So, Uh, This Is The Country That Put a Man on the Moon, You Say?

Absentee Ballots in Limbo Over Lost Sticky Notes in Brindisi-Tenney House Race [New York]
Syracuse.com | 11/23/2020 | Mark Weiner

The fate of 39 absentee ballots in the election between Rep. Anthony Brindisi and Claudia Tenney is up in the air after election officials admitted in court today that they lost sticky notes attached to some of the ballots.

Oneida County’s election commissioners told state Supreme Court Justice Scott J. DelConte that the color-coded notes explained how the ballots were handled and whether they were counted.

But by the time an envelope arrived at DelConte’s courtroom, at least eight ballots had no sticky note.

DelConte asked Cardone how to determine whether a ballot was counted and whether it was contested.

“You can’t,” she admitted.

Both commissioners said they believed each ballot had a sticky note on it and had no clue as to how they could have fallen off the ballots or what could have gone wrong in the process.

“We have a serious problem on our hands,” DelConte said.

“Venn Diagram”? ‘At’s-a What I Want To Know: Venn We Gonna See the Diagram?

I have always maintained (to anyone who listened) that there are people who liked The Three Stooges and people who liked The Marx Brothers — but very little overlap between the two groups. Am I wrong? Are there many who liked both?

They appeal to such different tastes. You can’t poke someone in the eyes and still make a witty comment.

On the other hand, one does watch both Gilligan’s Island and Shakespeare . . .

But what I mean is, there is the Benny Hill fan and the Monty Python fan. Can one person be truly both?

Welcome to IMAO! You May Possibly Be Able To Help Market Our New Technology

Motion pictures by radio coming soon. Motion pictures by radio is very near, predicts C. Francis Jenkins, who has designed this small radio-vision receiving set for use in the homes. It is only a few inches square and is attached to the regular radio receiving set. A miniature motion picture screen is placed on the wall of your home, as shown in this photo. The first of this machine to be made. The photo was taken in Mr. Jenkin’s laboratory at Washington, D.C. (1925)

Random Thoughts: Call of Duty and Revenge of the Sith

One of the reasons people don’t like liberty is the other side of the coin which is responsibility. Under liberty, you bear the burden over your own choices and can’t compel anyone else to provide for you.

“Trust science if it aligns with your politics; ignore it otherwise.” -absolutely everyone

Teachers unions are about giving your kids the least amount of education for the most amount of money.

I noticed an interesting incongruity in the last item in Luke 7:22 when Jesus lists the things people have witnessed him do.
Jesus answered and said to them, “Go and tell John the things you have seen and heard: that the blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, the poor have the gospel preached to them.” Luke 7:22
Maybe it means poor in spirit and not money. Still, it’s interesting to note I don’t think Jesus ever miraculously gave people money (besides one coin in a fish).
Also interesting, because all those other maladies Jesus fixed are not ones we (for the most part) can do anything about, but we can make someone not poor by giving them money.
And we can also preach the gospel.

I’m not planning to get Cyberpunk 2077. Cyber sounds cool, but I have no desire to be a punk.

Instead of god mode, I hope Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War has “Reagan mode.”

Finished the first draft of the third Superego novel. It’s leagues away from being readable to anyone else, but it’s got a beginning and an end and most of the middle.
I like to keep forward momentum, so my first drafts are filled with holes as I don’t like to pause to come up with made-up scifi names and if a section isn’t working, I just move on to the next.
I also usually decide on things that mean I will have to rewrite earlier chapters to fit, but I don’t go back and do rewrites until I’ve reached the end one way or another.
So it still has a lot of work left until it’s readable by anyone other than me. Then it will go to the alpha reader (SarahK), and after she approves I’m not embarrassing myself, to beta readers.
But, hey, it was five years between Superego and Superego: Fathom, and now we’re on schedule for a year or less between sequels 2 and 3.

I hope the new Call of Duty game where you shoot Commies for Reagan has a bonus level where you punch hippies.

Live your life such that you feel no obligation to defend any politician.

Man, I don’t know who wouldn’t be inspired by that Call of Duty Cold War trailer with Blue Monday playing while Reagan inspires you to action. Harkens back to a simpler time when we had real problems — Commies wanting to nuke us — and didn’t have to invent stupid ones.
And despite a realistic world-ending scenario constantly hanging over us, the 80s feels about a hundred times more optimistic than now. The thing this country needs more than anything else is perspective.

It’s weird now to think about how the promotion for The Mandalorian before it’s season 1 premiere didn’t include Baby Yoda at all. What was even in those trailers?
It’s a production that’s good at keeping secrets. No one seems to know anything about any episode before the day it comes out. And even though everyone knows Ahsoka Tano is in one of the episodes this season, not a single image has leaked.

Padme: “I can’t believe that Anakin would kill younglings at the Jedi temple. He’s only ever mass-murdered children once before.”

“Only a Sith deals in absolutes. No one else. Just them. If you ever hear anyone say an absolute, you should immediately kill them for being a Sith as they are the only ones who ever use absolutes ever. There is no exceptions to this rule.”

“Palpatine, you may have a point about how the Jedi are too quick to dismiss the Dark Side as evil.”
“Good to hear that. So would you like to murder a bunch of kids for me?”
“Would I!”

My kids put on Revenge of the Sith (according to my 5yo daughter, she loves the one “where Anakin kills Padme”), and it’s just impossible to watch and not make fun of.
UNLIMITED SATIRE!!!!

“Father, I sense there is still good in you.”
“Did I ever tell you how I once murdered a bunch of children with very little prompting?”
“Oh. No. I was dealing with all the facts here.”

There are two types of people who don’t actually care about masks: Those who refuse to wear masks and those just like to yell and mock those who don’t wear masks to feel good about themselves but don’t care about actually being persuasive.
People scream and yell about things not because they care too much but because they care too little — too little to swallow their own ego.

The whole focus of the left on Facebook and such is so so dumb. The core reason people despise the left isn’t because of what news they’ve been force-fed. They seek out the other news because they despise you and all your efforts to quash it will just make them despise you more.

In the movie It’s a Wonderful Life, I think it’s pretty inarguable that if Uncle Billy had never been born, things would have turned out great for everyone.

Tuesday Night Open Thread

I’m not a fan of Bing Crosby. I’m not a fan of the Andrews Sisters. But they were sure popular in the 1940, both separately and together.

This song spent six weeks atop the Billboard Juke Box chart beginning in October 1944.

[The YouTube]

Do you have something you’d like to share? A link? A joke? Some words of wisdom? A topic to discuss? It’s our nightly Open Thread, and you have the floor.

How Many Times Can One Say “Come On, Man”?

BREAKING: Ballot Count Upload Error in Arizona — Over 6,000 False Biden Votes Discovered
Gateway Pundit | 11/24/20

Joe Biden’s lead in Arizona dropped from 10,377 votes to 4,202 after a machine error was discovered on Tuesday.

The error was from a faulty upload from Greenlee County, which showed 22,110 votes — but should have been 3,723.

A data analyst for ABC 15, Garrett Archer, tweeted about the error before trying to downplay it by saying it “happens from time to time.”

Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs tweeted about the error, saying “Unofficial election results were displaying incorrectly briefly today due to an uploading error that posted Greenlee County’s results multiple times while uploading write-in candidate info. The error has been corrected.”

Second Entry In My “Wait … What?” File

Croissant Gyoza: Pie-Like Dumplings Take Japan by Storm
sora news 24 | 11/21/2020 | Oona McGee

This gyoza with a flaky croissant crust is so sought after it took a year for our order to arrive.

We’ve tried a lot of gyoza in Japan, ranging from Wasabeef wasabi gyoza through to varieties covered in gold leaf and ones made by former prisoners in Kabukicho.

What f***ing planet are we on?

However, there’s one type of gyoza that’s alluded us

eluded, perhaps?

since we heard about it a year ago, and it’s caused such a sensation around Japan that 4,000 boxes of them have been known to sell out in 30 minutes.

Compare to McDonald’s

Called Croissant Gyoza, this very special type of pot sticker comes from Tareya in Kagawa Prefecture, and when we say we’ve waited a year for them, we’re not joking. This screenshot of our receipt below shows the order date of 11 November 2019, and the scheduled delivery date — 11 November 2020!

Hate to tell you, but you’re being jerked around. And they’ve had your money, earning interest, for a year.

Puerile Harbor!

Oona McGee?

This Goes Right Into My “Wait … What??” File

Milan Prelate on Coronavirus: ‘Divine Punishment Does Not Exist’
Church Militant | 2/28/20 | Jules Gomes

The former archbishop of Milan has dismissed the idea that divine punishment for human sin could be a factor behind the coronavirus epidemic, which has spooked churches into shutting their doors in the dioceses of Northern Italy.

Divine punishment does not exist. It is an incorrect view of Christianity,” Cdl. Angelo Scola told La Repubblica, when asked if Christianity supported the vision of a divine punishment behind the coronavirus.

“Of course, God knows and predicts events but does not determine them,” Scola told the leftwing Italian newspaper in an interview Thursday.

The prelate, once considered a runner-up for papal office . . .

Distinguished Catholic historian Roberto de Mattei blasted Scola’s response to the crisis hitting Milan and other parts of northern Italy.  

“More than the epidemic that is starting to afflict the West, I highly fear the pestilential influence of those bishops and theologians who, out of fearful judgment of the world, have stopped believing in God’s justice,” Prof. Mattei commented. 

I was so taken aback, I forgot to use my preferred title for this post: “You Kids Get Off of Milan.”

Is there, perhaps, some other religion the pope-wannabe would feel more comfortable in?