Leftovers & links #35

Click any image to engorge.

Colin Powell died. I don’t know — or need to know — anything about his life and career except that he knowingly lied to take America to war, leaving a whole lot of people dead for nothing. Only the good die young, and that fucker lived to 84 damned years of age.

May he rest in perpetual pain.

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In-and-Out is an overrated but OK burger in California and the Southwest. The owners are well-known as semi-kooky Christians, with Bible verses on the cups and hamburger wrappers and such, but that didn’t keep me from eating there, when I lived there.

Now they’re actively refusing a government mandate to check customers’ COVID vaccine status before serving them inside the restaurant.

“We refuse to become the vaccination police for any government. We fiercely disagree with any government dictate that forces a private company to discriminate against customers who choose to  patronize their business.”
—In-N-Out Chief Legal & Business Officer Arnie Wensinger

Never again, In-N-Out. As a general rule I avoid eating in restaurants that try to kill me.

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If you’re at all in the news loop you’ve seen that Republicans are again gerrymandering every state they control, intent on overruling democracy to remain in power. They’ve also, of course, rewritten laws to make voting difficult for black and brown people. 

As ordinary routine, Republicans also do all they can to destroy the environment, protect lawbreaking police, make health care hard to get and expensive, keep even the safest recreational drugs illegal, let COVID keep killing, and just generally hold the downtrodden down.

That ought to be the Republicans’ motto — “Holding the downtrodden down.”

History suggests that there’s a limit to how many times people can be kicked in the face before fighting back. My own life is fairly comfortable, and I’m almost absolutely a coward and a pacifist, but we’re not far from a time when invitations to violence will be issued, and many will answer the call.

It’s only surprising that the people issuing and answering that call will be Republicans — imagining themselves the victims, and willing to kill to defend their rights and power that nobody’s challenged except democracy.

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Major culinary breakthrough, and I am serious about this: Popcorn tastes even better, much better, when it’s popped in grease left over from the previous day’s hamburgers. I imagine popcorn popped in bacon grease would be more addictive than PCP.

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All through my adult life, I’ve had the Elvis-given habit of addressing people as sir and ma’am, or Mr and Ms. These are all terms of respect, but my sister-in-law has asked me not to refer to her as Ms, but as Mrs Holland.

No slight was intended, of course. Part of respect is calling people by their chosen names, and she’s been Mrs Holland for most of her life, so Mrs Holland she will be.

My default with every other woman, though, will always be Ms. It was the very first thing I heard from what was then called the women’s liberation movement in the 1960s, and immediately their complaint made sense to me:

When a man and woman marry, the next day he’s still the same man, but she has a new last name, and she’s no longer Miss, she’s Mrs. After the marriage, a woman needs new checks, a new driver’s license, and a new library card. At work, she’ll need a new nameplate, a new badge, and a new email address. If old friends want to find a woman who’s married, they’ll need to know her husband’s name. That ain’t fair, ain’t right, and when I married, there was never any question that my wife would keep the name she’d been born with. She was never a Mrs.

It occurs to me, just about the only person who ever accidentally called my wife Mrs Holland was that same sister-in-law, who really is Mrs Holland.

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Some scientist thinks maybe we all came from a petri dish.

If so, it was a very poorly run lab.

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Of interest to old-time zine people, and old time rock’n’rollers: Larry Livermore explains what really happened between him and the late Piano Jimmy.

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OMG, it’s a nipple.

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Cost to clone your cat: $35,000.

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How the Beatles went psychedelic. 

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There seems to be some question whether Jackie Mitchell struck out Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, but there’s no question at all. There’s a box score, so it happened.

It doesn’t even matter whether it was ‘legit’, because again, there’s a box score, so it happened.

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This looks like a perpetual motion machine to me, but I was always told those are impossible.

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I’d be a cannibal if I could find a good cookbook.

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

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Sincere tip ‘o the hat to:
• Becky Jo
• Dave S.
• BoingBoing
• Captain Hampockets
• Follow Me Here
• National Zero
• Ran Prieur
• Voenix Rising
• and One of the Butt Sisters but definitely not the other.