Notes from a prone position.

Because Twitter didn’t collapse in a heap five minutes after Elmo got the keys, there’s a fair amount of pushback from his weird fans. But I’ll tell you: I no longer get served ads for new movies, cars or from any other legit brand, even gambling. Rather, it’s all these super-fast-cut commercials for shit like miracle cleaning brushes, or a wrench that looks like a snowflake, or 25 Times Famous People Ate In Restaurants and You Won’t Believe What Happened.

So I think the longer view is that Twitter won’t collapse in a heap, but rather, be eaten away by glitches and bad user apples like Kanye. Musk will get bored if no one is paying attention to him, and he’ll sell it for pennies on the dollar.

Too bad. Twitter was fun while it lasted. Politics, jokes and cute animals:

Thanks for all the back-care advice. Today, Friday, is the first I’ve felt on the road to recovery. PT starts week after next. Until then, no heavy lifting.

In my convalescence, I’ve been reading the news, oh boy. Two big stories here: One, the battle to lead the Michigan Republican Party, which is revealing that the MAGA wing learned nothing from last month’s election. Either that, or they don’t want to go back to work at their boring old before-times jobs just yet. The losing AG candidate and the losing SOS candidate both have announced their party-chair bids, along with losing U.S. Senate (in 2012) candidate Pete Hoekstra. You junkies might recall him as the guy who ran the “Debbie Spend-it-Now” ad during that year’s Super Bowl, which was so racist the Asian actor cast as Rice Paddy Girl issued a public apology the next day. And he’s the “mainstream” candidate.

The other is about the reshuffling of the Democratic primary calendar for 2024, in which Michigan’s place in the order will move closer to the front of the line. We’re hearing everything from second (after New Hampshire, which for some reason HAS to be first) to fourth, but anything is better than what it’s been in recent years. In 2020, my primary ballot had something like 13 candidates, all of whom had dropped out by the time I voted. Screw Iowa; we can do better than this.

And I guess everyone here has heard what happened when someone put Kanye West in front of a live mic yesterday. A shitshow.

OK, my back is starting to bark again, so wrapping this up. More muscle relaxers! Have a great weekend, all.

Posted at 8:46 am in Current events, Media |
 

23 responses to “Notes from a prone position.”

  1. Mark P said on December 2, 2022 at 9:10 am

    I keep thinking we will all wake up one day, look at each other, and say, “OK, that was strange. No more sauerkraut after 8 pm.”

    132 chars

  2. jcburns said on December 2, 2022 at 9:48 am

    Me, I’m going with no sauerkraut before 8 pm as well.

    53 chars

  3. alex said on December 2, 2022 at 10:14 am

    25 Times Famous People Ate In Restaurants and You Won’t Believe What Happened

    The knee-slappingly funniest line I’ve read yet today. Yep, Twitter’s running on fumes at this point.

    On edit: jcburns for a tie.

    218 chars

  4. Mark P said on December 2, 2022 at 11:13 am

    I don’t actually eat sauerkraut at any time. I happen to believe that we have a sense of smell for a reason. If I think my milk has gone bad, I smell it, and that can tell me. If I smell sauerkraut in the house, I know that something has gone horribly wrong.

    260 chars

  5. Jeff Gill said on December 2, 2022 at 11:35 am

    Dixville Notch, ftw!

    20 chars

  6. David C said on December 2, 2022 at 11:39 am

    Yeah there’s the “You won’t believe the what’s in the Guinness Book of Records” with a picture of a scantily clad woman surrounded by dozens of horny looking men. You know they want them to click in to find the world record gang bang. I bet it isn’t there and I bet hundreds of thousands click through to find out.

    315 chars

  7. jcburns said on December 2, 2022 at 12:03 pm

    25 Times Famous People Ate Sauerkraut in Dixville Notch And Ended Up In The Guinness Book of Records.

    In color!

    114 chars

  8. Peter said on December 2, 2022 at 12:35 pm

    Oh the good old days – growing up in an Eastern European home – sauerkraut, head cheese, liver…I swear there were some days when I just stuck my head out the window because the exhaust from the steel plant was WAY better to breathe than what was going on inside the house.

    274 chars

  9. annie said on December 2, 2022 at 1:41 pm

    an eastern european grandmother here too: also tongue sandwiches and cabbage strudel. I used to happily eat them all as a child. Now I can’t imagine eating any of it.

    170 chars

  10. Deborah said on December 2, 2022 at 2:12 pm

    I hate the smell of cooking Brussel Sprouts but they’re not bad to eat, my husband loves them. Broccoli isn’t great smelling either, but cooked cabbage smell is the worst. The only time I ever eat sauerkraut is when I have a Rueben Sandwich which is hardly ever.

    My German grandfather made sauerkraut, When I was a kid I watched him shred the cabbage with an ancient wooden mandolin with metal blades. I inherited that antique but I have no idea what happened to it.

    My grandfather didn’t have indoor plumbing on his farm, there was a hand pump right outside the kitchen door. Everything was harder to do, cooking, cleaning you name it. Maybe sauerkraut was easy to make since it’s basically jarred rotting cabbage. His farm house was torn down sometime after he died in 1973, I wish I could go back, I often have dreams about it.

    840 chars

  11. LAMary said on December 2, 2022 at 2:34 pm

    My father used to buy whole cow tongues, cook them and put them in the fridge on a plate so it looked like the fridge was sticking it tongue out at me whenever I opened the door. I like sauerkraut on a sandwich or with smoked sausage. It’s good for you too. Just sayin’. I like brussel sprouts and broccoli too. I guess I got used to stinky food early on in life.

    363 chars

  12. Deborah said on December 2, 2022 at 3:02 pm

    Actually LAMary now that you mention it, I have had sauerkraut with smoked German sausage, at Cafe Sabarsky, in the Neue Gallery in Manhattan, and thoroughly enjoyed it.

    Different topic: In the last thread a couple of us remarked on Alex’s use of the word vexatious. Here’s a word I hardly ever heard but now hear/read all the time “cohort”. Am I the only one who has noticed this? Recently I was listening to Scott Galloway and he used cohort a lot in just one podcast episode. And just now I was reading an article in the NYT, an article about Nannies and cohort was used in it. Those aren’t the only times I’ve noticed it by any means.

    643 chars

  13. Mark P said on December 2, 2022 at 4:10 pm

    My mother loved sauerkraut, but it made her sick every time she ate it. My uncle made my aunt cook it outside when she wanted it. My wife eats it, but from a jar. I would not be happy to have it cooked in our house.

    215 chars

  14. Connie said on December 2, 2022 at 4:20 pm

    My grandmother made sauerkraut in her basement, I have one of her crocks. I don’t much care for eating it.

    My other grandmother made the dutch version of head cheese, called balkan brij (long i, y sound). It smelled so bad when she fried up a slice I would go out back for air.

    282 chars

  15. Jeff Gill said on December 2, 2022 at 9:11 pm

    More fun to call it the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon, or:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion

    106 chars

  16. Mark P said on December 2, 2022 at 10:27 pm

    We voted early this afternoon in the Georgia Senate runoff. This was the last day for early voting. We got to the polls at around 4:35. We waited about 30 minutes in a long line, and then went into the room and voted. The process was extremely inefficient. There were eight voting machines, and the most people I saw at them was three. Often, as we stood in line and waited for the workers to do whatever they had to do, there was no one voting. It took about five seconds to actually vote. We spent a total of 50 minutes there.

    528 chars

  17. alex said on December 2, 2022 at 10:34 pm

    I remember the word cohort meaning “partner in crime” when I first came upon it in novels and newspapers as a youngster, and later in college I understood it to mean a group similar in age or status, like Boomers or Gen-X, when viewed in a scientific context. But the word’s always been around and isn’t faddish, like, say, “overkill” was in the 1980s (thanks to a pop song) until it got overkilled. Or “puling” in the early 2000s when Fox News was using it to describe liberals.

    Haven’t had any Baader-Meinhofs lately. Guess I’m just too well-read.

    553 chars

  18. Julie Robinson said on December 2, 2022 at 11:28 pm

    As always, this next generation rejects our rejection of the nasty foods our parents and grandparents ate. Verily they have rediscovered and renamed them. Fermentation. Probiotics. Bacteria in the air are good.

    For what is kimchi but sauerkraut rewritten and re-spiced? Kombucha, with its half inch thick scoby, that alien sponge growing on its surface, taunts me from the counter top. Look at me closely and try not to vomit, it says. Your children willingly grow me and drink me.

    Really. Go look it up and see if it doesn’t make your stomach roil. I’ll wait.

    Told you.

    582 chars

  19. Dexter Friend said on December 3, 2022 at 2:25 am

    My great aunt Hattie married a German named Zumbrunn or something like that. He made sauerkraut in his house in Garrett. Mom visited them and I was dragged along when I was a tyke. I was amazingly overwhelmed, wow.
    Jim Clyburn said South Carolina is fighting to be 1st in primaries, caucuses are hopefully to be eliminated. He said it’s ridiculous to make South Carolinians believe New Hampshire and Iowa pave the way to a candidate’s push upward. South Carolina was 4th in succession in 2020.

    I have to live with back pain daily, worse since Diclofenac fucked up my kidneys and I was taken off it cold turkey. By day 3 off that pain reducer, man, it hit hard. I inherited this arthritis from both grandfathers and my dad. Fun stuff. It doesn’t keep me down, I just am stiff all over, but nothing to whine about. I have had that stabbing pain before, that’s much worse than what I deal with.

    901 chars

  20. Jeff Borden said on December 3, 2022 at 9:22 am

    The Democrats, who have been saved repeatedly by the votes of black Americans, want people of color to have a greater say earlier in the primary process. Iowa and New Hampshire certainly flunk in that regard. Illinois was pitching to be an early state, but the DNC has decided the Chicago media market is simply too expensive.

    Watching the long lines in Georgia reminds me of all the efforts the Republicans made to make it harder to vote. I’m happy to see Georgians making the effort to stand in long lines. . .I wonder how many would last waiting outdoors on a cold November day in the Midwest. . .but continue to believe any political party that puts obstacles to vote in place already is losing.

    Alex Jones, Nick Fuentes and Kanye West all in the same room together made me wish the fourth in-studio guest was a ravenous tiger.

    837 chars

  21. jcburns said on December 3, 2022 at 9:56 am

    Jeff, you were watching my polling place among others, no doubt. I think the thing is: my neighbors know the Republicans made voting harder, and they said “screw them, we can do this.”

    Harder is not impossible. So far.

    Oh, here’s a shot of our polling place’s line down Ponce de Leon (across from the Majestic and the Plaza Theatre!) that I saw last night:

    457 chars

  22. David C said on December 3, 2022 at 10:12 am

    Has anyone been charged with giving someone on line water? There’s a law that deserves to be struck down.

    105 chars

  23. LAMary said on December 3, 2022 at 1:01 pm

    When I worked at a hospital I used to hire nurse cohorts four times a year, AKA new grad, newly licensed nurses.

    112 chars