is that jd vance or tammy faye bakker?
I always heard it as “a hit dog hollers.” (And, yes, a perfect example.)
I’m not sure what the British have to do with that. “Spaz” is a shortened form of “spastic”, meaning someone subject to palsy or some other condition causing uncontrolled shaking of the muscles. Everywhere the word “spaz” is used, that’s where it comes from. Without that original meaning, the word wouldn’t exist at all, and I hope I don’t have to describe how that original meaning makes the word offensive.
I suspect the point is that in America the original connection to cerebral palsy has long been forgotten and now it just refers to someone frenetically uncoordinated, whereas in the UK the rather unkind term “spastic” was in use to refer to people with CP much more recently (the charity “The Spastics Society” only renamed itself “Scope” in 1994) and so the word is very much seen as a directed slur rather than a broad, mild and lightly comic gibe.
Which is not to say that the US use is acceptable, but it explains why it is sometimes used so casually (including by (yep) Weird Al in “Word Crimes”, much to his later chagrin upon learning the background of it).
In conclusion, fuck Trump and Vance and the couch they rode in on.
… 
…
Texas republicans in their never-ending quest to disenfranchise Texans.
If you (understandably) don’t want to click on a TikTok vid, here’s the upshot: Say you want to register to vote in Texas. You Google ‘online voter registration’ and are directed to a .gov website. Once you’ve filled out the form, you click on the ‘submit’ button at the bottom of the page. Is your registration submitted? Hell, no. You still need to print out the form and mail it in. There is no online registration in Texas, ha ha.
So, something I found out recently when renewing my Texas Driver’s License. There was some reason I couldn’t renew online, so I went in person and got to talking with the staffer who did my renewal.
The people who do the online work on the Texas .gov site, at least for the DL stuff, is entirely separate from the staff (generally good but massively overworked and understaffed) at the DPS offices across the state. It’s actually a company they subcontract (of course they wouldn’t miss any opportunities to give their grifter friends a break while touting the “efficiencies” of the private sector) rather than state employees. So, there is online renewal at least, but on an entirely separate system that in a few respects can’t 100% ‘talk’ with the state system.
Here’s a stupid Republican idea: it’s not reasonable to expect that boneless chicken has no bones in it. 
So saith the GOP majority (4-3) of the Ohio Supreme Court, with a scathing dissent pointing out that the very definition of boneless is without bones. Linky.
The purpose of this Orwellian ruling is to screw a customer who got an over-1 inch bone in a 1 inch piece of chicken 
stuck in his throat and required two surgeries from the complications. Because he purportedly could not reasonably expect boneless chicken to be boneless, the Ohio Supremes affirmed the dismissal of his lawsuit against the restaurant without getting to a trial.
Not that I disagree that it was a head-scratcher of a decision, but did that guy ever hear about the concept of chewing?
Regardless of whether or not I expected bones to be in my food, I suspect I’d have a hard time somehow missing a nearly 2 inch long bone sliver to the extent it could “slip down the wrong pipe”.
If they took the bones out, it wouldn’t be crunchy, would it?
I was going to make a perfectly innocuous point about how there isn’t a “right pipe” for a bone to “slip down” but I could see that trainwreck coming a mile off.
Anyway - that’s a pretty big chunk of bone to bite into, and I am surprised that it wasn’t caught during the chewing stage. But fuck the “boneless isn’t boneless” Republicans anyway.
Oh, no doubt.
But that was a detail that caught my attention. Plenty of stupidity all around on this one, I suspect.
Most processed meat in the US can end up with small fragments of bone in it. It’s not ideal, of course, but everyone knows that biting on a bit of bone is a possibility.
Now, a two-inch piece of bone, that was a pretty big screw-up by whoever processed that chicken, but also a pretty big screw-up by whoever tried to swallow it whole. I suspect that if they had eaten like a normal person, and then made a truth in advertising claim, they’d have probably won. But for a personal injury claim, no, because there’s no way a reasonable person would have gotten that injury.
I suspect that the plaintiff did, indeed, eat the chicken like a normal person, and discover the bone, but then lied about choking on it in hopes of a larger payout.
To the point of needing two surgeries?
Yeah, they probably should have noticed before swallowing, but it doesn’t sound like the consequences were fabricated.
In 400 years, will people quote Monty Python as we quote Shakespeare today? It’s amazing how many phrases apply perfectly 50 years later.
Also, 
.
No, it isn’t.
An argument isn’t just disagreeing with everything someone says!
In order to argue, you have to take a contrary position.
Spam,
spam,
and spam.
But I don’t like Spam!