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Ghost of LL

Burnt Ends
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Everything posted by Ghost of LL

  1. I would hope so. They're called "accountants." And I would expect that someone with that kind of money would have an accountant.
  2. That struck me, too. There's not much ground clearance. And the entire thing looked really very low to the ground.
  3. Jesus, I saw a cybertruck for the first time last night on 360, and it's even worse than the pictures indicate. I don't think I had seen a photo of the thing at night, but it's headlight configuration is completely absurd. It's just one long lightbar on the top of the (non-existent) grill and then two little lights down where fog lamps might ordinarily be.
  4. We did something very similar early in World War II. Under the Neutrality Act, we could not fly military aircraft to a delivery point within a combatant. So we'd fly Lend-Lease planes to airfields very close to the Canadian border, and the Canadians would cross and tow them across to an airstrip in Canada.
  5. You wanted that team gone because the editing was done to make you want that team gone. That team was the "heel." But they played the heel only because that's how the producers edited the footage after the race was concluded. And it made sense to make that team the heel knowing that they kept tenaciously sticking around through non-elimination legs, which ended up infuriating you (and probably me) and made for good television. Look at the last leg, though. Do you think they're going to have that dance troupe come in a day early on the spur of the moment? Do you think they'd be able to have that ballroom available a day early with no notice? Fuck no--this shit is planned out months in advance. And maybe you plan for that ballroom to be booked for eight hours, but that doesn't mean you can change the booking the day beforehand.
  6. In my household, the proper name of a poster on this very site is used as the word defined as "to shart oneself" after a particularly infamous incident at a Dallas-area country club. As in, "Fuck--I had to race back to the office after having lunch at the Chili Parlor because I was about to @DDD Dad myself."
  7. But not really, because you have to have all this shit set up. You have to have all the people in place at the challenges, and the venues of for the challenges need to be shuddered to the public/their normal operations. You can't just have teams showing up a day earlier than anticipated because the producers decided at the last minute that a particular team was in danger of elimination. And for the record, I'm very skeptical of the hypothesis that non-elimination legs weren't pre-set at the beginning of the race. Fan favorites are only fan favorites because of how the producers edit their footage after the race is concluded. So they're not worried that any particular team is going to get eliminated. They're going to edit the footage to make the surviving teams more popular.
  8. I don't agree. As noted above, the non-elimination legs always seemed timed to avoid eliminating a fan-favorite or otherwise interesting team. Probably just coincidental, but it raised the prospect that the results were rigged. With the "keep racing" legs, there's no possibility of that. They have to have the challenges up and running well in advance. So there's no way the producers can make a last-minute "let's make this a non-elimination leg" decision to preserve a favored team. As to this last leg, I think we all saw what that long flight from India to Frankfurt in coach can do to one's mental acuity and temperament. Now's when we get more fights and more muddle-brained decisionmaking.
  9. Playing Minnesota will cure a lot of what ails a power play.
  10. Ok--so in this scenario there's a big question that I think we could use some insight from current/former waiters and bartenders. GF ordered a bottle of chardonnay. I assume she then took the bottle to the table and drank that for the rest of the mean, right? So your waiter would've sold you the bottle of chardonnay at the table had you just ordered two glasses at the bar. But instead, he missed out on that sale (and the resulting tip) because you got your drinks at the bar. So the question is this: do the bartenders share their tips with the waiter? I know in most places, the waiters are expected to tip out the bartenders. I don't know that I've ever heard of it going the other way. So my suspicion is the answer is "no." If that's the case, then I short-tip the bartender a little bit and I tip the waiter on what he would've gotten had I ordered the bottle from him. So in practice, let's say the bottle was $100 (just trying to make the math easy). Ordinarily, I would tip the bartender $20. But in this scenario, I might tip the bartender $5 or $10 on the bottle and tip the waiter at my table $10-15, depending entirely on how much time I spent at the bar with that bottle and whether GF ordered another glass at the table after finishing that bottle.
  11. I’m just going to keep shit-talking this team. You’re welcome.
  12. So we’re just going to play like shit tonight and that’s just going to be the deal, huh? Great. Cool.
  13. And it was completely foreseeable, which is why the fine people at MGM are going to be paying me some $$$.
  14. Not at the Texas Honey Ham in West Lake Hills, my friend. The Yoga-Pant Mafia remains firmly in control in those parts.
  15. Nope. So I guess we're left with the conclusion that Tuesday probably doesn't tell us too much about what is going to happen in 2024.
  16. I think that's quite apparent. But that's only going to last so long. I don't think you can pull off a front-porch campaign in the 21st Century. I mean, yes and no. Did we really see anything Tuesday that is inconsistent with a national R+2 environment in 2024? I'm not sure that we did.
  17. The concern I have is that none of these races really reflect a polling "miss." The polls pretty accurately reflected that ol' Tate was going to win a tight race in Mississippi and that Bashear would win in KY. And I don't think any reputable pollster had the Ohio referenda being terribly close. All of which is to say that the resulting implication is that the polls on Biden's low popularity may be uncomfortably accurate. Now, I don't think that's reason to panic. Polls of a presidential election a year ahead of time have very little (no?) predictive value. For one thing, there's a year's worth of events that are going to occur, none of which can be predicted. And this coming year, those events are going to include criminal trials of one of the leading contenders. But beyond that, there's no campaigning going on. And campaigning is effective. Obviously. I mean, there's a multi-billion dollar industry built on the presumption that campaigns have an effect on voters' decisionmaking. But still--I'd probably prefer to have Biden be comfortably up on Trump in every poll.
  18. Egypt and Pakistan (and to a somewhat lesser degree, Brazil) are major American allies that get a ton of military aid, including technical assistance with things like maintenance. It would not at all surprise me if the equipment in those countries is in significantly better shape than the stuff that stayed in Russia.
  19. . . . and I don't think I'm alone on this. Talking this weekend with @Brisketexan and @Pescado_Rojo, I made the observation that whenever I hear about something from the '80s, my internal timeline is that "Oh, yeah--that was like 20 years ago." But then I heard this past weekend that Saturday was the 15th anniversary of the election of Barack Obama. And my reaction was, "that was only 15 years ago? It seems like it was closer to 50." And both Brisket and Fish agreed. So what the fuck is going on with us old men that we think 1983 was 20 years ago and 2008 was 40? Is it a symptom of just being old and nostalgic? Or is there something deeper about all the shit we've been through over the past 5-10 years?
  20. “That’s one less thing to worry about.”
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