Dead Pool Round 138: 2021 wears army boots
Mrs Carl wins it with Tanya Roberts, best known as the Bond girl in View to a Kill. This Dead Pool should have happened last Friday, but I warn’t paying attention.
I do a lot of that lately.
Are we ready?
0. Rule Zero (AKA Steve’s Rule): your pick has to be living when picked. Also, nobody whose execution date is circled on the calendar. Also, please don’t kill anybody. Plus (Pupster’s Rule) no picking someone who’s only famous for being the oldest person alive.
1. Pick a celebrity. Any celebrity — though I reserve the right to nix picks I never heard of (I don’t generally follow the Dead Pool threads carefully, so if you’re unsure of your pick, call it to my attention).
2. We start from scratch every time. No matter who you had last time, or who you may have called between rounds, you have to turn up on this very thread and stake your claim.
3. Poaching and other dirty tricks positively encouraged.
4. Your first choice sticks. Don’t just blurt something out, m’kay? Also, make sure you have a correct spelling of your choice somewhere in your comment. These threads get longish and I use search to figure out if we have a winner.
5. It’s up to you to search the thread and make sure your choice is unique. I’m waayyyy too lazy to catch the dupes. Popular picks go fast.
6. The pool stays open until somebody on the list dies. Feel free to jump in any time. Noobs, strangers, drive-bys and one-comment-wonders — all are welcome.
7. If you want your fabulous prize, you have to entrust me with a mailing address. If you’ve won before, send me your address again. I don’t keep good records.
8. The new DeadPool will begin 6pm WBT (Weasel’s Blog Time) the Friday after the last round is concluded.
The winner, if the winner chooses to entrust me with a mailing address, will receive an Official Certificate of Dick Winning and a small original drawing on paper suffused with elephant shit particles. Because I’m fresh out of fairy shit particles.
January 15, 2021 — 6:00 pm
Comments: 72
Clap for the NHS, my ass
Let me tell you a story about the NHS.
I get my blood pressure meds from the pharmacy attached to my local clinic. Since the onset of covid, you don’t go in the building to access the drugs, they serve you from one of the 3 windows facing the parking lot.
On the window is a sign: please knock.
Today, as I walked up to this window, I made eye contact with one of the pharmacists inside. So I think to myself, “she saw me, no need to knock, I’ll let her finish what she’s doing.”
And I wait. And I wait. It is the middle of January and it’s lightly drizzling. I am not a young woman. I am gray of hair and wrinkled of visage.
And still I wait. I have now made brief eye contact with two of the three pharmacists working inside, all of whom can easily see there’s a person standing there. In the rain.
If I knock now, I think, it’ll look like I’m trying to rush them, since it’s obvious I’m here. I still don’t quite believe what I suspect is happening.
After a while, an elderly man joins me in the queue, six foot behind, naturally. A while after that, an elderly woman joins behind him. We are three old people standing in the Winter’s rain.
Now I’m kinda mad, but I’m also socially awkward. A better woman would have made a fuss, I know that, but I am a coward. I turn to the man behind me and say, “you try.”
He goes up, knocks on the window, gets served instantly. After which they serve me and the other old woman.
The sign said knock, comrade.
There are people who are loving this new world of rules and procedures. I hope some form of polite society survives them.
January 14, 2021 — 6:17 pm
Comments: 18
Huh. Actual cavemen carried actual clubs.
Meet the Thames Beater, a 5,000 year old club fished out of the river. The top one; the bottom one is a reproduction they used to beat up test dummies. Turns out, it’s deadly.
Actual study here.
I had to step away from social media today. It was making me ill.
I mean, I peeked a few times, sure.
January 13, 2021 — 8:16 pm
Comments: 8
Have I shilled for Brave yet?
I really like this browser. It’s built on Chrome, so it can use all Chrome’s extensions, and it’s got some great built-in features for blocking tracking cookies and so on.
But its real claim to fame is the Basic Attention Token, or BAT. It’s a crypto-currency that you earn by putting up with ads. You can decide how frequently you want to see ads, including not at all. The ads pop up unobtrusively in the bottom right of your screen. Some of them are even interesting (chess.com, which is exactly what you think it is, is a regular advertiser).
I don’t use this machine to browse much, so $3.72 is not too shabby for twelve days. I’ve got it on my phone, my laptop, my desktop and the Linux machine in my art room. The accounts aren’t linked (I could link them if I wanted) so each one is totting up separately. I haven’t totalled it or cashed any of it in, but I reckon I have a few bucks in there by now.
The second part of the equation is tipping creators with BAT. If you see a red triangle in the upper right corner of your address bar, or the lower right corner of a Tweet, you can tip that site with BAT. Not many in my daily reads have signed up for it, sadly.
And no, this site is not BAT-registered. I’d have a whole different relationship with this blog if I asked for money, and I don’t want that.
True fact: Uncle B came up with the basic idea twenty years ago. He called it “nergs” – each worth a few pennies, for tipping creators.
Heh. Turns out, I’ve blogged about this before.
January 12, 2021 — 8:59 pm
Comments: 18
Got to say goodbye to the bird site
I’m a tad annoyed that Twitter didn’t think me scary enough to ban. I am smol and wik.
I have to get off of there, though. It’s making me nuts. But I’m not quite ready to walk away from social media entirely.
I don’t think I’m a great fit with Gab. I’m not exactly the demographic. I didn’t like Parler when it existed – the interface was klunky and slow. I’m not sure changing what basket we put all our eggs in is the right way to go.
I’m exploring the nerdy open-source apps like Mastodon or Pleroma. (The two can talk to each other). They have a refreshingly ‘old Internet’ feel about them.
They’re decentralized, which has to be the direction we move in to get out of this mess. The way it works is, anyone can set up a Mastodon node (called an “instance”). The interface looks like Tweetdeck, with multiple columns. One column is system messages and your blank message form. One column is for your notifications. One column shows what people you follow are saying (“tooting” in the local lingo, which makes me smirk). And one column can either be your local instance feed, or the federated feed.
The “fediverse” is what they call the loose association of machines that communicate with each other. You can follow anyone in the Fediverse, in theory.
In practice, though, each instance makes up its own rules, sometimes really restrictive rules, and can block whole other instances (and therefore the people on them). And Mastodon, being new tech, is dominated by young people who are either far left or, at best, shitposting libertarians. The tools for finding other instances are really terrible – mostly just great long lists.
It’s really important that you find an instance that is well suited to you. I haven’t managed. I will let you know how the search goes.
January 11, 2021 — 9:38 pm
Comments: 16
Be-catted
Sorry for inattentive today (yes, we have a Dead Pool winner – congratulations Mrs Carl). I have been under a cat. Specifically, this one – Ol’ Kneewrecker.
Also, I’ve been on Twitter. It’s as awful as you can imagine at the moment. I’m going back to chickens, books and vidya games for a while. But I did want to mention two things I learned from this election.
There are more of us than there are of them. Like, a lot more. Like, so many more that we broke their ballot-cheating mechanisms and they had to get clumsy and stupid and obvious about the steal. Will see if that has repercussions.
It’s possible to do things differently. Trump made huge inroads into Middle East peace – for example – by ignoring the old wisdom about fixing perpetually dysfunctional Palestine first. He successfully brokered multiple individual deals between nations. He deserves a lot of credit for that, which he will never get. That, and bringing soldiers home from various permanently smoldering trash fires.
I guess, for me, that’s the definition of the “Trumpism” everyone’s talking about – approaching old problems in new ways.
Someone said on Twitter that people need to go back and start running for dog catcher and ward captain, with an eye to higher and higher office. But that’s like sending your nice kid away to college and getting back a blue-haired gender studies graduate with a nose ring. The years-long process of grinding through lower office changes people, makes them into politicians. We need to find other avenues.
Trump is a strange and, in many ways, unlikeable character, but he changed me from “anyone’s better than Hillary” to an enthusiastic supporter. I’m afraid he was lightning in a bottle: a well-known celebrity with go-to-hell money of his own. If we see the same combination in play again, it’ll probably be somebody like Cher.
I’m hoping he opens a giant media company, which zooms to #1 in no time (thanks to the collapse of Fox). Then he can be in their faces 24/7.
January 8, 2021 — 8:49 pm
Comments: 22
This smells
A spearhead of identifiable antifa/BLM types break windows and gain access to the capitol building while Trump is still speaking across town. Security non-existent, even though a huge political rally has been scheduled for days – just regular Capitol Police in their everyday uniforms. Some genuine Trump supporters join the mob.
They all take selfies in the offices. Somebody steals a podium. An unarmed MAGA woman is shot by a plainclothesman, for some reason. Then it gets shut down.
Nancy just called this an “armed insurrection” and is demanding Trump is removed over it.
This stinks to high heaven. This was supposed to blow up and didn’t, and everything the left has said and done since is an effort to inflame feelings further.
They’re dying to get an “armed insurrection” aren’t they?
January 7, 2021 — 7:57 pm
Comments: 18
Welp, drinking early tonight
The guys initially clashing with police looked like Antifa to me. Young men, dressed mostly in black.
Perhaps moot now.
January 6, 2021 — 7:44 pm
Comments: 16
For real this time
So this time I followed the recipe. For the wraps anyway. I didn’t have many of the ingredients for the filling. Who has Chinese chives on hand? (Don’t say “Chinese people”. You’re better than that).
I did have ground pork, so I’m not surprised they tasted pretty close to the commercial ones despite substitutions. Pork is the thing.
So, yes. They came out well. Steamed for 15 minutes in a bamboo steamer, then lightly fried on one side. Perfect-o.
I made an absolute pig of myself and ate twice as many as I intended, and did it in that weird late afternoon time between proper meals. That’s dinner screwed.
January 5, 2021 — 8:35 pm
Comments: 17
Imagine my excitement
I got a message from 23andme with the subject “View your unread Neanderthal report”. Oooo! Big fan of the cavemen, me. The link took me to a page that said “You have more Neanderthal DNA than 94% of other customers.”
Well, maybe. They’ve actually refined my Neanderthal DNA *down* a little, to less than two percent. But what they’ve done is found a tentative relationship between Neanderthal DNA snippets and certain characteristics. I only have one such snippet: it’s associated with a worse sense of direction.
Guys, I have the worst sense of direction of anybody in the whole history of sense of direction. I am true to thee, my Neanderthal ancestor.
I do NOT have the variants for these things, but I really should: having difficulty discarding rarely-used possessions, generally not feeling angry when hungry (hangry), having a worse sense of smell, being more likely to cry while cutting onions and being more likely to have a fear of public speaking.
Maybe they’ll rejigger the results again sometime soon and find me more Neanderthal. They do that a lot.
January 4, 2021 — 8:03 pm
Comments: 7