Green chile is life.

Yup.

Green Chile, and various food items smothered in green chile, with a craft beer from one of the kajillion small breweries we have around here.

I don’t know if it’s still there, but when I visited the town of Ayr in Scotland about 25-ish years ago, they had a playground very similar to that right off of the beach. Everything was large enough to accommodate adults, and I think it may have actually been castle themed. No ball pit though. They did have a thing like a tilted merry-go-round that was at waist height and had no handles. Not sure what it’s called, but it was probably the funnest and most dangerous single piece of playground equipment I think I’ve ever come across. There were about a dozen of us traveling together, and I don’t think a single one of us walked away from that thing without catching a boot to the face at least once.

Been listening to The Meffs a lot lately.

I think a big problem is a lot of the explainers for new users, at least the ones that were around back when I first joined Mastodon, were or are absolute dog shit. They were all existential explanations rather than practical ones. I was trying to figure out which instance to join, and why one might be better for me than another, and every explainer I saw was basically a variation on, “iT’s JuSt LikE EmAiL. wHy Is tHaT hArD? sToP bEiNg So sTuPid, DuMmY.” None of them really explained the user experience, and how different instances might affect it, let alone the existence of the local and global feeds and how your instance choice affects those. It was like asking someone how to use chopsticks and them telling you, “It’s easy. Just put food in your mouth with them. Works just like a fork.”

Technically true, but it omits some pretty crucial information.

Once you’re into it and have the lay of the land, it seems really simple in retrospect. But if you’re coming in cold with no idea how any of it works, and the only help you get is some dickhead shouting, “EmAiL! iT’s LiKe EmAiL!” then the learning curve seems a lot steeper than it actually is.

Got suspended in 8th grade for “smoking on school grounds” because I stood outside the front door finishing my fruit snacks before I walked into the school (we weren’t supposed to have snacks outside designated food areas). Some rocket scientist of a teacher saw me standing by the door with my hand occasionally going up to my mouth (I think it may have been cold enough outside to make my breath steam) and said, “AHA! This child is smoking!”

She literally grabbed me by my collar and dragged me to the assistant principal’s office. Multiple other kids, and an adult who must have been someone’s mom, told her I wasn’t smoking, but she wasn’t having any of it. And the assistant principal just believed her out of hand. Wouldn’t even let me finish a sentence to say something in my own defense.

They had the security guard escort me off school grounds. And I just stood there for a while looking back at the school, still holding my fruit snacks, trying to figure out wtf just happened.

I pretty much checked out mentally after that. That kind of stuff ended up being pretty much par for the course. I hung out with the metal/punk/skater/stoner/goth crowd, and that was some kind of unforgivable sin at that school. My friends and I were constantly being singled out for minor or imagined infractions and never believed or given the benefit of the doubt. I went from a 3.8 gpa to something like 0.6 that year. I’d have to sit through all these meetings about how I was “so smart,” and how “I could go so far if only I would apply myself.” And I’d straight up tell them what was going on, and they’d be like, “It’s just a mystery why you won’t apply yourself.”

It’s been like 30 years and I’m still mad about that shit.

It’s not plagiarism. The songs themselves are obviously completely different. Making an engine noise was one in a pretty standard set of whammy bar tricks that was pretty ubiquitous when guitars with Floyd Rose tremolo systems became popular in the 1980s. So many people discovered this trick independent of each other that nobody can credibly claim to have invented it. It was so common at the time as to be generic and kind of hacky.

In other words, it’s a piece of guitar technique and not an element that can be copyrighted. Which is good because music would become insufferably boring very quickly if musicians weren’t allowed to learn and iterate on each other’s technique.

One element to a good sense of humor that most of the other posts failed to mention is the ability to laugh at yourself.

Lots of people with bad senses of humor think they have a good one because they have a favorite comedian who makes them laugh, or think they have a good sense of humor because they’re quick to laugh at someone else when they do something silly or stupid. But when they’re the person being laughed at for doing something dumb, they’ll become furious and storm off, and maybe hold grudges against people who laughed at them.

Someone with a good sense of humor will be able to see what’s funny about what they did and be able to laugh along with everyone else, even if they feel kind of embarrassed.

GWAR in the '90s was definitely something to behold.

Probably showing my age here, but OK Soda. That stuff was great.

Close runner up was Josta, which was briefly the official drink of GWAR (at least according to GWAR).

In the Wizard of Oz, Glenda the “Good” Witch is actually a ruthless drug kingpin.

She used her magic powers to summon a tornado and then merks the Wicked Witch of the East with Dorothy’s house. She then puts WWotE’s shoes on Dorothy in order to make her a target for WWotE’s sister, the Wicked Witch of the West. Glenda then uses Dorothy as a stooge to bump off WWotW, thereby putting herself in control of Oz’s vast fields of opium poppies, and cornering the entire opium trade.

It doesn’t make sense any other way. Glenda could have told Dorothy to use the ruby slippers to get home at literally any point, but instead sends her on a wild goose chase, and uses her as a blunt instrument to take out the only other bases of power remaining in Oz: the WWotW, and the Wizard, who Dorothy exposes as a fraud. Only then does she tell Dorothy to click her heels, and poof: everything is all wrapped up with a bow, and Glenda’s hands are clean. Her two main rivals are dead, and the Wizard is fleeing Oz in disgrace.

It’s some fucking Kaiser Söze level shit.

I’m surprised nobody has done a modern TV version. All five books have been successfully adapted for radio, the scripts are done, it’s already blocked out into well-paced individual episodes. It’s just sitting there waiting to be made. You just need a good cast and a show runner who isn’t going to monkey with the source material. It’s already proven to be popular and long-lived. Seems like a no-brainer.

Ulysses is a rough one. There are some novels that are so dense that you have to have already read it through once before you can really read it for the first time. I think Ulysses might take three or four.

I started reading it after hearing Robert Anton Wilson talk at length about why he loved the book. He made it sound amazing. And having read it, and read about it, I get why the people who love it really love it. It’s a meticulously crafted, ultra dense, heavily embroidered, masterwork of English literature. You can spend years and years reading and re-reading the book, picking apart layer after layer, and still find new elements to explore, and new threads to pull, which still all end up being perfectly internally consistent. It’s really an amazing literary achievement.

But it fucking sucks to read for the first time.

You need like a companion reference book, the Internet, a French to English dictionary for one of the chapters, and a map of Dublin. It’s not entertainment; it’s a project. And honestly, I’ve found it a lot more interesting to listen to Ulysses experts explaining the book than it is to actually read the book itself.

At my high school we had a teacher who had an advanced degree in Shakespeare studies, and she would teach a different play every quarter. They were great classes, but a single quarter was plenty of time for a very comprehensive look at each play. I can’t imagine stretching it out over an entire year and have it be anything but absolutely tedious.

Look, my coke habit isn’t a problem. Just shut up and help me cover the windows with this aluminum foil. It’s the only thing that blocks the surveillance rays from the FBI agents that are hiding in the rosebushes. And watch out for the neighbor’s dog. I’m pretty sure he’s working with them.

Brian and Bob were walking through the forest when they came across a set of tracks.

“Those are cougar tracks!” Bob exclaimed.

“Hell, no! Those are coyote tracks.” Brain said.

“I’m tellin’ you, I’ve been out in these woods since I was little, and those are cougar tracks!”

“There’s no cougars in this part of the country. Those are coyote tracks!”

Then they both got hit by a train.

From the Wikipedia article:

“Early chiropractors believed that all disease was caused by interruptions in the flow of innate intelligence, a vitalistic nervous energy or life force that represented God’s presence in man; chiropractic leaders often invoked religious imagery and moral traditions. D. D. Palmer said he ‘received chiropractic from the other world’. D. D. and B. J. [Palmer] both seriously considered declaring chiropractic a religion, which might have provided legal protection under the U.S. constitution, but decided against it partly to avoid confusion with Christian Science.”*

Why would a chiropractor tell you that? Nobody selling you a quack remedy is going to just come out and tell you it’s quack remedy. That’s rule #1 of selling quack remedies. But the history of chiropractics isn’t a secret, Neither are the statistics on vertebral artery dissection and other injuries caused by chiropractic adjustments. But look, I’m not your mommy. You don’t have to believe me, and you’re free to go do what you feel. It’s your own neck you’re risking.

For people who don’t know, the theory of chiropractics is that the light of God somehow shines into the human body through the top of the head, travels down the spine, and on through the nerves. If you can just fix any blockages (aka “subluxations”) in that flow then it will be impossible for disease to exist in the body. Because God’s light.

The founder of chiropractics was told this information by a ghost.

I know some people swear by chiropractic adjustments, but this is information I wish I’d known when I had my back injury because going to a chiropractor set my recovery back by at least three years. And the money I lost to that quack could have paid for not only the legit physical therapist that actually got me feeling better, but probably a decent massage chair too.

No problem. They’re one of those bands whose sound changes a lot over their career, and you wouldn’t necessarily infer their beginnings from their later stuff, but if you go back and listen to their early albums like Ballots, or Pictures of Starving Children Sell Records, their punk cred is a lot more obvious.