I lived in Louisiana for a few years. I’m a white yankee and I used to dread situations where I’d end up in a room full of white native Louisiana dudes that I didn’t know very well. Absolutely guaranteed that within ten minutes somebody would throw out the N-word and then everybody would be laughing and saying racist shit.

The worst was when I was a member at the local YMCA. Fat old white dudes that worked at the courthouse (like judges and prosecutors) would sit around naked on nasty old leather couches in the locker room literally making jokes about sending innocent black men to Angola prison.

The only reason I can’t say Louisiana is the worst state in the country is that I also lived in Mississippi.

Why do I always think Goatse is the guy who did “Somebody That I Used to Know”?

We shouldn’t let men who constantly lie about what 9 inches looks like be the ones measuring insulation in the attic?

You must watch Cy Porter.

It’s funny, but there has long been a paradigm in programming called test-driven development or TDD. The idea is that you have a small number of experienced developers who write a suite of tests that an application has to pass, and then you let an army of newbies write whatever the hell they feel like writing and if their code passes the tests it goes into the application (somewhat snarky summary but not entirely). In my experience it does not produce solid applications but a large fraction of the programming world swears by it. I’ve always thought that the construction analog of TDD would be letting a bunch of inexperienced workers build houses and then the experienced contractors drive around in bulldozers knocking down anything that happens to not be built well enough.

My (nearly 80) uncle used to show me random Youtube videos and then other videos would start auto-playing. It was always beautiful young blonde women (real ones, this was before AI) spouting the standard right-wing talking points. He would say “see, she’s making a lot of sense” and I would ask him how it was that a blonde teenage girl had somehow arrived at the same “wisdom” that he had spent a lifetime accumulating. That actually made him think for a while, but he always forgot it by the next time around.

As someone who grew up in the '80s, no single person has ever disappointed me as much as Bono.

Only tangentially related, but: I’ve always wanted to see a mashup of “Firestarter” and Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire”.

Where I live there’s a blind turn and sometimes when I drive around it I come upon a bunch of crows standing in the middle of the road and they have to scatter to avoid being run over. There is never anything in the road there, so I assume they are playing chicken with cars.

I still think it’s possible that in 2016 the Republicans told him they were hiring him to play the President in a mockumentary.

I used to work for a company that wrote the software used by Clerks of Court in Louisiana. It was niche software because Louisiana is the only US state whose legal system is derived from the French, so the companies that write software that can handle all the other states don’t bother accommodating Louisiana. Clerks of Court in most of the LA parishes made $60K to $70K per year (which was actually a pretty astronomical salary there) but they controlled budgets that could afford the $100K per month cost of the software. The owner of the company would wine and dine the Clerks and pay for their house renovations and driveway pavings etc. and vacations and whatnot, and meanwhile he raked in fucking enormous profits (64 parishes X $100K per month, with a team of about 5 programmers). Nobody batted an eye at this shit.

On the other hand: Kimbra.

I’m waiting for Melon to ruin “Butlerian jihad”.

I went to Lowe’s a couple of months ago and that night on Amazon I got recommendations for drill bits and cabinet door pulls. The weird thing was that I did buy some drill bits at Lowe’s but I just looked at cabinet pulls there. I’m guessing my phone was linked to in-store footage and AI noted where in the store I stopped to look at stuff. As a kid I used to look forward to living in the future, now I kinda regret it.

I live in a Philly suburb (in Delco) and driving here is crazy enough, but whenever I drive into the city the transition to the Mad Max state of mind is just insane.

I’ll give it a try, but … jeez.

I make bread and pizza dough with honey or molasses instead of sugar and it’s fantastic. Honey is always better than sugar – except in coffee.

One of the plots in Dune was the idea that Baron Harkonnen initially put the Beast Raban in charge of Arrakis so that he could be a huge dick and make everybody hate him, then he would be replaced by Feyd-Rautha whom everybody would love because he was slightly less of a huge dick. Trump and Vance.

And yet for all of eternity we have had different numbers of hot dogs and hot dog buns.

My 401k would only ever be a supplement to Social Security. Fortunately the ruling party would never even dream of abolishing that.

/s of course. They used to say Social Security was the third rail of American politics – soon it will be the third leg.

Q: What’s the capital of South Sudan?
A: Not a whole lot!