Despite all my rage, I am still just a rat adding sage. pic.twitter.com/5JCO10MWt0

— Kibblesmith ⚔️ (@kibblesmith) September 6, 2017

Note: It’s only September, fercryingoutloud. Don’t go smashing any pumpkins.

I just want to bang on the drum all day:

Oh, and if you came in looking for Todd Rundgren:

Someone really needs to teach that bird how to play this.

Debt ceiling? What a joke:

This whole debt ceiling business is a gigantic scam.

It comes up every several months, and when it does, politicians on both sides of the aisle spend a few weeks hyperventilating about it, with the GOP yammering that they will not approve a debt hike without some minor (and meaningless) Democrat concession of some sort, while the Democrats squeal that the GOP is playing fast and loose with the financial status of the US government and economy, and we’re all gonna die.

Pure theater, and not very exciting, or even amusing, theater at that.

Here’s the truth: the debt ceiling is always going to be hiked, no matter what. By the time it reaches a hundred trillion dollars (and a hundred trillion dollars will buy you a one- pound bag of rice), it will still be raised.

This is a non-issue, and Trump is absolutely correct to treat it as one. The GOP is just pissed because he’s taking one of their most prized hobby horses off the table and they lose one of their favorite venues for political posturing.

The GOP holds 52 (of 100) Senate seats. What do you think they’d be doing differently if they held 62 or 72?

Based on what I’ve seen, the answer is “Not a damn thing.”

I would not expect to find one speck of fish in this can:

FakeMeats.com (ha!) does carry this product, with a slightly different label, for $2.29 a can. Customer reviews have been pretty favorable, though I’m waiting to hear from Jessica Simpson.

Now kicking for the Lee’s Summit North Broncos, number 95, Nick Havlik:

Mr. Havlik is the son of this righteous babe. Lee’s Summit is southeast of Kansas City, Missouri. It is not actually named after Robert E. Lee.

People who have known me for a quarter-century or so tend not to forget the things I’ve said and done. The substitute receptionist — not the usual one, mind you, but the substitute — hailed me as I passed the desk with “You did know Debbie Gibson was on Dancing with the Stars, didn’t you?” Well, of course; as a Debhead of long standing, I have to keep up with these developments. The teen queen is now forty-seven? Well, of course; these things happen.

And this is where it started, way back in 1986:

Deb’s partner on DWTS is Alan Bersten, a four-year veteran who was promoted to Professional this season.

There is, I decided, not a whole lot of emotional gratification in the absentee ballot; mostly, it reminds me that I am old and infirm. And frankly, passing in front of a mirror tells me that every stinking day.

So I betook myself to the actual polling place and hiked (well, with the walker) about 50 feet uphill. A guy in a Cox truck stared at me in disbelief. “Where’d you park?”

I pointed to my car, six spaces away.

“You want me to move your car up here?” “Up here” was along the side of the building, adjacent to the one officially marked handicap space.

“I’ll be all right,” I said.

He nodded — this is not something anyone wants to argue about — and grabbed the door for me.

And at about 5:03 pm, I started on the three pages of ballot. I’d pretty much made up my mind beforehand, so I really didn’t need to read all that legal verbiage. And the machine responded with 1024, 1025 and 1026; assuming everyone filled out all three pages — there’s no reason to assume otherwise, since there’s one poll worker dedicated to the task of handing you all three of them — I was the 324th voter.

Incidentally, the person in front of me was a long-legged young woman in a short leg cast; as I was leaving, a gentleman about my age arrived in a wheelchair. Had I had any doubts about what I was doing, I would have felt vindicated right about then.

“My name is Juan Pablo Montoya. I drive Bugatti. Prepare for speed.”

Deadpan howler from Wikipedia:

The Chiron’s top speed is electronically limited to 420 km/h (261 mph) for safety reasons.

Meanwhile, do not assume that this is the outer limit of the car’s velocity. Our driver here doesn’t:

[T]he company will disengage the limiter for all record attempts — just like it did with the Veyron. The problem is that nobody knows exactly how fast it will be until drivers start pushing the envelope. Assumedly, it will be faster than its predecessor. Bugatti upgraded the vehicle’s turbocharged 8.0-liter W16 to 1,500 horsepower and 1,180 pound-feet of torque, whereas the Veyron Super Sport only had 1,200 hp and 1,106 foot-pounds. On the downside, the new car is about 330 pounds heavier.

Realistically, we don’t see Bugatti encountering much trouble as it tries for speed records. The automaker is already promising a 0-to-124 mph time of 6.5 seconds and 0-to-186 in under 13.6 seconds — the latter of which is about a second quicker than the old Veyron’s best. But there is a big difference between paper and practice.

For this run, veteran racing driver Juan Pablo Montoya hustled the vehicle up to 400 kph (249 mph) in a scant 32.6 seconds before swapping throttle for brake. Slowing to a halt took another 9.3 seconds, which isn’t bad for about one-third the speed of sound. Montoya also bested his own personal speed, set behind the wheel of an Indy car, with the Chiron and says he’s looking forward to next year’s world speed record attempt.

“I think I’m probably too old for 300 horsepower.” — Me, after returning a borrowed Infiniti Q50 with a turbo V6.

This gall admits of no mitigation:

And why, you ask, would he want to do that?

My school issued me an iPad and I want to make it so that this iPad isn’t on their server. They block everything and I want to use an iPad that works with every site/app. Thanks.

In my idea of a perfect world, this jerk wouldn’t have been born, but I’m not in a position to be that picky. So let the school throw his butt on the street and send him a bill for $900 or so to cover the equipment he’s so eager to ruin.

Received yesterday: a spam offering a “New Wild Lettuce Video.”

I guess this had to be somewhere between romaine and Romulan. It goes on: “Similar to Morphine: The Best Natural Painkiller that Grows in Your Backyard.”

The rest of it is poorly disguised filler ripped off from some medieval-history article.

And I don’t get this URL: lostways.download. Plus a whole bunch of random spew. It’s a real top-level domain, but I wouldn’t trust it on general principle.

This week Prince George, having turned four this summer, started primary school at Thomas’s in Battersea. To the school, he’s just another student; there will be none of that His Royal Highness Prince George of Cambridge stuff. Nor will he be listed as George Alexander Louis Mountbatten-Windsor or anything that complicated.

What to do, then? Scarcely any American publication is more royals-obsessed than People, so People gets hit with the question:

[T]hough that is technically the royal family’s last name, it’s rarely the one members of the family use in day-to-day life. For example, Prince William and Prince Harry went by William Wales and Harry Wales during their own school days, as well as their years in the armed forces. Why? Because their father, Prince Charles, is the Prince of Wales. It’s an homage to their father’s title, for occasions when “Prince” just feels a bit too formal.

So what will George do? “Wales” might make sense, as that’s what his dad did — especially because, most likely, George’s own father will be the Prince of Wales himself one day. But William now has a title of his own: Duke of Cambridge. So just as William took his own last name from his father’s title, so will George — and he’ll be George Cambridge in his school records and to his peers and teachers.

And that teensy little tag on George’s school bag indeed says “George Cambridge.”

Most issues of Hilde Lysiak’s Orange Street News carry a short story. Now, though, she’s writing at book length:

Her new book, Hero Dog!, co-written with her father, Matthew Lysiak, a former New York Daily News reporter, is the first in the new Hilde Cracks the Case series from Scholastic, which is currently being developed into a TV show. This book, like others planned in the series, follows the mostly fictional exploits of real-life reporter Hilde, who made headlines herself last year when she scooped every other media outlet and was the first to report on an alleged murder in her hometown.

I hope she has time for all this and can still maintain the News back home in Selinsgrove.

They’re asking for a whole lot of money, as usual:

• Ordinance No. 25,750: A new quarter-cent sales tax, effective Jan. 1, 2018.
• Ordinance No. 25,751: A temporary, 1-cent sales tax to begin Jan. 1, 2018, and expiring April 1, 2020, to fund capital improvement projects.
• Proposition 1: A $490.56 million bond issue for street construction and repair projects.
• Proposition 2: A $26.795 million bond issue for bridge construction, repair and rehabilitation projects.
• Proposition 3: A $27.585 million bond issue for the construction, repair and maintenance of traffic control equipment.
• Proposition 4: A $60 million bond issue for economic and community development, including job creation programs.
• Proposition 5: A $137.72 million bond issue for construction, expansion and improvement of city parks.
• Proposition 6: A $23.91 million bond issue for the construction of a new library and remodeling, equipping and improvements at existing libraries.
• Proposition 7: A $20.185 million bond issue for renovations, furnishings and improvements at buildings in the Civic Center Complex.
• Proposition 8: A $20.395 million bond issue for upgrades to the city’s transit system, including the purchase of buses and improvements to bus stops.
• Proposition 9: A $13.085 million bond issue for expanding, renovating and improving the city’s Central Maintenance Facilities Complex at SW 15 and S Portland Avenue.
• Proposition 10: A $62.17 million bond issue for improving and equipping the city’s drainage control system.
• Proposition 11: An $8.865 million bond issue for repairs, renovations and improvements at Chesapeake Energy Arena.
• Proposition 12: A $30.84 million bond issue for the construction of a new Police Training Center, to be a part of a new combined Police-Fire Training Center.
• Proposition 13: A $45.35 million bond issue for the construction of a new Fire Training Center, to be a part of a new combined Police-Fire Training Center.

I expect all the bond issues to pass, since nobody will notice how they’re paid: through a small levy as part of the property tax. Over the years, the city has made an effort to keep that levy at or below 16 mills; it is currently 14.81 mills.

The MAPS 3 sales tax ends 31 December 2017; this new penny would kick in the next day. So the only “new” tax is that quarter-cent, which is intended to pay for more firefighters and police officers. This is over and above the 0.75 cent currently levied for public safety. Should both sales-tax measures pass, the combined state and city sales tax will rise to 8.625 percent.

They’re everywhere:

I have seen a couple of instances on social media of people pointing out, “See, all this is happening right after the U.S. withdrew from the Paris Climate Agreement!”

Sure, but even if you believe the Agreement is funding some sort of Captain Planet-type corps of superheroes pushing back against the cruel thermometer of Wicked Industrial Mankind (it isn’t), there’s one tiny problem: “The Paris Agreement (French: Accord de Paris), Paris climate accord or Paris climate agreement, is an agreement within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) dealing with greenhouse gas emissions mitigation, adaptation and finance starting in the year 2020.”

Catch that last? Twenty-twenty. So far, Paris hasn’t produced anything but fancy talk and high-falutin’ plans.

In fact, though President Trump most certainly has announced the U. S. would withdraw from the Agreement, it works out that the very earliest date by which this country could be out would be 4 November 2020, which just happens to be the day after the next Presidential elections, making this one of those safest of Presidential promises, slated to occur after the promiser’s term of office has ended.*

“But … but … CLIMATE CHANGE! Look at all these hurricanes!”

Um, no:

Looking back, the short-term “noise” of weather is huge compared to the long-term trendlines of climate: there’s a lot of jitter. On the scale of geologic time, the climate shows lovely rising and falling curves, Ice Age to Warm Period and back again, a bit sawtooth-y; zoom in to the span of a single human lifetime and the big curve vanishes under warm spells and cold snaps, floods and droughts. At no time has the planet been entirely Edenic: it’s a tough place for individual naked apes and it’s not all that great for the other critters, either: mortality is 100%.

I am persuaded that the single factor leading most people down the rabbit hole of “climate change” these days is the presence of a Ford F-250 truck with a Trump sticker on 35-inch wheels, two doors down.

The person who’s going to take this worst, you may be sure, is the guy who insists “See! It’s already proven!” Were that so, there’d be no reason to spend another 50 cents on research. So they’ll wait for the UN to fluff up some new way to pry dollars or euros out of working economies and then lavish them on Third World hellholes. It never takes long.

First order of business on this Monday morning is to shake the logs and see if anything even slightly amusing falls out.

hugh hefner death date:  Far as I know, no one’s died while going out with Hef.

decisive moments youtube moment bite this:  Yeah, that sounds pretty decisive to me.

yougore:  Featuring a collection of decisive biting moments from YouTube.

sister incest blog:  This has gotta be on Tumblr.

bat blog hoosier taxpayer:  So does this.

closest thing to cialis over the counter:  For you, probably Mucinex.

dorothy’s gnawing dark souls 3:  The closest thing to Mucinex over the counter.

valvoline rookwood:  She opened for Dorothy the year of the Gnawing Dark Souls 3 tour.

feral from the mortuary:  Growing up around dead things will do that to you.

audi from hell:  Oddly, it was sold at a Volkswagen dealer.

when the automobile manufacturer releases a new model in its wow series, it promises that drivers can expect to get mileage that varies by no more than 6.5 miles per gallon from its field-tested average of 28.4 miles per gallon. which solution represents the range of mileage you can expect from this:  They’re all 21.9 mpg, just like the Audi from Hell.

burp collaborator server:  God help you if you can’t burp on your own.

wank material:  For instance, anything referencing Rule 34.

There are times when jail time just doesn’t seem like enough:

Sometimes I think the brutal tar and feathers practice of our forebears should be brought back into fashion. If anyone needed a ride on a rail it is the top executives of Equifax. Not for the massive security breach, but that they took the time to sell off some stock before they announced the breach, knowing the value of the company would take a deserving hit. These executives make capitalists everywhere look bad. I’m not advocating brutal mob violence, but I would give a small cheer of approbation in this case.

And should they survive this journey out of town, their credit scores should be permanently fixed at 499.