I would absolutely cancel before the date, and make sure to go somewhere with a lot of people who know me and can support my alibi.
A black Rochester firefighter is suing the city because his supervisor ordered him to attend a party where the hosts had racist decorations. The host says she isn’t racist, even though she runs a racist twitter account.
British politician whose entire career consists of criticizing trans people, the poor, and immigrants leaves the Conservative Party because of being bullied for being a woman.
Missouri school district brings back paddling.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/missouri-superintendent-merlyn-johnson-brings-spanking-back-to-barry-county-school-district
Describing her as a politician is a bit of stretch, but I admit to some surprise that a party supports bullying and name calling of trans people, the poor and immigrants would also train their guns on someone for not having the right background and actually once having had a job at KFC.
[In Kimstu’s head:] “Huh, well if they were actually having a Juneteenth party then maybe they were TRYING not to be rac—”
The linked article:
[In Kimstu’s head:] “Oh for FUCK’s sake. 
”
Gee whiz, everybody likes fried chicken! And my hideously racist alt Twitter account is just a character I play, it’s not how I actually feel.
What’s the reason that the fire department captain insisted that he and others attend the party?
I’m trying to figure out why the fire captain ordered the fire-fighter (and two colleagues) to attend. I’m assuming that if all three were Black, that would have been mentioned. And I know that the fire department here will dispatch a truck to neighborhood parties (no idea what the criteria is to get one to come).
Being in a non-charitable mood, I’m assuming Mr Jones was ordered to attend because he is Black, and the other two were sent to provide cover.
My parents live in a town with a volunteer fire department and I believe for a small contribution (not sure how much) at Christmas, Santa will visit on a firetruck. That makes sense. This does not.
In addition to just the general evil horrendousness of the whole setup, I have to wonder, WHAT KIND OF LAMEBRAIN DELIBERATELY PISSES OFF FIREFIGHTERS.
I mean, I don’t care if you’re their supervisor, you’re still burning some pretty crucial boats there. [ETA: Totally missed the conflagration metaphor when I typed it but am leaving it in. I did not SWIDT.] Firefighters and EMTs are just about top of the list of Community Members I Definitely Do Not Want Hating My Guts.
There was a special Congressional election in New York last night. Polling showed the Republican winning by over 9%. The Democrat won by 3%. The pollsters were calling people to do their polls, but they were apparently only calling people on land lines. Not a very realistic slice of the electorate.
“Sorry your house burned down, we got stuck in traffic. Siren? Oh, yeah, we forgot we had one of those. Oh well.”
The local conservative rag went through a brief period in which they were distributing a truncated version of their publication in order to drum up subscriptions. I looked at it a few times, mainly in search of local news, and I remember seeing a letter to the editor in which a local man was ranting because he had seen a fire truck being driven to the grocery store of all places!!! How dare those firefighters go shopping while on duty!!! 
The kicker is that this grocery store has an attached gas station; I’ve frequently been there when a fire truck was being refilled, while some of the firefighters were in the grocery store. I didn’t see anything wrong with this.
I regularly see a fire truck at my local supermarket, with a couple of firefighters shopping for groceries. (I’m curious what they buying and eating.)
This is very common, IMHO. I believe the fire trucks need to be run periodically so they do not require expensive maintenance. I would think a twenty minute drive once a month would suffice, but around here, it seems that they need to run them every day or so, whether a run to the grocery, or maybe to the pawn shop. I’ve seen them both.
Yeah, fire trucks apparently get, like, three to five miles to the gallon? So even if these grocery-shopping firefighters weren’t just stopping in at the store on their way to somewhere else, which I think is probably what they were doing, they might have used a WHOLE GALLON of fuel taking the truck out to the nearest supermarket.
Even with today’s high diesel prices, that’s still under six dollars AFAICT. My outrage over this level of reckless wastage of the taxpayers’ money is… controllable.
No no no, clearly the prudent thing to do is to just let the fire trucks sit immobile for weeks or months on end between fires. Then when an emergency does occur, we’ll crank the ignition and hope that the truck starts.
If it doesn’t, well, too bad, so sad. Especially if it happens to be that irate nimrod of a letterwriter whose house is burning.
Irate great hunters write letters?
They CARVE them on MASSIVE CLUBS
screw it