OPEN BAR: it rubs the lotion on the skin or it gets the hose again

[LMNO]

"Have you shipped it yet?"

"No, I told you that I need to receive the balance due before I ship."

"Well go ahead and ship it today and I'll send you the balance owed when I get it."


You're gonna be waiting a long fucking time, buddy.

Owning your own business seems to be an endless series of trust falls.

[Cardinal Pizza Deliverance.]

"Have you shipped it yet?"

"No, I told you that I need to receive the balance due before I ship."

"Well go ahead and ship it today and I'll send you the balance owed when I get it."


You're gonna be waiting a long fucking time, buddy.

Man that one's a comedian, should go on the road. That act would be big in Vegas.

[Cardinal Pizza Deliverance.]

I love watching Georgians act like idiots in bad weather. Being from Pennsylvania and then living in Iowa for ten years, I understand what 'winter' is. What it means when the sky turns funny colors and what the solid state of water looks like when it's pelting from the sky at a rapid clip. These things are not unknown to me.

Down here though. Down here . . .

Lady a few doors down pulls out of her garage. Sees snow. Freaks out. Still in her driveway. Slams the gas pedal. Reverses right across the street into a light pole. Cries hysterically.

Dude with a manly-man pick-em-up truck tries to go up the icy, icy hill. Stalls out. Gets out and pushes. Slips. Rolls across the street to get out of the way of his truck which is now rolling and sliding down the hill backwards.

After that I start carrying my phone so I can take pictures as proof for the Darwin Awards.

The sidewalks are icy. At the moment you can't really discern a difference between sidewalk and street. So people just walk in the street. Right into on-coming traffic. On an icy road. Where cars have no traction. Yep.

Yep. I am loving this shit. From the comforts of my house, of course. I don't go any farther than the porch when the stupidity is this high.

Yeah, stupid warm-climate people should all have to spend a year driving in Wisconsin so they can learn to drive in snow! And all those idiot cold-climate retards that go all stupid and die when they have unprecedented heat waves should all be required to spend a month in Death Valley so they can figure out how air conditioners work.

I support both these motions.

Actually, no joy quite matches mine when some cocky cold-climater who is all "LOL I'm from a place where there are real winters, you temperate-zone morons don't understand snow" gets in their car and tries to drive in 1/2" of 30-degree snow, and promptly totals their car because they don't understand the physics of snow that close to the melting point. Or laughs off the city warning to stay indoors because they know what real weather is, and gets killed by falling ice.

Because it's true, people who never, ever have to drive in snow don't know how to drive in snow. And on the other hand, people who have only ever driven in cold-climate snow are the most dangerous fools on the road, because they think they know how to drive in warm snow, and they don't.

Yeah, winters in Iowa were distinctly different from winters in PA. Less sledding off the garage roof, more spinning like a top in cul-de-sacs. The lack of common sense just drives me batshit. How hard is it to slow down when weather conditions suck? How hard is it to turn on your god damn headlights when you can't see three inches in front of your car?

I know I'm a pretentious bastard about the weather thing at times. I can't wrap my head around why people do the dumb shit they do when nature is getting real on 'em.

[Cain]

OK, time to write about Loyalist paramilitaries in Northern Ireland...then I can conclude this bastard of a paper and write up the bibliography on Monday.  That will give me Friday off, and the weekend to do my Afghanistan article.

Or not.  Bleh.  I need just one article on the (proven) link between transnational terrorism and lethality, and I can't find one anywhere.  I found one almost as good...but I need the former before I can use it.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

TSUNAMI, LOL! THAT'S WHAT YOU GET FOR NOT PUTTING YOUR HOUSE ON A MOUNTAIN, DUH!

HAHAHAHA LOOK AT THOSE IDIOTS PANICKING BECAUSE OF A VOLCANIC ERUPTION! WHAT DID THEY THINK WOULD HAPPEN, BUILDING THAT CLOSE TO A MOUNTAIN?

SNORT, OLD LADIES IN CHICAGO ACTUALLY DYING JUST BECAUSE OF A LITTLE HEAT SPIKE? HAVEN'T THOSE DUMBASSES EVER HEARD OF AIR CONDITIONERS?

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I am having a panic because I just realized that I have a conference to attend this weekend and I also have a raft of homework to do this weekend. Everything sucks and I don't want to go to the conference, at all.

[Suu]

TSUNAMI, LOL! THAT'S WHAT YOU GET FOR NOT PUTTING YOUR HOUSE ON A MOUNTAIN, DUH!

HAHAHAHA LOOK AT THOSE IDIOTS PANICKING BECAUSE OF A VOLCANIC ERUPTION! WHAT DID THEY THINK WOULD HAPPEN, BUILDING THAT CLOSE TO A MOUNTAIN?

SNORT, OLD LADIES IN CHICAGO ACTUALLY DYING JUST BECAUSE OF A LITTLE HEAT SPIKE? HAVEN'T THOSE DUMBASSES EVER HEARD OF AIR CONDITIONERS?

[Cardinal Pizza Deliverance.]

Today's soundtrack is the sound of ice sliding off rooftops followed by the ring and honk of car alarms up and down the street. :P

[Cain]

I dunno, I've been legitimately making fun of people who chose to live on a flood plain and then got angry when they got flooded (during the most severe rainfall since records began).  Of course, that there is only 40 of them, that all their towns, farmhouses and manors have flood themed names and that they're stomping around demanding something that will do absolutely nothing to mitigate the floods has a lot to do with that.

I mean, when house prices are 20% lower than they are anywhere else, and you're not paying any more insurance or tax for the upkeep of flood defences, and you chose to vote in people who decided to cut the flood defence upkeep budget year on year, and then you claim to know more about rivers than hydrologists with decades of experience, and you ignore warnings to leave the area given in advance of said floods and warning of the risk to life...well, a certain level of mockery is called for.

[Salty]

Having spent my life in Hell, Frozen Over, when it iced over in Seattle it was weird. Different, much slicker somehow. Plus, we try to make roads as flat as possible, unless you're New Money, in which case you live on the side of mountain and have 4x4 or all wheel drive, studded or chained tires, and vote republican.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I dunno, I've been legitimately making fun of people who chose to live on a flood plain and then got angry when they got flooded (during the most severe rainfall since records began).  Of course, that there is only 40 of them, that all their towns, farmhouses and manors have flood themed names and that they're stomping around demanding something that will do absolutely nothing to mitigate the floods has a lot to do with that.

I mean, when house prices are 20% lower than they are anywhere else, and you're not paying any more insurance or tax for the upkeep of flood defences, and you chose to vote in people who decided to cut the flood defence upkeep budget year on year, and then you claim to know more about rivers than hydrologists with decades of experience, and you ignore warnings to leave the area given in advance of said floods and warning of the risk to life...well, a certain level of mockery is called for.

What pisses me off is that developers will buy a floodplain and bribe the city to let them build houses on it, and then will sell the houses to people who are moving here from out of town and don't understand the local geography and have no reason to assume that they are BEING SOLD A HOUSE FRESHLY BUILT ON A FLOODPLAIN, BECAUSE IN THIS DAY AND AGE WHY WOULD THAT EVEN HAPPEN? and then the developer dissolves their corporation and moves on to the next project, and then there's a flood and everybody's fucked.

[Cain]

Oh, these houses are much older than that.  The area is called the Somersets Levels, because it's below sea level, and they know it floods, because they write snotty letters to the Environment Agency every year to demand river dredging, despite the government banning river dredging a decade ago, said dredging not working, caps on outside contractors making it impossible to pay for river dredging etc etc.

And then they turn around and vote for the party which denies global warming and cuts the flood defense budget.  So really, their grounds for complaint are rather slim.

[Cain]

Oh, and no Youtube video today.  I forgot.  Because of 4 hours of sleep.  You can have an extra one on Saturday, as a consolation prize.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Oh, these houses are much older than that.  The area is called the Somersets Levels, because it's below sea level, and they know it floods, because they write snotty letters to the Environment Agency every year to demand river dredging, despite the government banning river dredging a decade ago, said dredging not working, caps on outside contractors making it impossible to pay for river dredging etc etc.

And then they turn around and vote for the party which denies global warming and cuts the flood defense budget.  So really, their grounds for complaint are rather slim.

It seems like the government should just buy back that land and convert it back to a natural flood plain. They've done that here with parts of the Johnson Creek floodplain, when they got tired of This every couple of years:


The problem is, the people who own that property either have to eat a huge loss that would be difficult or impossible to ever recover from, or they have to sell it to the next sucker. The government actually does have some level of responsibility for interrupting the cycle.

[Cain]

Oh yes, but the government will never pony up the cash.  Just the other day, our valiant Prime Minister was telling us there would be "unlimited funds" to deal with the crisis.  Which is obviously bullshit, but when the Environment Agency put in its calculation for the additional costs imposed by flood damage, it was told to find the money in it's current budget or fuck off.  Essentially.

Our government is determined to not do anything which costs any money or involves listening to civil servant expertise.  Their vast knowledge of hydrology, land deeds, marsh removal and flood defence was earned working for fancy banks in the private sector, and they're not about to let a bunch of know-nothing losers who couldn't make it in the Free Market tell them what's what.