Author: Brett L

Today young Ted “Theodore” L had all his diapers thrown away and will henceforth wear underwear. And treat them like cloth diapers. Three times I tossed him on the shitter, and what does he do, he sneaks around behind a table, and as I come around (because I suspect he’s taking a dump) yells, “Go ‘way, Daddy! There no poop hewe!” You know who says that in my experience? Someone who just shit their pants. And, in fact, this was the case. Its like he’s more comfortable walking around with his own shit weighing him down than just doing what I asked. There’s a metaphor there, but it might be crap.

Former head of the CDC arrested for sexual abuse. Remember when they were just literal dog-fuckers. Maybe someone should take out a multi-billion dollar grant to study the epidemiological patterns of sexual deviancy in federal institutions.

Horse gone, Papa Johns CEO insists on closing barn door. To strain the metaphor, I’m rooting for a cow and lantern scenario.

This is pretty much how I see LA in my head.

When you look at the map of this dangerous “kissing bug”, it seems that the Jayne Cobb school of romance appears near universal in West Virginia and New Jersey. Anyone surprised?

For OMWC, safely back from Detroit, I thought I’d play something from the Motor City Madman’s finest musical days.

Five plus hours of grinding out SQL and JSON — repeating each about 3x for each bleeding step. There’s a part of me that says, “oh just write a text automation script that generates all the documents, it can’t possibly take as long as just grinding.” This is a trap. This is always a trap. Although I was getting pretty good with search-and-replace by the end of the day. Next time is the time to write the automation. You want to be lazy, but optimally lazy. Never automate before it is time. Anyhow, I burned through most of my focus already. But MANY OF THE THINGS!! are working automatically now. That is good. When most of the hard problems are solved, and you can just grind it out, that’s fun for the first day or two.

Apparently, the Russians have never watched ROTJ. Deploy Ewoks to Poland!

Speaking of another disaster of film with too many muppets: The Happytime Murders is being panned.

Jim Brown doesn’t give a damn about what you think. He’s rooting for Trump.

Lots of people leave yoga balls filled with carbon monoxide in the trunk of their wife’s car, right?

When someone kills a police dog, its murder, right? We all know its different when a cop does it.

And this one is for my brother, who is having a birthday today. Someone has to be a 311 fan.

Today is a celebration day. Papa L was born on this day many long years ago. I am very fortunate to be able to take my sons to have birthday dinner with my father. He never got to do that. Happy Birthday, Pops.

Now, let’s get onto the WTF and outrage. I was working pretty hard in the Morning Links to line up President Pence and a bunch of you didn’t want to play. Come on! Its going to be a blast. We all know The Donald isn’t going to go quietly. We NEED impeachment so that the whole sorry spectacle plays out for months and months and ruins pretty much everyone who touches it.

If you commit bank fraud, you get the Paul Manafort treatment. If you steal a bunch of data from Congress and take it to Pakistan, as well as committing fraud you get…. three months probation? What in the fuck?! Are you kidding me?! Its fine to commit fraud as long as I some of it to build a women’s shelter?

I’m sure Sloopy will be along any minute to tell me that Duncan Hunter and his wife were just trying to have a nice life as private citizens.

Wow. I think I might have still been under the influence of alcohol when I reported to my workstation this morning. No, no, I didn’t endanger anyone. Just walked myself upstairs without stumbling and sat down. Note to self: Eat, don’t drink your dinner tonight, dumbass. That will be easy tonight as I have a pork butt cooking in the slow cooker. It is Taco Tuesday, and I will be doing my part!

I think we all knew this is how the story of this young lady would end. But still very sad.

She Guevara visits former employer which closed in part due to minimum wage laws She advocates for.

SLD, businesses should be able to choose who they associate with, but Wells Fargo terminates political candidate’s account for supporting marijuana legalization. We, also, get to choose who we do business with.

It looks like the jury is hung on at least one count in Paul Manafort’s case. For a defense that called no witnesses, this is a win.

Anticlimactic end to a local Florida Man story. I only post this because TBT’s coverage of this has been breathless. Running at least 3 stories on the “murdered” gopher tortoise. One of which featured a young child who was breathlessly heartbroken about it. Turns out, some guy was just trying to make sure he got to work on time as a crossing guard at the school.

If you have a child starting college (or are starting college yourself) I strongly urge you to get the meningitis vaccine or at least ask your doctor about it. My wife had a friend die of bacterial meningitis during college. The good news is almost nobody gets bacterial meningitis, the bad news is, the fatality rate is pretty darn high. Antibiotics, for the most part get trapped on the wrong side of the blood-brain barrier, so acute treatment is not as effective as it should be.

Everyone needs goals. May need headphones for this one.

So, just asking for a friend… if you were to find a person’s work computer open, and this person daily made your life annoying, and you were in Dearborn, MI; would it be wrong to enter a bunch of jihad search terms in their browser and start just clicking links at random. And if so, how wrong? Is this the equivalent of SWATting or just, you know, a fun prank between co-workers? I need to know in the next couple of weeks because this idea is very attractive to me today, but I may not be my best self.

Oh boy, here’s the TRUTH on vaping. It may not be “completely” safe. Much like eating, or using fitness equipment for exercise, if you do it an infinite number of times, eventually it may be fatal. God forbid that peasants without multiple medical degrees be able to judge their own risk tolerance (even if wrongly).

I also “hope” John Brennan sues Donald Trump. Its the ultimate no lose situation for me.

Add me to the list of people who think “Confidential Mode” in Gmail is not confidential to anyone that matters.

TOP. MEN. in Venezuela tie currency to oil-backed blockchain that many think is a scam. Remember, folks, this is where Elizabeth Warren wants to end up with her Supervised Capitalism or whatever she is calling it.

My three year old asked if he could listen to the end of this before I dropped him off at daycare. I figure we’re about eight years from “…and that’s how the band that wrote ‘Lost in the Supermarket’ ended up selling Jaguars to a song about London after a nuclear strike.” But you gotta start with the catchy ones.

Despite what The Cure may tell you, it is Friday that always comes too late. I’m done with this week. Been done for a while. So done. Time to crack open the office bottle and work my way through that until I can call it the weekend. I took my wife out to dinner last night because my mother is a saint and offered to watch the kids for a night. We ended up going all two miles down to the beach, where we had a nice dinner next to eight stereotypical Alabamans. How stereotypical? They shouted, “Roll Tide!” before doing a round of shots. I’m sure there are a lot of nice people in Alabama.

Florida Man had a rough day yesterday when his GTA LARP was interrupted by police.

Dubois was charged with two counts of Grand Theft Motor Vehicle, one count of Attempted Grand Theft Motor Vehicle, three counts of Burglary to a Conveyance, two counts of Burglary to an Occupied Dwelling, three counts of Leaving the Scene of a Crash with Property Damage, one count of Burglary/Battery, one count of Battery, two counts of Possession of a Controlled Substance, and three felony warrants for Violation of Probation- Grand Theft Motor Vehicle.

Angry dwarf goes on unhinged rant about Trump’s economic plans.

Don’t get me wrong. Some regulations should be eliminated because they’re just too costly relative to the protections they provide. But many regulations protect you and me from being harmed, fleeced, shafted, injured, or sickened by corporate products and services. And they’re worth it.

Yet Trump is taking a meat axe to all regulations. In so doing, he’s creating a new form of trickle-down economics—where the benefits go to corporate executives and major investors, while the costs and risks land on the rest of us.

Socialist It Girl bans media from town hall meeting

“We wanted to help create a space where community members felt comfortable and open to express themselves without the distraction of cameras and press. These were the first set of events where the press has been excluded,” said Trent. “This is an outlier and will not be the norm. We’re still adjusting our logistics to fit Alexandria’s national profile.”

Translation: Every time she goes on camera, her numbers go down

I love these breathless takes about the disappearance of the young lady from Iowa, especially the source that is citing from the FBI profiler playbook. At this point everyone who has ever read a single police thriller knows all of these things:

The 20-year-old Iowa college student was last seen on July 18 before she vanished without a trace. Police have followed hundreds of leads but have yet to follow one to Mollie, but it is believed she was kidnaped by someone she knew who is inserting himself into the investigation.

A source close to the FBI told Radar Online that authorities believe Mollie’s abductor is hiding in plain sight and even attended a vigil held for the missing student.

“There is reason to believe the person responsible for Mollie’s disappearance attended a vigil and has continued to closely follow the case,” the source said.

Oh what the hell, I worked too hard on the links to go deep on the music.

After eight solid hours of sleep, I feel like I might not be descending into some sort of gray hell anymore. I think I may be able to once again pass for human. The sun is out, the birds aren’t singing, and work is moving towards completion. Or else I just burned out my ability to be stressed about it for a couple of days.

In sad news, Aretha Franklin passed away this morning. I am moving the music link to the top in her honor. So here’s Aretha with the best rhythm section in the world.

This one’s for Playa Manhattan. Health officials identify organism that sickened 650 diners at Chipotle. No word yet on identifying the sickness that keeps people buying the mediocre food that seems to be making people ill regularly.

I swear to all I hold holy, if I end up stuck with an ill-tempered pony in my aisle on a Southwest flight, I’m gonna make the links. This is a little horseshit.

Aliens off the Bermuda Triangle? I don’t believe it. Mr. Lizard, cleanup on aisle 3.

I’m usually no conspiracy theorist, but this sketchy report, if verified makes this New Mexico thing start to stink like old fish. First a judge lets two guys accused of multiple counts of child neglect and abuse, some probably fatal since cops found a skeleton in shallow grave, get to walk on a signature bond, then authorities destroy the compound? Again, this report is the only one I’ve seen and cannot verify this report. Maybe some poor CSI guy tripped over a booby-trap and they aren’t telling anyone yet. Its also fucked up, to me, that some news crew is walking around what should be a still active crime scene.

Today, I got nothing. I haven’t slept more than 5 hours in 3 or 4 nights. Not really sure at this point. I haven’t started having any squiggles at the edge of my vision or auditory hallucinations yet, but the coffee isn’t doing it for me anymore. So if tomorrow’s links are gibberish, either I didn’t get any sleep or I’m just making less sense than usual. One day, one day, I will finish a project working steadily over the whole time. On that day, I will probably be terminated. Maybe the day after. Oh well, less than 3 weeks to deadline. Maybe tonight I’ll be too tired to worry about what didn’t get done.

Main page image courtesy of the super-awesome Hyperbole and a Half, who has not updated in years, but if you never read it, or haven’t read it in a while, is worth your time — and you will probably recognize some famous internet memes if you read much, because it is just that awesome.

Of all the horrible things that Net Neutrality has wrought, allowing the US to move from 12th to 6th fastest in speed at which racist, sexist filth can be downloaded over the interwebz has to be the worst!

Good news out of AZ, where the cops have really started adopting turning on their body cams — to record office trysts. You goddam moron. No matter WHY you are recording something, it is still evidence.

This Florida Man’s way to Heaven is definitely greased. “Authorities say a worker has died after falling into a vat of oil at a facility near Walt Disney World.”

Oh lawd. Elizabeth Warren launches “Accountable Capitalism” campaign. In which “Warren wants to create an Office of United States Corporations inside the Department of Commerce and require any corporation with revenue over $1 billion — only a few thousand companies, but a large share of overall employment and economic activity — to obtain a federal charter of corporate citizenship.”  Which is not the school-days definition of fascism “government control over a corporate economy” by some magic handwaving. What in the everloving fuck? I guess that’s one way to pop the stock market bubble.

Here’s something from the Pogues for all you pogues.

I really hate work-dodgers. It just annoys the shit out of me to see someone who is basically absent, late, or useless. The only thing more annoying than that is when a work-dodger decides that they need some piece of information from me RIGHT NOW when I’m working 10+ hour days and several hours on the weekend. I’m pretty ruthless about “is this going to get me to deadline?” (Which, this is not, but its kind of a sanity restorer in the mid-afternoon, so I will claim if there’s blowback) So I’m annoyed when a person misses a meeting due to a personal day and then tries to impose on me for the notes with our mutual boss in copy. The first draft of my answer said, “should have brought yourself to the meeting if you want to know what happened”, but PTO is rightly sacred. It’s your time (and also your responsibility to make sure your work gets taken care of). My final answer said, “I don’t have time to type up a summary for you, talk to this other person who attended and sent a summary email.”

Anyhow, enough about my work life, you want links.

Mr. Lizard, your skinsuit department is getting careless. Not only did they did they do a bad job with the skin, but they also made a careless mistake falsifying this Florida candidate’s educational record.

This disaster of an article posits Americans own less stuff because of media digitization and ride-sharing, takes winding detour into a confused “if American kids don’t have stuff, how will they learn to respect property rights”, and brings it all to a close with an incoherent cry for stronger Right to Repair protections. Its like this person has been listening to people much smarter have conversations and brought out this pastiche of misconceptions.

Nebraska does to convicted murderer what celebrities pay good money to do to themselves. And, I’m just spitballing here, but it seems like there’s an underserved market in either a fentanyl rapid test, or a 3rd party who certifies drugs as fentanyl free and enforces their brand integrity by any means necessary.

Texas Man passes Florida Man citizenship test, will probably find himself a guest of the State.

“Whaddya mean I don’t support your system? I go to court when I have to.”

Happy Monday, ever’body. And an especially happy Monday to me as it is back-to-school for both the wife and children. No, no, I’m not a slightly younger man with candy. My wife is a professional student, although we’ve negotiated that this will be her last educational venture that “we” pay for. After this she has to bring home at least as much money as she spends on school. It has been a remarkably quiet and productive day. Although I did stay up far too late drinking last night. I’m pretty sure my corner of the (brand new with a half-dozen beautiful free-weight lifting platforms!) gym today smelled like a brewery. But hey, the gym is not optional.

That guy in the parking lot shooting in Florida will be charged with manslaughter. I think this is the right call in this case. The shooter had four previous altercations that involved police, with him being the aggressor. Its unclear to me that someone with a documented history of “looking for trouble”, who initiated a verbal but aggressive and persistent confrontation with a woman shouldn’t face a jury of his peers to arbitrate whether or not he acted reasonably. That said, I’m not convinced that a guilty verdict should be returned. There was at least enough doubt in my mind, and in many others that a trial is probably appropriate.

Monk takes abusing the bishop too far. Defrocked monk beats Coptic bishop to death. The Copts have enough enemies without killing each other.

Turn that drone voyeurism hobby into a very lucrative career. Enough to pay your hobby’s legal bills, one hopes.

The Lancet known for publishing several blockbuster studies that have lowered the efficacy of public health by being fabricated and wrong, goes big with a comparative cost analysis of endocrine-disrupting chemicals and their harms in the US vs. the EU. (Think BPA and birth control in the water). Their hypothesis, which they magically proved, is that the US has higher cost because of less regulation. I think my favorite part is the metric “IQ points lost”. Several, reading this study. Interestingly, they also determined that the cost due to pesticides in the EU was triple the US — which on a per capita basis, I would have guessed Roundup to be far more plentifully sprayed in the US.

I mean, I think calling them lazy is pretty specist. “Laziness led to extinction of Homo Erectus”.

Sometimes, your day just needs a kick in the ass.