Dear LavenderB, the Taliban is smarter. Hugs. Maybe unfriend the turd?
My rant is always about the commercialism, and overgifting. And I wish my solstice bonfire hadn’t fizzled so, must have needed more diesel 
Hah! Go grocery shopping at Wally World sometime. I have no complaint with how the grocery department is laid out, mind you. Except when I need to buy dog food as well as groceries. Instead of having a pet food aisle in the grocery department, you have to go all the way to hell and back to the pet department clear the fuck at the other end of the store for dog food.
I agree that the FB person is an idiot and have no love for the Duggars, but I don’t understand why they are Taliban? Just curious!
He’s not a friend. He was just posting in a thread I happened to post in on Facebook.
As for the Duggars, it is one of my pet peeves at how little their beliefs are truly presented on television. The Duggars are not just your average ordinary family who happen to have a lot of kids. They are sexist, backwards, overbreeding, gay hating, dumb as fuck lunatics. In their world women are children and women are the property of grown men who can essentially do as they wish to them. Their child rearing practices are both dangerous and antediluvian, involving ideas such as obedience training for a small baby that are simply not realistic and may result in a baby not being fed often enough. As children age, they are not allowed to have any kind of independent thoughts or feelings. Children must always smile and never contradict their parents. Teen female children are told to essentially act as baby minders for a mother’s younger children and that’s about it. They are to be homeschooled and denied access to modern science and other materials that might teach them to think.
Older teen girls must marry who they are told to marry. She is not allowed to have any real education let alone go to a real college. She must have sex when her husband tells her to do so and is not allowed to refuse his advances. Birth control is not permitted either. I cannot overemphasize the truly disgusting viewpoint that adult men like Jimmy Bobby Duggar are taught about their wives and female children. Women are literally their property and nothing else.
And of course they hate gays passionately.
They are only slightly less insane than Fred Phelps. They’re lousy parents and lousy human beings. If I could, I would force their kids to disband and go to deprogramming camp. Then I would have Jimmy Bobby and his Michelle slave arrested and prosecuted for child abuse.
I almost think all you have to know about them is that they built a house. The boys have a pole that leads to the playroom. The girls? Their pole? LEADS TO THE FUCKING LAUNDRY ROOM!
A few links with more info:
I don’t usually accuse things of being a “waste of tax money” because I can see both sides of the issue 99.999% of the time. But “NORAD tracks Santa” - ugh, what a ridiculous concept, that makes me embarrassed for NORAD every year it comes around. Do those starry-eyed Santa-loving kids it’s made for even exist? (I don’t think any of my old grade school classmates would have cared about this, except to humor their parents.) Isn’t this better served by a smartphone app these days anyway?
Another mini-rant: It’s annoying when a great home cooked dinner gets prepared but it’s too hot to eat for at least 20 solid minutes.
Celebrities who don’t understand that they only exist at our pleasure.
E.g., Bodie Miller: The press is useless.
Marshawn Lynch “Thanks for asking. Thanks for asking.”
Bill Belechick, various press conferences.
The list goes on. If you want to be ignored, don’t have a job that only exists as a public amusement.
The ticketing system for local public transport has been in place for five years. Despite incremental adjustments, it still sucks donkey dick. The website uses Active Server Pages, for fuck’s sake, and feels like it was designed in 1998, and you can’t automatically transfer funds from a failed card to a new one, you have to send in a printed paper form to an address. For a $2.2bn system, I expect better.
Don’t get me started about Sydney’s newfangled Opal card. You can’t top up at most (any?) train station ticket offices or vending machines; instead you need to stop into a 7-11 (which is a swell deal for them!). You top up online and they say it takes up to 24 hours for it to be available; my experience is anywhere from a few hours to several days - leaving me at the mercy of a bus driver, as I hadn’t the cash for a cash fare and insufficient funds on my card.
Oh, and many people find it costs them more.
I …
uh…
:blink:
All I knew about the Duggars was that they have way too many kids and are supported by being TV stars because they have way too many kids. I had no idea about any of the rest of this.
ewwww
Mom killed the alien 
She’s been having problems with her hand falling asleep, but the regular “stress balls” are too hard for her. I’d found this one that’s softer and bought her one. It’s lasted four days. It has a little loop which can be used to hang it up or to thread a finger through it and play with it without it bouncing away: she managed to rip it off.
This is the same woman who once asked me to fix the pirate ducky I’d bought her in Zurich and it turned out she’d ripped out the duck’s whistle because “it annoyed her”. We refer to him as Pirate Glubglub.
It just feels so weird, telling your mother “this is why I can’t get you toys!”
What the fuck were you cooking, magma? Usually after 20 minutes it’s damn near cold.
Maybe I have a very efficient stove, but when I make anything that isn’t dry - soups, stews, anything with a sauce - I generally have to put it aside and do some task to kill time when the cooking is done. Sometimes even then only the top part is edible and the rest is still like trying to eat an oil fire. No complaints about the food, just about having to stand around and wait for it.
Marshawn Lynch is awesome to his fans, and his fellow teammates all speak highly of him. He’s a great guy. I love that he stands up to the ridiculous bullying he gets from the NFL.
You know, we like these people. We really do. But they invited us over for breakfast, which turned out to be a couple of slices of sweet bread and a cup of coffee. I need protein in the morning, folks. When you say “breakfast”, that at least implies that there will be an egg in there somewhere. After three hours, I was ready to take a bite out of the cat. We went straight to a restaurant just down the street when we left.
Finally got around to grading the second set of research papers from my AP Euro class.
<sigh>
It’s not that they plagiarize, so much as it is that they do it so badly. 4 papers in a row got zeroes because a simple Google search on a sentence led me straight to the source they copied wholesale. It can’t be that they don’t think I know how to use Google, or recognize their ability (or lack thereof) to write a complex sentence…can it?
Or are they just plain stupid?
Good thing I bought a new bottle of Maker’s Mark. It’s going to be a long night.
Fucking Brain Chemistry.
I believe Markos Moulitsas (founder of Daily Kos) either coined or popularized the phrase with his book. Though of course illustrative examples go way back.
Sorry, I lost the thread of the conversation. Which phrase was that?
Good to know I’m not the only one who lost that thread.
To silenus, and yes, I know I’ve quoted this before:
Mom’s having problems with one of her hands. This is a woman who used to say she’d move to the old folks’ home as soon as she turned 65… then 70… then 75… now (at 74) she says she doesn’t want to even go have lunch there because “it’s full of old people! I look like a spring chicken beside them!” (only because you have a bigger budget than most and spend most of it on clothes, makeup and hair, Mom, and nobody will think you’re young).
It is also a woman whose biggest regret over her husband’s relatively-early death is a stubbornly mistaken belief that “if he’s lasted just two more years, my pension would have been bigger!” (her widow’s pension is the highest there is, because it is calculated as a fraction of his and even with early retirement, his pension was the highest). To her, people are divided into “props for the star’s life” and “sources of income”; Dad, the husband that she chose and that she loved as much as she’s capable of loving anyone other than herself, was both. So are her children. There is a line in a song, Cecilia’s Dama, dama: “(if she could) she’d be the bride in the wedding, the child in the baptism, the corpse in the funeral.” Hi, Mom! Her utter self-centeredness means, for example, that she never moves out of the way until you explicitly explain that she needs to do so because you just can’t pass and in case you haven’t noticed, I’m carrying the roast and it’s kind of hot. Thank you. She never helps anybody unless there is a specific benefit she expects to get out of it.
She wakes up at any time between 8 and 11am, and it can take one hour between the first time she says “I’m going to get dressed” and actually opening the closet, add another half an hour to decide what to wear. She changes clothes four or five times a day. And for some unfathomable reason, she was expecting my brothers to offer to come help her get dressed, and to actually do it 
Were they supposed to help her pick a blouse while on the phone with the bank? To draw a blueprint with one hand while helping her pull up her stockings with the other? I have no idea, but the woman has the logic of a drunk geranium - and she’s less bad at it than the majority of our relations on her side.
My home is now minus one Princess. At midnight, with a dear friend trying to sleep in the next room, Vinnie and his mom began arguing. When he used the phrase “someone needs to put you in your place” to his mother? He was immediately no longer ever welcome in my home again. Ever. I hate that he woke almost the entire household, but it’s probably worth the trouble for him to be gone.
My only regret is that I took the already-limited Christmas budget and divided it nine ways instead of six. His share should have gone to people I actually care about, not to a self-entitled little pissant who has the nerve to speak to any human being, much less his own mother, like that.