Saturday Evening Links – WebDom Style

by | May 13, 2023 | Daily Links, WebDom’s Browser History | 145 comments

Hello there Glibbies! Long time no links.

I’ve got so many things whirling around in my mind I rather don’t know where to begin.

A couple mornings a week I look after a toddler who belongs to two of my employees before I go about my errands for the coffee shop. A couple days ago I was claimed by one of the outdoor cats who lives in the yard. She’s incredibly sweet and has decided her best life is lived riding around on my shoulders.

I arrived yesterday morning and went about my usual routine. I got the kid up, changed, and fed. I was making myself coffee when I heard a very faint “meoowww” by the door. The child toddled over, as he does, and said, “cat!”

That, in and of itself, was quite a big deal. He is autistic, and has a very restricted vocabulary. His usual words are, “hi” “hug” “help” “outside” and “Tractor Supply.” Yes, Tractor Supply the retailer. It’s adorable.

For about a month now, I’ve been studying Arabic. It quickly came to my attention if I really want to do a good job of this, I need to study Modern Standard Arabic, Egyptian Arabic, and Levantine Arabic. The dialects are similar, but not as similar as I had hoped, which makes the journey even more challenging. The child has mastered the word عفواً (afwan), which translates to “pardon” and is also used as a response to “thanks” شكراً (shukran).

I also introduced the child to the world of Terry Pratchett. We’ve watched Going Postal twice this week now. I highly recommend it if you haven’t seen it. It wasn’t until this most recent re-watching that I noticed Alex Price from Father Brown has a small role. I rather enjoy the mini-series they made of Pratchett’s work, even if they’re not 100% true to the books. I watch Hogfather every Christmas Eve, and feel it’s really the best Christmas Movie (next to Die Hard, of course).

In other news, l0b0t and I have been arguing about something for a little bit now: are operas musicals? My position is operas are musical, but are not musicals. l0b0t thinks operas are in fact musicals in and of themselves. l0b0t also thinks musicals are the highest form of theatre, but I’ll leave that argument for the comments. 😉

Onto links…

Some of these links might be repeating what’s popped up in the comments lately. I’ve been too busy to keep up with the site. But here’s what’s caught my eye this week.

This writer really likes hats

A very useful list

Babylon Bee kills it with an article about the new female Twitter CEO.

For a mere €950,000 this charming property in County Wicklow can be yours.

I recently got my hands on a bottle of Widow Jane Decadence. If you’re interested in bourbon, I strongly suggest hunting one down. One of the better bourbons I’ve ever had.

This Twitter thread about the magical bakery box at Costco.

 

About The Author

WebDom

WebDom

WebDom grows Peyote buttons in the vast desert of her mind.

145 Comments

  1. Timeloose

    Great link fu Web Dom.

    Have a good afternoon/ evening.

    Happy Birthday CPRM!!! Wish I could be there, but Mrs time’s birthday is today.

    For you CPRM:

    A little Wisco Disco.

    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=krhdVi3qlyw

  2. DEG

    Hey– are you even listening to me?

    I read the whole thing.

    What is wrong with me?

  3. DEG

    Water sports are close to hand at Blessington Lakes

    Not even a euphemism.

  4. Fourscore

    The Wicklow County home is nice, priced right but needs a lot more forest and lakes.

    Not a twitterer so I’m not concerned about how many characters she needs. Go for the max!

  5. robc

    He is autistic, and has a very restricted vocabulary.

    For about 9 months, my daughter’s vocabulary consisted of “Go”.

    That was it, one word. And she only said it if you said , “Ready…Set…” first. It was useful for finding her if she was hiding.

    Then we started ABA therapy (YMMV…greatly).

  6. Rat on a train

    I’m with you on the distinction. Musical conveys spoken dialogue interrupted by song. Opera is continuous music.

    • juris imprudent

      Yep, a musical is just a degenerated opera.

      • Rat on a train

        What about through-sung theater?

    • Gender Traitor

      I, too, agree that operas are NOT “musicals.” But I also agree with l0b0t that musicals are the highest form of theater.

      And just to be a bitch (as well as a bit of a Gilbert & Sullivan aficionado,) I’m going to throw operettas in the mix. Opera? Musical? I say they’re their own thing.

      • rhywun

        I think all the various forms of theater have their place. Not a fan of full-on opera but I like musicals and straight theater. I don’t know WTF an operetta is, TBH.

      • Pat

        I don’t know WTF an operetta is, TBH.

        From what I’ve gathered in scattered television and internet references, opera for people with short attention spans. As a novella is to a novel.

      • Not Adahn

        Yanno how we learn the definition of haiku as 5-7-5, but weebs roll their eyes at that (and Japanese people are far too polite to do so)?

        Operetta is like that.

    • Q Continuum

      Who cares? They both suck.

      • Chafed

        🤟🤟

    • Not Adahn

      Musicals are descended directly from Grand Opera, via Light Opera.

      Actually, “musical” is just a marketing term for “light opera.”

  7. Tundra

    Hi WebDom!

    l0b0t is correct. Grease and La bohème are, in fact, the same genre. And they all suck.

    Quadrophenia is more my speed.

    Yes, Tractor Supply the retailer.

    That is the cutest thing ever. The kid is gonna be just fine.

    Great memes. Especially the one-tripper. That one speaks to me.

    Have a great night, Glibs!

    • Pat

      Grease and La bohème are, in fact, the same genre. And they all suck.

      What are you, some uncultured provincial white trash swine?

      Agree, by the way.

    • Zwak , who will swing for the crime, in double time!

      “l0b0t is correct. Grease and La bohème are, in fact, the same genre. And they all suck”

      QFT.

    • Chafed

      Greasecan be made much better than it was.

  8. Mojeaux

    Opera is of the devil, that’s what.

    Musicals are of some random middling demon.

    • Rat on a train
    • MikeS

      Where do we stand on Rock Operas? I feel like that has the potential to be the new deep dish.

      • Tundra

        See above.

      • MikeS

        I tend to agree. But as much as I hate all involved parties, The Wall is pretty damn good.

      • Zwak , who will swing for the crime, in double time!

        Um, gonna hafta go with a no on that.

      • pistoffnick

        I thought I liked you, Zwack…

      • MikeS

        So, almost without exception, film musicals are are heinous. And it doesn’t matter if some good songs come from them. I’ll contend ’till the day I die I got hacked if this gets out, but I like some songs from South Pacific. But I’d rather have needles inserted under my toe nails than watch that fucking movie.

      • Gender Traitor

        If your exception is not Singin’ in the Rain, you are irretrievably mistaken.

        And what song or songs from South Pacific can a decent human being NOT like??

      • Ted S.

        42nd Street is another great backstage musical.

      • The Bearded Hobbit

        … and another Busby Berkley classic.

      • Pat

        Where do we stand on Rock Operas?

        A solution in search of a problem. Opera snobs and rockists both rightly reject them for essentially the same reason: they are pretentious midwittery. Rockers trying to rise above their artistic station.

      • kinnath

        Jesus Christ Superstar. I wore out my my first set of vinyl.

      • Gender Traitor

        I once attended a movie “triple bill” of Jesus Christ Superstar, Godspell, and Tommy.

        I guess someone thought the three of them went together according to some sort of strained logic.

      • The Bearded Hobbit

        Never was a fan of Godspell but JCSS is a guilty pleasure.

        Tommy is brilliant. Ann-Margaret as eye candy and many, many rock interludes.

      • Chafed

        Ann-Margaret was fantastic.

      • Bobarian LMD

        Tommy was awful. Ann-Margret, Tina Turner, Elton John were exceptions, but “Oliver Reed Sings” was an abomination.

      • Chafed

        I agree with all of that.

      • The Bearded Hobbit

        Thanks!

      • J. Frank Parnell

        My dad took me to see Tommy in the theater when I was way too young and I’m convinced it’s why I’m afraid of needles.

      • juris imprudent

        the three of them went together

        Sure, based on when the acid kicked in.

      • Gustave Lytton

        Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat Was the nadir of rock opera movies.

      • The Hyperbole

        Where does ‘Joe’s Garage’ fit into this, Rock opera, musical ? all I know is that it kicks ass.

      • The Bearded Hobbit

        “Concept Albums”.

        I like Zappa but Joe’s Garage is way down on the list.

      • Penguin

        I saw that when it was first shown. After the “kitties are sleeping” line, I was laughing for about 5 minutes.

  9. MikeS

    re: Canada Goose range. I can confirm. The Hate Birds (birds that hate) are also in Germany. Freaked me the fuck out. I was afraid they followed me here until I looked into it more.

  10. MikeS

    How much do you suppose this beer in the hotel room fridge is going to cost me?

    • Tundra

      Who cares? Vacation dollars don’t count.

      • MikeS

        This guy gets it

    • Zwak , who will swing for the crime, in double time!

      That beer is gonna cost you a trip outside the room, which will require putting pants BACK on, along with shoes.

      Drink at your own risk.

  11. MikeS

    Erste, Schlampen!

  12. KK the Porcine Pearl-Eater

    Happy birthday CPRM!

    • Penguin

      Indeed. And since I can’t make it to the party, or get you a gift, I’ll just wish for the Packers to have a good draft this year.

      • KK the Porcine Pearl-Eater

        I mean, I like CPRM and all, but that’s a bridge too far!

      • Penguin

        Yeah, I didn’t think I’d make it to Remagen.

    • Mojeaux

      Now that’s the life, right there.

  13. KK the Porcine Pearl-Eater

    Same Zoom link as last night?

    • Animal

      Oui, y aura-t-il un Zoom?

  14. rhywun

    OMG I want that Vader teapot.

  15. westernsloper

    Who else thought Webdom was talking about Lobot when she mentioned a toddler who liked tractor supply? The musicals things threw me from that thought. That overpriced house is way cool.

  16. Sensei

    Good luck on the Arabic studies!

    I can relate on the learning curve.

  17. Gender Traitor

    This afternoon I attended a memorial gathering for the adult daughter of a longtime friend. To say the deceased had led a “troubled life” would be putting it mildly – she went off the rails years ago, and the fact that she ended up being killed by a hit-and-run driver was only surprising to me in that it wasn’t an OD or outright murder that finally caught up with her. She left behind five children, none of whom she had raised. (My friend raised four of them – three boys and a girl with pretty serious developmental disabilities.) Yet her mother and younger sister remembered the sweet little girl and big sister she once had been.

    Does it reflect poorly on me that this is the song that comes to my mind?

    • The Bearded Hobbit

      I think that it is quite appropriate. Sorry about your loss.

    • Tundra

      Sorry, GT.

    • Zwak , who will swing for the crime, in double time!

      Deeply sucks. Sorry to hear this.

      But, Momma tried.

    • Pat

      She left behind five children, none of whom she had raised. (My friend raised four of them – three boys and a girl with pretty serious developmental disabilities.)

      I have been acquainted with several such dysfunctional people over the course of my life – several in my own family. It always makes me some combination of angry and sad that they create so many lives only to destroy them. As big a fuckup as I am, there’s some comfort in the knowledge that I at least didn’t spread it around. Hopefully the kids can overcome those circumstances.

      • Gender Traitor

        I was (kinda) surprised today when it was the second youngest child – a boy of about fourteen – who ended up speaking for the rest of his siblings about their mother. He’s always struck me as “Mr. Personality,” and displays poise beyond his years. I have high hopes for him, especially.

      • Fourscore

        It seems a lot of families will have one renegade or throw away child. It’s strange how kids with the same parents, same genetic make up will have totally different personalities and outlooks.

        I’m guessing those we call homeless, drug users, are the throw aways of their respective families. Who knows?

      • robodruid

        I wonder if we even rally have free will. I see people (me) and the genetics of our children and sometimes they act the same way. Are we programmed to be good or bad?

      • The Bearded Hobbit

        Are we programmed to be good or bad?

        I think that we are born “bad”. Take what you want by any means possible. Kill or be killed.

        I think that “good” is the result of culture. Your parents show you how to behave in a community. Cooperation is learned. Respect is learned. Constraint is learned.

      • kinnath

        We are born feral. Parents civilize us.

      • Chafed

        What kinnath said.

  18. The Bearded Hobbit

    I used to hate musicals. “People don’t just go around breaking into song!” Then I saw “Fiddler on the Roof” and I realized that maybe, sometimes people do break into songs. Been a fan ever since.

    Even as a kid, though, I loved the complex dance routines in Busby Berkley musicals.

    Also, I used to hate opera. Then PBS broadcast the NY Met production of “The Ring”, the entire 16(?) hours over four nights. I was hooked. Now I can say that I don’t love or hate opera, I appreciate opera.

      • The Bearded Hobbit

        Love it, love it, love it, even though neither of the two leads can carry a tune in a bucket.

      • The Bearded Hobbit

        … and that is a Mission From God. One of a solid core of classics from the ’80s.

  19. Brochettaward

    I have Firsted my way to Firsthalla 100 times over, but The Great Firster foresakes me?

    • Zwak , who will swing for the crime, in double time!

      So, you are a ‘Halla back girl?

    • Stinky Wizzleteats

      You’ll never make it to Firstvana if you keep claiming firsts on the fifty first comment.

    • Ted S.

      Shouldn’t everyone forsake you?

  20. Pat

    The revenge of the technocrats

    So much for the bonfire of EU laws. Rishi Sunak’s government has ditched plans to erase all EU legislation from the UK statute books by the end of 2023. It was his big promise during his leadership campaign in August last year. A ‘Ready for Rishi’ video showed piles of paper marked ‘EU legislation’ being fed into a shredder. ‘In his first 100 days as prime minister, Rishi Sunak will review or repeal post-Brexit EU laws’, the vid said. ‘Keep Brexit safe, vote Rishi Sunak’, it continued. Now he’s backtracked. Now around 800 EU-era laws are due to be revoked, leaving thousands on the books. So, seven years after 17.4million of us voted to leave the EU, we’re still labouring under EU legislation, and will be for a long time to come.

    By Sunak’s own definition, Brexit isn’t safe under his premiership. If the pulping of EU law was the best way to ‘keep Brexit safe’, then the retaining of EU law must mean Brexit’s in trouble. It’s an extraordinary state of affairs: a bill designed to rid our liberated land of laws drawn up by a foreign oligarchy will now do the very opposite. The Retained EU Law Bill currently making its way through parliament was set to automatically delete all EU laws at the end of the year, apart from those that ministers expressly decided to keep. Now, in an about-face of epic proportions, thousands of EU laws will remain UK law at the end of the year. As the Independent puts it, the government’s retreat ‘turns the logic of the bill on its head’.

    Business secretary Kemi Badenoch confirmed the government’s shift in a written ministerial statement on Wednesday. In response to the pleas of civil servants – who said it was too stressful to have to pore over every EU law to see which should be saved and which should be ditched – the government is adopting ‘a new approach’, said Badenoch. The ‘current sunset in the bill’, which would have voided every unsaved EU law on 31 December 2023, will now be replaced by a list of EU laws that ‘we intend to revoke’, she said. Perhaps if civil servants weren’t working from home and crying ‘bully!’ every time a minister asked them to do their jobs, they could have found the time to do what the new prime minister promised the nation he would do: scrap the laws of that foreign institution we’ve now left.

    • Stinky Wizzleteats

      The British version of no matter who you vote for you get McCain. At least they aren’t bombing anyone (except they kinda are).

    • rhywun

      it was too stressful to have to pore over every EU law to see which should be saved and which should be ditched

      OFFS.

    • juris imprudent

      In response to the pleas of civil servants

      The lamentations of the bureaucrats? Now THAT should be a musical.

      • Gustave Lytton

        The burning of bureaucrats and burying of civil servants.

    • Scruffyy Nerfherder

      LOL. Sunak is there to undo Brexit. He was straight up lying.

  21. Pat

    The new homophobia

    […]In 2017, at the age of 33, I enrolled at Columbia University, New York to complete my undergraduate degree. There, I was shocked to discover how gay activism had evolved since marriage equality became the law of the land. The focus was now entirely on personal pronouns and on being ‘queer’. My classmates labelled me ‘cis’, short for cisgender. I didn’t even know what it meant. All I knew was that they called me ‘cis’ in the same cadence that the seventh graders had called me ‘fag’.

    Soon, I learned about nonbinary identities, and that some people – many people – were literally arguing that sex, not gender, was a social construct. I met people who evangelised a denomination of transgenderism that I had never heard of, one that included people who had never been gender dysphoric and who had no desire to medically transition. I met straight people whose ‘trans / nonbinary’ identities seemed to be defined by their haircuts, outfits and inchoate politics. I met straight women with Grindr accounts, and listened to them complain about the ‘transphobic’ gay men who didn’t want to have sex with women.

    All around me, it seemed, straight people were spontaneously identifying into my community and then policing our behaviours and customs. I began to think that this broadening of the ‘trans’ and ‘queer’ umbrella was giving a hell of a lot of people a free pass to express their homophobia.

    At Columbia, I took classes on LGBT history, but much of that history was delivered through the lens of queer theory. Queer theorists appropriate French philosopher Michel Foucault’s ideas about the power of language in constructing reality. They argue that homosexuality didn’t exist prior to the late 19th century, when the word ‘homosexual’ first appeared in medical discourse. Queer theorists proselytise a liberation that supposedly results from challenging the concepts of empirical reality and ‘normativity’. But their converts instead often end up adrift in a sea of nihilism. Queer theory, which has become the predominant method of discussing and analysing gender and sexuality in universities, seemed to me to be more ideological than truthful.

    In my classes on gender and sexuality in the Muslim world, however, I discovered something else, too. I learned about current medical practices in Iran, where gay sex is illegal and punishable by death, and where medical transition is subsidised by the state to ‘cure’ gays and lesbians who, the theocratic elite insists, are ‘normal’ people ‘trapped in the wrong bodies’. I privately drew parallels between the anti-gay laws and practices of Iran and what I saw developing in the West, but I convinced myself I was just being paranoid.

    Then, I learned about what was happening to gender-nonconforming kids – that they were being prescribed off-label drugs to halt their natural development, so that they’d have time to decide if they were really transgender. If so, they would then be more successful at passing as the opposite sex in adulthood. Even worse, I learned that these practices were being touted by LGBT-rights organisations as ‘life-saving medical care’.

    It felt like I was living in an episode of The Twilight Zone. How long were these kids supposed to remain on the blockers? And what happens in a few years, if they decide they’re not ‘truly trans’ after all, and all of their peers have surpassed them? Are they seriously supposed to commence puberty at 16 or 17 years of age? These questions rattled my brain for months, until I learned the actual statistics: nearly all children who are prescribed puberty blockers go on to receive cross-sex hormones. Blockers don’t give a kid time to think. They solidify him in a trans identity and sentence him to a lifetime of very expensive, experimental medicalisation.

    I wondered how different these so-called trans kids were from the little boy I had been. Obviously, I grew up to be a gay man and not a transwoman. But how could gender clinicians tell the difference between a young boy expressing his homosexuality through gender nonconformity, and someone ‘born in the wrong body’?

    • rhywun

      I convinced myself I was just being paranoid

      You’re not. The trans fad is anti-gay. Better a kid who sort-of passes for a “girl” if you squint, than a gay boy.

    • juris imprudent

      I’m just gonna say – when you find yourself in the same camp as Shi’ite mullahs, wrt transgender vice being gay, you might really want to rethink your premises. You aren’t very fucking radical or transgressive.

    • Q Continuum

      “I met straight women with Grindr accounts”

      wut

      • Gustave Lytton

        I think there was rhyming term for those sort of women twenty years ago.

      • slumbrew

        Fruit fly?

      • Ted S.

        Gay for pay?

      • Scruffyy Nerfherder

        Fag Hag

      • Chafed

        If I were younger I would think about setting up a Grindr account and look for the straight women on it.

      • Gustave Lytton

        If I were younger, I look for countries where I could get a work visa.

  22. Sean

    My gf has been hitting the pistachio butter too. It’s now a 3 jar a month habit. 😒

  23. Sean

    What’s a “walk-in”?

  24. Penguin

    Dirty hippy talks about the environment.

    Seriously, it’s Dr. Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace, talking about why the modern environmental / climate change movement is utter bullshit.

    • Stinky Wizzleteats

      Yeah, I’m all for not pumping raw sewage into rivers and smokestacks spewing god knows what but the current environmental movement, if you can really call it that, has gone off the rails. From solar farms that take up huge amounts of pristine land to wind farms that chop up birds to banning gas stoves, it’s all so obviously a grift.

    • Gender Traitor

      Good morning, Sean, Stinky, Penguin, and up-thread a ways, Ssccrruuffyy and NA!

      It’s a sunnier morning than yesterday here at Tranq Base, and I have my favorite Sunday morning choral music show on the Radio From Space. (There may even be some opera involved at some point.)

      • Sean

        Mornin

      • Gender Traitor

        I’m afraid I’m more inclined to sit on my own ass this morning than to kick anyone else’s. 😄

    • Ted S.

      [Kick’s Sean’s ass]

      • Sean

        ”””””’
        ”””””’
        ”””””’

        I’m blocking you with a wall of apostrophes’.

      • Ted S.

        Hateful®.

    • Scruffyy Nerfherder

      This is how America ends, with crack whores and corrupt politicians.

      Fitting

      • Ted S.

        I hope Upgrayedd testifies too.

      • Stinky Wizzleteats

        What’s the extra d for again?

      • Tres Cool

        Something about a pimp’s love….

  25. Bob Boberson

    Morning Glibs!

    Spending time with my wife’s extended family and getting to know them for the first time. All I can say its showcased the human cost of what wokeness does to families. It really is akin to the younger generation joining some strange new (cynical) religion. I know that happy, functional families are the exception rather than the rule but it’s truly heartbreaking to see. Makes me appreciate my own (far from perfect) family.

    • Stinky Wizzleteats

      So what is the toll? Are the global warmists attacking the the transgender enablers because of the carbon footprint of the surgeries or something?

    • Stinky Wizzleteats

      Something especially alarming about mothers that intentionally end their own kids.
      Also, fifth husband? Lord have mercy…

      • Gender Traitor

        Medea is the enemy.

  26. Tres Cool

    suh’ fam
    yo whats goody yo

    TALL SABBATH (and Mother’s Day) CANS!

  27. Tres Cool

    Mother’s Day obligatory cover.