May the best white guy win.

I had half a post pecked out, but then remembered tonight is Veep Debate: Clash of Those Two Guys, and figured you’d want to talk about that. And then I found this wonderful site, which should be amusing to Deborah, Peter and Alex, as well as Basset and many others. People, I give you: McMansion Hell. Enjoy as much as I did, and open thread on the debate, too. Let’s get snarkin’. I’ll be back tomorrow.

Posted at 8:38 pm in Current events |
 

40 responses to “May the best white guy win.”

  1. alex said on October 4, 2016 at 8:55 pm

    Regarding Leo Strauss, from the last thread. Republicans need intellectual creds; whom better to rip them off from than someone who’s dead and unable to defend himself?

    And the foam stonework on McMansions is the most atrocious shit I’ve ever seen. A newish house near me got popped by a careless driver entering or exiting the garage and the mess it made of the facade was unbelievable. Hope the place never burns down. The off-gases would probably kill everyone within a mile.

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  2. Dorothy said on October 4, 2016 at 9:23 pm

    Pence just gave a shout out to Ft Wayne! He’s still a big putz though.

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  3. David C. said on October 4, 2016 at 9:23 pm

    Is it a blessing or a curse to know the real reasons to hate McMansions. Whichever it is, it’s fun to read.

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  4. basset said on October 4, 2016 at 9:39 pm

    I will circulate that among our designers tomorrow. Always thought a snout house, though, was a tract house with a garage protruding toward the street. Like these: http://www.thegazette.com/2011/08/08/cedar-rapids-marion-take-aim-at-snout-houses

    Debate? Went to Publix for a pharmacy pickup, then we watched some of Sanford & Son, then we turned the tv off.

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  5. Suzanne said on October 4, 2016 at 10:18 pm

    Why the heck am I watching this VP debate. It’s making me mad. Kaine’s isn’t coming across very well & Pence is just being a huge prick. Huge prick. Same old GOP talking points.

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  6. alex said on October 4, 2016 at 10:52 pm

    Suzanne, I agree. Kaine seemed too high-strung and too rehearsed while Pence came across as more composed and measured, even though he was lying his ass off as he always does. If you had the sound turned off, or you’re one of those people who doesn’t know jack about issues or care, you’d think Pence came off better.

    Didn’t help that I sat through the whole excruciating thing with a sinus headache.

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  7. Deborah said on October 4, 2016 at 11:00 pm

    Those McMansions are examples of what my husband calls evaluative oblivion. I can’t even get riled up about them, they’re so irrelevant.

    I could not stand watching Pence shake his head or chuckle dismissively and smugly whenever Kaine accused Trump of saying outrageous things that Trump indeed clearly has said. Pence kept saying that Trump didn’t say those things when he absolutely did.

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  8. Deborah said on October 4, 2016 at 11:18 pm

    I think Kaine was strategically a caffeinated pit bull, on purpose. He had to try to keep Pence from coming across as measured and composed because Pence is good at that. Also, Kaine had his facts and was able to tick off point after point of Hillary’s various plans, where Pence just gave the same old broad brush statements with no specifics.

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  9. Deborah said on October 4, 2016 at 11:23 pm

    And one more thing. I think Pence’s whole agenda was to come off measured and composed to counterbalance Trump’s hotheadedness. Pence was pretty successful in that endeavor even though Kaine did manage to rile him up a bit.

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  10. alex said on October 4, 2016 at 11:31 pm

    Just took a longer tour of the McMansions and my nasty headache came back.

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  11. Sherri said on October 5, 2016 at 1:53 am

    I went out to dinner with my husband instead of wat hung the debate. Then I watched Buck Showalter lose an elimination game with his best relief pitcher still in the bullpen. Managers and coaches baffle me sometimes. When your entire season is on the line, why are you saving your best for some future that won’t come if you don’t survive right now?

    It’s going to take some serious even year magic for the Giants to get very far in the playoffs, unfortunately.

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  12. Dexter said on October 5, 2016 at 2:04 am

    Books…we would have gotten our asses beaten by the ubiquitous paddle with the air holes drilled if we had marked in rented text books as a kid. As one progressed through the years, buying textbooks became the way, mark ’em up. Magazine reading habits vary. A man who has been the topic of a few threads here at nn.c, Ernie Harwell, had a good system. He read mags while in airports and in airplanes. He’d tear the covers from magazines immediately and then rip out any articles he’d deem readable, then throw the cover and the unwanted ads and stories into a trash can, and when he read an article, he’d just leave it on the plane or trash it somewhere. He did this to lighten the weight of his grip.
    A guy named Glenn who I worked with for years had an odd habit. He’d keep track of how much content he had read in his beloved Readers’ Digest and his car mags by underlining every line with a ball point pen. He’d star paragraphs that had grabbed his attention.
    I read magazines backwards, last articles first. Some peeps read books backwards…they read the last chapter to decide if getting to that point would be worth it…spoiler alert? Meh…they must not care.
    Now all I receive are my vets mag and my AA Grapevine…I keep forgetting to renew my expired New Yorker. Everything else is free stuff I find online.
    Debate: I’m like…from another planet from nn.c literati. A Veep debate when the American League Wildcard game was on? Unthinkable to the great unwashed common baseball nut. I DVR’d the damn debate and watched 20 minutes and then erased the fuckin’ boring extravaganza.
    Still not tired at 2:00 AM. I think I sleep less than Trump (he sleeps 4 hours a night). “Westworld”, an HBO new series? Is it good? Guess I’ll watch the first episode and then crash.

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  13. Pam said on October 5, 2016 at 4:45 am

    When I volunteered for the 2nd Obama campaign, I went door to door in one of those McMansion neighborhoods. It was on a far smaller scale than the ones shown on that hilarious web site. All of the houses had those huge 2 story arched entrances with really badly poured concrete steps leading up to a concrete front porch that on most houses seemed to be slipping away from the house (a soon to be water problem). It was a hideous neighborhood (and not cheaply priced) and most of the folks who lived there seemed depressed. I know I was when I left there. It was like depression was an invisible gas in that neighborhood, likely given off by the building materials. A little further up the way were the much larger McMansions that just seem to be “off” somehow. Now I know why.

    Didn’t watch the VP debate. What’s the point? I’ve made up my mind who I’m voting for and nothing will change it, so we have officially exited from all political blather. This election cycle has been painfully loooong and will likely start anew right after this election is concluded.

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  14. ROGirl said on October 5, 2016 at 5:37 am

    McMansions…so much hideosity. Someone once pointed out to me that they look like old train stations, and it’s true. This is a former train station.

    http://www.afar.com/places/big-rock-chop-house-birmingham

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  15. Suzanne said on October 5, 2016 at 7:18 am

    And for Pence to excoriate Kaine for acting like interrupting Trump in a debate was just so beyond the pale. Pence truly does live in some alternate universe. He keeps showing me he’s a bigger a$$ than I thought. And I think he’s a pretty big a$$.

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  16. alex said on October 5, 2016 at 7:22 am

    In reflecting on last night’s debate, Pence reminds me of so many people I’ve known who are in deep denial about their dysfunctional spouses or children, forever putting ludicrous positive spins on indefensible behavior instead of just facing up to the fact that they married or raised some really sick fucks and that others are owed an apology, not an excuse.

    “That Mexican thing” seems to be the runaway hit of the night, pretty much encapsulating everything that’s wrong with Trump and his entire campaign. A brilliant line, and so unwitting.

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  17. adrianne said on October 5, 2016 at 7:38 am

    Alex, yes, Trump is the abuser and those around him are his enablers! Perfect analogy. I loved when Nance posted a video of Jared and The Donald arguing after the first debate (I’m sure he was telling Donald that he blew it, and Donald couldn’t believe it), and Ivanka and Melania are just … completely silent. Don’t argue with the abuser, he might lash out at you. That’s the dynamic.

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  18. Deborah said on October 5, 2016 at 7:51 am

    I’m waiting at my gate at Midway. I didn’t sleep a wink after the debate, for some reason I was really wound up. Maybe Kaine’s jitteryness got to me. I spent the night reading about Leo Strauss an his followers. That led me to the Claremont Institute and then I read the flight 93 screed written by the guy who uses a pseudonym of Plurbius something something. I also read his rebuttal to the criticism he received for it. From my perspective the guy is completely misguided. He’s seems extremely intelligent which always makes me wonder how he could be so wrong. He seems like the kind of guy you could never win an argument with, at least I know I couldn’t. I did sleep for about a half hour before the debate started but that was it. By about 2 or 3am I was afraid to sleep for fear of not waking up in time for my flight. It was miserable but I learned a lot about neocons etc. I had no idea they espoused such radical views, their basic premise from what I could tell is that there are leaders and there are those who need to be led and it’s ok to lie to the masses, because they need to kept in line. Of course it’s more complicated than that, and there are other premises to involved to get into here.

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  19. Deborah said on October 5, 2016 at 7:54 am

    Make that “too involved” and other typos after not enough sleep.

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  20. Kim said on October 5, 2016 at 8:16 am

    My youngest goes to school at Longwood, where the VP debate was held. Students were watching it on a giant TV set up on a campus lawn and he said everyone was pro-Hillary, which surprised both of us. I wished for a tad more civility from Kaine, who’s a nice guy. If he’d just waited instead of stepping on Pence his calls for an answer to “how do you defend Trump” might’ve been easier to catch. The NYT’s editorial this a.m. is titled “Mike Pence’s fantasy running mate,” which would be amusing if it weren’t yet another bizarre truth in this weird election.

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  21. Peter said on October 5, 2016 at 9:26 am

    I don’t know. Pence, to me, did come off as The Adult In The Room that the GOP was hoping for when he was selected – don’t worry about Donald being cray cray, Big Daddy Pence will talk him off the ledge.

    On the other hand, he reminded me of a high school principal or boss that could be 100% wrong and still keep a straight, infuriating face.

    Thanks for the McMansions link Nancy – what a great site!

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  22. Bitter Scribe said on October 5, 2016 at 10:25 am

    If Pence keeps shaking his head every time someone brings up something Trump has said and done, he’s going to end up with a sprained neck.

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  23. Peter said on October 5, 2016 at 12:37 pm

    Well, if anyone needed any more proof that we’re in Bizarro World, Trump apparently didn’t like Pence’s performance: http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/10/5/13170838/pence-trump-unhappy

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  24. Heather said on October 5, 2016 at 12:51 pm

    I work in the western suburbs of Chicago so I see a lot of McMansions. On one street there are some really lovely, old, charming “little” houses (little by today’s standards, although some are quite big) on spacious wooded lots and they’re slowly all being bought and torn down to be replaced by these ugly things. Depressing.

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  25. Jakash said on October 5, 2016 at 1:03 pm

    Pence may be “The Adult In The Room that the GOP was hoping for,” but I don’t really see where that gets Rump any votes he doesn’t already have. It likely just makes folks who’ve deluded themselves into thinking that Rump wouldn’t be so bad feel a tad better about supporting an incompetent boob. And, of course, because no rational person could, Pence didn’t do very well at defending The Toddler In The Room that the GOP is stuck with. The commercials showing him denying or shaking his head at something Kaine pinned on the Cheeto King, followed immediately by showing Trump saying just what was alleged, practically assemble themselves and are already rolling out.

    Full disclosure: I didn’t watch the freaking thing! But, from what I’ve read, I’m pretty comfortable with the takeaway I saw from Ezra Klein on Twitter: “Mike Pence won. Donald Trump lost.”

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  26. Deborah said on October 5, 2016 at 1:46 pm

    I’m on the shuttle in NM heading for Santa Fe.

    I will say that it’s not only McMansions that are made with chewing gum and styrofoam, many buildings are too. I designed a lot of architectural signage in my day and I can’t tell you how many times we wanted to put an entry or identity sign on a facade and couldn’t put it where it should have gone because the wall or column was made of foam and had no structural integrity to hold up the sign.

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  27. brian stouder said on October 5, 2016 at 1:58 pm

    Pam and I watched it, and I forewarned her that our Bobby Knight look-alike governor was a smooth operator (talk-radio background)…and I was expecting a little more from Kaine (in a word, he sounded rude, if not almost manic….like too much coffee in the evening)

    But, even accounting for Kaine’s excess kinetic energy, I thought it was interesting, even if ephemeral.

    If HRC hands Trump his ass again, the VP debate is even further in the weeds

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  28. Sue said on October 5, 2016 at 2:00 pm

    Seems McMansions are losing value:
    “When Dr. Kishin Ramani decided to sell his six-bedroom, Georgian-style home on a half-acre lot in Hinsdale three years ago, it never occurred to him that he’d be resigned to accepting far less than he paid when he bought the home in 2005.
    Ramani was immediately drawn to the home, built in 2003, because “it was gorgeous and airy, with the highest ceilings I’d seen.” A recent appraisal said it is worth $2.5 million. But after years on the market, and dropping the price three times to $1.99 million, he says he is ready to take a $600,000 loss on the home because he has little choice.
    He needs to move soon into a new home he had built in Oak Brook for his wife, Dr. Suman Kaur, his two children and his parents, and he has no interest in keeping two homes.”
    http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-mcmansions-price-drop-chicago-0906-biz-20160902-story.html

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  29. LAMary said on October 5, 2016 at 2:29 pm

    The locals here are loving Pence’s comment about “that Mexican thing.”

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  30. Judybusy said on October 5, 2016 at 2:41 pm

    I love the whole phrase even better: “Now you’re whipping out that Mexican thing!”

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  31. Jakash said on October 5, 2016 at 2:45 pm

    Funny sign in N.Y.C.:

    https://twitter.com/DaleMaharidge/status/783503023263903744?lang=en

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  32. Heather said on October 5, 2016 at 2:48 pm

    Sue, Hinsdale is where I see the worst examples around work!

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  33. Sherri said on October 5, 2016 at 3:11 pm

    This is bad even for Fox, even for Bill O’Reilly. It’s just ugly racism played for a joke.

    http://www.theatlantic.com/notes/2016/10/trump-time-capsule-127-a-chinese-view-of-election/503009/

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  34. Jolene said on October 5, 2016 at 4:31 pm

    Have seen several posts on the “Jesse Watters visits Chinatown” video, Sherri, all of them calling out the racism.

    Here’s an article that describes both some official responses by organizations concerned with Asian Americans and responses from social media.

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  35. Icarus said on October 5, 2016 at 5:54 pm

    @Sue, I saw that a while back and all I could think was wow what is this world coming to when a man struggles to get his family out of the Ghettos of Hindsale and into the upper crust of Oak Brook.

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  36. Sherri said on October 5, 2016 at 6:17 pm

    I’ve been thinking a lot about this New Yorker article about Trump voters in West Virginia, which is more nuanced than most of the Trump voter articles I’ve read and I think captures something important about many Trump voters who aren’t deplorable. They like the “America First” idea of Trump, the strong borders, the Muslim vetting, even though they don’t like Trump’s bombast and don’t think any of it should go as far as he talks about. To me, this was the key idea:

    The sense of family that people talk about in Logan is complicated, because, like most family feeling, it tends to intensify not only the bonds between people who are counted as part of the family but also the hostility toward people who are not.

    This is very Southern. More than I heard overt or even coded racism growing up, I heard remarks about Yankees. As oh well, that neighbor is a Yankee, what can you expect? She’s pretty nice, even though she’s a Yankee!, etc. They were the other, outside the tribe, not to be trusted. Same thing in the Southern evangelical church, which is a real irony, where there is us, born-again Christians, and them, not true Christians and to be pitied and mistrusted.

    If you were an apple that fell a little too far from the tree like me, then all of this was very confusing because it didn’t make any sense, and of course conflicted mightily with what they were telling you in church. No, they don’t think of themselves as bigoted in any way; once they really get to know a person, they’re happy to let them in, regardless of their race. But the notion of outsiders coming in and changing things, whether immigrants from another country changing what’s on the grocery shelves and not speaking English or Yankees from the government telling them they have to do something different makes them uncomfortable and therefore mad. I don’t really know of anything that will change that. They aren’t stupid; they know that Trump isn’t going to bring back the coal jobs to West Virginia. They probably even know that if he’s elected, their lot in life won’t change. But for a few minutes, they get to puff their chests up and say, yeah, this is our America, not yours!

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  37. Suzanne said on October 5, 2016 at 6:52 pm

    Sherri, Very good assessment. I think it is key that they don’t see themselves as bigoted. My Grandmother used to say all the time that so and so was Catholic, “but they’re nice people.” I can guarantee she did not see herself as the least bit prejudiced.
    So often, when Trump or his sidekick Lyin’ Mike spout off crazy, xenophobic, racist stuff, I think how it doesn’t cause a stir among so many people I know because deep down, even if they don’t like the way it was said, they see nothing amiss with the sentiments. Those immigrants are dangerous, so what’s wrong the Trump overstated it a bit? Those black people shouldn’t be protesting or rioting, so he is just saying the truth.

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  38. Colleen said on October 5, 2016 at 7:13 pm

    Our niece graduated from Longwood several years ago.

    I watched about five minutes of the debate, and all it was doing was making me mad, so I turned it off and listened to Lambert, Hendricks and Ross until I fell asleep. I think I made the better choice.

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  39. Jakash said on October 5, 2016 at 7:35 pm

    Fine assessment, indeed, Sherri, though the irony that they choose to back the most ostentatious and arrogant Yankee of them all because he’s enough of a charlatan to try to bamboozle them with what they want to hear is the part that gets me.

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  40. Hattie said on October 8, 2016 at 5:06 am

    I loved that McMansion stuff! What a commentary on our big, empty-minded country!

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