Now we’re all sad and alone

We just got back from dropping Skatje and Iliana off at the airport — they’re on the way home. Now I have to go back to being my usual sour, cranky, black-hearted self.

I snapped that picture after telling Iliana, after a long, unpleasant drive, that now she gets to go home to her daddy. I think she only understood one word of that, but it was the important word.

Would you pay $600 for a liter of water?

Yet another reason to break out the tumblers and guillotines.

If you read the review of various over-priced bottled water brands, you’ll discover there exists a profession called “water sommelier”. Yeesh.

Meanwhile, in Flint, Michigan…

I guess I’m being sued, I guess

I’ve only heard about it indirectly, from people who noticed it on legal databases, but I haven’t been served yet…because Richard Carrier is acting as his own lawyer, and he flubbed something in the filing so no papers were delivered to the accused. I’m still waiting. At least we’ve got our lawyer primed and ready to respond.

I got a lot of the detail from this extraordinarily entertaining video. Rebecca Watson recounts some of the documents Carrier submitted himself, in his defense, to show that no, he’s not creepy and obnoxious, no sir. She reads his own “evidence”, which does a very good job of showing that he’s creepy, obnoxious, oblivious to criticism, and completely unaware of boundaries. It’s amazing how his own incel-like emails demonstrate his lack of awareness.

Now I just have to wait for my own copy of the filing. No hurry. It’s all another silly, futile exercise.

Still the one

This evening, my wife plunked a big box of old papers and junk in front of me and told me it was my job to sort it out and clean it up. I went through it obediently, even though I quickly discovered that it was mostly her old trash. There were a few gems scattered in there, though, and I pulled them out before tossing the rest into the recycling bin. It seems only fair that I get to post some of them.

Like her school photo from when she was in 4th or 5th grade.

Ah, yes. The Summer of Love, 1967. We were going to school together then. She’s still just as pretty, just a bit more mature, fortunately.

I guess it should be no surprise what happened 13 years later.

Now see what she’s done? She not only made me clean up her stuff, she sent me on a nostalgia trip.

Wily grandparents set cunning traps

We have a plan. First thing we’ve done is install a baby trap inside of our baby transport vehicle.

Once captured, the baby will be transported to our baby cage.

It’s a foolproof plan. Here’s the baby.

She arrives by plane tomorrow afternoon, we snare her upon arrival, and then race back to Morris. It’s going to work.

Unfortunately, this is a catch-and-release program, so we’ll send her back to Colorado early next week. That’s OK, though, this is kind of proof of concept, and we have a second grandbaby we can try and capture sometime.

That one may be more of a challenge, since he seems to be fully mobile and more capable of evasive maneuvers.

It’s either part of a nefarious plan, or mental illness, or both

Police raided a home near Los Angeles and uncovered a stash of thousands of guns. They’re currently sorting through them trying to figure out why this house needed that kind of armament.

My first thought: cat ladies. There is a kind of well known obsession where individuals collect cats, they overrun their homes, the person is unable to keep up with the filth they produce, and the animals are neglected and suffer, while the person insists that they love their animals and don’t want to be parted with them, all while their home becomes an unliveable hazard. This is not to imply that having cats is a mental health issue, but compulsive and excessive hoarding might be.

Maybe there should be a recognized problem like “crazy gun hoarder syndrome”. Affects mainly older men. Leads to houses cluttered with rifles and handguns everywhere, so many that they aren’t properly maintained and constitute a danger to the resident and the neighborhood. Makes everyone wonder why they can’t control their obsessions. Needs to be dealt with with sympathy and social treatment.

What reinforces that idea are some of the comments on that video.

‘Adam & Ramona’ are clearly in the early stages of the syndrome. No, you don’t need 20 rifles and 10 handguns. You certainly are within the allowed limits of the law, but you’ve got a problem. Before you defend yourself by saying you’re a “collector”, well, that’s not an escape clause. Collect things that don’t kill people, OK? Or maybe he removes the firing pins from his historical archive of period self-defense tools, which are all neatly stored with labels in locked cabinets.

‘P G’ might have a problem, too. The police find a house packed to the rafters with murder sticks, and you’re concerned that the murder sticks might get scratched? Your priorities are kind of messed up, guy.

They don’t even have feline toxoplasmosis to blame.

Alternatively, of course, maybe the house owner will turn out to be a far-right wannabe terrorist with grand plans to take over LA with a hodge-podge of guns. That’s not good either. Or he was a petty crook running an illegal gun store to sell to people who couldn’t even pass the minimal gun checks in our law. Also bad.

There’s nothing good about any of this!

What? Even in Morris?

This “Beyond Meat” stuff must be booming if it’s showing up on grocery store shelves even in remote, barren backwaters like rural Minnesota.

But OK, I’ll give it a try this evening, despite the fact that marketing something as just like meat isn’t exactly a great way to reach vegetarians.

Hey, kind of like how Joe Biden is a fake progressive who’ll appeal more to neo-liberals and centrists, but not so much to people who want real change in the system.