Aaron

Language Transfer is free and amazing. Also listening to Radio Ambulante has helped me a lot.

Edward Norton would be a fantastic Muppets host

@weratedogs.com I thought you might enjoy Pantalaimon when he was a puppy being very proud of himself for carrying this branch he kept tripping over.

This is likely to be a deeply unserious renovation.

"Improvised Emotional Harm Device"?

But I missed it, males missed it, and conservatives missed it. The anger festered during the Biden years, turned into rage with the overturning of Roe v. Wade. And the reelection of Donald Trump, King of the Alphas? Like hitting the nucleus of Uranium-235 with a neuron. And Ground Zero, at the moment, is Minneapolis. It’s fair to ask how these women would react if Trump had embraced the criminal illegal immigrants, the rapists, and sex traffickers. If he’d been the one sipping margaritas with Kilmar Abrego Garcia. One suspects they’d be screaming just as loud at Trump for increasing their peril because of his “hatred of women.”

The most cringeworthy sentence in the article, for me, is the one highlighted here. Though the bottom paragraph in the screenshot is incredibly irony-deficient too. Pretty sure it's a troll piece, what with "sipping margaritas with KAG."

I have a printer. Is there a good way to donate whistles?

@jamellebouie.net it's even worse than that. According to the school district, they used him as bait by making him knock on his door and ask to be let in.

Ah, didn't pick up that it was intentional voice. Carry on!

2. "a shipload of weapons and good news" tripped me up due to parallel construction. Maybe better as "good news and a shipload of weapons"?

2/2

Take this for what you will, but two bits of feedback on the after:

1. "Personally, I think" aren't needed. In a first person narrative, readers know unattributed thoughts belong to the narrator. Maybe "Revolutionary meetings would probably go better" &c

1/2

I like Elizabeth McCracken's advice from A Long Game for this: include a couple "had"s, then switch to past tense.

Eg: Lucy had arrived yesterday, ... . I had planned to spend the night with her. Instead, I spent the evening drinking bad rum and spitting nails, ...

Extra! Extra! 1/11 Yes. Good things DID happen this week!

@jesscraven101.bsky.social publishes a list of good things to celebrate every Sunday over at Chop Wood, Carry Water, and it's a large part of the reason I'm still mostly sane. (Linked is last week's, for example).

Paul Simon was straight-up prescient with that verse.

"These are the days of lasers in the jungle
Lasers in the jungle somewhere
Staccato signals of constant information
A loose affiliation of millionaires and billionaires"

@aarond42.bsky.social

A happy, freshly bathed and blown-out Pantalaimon

A very slightly different angle on Pan's beautiful smile and freshly-brushed fur

Pantalaimon hiding in the corner by the air filter, half-under a tasseled curtain, little snout on the ground. His left hindpaw glows with sunlight.

Pantalaimon still hiding in the corner by the air filter, still hindpaw-aglow, but now noticing me noticing him. He continues to pretend that I can't see him.

Pantalaimon is very good at hiding.

In Chocolate Town all the trains are painted brown On the silver paper of the wrapper There's a dapper little man And he wears a wax mustache That he twists with nicotine fingers As he drops his cigarette ash And someone comes and sweeps it up And then he doffs his cap And there's a rat in someone's bedroom And they're shutting someone's trap And they'll soon be pulling down the little palaces

Elvis Costello introduces Little Palaces by saying that he grew up in a Cadbury factory town, where everything was branded. I hope to, someday in my life, write something as beautiful as its first stanza.

(Fin, because I have to stop somewhere)

From Dar Williams' When I Was a Boy:

I will not forget when Peter Pan
Came to my house, took my hand
I said I was a boy; I'm glad he didn't check.
...
So now I'm in a clothing store
And the signs say, "Less is more"
More that's tight means more to see
More for them, not more for me

2/

Too many to name. Here's a few:

The moon was low enough to put your drinks on
So we ponied up and got our drink on
And I was fucked up as my haircut
She was wasting good perfume
It was useless as the truth is
In these ruthless little rooms

From The Freefall by Cory Branan

1/

Champion of the sun!

Multiple people got each other the exact same gifts, and it caused a kerfuffle?

Jerry, this is fire.

Black Doves was an alright show elevated by an absolutely electric Ben Whishaw performance. But I'll watch anything he's in.

The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson is a great optimistic "how to build a better future" book.

@ericjannsen.bsky.social skeeting: "Remember when you bragged about considering all members of the male species as rapists, pedophiles, sex-traffickers and serial killers who lived to stalk your daughters from birth, and said you'd gladly welcome the claws of a grizzly? 🐻 We decided to spend time around someone less judgemental."

I regret to inform you that it is.

I feel incredibly lucky that I got to see it (it sold out so quickly). The show was electric, and then half the people in attendance went to dinner with him afterwards and jammed late into the night (sadly, I didn't attend that part). I'll miss Woody Aragón's performance, though :/ (traveling)

Major is not the first presidential dog to have biting incidents. In separate incidents, Franklin D. Roosevelt's dog, also a German Shepherd named Major, bit United States Senator Hattie Wyatt Caraway, and attacked Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Ramsay MacDonald, tearing MacDonald's pants off.[18][19][20] Theodore Roosevelt's bull terrier Pete bit numerous people, even tearing the pants off of ambassador of France to the United States Jean Jules Jusserand.[21][22][23][24][25]

I was not prepared for that Wikipedia article. Thank you for giving me occasion to look that up

@thelouvreof.bsky.social

Blue Wave shares a tiktok video of happy shelter dogs rushing to choose toys. The first dog wags its tail so fast you can feel the breeze through the screen. IdiocracyIsTrue replies, "If tRump had a dog (which he never would.. dogs can sense evil), it would cram 8 toys in its mouth, pee on the rest, and blame Biden's dog for it."

This website is amazing