Sand

Today I discovered that techbros, usually as a rejoinder to scepticism about the unlimited potential of innovation in computing or the notion, say, that humankind will terraform Mars, like to use the phrase "we taught sand to think". Now, I'm not saying they really don't understand that the only function of the silicon in silicon chips is as an insulator, just: stupid people use stupid slogans. (Mind you, more common on the internet is the T-shirt inscription "Teaching sand to think was a mistake" which only avoids being dumb by virtue of being facetious.)

Dry

A middle-aged British man who became an unlikely sensation on Chinese social media and added a new item to the Chinese vocabulary for his lunch sandwiches passed away on Wednesday, his family said.

...

Keith rose to fame through videos posted by his wife, a native of northeast China. These videos featured him cutting whole-wheat bread as he made avocado toast or a tomato sandwich and garnered millions of likes across platforms.

These meals became known as "dry lunch" or 干巴 in Chinese and Keith himself as the "dry old uncle." The videos have become a source of both amusement and disbelief for Chinese viewers.

"One bite of this after work, and I'll be scarred for life" was one comment, which was liked 127,000 times.

All the English language news sources reporting this story insist on referring tp this gentleman as "Old Dry Keith" thereby proving that Western media can't get the simplest things right.

Colección

You worry me, duolingo.

Silence

Of those killed, at least 138 139 were journalists...

Consider all that for just a hot fucking minute. The assault on the profession, the massacre of colleagues-in-news by a religious apartheid ethnostate, only for an entire industry – and a mouthy one at that – to shut the fuck up so sincerely about any of it.

[Cricket chirps]

Consider also: the people routinely on these Sunday morning couches get worked up when people on Twitter say nasty things about underwhelming reporters. They find their solidarity and cojones when a presenter is under fire for being a bit shit or the profession is slandered, and onto their high-horse they hop. But when a genocidal nation kills fellow journalists, there’s nothing but cowardly silence and endless justification for the ongoing devastation.

Labels

If you thought the above was the most clueless, or, as the old folks say, cringe election season meme ever produced by a Democratic supporter, you should strap in:


(Click for Twitter video)

I assume the blasted landscape represents Gaza.

As always with these things I had to check for traces of irony, but... apparently there are none.

Ologist

As the arrival of Alien: Romulus in cinemas has sparked a bizarre online tendency for championing the other prequels, here's a necessary reminder that Prometheus is not an intriguing examination of profound questions but, actually, utter shite:

When the Challenger blows up, you don’t waste your time complaining about its paint job. But beyond Sweet et al.‘s observations about the lack of dramatic tension, the lack of mystery, the lack of story, science does play a disproportionate role here. Alien was about a bunch of truckers on a lonely monster-haunted highway; Aliens, about a bunch of jarheads rediscovering, to their shock and awe, the nastier lessons of Viet Nam. Prometheus is about a scientific expedition ... and ... it’s blindingly obvious that Scott couldn’t be bothered to ensure that his “scientists” knew the difference between a gene and a bad joke. Much less anything about science as a profession.

So nobody thinks it remarkable when an archaeologist performs micro-necro-neurosurgery or runs a genetic analysis — anybody with an ologist on their resumé has gotta be a whizz at everything from microbiology to global general relativity, right? We’re shown a biologist who uses the word “Darwinism” as though it were a legitimate scientific term and not a dig invented by creationists: the same biologist who, in the penultimate act of a profoundly undistinguished career, runs with his tail between his legs at the sight of the first actual alien the Human race has ever encountered, even though it’s been dead for thousands of years. Then, a few hours later, watches a live serpentine alien perform what’s pretty obviously a threat display — and tries to pet it.

And yet, idiotic though that biologist may be, the scientist in me can’t really take personal offense because nobody in this shiny train wreck has a clue, from the pilot to the aliens to an on-board medical pod that, honest-to-God, is Not Configured for Females... Nobody bothers with any kind of orbital survey prior to landing (blind luck is always the best way to locate artefacts that could be anywhere on the surface of a whole bloody planet — although that’s downright plausible next to being able to find a multi-mooned gas giant from 34 lightyears away, based on a prehistoric game of tic-tac-toe someone scratched into a cave wall during the last ice age). A survey team goes charging into an unexplored alien structure and takes off their helmets the moment someone says “oxygen”. Their captain leaves the bridge unattended for a quick fuck, right after informing two crew members stranded in the bowels of said structure that some kind of unknown life-form reading is popping in and out of sensor range just down the hall from them.

And so on.

Scott's apparent facility at SF as exemplified by Bladerunner and Alien was precisely his incomprehension of the genre and its themes, which led him to avoid taking charge of the meaning or resonances of the stories, left sensibly in the hands of great scriptwriters, and concentrate instead on the stuff within his skill set, as a director who cut his teeth in advertising: making it all look amazing. Later, having the career gravitas that persuaded people to take his narrative skills seriously, he revisited films that should have been let alone, burdening them with half-baked meditations on supposedly profound issues (What is life? What is humanity? What is free will?) that actual SF has found tiresome for six decades.

Never confuse serendipity for proficiency.

Sorority

So glad I was reminded of the existence of this, as a result of people suggesting potential performers of RFKJnr's epic about the bear corpse:

Michael Shannon Reads the Insane Delta Gamma Sorority Letter

(I did try to embed it, but they have it age-restricted on the grounds of how impressively sweary it is.)

Bob Newhart 1929 - 2024

I imagine everyone is citing Lincoln vs Madison Avenue, as they should, but I've always been partial to The Grace L. Ferguson Airline (And Storm Door Co.).



And then there's this:

(OK, the video that was here and is now IP blocked was of Newhart on MadTV as the $5 psychiatrist. Maybe you can find it somewhere else.)

Without hinge

Actually, the picture in the previous post does have some amusing context, as it shows the moment at the RNC immediately after West Virginia governor and senate candidate Jim Justice, who was supposed to read from the teleprompter the phrase "everything hinges" on Trump winning in November, instead said "we become totally unhinged" if Trump doesn't win. Now BlueAnon are going spare at what they see as a call to arms. It reminds me of the moment at the 2020 debate when Trump told the Proud Boys to "stand back and stand by", which almost everybody chose to treat as a request for the fascists to keep their powder dry, when it was obvious to me it was the result of Trump having a senior moment and not being able to come up with the verb phrase for what a bystander does.

The dog, I dunno.

Convention

You don't need context.

A Guy Changing His Mind About Killing the President

Invisible

For example, one parent told us that her son had a playmate named Nobby, a little invisible boy. The child also mentioned Nobby when he was asked about pretend friends, but when we asked how often he played with Nobby, he scowled and replied, "I don't play with him." We learned that Nobby was a 160-year-old businessman who visited the child between business trips to Portland and Seattle, whenever the child wanted to "talk things over." The boy's mother was as surprised as we were.

Imaginary Companions and the Children Who Create Them, Marjorie Taylor, OUP, 1999, Chapter 2, Page 21

Fantasy play of various types can play a powerful role in children's ability to overcome fear. This point was brought home to me by my daughter's reaction at age 3 to the gift of a small box described as containing a "baby ghost." Amber had developed a fear of ghosts that disrupted her sleep and made her anxious when left alone at bedtime. However, when asked if she would like to take care of the baby ghost, she was eager to do so. For more than a week she carried the box with its invisible contents with her wherever she went and was very much absorbed in this fantasy. The baby ghost and its box were eventually abandoned for other toys, but Amber was never again bothered by a fear of ghosts. Conceptualizing the ghost in the box as something weak, tiny, and in need of care seemed to remove the scariness from her thoughts about ghosts in general.

(Endnote:) The children at her day care took turns one day taking the box into the bathroom, turning out the light, and letting the ghost out of the box. In the pitch dark of the windowless bathroom, all the children were able to enjoy playing with the baby ghost.

Ibid., Chapter 4, Page 75

Sometimes the child involves family members in her game of pretense. A colleague of mine has a daughter who as a 3-year-old enjoyed fantasy games of impersonation that required the cooperation of the entire family. On her request, everyone shifted to alter identities on Wednesdays. The girl became a boy named Rainbow Cutter, the younger brother became a girl named Rainbow Cut, the mother became a little girl named Sweet Flower, and the father (who got the raw end of things, I think) became a piece of string named Hagar.

Ibid., Chapter 3, Page 50