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Pork, beef, and leather spies

Leftovers & Links # 59 

The late Bob Dole was a Republican Senator all through my childhood and most of my adulthood, culminating in a run for President in 1998. I’m not interested enough to research it, but as a Republican he presumably opposed abortion and worked against civil rights and loved giant corporations — all the ordinary Republican positions of his era.

I don’t remember him mocking science, though, or lying about everything every time he quivered his lips, and while I certainly found him annoying, I don’t remember hating his fuckin’ guts.

What a piker, compared to contemporary Republicans.

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This is a long and introspective essay from a woman who didn’t have an abortion, reflecting on that choice many years later, and how it changed her life and ended her dreams. Worth reading, I think.

Quote:  Yes, it can be true that you will love the child if you don’t have the abortion. It’s also true that whatever you thought would be so hard about having that child, whatever made you consider not having a child at that point in your life, may be exactly as hard as you thought it would be. As undesirable, as challenging, as painful as you feared.

This would be bad politics on a broad scale, but personally, I am done pretending to have a reasonable conversation about abortion with anyone who's passionately against it. They're monsters, and it's futile discussing such issues with Godzilla.

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San Francisco’s ‘Starship House’ imperiled.

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“Supply chain issues” continue, so for the past two months my beloved cat has been deprived of her favorite cat food. When there’s genuine Friskies™ in her preferred flavor, she meows only when her bowl is empty, but with any other food she’ll meow like heavy metal even when her bowl is full. She's eating less, meowing more, and it’s frustrating for both of us. I want Izzy to be a happy cat, so until her seafood flavors of Friskies™ return, she'll be eating the same tuna I sometimes eat, sans the mayonnaise and mustard. And she’s lovin’ it.

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I am opposed to cruelty to animals, but People For the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) is a bunch of nuts who damage their own cause. Latest example: this parody website offering clothes and bags made from human skin. It's icky, creepy, and mean — par for PETA.

When it’s revealed that the leadership of PETA was long-ago infiltrated by spies from the pork, beef, and leather industries, it will hardly be a surprise.

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One-word newscast:

Dear Trey Parker...

Good news:
Drones 

Bad news:
Snow 

Stupid news:
Coronavirus
High school
Trump 

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You are Jeff Bezos.

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Imagine a world without celebrities.

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Visit to Scientology Central, Florida headquarters for the scam church. Tom Cruise has a penthouse nearby. 

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Coupla weeks ago, I saw a doctor for the first time in years, and now the company that employs the doctor wants me to take a survey, and rate his doctorin’. I used to work for a survey company, and kinda enjoy taking surveys, so I clicked the link, and the first question is, “To ensure privacy, please enter Douglas’s date of birth.”

Nope. 

The survey comes from a “do not reply” email address, but with some internet sleuthing I was able to find the company’s executive in charge of such stuff, and sent him this:

You're a busy man, so I'll be brief.

A survey that requires my date of birth "to ensure privacy" smells like BS. Can’t imagine what my birthday adds to the data except helping to identify me, which means your survey is not anonymous, which means it isn't worth squat as a survey.

Your company knows that, of course.

My doctor's doctorin' was fine, but I'm not taking a non-anonymous survey.

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Speaking of grifter companies, Menards is a Midwestern household supply and hardware chain, where a friend of mine used to work. From her I know from her that they’re owned by a right-wing lunatic, but I disliked Menards before knowing that. I’ve only been a customer once, accidentally, many years ago.

Several weeks back, though, looking for a something somewhat obscure, I landed at the Menards website, where I may have visited 2-3 pages before noticing where I was. In those few moments, Menards scraped my email address, and I’ve been receiving spam from them ever since — 15 spams in the last 26 days. 

There’s required to be an ‘unsubscribe’ button in any commercial email, but in spam from Menards that button takes me to their “sign up and save big!” page, as if I want to receive even more emails from Menards. Instead, I’ve sought and found email addresses for a few of their executives, and all incoming spams are forwarded to them.

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Be my help desk, please: I am old and stupid and still new to ‘subscriptions’ on YouTube, but I want to believe that their page called ‘subscriptions’ is a grouping of YouTube pages I’ve subscribed to. I visit that page once weekly, to catch up on what’s new from my favorite few YouTubians.

And yet, each week I find that I’m ‘subscribed’ to a few pages I would never subscribe to, and didn’t. Are my own fat fingers to blame, or is YouTube ‘subscribing’ me to pages based upon its mysterious algorithms? If it’s the latter, I’m done with YouTube subscriptions.

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My last grouse of the day, I promise: Blogger’s comment function for this site is becoming less and less functional. There’s no response from Google, so when it annoys me enough I reckon I’ll pack everything up and switch to the competition, Wordpress. Sigh. I’ve used Wordpress software before and found it clunky, but at least it works.

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 Mystery links  — Like life itself, there’s no knowing where you’re going:

—①—
     —②—
          —③—

 Sing along with Doug:
Oh Yeah, by Yello


Sincere tip 'o the hat:
Linden Arden • BoingBoing
Captain HampocketsFollow Me Here
John the Basket • LiarTownUSA
Messy Nessy ChickNational Zero
Ran PrieurVintage Everyday
Voenix Rising

Extra special thanks:
Clayton Barnes • Becky Jo
Name Withheld • Dave S.

 12/6/2021

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3 comments:

  1. It's inevitable that the Starship house will be crushed and homogenized under the heel of greedy family. Sad, that was an interesting watch and read. I lived about 8 blocks East and 10 blocks North of it for 6-7 years, and never knew it existed.

    Depending on how much you want to support evil, you might be able to get Izzy's food on Amazon. I don't know the exact flavor, but I checked, and you can get a case of this, 24 cans, for $14.29, free delivery if you're a Prime member. Fuck, I sound like a salesman.

    https://imgur.com/p50e07T

    Also, in my experience and on /r/shortages on Reddit, animal food is a commonly cited item affected by shortages.

    Be careful with tuna : "Cats can be addicted to tuna, whether it's packed for cats or for humans. Some tuna now and then probably won't hurt. But a steady diet of tuna prepared for humans can lead to malnutrition because it won't have all the nutrients a cat needs. And, too much tuna can cause mercury poisoning."

    That's why we feed the dogs salmon with their food. For some reason, it's less susceptible to mercury buildup.

    Re YouTube - all I can say is that I've never had that problem. Maybe you're fat-fingering, I dunno. But I found this after a quick Google :

    https://www.technipages.com/why-is-youtube-subscribing-me-to-random-channels

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Let’s fly out to Frisco, grab a few burritos, and defend the Starship tonight.

      I will curb the tuna — thanks for the head’s up. Might even switch her to salmon. Canned salmon is pretty cheap.

      There’ve been weird unwanted channels among my faves the past two weeks. There are worse indignities in life, though, like my new neighbor who dresses her cat in a Christmas sweater.

      Delete
  2. [johnthebasket]

    I found your reference to Kay Martin and followed it down the rabbit hole to her Las Vegas days with her "Bodyguards" and her recording days which lasted many years. I found interesting parallels with Rusty Warren, who also played Vegas "blue", also made "raunchy" "party records", and also was widely known to a generation, then was generally forgotten. Ms. Warren cut an early party record called "Knockers Up" that sold in surprising volume. She became known as the "Knockers Up Girl", and made many appearances in Vegas under that nom de sein. She also cut and released two more Knockers Up records, and remained fairly popular well into the 1960s.

    There was an odd social phenomenon that lasted from something like 1966-1974 (see also: Vietnam War, Nixon) where a lot of people in their 30s and 40s, too old to be hippies, but too young to give up and become respectable, took on some of the hippie-like tropes without actually living communally or getting dirty: lava lamps, convertibles, short skirts, leisure suits, razor cuts, limited swapping (mostly blow jobs), hip talk, and many other hip things. These people were Rusty Warren's target audience in the 60s and early 70s.

    I was a half-generation younger than these odd people and I knew some of their kids when I was a teen-ager and young adult. It was an odd time. Rusty Warren probably isn't interesting enough for you to check out, although her collection IS in the Library of Congress. As it turned out, this "sex expert" was a lesbian had had the same partner for many years. The Knockers-Up girl retired to Hawaii with her girlfriend after her records stopped selling and died there in 2021 at age 91. Not a bad life as lives go.

    John

    ReplyDelete

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