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Bat Guano

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Everything posted by Bat Guano

  1. A car salesman tried to get my girlfriend to get some kind of insurance once for exactly this kind of situation, to pay off the loan if she died, so her family wouldn't be stuck with the payments. Why would I care about that? I'll be dead, she said. Salesman was at a loss for words for a while.
  2. Sometimes I go into the Indian market and wander into the curry spice mix aisle. There are usually several dozen brands of various types of curry mix. You want vindaloo? You've got about 15 different ones to choose from. Mutton masala? Chicken? Vegetables? Same thing. How the fuck are you supposed to decide? Once a store employee came over and offered to recommend one, but I didn't really have a specific idea of what I was looking for, so I didn't take him up on it. Probably a mistake; all the times I have been looking for a recommendation, nobody is available. Anyhow, I've tried a bunch of different ones, basically picking one at random or by the picture on the box, and they've all been pretty good. They usually call for a number of other ingredients and cooking them is not much different from doing a similar dish from scratch. And coconut milk. Coconut cream is for sweet fruity drinks, umbrella optional.
  3. My dad had one of these: He used to drive us several hundred miles on various road trips in the summertime; he liked to drive at night, when it was cooler, and we kids would sleep in the back, just stretched out on a couple of blankets. It was only a couple of years ago that he confessed he regularly "almost" fell asleep at the wheel, usually around 3 or 4 in the morning. Just another practice from a bygone era that we survived by pure luck.
  4. I've always thought if Trump hadn't had a rich daddy his natural station in life would have been a bouncer at some shiny-shirt-douchebag club in Queens or the Bronx. But as things turned out he should definitely be doing hard time in the pen.
  5. Bat Guano

    Tax reform

    Now if they change the withholding tables for next year, there's a good chance people will notice their smaller paychecks; it's more salient when you lose money than when you pocket a bit more. Already pissed about a smaller refund, and then your paycheck goes down the next year? Yeah, that's gonna go over real well.
  6. I guess I should be used to it by now, but it still amazes me that anything Trump is even peripherally involved in, when you find out what's really going on, turns out to be sleazy and corrupt to a degree that goes beyond what a normal person would think is even possible. Every single thing. There is not a single facet of his life that is straight and above-board.
  7. Kids these days don't know how to make a decent Molotov cocktail. Sad!
  8. When I'm giving a facial, I'll take care to avoid getting it in her eyes. I'm just a gentleman that way.
  9. Fify. That's not a nitpick, it's an important distinction.
  10. So she was defined by her political enemies. Sucks, but the fact is the perception is out there - this stupid issue is part of her political persona now, and it won't go away. She has to address the perception, fair or not. Trying to prove she has NA blood backfired; she has to do something else.
  11. I thought I heard she put it on her Harvard application. I could be wrong about that, or I may be remembering something put out by liars.
  12. You really don't know that ethnic diversity is a hiring goal in many institutions, including many elite universities?
  13. If she brought it up during her application to teach at Harvard, then she probably was trying to benefit from a perceived diversity preference. No hiring authority is ever going to say that she was hired because of it, and it probably wouldn't even be true if they did; they would accurately classify it as one of a number of factors that went into the decision. But let's be honest: she didn't put down Native American on stuff because she was proud of that obviously tiny bit of ancestry. She put it down to gain an advantage. Whether it played out that way is impossible to prove one way or another, but the only way to put this behind her is to admit that she did it to try to advance herself in some way, and apologize for that. It might kill her politically, or she might be forgiven, but it's the only way to get past it. It would certainly be a refreshing change from the self-aggrandizement of our current president, and maybe that would be enough or maybe it wouldn't, but if she ties it to her story - humble background, made it pretty far in life on smarts, competence and determination, then ties that to her policy prescriptions designed to help others do the same, it might help. This is what she's done sort of circuitously, but she needs to make it an explicit narrative. It still won't go away, but at some point people will get tired of hearing about it and it may lose its punch.
  14. True. I was getting way ahead of things, thinking about the general.
  15. Wonder what that preposition was. My money's on 'into.'
  16. This stupid NA story has become part of her political persona now. I don't know if she can put it behind her. Maybe if she fesses up and apologizes a few more times it will help; on the one hand, anyone who won't vote for her because of this story very likely would never have voted for her anyway. On the other hand, she could be entering the Hillary zone, where the right-wing smear campaign just constantly throws so much shit in the air that people who would otherwise vote for her get the feeling that ... they just don't like her, can't really put their finger on why not. And on the other hand (yes, that's three if you're keeping track) maybe there's enough time left to bury this under other stuff, like the Green New Deal and her legitimately good ideas about bringing the fat cats to heel. But she's going to have to become a much more adept politician to pull that off; this kind of rookie mistake makes me think she doesn't have the political instincts or skill to close the deal, entirely apart from her policy ideas. Why isn't there a Kirsten Gillibrand thread?
  17. That's some good shit. It's only part of the corruption, but it's as good a place as any to start.
  18. This thread has taken a turn for the weird. Now I'm trying to figure out whose sock I am.
  19. After I take a shit at work, and I'm putting my phone back in my pocket, I have an inordinate fear of dropping the phone in the toilet.
  20. So you have something with all the disadvantages of the mechanical pencil, but you still have to sharpen it, so you got the one disadvantage of the wood pencil, too. Well, to each his own....
  21. No other writing implement is as reliable as a wooden pencil. That puts them in a class by themselves; mechanical pencils are fine to write with, but they're fussy and high maintenance - the supermodel-girlfriend of the pencil world. For quotidian, reliable performance, give me a wooden pencil any day. #2, please.
  22. Bat Guano

    Tax reform

    Does it make a substantial positive impact on peoples' lives? Sure, as I said most people will pay less; but how much less? I'd say if it doesn't make enough difference for them to notice that they got a cut, then no, it's not a substantial impact. Maybe your special lady is not most people; it's one case. And the middle-class part of the tax reform will get smaller over the next few years and eventually disappear. All that equals a bust. A bust can also be defined politically: if Trump was counting on people to appreciate their tax cuts and vote for him based on them, then it was definitely a bust, based on the anecdotal evidence in this thread.
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