And take a wild guess who he means when he says God.
I absolutely did ask, and thank you!
That reminds me of a joke. And since this is the Pit I’m going to go ahead and digress.
This guy was getting ready to go on a business trip to Boston, and his work colleagues said, when you get there be sure and try the local fish dish, it’s called scrod.
So he made a mental note to do that, and when landed in Boston and got into a cab, he said to the cabbie, “Do you know where I can get scrod around here?”
And the cabbie replied, “I’ve heard that question asked many different ways before, but never in the pluperfect subjunctive.”
Or maybe “RUN-DED OFF,” complete with tar and feathers. That would be the passive-aggressive case, imperative voice, first person singular.
Post all the blind links you want, as far as I’m concerned. No one is being pressured to click on them, despite the whining.
I think the issue is that it would be nice to know beforehand that it’s a link to YouTube. Yes, I’m guilty of posting such, but I try not to forget to mention it. I have terrible luck with advancing the link to a particular point so I also try to mention where the relevant part or parts begin. As with many other things, I don’t always remember.
I love this joke! For those who don’t know, there is no species of fish called “scrod”, even though it shows up on a lot of menus here in New England. It basically just means “generic whitefish,” usually cod, haddock, or pollock. I had someone ask me once what it was, and I came up a joke on the fly, saying if you think you’re getting cod when you order fish and chips, but you actually get something else, then you got scrod. 
The White House then immediately supplied two examples of his successes.
I can’t believe I typed that with a straight face.
Now that’s a great idea for a grammatical case!
I still like H. Beam Piper’s Kragan tense setup:
- spatial-temporal present, things here-and-now
- spatial present and temporal remote, things which were here at some other time
- spatial remote and temporal present, things existing now somewhere else
- spatial temporal remote, things somewhere else some other time
This was in his Uller Uprising, an appallingly racist recasting of the Indian Rebellion of 1857 (aka Sepoy Mutiny) in a Science Fiction setting.
When I was an undergrad at MIT, it was said that the sentence “Scrod by the Dining Service again,” had two meanings, both of them correct.
Then over the weekend the FDA says ‘oops, we had a false positive on a Taylor Farms lettuce sample’ just a few days after execs from Taylor Farms met with the trump admin. Oh, and Taylor Farms had given the trump Superpac ‘Make America Great Again Inc.’ a $1 million donation in 2025. Taylor Farms issues a statement saying the FDA apologized to them, to which the FDA said 'did not!"
In response to all that, the Department of Health and Human Service (HHS) wrote on X on Monday: "This is how the FAKE NEWS works: imply collusion, ignore the facts. Nothing influences our decisions except science and the safety of the American people.”
To which I say, of course, this chain of events is all coincidence! I don’t mean to imply collusion at the expense of our national food safety at all. I totally believe that statement by the HHS. The fact that the social media arm of the HHS sounds exactly like a mouthpiece for trump himself does not in the slightest suggest that the HHS is a rubber-stamping marionette puppet of the trump admin.
Thanks. I’ll be here all week. And longer, too.
BREAKING-NEWS. NYTIMES prints an anti-trump opinion piece.
Trump’s Kiss of Death
July 21, 2026
By Thomas B. Edsall
Mr. Edsall contributes a weekly column from Washington, D.C., on politics, demographics and inequality.
Donald Trump is the black-thumb president.
…
Blahblahblah…
He cites and quotes others at length on the ineptitude and destructiveness of DJT. Which most of us knew and watched while it was happening.
In conclusion:
…
The problem is that we are going to have to live with this man in the White House for the next two and a half years. Even worse, what Trump destroys with a snap of his fingers will take years to repair, except in those cases where he has broken something beyond restoration.
To which I can only comment: what took you so fucking long! And I did post that comment, but they probably won’t print it.
Still, it’s something. Trump will probably call for the paper to be shut down. Whatever.
Yeah, that writer is years behind. Wait until they learn about Jan 6. They’ll probably write something scathing!
Nice to see you read Pinker when he was still good and funny.
BTW, when I read that joke I wondered how come the pluperfect, subjunctive or not, does not use an auxiliary verb. Or is get suposed to be the auxiliary verb in that joke?
The joke only works if you understand the terms as grammatical, but not their specific meaning, which I’d wager is the majority of English speakers. Our language education (at least in the US and UK) is very, very sparing on analytical grammar, and our colloquial language doesn’t really use the subjunctive much at all. Both “pluperfect” and “subjunctive” are things we tend to encounter in our brief educational forages into French or Spanish, which typically don’t result in fluency.
People educated in other languages have a different experience.
Later, the cab driver stops to pick up a man who’s doubled over in pain…
PASSENGER: Take me to the nearest hospital!
DRIVER: Peter Bent?
PASSENGER: Bent?! She damn near bit it off!
“Young kids, they kill them like they’re candy.”
Kegbreath is lying to lawmakers live on CNN and so far has been interrupted 4 times by protesters.
God, I hate this Asshole! I want to throw things at the TV.
…sure, Donald, why not.
I must confess that I was educated in another language (Spanish) but since I hated all that grammatical stuff with all my heart I studied juuust enough to pass the exam and promptly and gladly forgot all about it.
So I cannot currently distinguish a “pluscuamperfecto” from a “subjuntivo”.
Duh. THAT’S what makes it a joke!
