Not watching either.

Nope, I’ll be reading a book.

Open thread. I got nothing, alas. Let’s talk about what happens tonight.

Posted at 8:15 pm in Current events |
 

48 responses to “Not watching either.”

  1. Dorothy said on January 8, 2019 at 8:36 pm

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  2. Suzanne said on January 8, 2019 at 8:57 pm

    Well played!

    I believe I will watch a Law & Order rerun

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  3. Deborah said on January 8, 2019 at 9:07 pm

    I was watching Chris Hayes, who had Rachel on and then it transitioned into her show and when she announced Trump I shut the teevee down. They say it’s only supposed to last 20mins. I may watch the response as I said, but right now I’d just as soon skip it all.

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  4. alex said on January 8, 2019 at 10:00 pm

    I wasn’t gonna, but I was watching Henry Louis Gates doing big roots reveals on Andy Samberg and George R.R. Martin and then PBS suddenly announced they were airing this shitshow.

    I thought with PBS commentators it might not be so bad after all, but they struggled to find anything worthwhile to talk about. Trump reading a teleprompter was a bore and so was his ineptly written script. Pelosi and Schumer were also stiff. I’m betting no one’s opinion in the entire country budged an inch.

    Mad props to Schumer, though, for pointing out that Trump’s just doing this to distract attention away from his imploding presidency.

    It’s a half hour of my life I won’t get back, but hey I already blew about five hours at work today trying to finesse bureaucrats into actually doing their jobs so what’s another drop in the bucket, motherfuckit.

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  5. Sherri said on January 8, 2019 at 11:57 pm

    I just discovered and binged a Rachel Maddow podcast, Bag Man, about Spiro Agnew. I didn’t remember much about Agnew other than him resigning due to some kind of scandal and nattoring nabobs of negativism. I didn’t realize just how big a crook he was until this podcast, overshadowed as he was by Watergate.

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  6. beb said on January 9, 2019 at 2:01 am

    At te end of the last thread Sherri said “They just want to hurt people.” Which may have been teeing off this comment via Lawyers, Guns and Money:
    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/07/us/florida-government-shutdown-marianna.html
    The key line quotes a Crystal Minton, a trump supporter: “I voted for him, and he’s the one who’s doing this,” she said of Mr. Trump. “I thought he was going to do good things. He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting.”

    I wonder who she considers the people Trump is supposed to be hurting?

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  7. Sherri said on January 9, 2019 at 2:18 am

    I’ve been trying to come up with a generous interpretation of that quote, beb, but so far, I’m coming up empty. Yes, I was teeing off that quote partly, and partly off something I saw somebody write in a Facebook comment. This man said he had no sympathy for Federal workers who weren’t getting paid, that he wanted them to feel the pain and uncertainty he felt as someone self-employed. I looked him up; he’s a farmer.

    No matter what they have, it’s not enough.

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  8. Beobachter said on January 9, 2019 at 6:25 am

    #47, Columbus!

    https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/travel/places-to-visit.html

    I recommend 18 (Puglia) and 49 (Vevey)

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  9. Jeff (the mild-mannered one) said on January 9, 2019 at 8:30 am

    The writer of the Pacific Standard piece I linked last thread is the chair of the Narrative Journalism section of the English department at Denison, and I get to hang with his students enough to be encouraged for the future. They go with us into some interesting places and come out with perspectives and reporting that’s got potential to make change.

    As for us older folk, we’re just going to have to follow John Irving’s dictum: “keep passing the open windows.”

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  10. Heather said on January 9, 2019 at 8:33 am

    Went to the pool and got some laps in. This morning I saw this from the AP: “AP FACT CHECK: Democrats put the blame for the shutdown on Trump. But it takes two to tango. Trump’s demand for $5.7 billion for his border wall is one reason for the budget impasse. The Democrats refusal to approve the money is another.”

    Yes, when a criminal takes someone hostage and the hostage resists, both parties are at fault.

    https://twitter.com/AP_Politics/status/1082857277084893184

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  11. alex said on January 9, 2019 at 8:48 am

    When the president puts his hands on a woman and the woman resists…

    I don’t think the AP is being inconsistent.

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  12. alex said on January 9, 2019 at 8:52 am

    Had to do a spit take on this headline and photo: http://www.journalgazette.net/article/20190109/ARTICLE/301099916

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  13. Deggjr said on January 9, 2019 at 8:58 am

    Beb@6, maybe Crystal Minton was referring to Russia and Vladimir Putin.

    I kid, I kid.

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  14. FDChief said on January 9, 2019 at 9:01 am

    Well…the orange fool didn’t declare a state of emergency, so the Reichstag stands for one more day, at least. There’s that.

    I think the main takeaways are what we know already; 1) the dude is just not bright, 2) he has no clue how to energize people who aren’t petty, vicious little bastards like he is and doesn’t want to try, and 3) as a politician he’s a mediocre real estate grifter.

    No, the real ugly here is the ugly of the Florida ladycracker in the article as spokesbeeyotch for all these Trumpkins. This whole administration is their fapping about hurting what they hate; the 21st Century, tolerance, equality, and the idea that white doesn’t mean right. They are small and angry and will happily burn the nation down if it means they can burn up a lesbian couple or a Muslim congregation in it.

    Just your daily reminder that the GOP must be destroyed.

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  15. Suzanne said on January 9, 2019 at 9:13 am

    Heather, I saw that AP headline as well and thought basically the same thing. Takes two to tango? The GOP had a majority in both houses of Congress for 2 years and did nothing about border security. It’s like a guy who refused to ask out a woman he saw & spoke to every day and after for 2 years, she gets married to someone else, and then he’s mad when he finally asks her out and she turns him down.

    Crystal Minton’s words should be worked into every campaign against a GOP contender in the next election: “He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting” reminding voters that if they vote GOP, they just might discover that they are the people Trump & the GOP intend to hurt.

    Alex, I saw that picture in the paper and didn’t notice the “ahem” factor until I saw it online! LOL!

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  16. Dorothy said on January 9, 2019 at 9:23 am

    Sorry about the first comment last night – not sure what I was posting but it didn’t come through!

    I record Rachel Maddow every night (and usually watch it live but sometimes I don’t), and last night I opted to read my book. This morning I accessed my Maddow recording, fast forwarded through the Trump part, listened to (with great bemusement because they were so stiff) Chuck and Nancy’s response. Then back to Rachel. I’m glad I stuck with it because late in the show she had Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on. She’s a pretty cool person but she is also going to have to learn how to own her mistakes and apologize for them correctly instead of saying something she said was ‘morally right’ as opposed to being factually correct. Let’s hope she continues to be a voice for the people she represents and doesn’t commit any huge judgment errors during her term.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/01/07/alexandria-ocasio-cortezs-very-bad-defense-her-falsehoods/?utm_term=.2626b29e6b41

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  17. Icarus said on January 9, 2019 at 9:37 am

    Beb @6

    In my amateur journalism days, a quote like that would be 1) hard to come up with and 2) golden because see #1.

    I do wonder if this is exactly how Crystal Minton worded it, though it wouldn’t surprise me in the least.

    spent the holidays with the right-wing nut side of the family. FIL brought out his gun collection to show me the AR-15 he bought because he thought Hilary was gonna take the guns away. I thought he was joking, trying to rile me up, but no, he was serious. I even said, “Obama didn’t take them away in 8 years and you thought Hilary would?” Before he could respond my White Suburban BIL interrupted with “hey, no politics talking!”

    My Good Old Boy BIL told me separately that he is scared of Trump but if Hilary runs again he would vote for Trump (again) because he is afraid of what Hillary would do. If it isn’t clear, he’s seen what 2+ years of Trump have done, is admittedly scared of him, but still thinks Hillary is the worst choice!

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  18. Diane said on January 9, 2019 at 9:49 am

    I saw that AP “Fact Check” on twitter and really didn’t understand it. I thought it must be a parody account or something. Since it apparently isn’t I guess I still don’t understand it.

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  19. Julie Robinson said on January 9, 2019 at 9:50 am

    Yesterday I started listening to Bob Woodward’s Fear, so I considered that enough punishment for one day. Reading analysis this morning, I see there was nothing new presented and it was a good decision. I don’t need to get all upset right before bedtime.

    It’d be interesting to chart out who was more crooked: Agnew, Nixon, Trump, Manafort, Cohen, etc, etc, etc.

    It’s cold, gray, and snowing; cue the winter blues.

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  20. Suzanne said on January 9, 2019 at 9:50 am

    Icarus, no those “I had to buy guns before Hillary took them away” people are not kidding and are out there, more of them than most of us imagine. It’s scary. Unhinged people who believe lies with gun arsenals in their basements.

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  21. Jeff (the mild-mannered one) said on January 9, 2019 at 10:38 am

    As a pastor, all of the hardest to answer questions I get boil down to one essence, even if they all sound different on first hearing: why can’t things be the way they used to be?

    Sometimes it’s simple if unanswerable: why did my dear one have to die?

    I could say “because she was 93, because the cancer was everywhere, because the morphine had to increase to where breathing stopped to stay ahead of the pain.” But that’s not really what they’re wanting to express, or hear comfort about.

    Sometimes it’s prosaic: why did the city tear down the gazebo on courthouse square?

    I can explain “because it had rot in the timbers, was being used as a shooting gallery by addicts, and we have a new multi-million event space on the other side of the square, so why spend a fortune to keep the same thing in that place?” But that’s not the heart of the matter.

    And then there’s the ugly: why are there so many colored families living in this neighborhood?

    I try to respond with “the neighborhood housing stock is mostly from 1890 to 1915, your adult grandchildren don’t want these houses and they buy in subdivisions out in the lily white unincorporated outlying school districts, and we need to talk (again) about that term ‘colored’ okay?”

    Yes, it involves racism. It’s not just that, but it’s deeply intertwined and all the harder to deal with, because it’s tangled up with “why can’t things be the way they used to be?”

    Which is the pernicious appeal of “Make America Great Again” in places like county seat Ohio.

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  22. Jeff Borden said on January 9, 2019 at 10:40 am

    I can say with complete confidence I will never have to discuss an Orange King speech in my class, at least until he is out of office. Then, we’ll talk about what a phenomenally immoral, unethical demagogue he was.

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  23. Dorothy said on January 9, 2019 at 11:29 am

    Jeff I realize where you’re coming from as a pastor when you have to answer those questions. When I hear a variation of that at work or elsewhere, my go-to comeback is “We’d still be getting mail by pony express if everything stayed the same all the time.” Then I launch into the significance of progress, how technology influences so much now, and clothing styles, cars, furniture, all change. Nothing stays the same – ever. It’s called progress. It’s the way life is. I try not to get impatient but honestly, it is mind boggling that people want things to stay the same. It’s such an antiquated attitude. I’ve never been able to understand that approach. Good thing I’m not a pastor, I guess.

    I have heard all but the last episode of Bagman and found it so, so interesting.

    And Jolene a few weeks ago I put a photo of a button I bought in NYC on Facebook. I think you mentioned it’s one thing to have that in NYC, but another in red state Ohio and wondered what reaction I’ve been getting. So far it’s been very positive. Of course I’m wearing it on my coat that I wear to work, so in the elevator I’m with educated people who know what Trump is. Each person has said “I wish I had one of those!” If anyone else disagrees with my button, they’ve kept their comments to themselves. FYI the button says “If you don’t know what’s wrong with Trump, I don’t know how to explain it to you.”

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  24. basset said on January 9, 2019 at 11:45 am

    I want one and I haven’t even seen it. Link?

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  25. Dorothy said on January 9, 2019 at 12:29 pm

    Beb I got it from a street vendor in Bryant Park in New York last month

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  26. Jakash said on January 9, 2019 at 1:41 pm

    Jeff (tmmo) @ 21,

    One of the answers to “why can’t things be the way they used to be?” is that folks like your county seat congregation voted for decades to lower the marginal income tax rates, so that rich people could have more money, while the nation’s infrastructure has suffered. Another is that they voted for a Supreme Court that would decide that “a corporation is a person” and that “money is speech,” so that those rich people could use their extra money to have even more political power than they always did, which was disproportionate to begin with. It was supposedly “Morning in America” in 1984, but the rest of the day that the Reagan Revolution brought to bear for the country wasn’t very sunny at all. They voted for people whose policies favor the few over the many, too blinded by anti-otherness to keep in mind that they, themselves, are part of “the many.” The oddest thing about it is that they did this while railing against “the elites” the whole time.

    That’s a swell button, Dorothy, and I think it’s gutsy for you to wear it around Dayton — everybody you see as you make your rounds is not a Flyer, after all.

    Alex @ 12, to paraphrase something that Freud probably didn’t even say, “Sometimes a (whatever that thing is) is just a (whatever that thing is.)” : )

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  27. beb said on January 9, 2019 at 2:13 pm

    I’d like one of those buttons, too, but basset asked about your button.

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  28. Deborah said on January 9, 2019 at 2:28 pm

    I had to drive down to Albuquerque this morning to pick my husband up from the airport, he had to unexpectedly make a trip back to Chicago for a few days. I listened to Rachel Maddow being interviewed on Fresh Air by Terry Gross along with the guy Rachel collaborated with on Bagman. It was fascinating. I’ve only listened to the first two segments of Bagman so far. Wow was Agnew ever a crook and there are so many comparisons that can be made with Trump regarding obstruction of justice etc.

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  29. Dorothy said on January 9, 2019 at 2:50 pm

    OOOOPS! Sorry – got my b’s mixed up. I actually Googled that phrase and nothing comes up. Interesting story about the guy I bought that button from. I bought several from him (another says We are a proud nation of immigrants – I’m wearing it today!). We got to chatting and he asked where we were from. I mentioned working at the University of Dayton – don’t you know he’s personally acquainted with a professor in the Philosophy department here at UD! Small world, eh? He told me his name but I plumb forgot it by the end of the day. He used to work in ‘finance’ in New York but no longer does. He sells these badges etc. to supplement his retirement income. He had grey or white hair so I assumed he was around my age (early 60’s).

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  30. susan said on January 9, 2019 at 2:57 pm

    Dorothy, I looked on-line for that button but so far haven’t been able to find one. I did find this one, though.

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  31. Sherri said on January 9, 2019 at 3:08 pm

    What most people can’t even see is the inherent racism and sexism built into even asking the question why can’t things be the way they used to be. Because there’s an assumption that you were better off in that long ago, but you’re not considering why or how that was, or who was paying the price.

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  32. Bitter Scribe said on January 9, 2019 at 4:15 pm

    Trump’s Oval Office speech was basically a version of his stump speech. He dragged out examples of horrific crimes, which are somehow supposed to justify harsh measures against all immigrants but never seem to matter when it comes to gun laws.

    Someone upthread mentioned the Pony Express. Little-known fact: Even though the USPS has (or had) an image of a Pony Express rider as part of its logo, the Pony Express was never part of the Post Office. It was an independent company that contracted with the Post Office. This was partly due to Southern senators holding out for a southern stagecoach route for the mail. Eventually, of course, the transcontinental railroad came along and made it all moot.

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  33. Julie Robinson said on January 9, 2019 at 4:29 pm

    Exactly, Sherri. I don’t want to go back to the days when, for example, my grandmother hid her black mother because she was afraid for her life. Let’s elevate everyone, not push people down.

    I also don’t want to go back to the good old days before antibiotics, because I would have died at the age of 40.

    Somewhere I’ve got a Nixon’s the One button. Not planning on wearing that!

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  34. Suzanne said on January 9, 2019 at 4:40 pm

    Jeff (TMMO) you really did hit the nail on the head. I had a decent childhood, close family, lots of love, not a lot of money or sophistication but we laughed a lot and I knew I was safe. It was great. But for great swaths of the population, that wasn’t possible and still isn’t. The post war years I grew up in were mighty fine if you were white and Protestant, which I was and am. It does amaze me how many people can’t or won’t understand that.

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  35. Mark P said on January 9, 2019 at 4:50 pm

    The good old days. Yes, I was alive for those. I might have mentioned this before, but within my lifetime, it was perfectly legal to keep black kids out of white schools. It was legal to make blacks ride in the back of the bus, and to prevent them from using a public swimming poor, or eat in certain restaurants or stay in certain hotels or motels. It was OK to keep them from buying homes in certain neighborhoods. It wasn’t, strictly speaking, legal to prevent them from voting, but it was certainly done without consequence. It was pretty routine in the South for white businessmen to cheat black buyers or repossess furniture bought on time, even, sometimes, from people who did not buy the furniture in the first place. It was routine for blacks accused of crimes to be tried before all-white juries. It wasn’t unheard of for blacks or whites to be killed for trying to register blacks to vote. I’m not sure how many blacks would want to go back to the good old days. But, of course, the people who want to go back to the good old days don’t really care much what black people want. Or anyone else, for that matter.

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  36. Deborah said on January 9, 2019 at 5:37 pm

    I was 7 years old when I first saw separate drinking fountains, one labeled “colored” the other “white” in a large discount store in Miami called Shell City. Of course my 8 year old sister and I thought the water would be colored and white, we were puzzled when we tried the fountains and they only had plain old clear water. My mother scooted us away when she saw what we were doing. I certainly don’t want to go back to those cruel times.

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  37. alex said on January 9, 2019 at 6:22 pm

    I just saw how our cowardly local news handles Trump’s address. They reiterate his talking points about the “humanitarian crisis on our border” and the “crisis of the heart and soul” bullshit, then quote one of our idiot senators agreeing wholeheartedly and vowing to fight for it. No worry about fielding phone calls from the cranks tonight, I guess. And it’s not even a Sinclair station.

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  38. Dexter Friend said on January 9, 2019 at 7:22 pm

    Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Rachel’s show was sort of can’t miss TV for me. She is well spoken and has transitioned from restaurant waitress to Congresswoman in less than a year, and done it well. She reps NY 14th, from Jackson Heights to Astoria Queens and a lot more territory in between. Over 50% of her constituency are immigrants. She’s young enough, strong enough to do them well. Kudos to this true firebrand. And fuck Mike Pence, that goddam charlatan radio preacher, to hell with his bullshit, his lies about alien invasion.

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  39. Jeff (the mild-mannered one) said on January 9, 2019 at 9:10 pm

    Suzanne, exactly. It was great for “us.” And the idea that “us” isn’t everyone is a very high reach for a lot of people. Sherri is correct, there’s a lot of inherent racism and sexism in used-to-be-ism, but it is damn hard to get at for most people. I’ll keep trying.

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  40. alex said on January 9, 2019 at 11:16 pm

    Used-to-be-ism. Makes me think of middle-aged and older women learning how to drive in the late 1960s. And integrated lunch counters at the G.C. Murphy and WT Grant and Walgreens, not that people of color were availing themselves of it (because they didn’t want spit or worse in their food). And gasoline fumes in the air, both visible to the naked eye and olfactorily frightful. And riverbanks covered in tires and mattresses and other garbage. I think back on a childhood that was seedy, sordid and sickening, yet people seemed to be in denial about all of that; the only bad things in the world were bra-burning feminists and uppity coloreds and draft-dodging wussies, none of which I ever had the pleasure of encountering, any more than any of the monsters Donald Trump was describing as he descended on his golden escalator.

    It’s kind of like we’ve gone back 50 years in the last two, only the clean environment has yet to catch up.

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  41. Dexter Friend said on January 10, 2019 at 1:20 am

    Alex…as I read yours above, I recalled my first trip through Riverhaven …Jesus, what an eye-opener…1971. All I remember are old tires, garbage and crap everywhere in the yards of the crooked, falling-in homes. In Chicago in the 60s and 70s, the medians of the freeways, especially the Kennedy and Dan Ryan, were totally covered in litter of all types…it was quite a way to welcome visitors coming into the city from O’Hare, seeing that amazing amount of societal crap.

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  42. Jeff (the mild-mannered one) said on January 10, 2019 at 7:52 am

    Another small piece of good news from my backyard; Chris is a good friend and I’m spending way more time with Scott these days than I would have expected seven years ago . . . I’d have to commit a crime to see him more often! But there are some signs of hope and renewal here in Licking County, Ohio.

    https://psmag.com/social-justice/licking-county-ohio-a-corrections-strategy-that-offers-counseling-art-classes-and-mindfulness-training

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  43. Sherri said on January 10, 2019 at 10:28 am

    Remember how the tech world likes to see itself as a meritocracy, so racism and sexism aren’t a problem, talent wins? Not so much. If you’re a woman likability >> talent.

    https://mobile.twitter.com/johannarickne/status/1082687438995292160

    Which brings me to this piece about Richard Feynman. Feynman is worshipped among techies. He was a genius and he was cool. He was also a shit to women. In fact, a lot of the heroes of the techies are/were shits to women; the cooler they are, the shittier they are.

    As a young woman in tech, I internalized all this. I tried to be one of the guys, to fit in. Slowly, I figured out, that wasn’t possible, that I’d never be one of the guys.

    What I don’t think the guys who still worship their heroes who treat women as shit get is, that’s not benign. It causes real damage to people around you.

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  44. beb said on January 10, 2019 at 3:43 pm

    Accoording to this article on Buzzfeed the whole world is disgusted at how Americans heat water
    https://www.buzzfeed.com/mjs538/the-entire-world-is-disgusted-at-americans-for-how-they
    I thought they were disgusted by hot water heater instead of on0demand hot water heaters, but no. The world thinks we use our microwave to heat water for tea. How can I explain how wrong the are. Perhaps by pointing out that most Americans don;t drink tea. They drink coffee. Which is made in a coffee-maker. And that after a time the coffee gets cold and needs to be warmed up, which is easiest done in a microwave. Then again, people in Great Britain seem to have electric tea kettles while I don’t think I’ve ever seem an electric tea kettle for sale in the US. I blame Trump for making the world mad at us for using the convenient microwave for doing the thing it was designed for — heating things.
    /sarcasm

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  45. Julie Robinson said on January 10, 2019 at 4:49 pm

    Beb, we drink tea in this house, a LOT of tea. Hubby drinks coffee too, but at home it’s usually tea. We use an electric teakettle because they shut themselves off when the water has boiled. (*Someone* in our house would bypass the whistler and then forget they had put water on the stove to boil. It happened many times.) They are available in any big box store that carries kitchen stuff. They may have saved our house from burning down. They may have saved our marriage.

    A couple jobs ago there was no kitchen, only a mini-fridge and microwave, so I did heat up my tea water in the microwave. It worked just fine.

    Still slogging my way through Fear, but I stopped in the library and Becoming had reached the top of my queue!

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  46. Deborah said on January 10, 2019 at 4:50 pm

    In our hotels in both London and Paris there was an electric kettle, they had instant decaf and regular coffee in individual packets. The instant coffee they provide at the London hotel we stayed in, the same one as last year, is actually very good. I always gather whatever packets I didn’t used there and bring them back to Chicago. I can’t find a place to buy the brand online.

    American hotels provide those silly coffee makers that dispense one cup at a time, but not Kuerig types. Sometimes they have Lipton tea bags but how are you supposed to heat the water unless there’s also a microwave?

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  47. Julie Robinson said on January 10, 2019 at 5:13 pm

    Deborah, they expect you to run the water through the coffee pot, where it will not get hot enough and will taste like coffee. If they have a microwave they usually only have styrofoam cups. If we’re on a car trip, I always stick in a couple of our own mugs and teabags. Things get ugly if *someone* doesn’t get their tea.

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  48. Sherri said on January 10, 2019 at 5:34 pm

    Another tea drinker here, who also owns an electric tea kettle. I take tea bags with me when I travel, and once bought an electric tea kettle on vacation because everybody in my family drinks tea and the small underpowered microwave wasn’t enough!

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