I was (and still am) an idiot, I asked "Then why can't I tell you apart?" Needless to say, I didn't get a lot of romantic action from that particular clique. Still, it's kind of amusing to me that today's unique personalities still go straight to the cookie-cutter template so that they'll look "different" in exactly the same way as all the other unique personalities. plus ça change...

Conscious sedation For Christmas in 1990*, I got four wisdom teeth removed in one operation. One of the teeth was impacted and took some extra effort, so I got some extra happy juice to keep me out of it until the oral surgeon was done. According to my mother, I spent an hour in Recovery raving in Spanish. Evidently I really didn't like the stuffed dog they gave me to hold on to, but I refused to let anybody take the dog away, either. They kicked us out after a while because they needed the recovery room for the next patient, but I was still on another planet. I don't remember much until I woke up on the couch in the living room sometime that afternoon. Thankfully this was 1990 and I didn't have to worry about my ravings being posted for the entertainment of strangers. * This was not at the top of my Xmas list; insurance changes kicked in 1/1/91 that would make the procedure much more expensive.

As an arrogant prick of above-average intelligence*, I must admit that I've really enjoyed life in the age of Dr. House, Sheldon Cooper, Sherlock, and Tony Stark (with apologies to any I've left off the list). Society was sorely overdue for a proper appreciation of the type! *(A former cow-orker once told me I was a cross between Ron Swanson and House. For the rest of the day, I felt like I was walking on air!)

That's some straight-up, BladeRunner dystopia shiznitt. I had the exact same reaction. I was already looking for the movie footage when I saw you beat me to it. "A new life awaits you in the off-world colonies!" I gotta confess, if the woke anti-colonialists refused to participate, I'd be sorely tempted to board a colony ship today.

|| A feel-good ass-kicking. || I need to keep this handy for the next time one of my drinking buddies says we need to defund the police. This may not be what they have in mind, but it's fer damn sure what they'll get!

...none so desperate as those who have nothing left to lose. Separate from having nothing left to lose is the idea that the skunks have only one weapon, and once it's been used they have nothing left in the arsenal. Once the dog has been sprayed, there's no reason for him not to savage the skunk that's taking over his space and eating his food. How many normal people still cower in fear over being called 'racist' or 'sexist' or 'transphobe' at this point? When the threat to ruin somebody's reputation and professional life is no longer feared, what then?

And now I see that WTP beat me to the punch on Wisdom anyway. *sigh*

When I was introduced to Dungeons & Dragons as a spotty youth, I had some difficulty right out of the gate with understanding what the six primary ability scores were supposed to represent. At first it made little difference, because we were just playing make-believe, having fun killing goblins and accumulating absurd amounts of gold and magic items. As we got older and the campaigns grew a little more sophisticated, we stopped cheating on our ability rolls and started playing characters with actual weaknesses, because it was a new kind of fun. It was only then that I started looking at interesting contrasts in player abilities. The 'Sickly Strongman' (STR 17; CON 7) who could lift damn near anything one time but could barely climb up a flight of stairs without blacking out. The 'Village Mayor' who was utterly average except for a high Charisma score -- people loved him, though they could never tell you why. But the one I actually played for quite some time was the Misguided Mage. Intelligence 18, Wisdom 7. Here was a guy who could put together the most elaborate plan for building a machine or breaking into a fortress, without giving the slightest thought to whether these plans were a good idea at all. (It helped that a friend played a manipulative little shit of a thief, and used to give our Dungeon Master fits by talking my character into pursuing the most absurd and misguided plots he could think of.) Anyways, that's my long-winded way of saying that even Gary Gygax understood the difference between intellect and wisdom, and did a decent job of trying to enlighten my generation on the concepts.

I'm not sure that "Half these kids can't even regurgitate the tired clichés I drone on about endlessly in class!" is the winning message this 'educator' believes it to be.

What did that, er, individual, say to the gentlemen videoing him? I believe that the onlooker said "Please tell me you're having a laugh," and the subject responded in kind. Which reminds me of a question that my wife and I came up with the other day: How do the producers of The Repair Shop determine when to include/not include subtitles? We'll watch an episode where some lovely elderly Scotsman hands over a trinket and they subtitle his speech as though he were speaking Korean, and then a few episodes later they'll have some Scouser or Geordie walk in and deliver a monologue that I can't make heads nor tails of, with nary a hint from the producers as to what's being said. What gives?

Not unrelated... Tim Curry did it much, much better. It's just a jump to the left...

Guess I should shave the ol legs, then? You can create a really interesting moiré pattern if you don't. Not that I would have any (ahem) first-hand knowledge of such things...

When school discipline is something to “disperse across ethnicities.” Infuriating, but still somehow not as bad as what Supt. Valeria Silva implemented in St. Paul ten years ago. Today's linked article just talks about lighter punishments for darker skin tones. Plenty bad, and almost comical in the way it formalizes "diminished expectations," but still falls short of the pinnacle we achieved here in the Saintly City. Back in the day, we implemented a system whereby a teacher could not discipline black students unless he or she disciplined an equal number of white students. So your average white kid would get nailed to the wall for something like chewing gum in class, simply so that the teacher would have leeway to send a disruptive black student to the principal's office. As I ranted later, "They essentially took a group of kids who were ill-behaved and resentful and gave them free rein to terrorize students and staff alike. At the same time, they took another group of kids who were more-or-less functional and turned them into resentful little shits." Honestly, I would not piss on that woman if she were on fire.

The mother is teaching her child in many ways to be a barbarian... People don't need to be taught to be barbarians. A child is a natural-born tyrant -- selfish, impatient, demanding, brutish. To turn a man into a gentled-man requires a dozen years or more of unrelenting training and discipline by parents, teachers, family members, neighbors -- in this sense, it really does take a village. Failure to provide such guidance and discipline allows the little barbarians to continue as they are, until an actual grownup (usually an agent of the State, unfortunately) is summoned to take care of the problem. It's a similar dynamic as we see when Big Thinkers write pieces about the Causes of Poverty. There are none! Sit on your arse all day doing nothing and -- voilà! -- poverty! (Sorry. It's a pet peeve of mine that people will pretend that certain conditions require action and effort, when in fact they are more properly understood as starting conditions. "Ground states," as it were.)

“I’m here as a mother of two queer children...” Don't remember who made the observation, but it seems appropriate to the situation: "When somebody tells you that her cats are vegan, it's not the cats making the decision."