Alex F.

A picture of white ceramic tile on which there are dozens and dozens of small, diaphanous, unattached wings, along with a handful of thin, black, antenna'd insects who still have their wings.

TW: picture of a bunch of bugs.

At or around 7 p.m., our bathroom was taken over by scores of breeder carpenter ants, shedding their wings all over the place. No idea how they got in. Assume they were already in. Assume the building is going to collapse more or less now. Goodbye.

Yeah, I had some thoughts about that conversation.

Honestly, I run into senior PH professionals who are unfamiliar with it--or assume it's a frivolous distraction from social determinants--all the time. It's still emergent in many ways. And I wouldn't be surprised if part of that is the labor in reframing from decisional psych to behavioral epi.

I think Rob Thomas is an extremely fun and often empathetic showrunner, but not one prone to pondering too deeply on Themes.

But the whole thing is North County Noir--it pays that self-deceiving moralizing into the tragic... uhh... redacted thing.

On top of this, I feel like often the stream is presented so that the ultimate downstream destination--emergency care--is omitted so it becomes a model of efficiencies instead of a cautionary metaphor. I'm absolutely guilty of it!

A axis chart with Pizza, Burger, and Taco.

explaining the WBC elimination scenarios to an American: imagine taco, pizza, and burger.

So Kounalikis's sinecure meant that the chosen successor was legitimately too useless to be elected under any circumstance?

And of course people engage in impulsive acts of property destruction all the time. That doesn't make it right, but it should be exactly as illegal when an unhoused person does it as when a fratboy does it.

Accepting and understanding whatever sparked the... anger? curiosity? need for attention?... that led to throwing that rock is necessary if you want to engage him in preventing it.

And often both recovery and acute mental health tx cares little about doing that, and the justice system even less.

There's a couple things going on here:

a) "rational" as in "an appropriate response to a stimulus" is not the same as "rational" as in "an action that maximizes your benefit," and

b) there's far fewer people engaging in rational behavior according to the second definition than one might think.

"Fire water air earth heart" and then Captain Planet powerfully kicks their ass

Juice! Juice!!

The Fauci worship was dumb, but it stemmed specifically from him being in opposition to, not a source of, anxiety and death.

Pretty sure RFK has HHS churning out insane video game animations of him because he mistook dopey libs collecting Fauci baseball cards as an indication that HHS should be run as a personality cult--instead of people finding respite in a figure who could speak calmly and reassuringly about horror.

A screenshot from the roguelike computer game Caves of Qud, in which a procedurally generated meal is labeled "Meatballs with Meat Stew, Meat Meatballs, and Meat Hash".

Good evening, I'm just ducking in here to complain that the Caves of Qud Reddit mods deleted my joke about the USDA Dietary Guidelines.

Kind of gets to the essential difference between Kristin and Padma: if you don't delight Kristin, you'll make her sad. If you don't delight Padma, she'll feed you to the crocodiles she named, hand reared, and put through Dartmouth.

I mean, it's a garbagetime rookie number and I have definitely had my brain melted by the internet. But there has to be someone in the org with an equally melted brain and the chutzpah to mock him.

Whisenhunt's number is what now

All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us, and this is a perfectly legit such decision.

Man every so often you're reminded that Delroy Lindo comes from the Theatre.

Enough of them have had their plots play out (River, Simon), had the ambiguity baked into the character (Book), become basically too cool for the show and also died (Alan Tudyk), or been played by Adam Baldwin (Adam Baldwin) that you can just reboot and recast with occasional guest appearances.

I need to start an Oaklog list of "Things That Made Me Awkwardly Angry During Trivia"

There will be much rending of overalls in this apartment tonight.

That statue, which was cast back in 1961, was modeled on 1950s Texas Rangers – as in the law enforcement Texas Rangers – Captain Jay Banks. Since it's unveiling 65 years ago it has spent most of its life at Love Field in Dallas. But then in 2020 it was removed and placed in storage. Why? Because Captain Jay Banks was a racist cop who made it his mission to stop schools from integrating. This is an excerpt from the 2020 book, Cult of Glory: The Bold and Brutal History of the Texas Rangers by Doug Swanson, which describes' Banks' role in efforts to keep schools in Texas racially segregated in defiance of the United States Supreme Court's 1954 decision, Brown v. Board of Education: Then there is the form and face of the statue itself. This dates to 1956, when the NAACP, backed with a court order, attempted to integrate the high school in Mansfield, about 30 miles southwest of Dallas. White residents erupted in fury, so Gov. Allan Shivers dispatched the Rangers. But unlike state police in other Southern racial hotspots, the Rangers in Mansfield did not escort black students past howling mobs of white supremacists. They had been sent instead to keep the black children out of a white school.

The commanding Ranger on the scene was Sgt. E.J. “Jay” Banks. A wire service photo showed him casually leaning against a tree outside Mansfield High. To his left, above the school’s entrance, was a dummy in blackface, hanging from a noose. Nearby a white mob had assembled. Some carried signs that threatened death for anyone attempting to integrate the school. Banks saw no need to remove the effigy or disperse the mob. “They were just ‘salt of the earth’ citizens,” he later wrote. “They were concerned because they were convinced that someone was trying to interfere with their way of life.” Blacks were so intimidated that none attempted to enroll at Mansfield. Several days later, Gov. Shivers ordered Banks and a few other Rangers to Northeast Texas, because African-Americans wished to take classes at all-white Texarkana Junior College, a public institution. Again the Rangers’ job was to stop black students from enrolling. As at Mansfield, a mob of white men gathered outside the school. An 18-year-old woman and a 17-year-old boy, both black, arrived by cab and began to walk toward the college. The mob blocked their path. Some surrounded the 17-year-old and kicked him, while others threw gravel. The Rangers watched it happen and did nothing except threaten to arrest the two students. That wire service photo of Banks in front of the school with the Black person hung in effigy can be seen at the top of today's newsletter.

The statue was removed from public view in 2020 in the wake of that book about the Rangers being published. This occurred at the same time that statues of Confederates, Klansmen, racists, and segregationists were removed all over the country following the murder of George Floyd. But now the Texas Rangers Baseball Club, knowing full well the history of the statue, its subject, and its removal, and knowing that multiple municipal institutions decided it was inappropriate for public display, is happy to put that statue up in a public concourse at a major league baseball stadium. When I learned of this yesterday afternoon I contacted Major League Baseball and asked the following questions: Is Major League Baseball aware of the history of the "One Riot, One Ranger" statue and its subject, Jay Banks? Is Major League Baseball aware that Love Field and the City of Dallas removed the statue and put it in storage in 2020 after Banks' involvement in attempting to keep schools segregated in the 1950s came to light? Does Major League Baseball condone one of its Clubs erecting a previously-removed statue of a staunch segregationist at its ballpark?; and Does Major League Baseball have any comment regarding the discomfort that will be felt by Black fans when confronted with the statue of a segregationist at Globe Life Field? I did not receive a response. I'm going to assume that the league's silence on this means that it wholly condones the Rangers putting up the "One Riot, One Ranger" statue despite its sordid and extraordinarily well-reported history.

Yesterday the Texas Rangers erected a statue of a segregationist cop at Globe Life Field. A statue that was removed from public property in 2020 because of its racist history. @mlb.com has refused to comment. www.cupofcoffeenews.com/cup-of-coffe...

"8 hour coke fueled policy vlog on SF arts funding" in there? Because it was a glorious wtf.

Isn't an anti-woke "Sinners" just every single other vampire movie?

Miss u boo :(

LOL yes Bsky that is indeed a butt.

A painting set in orbait above a turqouise planet, of a blue-and-white winged spaceship with spherical tanks and a cluster of engines at the back rendezvousing with a oblate satellite. Half a dozen tiny figures are busy worked on the latter. At the bottom left is the signature "Chesley Bonestell".

This has nothing to do with good album design except inasmuch as they obeyed the inviolable principle of "put Chesley Bonestell shit on the front". (Most of the rest of Shellac's stuff is the Extremely Tasteful '90s Minimalism(tm), although they at least tried to be funny about it.)