Kyle D. Long

*holds hat over heart* I'm glad my poor cats didn't live to see this...

...because I would be cleaning up the mess for the rest of my danged life.

Your regular reminder that Mayor Pete bulldozed the homes of predominantly Black families and fired his Black police chief for bringing him evidence of racism on the force.

I know you're talking about Jaws but Drax was unusually good because his central plan made sense for a megalomaniac. "I want to remake humanity in my own image" is so much more believable (in this specific weird context) than "I want to irradiate some gold."

"I, a married gay man whose family and relationship were illegal in my own living memory, think we got needlessly sucked in to a conversation about identity."

"Masterful gambit, sir!"

How do we construct a society in which every identity (barring Nazis, natch) is respected and full and equal rights are had by all *except* people who campaign on eschewing identity politics? They can have all the oppression they want, but only of themselves. 🧐

That salmon knows what it did. 🧐

What gets me is people saying she *quoted* the lyric when no, she didn't. I suspect that if I said I wanted to murder a specific person and claimed it was a reference to a song in which a past unspecified murder was mentioned I'd get to think about that difference in prison for a while.

Soooooo... This site has some occasionally extremely shitty moderation, but I think it's generally a good idea not to threaten violence even if your threat is similar to a song lyric. 🧐

I'm dyslexic, and I read by looking at the shape of a word and picking out each letter and making sure the two things agree, and this method taught in schools sounds horrifyingly like that plus "look at a picture and guess." No wonder younger people are struggling to read! 😬

And they'll still be killed by the Republicans starving them, because unless I'm misunderstanding the news the regime is still fighting in the courts to continue withholding SNAP funds, even after the Democrats caved. They got nothing, nothing at all.

a woman with curly hair is standing in front of a window with her arms outstretched Alt: From Ghostbusters, Sigourney Weaver as Dana just before the "There is no Dana, only Zuul," scene, looking annoyed and slamming a door.

Smart Bond: the name and number go together. They're inherited by each new 007, in honor of Connery's original. When Craig meets new 007 in No Time to Die she introduces herself as "Bond, James Bond," and M asks why he's still using the name.

Actual Bond: There is no Connery, only Craig.

The problem is they worked so hard to retcon Daniel Craig into the original and only Bond. They even gave him Sean Connery's DB5, a car four years older than Craig himself, and made it clear it was his first spy car. There's a limit to how high (and how often) one can suspend one's disbelief.

I have a low tolerance for this song to begin with, but this is about as bad as it gets. Why are the veterans saluting? Why are hands on hearts? It's not the national anthem, it's Irving Berlin! And why the hell is it a sing-along?? 🧐

And now I will shortly have the original version of "Early Morning Rain" as sung by the musical genius who wrote it, and I am excited to wallow in 30-year-old nostalgic unrequitedness. Thank you for joining me (or not) on this weird little amble down Memory Lane. Glad to have you and I'm sorry.

Friend went to Greece. Friend spent a summer working on a shitty commune, built one house for people who didn't want it, and eventually fell briefly in love with the daughter of the owner of the taverna where he got drunk on Retsina every night. Friend came back and said, "It was a fucking cult."

My friend was the only living being who knew about this song except possibly a cricket who lived in my car. So when Not a Cult Leader Knockoff Sagan started singing it, I got up, said to my friend, "It's a fucking cult, run while you can," and left. Friend did not leave.

Now, this was my Particular Song. When I was feeling low because a certain young lady did not return my affections, I would listen to the Kingston Trio live version of it over and over, because I am a sappy pile of damp emotional cotton batting at heart. I am also somewhat guarded about such things.

I had been skeptical, to the point that Friend had pulled me aside several times to say, "Stop looking like that, it's not a cult," and this guy had been putting some pressure on me because he could tell Friend valued my opinion. And then he looked at me and started singing "Early Morning Rain."

...and it was this aging ex-hippie guy with a ponytail and a guitar and a beard and a Carl Sagan turtleneck and corduroy blazer thing going on. And he talked about the great work at the place where civilization was born, and then he played his guitar and had a bit of a sing-along.

The story behind that weird post: in the deeps of time, when I was a lad of 19, a friend decided to go to Greece for a summer or a year or maybe forever to work on a commune and build houses for the poor. He brought me to meet the leader of this totally not a cult philanthropical organization...

I am both stoked and gobsmacked because all the Edmund Fitzgerald posting made me finally go buy Gordon Lightfoot's greatest hits, and thus discover that HE FUCKING WROTE "EARLY MORNING RAIN," a song I love so much a cult leader once used it to convince me to join him at his compound in Greece. 🤯

a man with a mustache wearing a maroon shirt looks at the camera Alt: Nick Offerman as Ron Swanson, looking exactly like the guy in the right-wing cartoon the name of which I've forgotten while posting this, down to the reddish-brown shirt, glowering into the camera.

Can Nick Offerman sue for appropriating his likeness and aspects of a character he played? 🧐

a picture of a raccoon with its mouth open and the words aa aa aa aa aa Alt: An angry screaming raccoon under a red filter with a banner reading "AAAAAAAAAAAAA" that really comes nowhere near to expressing what I'm feeling.

I really want to cut loose with a barrage of virulent Italian cursing right now, but thanks to assimilation I don't speak Italian. All I have left is "fuck this guy," which honestly falls flat.

Those who wanted to curry favor with Akhenaten, whose unusual appearance was probably due to Marfan's Syndrome, began having themselves depicted in tomb art as looking like him, with elongated limbs and necks and faces, and heavy hips and large bellies.

The Democrats suck. We can do something about that.

The US has a two-party system. We can do something about that *if and only if* we retake power and keep it. We can't retake power if we're more invested in stopping the Democrats than stopping the Republicans.

As I see it, we have two choices:

1) Accept the reality that this is a two-party system and changing it will be the work of decades, and direct all that anger into fixing the party we have, winning in 2026 and '28, or

2) Chasing a fantasy of instant reform and getting permanent fascism.

When I hear people talking about abandoning the Democratic Party to create a third party, while I absolutely agree with the rage and fury directed at our current electeds, I see the mistakes of the past jumping up and down excitedly and clamoring, "Again! Again!"

Do I posit Utopia? No, of course not. But the real and terrible history of the 20th and 21st centuries began with Roosevelt the spoiler third-party candidate throwing the election to an incompetent isolationist bigot. Sound familiar? Does anyone remember 2016?

Taft wins in 1912. He does not promise to keep the US out of war. American assistance comes earlier, helping to stop the conflict before it completely ravages Europe. The treaty ending the war would likely then be less brutally punitive toward Germany, and the US would remain a global partner.

Now, I studied ancient history, not modern, but trends and types of ruler are still quite similar. Taft believed the US should be involved with the rest of the world, and while his policies were often shite, he was more interventionist than isolationist by far. So imagine: