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UpperWestside

Certifiably Surly
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Posts posted by UpperWestside

  1. 14 hours ago, Fudge Nuggets said:

    Con man conning those that want to be conned.  Interesting.

    Anyone propping this garbage up belongs in prison. The con is obvious with crypto. You have to either have the IQ of a howler monkey or be someone that is susceptible to being scammed. Watching people spend real money to obtain fake money is about as good an investment as buying a bunch of beanie babies 25 years ago.

  2. Why has this stuff not been banned yet? This is not real currency. It has no value and is one of the biggest grifts this side of what TFG and his fellow criminals do. This is still a gigantic pyramid scheme that should be punishable by time in prison for the clowns still trying to “sell” the public on the benefit of owning fake money.

  3. I watched this interview with Yakusho. I need to go and find some of his other movies and watch them. This was a really cool interview. He has said before his English has never been good enough to make it into American film so it’s got subtitles. He comes across as really thoughtful and nice and appreciative of getting to work with the director Wim Wenders.

     

  4. 9 hours ago, JosephStang said:

    I don't want to wait 2 weeks to stop being homeless and broke, and I don't want to wait 2 weeks to stop WWIII. I want to be treated correctly and I want to stop the war and I want both those things RIGHT FUCKING NOW. I've suffered this for 7 years. Your entire life is built on science and I am the King of science. We know this because we know I discovered the theory of everything. Don't tell me to wait. It's gross.

    I think you might should look into posting on abovetopsecret.com. That site seems more your speed. Plenty of conspiracy-minded people there.

  5. On 11/17/2023 at 6:40 PM, Chewbacca said:

    Those poor, oppressed white guys.  When will they ever catch a break?

    I used to have this routine I’d do with a friend from Niger when we were working. He’d say how easy the white man has it in America and I’d jokingly retort back how hard it is being white in this country. “Don’t you know the struggle is real for the white man? We have always had it rough and never can catch a break. It’s rough being white in a country not built for us!” 
     

    If we were out in public doing mockery like that I think some people would think we were being serious. White people, men in particular, have the easiest existence in this country economically. I had and have more respect for that man ascending to a position where he made so much money that he could let his wife go to medical school and have no monetary issues at all for his family while she finishes up. White people making great money? Yeah we’re a dime a dozen.

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  6. 2 hours ago, atomheartbevo said:

    For those worried about gambling and what it can do to people, go hang out at a convenience store in a low-income neighborhood or rural area and have your eyes opened.  It’s here, it’s just so pervasive you don’t realize it.  

    I can confirm this also here where I live in East Harlem. I get on the 6 train at 103rd street sometimes when I head to mid-town and right next to it is a bodega that sells lottery tickets. Some of the poorest people in my neighborhood are the ones in there day after day handing over what little money they have hoping to strike it rich. The line is always longer for the lottery than the one to buy something to eat or drink. It is beyond sad to see it honestly. 

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  7. 1 hour ago, mchookem said:

    im flying overseas for the first time in a couple of months. i should really quit reading this thread. 

    You’ll be fine, unless you aren’t. In which case it was nice knowing you.

    Seriously flying overseas is safe and your flight will be just fine. I feel safer 40000 feet up than I do attempting to cross the street in Manhattan during daylight hours.

  8. 44 minutes ago, Red Five said:

    We also don't have to worry about our president overthrowing democracy and installing himself as a dictator. So, you know, that's nice too. 

    Oh you think senile Joe only wants a 2nd term? He’s busy rigging this election and then the day after he takes office again he’s naming himself dictator for life. It’ll also be written into law that Hunter will be named president upon his death so get ready for a whole lot of wild parties at the White House.

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  9. 19 hours ago, Royalfan5 said:

    For me I keep finding it an increasing turnoff. (I had a front row seat for an Uncles horrendous gambling problem, and I’ve never placed sports bets because of that and almost no other gambling) I’ve always been a big sports in general guy, but with gambling stuff seeping into all levels of the coverage and I hear my coworkers keep talking about their increasing bets,(and none them bet two years ago at all) it just makes me feel like something bad is going to evolve out of the spread. 

    Pretty much most of the dialogue now at work about sports has to do with gambling. I place some small bets, but I don’t talk about them. Overall I would say that for myself I now have even less interest in pro and college sports than I did before, which was already little to none.

  10. I am not sure that telling anyone to rush out and watch a film that has a main character who cleans toilets in Tokyo will get anyone to watch it. That isn’t the point of the film though. I suggested this movie to someone on this site because you cannot help but feel good after seeing it. It stars Koji Yakusho as Hirayama and he has minimal dialogue. His facial reactions to things that happen in his day make this film beyond amazing to watch and so uplifting. He is content with his life and I find myself identifying with many of the characteristics his character portrays in this wonderful movie. It’s two hours of a thoroughly great movie-going experience. I have watched it more than once and I enjoy it more each time and see something new as well when I see it again. Highly recommend this movie.

     

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  11. 1 hour ago, Nicole44 said:

    I don’t know if this is Starboard and Port (the two miscreants murdering great white sharks) but this is kinda terrifying:

     

    Watching them do their thing is pretty cool. The oceans are their world to do what they want to. Those orcas are infinitely smarter than the collective IQ of my hometown.

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  12. Watching the creatures of the ocean do their thing is pretty cool. I’ve been lucky enough to get to swim a few miles out off the coast of Oahu with sharks and got to watch them up close. This year I have swimming with humpback whales on the list. I swam with reef sharks as well, but they were fairly docile and seemed really used to being around people.

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  13. On 2/5/2024 at 10:21 AM, Ghost of LL said:

    It's not the worst movie I've ever seen.  But it's the one that makes me the angriest.

    You had Bryan Cranston and Catherine O'Hara and Sam Rockwell in a cast, and this is the shit you turned out?  I mean, fucking seriously?  It's only redeeming quality was that it wasn't badly acted.  The decent acting just revealed how awful everything else was.

    I sweatergawd, I was ready to leave after the first scene.  Actually, in the middle of the first scene.  The CGI was so distractingly bad, and the plot really made no sense (so there's a lounge full of beautiful people all drinking and partying at 7:00 AM in Santorini, and literally every one of them is a spy/hitman/hitwoman?).  And honestly, that was probably the high point.

    Goddamn, it was so bad.

    I walked out about 45-1 hour in. This was, well, this was a movie that should never have been made. I really Sam Rockwell so it was not fun walking out of a movie he’s in. I am loathe to criticize movies as a whole because not everyone likes the same kind of style of movie or genre, but this was a trainwreck of a movie from what I watched.

  14. Last night while I was at work one of the people I work with received a call. He immediately looked crushed. I asked him what happened and he said that the woman who helped raised him, his grandmother, passed away. It seemed like this was completely unexpected. All I knew to do was give him a hug and let him cry for awhile. I am not much on hugs and physical contact with people, but I can recognize when someone really needs that. I got his number and told him to just text or call to talk. His mom and dad had no part in his upbringing and it was an aunt and uncle and grandmother who raised him.
     

    I worry about him because I do not want him to go overboard and drink heavily. I know he had one last night before he left. I just told him to try and gather his thoughts and grieve for as long as he wants in whatever way he wants. He’s a really good guy, but this just hit him like a rock. 

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  15. Spoiler

    On Tuesday, Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema announced that she would not be seeking re-election in the United States Senate, a development that changed the dynamic in what's expected to be one of 2024's most competitive races. Though her tenure in the Senate was just one term, few elected officials were more polarizing or distinctive. Here, Defector presents two perspectives on her political career and legacy.

    Point: Kyrsten Sinema Was The Perfect Senator For A Moment Without A Purpose, By David Roth

    The political obituaries for Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, many of which give the impression of having been pre-written in the way that newspapers do for public figures whose last and signal contribution to their legacy will be dying at some point TBD, tend to mention what she was and did before she came to the United States Senate five years ago. These are interesting things, especially by Senate standards—Sinema was a social worker and an anti-war activist, a failed progressive candidate for local offices and then a successful and progressively less principled one for national ones. All of those are more interesting than the years of undistinguished and lavishly well-compensated corporate board service that await Sinema, who is 47, over the rest of her life. None of them really seem meaningful at all in light of what she became, which is something like the living emblem of America’s luridly uninhabitable upper house. Hit a cheeky curtsey while casting a thumbs-down no-vote on a billraising the national minimum wage to $15 and whatever or whoever you were before having done so will naturally matter less. Or, anyway, all the various possibilities latent in that biography seem less significant than what you have become instead.

    The United States Senate, in its current toxic senescence, offers a great deal to loathe. Its members posture and bluster and never do anything or leave; the ubiquity of the filibuster during Mitch McConnell’s time atop the institution ran it into a state of permanent brownout long before McConnell himself started powering-down like C-3PO during public appearances. Nothing works, nothing happens; as a general rule, the most action in the Senate is either when it pulls together to deliver itself of a 3000-page omnibus funding bill once per year or when one of the chamber’s many grandiose octogenarians seems notably closer to death than usual. With the filibuster’s supermajority threshold making regular business impossible, there is nothing left but a competition between variously exhausting aesthetics. 

    And if Sinema was not a worse Senator than most—if she seemed, given her status as “a committed centrist,” to be trying her hardest to be either the 50th best or 50th worst Senator, depending on your perspective—her aesthetic was undeniably among the most exhausting on offer. When Walter Benjamin warned of the aestheticization of politics as a hallmark of fascism, it was in a broader sense—a familiar one in which voters who have given up on actually getting anythingfrom their politics instead express themselves by proxy through their alignment with various degraded and degrading champions. Sinema, in her load-bearing outfits—lunchboxes and statement necklaces and eyeglass frames that would give Prue Leith a tummyache—was the farcical version of that running concurrently with the tragic version currently climbing like black mold over every corner of American public life. In lieu of noteworthy public service, there was just a relentlessly public serving of lewks.

    She was not an avatar for her state’s voters, with whom she made a habit of avoiding any kind of contact from the moment she entered the Senate; she was also not, in the way that Senators tend to age and blanch into something indistinct and vaguely the color of money, just dressing for the job she had. Sinema was representing herself and herself only; she raised money and still has it, $10.6 million in campaign funds that she now won’t spend, but her compromises, which came in time to become the whole of her politics, left her with nothing much to sell. The stilted meta-governance that became her hallmark guaranteed that the references through which she communicated weren’t really attached to anything. Her thumbs-down against the $15 minimum wage echoed the one cast by Arizona Sen. John McCain, but was in point of fact just an echo. He cast his against a Republican vote to end the Affordable Care Act, and that heresy became a part of his legacy; she cast hers against that minimum-wage increase, and it wasn’t really a heresy at all, just someone ostentatiously performing the blank sadism of centrist politics. It was just her doing what she did, in short, which was keep things from happening in a visually busy way. Sinema governed, in that moment and in general, like a layoff email with an incongruous and jarring number of Zany Face Emojis in it.

    It is worth taking a moment, here, to consider what the 50th-worst Senator actually does, and how lousy such a public servant would be. “She refused to help Senate Democrats end or weaken filibuster rules, which require 60 votes to advance most legislation,” the Wall Street Journal wrote after her announcement. “She made Biden scale back his multibillion-dollar Build Back Better agenda. She single handedly forced the party to scuttle its plans to raise the top marginal rates for corporate, capital-gains and individual-income taxes. Later, she made the party drop plans to increase taxes on a key source of private-equity managers’ income.” It is true, I guess, that Sinema could have been worse; it is also hard to see how she could have done much less. All those bygones in her biography suggest that Sinema might have been more, or different, than the neon pylon standing athwart any kind of equity or progress that she became, but that wasn’t really her, or how she understood the job. 

    That, too, was symbolic in a damning and familiar way. Like many other people who once presumably had beliefs, she came to mistake the Senate’s smug and sclerotic unworkability as its function; as such, she misunderstood all the things that she prevented from happening as her doing her job, and seems to see all the governance-shaped anti-governance that she authored as her legacy. “Because I choose civility, understanding, listening, working together to get stuff done,” she said in her announcement on Tuesday, “I will leave the Senate at the end of this year.” That sentence is opaque and cynical and self-congratulatory, but there is also no indication that she doesn’t believe in it, to the extent that there is any evidence of belief to be found here. 

    Mostly, though, the sentence does not really scan, and in a way that perfectly fits its author—it has all those Senatorial words in it, but the “because” makes it incomprehensible. Here’s the real epitaph for Kyrsten Sinema as a Senator, then: She did what she did, and said what she said, and it was all very bright and easy to see, but “because” was always her undoing. Signifiers and symbols, accessories and flair, wrapped around nothing—not a reference, not even an echo, but just a strange testy silence. It is difficult to imagine an enigma whose solution could be less interesting. 


    Counterpoint: Kyrsten Sinema Is A Vicious Day-Glo Demon And The World Is Demonstrably Worse Because She Was Born, By Albert Burneko

    What a horrible nightmare of a person Kyrsten Sinema is. That she might end up having been the signal political figure of our time—a period in which the day-to-day work of elected officials has become so hopelessly divorced from the material conditions their work nominally governs that "Looks like those clowns in Congress did it again. What a bunch of clowns" can function as the full ideological expression and sum total contribution of an actual Senator—does nothing to redeem her, personally. At a certain point you could extend her a kind of sour grudging credit, I guess, for having pioneered a new depth of undisguised cynicism in politics, a dark idiocratic abyssal layer where nothing has any value except to the extent that it demonstrably foils one's own political party and sells out one's own voters in service to one's patrons. This is the kind of credit you give when you walk into an apocalyptically ruined public bathroom, freeze, and say, "Whoa, somebody took one crazy friggin' dump in here."

    This society's total prostration could hardly find a better—which is to say worse—avatar than Kyrsten Sinema, the mandate that nothing may ever be allowed to disrupt its consumption (or even to facilitate the hope that it could be slowed) congealed into a sneering blonde Karen theatrically performing her own imaginary cuteness while she kills even mild and popular compromise initiatives toward a better future. It's rare for a single person to hold that kind of power, and unspeakably awful and sad that it fell into the hands of an absolute F-minus of a human being.

    In any case, if holding her spiteful, obstructive, nihilistic line turns out not to have benefited any electoral ambitions—there's no real broad base for a program best described as "the most hateful possible centrism," to the surprise of no one else—it's also not clear that Sinema ever authentically had any, at least as such things might be said to exist separate from her own quest to get ahead. Which fits, since she also lacks any authentic political beliefs, convictions, or sympathy to or solidarity with humanity, at least as such things might be said to exist separate from her own quest to get ahead. Her constituents as electoral politics defined them hated her guts; on the other hand she all but explicitly did not consider them her real constituents. Her real constituency (assuming Literally Dracula doesn't count here) is the class of rich freaks for whose benefit she will now even more openly serve. Few could promise to protect them with as little shame, or as much sheer sadistic glee. I wish her all the very worst, forever and ever.

    https://defector.com/point-counterpoint-senator-kyrsten-sinema-retires
     

    I have met one of the two authors of this piece at Defector’s annual birthday celebration. David Roth would fit in around here. He is someone that I am sure others read with their Defector subscription. It’s mostly sports, but he’s a great read on any topic he writes about, even when it’s his Mets failing him again.

    Albert Burneko is also a great read. That man knows a con artist since he’s a fan of all the Washington sports teams. 

  16. On 2/26/2024 at 11:02 PM, Parliament said:

    I haven’t posted here for awhile so I’m chiming in to remind y’uns of how much I appreciate this thread.  I’ve had some friends and family go through bad things.  Got a cousin who spent the last 26 years totally 100% committed to his wife and six kids.  Turns out his wife is nutso, and was carrying on an 2.5 year affair with their neighbor and friend.  I honestly believe if she hadn’t asked for a divorced he’d be trying to work it out.

    He seems to he doing OK but as we know here, You.  Never. KNOW.  I worry about him taking up with another woman before he’s right in his head and finding one who’s very bad for him.  Was joking with his brother that any woman he does take up with is gonna get a full background check from us.  Like family interviews and such.  I was joking when I said it but if his brother calls and wants to do it, I’m in my pickup.  We’ll grill her kin.  And this thread will make me better at it.  That hussy is gonna get a full body cavity search.  When we’re done with her, if she hasn’t run off, she’s the one.

    Anyway.  There’s entire pages in this thread that are all dark.  Please don’t ever go thinking there aren’t lurkers learning.  We’re all just learning and trying our darndest to become a better version of ourselves.

    Have a great evening, guys.

    I feel for your cousin as no one should ever be in that position. I hope that he gets some good guidance through what will be some rough sailing. Man that’s so hard to read and I really feel sad for him right now. Better days will eventually come, but right now that doesn’t help him much. Be there for him and call him regularly to give him an ear that’ll listen to him. 

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  17. I realize everyone can score in the NBA now, but getting beat by 52 points means you are just not really trying. I do not watch the NBA like I once did due to other interests in life, but man lopsided beatdowns like this seem far more common now. 

  18. I went to a 2am showing on opening night because I worked late. Seeing this in IMAX is definitely the way to do it. I thoroughly enjoyed it and the pacing was good. The battle scenes were really, really well done. Javier Bardem is still really cool in whatever he does and his character is my favorite.

    A manager at work started reading the Dune books again (big sci-fi fan apparently) because myself and another co-worker read a lot of books in general (said he felt like he should be reading something because of how much we read) and I told him to go see the movie as it wouldn’t disappoint. If you have an aversion to long movies just stay home. It’ll save you having to come here to complain about three hours you had to spend around people in a theater. If you can handle sitting for three hours then go see this and enjoy a wonderful movie.

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  19. 37 minutes ago, Red Five said:

    If someone told me that they read a book about the Black Plague at least once a year, I'd probably walk away slowly, Homer Simpson into the bushes style.

    Well he told me his wife enjoys the macabre so it fits her personality. Honestly the book was really engaging and written in a way that does make me eventually want to reread it myself. Showing the various iterations of the plague and how and where they originated (And still survive at)  made for some pretty compelling storytelling. So many different things had to happen all at once for the plague to be as deadly as it was. It was a perfect storm of unfortunate events. Again this is outside of my normal reading, but I’m glad I read it and learned a good bit about a really brutal period of history.

  20. A manager at work recommended this book to me recently. He lent me the copy that he said his wife reads at least once a year. It’s outside of what I normally read about, but I found it really interesting and engaging to read. I see why his wife enjoys reading it regularly. I would recommend this one, especially when thinking about what we went through with COVID.

    IMG_0050.thumb.jpeg.c1e2e94314421db1697e262eceaa60c6.jpeg

  21. 1 hour ago, Bozo_Casanova said:

    Trust me. Nothing about my views on American healthcare or anything involving the exchange of money for goods and services is Pollyannish. 
    But when it comes to primary care, Amazon can’t do worse than what we’ve got, because economies of scale work.  I’ve got no illusions about the potential downsides, they are already with us.

    So far at One Medical everyone has seemed less stressed out, and far more patient centered. He me of the docs told me they liked it because he “just just practices medicine here.”

    Isnt that right across the Lincoln Tunnel? 

    It is. Only one stop across. She has a waterfront apartment last I remember. She grew up in Jersey from the time her parents moved the family from Nigeria to the US when she was 7. She still has one of the best stories I’ve ever heard about being an undocumented immigrant and not realizing it until she needed to apply for college.
     

    Work wise she was completely stressed by her old job that she was at for several years. Loved the patients she had, but the stress of pushing people in and out so quickly wore on her a whole bunch it seemed. 

  22. I know a pediatrician who got completely fed up with overbooking at a hospital she worked for in New Jersey. She left and last I know she was working in a hospital in Manhattan in a newborn ward and also teaches there as well. She enjoys that more than the constantly overbooked days she had before. Still lives in Weehawken I believe and makes the commute over here.

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