highlyeccentric

Oh fuck no... Quinn Hughes is going to be on SNL this weekend, possibly with Jack.

This weekend is the one with Connor Storrie.

Some context: Some of what happened if Team USA won was honestly expected, but the Hughes brothers and the ongoing mess they've been in was a surprise to a lot of people. This is 100% a PR repair move, not just a celebration of Olympians. How is it obvious? Simple, fucker has a game the next day in a different city. Leagues spent millions to maximize player rest, and he's filming a midnight show the night before a game. That is beyond weird.

Not only that, he's flying back to NYC after the game to tape Fallon and then fly back for another game, and that game is against the Tampa Bay Lighting... possibly the toughest team in the league. That is an insane schedule. This is putting player PR above everything.

Also, the team with the most Team USA men's players? The Minnesota Wild. The home state of some who opted out from the White House BS? Minnesota. The person who let Patel into the Team USA locker room? Wild GM Bill Guerrin. I don't know how upset Minnesotans are, but I hope it's a lot.

But also, fucking hell, don't put Connor in the middle of this. Fucking hell, just don't.

nanila posting in

awesomeers

It's challenge time!

Comment with Just One Thing you've accomplished in the last 24 hours or so. It doesn't have to be a hard thing, or even a thing that you think is particularly awesome. Just a thing that you did.

Feel free to share more than one thing if you're feeling particularly accomplished! Extra credit: find someone in the comments and give them props for what they achieved!

Nothing is too big, too small, too strange or too cryptic. And in case you'd rather do this in private, anonymous comments are screened. I will only unscreen if you ask me to.

Go!

silveradept

The Constitutional requirement for the President of the United States is that "from time to time" he shall "give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union, and recommend to their Consideration such Measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient[.]" This has become, by custom, a yearly address, with the intention of setting agendas and celebrating victories of the previous year by the President and his legislative allies.

Given who's in the White House right now, I expected self-aggrandizement, I expected deeply partisan commentary, and I expected Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics that would be deployed in service of the other two. I expected the current administrator to be more in his element, since he didn't have to make policy pronouncements or answer difficult questions or any of the other things that generally take him away from the things he likes to do and make him work in our reality.

That it appeared to be more of a session much like the Prime Minister's Questions, rather than a speech on the state of the Union, I probably should have expected, but did not. I suspect many of the things said during the speech would probably have gotten someone censured in Hansard or any other such record of governmental procedure, as the deeply partisan part was very much something that he wanted to make a point of.

Running on the Associated Press transcript of the speech itself, let us dive in and see what horrors lie on the surface and below it. Not in the transcript are the several times in the speech where there are either chants of "U-S-A!" or Members of Congress attempting to fact-check the administrator or call him out on his falsehoods (or chants trying to drown out those checks and callouts) or the applause that followed some lines.

(Why do this, you might ask? Some of it is because the record needs to be set correctly. Some of it is spite and malice against someone who is unqualified and ineligible to hold the office he is currently caretaking. And some of it is because I've been doing this for a while, and I'm not letting this joker put me off it, not when I'll have plenty of low-hanging lies to point out.)

( To spare your list, and also because the material contained within is likely hazardous to your blood pressure and your SAN score. )

And, as has become tradition, after the administrator gives their address, a designee of the opposition policy provides a rebuttal and a counterpoint speech to the address. The newly-elected Democratic governor of Virginia, Abigail Spanberger, was chosen to give the rebuttal, and chose to do so from the house of the legislature in Virginia. This transcript also does not indicate places where there were applause breaks in the speech, but there were only applause breaks in the speech, rather than chants or trying to drown out people who were likely fact-checking him in real time.

( The Democratic response is much more grounded in the reality we are experiencing )

In a much shorter form, the response speech was more relevant, more important, and more accurate than the speech that preceded it. If the Democratic Party is willing to actually say the message, at the level of crudity and honesty that it requires, with the volume it requires, and with the repetition it requires, they should be able to instill in that part of the country that doesn't want open authoritarian and fascist government the necessary will to punch Nazis in the face, as many times as it takes to get them to go away, in as many ways as they present their face to be punched.

If we want to say the state of the union is strong, then fisticuffs, metaphorical and possibly physical, are in the cards for everyone. If we're feeling generous, Queensbury rules.

Current Mood: annoyed
Current Music: Professor Elemental - Fighting Trousers

ysabetwordsmith posting in

common_nature

Today I took some pictures around the yard and did a couple of garden crafts. These are from the house yard and savanna.

( Walk with me ... )

Current Mood: accomplished

kaberett

Ridiculous indulgent breakfast situation (though having now looked up Culinary Strata because A asked, I am extremely unconvinced that pistachio croissants with raspberries)... counts.
Therapy session, spent entirely talking about One Thing (with tendrils), has left me feeling distinctly more settled.
Today's primary Make Numbers Go Down project has been working my way through some of the short fiction I've had open in tabs since [mumble]. Highlight thus far is Naomi Kritzer's The Thing About Ghost Stories (cn parental death, dementia).
The other New Thing I started consuming today is A Physical Education, which is extremely and often graphically about diet culture and disordered eating, but which 11% of the way through the audio file I am Very Much Enjoying. Further updates to follow. (The library only has audio, I apparently put a hold on it seven weeks ago though I can't at this point remember where I came across it, and The First Headphones I Have Ever Tolerated remain excellent. Shokz OpenRun Pro.)
The Child liked the replacement mock cherries; spring flowers are excellent (we are firmly heading into daffodils now); Routine Dinner tonight DID work even though the app initially Frightened Me by claiming first available pickup was tomorrow morning.

anais_pf posting in

thefridayfive

Feelings…

1. What made you happy this week?

2. What made you sad?

3. What made you angry?

4. What are you looking forward to in the next week?

5. What are you not looking forward to?

Copy and paste to your own journal, then reply to this post with a link to your answers. If your journal is private or friends-only, you can post your full answers in the comments below.

If you'd like to suggest questions for a future Friday Five, then do so on DreamWidth or LiveJournal. Old sets that were used have been deleted, so we encourage you to suggest some more!

marycatelli posting in

book_love

Hunting the Falcon: Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn, and the Marriage That Shook Europe by John Guy and Julia Fox

A history/biography.

( Read more... )

ofearthandstars

"Today, transgender people across Kansas are reporting receiving letters from the Kansas Division of Vehicles stating that they must surrender their driver's licenses and that their current credentials will be considered invalid upon the law's publication in the Kansas Register on Thursday. Should any transgender person be caught driving without a valid license, they could face a class B misdemeanor carrying up to six months in jail and a $1,000 fine.

...In addition to the driver's license provisions, the law bans transgender people from using bathrooms matching their gender identity in public buildings and creates a bathroom bounty hunter system allowing citizens to sue transgender people they encounter in restrooms for at least $1,000 in damages, including potentially in private restrooms."

We ran Pat McCrory out of the governor's seat for a lot less.

siderea

Canonical link: https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1897060.html

[Content Advisory: info that may be US government classified and controlled unclassified info leaked to news outlets, within. Actual status is unclear to me.]

Cuba has been effectively under siege by the US since at least January.

The US has cut off all Cuba's access to fuel imports. The situation is getting increasingly desperate. And a bunch of things just happened today. Yesterday, by the time I post this.

The US seized Venezuela January 3. Venezuela had been one of Cuba's two primary sources of oil, and once the US had control of Venezuela, the US halted shipments of Venezuelan oil to Cuba. Cuba's other main supplier of oil was Mexico, and on Jan 27, Mexico announced it was suspending oil shipments to Cuba. The Mexican president was evasive when asked point blank if the Trump administration was pressuring them into it, but Mexico has a critical trade deal with the US coming due for renegotiating, and dare not antagonize Trump.

Two days later, Jan 29, Trump issued an EO threatening any country that ships oil to Cuba with tariffs.

Apparently, there has been, since around that time, an undeclared US naval blockade of Cuba, to prevent oil shipments from getting through. The Trump administration hasn't admitted it, but Jan 23, Politico published a report that three anonymous sources in the Trump administration said that the administration was considering a "total blockade on oil imports" to Cuba, and a few days ago the NY Times published an analysis of ship movements in the Carribean indicating that there was indeed a naval blockade.

Cuba has received no foreign oil since its last shipment from Mexico Jan 9th.

As of Feb 3, the Financial Times was reporting that a consultancy was reporting that Cuba had "15 to 20 days" of oil left. Feb 5, the UN Secretary-General spokesperson issued a statement about a humanitarian disaster looming in Cuba.

Cuba of course did what it could to ration oil, but without enough of it, things began to fall apart. They started running out of fuel for cars, public transit, trucks to ship in food, garbage trucks to take the trash, and tractors to harvest crops. Cuba primarily generates electricity from oil-burning power plants so the electrical grid started failing and they started having blackouts. People have been cooking with whatever they can burn in the streets; there is no reliable refrigeration. Of course, they are also running out of food, and have difficulty accessing water. All elective surgeries have been canceled.

Feb 8, Mexico sent a delivery of humanitarian aid – 814 tons of food and hygeine supplies – to Cuba, to arrive later that week. This doesn't violate the US sanctions. Probably.

Feb 9, Cuba notifies all airlines that fly to Cuba that Cuban airports are running out of fuel and they will no longer be able to refuel in Cuba; Air Canada announces it's suspending flights to Cuba and sending empty flights to rescue Canadians in Cuba. Canada has been the largest source of tourists to Cuba, and the tourism industry is one of Cuba's main sources of foreign currency, without which it basically can't engage in international trade.

Also Feb 9, Mexican president Sheinbaum publically called the US's sanctions on Cuba "unjust" ["muy injusto"] for how they impacted the people of Cuba and pledged to keep finding a diplomatic solution with the US to get to ship Cuba oil.

Feb 13, the Ñico López oil refinery in Havana, Cuba, had a fire. The Cuban government reports that it was swiftly contained, and that the refinery continues to function, but that an investigation was opened into its cause.

Feb 22, shipping analysis firm Windward announced that they'd detected a Russian tanker (subsequently identified as The Sea Horse by Kplr) headed from the Mediterranean to Havana, likely carrying oil, putting it on a track to directly challenge the US Navy's blockade. It is due to reach Cuba in early March.

Feb 23, Canada announced it would be sending some sort of relief supplies to Cuba, but was cagey about just of what those supplies would consist.

Today, Feb 25:

Trump announced a plan to allow US companies to sell Venezuelan oil to Cuban businesses, but not the government.

It has emerged that Marco Rubio (US Sect of State) is in talks of some sort with Raúl Castro’s grandson, Raúl Guillermo Rodríguez Castro.

There was an exchange of gunfire between Cuban border forces and 10 heavily armed people in a speedboat with Florida tags who opened fire on them when discovered just off the shore. According to the Cuban government, the assailants were all Cuban residents of the US; four were killed, six wounded and taken for medical care. Cuban authorities have accused them of being terrorists. The commander of the Cuban vessel was also wounded in the initial attack from the speedboat.

The commenter VisualEconomik EN on YT argued today that Russia is unlikely to go to the mat for Cuba, for a variety of reasons, including that Russia is economically over-extended by its war in Ukraine; he also contends that Russia and China have no more patience for Cuban mismanagement and despite the tactical military advantage having turf within 100 miles of the US coastline, they're kind of done with dealing with Cuba's government. As to whether this is true, I can't say, but it sounded reasonable. This is good news if true, because otherwise, if either wanted to back Cuba against the US, this could be the match that sets off the powderkeg.

( News sources and further reading below, in chronological order of publication [6,690 words] )

This post brought to you by the 226 readers who funded my writing it – thank you all so much! You can see who they are at my Patreon page. If you're not one of them, and would be willing to chip in so I can write more things like this, please do so there.

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nanila posting in

awesomeers

conuly

Watch on YouTube

kaberett

Made it to the plot! Brought home more salad than we actually wanted to eat this evening! Mostly lamb's lettuce but some bonus baby beetroot and spinach leaves :)
Also, the broad beans are starting to emerge (well, the ones that didn't get partly dug up and then abandoned on the surface unmunched, anyway; those have now been reinterred).
In the course of Making An Effort to Close More Tabs I rediscovered Standard Ebooks, and downloaded a bunch of things I'd apparently been interested in for Some Time: Standard Ebooks takes ebooks from sources like Project Gutenberg, formats and typesets them using a carefully designed and professional-grade style manual, fully proofreads and corrects them, and then builds them to create a new edition that takes advantage of state-of-the-art ereader and browser technology.
I spent some of the evening doing minor crafts with supplies A acquired, to make replacement cherries for a children's board game, using red wooden beans and green cotton string. I am mildly concerned that the Child might disapprove of the string being green rather than red, but We Shall See...
Cleeeeeeeeeen hair.

sabotabby

Just finished: Nothing.

Currently reading: A Drop Of Corruption by Robert Jackson Bennett. This continues to be really fun. I wish there was more Ana, but her more distant presence in this is balanced by just how weird and gross the worldbuilding is. All magic in this world is drawn from the blood of leviathans, giant eldritch horrors that live in the sea and during the wet season, come on shore to try to kill everyone, and the murder plot revolves much more around the technicalities of this than the first book did. I'm here for weird body horror and squishy stuff so this works for me.

I am a wee bit confused over Din's motivations; he wants to join the Legion, which is the division of the military that blows up leviathans, rather than investigating crimes with Ana, which is a fairly major switch from the first book. But he can't do it because he's deep in debt to an insurer who covered his now-dead father's medical bills, and the job is so dangerous that the insurer would never be able to collect. Which, do not get me wrong, is a cool motivation! But it does seem like a break from the way his character is initially presented, and so far the only reason for the switch seems to be that he hooked up with a soldier at the end of the first book.

Anyway I just got to the part where he goes inside the Shroud, which is a giant cyst in the water where they extract leviathan blood, inhabited by augurs, who are altered to be incredibly good at working with vast amounts of data but go insane after three years and can only communicate by tapping. It's super cool.

nanila posting in

awesomeers

siderea

2026 Jan 20: ApasheOfficial on YT [music video]: Kyiv by Apashe & Alina Pash

Watch on YouTube

kaberett

inCompleted White Puzzle!!! We were right about That One Piece being the missing one, and now that I'm not worried about spoilers I have poked the internet and it (mostly in the form of reddit) confirms that Those Are The Missing Bit.
one (1) orchid flower is all the way open!
supermarket had discount fancy croissant, so we are most of the way to prepped for Fancy Breakfast tomorrow morning :)

olivermoss

Watch on YouTube

Way later than expected, but the Backrooms film from A24 is finally coming!

olivermoss

The cottage from Heated Rivalry is up on ABNB.

conuly

And I'm getting paid for every last one of them, including the 6 hours when the house slept and so did I. Normally, we're not actually supposed to sleep on an overnight shift - but almost everybody really does, so it's more like "don't get caught" - but c'mon.

For everybody at home, leaving without a replacement is not simply a fireable offense but an actual, factual crime. Also, I'm not sure how I would've gotten to the bus. I mean, it's right outside the door, and buses were running all night, but man, it was brutal out there. We needed a little shoveling, and neither I nor manager wanted to shovel, so we had to wait for the neighbors to get their sidewalks and then sorta patch us into theirs. (The transportation issue is also why I'm not blaming any coworkers who didn't come in. It was impossible. I genuinely don't think that this was a fixable issue, Staten Island got a lot of snow.)

In retrospect, what probably ought to have been done would have had to have been done in advance:

1. Manager should've taken as much discretionary money as possible, agreed to let staff order Chinese or whatever for two, three meals - something that reheats nicely - and offered to pay all our carfare home in advance, and then used that to straight up bribe at least one extra staff member to stay over the storm. With three of us, we could've had one on each floor and also could've more easily arranged sleeping shifts so somebody was awake at all times.

2. She also should've called up the families of those residents who frequently go home for an overnight and asked if they'd take their relatives from Sunday afternoon until Tuesday afternoon or Wednesday morning. That's suboptimal for a lot of reasons - there's a reason they all live in a residence instead of with their families! - but it would've lightened the burden on us significantly if we'd had even just our two or three easiest residents away visiting their sisters and brothers.

But we all survived! My replacement actually showed up at midnight last night! But she declined to wake me on the grounds that I wasn't going home at midnight, and she was quite right. And then another staff member showed up this morning, and 90 or 100 minutes later my bus finally showed up. (And yes, I do insist on getting paid for that last hour and a half as well. I wasn't just sitting around, I was doing laundry, and supervising on the basement so that everybody else could handle the upper floors, and walking the guys out to their van so nobody slipped on ice.)

I'm home now, I showered, and I have the rest of the week off, off, off. Yay me!

If this happens again, I'm bringing a change of clothing.

ysabetwordsmith posting in

book_love

The George Foreman Lean Mean Fat Reducing Grilling Machine Cookbook
Paperback – January 1, 2000
by george-foreman-connie-merydith (Author)

Today we finished reading our second cookbook of the year. The front matter includes Acknowledgements, Preface, Introduction, and Smart Eating for Healthier Living. The recipe chapters are Bring Out the Best of Grilling -- Marinades, Sauces, and Rubs; A Cut Above -- Beef and Lamb; Smoky Sensations -- Pork Chops, Ribs, and Ham; Tender Choices from the Sea -- Fish and Shellfish; Savory Grilled Poultry -- Chicken and Turkey; Quick and Easy Favorites -- Burgers, Sandwiches, and Snacks; Tempting Companion Dishes -- Vegetables, Fruit, Salads, and Desserts. Then in the back are a basic cooking guide, glossary, and index. The index lists both recipe titles and ingredients.

( Read more... )

Current Mood: busy

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highlyeccentric

November 2025

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Page Summary

olivermoss - (no subject)
nanila in awesomeers - Just One Thing (27 February 2025)
silveradept - A long and boring speech, annual in its delivery.
ysabetwordsmith in common_nature - Photos: House Yard
kaberett - some good things.
anais_pf in thefridayfive - The Friday Five for 27 February 2026
marycatelli in book_love - Hunting the Falcon
ofearthandstars - Morning Rage.
siderea - The Siege of Cuba [war/WWIII, US/MX/CA/RU, Patreon]
nanila in awesomeers - Just One Thing (26 February 2026)
conuly - (no subject)
kaberett - some good things
sabotabby - Reading Wednesday
nanila in awesomeers - Just One Thing (25 February 2026)
siderea - Feb 24, 2022 [curr ev, war]
kaberett - some good things make a post
olivermoss - Here we go, yo
olivermoss - (no subject)
conuly - Well, I spent 40 hours at work
ysabetwordsmith in book_love - Review: "The George Foreman Lean Mean Fat Reducing Grilling Machine Cookbook"

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Style: Sea and Salt for Nouveau Oleanders by branchandroot
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Just One Thing (27 February 2025)

A long and boring speech, annual in its delivery.

Photos: House Yard

some good things.

The Friday Five for 27 February 2026

Hunting the Falcon

Morning Rage.

The Siege of Cuba [war/WWIII, US/MX/CA/RU, Patreon]

Just One Thing (26 February 2026)

(no subject)

some good things

Reading Wednesday

Just One Thing (25 February 2026)

Feb 24, 2022 [curr ev, war]

some good things make a post

Here we go, yo

(no subject)

Well, I spent 40 hours at work

Review: "The George Foreman Lean Mean Fat Reducing Grilling Machine Cookbook"

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November 2025

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