Friday Ephemera

Don’t try this at home. No, really. Don’t. || A heartwarming moment of cross-cultural bonding. (h/t, Holborn) || How to make a blockbuster movie trailer. || It seems we need a bigger bomb-bay. || Impress your friends with fingertip bling. || A partial list of parenthetical pop songs. || Wouldn’t it be nice. || Riposte of note. || A partial success. || Always respect the media. || So many X-Men. || This. (h/t, Damian) || Air conditioner with bonus features. || All aboard. || Debussy plays Debussy, 1913. || Enterprise-D virtual tour revisited. Watch out for the dead crew member and the creepy apparition in the turbolift. || Handmade oak and brass phone cases. || On the origins of chili con carne. || No, you first. || And finally, especially for American readers, “Look, the stars are coming out.”

Comments

[Hal]

It seems we need a bigger bomb-bay.

Oh, yes, this fellow.

[Hal]

On the origins of chili con carne.

Awhile back a request was made in a different forum for recipes for making chili. There were a couple of responses, and then the following, paraphrased from memory.

Take a pot, fill it part way with beans, then add water to the top. Place on stove and add heat, stirring occasionally as the water heats to a boil. When the water is boiling, take the pot off the stove and drain the water. Next, empty the beans into the garbage. For good measure, also throw away the contaminated pot. Now get a clean pot and start making chili.

The immediate next post announced; Ok, we've now heard from the Texas contingent.

[Hal]

No, you first.

Well, allegedly some have gotten behind the idea . . .

[R. Sherman]

I'm fortunate that my travel to view the eclipse necessitates me walking onto my front porch. We'll have 2 minutes, 36 seconds of totality. My daughter flew in from Europe and intends to make margaritas, so I've got that going for me, as well.

[Sam Duncan]

“How to make a blockbuster movie trailer.”

Booj!

“Handmade oak and brass phone cases.”

Nice. More proletarian stick-on type. Genuine wood veneer, mind. And a wider range of phones (tablets, laptops, games consoles...). I'm tempted.

[TimT]

This has probably been linked before but it's still fun and relevant: the interiors of the Hindenburg. Complete with grand piano and smoking room.

[David]

We’ll have 2 minutes, 36 seconds of totality. My daughter… intends to make margaritas,

I saw a total eclipse in the summer of 1999. I mostly remember the odd silence and the sharp, crescent-shaped shadows, and the shifted colours were unexpected. It was faintly psychedelic. And as noted in the video, it can offer a brief, but quite striking, sense of perspective.

[John D]

Watch out for the dead crew member and the creepy apparition in the turbolift.

There's a ghost in the machine. :-)

[David]

There’s a ghost in the machine. :-)

The thing is impressive in its detail and scope, but it’s the remaining bugs and glitches that kept me watching. Turbolift guy was disconcerting, as was the expired crew member left undetected in a Jefferies tube. And then there was the crewman who was trying to drink but his beverage hadn’t been rendered, leaving him to mime with an empty hand. Some of the fan nit-picking is quite entertaining too, if you like that kind of thing. E.g., “The Red Alert lights are not strobing at the right speed.”

[David]

I suppose it’s one way to do it.

[Daniel Ream]

A partial success.

Now, now, Atlas is doing his best.

[WTP]

Re The Eclipse, I will be travelling to my second home in the Geogia mountains to expience the totality. There has been much fear and consternation in our little town regarding this event. Governors across the nation, including Georgia's, have called out their respective nationsl guard units. Now I personally dont expect much more than an extremely busy July 4 kind of crowd, but beyond that there's an added twist for Hiawassee. It seems during this, what is likely to be the busiest event in the town's history, our sheriff will be playing his guitar in a band at a local bar. An excerpt from a concerned citizen:

Our sheriff needs to have his ass in a helicopter,SUV,,boat,bicycle,o r horse and ON duty during the eclipse nightmare.In what world is this ok?We are going to have Woodstock in our town while our sheriff strums his guitar and attempts to sing.There are going to be problems this town can't handle.Besides 100,000 pissed off people the powers going out cause our grid can't handle it and cell service will crash due to overload.While all this is going down not to mention the trespassing,vandals and being right on the heels of Charlottesville our great sheriff is jamming out.It looks really bad.

Pray for me as I venture into The Heart of Darkness.

[Jonathan]

Punch a Commie for America!

This is ok, right.

[Jonathan]

The burning question of the day is: How far can you see from the top of Mount Everest?

[David]

Attention, all you white devils. Ashleigh Shackelford has some wisdom for y’all. It's intersectional and everything.

[WTP]

She just posted that on Facebook and the whites are trolling as usual. The whites. Are trolling.

[David]

The whites. Are trolling.

Ms Shackelford is a “black queer, nonbinary, fat femme writer, artist and cultural producer.” And, obviously, a contributor to Everyday Feminism. The specifics of her cultural production are a little sketchy, but when not calling random white people violent and racist, she seems to spend her time in “direct action shutdowns on highways,” and photographing her own arse and sharing it on Twitter.

And there are so many of these creatures. All uniformly educated.

[Microbillionaire]

"Trolling", in modern jargon: Posting things I don't like.

[Daniel Ream]

This is ok, right.

I've just been rereading my Avengers archive and #18 has them fighting a fictional Southeast Asian country's supervillain named the Commissar. It's pretty heavily anticommunist, even for 1965.

[Nemo]

Ashleigh Shackelford has some wisdom for y’all. It's intersectional and everything gone.

Trolls 1, Ashleigh 0?

[R. Sherman]

It's funny to note that Ms. Shackelford's diatribe, filled as it was with all manner of references to the demonic evil nature to which Caucasians are genetically predestined, was directed at a room filled with what appeared to be middle-aged white women, who did not proceed to tear Ms. Shackelford limb from limb in expression of their inner, subconscious racism. For racist, inhuman demons, we seem to be doing it wrong.

[Darleen]

Well, here's another tell to not to hire a person.

[Darleen]

When a major newspaper reads like The Onion.

[Nikw211]

From the Urban Dictionary:

Troll

One who posts a deliberately provocative message ... with the intention of causing maximum disruption and argument

No wonder journalists and politicians of a certain stripe detest trolls - the latter are guerrilla amateurs doing gratis - and often much more effectively - than the would be professionals:

Sally Kohn - and just look at the things included in that damn pyramid that she counts as "Covert White Supremacy (socially acceptable)". One of them is "Assuming good intentions are enough"; another, somewhat bizarrely, is "Self-appointed white ally".

It is not at all coincidental that Kohn happens to be plugging a new book with that Tweet.

Jess Phillips MP - also not at all coincidentally plugging a new book.

Laurie Penny - yet again, and not at all coincidentally, plugging a book.*

*To be fair, as is well-known, she writes everything at such a hyperbolic pitch it is often hard to tell whether Penny writes this way because she's a troll in all but name or simply because she's talentless.

[WTP]

She's a troll because she's talentless.

I remember back in the day when the term was "provocative". And it was always good. Because it was our betters doing it.

[Jonathan]

At least one Spanish Man still has his balls:

http://twitter.com/ColumbiaBugle/status/898312325513355264

[Hal]

Telling of an excruciatingly detailed guide to babysitting.

[David]

If, by any chance, you couldn’t tell, I found this Twitter thread via Everyday Feminism.

[Lancastrian Oik]

Wouldn't it be nice.

I saw the "Pet Sounds" 50th Anniversary Tour recently at what I still insist on calling "Hammersmith Odeon". Whilst I wouldn't go as far as one reviewer who likened the experience to "...going to the theatre to see "Hamlet" and having William Shakespeare read it to you", it was still an intensely moving three hours, Brian Wilson's mental and physical frailties notwithstanding.

It later occurred to me that the average fifty-odd-year-old baby boomer has probably heard "Good Vibrations" at least 1,000 times in his/her lifetime- it's been around over fifty years and one probably hears it played around twenty times annually in various situations. As a Beach Boys nut I reckon I've listened to it 4,000 times and I still find it interesting.

Thank you David.

[WTP]

Some video of the eclipse from Hiawassee, GA...

https://m.youtube.com/watch?t=4m15s&v=uyavoEdJxnA

[WTP]

Heh...meant to add...the video is not of the eclipse itself as I did not have proper equipment for that, just video of the marina as the darkness came and went.