Wait, Tolkien was English. He didn’t mean “Shire” to be pronounced like we Americans do it?

I just saw a sign this morning that said “Irish Wristwatch - now you know you can’t pronounce it”. The sign was right.

Our ancestors’ brains went from chimpanzee-sized to modern-sized (actually slightly bigger than today) between two million and one million years ago, and more importantly the language-governing areas increased in size during that stretch. So human beings a million years ago were very much like us today, just without the advanced technology.

My favorite was “a sucking chest wound is Nature’s Way of telling you you’ve been in a firefight”.

Galluspetat

I always liked how archaeologists would dig up ancient statues of big-breasted and big-butted women and call them evidence of a “cult of fertility”. I guess that sounds better than “porn”.

Which can only be applied to Goya products.

Not to mention that restaurants heavily rely on undocumented immigrants in their kitchens.

On the other hand, with all of their workers having been deported, farmers wouldn’t be able to produce anything at all. This is why I want to believe that Republican talk of deportation is just bluster, but I thought that about Roe v. Wade as well.

is a felon

A few houses in my neighborhood had the “I’M VOTING FOR THE CONVICTED FELON” signs up. I would have assumed this meant they were actually anti-Trump except they had a bunch of the conventional Trump signs up as well. My understanding of these people is that they think all the negative reporting about Trump is faked by the left (or that the criminal charges are invalid and politically motivated), not that they think it’s all true and support him anyway.

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how do you drive around in a school bus as a smoker and not smoke for the entire route

Funny you should mention that - a lot of them have taken up vaping and they vape on the fucking buses. At least they only do it in between runs (as far as I know) and not with actual kids aboard. This shit pisses me off almost as much as when they talk on their phones while driving, and surprise surprise it’s the same shitty people doing both things (and they’re all trump supporters too).

As a parent of two kids…one loud and high-energy, the other a prime target for bullying…I appreciate what you do.

I appreciate your appreciation, but we do get paid for it. It’s a pretty soft gig for just driving a big Tonka truck around.

I’m a school bus driver and a lot of my colleagues smoke. The ones in their 40s and 50s look 70+ and they’re just so … leathery. The ones older than that look like zombies.

Fun fact: through the 1800s coal-powered steamships mostly replaced sailing vessels for the transportation of people and time-sensitive cargo around the world. But steamships were highly inefficient and required frequent re-coaling, and locally available coal was dirtier and contained less thermal energy than the good stuff that Britain (who was doing by far most of the shipping) got from Wales and other places on their island. Because steamships could not efficiently and cheaply haul the coal that they needed around the world to restock the coaling stations, this was done instead by an enormous fleet of sailing colliers. So the “steam revolution” of the 1800s was actually a steam/wind-power hybrid. It wasn’t until the advent of triple- and quadruple-expansion steam engines, turbines, and greatly improved boilers in the early 1900s that steam-powered vessels could efficiently and economically haul their own fuel. And even with that, wind-powered cargo vessels remained economically viable and operating in significant numbers right up until the start of WWII (that’s II, not I).

A great read is The Last Grain Race by Eric Newby, about his time as a sailor aboard Moshulu (a large steel sail-powered cargo ship) in 1938-1939. Moshulu went on to star in The Godfather Part II as the ship which brings young Vito Corleone to New York, and is now weirdly enough a floating restaurant in my city of Philadelphia (I’ve never eaten there but I want to).

The Palestinians have taken to the streets to sing songs in your honor. You’ve saved them!

Heh, according to the guy who sold me the house, he had to put the grey vinyl flooring in because of water damage from a portable AC unit.

grey vinyl flooring

I hate that shit even more than I hated the fake wood paneling and shag carpet of the '70s. I bought a house last year that had the grey vinyl flooring in the living room and I’ve tried my hardest to fuck it up during the renovation so I have to replace it, but unfortunately it holds up to extreme abuse pretty well.

Might be mango lassi - possibly the greatest drink on earth.

It’s almost as bad as provolone on a cheesesteak.

He’ll flee to Russia before he does a day in prison. And I think that would be better for the country as it would clearly expose him as a traitor - and some of his cultists might follow him there.