Apparently, time flies whether you're having fun or not

Whew!  It’s been a crazy week.  Family stuff, work stuff ... hopefully it’s all settling down soon.  But luckily this was a short post week anyway, so it all works out.  Let’s see how next week comes out.

The Fox May Grow Grey, but Never Good

Many moons ago, I would often tell people that I didn’t think that Rush Limbaugh believed the things he said.  “This guy,” I would tell anyone who asked, “is just performing for the audience.  Oh, he might believe something he’s saying every once in a while, but it’s almost accidental: believing or not believing is completely irrelevant for him.  He makes a lot of money with this act, and he will literally say anything for the money.”

Now, Rush’s popularity faded, and eventually he died, and younger folks today might not even remember who he was.  But the sad thing is that there was always someone coming along behind him, trotting out the same old act—some even priding themselves on taking it further—saying the same old bullshit, and making the same old bank.  First Bill O’Reilly, who has himself come and gone by this point, then Glen Beck (gone but trying to stage a comeback, I’ve heard), Alex Jones (fading fast), Sean Hannity (still around), and current star pupil Tucker Carlson.  Not to imply that right-wing douchebaggery is only a man’s game, of course—folks like Laura Ingraham and Jeanine Pirro are fighting to break that glass ceiling, for some reason—but it’s mostly been the men, hogging the spotlight, as men are wont to do.  But the point is, there’s always been someone, and usually several someones.  And, for every single one of them, I’ve said, repeatedly, I think it’s all an act.  I don’t believe for one second that any of those motherfuckers believed a single word of the shit they were spewing, except maybe by accident.  Many of them are very well educated, and it’s quite simply not logical to believe they’re that stupid.  ‘Cause, you know, they’ve said some stupid shit.  Limbaugh once said that “firsthand smoke takes 50 years to kill people, if it does” (he, of course, died of lung cancer).  Jones once said “the majority of frogs in most areas of the United States are now gay.” Megyn Kelly (who is not Laura Ingraham, but is a credible imitation) once said “Santa just is white.” Not only do I not believe that any of these people believe what they’re saying, I think they’re engaged in a competition to see who can say the most ridiculous bullshit and make it sound credible.  I imagine a Victorian-style English gentlemen’s club where Hannity, wearing a long walrus moustahce, is slapping Kelly on the back and saying, “oh, good one Megyn! ‘Santa just is white’ ... bally good show, eh wot wot?”

And, for all the decades that I’ve been saying this, people have been telling me I’m full of shit.

Not just conservatives, mind you.  Most liberals also seem convinced that these folks are true believers, which of course is more dangerous.  Though ... is it?  Would it be more dangerous if someone truly believed the hate they were shoveling, or if they were cynically manipulating people into a hate they couldn’t be bothered to feel?  Perhaps an academic question.  Point being, I’ve been ridiculed for having this view just about every time, by just about everybody, from just about every point on the political spectrum.  I’d like to say that I kept saying, “just wait: one day you’ll see.” But, the truth is, I didn’t actually hold out much hope of this.

Oh, I’ve had some glimmers of hope along the way.  In 2017, Alex Jones was involved in a vicious custody battle; his wife, unsurprisingly, said she didn’t want her kids being raised by someone who routinely made homophobic comments and indulged in outlandish conspiracy theories.  Jones’ lawyer claimed: “He’s playing a character.  He is a performance artist.” Kinda sounds like what I’ve been saying for years, right?  But of course people said he was just saying those things to get out of legal trouble (which was probably true).  In late 2016, Glenn Beck did an interview with Samantha Bee of Full Frontal wherein he said: “As a guy who has done damage, I don’t want to do any more damage. I know what I did. I helped divide.” Sure sounds like he not only wasn’t drinking his own Kool-Aid, but had rather come to regret ever selling the stuff.  Still, people said that Sam Bee and her people had edited the interview to show the narrative they wanted to show (which, also, was probably true).

But now, my friends, I have achieved total vindication, thanks to Dominion Voting Systems, and their more than one billion dollar lawsuit against Fox News.  See, because what we’re learning now is not what Fox News people are saying in court; no, what we’re learing now is things they said, to each other, in private, which is now evidence in court.  And I don’t think anyone believes that the court is editing the information to fit a narrative ... in fact, if anything, Fox is the one doing the editing.  Just this week, the judge in the case sanctioned Fox News for withholding evidence.  Plus, as law professor RonNell Andersen Jones pointed out in an interview with Jon Stewart, there’s still a lot of information that is redacted in the court filings.  The stuff that we know about is the stuff that “either they thought that they could let it go or ... they lost in an effort to redact it.”

So what do the texts and other messages say?  By now you’ve likely heard the worst of them.  Tucker Carlson describing Trump as “a demonic force, a destroyer” and writing of the ex-president’s lawyer “Sidney Powell is lying by the way. I caught her”; Ingraham replying “Sidney is a complete nut”; Hannity saying of Giuliani “Rudy is acting like an insane person” and calling Powell a “fucking lunatic.” Not only do the messages show that the on-air personalities didn’t buy the bullshit they were peddling; they also tell us exactly why: it’s all about the money.  When the New York Post asked Trump to stop claiming the election was stolen, they started losing readers; Rupert Murdoch (owner of both the Post and Fox News) messaged the Post’s chief executive “Getting creamed by CNN!” When a Fox reporter tweeted that “there is no evidence” of voter machine defect or fraud, Carlson texted Hannity “Please get her fired.  Seriously what the fuck?  Actually shocked.  It needs to stop immediately, like tonight.  It’s measurably hurting the company.  The stock price is down.” None of this is controversial.  None of this disputed.  None of this is paraphrased or edited in any way.  All of it has been reported multiple times by reputable outlets (the links I’ve included above range from ABC News to the Guardian in the UK to Rolling Stone magazine), and they’re direct quotes from court evidence.  And this, as Andersen Jones points out, is what they couldn’t get suppressed.  There’s like a lot worse out there waiting to be unredacted.

But, hey: this is sufficient for me.  This, I think, proves my point to a T.  These idiots don’t believe what they’re saying.  What’s worse, they don’t care how much damage it does, as long as they keep making money.  At the end of the day, that’s really all it’s about.  So is it more dangerous that they might all be true believers?  I’m not sure.  I think the truth might be even more dangerous than that: that they are all cynical, performative, money-grubbing assholes who care more about lining their pockets than they do about the state of our democracy.  They are, in many ways, the ultimate expression of late-stage capitalism: fuck ’em all, let the world burn, as long as I get my nut.  That’s plenty scary enough for me.

[A side note on today’s title.  Wiktionary refers to it merely as a “proverb,” and says it basically means the same as “a leopard cannot change its spots.” Now, if you ask the Internet, it will gleefully tell you that this saying derives from Benjamin Franklin, and one source (which I refuse to link to) even has the balls to source it as being from Poor Richard Improved.  But, see, here’s the thing: the entire works of Mr. Franklin are available on Project Gutenberg, including Franklin’s Way to Wealth; or, “Poor Richard Improved", and the only thing it says about foxes is that “the sleeping fox catches no poultry.” In fact, after some diligent searching, I have concluded with a decent degree of confidence that Franklin never said any such thing.  So, you know ... don’t believe everything you read on the Internet.  If you want more musings on quotes, I got you covered.]

Gothic Gaming

This weekend we’re going to try finish up the many-times-postponed birthday game of D&D that my eldest prepared for my middle child.  And, yes, it’s nearly a month late, but ... well, shit happens.  After getting postponed due to sickness, unpreparedness, and all around general grumpiness, I ended up having to postpone due to fallout from my big work project, which I finally pushed to production on Monday.  So we started on Friday, but we started late, and now we’re finishing today, so, TL;DR: you get no proper post again this week.

But, in order to have something to put up, I thought perhaps I’d tell you about some of characters for this game.  We’re doing a sort of Gothic horror game, though it seems so far like it’s less Ravenloft and more Castle Amber (if you speak D&D, you’ll get what I mean).  My middle child opted for a flesh golem moster hunter barbarian—think Frankenstein’s monster, one of the intelligent but reticent versions, weilding a combination sword-shotgun (I, Frankenstein might work, or any number of videogame characters).  I can’t give you too many more details than that, because I wasn’t responsible for helping build that character.

My youngest, on the other hand, came to play with a creepy-as-fuck concept.  Silvin is a young man with no eyes (he wears bandages over where they should be) who wears dark, baggy, nondescript clothes ... including gloves, which cover the fact that he has eyeballs in his palms.  So he has to take his gloves off if he wants to see, but on the other hand he can move through the world just fine as a blind person.  He can’t speak, but he can communicate telepathically.  He is a bard of the college of whispers, which gives him access to powers like Psychic Blades, Words of Terror, and Mantle of Whispers.  As if that weren’t enough, he’s a feat machine, having taken Telepathic, Telekinetic, Shadow-Touched, and Gift of the Gem Dragon, which latter is just more ways to push people around with your mind.  Aside from Words of Terror, he can cast cause fear, fear, danse macabre, dissonant whispers, phantasmal force, and phantasmal killer, which is a hell of a lot of ways to be a scary dude; when it comes to “look into my eyes” type shit, there’s the aforementioned Mantle of Whispers, plus even more spells: enthrall, confusion, unearthly chorus, Tasha’s hideous laughter, mental prison, crown of stars, and synaptic static.  And I haven’t even listed all the spells he knows ... did I mention we’re 14th level for this one-shot?  It’s crazy.

For myself, I resurrected an old character of mine that I had for a previous one-shot (also Gothic horror, and possible also for a birhday game).  She was only 7th level, but it was easy enough to bring her up to 14th.  She’s a rogue inquisitive and also a warlock of the Raven Queen (pact of the blade).  I built her to be a mystery-solver who can also hold her own in a fight.  She’s a lavender-skinned tiefling; I found this image on the Internet drawn by Bright Bird Art:

So she looks pretty much like that, except that her staff is actually illusory, so she can stab you with it (she summons her pact weapon, a scimitar, so that it’s inside the illusion of the staff), and she has a raven on her shoulder which doesn’t look quite real.  In terms of feats, she is Perceptive and Mobile; in terms of eldritch invocations, she wears her Armor of Shadows, and can summon a Cloak of Flies when she needs to be really scary; in terms of spells, she can also mess with your mind too: via puppet, ego whip, or Raulothim’s psychic lance.  Her expertises are in acrobatics, stealth, investigation, and perception; in battle she likes to cast spiritual weapon in the form of a person-sized raven and then either eldritch blast from afar, or get into the mix using Mobile, her improved pact weapon, and sneak attack.  In social situations, she’s pretty darn good at persuasion and deception, but she’s not afraid to break out that cloak of flies, which can do poison damage if you stand too close, and, if you don’t, there’s always infestation to send those little buggers out up to 30 feet away.

So that’s our primary party (my eldest’s partner is playing a helpful druid, but he’s really closer to an NPC), and we’re exploring a vampire’s castle and seeking out and destroying various loose, undead organs.  We got the stomach and the liver so far, but I’ve a feeling there’s a lot more to go.  Wish us luck!

Infinite Birthday Season

This weekend, my youngest is having her birthday weekend.  She almost made it to the end before the curse of the Holiday Sickness came for her as well.  So we may very well be doing more make-up time next weekend, just as we had to do for the middle child—this is starting to turn into the never-ending month of birthday celebrations, and it’s already next month.  But we shall see if everyone recovers and is satisfied with their birthday experiences.  Hopefully it’ll all work out.

Whither the beef?

When I was a kid, the only thing I liked to eat was hamburgers.

For my own children, it was more about the chicken nuggets (at least for the first two).  But, for me, it was hamburgers.  At home, my parents would cook hamburger helper a lot, but that’s still hamburger, right?  I didn’t eat chicken, period.  Wouldn’t touch pork (well, unless it was disguised as bacon, of course).  And seafood?  Don’t get me started.  My grandparents on my mom’s side loved seafood.  They would often go out to eat at very nice seafood restaurants, and sometimes they’d take me.  And there was literally nothing on the menu I would eat.  Oh, sure: nowadays, almost every restaurant will offer a hamburger or some chicken nuggets on a kid’s menu, regardless of the actual cuisine.  But not in my day.  In my day, if you didn’t like the type of food they had, you were just supposed to suck it up and eat it anyway.  But I was a stubborn child.  I would eat nothing rather than eat seafood.  I spent many a meal eating Captain’s Wafers sandwiches with butter in the middle that my grandmother would make me, and that was literally all I’d get.  Once when I was perhaps 8 years old my grandfather gave me a few dollars and told me that, if I wanted a hamburger so bad, there was a McDonald’s next door: I could go get it myself.  I was a painfully shy kid, and the thought of going somewhere (even directly next door to a restaurant where my grandparents could easily see me from their table by the window) and actually interacting with adults was horrifying, and, in retrospect, I think my grandfather knew this and the whole thing was sort of a challenge.  But I ate a hamburger and fries that night.

I was committed to the beef, is what I’m saying.

Besides the fast food hamburgers and the hamburger helper, there was “hamburger steak,” a dish (and I’m being very generous in calling it a “dish”) that my father made by serving a hamburger patty in onions and gravy rather than on a bun, bologna sandwiches (always beef bologna, of course), spaghetti and meatballs (meatballs composed either solely or primarily of, you guessed it: beef), beef stew, the occasional beef pot roast at my grandmother’s house which then turned into something she called “beef hash” the next day, and probably a few more ways to dress up cow meat that I’m not even remembering right now.  The only thing I can really remember eating as a child that wasn’t beef was hot dogs (we didn’t really do beef hot dogs back in those days).  And the occasional meal of chicken chow mein (my foodie grandfather again) that was served in that particular way that they used to make it on the East Coast before they decided that it should be full of bean sprouts (bleaaugh).  It was a whoooole lotta beef.

Of course, most of it wasn’t very good beef.  I didn’t care for steak (too chewy), and my parents and grandparents were just as happy not to have to pay for one for me anyhow.  I didn’t do prime rib either, on those super rare occasions when the parents or grandparents would spring for it.  So the vast majority of the beef I ate didn’t taste much like beef: the hamburgers tasted of mustard and ketchup; my dad’s “hamburger steak” tasted of gravy; most of those meatballs tasted like my grandmother’s spaghetti sauce; hamburger helped tasted mostly like MSG.  And, you know, back in those days, that might have been for the best.  Beef was pricey (chicken was the “cheap” meat back then), so most of what I was eating was right down at the lower end of the quality spectrum.  Which is fine: I was a dumb kid.  Don’t waste the good stuff on me.

Of course, as I got older, I did get a little more discerning.  I never really developed a taste for seafood, but I started liking various forms of chicken, and even started appreciating pork chops, not to mention all the really delightful disguises that pork can assume, like pepperoni, salami, capicola (for Italian subs), andouille sausage (for red beans and rice), country sausage (for biscuits and gravy), country ham (for ham rolls on Christmas morning), etc etc etc.  I even started liking the finer forms of beef ... somewhat.  I’ve always been the sort of person who appreciates a good filet mignon but otherwise can take or leave a steak, and as far as I’m concerned the attraction of prime rib lies almost entirely in the au jus.  Even what is probably my all-time favorite beef dish, steak au poivre, is, again, all about the sauce.  Curiouser and curiouser.

Of course, in recent years, even the once-lowly hamburger is getting new appreciation from the culinary world.  First they told us to stop using so much damn ketchup (or mayo, or thousand islands dressing, or whatever your slathering of choice may be) so we could actually taste the meat.  Then, once we decided that was a terrible idea, they started telling us to seek out a better class of meat.  Organic, pasture raised, grass-fed: all that stuff became all the rage.  Even kobe, if you want to get really pricey.  And, as the much better qualities of beef have gradually become more and more commonplace, and we’ve all become more and more able to actually taste the meat, and I’ve become more and more discerning, I’ve discovered a very curious thing about myself.

I don’t actually like the taste of beef.

When I look back on my life at the quantity of beef I’ve packed away, this is practically shocking.  I mean, how can I not like beef?  Everyone likes beef.  It was the most consumed meat in my country of origin for the first twenty-five years of my life, and #2 for the last thirty.  In 2020, the U.S. consumed 20 billion pounds of beef, which is roughly 90 pounds of beef for every man, woman, and child in the country.  And for 50 or so years, I was perfectly happy with beef.  Until I could actually taste it.  Now ... not so much.  Now, I would have to rate it as “meh” at best.  Quite often, in a beef dish made with particularly high-quality grass-fed beef, I actually dislike it altogether.  Sometimes, when someone in my house is cooking beef (especially in combination with garlic), it can actually make me a bit queasy, even though I know I’m going to enjoy the taste once it’s done.

And of course the silly thing is, it’s not particularly good for me.  I know there’s some debate about whether beef is healthy or not, but I think a lot depends on the individual.  For me, I can tell you definitively that there are only a few things I know for a fact help me lose weight, and one of them is to cut out red meat.  So what occurs to me is, why should I bother continuing to eat a meat that makes me fat and I don’t even like the taste all that much?

Oh, I don’t propose to cut out beef altogether.  I still like a nice filet every now and again, but for me “every now and again” means about once a year.  When it comes to meatballs or hamburger-helper-style meals or tacos—at least when we’re cooking it ourselves—I find that ground turkey is perfectly lovely.  And for the ever-popular hamburger itself ... well, I’ve started eating Impossible burgers.

I tried it on a whim, really.  Just to see if it could really live up to the hype.  So, can I tell it isn’t beef?  Of course.  Then again, that’s sort of a plus from my perspective.  The more important question is, can I tell it isn’t meat?  And the answer is, no, not really.  It sort of tastes like an exotic meat you might get at a fancy chain, like an ostrich burger from Fuddrucker’s (and, yes: I’ve had one of those before).  Like a turkey burger, but different enough that you probably wouldn’t think it actually was turkey.  Point being, it’s a perfectly acceptable meat substitute.  And they say that plant substitutes such as Impossible are better for the planet, so that’s a win-win in my book.  It does contain soy, so I try not to eat it as a regular thing (soy has its own set of pros and cons), but, as a sometime food, it’s probably better (and better for me) than actual beef.

So that’s where I’ve landed on the topic of America’s #2 favorite (formerly #1) processed animal protein.  I think I just don’t need it any more.  And I think that’s going to be good for me in the long run.  No need to go full-on vegetarian, I don’t think, but getting a bit closer has got to be a good thing.

The tide is high, but I'm holdin' on

I don’t think I’ve ever gone this long without posting a proper, long post.  But everyone in my house has been sick for nearly two weeks, and it’s finally come for me.  So this is about as much as I can manage in between cough drops and shots of Cēpacol.  At this point it seems foolish to try and promise anything, but please believe that I will do everything in my power to end this dry streak next week.

The joint is out of time

You know, when I said I should be able to get back to a normal schedule this week, I didn’t consider that it was the beginning of the March birthday season.  Even still, I might have been able to slap something together, except that another stomach virus—which germs seem to be attracted to birthdays and other holidays in our house—descended upon us and kept me home from work a few days whilst taking care of sick kids.  In point of fact, our middle child, whose birthday weekend this was supposed to be, eventually had to give up and take a rain check.  So there’s a distinct possibility that I might fail at making a blog post next week too.  But I’ll do my best to put something together ahead of time for a change.