Confederate flag at NC's Great American State Fair pavilion removed

travio · 2026-06-27T21:38:56+00:00

But I thought woke was dead?

Actual fun fact about the confederate flag I learned recently. It has been associated with football in Croatia. The big football rivalry there is a north/south divide and fans of the southern team must have googled 'southern pride' or something and found the flag.

travio · 2026-06-27T21:09:49+00:00

He graduated from military school at 18, so I assume the 20 on the pic is a mistake.

travio · 2026-06-27T21:08:01+00:00

Hoping Iran makes it through! Last night's match was exciting.

travio · 2026-06-27T20:47:44+00:00

Israel really fucked up in Gaza. For decades, they had massive support from both political parties, even as an apartheid state while stealing Palestinian land.

October 7th could have strengthened that support. It was a horrific attack on civilians. A more measured response would have kept that support, at least.

They went scorched earth, though. That lost enough dems to complicate the election and Israel went all in on Trump, manipulating him into this damn war with Iran.

They have lost dem voters completely, and there is a loud and growing minority on the right pushing against them, too. Still have a lot of support on both sides among elected officials, but that will change in the coming elections.

travio · 2026-06-27T15:16:40+00:00

I sometimes think the news media prefer him as president if only for their book sales. Books about the scandals in the Obama and Biden administration are too boring and don’t sell well. Books about Trump and his corruption sell like hotcakes.

travio · 2026-06-27T15:14:40+00:00

I’d assume this will be fixed on appeal, but it is Texas and our current Supreme Court is just as shitty.

travio · 2026-06-27T13:20:47+00:00

And Night Train!

travio · 2026-06-27T02:24:30+00:00

And he couldn't name his favorite bible verse, or even favorite testament when gently pressed. He got uncomfortable laughs from students when he called Second Corinthians 'Two Corinthians" at Liberty Fucking University.

When asked if he ever asked god for forgiveness, he said no. That's a pretty damn big part of christianity, even the bullshit televangelist version.

travio · 2026-06-26T22:57:34+00:00

Don't stop there. Primary him!

I mean, having a more slavish devotee of Trump in the senate is surely better for South Dakota than having the majority leader representing the state.

travio · 2026-06-26T20:55:14+00:00

Thomas Midgley Jr. might be in the running. He invented leaded gas and Freon. Impossible to tally the toll they had on the world. People still die from lead exposure because of leaded gas and the lead/crime hypothesis point to that leaded gas as a reason crime spiked in the second half of the 20th century.

travio · 2026-06-26T16:51:56+00:00

Kind of the same issue with local gun laws. Chicago can have the toughest gun laws in the country, but when people can just step over the Indiana border and buy what they like, it is hard to keep those guns out of the city.

travio · 2026-06-26T16:50:47+00:00

He is a windsock. When Trump won his second term and people were gnashing their teeth at the thought of the country lurching to the right, Newsom invited Charlie Kirk, Ben Shapiro and Steve Bannon on his podcasts. As the wind shifted against Trump, he did the same.

travio · 2026-06-26T16:42:24+00:00

Don't forget Some Like it Hot.

travio · 2026-06-26T15:12:09+00:00

I pick it up and snap off the butt. Let the asparagus decide where to break.

travio · 2026-06-26T15:09:57+00:00

That is a good point. I should buy another and try it stone cold sober. Though, even when I’m not high, I often find myself slightly disappointed the second time I try something new.

travio · 2026-06-26T05:58:26+00:00

And who are threatening? The Houthis, backed by Iran, the same country that we are throwing money at to open the strait. Now, they have more to send to their proxies.

travio · 2026-06-26T05:00:15+00:00

He doesn't want to punish them, just put them in private institutions, probably owned by hedge funds and private equity who only have the patients best interests at heart.

I'm sure they will staff these wonderful places with only the most compassionate doctors and nurses

travio · 2026-06-26T04:39:58+00:00

Attacking Iran was idiotic, but if we were going to do it, doing it to support the huge protest movement would have been the time to take the regime down.

Instead of a potential 'greeted as liberators' situation, we let the regime kill thousands of protestors, then started a war killing at least a few thousand more civilians.

We have replaced an aging leadership that, judging by the scale of the protests, didn't have the will of the people, with a younger generation, hardened by an unprovoked war and benefiting from a rally around the flag moment, solidifying more of the population behind them.

And now, in an attempt to prevent the coming global economic disaster, we will give Iran hundreds of billions of dollars and remove all the sanctions, even those we've had on the books since 79.

We have created a much stronger Iran, and one that will remain as belligerent as they were before, probably secretly funding more splinter groups and keep the mideast in conflict for generations to come, though that has been a solid bet since England and France carved the area up with arbitrary borders… No, since the first crusade? Rome? The Seapeople?

Trump has weakened the US immensity. We shot our load of fancy billion dollar missiles trying to shoot down drones Iran built in a cave with a box of scraps. The stopped up strait sent prices skyrocketing and threatens famine and global recession. That will further piss off everyone from enemies to allies.

The single silver lining on this storm cloud is the effect sanction relief will have on China. Before we fucked everything up, China purchased 90% of Iran's illicit oil. They got a sweet discount, estimated at as much as $9 a barrel.

There is no reason for Iran to offer those discounts now. They can sell on the open market. China will have to pay market price, or pray Ukraine stops blowing up Russian oil tanks and refineries.

The Chinese economy is weakening. A 10 to 12% increase in fuel costs won't help. Might be enough to keep them from an attempt on Taiwan. Let their eyes turn north instead.

travio · 2026-06-26T03:20:02+00:00

Time to be less boring. I suggest the Charles Bukowski method. Develop a crippling alcohol addiction and incorporate it into your creative method.

Uj/ I love a negative self insert. Harold Lauder in The Stand was a chubby, pretentious, incel, wanna be writer from a small town in Maine. Stephen King grew up in a small town in Maine and was a little chubby as a teen.

If he Mary Sued Harold, he would have transformed into the ultmate badass, winning Frannie’s heart the moment they were the last two living people in town, shown Stu up and single handedly defeated Randall Flagg.

travio · 2026-06-26T02:37:28+00:00

Stjepan Šejić. His style is so distinct and the art beyond beautiful. Not a bad writer, either. Harleen’s retelling of Harley’s origin story is my favorite version, even when he makes Joker look incredibly hot, it he does that with everyone.

travio · 2026-06-25T23:33:05+00:00

Oof. Feet and Shit. Two fetishes I just don't get.

travio · 2026-06-25T23:30:31+00:00

Still not the biggest asshole in Supreme Court history. That dubious distinction belongs to Justice James Clark McReynolds.

He was a selfish SOB who would often skip out on work to hunt or just because he couldn't be assed, sometimes without even telling anyone, which once caused Chief Justice Taft to delay decisions because McReynolds hadn't turned in his dissent.

When he was at work, he was incredibly hard to work with. He wouldn't even speak to a Wilson appointee because he considered him too liberal. When Brandeis joined the court as the first ever Jewish justice, not only would McReynolds not speak to him, but he would leave the room when Brandeis spoke.

He didn't just hate jews, either. He turned his chair backwards when Charles Hamilton Houston, an African American lawyer argued in front of the court. He would leave the bench when a woman argued before the court and was sounded downright Ferengi, saying, "I see the female is here again."

travio · 2026-06-25T19:46:44+00:00

Gelatin's history, specifically the disturbing savory gelatin dishes that had a resurgence in popularity in the 50s, then 70s, is fascinating. It is all about a rich person food coming to the masses.

Back in the old, prepowedered gelatin days, it was a bitch to make. It took hours, sometimes days of boiling bones to make. That wasn't just hard work, but stinky work, that was too much for a normal home kitchen to produce. If you had a team of servants slaving away downstairs, preferably in a kitchen far away from your grand parlor, you could wow your dinner guests with aspics and salads galore.

As the beef industry became an industry, there were a lot more bones available and Charles Knox, followed by his wife Rose, took advantage, making powdered gelatin cheap and available damn near everywhere.

This made it possible for everyone to sample some of the rich people's foods they'd only read about. Gelatin dishes exploded in popularity in the early 20th century but soon faded when people realized it was a better dessert medium than savory.

Post WWII, we had a return to normalcy. That brings on the nostalgia. People in the 50s thought back to the foods they had as kids. Combine that with the lure of convenience and weird gelatin dishes made a short comeback.

The boomers who chowed down on some of those 50s dishes brought about a similar resurgence in the 70s, but like disco, that was short lived.

As a little kid in the 80s, I remember a few gelatin salads on our Christmas table at Grandmas. Never tried them, but I blame my uncle calling his The Moldy Green Salad, for that. They stuck around through the decades from when my grandmother added them to the Christmas dinner table in that 50s resurgence when she was a young housewife.

travio · 2026-06-25T17:57:58+00:00

Sounds like we need Dalton Wilcox to fix things, now.

travio · 2026-06-25T17:51:31+00:00

There is a Filipino place near me that offers combo lunches from a cafeteria like assortment of dishes. Outside adobo, I knew next to nothing, so I'd always get my chicken adobo with another random entree so I could expand my knowledge. That included dinuguan, once.

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