They existed and were more of a new wave instrument at the time, but not heavily used in rock like that.
I was unaware of Brownsville Station when I was eleven.
Sorry to have failed your class professor.
We couldn’t all be Jack Black in high fidelity at that age.
I believe I was in sixth grade when that album came out.
First of all, it used a whole lot of synthesizers, which were pretty new technology at the time, and I felt like I was living in the future when I heard it.
As to the album cover, it somehow didn’t register with my that it was a baby smoking.
Rather, it made me think of teenagers smoking in the high school bathroom.
Motley Crue’s Smokin in the Boys Room came out a year later, so I don’t think that influenced my mental image.
I’d wager that his lease has a mandatory arbitration clause that requires him to pay up front then try to get it back via arbiters chosen by the landlord.
Not in computers. I’m an accountant. I don’t have enough money to throw the double middle fingers. Can somebody please, for the love of all that’s holy, show me the way out or, you know, come sneak onto my property when I’m not looking and delete me?
Edit: JUST now, I got told that I’m unprofessional because I refuse to give my personal cell phone number to all three thousand of our clients. I said that my private phone funded by my personal money is not a business asset and they can give me a company phone if they want me texting clients. This was met with a huff, turning of a back on me, and storming off.
There were a bunch of geese around my grandparents’ house when I was a kid. God those things would torment me. They had free range of the property and I tended to completely avoid the area they hung out because they were hyper aggressive and would chase after me every time I got anywhere near them. I was six years old, so it felt like they were as tall as me and they were definitely faster.
It wasn’t so bad once I got a little older, a little taller, and relied more on my bicycle than my feet for movement.
Nonetheless, those things gave me childhood trauma to the extent that I still can’t stand geese some forty five years later.
No. No it does not.
Michelle: When they go low we go high.
Kamala: Let the meme trolling begin!
If we do end up descending into a Draconian hellhole of an autocratic dictatorship at least the election run-up is going to be exponentially more entertaining than it was going to be with Joe.
I say that dictatorship part because don’t think for a second that the GOP is gonna just roll over and die. Expect hard-line challenges to vote counts in every single swing state.
Mutual disdain was the catalyst. I did it for eight years and probably lost fifteen years of life expectancy from it. Ungodly toxic environment. Fuck big firm accounting. Fuck them all in the most demeaning, painful way imaginable.
I make roughly one third the money today, and I’m much happier for it. I still make a comfortable living where I don’t particularly worry about money, so what would the additional two thirds do for me outside paying medical bills it causes?
No matter how much I try to remove my name from searches, I still get recruited by ambitious young people on a regular basis. I generally make them stop with a response that goes something like this:
I would rather have my eyes gouged out by the white hot barbed penis of Satan himself while he spits in my mouth than return to public accounting for any amount of money.
As a tax accountant, I sincerely hope this gets to a point where a vast majority of the population has no need for my services.
I used to play in the big leagues where none of my clients would ever qualify for this and their returns routinely took upwards of a hundred hours to complete. Those guys need to keep paying.
Now I play down in the minors a couple steps above the Block, and I hate seeing the owner sell these three or four hundred dollar returns that might take me an hour to complete in the first year and maybe thirty minutes in subsequent years.
There’s pretty much zero oversight for a supreme court justice, right? I’m kinda surprised he didn’t just lynch a few brown and/or gay people in his front yard because doing so would have equal consequence - none.
Late Friday night, the former president of the United States—and a leading candidate to be the next president—insinuated that America’s top general deserves to be put to death. That extraordinary sentence would be unthinkable in any other rich democracy. But Donald Trump, on his social-media network, Truth Social, wrote that Mark Milley’s phone call to reassure China in the aftermath of the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021, was “an act so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH.” (The phone call was, in fact, explicitly authorized by Trump-administration officials.) Trump’s threats against Milley came after The Atlantic’s publication of a profile of Milley, by this magazine’s editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg, who detailed the ways in which Milley attempted to protect the Constitution from Trump. And yet, none of the nation’s front pages blared “Trump Suggests That Top General Deserves Execution” or “Former President Accuses General of Treason.” Instead, the post barely made the news. Most Americans who don’t follow Trump on social media probably don’t even know it happened.
Trump’s rhetoric is dangerous, not just because it is the exact sort that incites violence against public officials but also because it shows just how numb the country has grown toward threats more typical of broken, authoritarian regimes. The United States is not just careening toward a significant risk of political violence around the 2024 presidential election. It’s also mostly oblivious to where it’s headed. Trump loves to hide behind the thin veneer of plausible deniability, but he knows exactly what he’s doing. If a mob boss were to say, “In times gone by, people like you would have had their legs broken,” nobody would mistake that for a historical observation. The suggestion is clear, and it comes from a man who has one of America’s loudest megaphones—one that is directed squarely at millions of extremists who are well armed, who insist that the government is illegitimate, and who believe that people like Milley are part of a “deep state” plot against the country. Academics have a formal term for exactly this type of incitement: stochastic terrorism. An influential figure with a large following demonizes a person or a group of people. The likelihood is strong that some small number of followers will take those words literally—when Trump implies that Milley deserves to be put to death, some of his disciples might take it as a marching order. The number of those who take action does not have to be large for the result to be horrific.
Already, one of Trump’s minions in Congress has echoed the incitement to violence. The Republican Paul Gosar of Arizona wrote—in his taxpayer-funded newsletter, no less—that “in a better society, quislings like the strange sodomy-promoting General Milley would be hung.” The meaning is not ambiguous: Gosar is explicitly saying that killing Milley would be desirable. From the November 2023 Issue: The Patriot As a political scientist who studies political violence across the globe, I would chalk up the lack of high-profile assassinations in the United States during the Trump and post-Trump era to dumb luck. Already in 2018, one deranged Trump follower, Cesar Sayoc, sent pipe bombs to public figures (and a media organization) who just so happened to be among those whom Trump most often attacked in his Twitter feed. Thankfully, nobody died—not because the dangers of Trump’s rhetoric were overstated but because Sayoc was bad at building bombs. Heading toward one of the most consequential, divisive elections in American history, every ingredient in the deadly recipe for political violence is already in the mix: high-stakes, winner-take-all politics; widespread conspiratorial delusions that detach followers from objective realities; a suggestion that one’s political opponents aren’t “real Americans”; a large supply of violent extremists with easy access to deadly weaponry; and a movement whose leader takes every opportunity to praise those who have already participated in a deadly attack on the government.
Eventually, all luck runs out. Political violence is notoriously difficult to forecast with precision, but would anyone really be surprised if Trump’s violent rhetoric led to real-world attacks in the run-up to the 2024 election—or in its aftermath, if he loses? For all of these reasons, Trump’s recent unhinged rant about Milley should be a wake-up call. But in today’s political climate, the incident barely registers. Trump scandals have become predictably banal. And American journalists have become golden retrievers watching a tennis-ball launcher. Every time they start to chase one ball, a fresh one immediately explodes into view, prompting a new chase. Eventually, chasing tennis balls gets old. We become more alive to virtually any distraction: The media fixate on John Fetterman’s hoodie instead of on stories about the relentless but predictable risk of Trump-inspired political violence. Bombarded by a constant stream of deranged authoritarian extremism from a man who might soon return to the presidency, we’ve lost all sense of scale and perspective. But neither the American press nor the public can afford to be lulled. The man who, as president, incited a violent attack on the U.S. Capitol in order to overturn an election is again openly fomenting political violence while explicitly endorsing authoritarian strategies should he return to power. That is the story of the 2024 election. Everything else is just window dressing.
Shhh… Nothing to see here. We’re busy setting the coals to the feet of a Democratic senator!
It was just one of those things. I needed to test same day, so I had to pay the premium.
It was about fifty dollars for three tests at CVS
Good. I’ve come down with something that mirrors what COVID felt like and have exhausted my supply of tests. They were pretty expensive to purchase.
How does one fall short of something that is infinitely lacking in stature?
I live in Texas. Is it my patriotic duty to go rub one out now?
And the synthesizers in the eighties were nothing like moogs
Irrelevant I guess. I was casually reliving a memory from when I was a child, but there’s always got to be a pedant to further solidify my general withdrawal from society because I’m clearly not satisfactorily intelligent enough for it.