A good time not to be in Hanoi

In the news: 

Vietnam is turning off street lights and manufacturers are switching operations to off-peak hours to keep the national power system running amid record temperatures in some areas that have caused a surge in demand.

As weather officials warn the heatwave could run into June, several cities have cut back on public lighting and government offices have been urged to cut power use by a tenth after state utility EVN said the national grid faced strain in coming weeks.

"It's so harsh and hot outside that people have to wear protective clothing to cool down and not get burned," said Hanoi resident Tran Van Hung, 67.

Temperatures this week are expected to range between 26 degrees Celsius and 38 degrees Celsius, weather officials say.

To tackle the problem, Hanoi has shortened the duration of public lighting by an hour each day, while halving illumination on some major roads and in public parks.

"If people all save energy, all will have enough electricity to use, but if not, there will be a partial electrical overload that will put the power grid at risk," said Luong Minh Quan, an electrician with EVN in Hanoi.

Last week Vietnam called for electrical devices to be turned off when not in use, and for air-conditioning to be kept above 26 degrees Celsius.

I have to say, the second half of February was a pretty good time, weather wise, to be in Hanoi.  March might be even better, if going to the seaside areas especially.  But clearly, May is too late.

 

On buying a new refrigerator

Last weekend was pretty irritating:  our main refrigerator died, after lingering with what seemed to be decreasing cooling for quite a while.  Turns out it wasn't just our terrible habit of loading up the thing with half used jars of pastes, pickles, jams and condiments of one type or another, only to throw them out a few years after their expiry date.   I'm not joking:  I found a large jar of home made, souped up soy sauce my wife had labelled in 2012!  Maybe refrigerated soy sauce with plums in it lasts for more than a decade, but I did have approval to throw it out.

Anyway, looking for a new refrigerator, I have realised that the general design of them seems to have gotten deeper as the years go on.   Already, the deceased fridge stuck out past the cabinetry it is beside; the new one is going to have 10 cm more protrusion.  (Maybe it will come down to 5 cm, as we have left about a 10cm gap between the back of the current one and the wall, as you are supposed to do.  I suspect that gap can be smaller without disaster, though.)

The other thing of interest is how many refrigerators come from China, and although they make some reasonable looking ones, I figure that these days, if you are buying any product for which you might want a spare part in even 5 or 10 years time, it feels a risk to be relying on having access to stuff from China in that period.  I mean, I still don't care if I have a Chinese built phone - no one expects spare parts for them - but cars and whitegoods - you don't throw them out and just get a new one lightly.    

Or is this why China might think it can invade Taiwan without long term consequence:  it makes 90 million refrigerators a year, although I don't know how many of those are exported.   "You can't keep your trade bans on us forever - you have millions of fridges needing spare parts, and people hate replacing fridges unless they really have to!"  

But I'll be OK - the one I intend buying was built in Vietnam.   

Don't say I didn't warn you.

 

Seems to still be relevant

I finally watched the remake of All Quiet on the Western Front on Netflix on the weekend. 

I hadn't read any reviews, except I assumed that it must be OK to have had a Best Picture nomination.   

I would rate it pretty highly, with some reservations which I see were shared with some critics, mainly to do with it having too light a touch on character development.   The one we (eventually) get to feel closest to is not even the main character, and for the first 30 minutes, I wasn't even sure that the distant feeling given to characterisation was going to put me off the movie completely.  

But it does improve in that regard, and the obscene pointlessness of the war is well made by the end.   

It's depressing to think that, more than 100 years later, we can see watch aggression borne of militaristic nationalism causing pointless destruction in Ukraine:  

 

Week end thoughts

*  The late Tina Turner:  pop music not being all that important to me, it's not like she was a performer I would ever have bothered seeing, and I rate her songs as being in the "inoffensive to sometimes catchy" range.   But, she seems to have been a genuinely nice person, and I have to agree - the Rugby League marketing campaign featuring her and her songs was, like, probably the best campaign of its kind we will ever see in a lifetime?  (And again, it's not as if Rugby League is important to me, even though I may watch about 3 games a year - it's just that the quality and likeability of that campaign was undeniable.)

* There seems to be an awful lot of gullible promotion of alleged evidence of UFO's lately.  That Mick West manages to debunk most with relative ease, but there is still some kind of mystery going on, especially at sea, I reckon.

*  This certainly belongs in the "funny because it's true" category:

*  And although this is very old, in light of another Fast and Furious silly movie being released, this is also very amusing:

* Here's an idle thought:  back in 1982, in ET, a kid wore big headphones while riding his bicycle and I think audiences were meant to, and did, take it as a geeky, not cool, look.    Fast forward 40 years, and  adults now walk around with headphones anywhere: in the supermarket, on the bus, etc; and no one - except me perhaps - seems to thinks it's a bad look.    Discrete earphones I can handle, but headphones just look too anti-social to me.  A "don't bother me, I'm in my own world" kinda vibe.

 

 

If you wrote a character doing this in a comedy movie, critics would say it's too unrealistic

 

What? Something multivitamins are good for?

It seems that research on the benefit of taking supplementary vitamins (at least if you are a person with a reasonable diet and no obvious cause to have deficiencies) are pretty rarely positive, so it is a surprise to read this in the Washington Post:

A daily multivitamin — an inexpensive, over-the-counter nutritional supplement — may help slow memory loss in people ages 60 and older, a large nationwide clinical trial suggests.

The research, a collaboration between scientists at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Columbia University, appeared in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition on Wednesday.

It was the second such multivitamin clinical study within the COcoa Supplement and Multivitamin Outcomes Study (COSMOS) — a larger body of research examining the health effects of certain dietary supplements — to reach the same conclusion.

The most recent study found that those taking multivitamins showed an estimated 3.1 fewer years of memory loss compared with a control group who took a placebo. Put another way, the multivitamin group was an estimated 3.1 years “younger” in terms of their memory function than the placebo group.

The full report is here.

 

Another problematic take

Former Pink Floyd member Roger Waters did a concert in Germany a few days ago, which featured this:

Roger Waters projected Anne Frank’s name at recent concerts to draw comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany, leading Germany’s Orthodox rabbinical association to call for a ban on Waters’ performances in the country.

Observers told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that Waters, the former Pink Floyd frontman known as a leader in the boycott Israel movement, has lumped Anne Frank together with Palestinian Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in on-screen projections at concerts on his current tour. Abu Akleh was killed on an assignment in the West Bank last year.

The screen at Waters concerts also frequently shows a pig-shaped balloon emblazoned with the logo of an Israeli armaments firm. He reportedly at times dons an SS uniform and symbolically shoots a machine gun into the crowd.

But - he's been doing this for years, as it would seem this report is from 2013:

Former Pink Floyd rocker Roger Waters is one musician who isn’t afraid to voice his opinion on Israel.

Waters performed July 20 in Belgium wearing a black leather jacket with a red and white arm band, similar to that of a Nazi uniform, while pretending to fire a machine gun. The concert also featured a giant pig balloon floating above stage with the Star of David stamped all over it.

Waters has openly urged other performers to boycott Israel and has compared Israel’s occupation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip to the South African apartheid. The Anti-Defamation League said that Waters has a long history using  these symbols in his concerts, according to the Jerusalem Post.

Not caring for the band, I had missed this recent story:

Polly Samson, the wife of Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour and a lyricist on the band’s two most recent albums, has spoken out against former bandleader Roger Waters on Twitter, describing him as an antisemite and a “Putin apologist”.

“Sadly [Waters] you are antisemitic to your rotten core,” she wrote. “Also a Putin apologist and a lying, thieving, hypocritical, tax-avoiding, lip-synching, misogynistic, sick-with-envy, megalomaniac. Enough of your nonsense.”...

 Samson’s tweet is seemingly in reference to an interview Waters did with the Berliner Zeitung newspaper earlier this month, reposted in translation on Waters’ website, in which he wonders if “Putin [is] a bigger gangster than Joe Biden and all those in charge of American politics since World War II”, and says that Putin “governs carefully, making decisions on the grounds of a consensus in the Russian Federation government.”

In the interview, Waters also said that “Israel Lobby activists” were trying to have his concerts in Germany cancelled, and that “the Israelis are committing genocide. Just like Great Britain did during our colonial period … We believed ourselves to be inherently superior to the indigenous people, just as the Israelis do in Palestine.” He also expresses his continued support for the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, and that he would still play in Moscow, “given that Moscow does not run an apartheid state based on the genocide of the indigenous inhabitants.”

 

A problematic take

Not sure that I should highlight this, given I don't independently know any details of her life struggles, but surely I can't be the only person to read this and not conclude that it sounds like a case of neuroticism (or some other mental health diagnosis) which finds a convenient blame outlet in claims of extreme racism.  (She's not the only neurotic sounding indigenous woman - including several in academia - who are on Twitter.  They really are going to explode if the Voice referendum fails.)      

As with Sandy O'Sullivan, there seems to be an awareness that they are known as "difficult" or "too much", even within their own group, who they get upset with if they don't take the same line.  

What bothers me most about it is that this rhetoric is extremely unhelpful messaging to young indigenous who we want to succeed in the system they live in (a modern, capitalist State with a pretty good, if imperfect, welfare system), rather than live lives of continual resentment.  

Recipes and diet, discussed

This looks and sounds nice to me:

It's a recipe from the Washington Post.  I don't subscribe to the much more famous recipe section of the New York Times, so it's WAPO for me.

The recipe is:  Orange-Sichuan Pepper Chicken.   I want to cook it because I don't think I have ever used Sichuan pepper in a recipe before, and I only learnt recently that the type of heat it brings is (apparently) distinctive.  (I also quite like savoury dishes that include fruit - a matter of some contention in my household, as half line up on the "meat and fruit don't really belong together" side.)

Which reminds me:  on Saturday I cooked lamb saag, successfully, following this recipe.  It called for three green chillis, and as they seemed hot to me, I de-seeded them with my hands.   (I know - most of the heat is supposed to be in the white fibres that the seeds are attached to.  I pulled them off with my hands too.)   The result was an interesting "chilli hand" effect that lasted for hours, and when I was having a shower it was particularly noticeable that the hot water made the affected hand parts tingle very strongly.   It wasn't exactly painful, just very noticeable and very long lasting.  I have never had the same sensation from other chillies, perhaps because I usually am only using small ones which affect the fingertips at most; and truth be told, I do find myself 95% of the time using dried chilli flakes when I want chilli heat in a recipe. 

I also watched a video recently that spent about 40 minutes explaining why vegan diets are not (long term) healthy, due to the great difficulty in getting all nutrients needed from a purely plant based diet.  It was citing a lot of studies, and cases of internet vegans who had to give up because of digestive and other issues they just couldn't solve on a vegan diet, and it all sounded very convincing.  But then I discovered that the guy's Youtube channel also contained Jordan Peterson content, in an unironic way.  This gives me a trust issue.

A second video I watched on another channel cited a lot of health benefits of plant diets, but it was obvious when watching it that the studies referred to "vegetarian/vegan diets", which is a bit of a cheat, given that (unfortunately, in my view) veganism has replaced vegetarianism as the "go to" alternative to the normal omnivore diet, and studies that lump both types of diet together are not going to reliably say much about veganism alone.    

Obviously, I am still eating a lot of meat, even though I am just curious enough about some vegan recipes to occasionally (very occasionally!) try them.   

But I still say, if ever I choose to give up meat for animal cruelty reasons, I would never worry about eating animals low on the intelligence/emotional capacity scale, such as most seafood, with the possible exception of octopus.  And I would also be hard pressed to ever give up dairy and eggs, even though both routinely mean the early killing of "unnecessary" offspring.  (That may soon change with eggs, though.)   

And if you are going to include eggs, dairy and seafood in your diet, but leave out all other meat, I presume that it's easy to get all nutrients from that diet.   But someone should do a Youtube confirming that.   The "Everything but Meat" diet, and its benefits.

Update:  made the chicken dish last night - it's good!   Just used jar crushed garlic - mincing 9 fresh ones is a bit of effort and I was in a hurry.   And yeah, Sichuan pepper does have a distinctive smell and flavour.

Never has a knife been so sharpened for a movie

As I have mentioned before, there is an online world of Right-ish movie/culture critics who writhe about how "woke" feminism (and, to a degree, queer promotion) has ruined the Star Wars franchise, the Tolkien franchise, the Marvel franchise, etc.  Prime amongst them is the guy called the Critical Drinker, and I do watch some of his Youtube videos, as well as some of those by Nerdtronic.  

I have to confess that, to a significant degree, they have a point.   (I mean, I posted about the huge female presence in The Last Jedi at the time, and how a major thread in the story was about how stupid and impulsive men are.)    And there is no doubt that Marvel has been working to promote stories with female leads, with increasingly diminished critical and audience returns.  And Disney cartoons now feature gay characters, not that I think that is necessarily a bad thing.   But still, none of this feels organic:  it is just  too obvious.

That said, it's not as if the problems with the Star Wars franchise are just due to this:  I have argued before that the fundamental issue is the lack of a clear and consistent treatment of the Force throughout the series.  And I think it is just not that interesting a universe without some consistency on a fundamental thing like that.   As for Marvel:  it is a mistake to base a meta theme on the multiverse, because it is an idea that can drain away tension in dramatic storytelling - if anything can happen, nothing much matters.

Anyway, a key figure of hate - the key person the Right wing critics attack for this - is producer Kathleen Kennedy.  And as she is behind the latest Indiana Jones movie (Dial of Destiny), they have been slavering about how she is going to ruin it like she's ruined everything else. 

I think it's kind of funny:  the movie has so far been getting mixed reviews from its showing at Cannes - it has 50% on the not always reliable Rottentomatoes - and I think quite a few are putting it below the first three movies but a tad above Crystal Skull (which I think is unfairly demonised.)    If that is the true positioning, the movie is bound to make a squillion dollars regardless of these bearded critics say.  

But boy, have they been pre-emptively promoting the critical and audience downfall of this movie.

They are, just like the woke producers who they hate, being just too obvious that there is no way they are going to give the movie anything like an objective viewing.

And who knows - I may not like it, either.  The ending apparently is divisive, and a bit fantasy-ish, and my biggest concern is that I will read what it is before I get to see it.

I still think the trailer looks quite OK, though...

Stan's word salad

When I search his name in my search bar at the side of the blog, I see that I have been complaining about the waffle of Stan Grant for many, many years.  

His parting shot on Q&A is a spectacular example of his pompously earnest word salad style - and now he adds apparent indigenous spirituality that is as obscure in meaning and consequence as is about half of all commentary he makes.     

No doubt he does get purely racist rubbish thrown at him continually on media and social media.   

But I still think his style is grating in a way that has nothing to do with his skin colour.

I'm also against Q&A as a format, as many people I follow on Twitter are.  I haven't watched more than short bits of it for quite a few years.

Gender waffle

Probably a good idea that the Guardian not provide for comments to this piece, because it is bound to invite skepticism, if not ridicule, of the whole gender ideology that seems to have leaked out of universities' humanities departments and infected a surprising large number of younger people.  Here's the subheading:

Madison Godfrey inhabits gender beyond a binary, but transition isn’t what makes them trans

Here's part of her piece:

Not every non-binary person labels themselves under the transgender umbrella – but some do. My transness is not about feeling uncomfortable in my body; it is about feeling uncomfortable with the gender that was allocated to this body. Although I was once assigned female at birth, on days when I wear winged eyeliner and a crop top that makes my boobs look great, I am still non-binary. Medically transitioning, sometimes involving hormone therapy or surgical procedures, can constitute an integral part of a person’s journey of gender affirmation – but pursuing this process is not a prerequisite of being trans or non-binary, and does not determine the validity of anyone’s gender identity. Imagining it as a checklist overlooks the barriers often encountered by trans people who want to medically transition – such as inaccessibility, costliness, wait times and stigma perpetuated by some practitioners. To suggest that being trans requires a specific type of transition is to enforce a hierarchy that is ultimately elitist.

The assumption that every trans person wants to transition also reproduces stale discourse that all trans folk feel “born into the wrong body”: a stereotype that shouldn’t be uniformly applied. As poet Sam Rush writes, “I wasn’t born into the wrong body, I was born into the right lesson.” For some people, transitioning is literally lifesaving – but squeezing all trans narratives into a narrow trope erases individual experiences, minimises us into a caricature of ourselves, and is ultimately boring. Trans and non-binary folk inhabit more than one character description. Besides, just because someone pursues transition doesn’t mean they hate their body. Consider the moment when you change your outfit just before leaving the house; it’s not that you necessarily hated the initial fit, you just want to wear something that makes you feel more like yourself.

So, rather than simply acknowledge that some men have apparently feminine traits, and some women have "butch" traits, and may or may not be fully (or partially) same sex attracted with it, and everyone has known this forever; people now spend an incredible amount of time on what is increasing hard for me to not see as an intensely narcissistic endeavour of self analysis and self justification for their own tastes in how they want to present themselves.  

Incidentally, I think the gist of this article is the same line that Eddy Izzard takes:  he has been "out" forever as an occasional transvestite who only sleeps with women, but now he has decided he is "transgender", although one with no problem going forward with penis intact (and, I think, only sleeping with women.)   

This is kind of weird to most people, but harmless up to a point:  it becomes problematic when they insist that we all have to accept a dubious and faddish intellectual framework ("trans women are women!", "being non binary and trans is a thing") and all of its consequences because that's what suits them.

Update:  The column has attracted some comment on Twitter:

 Many are along these lines:

The inevitable problem with the Voice appears already

I mean, I don't want to be negative about the idea of the federal government having to give due consideration to an indigenous "voice" on legislation that affects the indigenous community. It sounds fair as a concept, and there is precedent from other countries.

But I find this week's argument between Mick Gooda and Noel Pearson about the wording of the relevant amendment pretty much an endorsement of my prediction the concept is going to have serious practical problems even if it gets up.    

I happened to see Gooda on 7.30 talking about his concerns, and he came across as very reasonable and cautious and well intentioned.   Pearson's response comes across as bullying and unfair, and perhaps someone needs to have a word in his ear (and Langton's, and that of anyone else who takes this line) that the more belligerent they sound (and the more they claim it will be disastrous to the future of indigenous politics if the referendum fails), the more they are likely to push skeptics to voting "no".  [I can imagine a huge number of aboriginal activists outraged that it's racist and paternalistic to effectively tell them to "behave" if they want to get their way - but I would say it's more a case of realism and pragmatism based on the history of referenda in this country.]

Long story short:  if there is already strong friction between long standing, mainstream aboriginal leadership figures on the implementation of this system, why shouldn't we expect that the instituional "Voice" will also routinely be the subject of criticism from within the indigenous community that it has given the "wrong" advice to government on particular issues?    And if so, how will that changes things going forward?      

I suspect that the problem in Australia may come down to the size of the country and hence the number of groupings of indigenous here:

Aboriginal people belong to Mobs (tribes) and within those are Clans (family groups). There are over 250 Mobs in Australia and even more Clans (some Mobs have upwards of 7 clans). Most Aboriginal people will have a ‘moiety,’ ‘totem’ or ‘spirit protector’ and usually an individual will have more than one – tribal, gender, family, personal.

All Mobs have their own ‘Country’ with boundaries that are typically marked on trees and by natural landscapes such as a river being a boundary between two neighbouring tribes or clans.

I would bet that most countries with successful institutionalised indigenous advisory bodies that are formalised just don't have that problem.   

 

Right up my alley

 It's not published until the end of the year.  It's only 208 pages long - why such a long lead time?

Goff has been mentioned at least once before here, but I don't recall if I have read much about him before.   I have found his views on Wikipedia.  A defender of some form of panpsychism, I see.  

Well, I do like the way he is trying to find a path forward between religion and scientific materialism.

A Friday religion post

I was just thinking how I hadn't had a new, interesting thought about Buddhism for a few weeks, Googled the topic, and turned up this good essay at Aeon:

Reckoning with Compassion

It deals with my long standing concern about Buddhist approaches:  while teaching a fairly simple or straight forward moral behaviour code on one level, on another, an emphasis on the source of suffering being desire (and teaching the importance of meditating that away) can surely lead to a kind of passive acceptance of other people's bad behaviour (as well as "natural evil", such as illness), even if it impacts you directly and an non-passive approach may be what is really required.   In the essay writer's case, this related to sexual abuse, and she talks about "compassion" teaching in Mahayana and Tibetan Buddhism and the way it can led to a passive response to wrongdoing.  

Here are some extracts:

So perilous is the habit of self-cherishing that Mahāyāna teachers devised radical methods for extricating oneself from it. These moral-psychological therapies require that the practitioner take up dramatically counterintuitive attitudes in order to reveal and unravel the depth of their self-cherishing. Among the most celebrated of these teachers is the 8th-century Indian scholar Śāntideva, whose text the Bodhicaryāvatāra is widely admired and studied as the guide to Mahāyāna ethics. There, among his philosophical expositions of the way of life of the bodhisattva, Śāntideva encourages his reader to reflect upon the fundamental equality of all beings and the indefensibility of pursuing one’s own self-interest on the basis of a dubiously reified ‘I’. He also proposes that one can counteract one’s tendency toward selfishness by taking a pointedly critical perspective toward one’s own shortcomings, including negative emotions such as anger. Rather than directing our anger at the people we believe have done us wrong, Śāntideva advises that we should depersonalise the problems that befall us and chalk them up to the inevitable vicissitudes of a complex and interdependent world. In other words: ‘Them’s the breaks.’

This is a practice that strikes right at the logic that inspires self-cherishing. The thinking goes: if I weren’t so heavily invested in my own selfhood as something intrinsically real, with discrete interests to defend, then I would not experience others’ slights with such a personal charge. This is not to say that I wouldn’t experience them at all – that they wouldn’t be happening or that I wouldn’t notice them – but rather that I would be able to let those misbehaviours slide off me, simply regarding them as the product of innumerable, impersonal causes and conditions rather than targeted attacks on me and my ability to have things always go my way. When someone does this, Śāntideva argues, they become invincible to suffering not by changing others’ behaviour but by cultivating the mental fortitude to withstand life’s provocations with forbearance. Śāntideva suggests a contemplative practice for inculcating this radically diminished sense of self known as ‘exchanging self and other’, in which the practitioner imaginatively ‘exchanges’ their own happiness for others’ suffering. Being willing to give up happiness and take on pain enacts the kind of unbiased, boundless altruism that is the hallmark of the bodhisattva....

 Experimenting with reversing habitual responses like defensiveness or selfishness is profound. Relaxing our territoriality and letting go of our need to always be ‘right’ (or at least our need to make sure others know when they are wrong) can have a salutary effect on how we engage with others. But there are also profound problems with this approach.

And the downside:

Some time ago, a friend who works with survivors of sexual violence put a challenging but tactful question to me: what about her clients, whose trauma so often shows itself through self-blame? The majority of sexual assaults occur between people who know each other, often through methods of coercion that falsely lead victims to conclude that they ‘let it happen’ or are in some other respect to blame for the abuse. In cases like these, it is incredibly important to be able to say (and be heard in saying): ‘They were in the wrong. This was not my fault.’

A similar pattern holds, I suspect, for many people who have experienced abuse and certain forms of oppression. The fact is that there is a lot of explicit and implicit social encouragement not to be hard on others, to be accommodating, to get over it – in other words, to internalise the costs of the harm that has been done to them rather than force the awkwardness of asserting a boundary. In cases like these, ‘banishing all blames into the single source’ becomes the emotional labour of ‘taking one for the team’.

Essentially, what my kind critic was telling me was that this ideal of viewing all of our problems and struggles as stemming from self-cherishing was actually a great way for victims of abuse never to be able to heal. Sometimes expressing and holding a boundary – a boundary between self and other, between one’s own needs and theirs, between the workable give and take of harmonious social discourse and occasions that require a hard ‘no’ – can be necessary and even therapeutic. Especially for someone who is already well practised in the habit of taking on the burden of other people’s wrongdoing, the instruction to ‘banish all blames to the single source’ may come all too naturally, re-inscribing their existing trauma rather than helping them heal and grow through it.

All pretty interesting, if you ask me.   

The article also links to this other Aeon essay, which I think I noticed before, but never got around to reading: The Problem of Mindfulness.   Must read it later.

As predicted by virtually everyone...

The news:

Disney’s venture into an immersive, very expensive Star Wars experience is ending.

The company said that its Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser hotel at Walt Disney World in Florida, which costs nearly $5,000 per couple for a two-night stay, will take its final voyage on Sept. 28.

It is hard to credit that Disney executives could not work out that most people into role playing games (which essentially was the whole point of staying at this hotel - or at least, the only basis on which the cost could be justified) are not rich.   More like college age dudes who haven't started making money yet.

 

Reminds me of something

Whenever I see her looking like this:

 ...she reminds me of this:

Exce that Homer may be dumb, but he's not nasty.  And he is still married.

Time for some light relief

The short parody videos of the distinctive looking comedian Alasdair Beckett-King are nearly always  good, and I'll show this one as an example.  (One joke in the middle of it struck me as very funny).

A point that seems little mentioned in mainstream media coverage

Update:  well, OK, here's a Washington Post report on the GOP refusing to talk about tax increases.

Are we sure that neurological condition in his throat isn't affecting his brain too?