I had that thought too, but what a weird choice to use generative AI.

What kind of plug is that? Type I should have slanted blades on the bottom, right?

Interesting. Twain/Clemens was definitely a cat person. Despite protesting a bit much that he didn’t, it seems he liked dogs well enough (never trust somebody who hates dogs, btw), but he identified with cats much more closely. He was of the school that wonders how you can respect a creature that loves humans unconditionally. He also didn’t like barking.

Even if he couldn’t respect them fully, he did appreciate their good nature, and especially in his older years where his writing developed a particularly acerbic streak of misanthropy, he constantly compared them favorably to humans:

The dog is a gentleman; I hope to go to his heaven, not man’s.

Heaven goes by favor. If it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would go in.

If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man.

And, after his daughter died (epilepsy), he spent his last few months with her German Shepherd as his frequent companion.

I do not like dogs, because they bark when there is no occasion for it; but I have liked this one from the beginning, because he belonged to Jean… The dog came to see me at eight o’clock this morning. He was very affectionate, poor orphan! My room will be his quarters hereafter.

One thing I’m pretty confident he didn’t say is “The more I learn of men, the more I like my dog.” While it’s in character with some of the other quotes, it had been going around as a French witticism since the 1700s and eventually got attributed to Twain not long after his death.

A man’s treatment of a dog is no indication of the man’s nature, but his treatment of a cat is. It is the crucial test. None but the humane treat a cat well.

-Mark Twain

This will be interesting. McDonald’s seems to be opening with “nothing is setting prices for them!” which seems a little disingenuous if it’s true that it’s being pushed from corporate and the franchisees have to account for deviations. I almost feel like the stronger argument would be that McDonald’s allocates franchises in a way that ensures they’re not direct competitors, mostly with geographic exclusivity. For this purpose, it would seem the “competition” is really other fast food restaurants. A variation of argument is how, for instance, Sirius and XM satellite radio got their merger approved: “XM is not my only competition, radio, CDs, iPods, and even this crazy new thing of streaming audio over a cell phone connection… that’s our competion.”

nobody has as much head canon about Dr Crusher as McFadden

To the extent this is worth caring about, this is where the concern would lie, I think. The headcanon that gets a particular actor into the right frame of mind to do their best work is not necessarily something that can be fleshed out into a good or even cohesive narrative.

The last grandchild (i.e. no “greats”) of John Tyler, the tenth president of the United States, died in 2025. For comparison, Abraham Lincoln was the sixteenth president in the 1860s.

You’ll get no argument here, but I have a Subaru Outback, not that Ford-looking rectangle.

I just watched a slightly boomerbait youtube video where a bunch of English high school kids try American barbecue and sides, and apart from the sweet tea, the only thing most of them disliked was the cornbread, though to be fair half of them decided that because it looked like cake it was supposed to taste like cake.

Silly Brits. The stuff that tastes like cake is the stuff that looks like bread.

That reminds me: Lanterns is really good.

Star Trek Replicator Chicken fingers. It looks perfect and is always the same, but it’s the type of place where somebody probably got thrown out of a window for suggesting that a pinch of black pepper be put into the recipe. The sauce is pretty decent, but I hope you like it because it’s utterly necessary. Good lemonade too. Founder leans right, but not “Cathy-family” right.

If you live somewhere with a Layne’s Chicken, that’s way better. Popeye’s is generally better too, though it’s traditional fast food grimy versus “pretend we’re fast-casual” veneer that a lot of the chicken places like to do.

She needs to up her game: do it indoors on mats that her fellow competitors will need to use for pushups.

Wow, Gen X and the early Millennials are really aging!

This is obviously lower stakes, but by and large Stewart as an influence on the writing did no favors for Picard, and I will stand by the argument that what little we’ve heard of Mark Hamill’s ideas for Luke Skywalker are wholesome but also basic AF.

Do comics do ghost writers?

Would that create an entirely new and disgusting set of problems for a comic about Bev Crusher? 🤣

have we ever met a Klingon hillbilly?

Linguistically? I’m not sure. Culturally? Definitely.

Depends? Some of them seem to indicate a proper glottal stop. Some others are a reminder to English speakers not to let a half-syllable schwa or other vowel intrude on an unfamiliar consonant cluster, but characters/actors kinda do what they want. Some of them just seem to be there for looks.

Probably not, but it’s admittedly odd to verify that a home furnishing is obviously also a lump of seasoning.

Twist: poster is AB+

Well, yeah. We do!

Ted Lasso has it right: pigeon sweat.

Only exception for me is southern-style sweet tea where the tannins make the 'beetus juice taste a little caramel-esque.