Anyone got any tips on how to deal with flying eleven time zones west?

“We believe”? Wait, I thought fast food joints, hurh. Don’t you guys think that they’re like of the Devil or somethin’ I was. Liberals, you want to send those evil employees who would dare work at a fast food joint then ya just don’t believe in, thought you wanted to, I dunno, send them to Purgatory or somethin’ so they all go VEGAN and, uh, wages and picket lines I dunno they’re not often discussed in Purgatory, are they? I dunno why are you even worried about fast food wages because dha.

Real Vice President material, that one.

via The Daily Banter

"Boing" is not a Scrabble word.

"Honda" is (it's the part of the knot which makes a lasso work).

"Jato" is a Scrabble word, but seems to have no definition outside of the US military acronym "JATO". It's a good way to use a J, though. Also, "Jota" is a word, which is nice.

"Xyst" is also a Scrabble word (it's a long covered portico or tree-lined walkway).

Today a lucubration (or lucubrations — the word more often appears in the plural) is a derisive reference to a pedantic, over-elaborate or muddled attempt to make a point.
...
Lucubration literally means thought, study or writing that has been undertaken by artificial light. Its origin is Latin lux, light, via the stem of the verb lūcubrāre, to work by lamplight. Imagine a scholar hunched beside a guttering flame, striving late into the night to get his ideas on paper.

www

In 1958, a Canadian-born right-wing crank by the name of Cleon Skousen wrote a book called "The Naked Communist", about how the commies were scheming to take over the world. That book contained a list that Skousen claimed were the "Communists' Goals" - but was really just a list of things his cold-war-addled wingnut mind said the commies wanted to do in order to assure their world domination. He figured out their plans, ya see.

Included in that list are:

13. Do away with all loyalty oaths.
14. Continue giving Russia access to the U.S. Patent Office.
15. Capture one or both of the political parties in the United States.

18. Gain control of all student newspapers.

22. Continue discrediting American culture by degrading all forms of artistic expression. An American Communist cell was told to "eliminate all good sculpture from parks and buildings, substitute shapeless, awkward and meaningless forms."

So, ya know: the paranoid delusions of a wingnut, in list form.

By the way, Glen Beck loves the guy.

And so we flash forward to today, to the modern paranoid wingnut website, "Renew America", specifically to AJ Castellitto:

If one were determined to take down America; if it were not possible by force; the secret weapon would come from a surprising place....

From out of the closet.

As per number 26 of the 45 declared goals for the Communist Takeover of America (don't blame me – I didn't make these up) a strategic, targeted area of cultural infiltration would include the presentation of homosexuality as "normal, natural, healthy."

I'm wondering if this goal was actually too low on the list?

(No, you didn't "make them up", somebody else did. And maybe an attribution would have been nice. Make me Google for things... why I oughtta..!)

The paranoid speculations of a wingnut ranting at his typewriter in 1958 are now taken as plain fact by today's modern wingnut. (And people say kids these days don't respect their elders!)

When applied to the "takeover" agenda, it could be perceived that American homosexuals are merely commie pawns unknowingly being used for the hat-trick trifecta destruction of freedom, faith, family.....

What if individuals with same sex desires are merely being held up and exploited as objects of intolerance? What if they are just the means to a much greater and darker end-game agenda.....?

Yeah! What if?!

Fuckin commies.

Noted intellectual Michele Bachmann thinks that maybe just maybe those immigrant kids are going to be used for medical experimentation by unscrupulous foster parents and hospitals.

As an experiment, purely in the interest of science, she should fuck fellow deep thinker, Louie Gohmert - preferably on the House floor so we can verify the union - just to see if there's any chance their offspring could be any dumber than the two of them are, or if they are each, in fact, the very dumbest that anyone can possibly be.

The Daily Beast:

Templeton Rye, by contrast, has built its successful brand on being a product of Templeton, Iowa. They tell an elaborate story about how their recipe was used by the owner’s family to make illicit whiskey in Iowa during Prohibition, and how that rye had become Al Capone’s favorite hooch. They publish a description of their “Production Process” so detailed it lists the temperature (124 degrees) at which the “rye grain is added to the mash tank.” They brag that they focus their “complete attention on executing each step of the distillation process.” And yet, for all this detail, the official “Production Process” somehow fails to mention that Templeton doesn’t actually do the distilling.

....

Another challenge actual craft distillers face is that the armies of new rye drinkers have come to expect whiskey with a particular flavor—that is, the taste of MGP [the giant industrial distillery] rye. “If you’ve tried Dickel rye, Redemption, and Templeton, you’d think that’s how rye whiskey should taste,” says Clay Risen, author of American Whiskey, Bourbon & Rye. MGP’s whiskies are marketed under so many different labels that they “have colored perceptions” of what rye should be.

Sigh. I do like Redemption Rye. But if it's made in a giant factory and sold by the truckload, it's probably way overpriced.

Update: So, in some cases, and maybe in a lot of cases, it's not quite accurate to say the whiskey is made in this giant factory. In some cases, the maker will cook/mash/brew up the raw ingredients themselves and ship that to this place to be distilled. Distillation is a highly-regulated and capital-heavy process that many makers just can't afford, or haven't had the time or money to set up for themselves. Then, they get the distilled product back and put it in their own barrels for aging and/or blending. So, it's not entirely a sham. Not always. Just sometimes.

I suppose this is similar to how many wineries operate. If they grow their own grapes, they might use the facilities of a larger winery to process/ferment their grapes, and then put the result into barrels and age them at their own warehouse, or maybe at someone else's warehouse. Or maybe they own a winery but not a vineyard, so they buy their grapes from independent farmers and do the rest themselves. Or maybe they buy anonymous wine made at an anonymous winery, blend it or oak it, and slap their own label on it. And every mix and combination thereof.

David Anthony at the AVClub trolls the internet:

It’s hard to think of a song as ineffective as “You Shook Me All Night Long.” It’s an ode to a particularly talented sexual conquest of Johnson’s, but not a single word in the song expresses that. Not only does Johnson open the song by comparing a woman to a car (a metaphor so weak it deserves to be put on cinder blocks), but then goes right ahead and says, “She’s the best damn woman that I ever seen.” He plays coy in the shittiest way possible, only to drop the facade less than a line later. It’s lazy in all the worst ways, never fully committing to its premise, and never rising above mediocrity when it at least tries.

"It’s an ode to a particularly talented sexual conquest of Johnson’s, but not a single word in the song expresses that." - WTF does that even mean? The entire song is about how "talented" the woman was.

I usually make meat loaf once every two weeks.

• Meat loaf mix from the store (beef, pork, veal ground together)
• An egg
• Bread crumbs
• Some finely-diced garlic, onion & bell pepper, gently-sauteed to soften (since they otherwise won't have time to cook in some of the variations below)
• A good squirt of Sriracha
• Salt, pepper, etc..

Squish it all up. And now you have pink slime.

Given a bowl of this squishy mess, I usually make one of the following:

1. The classic: a big ol' loaf
2. Mini loaves cooked in a muffin pan. They're a handy serving size!
3. Micro loaves cooked in a mini-muffin pan. They're like little oddly-shaped meatballs.
4. Meatballs (hand-roll, fry, bake). Takes the most work, but frying them makes increases the yummy.

Wifey likes the smaller ones because they're easier to take to work - pop a handful of meatballs into a baggie and then you can eat them with your fingers! And, the little ones cook quicker. But it takes a lot of work to clean a muffin pan after meatloaf grease has caramelized all over it.

But, the best thing to do with meatloaf mush is to shape it into patties and then grill it. And put Pepper Jack cheese on it. It's sublime.

Well, it was the hottest June ever, anyway.