Endless supply of cheap pizza delivered to the picket line.

Is it solipsistic in here or is it just me?

There are a bunch of aptronymic last names, especially in English culture. The Baker family, the Tanner family, the Shoemaker family etc.

Don’t ask about the Dickinsons.

If they had completely scrapped the casino arc it would fix so many problems. Not only would that shitty, worthless sequence not exist, but they would’ve had screen time to put in more quality stuff. Imagine if at the end of the movie the big reveal was that Palpatine was alive. Instead, they had to put that into a messy scroller at the beginning of the third movie.

Similarly, I want to know what a reach-around is.

Back home, it meant that when you’re giving someone a bj, you reach around and finger their butthole.

I move out west and people are saying that it’s when a guy is banging a guy from behind, he reaches around and gives the receiver a handy.

In these trying times, America needs to know.

I woke up every day worried that we’d nuked Spain overnight.

A buddy of mine is a wine steward. He quit smoking and said “Holy shit I can taste wine again. I’ve just been making it up for years!”

I think it might be this. A lot of traditional media outlets are mad about twitter becoming such a necessity for them. The old guard is mad that they have to cater to this bullshit online platform. The new guard is mad at the fact that the best outlet for breaking online news is suddenly owned and operated by a fascist.

All of them want to say that x is bullshit, but they don’t want to actually lose the clicks/ market share that comes with it. So they keep passive-aggressively calling it twitter.

Drunkenly thinking about it, this is kinda like calling a trans person by their dead name. Except it’s insulting a shitty company led by a shithead, so I’m cool with it.

A fuel injector is measurably better in basically every way.

I might still rather have a carburetor…

German efficiency at its best.

I have met many, many school teachers in my adult life and the vast majority of them are lovely people. There has only been one who I’d describe as a psychopath.

Alcoholics? Absolutely. It’s a toss-up between teachers, lawyers and nurses for the hardest-drinking group of motherfuckers I’ve ever known.

If I’m a coworker in this situation I don’t care. If I’m a manager in this situation I just don’t bother training them on anything but the basics for the job.

Related to Dunbar’s number. The human brain is only capable of really recognizing around 100 people as actual people and understanding interactions with them. Everybody else in the world is only a person in a vague, nebulous sort of way.

Caffeine and anger.

“Hit it, quit it, then forgit it!”

-Bigfoot

A few years ago I asked a customer for a list of employees, so I could verify who could purchase on their account. They replied with their personnel files. Luckily it didn’t have social security numbers, but it had a LOT of personal information. Medical records, drug test results, stuff like that.

Not much of a war, really just a naval blockade, but I think that the Venezuelan crisis of 1902 is maybe the most overlooked major event of the 20th century.

Basic breakdown: Venezuela took out shitloads of loans from England and Germany in the late 1800s. In that same time, they underwent a series of revolutions. The dude who ended up in charge decided that he didn’t want to pay off the debts that somebody 5 governments ago had accrued. He also assumed that the US would keep the European powers from doing anything about it based on the whole manifest destiny thing. Teddy Roosevelt however decided that he would keep out of it.

A bunch of British and German warships then anchored just off the Venezuelan coast and started taking ships and messing with all the marine traffic. The British mostly led the charge on this whole operation, except for one time that a German ship bombarded a little base called Fort San Carlos, killing a couple dozen people.

This entire time, Americans had kind of been stewing about this whole thing. The bombardment was a tipping point, and the US started putting pressure on Britain and Germany to get out of our sphere. The British said that they had given strict orders not to attack any land-based targets, so the blame landed firmly on the Germans. A couple weeks later all the countries agreed to terms of arbitration.

All of this seems relatively tame on the scale of international conflict. However, 12 years later this massive fucking war broke out between all these European powers. They beat each other up for years, and everything seemed to be going really poorly for everybody. Then the US decided to join.

A lot of people don’t realize how close it was, which side of the war the US would fight for. Generally we had better relations with the Entente powers (Britain, France and Russia) than we did with Germany, but there were millions of German immigrants living in America and it had been less than a century since Britain had burned down our capitol. The Venezuelan blockade played a large part in our decision, just because the general populace had this idea of “Germany bad” because of it.

Now, American troops didn’t do well in WWI. They mostly got their asses kicked. But just the fact that there were fresh troops being infused into the lines meant that the momentum shifted towards the Entente powers (now Britain France and the US). Within two years the war is over, Germany surrenders, signing a shitty-ass peace accord that all but guarantees that WWII will happen.

I’ll admit that this is a bit of an oversimplification, and a bit of speculation on my part. But I really believe that the entire 20th century would have been completely different if that blockade had gone differently. The Soviet revolution, Mussolini, Hitler, the Holocaust, Chairman Mao, the Cold War, Vietnam, etc. All of that might not have happened if that German captain had gotten the memo to not shell land-based targets.

He didn’t say what it was. It might be a flashlight that goes into the exhaust pipe.

Really digging Reign in Slumber. Thanks for the recommendation.

On the topic of Asian metal, Voice of Baceprot just played the Glastonbury festival, which is pretty awesome. All-female Indonesian band.

Also, the dude who works at the gas station down the street introduced me to Minerva, a Bangladeshi metal band.

The only ability you have in French is to judge. It’s what the language is for.