And justlikethat, the weekend is over. Kate is back from school, summer plans still unformed, despite her best efforts. She was literally home for 90 minutes before taking off for the U.P. with a friend, I guess because the highs are going to be in the 40s for the next few days and who doesn’t want that kind of weather in May, right? But she’s home, and it’s nice to have her here, at least for an hour and a half.
This will be a short week for me here, too — we won a weekend at a cottage on the Betsie River in a recent charity raffle, and we’re taking it, plus a couple more nights, at the end of this week because why the hell not. But I hope to have lots of pictures, too.
I don’t know how I forgot to mention Tom Thumb Donuts in the last entry, although it’s been ages since I’ve seen one. They were always a must-stop at the Ohio State Fair, and it’s been ages since I’ve been to that throwdown, too. I covered it for the paper one year, and ate a bag a day. Tom Thumbs were mini doughnuts, and half the fun was standing, mesmerized, in front of the window on the booth, watching them go through their manufacturing process – seen here – then walking around the midway, working your way through your allotment, maybe trying to spot Miss Citizen Fair or just inhaling the unique aroma of a big state fair — manure and junk food and sweat and hot pavement all mixed together and not nearly as bad as I’m making it sound.
I wonder how the fair is doing these days. It used to be the single biggest thing in a kid’s summer in Columbus, but I imagine it’s been screwed up one way or another. Too expensive, too big, too much to police. It was fun for me, both to attend and later to cover. The assignment came soon enough after my time as a teenage patron that it combined the best of both worlds – I get to go the fair and write about whatever I want, and there’s an air-conditioned trailer office and the paper is renting me a golf cart? Best fortnight of the summer.
But now it’s still springtime, and the lambs and calves that will be shown in August are new in the barn. A friend of mine here in Detroit has a duck flock in her back yard, and is so overloaded with eggs that she brought a case of them to a local bar on Friday night to sell. I bought a dozen. The eggs are thick and the yolks big and pudding-like, almost a neon orange. I recall Coozledad’s observation, some years back, that ducks will basically eat anything, and vow to cook them thoroughly, but Saturday night’s duck-egg spinach soufflé was delicious with a prime ribeye.
I’m looking over the weekend’s news, and am feeling a little numb. Another propaganda rally, another jaw-dropping foreign-affairs blunder, another enormous march in Washington against the status quo. How can it possibly have been only 100 days? What are the next four years-minus-100 days going to be be like? I think I really need this long weekend; I’m going to try to ignore the news and hope we don’t start something with North Korea. The cell service is probably pretty spotty up there, and for once, that’ll be a blessing.
Got a link to share? Feel free.
Suzanne said on April 30, 2017 at 8:31 pm
But we’d still vote for him!
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/04/23/business/economy/indiana-united-technology-factory-layoffs.html?_r=1&referer=https://t.co/6MPG8xWbsF
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Suzanne said on April 30, 2017 at 8:31 pm
Deborah, if you can manage it at all, see Hamilton. It is incredible.
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Sherri said on April 30, 2017 at 8:55 pm
February 18, 2018 at the Paramount Theatre in Seattle. That’s when I finally get to see Hamilton!
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BigHank53 said on April 30, 2017 at 9:04 pm
Oh, duck eggs. A scrambled duck egg to go with your asparagus. Duck-egg omelettes with brie and ramps. The yolks are huge and make everything just a bit more custardy, which isn’t really a word but it should be.
Ducks are scavengers, and they will eat a lot of stuff that chickens will ignore while they wait for someone to bring them a scoop of chicken feed. But that means they eat a lot of bugs and other actual natural stuff, too, and the good vs. evil cholesterol levels in duck eggs is fantastic.
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Julie Robinson said on April 30, 2017 at 9:09 pm
Sherri, you will love it. We saw it Saturday night in Chicago, and I’m still on a high. I barely slept last night because I was reliving the show. If you can listen to the cast album three or four thousand times ahead of seeing it, that’ll be helpful too. Or maybe that was just my personal obsession?
We stayed with friends in Oak Park and had some great deep-dish as well as great conversations. The weather was crap, just like here I think with rain that never let up and cold temps. I stepped in so many puddles! Didn’t matter a bit.
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coozledad said on April 30, 2017 at 9:11 pm
The US-Philipino axis will get a boost when Geraldo inventories Melania’s shoe hoard.
I’ve gone back to reading poetry. I’d grown to believe it was bullshit. But the NYT has shown me there’s a deeper, more deadly strain of fantasism in their cult.
I hope they fold.
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Deborah said on April 30, 2017 at 9:20 pm
Well we said yes to the Hamilton tickets. I’m going to get through it, I’m sure everything will be just fine.
I binge listened to S Town today. I know Nancy mentioned it a few weeks ago but i can’t remember there being much discussion about it herewith. I enjoyed the first Serial about Adnad Syad (spelling?) and the second one about Bowe Bergdahl. This one about John B McLemore was good too. I love those kind of presentations.
Little Bird has a good friend in Santa Fe who grew up 25 miles from Shit Town, AL. I will be interested in hearing his opinion of the series.
When I lived in Dallas, we went to the Texas State fair every year. That was the only thing I liked about living in Texas, I lived there for 7 years.
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Julie Robinson said on April 30, 2017 at 9:23 pm
Deborah, so glad you’re going to Hamilton! It does run three hours, so you might want to load up on the painkillers. OTOH, it is an out of body experience and you won’t feel the pain until later.
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coozledad said on April 30, 2017 at 9:24 pm
This book isn’t terribly expensive and it has moments of words doing things they weren’t neccessarily made to do.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2013/02/out-of-isolation-alfred-starr-hamiltons-a-dark-dreambox-of-another-kind/
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Deborah said on April 30, 2017 at 9:29 pm
Yikes, three hours! So far I can sit for about 30 minutes and then have to get up and walk around for a few minutes then I can sit for another 30 mins etc. I hope there’s an intermission.
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Suzanne said on April 30, 2017 at 9:35 pm
Fellow Hamiltonians, get your hands on the book Hamilton: the Revolution which goes into how the show was put together, Miranda’s thought processes, some of the casting decisions, extra tidbits about the lyrics, etc. The section on It’s Quiet Uptown, well, if I had read it before I saw the show, I would have cried even more (the row I was in was sniffles and eye dabbings all down the line).
I would love to have seen the original cast.
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Sherri said on April 30, 2017 at 9:57 pm
My daughter already has the cast album burned into her brain. I’ve listened to it a lot, and will listen to it more. I told my husband when I bought season tickets to ensure tickets to Hamilton that I was taking my daughter; she’s been looking forward to it since she was In high school and one of her teachers showed them the video of Lin Manuel Miranda performing one of the songs at the White House when the musical was in early development.
If we could find the time before then, we would pay the money and travel to Chicago or NY and see it, but life is a little chaotic right now.
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Rana said on April 30, 2017 at 11:20 pm
Deborah, yes, there’s an intermission. 🙂
And it’s amazing even if you’ve not been binge-listening to the album. I didn’t listen to anything before we saw Hamilton in Chicago, and I was just blown away by how good it was.
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David C. said on May 1, 2017 at 6:21 am
Happy Loyalty Day, everyone.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2017/05/01/may-1-is-loyalty-day-in-america-heres-trumps-view-of-the-day-and-obamas/?utm_term=.e847ce6b5d9f
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Jeff (the mild-mannered one) said on May 1, 2017 at 7:36 am
I go every year to the Ohio State Fair; the Natural Resources Area in the southeast corner is a delight, the Ag buildings still a pleasure, and if my wife can make it we take at least one long lap on the Skyrider. The pork loin sandwiches are still for sale right outside of the butter cow display (which usually has some new thematic company) and we check out the adjoining ice cream counter in the Dairy building for this year’s special flavor. Bacon Maple is still memorable, even if I never plan to try it again, but sometimes it’s good. And the art show at the south entrance is always revelatory.
Go by a Kroger on your way in and buy the ticket there for a few bucks off, otherwise it’s ten or twelve, rides separate. We like to go and do our bit and head home before the evening’s up-and-coming or formerly-and-washed-up performer in the central auditorium; there’s always a couple of no-name performers around the various outlying stages that cause us to pause, but the best is the All-Ohio Youth Choir shows at the Natural Resources area, and the bluegrass performers from around the state almost every afternoon at the pioneer cabin.
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basset said on May 1, 2017 at 7:43 am
Tennessee has a pretty weak state fair, not as bad as Mississippi’s but the fair in an adjacent county is better. Closest real state fair to here is the southern Illinois fair in Du Quoin. Mrs B went to school in Minneapolis for awhile and we’ve been talking about going to the Minnesota state fair, maybe this’ll be the year.
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coozledad said on May 1, 2017 at 8:43 am
Dylan Byers is a fascism-normalizing whorebag. I don’t know what’s gotten in the water with these folks, but their powers of self awareness have been utterly wiped out.
https://twitter.com/DylanByers/status/858846433100935168
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Colleen said on May 1, 2017 at 8:45 am
I was surprised when I moved here that Florida’s state fair is in February. Which I suppose makes sense, since it will be ungodly hot in August….
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coozledad said on May 1, 2017 at 8:53 am
There’s a grotesque arrogance in white stupidity- a pride in indifference to historical and scientific facts coupled with an assumption that being a simpleton lands you closer to the truth:
https://twitter.com/fivefifths/status/859022301379125249
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Dorothy said on May 1, 2017 at 9:52 am
Jeff (tmmo) and I bumped into each other at the Ohio State Fair a few years ago, before we moved to Dayton. I think it was the year AFTER I got to see a calf being born for the first time. That was damn cool. I took a LOT of pictures of it, too.
I used a different phrase to describe what you called a ‘propaganda rally’ on Facebook yesterday morning and promptly pissed off a couple of friends. I called it a masturbatory rally. I’ve reduced my attention I’m paying to ol’ Happy Hands because of the new granddaughter, and my dog was diagnosed last week with a tumor likely on his spleen. This was quite a jolt because he’s been so healthy all his life, and we lost the other dog in December. But politics still intrudes from time to time and every once in awhile I just have to vent.
We are not having surgery for Husky. We’re feeding him whatever he wants these days. He decided a couple of weeks ago that he didn’t want to eat the Pedigree kibble anymore, which was one of our first clues that he was ‘off.’ I’m cooking up ground beef and pork and chicken and mixing in brown rice with it. Anyone have any recommendations on other things to make for him? I’m not going to go overboard, but I certainly don’t want him starving to death. The anti-inflammatory meds were a disaster – so now he’s new meds to stop the reaction from the first meds. They worked quickly, thank heavens. I hated not allowing him upstairs to the carpeted areas of the house. He’s lost 10 lbs. since the end of December. I hope he lasts a couple more months but I’m not exactly certain he will.
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brian stouder said on May 1, 2017 at 10:10 am
Cooz at 19 – egad!
I mean, for Heaven’s sake!! I’m nowhere near the smartest guy in the room, but if el-Trumpo would even seek out a decent 2-or 3-thousand word essay on origins of the Civil War (leaving aside all the thousands of books on every aspect of it) – he’d see that President Lincoln himself puzzled over why such a terrible catastrophe occurred to us. (Trump could get a good start on that exact question from President Lincolns succinct Second Inaugural)
Afterall, Ken Burns might be a “Liberal Elite” who produces fake documentaries; and the National Park Service might be peddling ‘Fake History’ at the various – and invariably beautiful – beguiling, and quietly terrible National Military Parks and battlefields; and C-SPAN (since our president loves to watch TV, like Peter Sellers in Being There) might have one lying fake-historian after the next on their air, talking about all aspects of the American Civil War……
but if the Donald really wants an answer to his question – he should be able to see the outlines of it, without too much exertion
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LinGin said on May 1, 2017 at 10:31 am
For the HAMILTON lovers here, LMM has been posting a playlist of demos in his account on Soundcloud. They are interesting to listen and compare to what ended up on stage. His account is Lin_Manuel and playlist is HAMILDEMOS.
Linda
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coozledad said on May 1, 2017 at 10:40 am
The most likelyreason Trump thought Andrew Jackson was alive during the Civil War:
https://twitter.com/BillinPortland/status/859027141811417088
Republicans are no-reading sons of bitches; they elected the no-readingest son of a bitch they could scrape out of a racist realtor’s spooge sack. He and Pubis are going after the First Amendment now, because any form of literacy naturally offends these dumb motherfuckers. They been chillin’ with the mouse and ain’t got a fuckin’ book in the house.
But this is a good time to discuss Obama’s paid speeches. He’s so black when he gives them.
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Jeff Borden said on May 1, 2017 at 10:42 am
Neil Steinberg has a decent corrective today.
http://www.everygoddamnday.com/2017/05/trump-is-indeed-making-america-great.html
My greatest fear of this administration is what will happen after a major terrorist attack here, which seems to be just a matter of time. Is there anyone here who doubts the Orange King would seriously consider martial law? Censorship of the free press? Travel bans? Interment camps? I mean, we’re already marking “Loyalty Day,” whatever the fuck that is, and our illiterate, uneducated leader lusts for the power of the dictator.
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Sherri said on May 1, 2017 at 10:49 am
Every time trump mentions Old Hickory, I just imagine what would have happened had the two of them ever met. Jackson, notoriously touchy about his wife’s honor, and trump, who views women as arm candy only (and Rachel didn’t qualify as arm candy, called a “fat dumpling” in the press). How long would they have talked before Jackson called him out in a duel?
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Bitter Scribe said on May 1, 2017 at 11:12 am
Has there ever been a president who whined about the press as much as this guy? And of all the presidents who spent a lot of time complaining about the press, have any of them ever been worth anything?
Regarding Duterte, I don’t know if Trump is ignorant of the man’s record or just doesn’t believe what the press says about him.
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Julie Robinson said on May 1, 2017 at 11:18 am
The Hamilton book is fantastic. My dear daughter, who knows me well, gave me a copy for Mother’s Day. I’ve been a Lin-Manuel Miranda fan ever since his first show, In the Heights, which is worth seeking out on video as it was filmed by PBS. If I start sharing all my thoughts I’ll be here all day so I’m going to stop.
BTW the wine Deborah recommended was a hit with everyone except my hubby who likes kool-aid wine. If I had wine like that around I might get interested in drinking it again.
Dorothy, I’m so sorry about Husky, having just gone through this with my mom and her cat. It’s so helpless watching them deteriorate, after all the love they’ve given you. All I can say is that there is life on the other side, and she is delighted by her new cat.
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coozledad said on May 1, 2017 at 11:22 am
trump, who views women as arm candy only
Republicans accessorize with women as a way to signal to other Republicans that they will pay at least some grudging respect to their public code. In private, it’s all Denny Hastert’s massage table, or coming on to Billy Bush by talking about sexually assaulting women.
Misogyny and its attendant efforts to delegitimize women’s rights proceed from a view of sexuality that is male centered. Just look at poor old Rod Dreher- he can barely keep himself in the closet.
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Deggjr said on May 1, 2017 at 11:40 am
Dorothy #20, we fed our very old dog Gerber chicken baby food for the last seven months or so of his life. He had trouble keeping his regular food down and then went a day without eating. He really, really enjoyed the baby food.
We found a website that had a calorie/pound algorithm and worked backwards from the jar to determine how much to feed him. We fed him five times a day to reduce the load on his digestive system.
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Sherri said on May 1, 2017 at 11:59 am
Travis Kalanick is afraid of Kara Swisher: https://www.recode.net/2017/5/1/15498026/uber-travis-kalanick-arianna-huffington-code-conference
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Dorothy said on May 1, 2017 at 12:44 pm
Thanks Deggjr. I shudder to think how much baby chicken food I’d have to get for a dog who is currently 84 lbs. But as long as he’s eating what I give him, I’m happy. Feeding five times a day is not an option, unfortunately, when you work full time. Weekends maybe, but probably not. BUt I know what you mean. He eats smaller amounts and I’m sure it’s because he feels full faster. But his appetite is pretty good. He sure loves it when I make him scrambled eggs.
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LAMary said on May 1, 2017 at 12:44 pm
Brown rice, fat free greek yogurt and a couple of scrambled eggs. That’s what I give the dog crew here. Georgia is young and healthy but since I’m feeding this mixture to Smokey she gets it too. A friend who is always saving rescues and strays suggests adding some canned pumpkin to the mixture.
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basset said on May 1, 2017 at 12:53 pm
Plain canned green beans moght be worth trying as well, they’ve worked before.
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coozledad said on May 1, 2017 at 1:04 pm
Mobbed up piece of shit.
https://twitter.com/nadabakos/status/859079963365883905
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Jakash said on May 1, 2017 at 1:16 pm
What a tweet @ 19, Cooz. The fact that his ignorance about almost everything is just taken for granted at this point, and largely celebrated by anti-elitist deplorables is chilling, indeed. In reply, the false equivalency folks have the brilliant retort of Obama misspeaking about 57 states once. Quite the burn! On the upside, I learned a swell, succinct name for our Maximum Leader among the comments to that tweet: “Dolt 45.” Sound like a keeper to me.
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Kim said on May 1, 2017 at 1:17 pm
I swear I won’t stop paying attention to the clown and his daily three-ring circus (is that enough rings? Likely not) but I do need daily affirmations that the entire world hasn’t gone to shit.
Today, I offer the annual When You Work at a Museum Dance-Off, the U.S. Eastern Finals. Repping today are museums from Pennsylvania, Indiana and Virginia. Enjoy, please. And, you know, vote.
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susan said on May 1, 2017 at 1:58 pm
Here’s the audio of himself, talking about why why oh why the Civil War Andrew Jackson’s Big Heart… that coozledad referenced @19.
Oh dawg, this cannot continue for four years. Can it?
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susan said on May 1, 2017 at 2:14 pm
Jakash @35 – I think it’s a toss-up between Dolt 45 and Lord Dampnut (an anagram of Donald Trump). Just might use them interchangeably.
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Deborah said on May 1, 2017 at 2:57 pm
Home alone, it’s amazing what you can do with your feet without stooping over. I was putting leftover pasta with tomato sauce in the microwave to have for lunch and somehow I dropped it and broken glass and pasta ended up all over the kitchen floor. I can’t bend over so I managed to snake the dustpan out of the lower cabinet with my feet. Then I got the broom out of the closet and swept everything into a big blob on the floor, then held the dustpan with my feet and swept the blob up into it. Now it will sit in the dustpan in the middle of the floor until my husband gets home because I can’t reach down and pick it up to put into the trash. I’m kind of proud of myself. I’ve tried keeping my back straight and squatting to pick things up but my leg muscles are way out of shape to do that, right now. I need one of those grippers with a long handle to pick things up when I drop them, but even that wouldn’t have helped this mess. And right now my reading glasses are under the bed, I managed to drop them (they were atop my head, holding my hair back) and they skittered away. I tried using the broom to sweep them out but they’re either way back there or they’re caught behind one of the legs of the bed. I realize these are first world problems, but aggravating.
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coozledad said on May 1, 2017 at 3:01 pm
Trump is the logical end of the inherent sociopathy that underpins “conservatism”. The authoritarians and their enablers on both extremes of the political spectrum are the same damn people. You could put modern Republicans in Stalinist Russia, and they’d be snitching on their neighbors in no time. We already see how quickly they adopted Putin as one of their own.
Here’s Trump’s view of the Tienanmen square massacre. It’s a fucking endorsement:
https://twitter.com/harrysiegel/status/859105680128659458
Every damn one of these fuckers lives to lick some dictator’s balls. It’s the primacy of the hindbrain.
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Peter said on May 1, 2017 at 3:37 pm
Cooz, you have a point.
When I was younger I had heard that Evanston, Illinois, is what the Soviet Union would look like if it were run by Republicans, but now I think that the Soviet Union is what the Soviet Union would look like if it were run by Republicans.
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Peter said on May 1, 2017 at 3:43 pm
Gary Willis said that the best thing about Eisenhower was that he would occasionally say something that was nakedly and completely true, but because of his constant rambling, it wouldn’t be noticed until much later. Maybe Dolt 45 has copied his style:
“I DON’T STAND BY ANYTHING.”
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brian stouder said on May 1, 2017 at 3:51 pm
Cooze – indeed; indeed.
Honestly, yesterday I could feel my attraction to Formula One racing beginning to weaken.
It should have, really, years ago, when Max Mosely* was outed as a swastika-wearing Nazi shit-head (he’d dress up that way before engaging in S&M sex with whoever) – but no; the allure remained.
And then I watched yesterday’s event from Sochi, and ol’ Vlad Poo-poo was shown again and again, proudly smirking during the pre-race stuff, and trading pleasantries and more smirks with the top-3 finishers before the podium ceremonies; and then on the podium itself, with more smirks and hand-shakes – before the champaign was sprayed.
The guy was more of spotlight-sponge-glom then even the most ego-centric track owners, and there are LOTS of those!….and of course, in any sense of the word ol’ Vlad IS the track-owner there – at least to the same extent that Al Capone owned Chicago.
F1 is an interesting microcosm of lots that’s wrong, really. It’s exorbitantly expensive, and all the principles are enormously ego-centric, and almost always – ‘the show’ requires stacks and stacks of millions of dollars from nation-states (ie – tax-payers and others with no interest in it), frequently 2nd world (if not 3rd world) nations such as Bahrain or China.
I think I’m now done with it
*son of Oswald Mosely – a real-life, marching-in-the-street fascist, and again literally – a nazi fucker
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Jeff Borden said on May 1, 2017 at 4:19 pm
Brian,
A popular debate among my dog park buddies is which athletic institution is the most corrupt: F1, IOC, FIFA or the good, ol’ ‘Murican NCAA. I am always arguing for the NFL, which in addition to downplaying the grievous effects of being smashed in the head repeatedly, displays all the loyalty of a streetwalker to the fans while holding up cities for exorbitant pleasure palaces in which to play. So, fuck you, San Diego. And fuck you, St. Louis. And fuck you, Oakland.
If only Andrew Jackson were around. He’d be able to fix all these things!
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brian stouder said on May 1, 2017 at 4:55 pm
In that game, I’d vote for either FIFA or F1, as they literally span the globe, looking for suckers with money
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brian stouder said on May 1, 2017 at 4:57 pm
…and I forgot to say – the one good thing about the Donald’s (invincibly ignorant) admiration for Andy Jackson is that it gives the lie to the 2017 Republican party ever daring to call themselves “the party of Lincoln”
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David C. said on May 1, 2017 at 6:37 pm
Bitter Scribe @26. Trump knows all about Duterte and loves it.
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basset said on May 1, 2017 at 6:47 pm
Formula 1 got rid of Bernie, though, didn’t they?
I am starting to rekindle my interest in Indy car racing, now that Mrs B and I have someone to pull for… Charlie Kimball, in the diabetes-medicine csr.
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alex said on May 1, 2017 at 6:49 pm
If only Andrew Jackson were around. He’d be able to fix all these things!
Maybe he could give Frederick Douglas a shot at it.
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Sherri said on May 1, 2017 at 7:41 pm
How does someone this astoundingly stupid and uninformed keep getting big media gigs?
https://mobile.twitter.com/asymmetricinfo/status/859083678672187392
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Sherri said on May 1, 2017 at 7:45 pm
The great negotiator:https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/daily-202/2017/05/01/daily-202-eight-ways-trump-got-rolled-in-his-first-budget-negotiation/590687f2e9b69b3a72331f09/
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