Saturday, March 17, 2018

Happy Saint Patrick’s Day

  For this year’s reenactment of St. Patrick driving the snakes out of Ireland…

st patrick driving the snakes out of Ireland

AG Jeff Sessions fired Andy McCabe. If this godforsaken island of perfidy is ever going to be habitable by decent men there are a lot more snakes that need a one way ticket out of town. But nice start.

On another St. Patrick’s day note I feel I should warn those of you wandering off to a bar to celebrate the day with a beer and perhaps a wee dram chaser: along with the usual green brews this year’s on tap selections include a new “glitter beer” – that’s right, lager ala glitter-atti.

636566350692041638-glitter-beer-urban-vines-brewery                                  glitter3glitter4

Breweries like Ska Brewing in Durango, Colorado; Three Weavers Brewing Company in Inglewood, California; and Bold Missy Brewery in Charlotte, North Carolina are just a few of the rising number of brewhouses who have released glitter-filled elixirs.

Goodness! I’ve head of unicorn farts

8ca4053d49fdaa020e4b466ca458170d

but, glitter-pee?

glitter5Drink glitter beer and sparkle all night…and well into the following morning!

And whatever you do, do not mix both green and glitter, the resulting by-product might make your hangover the following morning even worse than usual.

Screen Capture #117

So please remember, all that glitters is not gold; therefore if you must drink today please drink, and pee, responsibly.

Linked By: Larwyn’s Linx on Doug Ross@Journal, and BlogsLucianneLoves, and Free Republic, Thanks

Friday, March 16, 2018

FLOTUS Friday: Emerald Isle Edition

In the annual sign of friendship between the Republic of Ireland and the USA. the Irish Prime Minister, (Taoiseach) Leo Varadkar presented President Trump with the traditional shamrock bowl.

irishTaoiseach Leo Varadkar, bringing the luck of the Irish with him in a bowl

Melania looked lovely in an emerald green leopard print shift.

irish2

I see no reason to discuss anything further although reportedly The President and Taoiseach discussed trade, military assistance, cyber-security and golf.

And I understand that Ireland’s first Indian-Irish openly gay Prime Minister did discuss LGBT issues with VP Mike Pence over breakfast today. I’m not sure what the agenda will be since as far as I know LGBT (and Q) currently enjoy all the same civil rights in both Ireland and America as everyone else. It doesn’t really matter, all we’ll hear about from the MSM this weekend is Stormy Daniels, Donald Trump Jr’s divorce, Melania’s “hypocritical” position on cyber-bullying and the continuing chaos in the Trump White House. Apparently there are still a lot of snakes to get rid of.

st patrick and medusa

Linked By: BlogsLucianneLoves, and Free Republic, Thanks!

Thursday, March 15, 2018

#ThrowbackThursday: In Which We Get It All Wrong

Today’s #ThrowbackThursday Post comes via the Wall Street Journal’s Magazine: Spring Men’s Wear Fashion edition. It will adequately demonstrate why Throwback Thursdays are more than a bow to nostalgia.

First, we  take a look at what the world considered to be stylish men – both straight and gay – from the past century: l to r: James Dean, Gary Cooper, Paul Newman

Screen Capture #112

Buddy Holly, Dean Martin and Miles Davis:

Screen Capture #113

Compare the above to the WSJ’s Spring fashion shoot Drift Away to a Sultry Riverscape in the Season's Best Menswear: The clothes haven’t changed all that much but the skeletal frame on which they are displayed certainly has. The new male “model” appears anorexic, gay, and quite likely a heroin addict.

Screen Capture #114

The young man with the hollow cheeks, hollow chest, strangely craggy face and just plain weird hair looks like the guy who would have had sand kicked on him at the beach in an earlier era.

BN-XP446_FASHIO_1000V_20180223135458

Now he is…what? A model, to be emulated? An idol, to be adulated?

BN-XP438_FASHIO_1000V_20180223135359Huh?

And that’s hardly the worst of it. The magazine also has a feature on Thom Browne, a clothing designer of both men’s and women’s wear. How Thom Browne Revolutionized the Suit:

thom browne shortiesHoney, I shrunk it!

This man has transcended the run of the mill misogynist and gone full-bore misanthrope.

circus thom browneScreen Capture #115

But wait! We’re not done yet! In another article,  Spring’s Hottest Trend for Men? Normal Fashion, we see what fashion editors deem to be “normal” these days: Carhartt bib overalls worn with thousand dollar designer shirts and multi-thousand dollar over-sized overcoats and sleeping bags doubling as jackets.

            BN-XR270_NEWNOR_1000V_20180228123027BN-XR272_NEWNOR_1000V_20180228123037BN-XR278_NEWNOR_1000V_20180228123132

So you see #ThrowbackThursdays serve a very important purpose: it reminds us that those who forget history may indeed be destined to repeat it but they will get it all wrong.

Linked By: Larwyn’s Linx on Doug Ross@Journal, and BlogsLucianneLoves, and Free Republic, Thanks!

Wednesday, March 14, 2018

#OpenWhineWednesday – HOV Edition

"Visiting California, Trump says Gov. Jerry Brown is doing a ‘terrible job’" 

Trump has repeatedly bashed the state, dismissing California as "out of control" during a 2017 interview, a comment he repeated Tuesday.

I can’t speak to those allegations first hand but I can pass along this  #OpenWhineWednesday anecdote via my neighbor. He had been on a business trip in California last week. When I ran into him yesterday he had just received a citation in the mail for unlawfully using the HOV (high occupancy vehicle) lane while he was there. Oddly enough the citation was not because he didn’t have high occupancy in his car – there were 4 of them traveling together – but because his (rental) vehicle was not “registered for use of the HOV lane.”  I believe it’s that type of regulation on top of legislation that partially defines “out of control.”

hovhov2Huh?

I didn’t ask but I suspect the fine was significant as my neighbor was really, really irritated.  I don’t know why rental companies don’t just register all of their cars for use of HOV lanes but I’m guessing its because the regulations doesn’t allow them to do so en masse (and probably costs money for every car that is registered).

I’m not even sure HOV lanes are legal under the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment but that’s another whole can of worms and we’ve got much bigger fish to fry than freeway lane access should anyone care to open that can of whoop-ass.

This is “Stone Cold Steve Austin” trash talking whoop-ass to Donald Trump. Let the record reflect that Steve in now a retired wrestler and Donald Trump is President of the United States.

So that’s my proxy #OpenWhineWednesday gripe. What’s yours?

Oh, and Happy Pi Day! Finally, I thought it would never get here.

wife of pi

Linked By: Larwyn’s Linx on Doug Ross@Journal, and BlogsLucianneLoves, and Free Republic, Thanks!

Tuesday, March 13, 2018

#TransformationTuesday: Help! We’re Trapped In the Future!

Kamala Harris Tells Us “California Represents The Future.”

That’s precisely what we’re afraid of Kammie:

Homeless in Hollywood

poop mapSan Francisco’s Poop Pile Map

skirball fire homelessAftermath of the Skirball fire, started by a campfire at a homeless camp

maxine nancy

California’s Past and Future Brain Trust

CALIFORNIA POLS

Mark-Zuckerberg-wants-to-reconnect-with-China1

harvey-hollywood-300x157

But thanks for the warning.

We’ll keep it in mind as we work hard to MAGA.

Linked By: Larwyn’s Linx on Doug Ross@Journal, and BlogsLucianneLoves, and Free Republic, Thanks!

Monday, March 12, 2018

#Monday Moanin’ - So Embrace The Suck

My brother was kind enough to pass this article along to ruin my weekend: We Nneed the Singular ‘They’ – and It Won’t Seem Wrong For Long. He thought it could provide fodder for my Monday Moanin’ post, and that it did, splendiferously. He noted that while it was written by an educated woman who clearly knows better, her allegiance to the 198 or so newly discovered genders demands that she take this position.”

The article is written by Stephanie Golden, a ground breaking editor in her own right who has been serving humanity with gender equality copy since the late 60’s.

“As a manuscript editor at the New York branch of Oxford University Press, I helped engineer the next contentious usage shift. Feminism was acquiring legitimacy (much like non-binary gender identities today), and feminists pushed for nonsexist language, including alternatives to ‘man’ and ‘he’ as generics.”

In other words she was a willing and useful soldier in the early years of the gender wars. She enthusiastically embraced all the silly “work-arounds” still in place today to pander to feminists and foul the English language.  She can be held at least partially responsible for enlightened updates of previously mellifluous phrases such as “to bravely go where no man has gone before” to the mundane “to where no one has gone before.” So thanks, Stephanie, for neutering the Starship Enterprise’s offensive mandate. What else do you want from the English language?

As it turns out she wants it to solve the gender pronoun trap that has been laid now that people have been encouraged to believe that there are more genders than San Francisco has piles of human excrement. And she has even proposed a solution to the gender pronoun problem in the age of the non-binary, seemingly infinite, gender spectrum. And all we have to do to solve this intractable problem is embrace the suck.

embrace-the-suck-vr5gh4

She thinks we should  adopt “they” as the English standard’s third-person, gender-neutral pronoun in all writing and speaking contexts. And don’t worry, you’ll get used to the bad English in no time.

So she ends up where progressives always do: acquiescing to a bunch of stupid people with a stupid solution in order to sidestep the sticky wicket of somebody, somewhere feeling offended by something.

 baby-750x500That’s seriously close to throwing out the baby (gender unspecified) with the bathwater 

We can assume she agrees with the offended in this case, as we know that when progressives don’t agree with those taking offense, their default action is RESIST rather than acquiesce.

But Steph has lots of backup in the pronoun war, where the only resolution is for the language to conform to accommodate the demands of the gender-freaks rather than expecting them to conform to normative societal conventions (all most assuredly established by white guys).

Now comes ‘they’, and I admit it’s a tough one. Paula Froke, the AP Stylebook lead editor, gives two reasons for embracing ‘they’: ‘recognition that the spoken language uses they as singular’ and ‘the need for a pronoun for people who don’t identify as a he or a she’. The first ‘they’, as in ‘Everyone can decide which personal pronoun best matches their identity’, is what people have been doing for centuries anyway; most of us already use it without thinking.

I really must interject here: the only reason people have been “doing” it for “centuries” – by which I presume she means the later half of the 20th and the early part of the 21st – is because the feminazi’s insisted we stop using “he, him, etc. as a generic, genderless pronoun in such sentence structure. Up till then people may have “done it” but it was considered incorrect grammar, would earn a red mark when used in an essay and hopefully be pounded into your skull that it was NOT the correct use of the pronoun.

Until our author and other editors decided to advance the feminist cause by taking it upon themselves to refashion the English language by making it politically correct very few people of letters thought to use “they” where “he” sufficed. But ever since then language has been used as a weapon in the long war against men. But let us move on to the second part of Steph’s argument for making “they: and “theirs” singular as well as plural.  

But the second usage, which raises fundamental questions about identity, society and the nature of reality itself, has met furious resistance.

A sentence like ‘Carey makes themself coffee every morning – they hate tea’ violate deeply engrained rules of grammar. Saying ‘Lisa told me they love gardening’ calls into question basic categories of being. For many people, ‘they’ is the untuned string that portends discord and chaos…

Language evolves, and no amount of fulminating, or imposition of rules, can stop it. But more importantly, justice demands that we make the effort to accept ‘they’, ‘themself’ or any new gender-neutral pronouns that achieve widespread use. A language that collapses male and female into ‘man’ reflects a society that strips women of their separate being. And a language that collapses the spectrum of gender identities into male and female reflects a society that refuses to acknowledge the identity and very existence of a significant segment of its population. In the Trans Allyship Workbook (2017), Davey Shlasko writes:

The rule against using singular they is enforced neither because it preserves some consistent, objective grammatical standard, nor because it serves our communication needs. It is enforced because enforcing language norms is a way of enforcing power structures.

And there it is: PATRIARCHY! I knew it, “patriarchy” is the new progressive bogey-man (person?) that the tribe can huddle, offended, around.                

                   get-degree-in-gender-studies-blame-patriarchy-for-inability-to-get-a-job                                      

Our editor/author concludes by saying that although she believes that using “he or she” worked “if used well” she still believes it must be dropped now “simply because it leaves out other gender identities.”

misfit toys

And we can’t have that because, shut up!

While I still adhere to the “there are only 2 genders” rule I do have a modest proposal that could end  this crisis of genderization. Could we all just stipulate to the pre-I-Am-Woman-Hear-Me-Roar era convention of gender neutrality? That is to say, in certain usage he, his, man, and men refer not to genitalia of any sort but rather to the entire human genus of Homo sapiens, regardless of which of the 198 genders you identify with.

I mean, let’s not make this any harder than it has to be because it’s only going to get tougher. What are we to do once our fellow Earthlings no longer identify as humanoids at all?

transgender dragon in makingalways-be-yourself-unless-you-can-be-a-dragon

Maybe we should be working on what we’ll have to do to accommodate them instead of trying to reinvent the old gender pronoun controversy.

For the record, when they day comes, I’d like to recommend the exclusive use of youse and youse youses as both singular and plural pronouns for all life-forms.

RELATED: From Gerard, SAY THE DAMNED PRONOUNS

Linked By: Larwyn’s Linx on Doug Ross@Journal, and BlogsLucianneLoves, and Free Republic, Thanks!

Sunday, March 11, 2018

#SooperSunday: DST Edition, and I’m Feeling Cranky

Only the government could steal an hour from you in March and pay it back 8 months later – without a minute of interest – and expect you to be grateful. Well I’m not grateful, I’m cranky; and if history is any gauge I will be cranky for the better part of a week as my biorhythms slowly adjust to this government mandated jetlag.

circadan4My complete circadian rhythm cycle: Cranky

So I’m just making a really simple soup today for #SooperSunday. It’s sort of like a spring tonic except it’s clearly not spring yet and hence NOT TIME TO SPRING FORWARD!

Anyway, here it is: Sweet Potato Leek Soup. It’s easy, delicious and most likely good for you: everything government is not.

Sweet Potato and Leek Soup

Ingredients
  • 1 Tbsp olive oil
  • 2 medium uncooked leek(s), (about 3/4 pound), cleaned and sliced (white and light green parts only)
  • 1 clove(s), medium garlic clove(s), minced
  • 3 medium uncooked sweet potato(es), (about 1 1/2 pounds), peeled and cubed
  • 6 cup(s) chicken broth
  • 1/4 cup half-and-half (or more, or heavy cream if you feel your disrupted circadian rhythm deserves it)
  • 1/8 tsp ground nutmeg, or to taste
  • 1/4 cup(s) chives, fresh, chopped

Instructions

Heat the oil in a large nonstick saucepan over medium heat. Add the leeks and garlic and cook, stirring frequently, until the leeks are tender, about 6 minutes. Add the sweet potatoes and broth; bring to a boil. Reduce the heat and simmer, covered, stirring occasionally, until the potatoes are fork-tender, about 25 minutes.

Remove the pan from the heat; let the mixture cool for a few minutes. Transfer the mixture in batches to a blender or food processor and puree. (OR: IMMERSION BLENDER!) Return the soup to the pan. Stir in the half-and-half and nutmeg; return to a simmer. Serve sprinkled with the chives.

Notes

Leeks often contain sand in between their layers. Here’s how to clean them: Trim away most of the dark green tops and the roots, leaving the root end intact to hold the layers together. Slice the leek lengthwise to within a half inch of the root end. Hold the leek by the root end, fan open the layers, and rinse thoroughly under cold running water.

paleo-leap-3

If you use fat free half and half (oxymoron if ever there was one) this is a Weight Watcher’s approved recipe, if you care. All I know is that it’s easy and delicious. In order to fight off the jet lag however I think I’ll serve it with pulled pork sliders.

I’m pretty sure you can use vegetable broth instead of chicken, if you don’t want to disturb your chicken’s circadian rhythms. 

16d74850d3d7fc19ef0930d35f9c535c

Take my cigarette and the chicken gets it. I’m not kidding, I haven’t had my nap yet and I’m a little cranky.

Linked By: Larwyn’s Linx on Doug Ross@Journal, and BlogsLucianneLoves, and Free Republic, Thanks!