One down

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My wife is in Boston for work until next Saturday, so I am entirely responsible for keeping our pets and son alive until she returns, which sounds like it ought to be a lot of work but I think I can probably handle it. I’ve got about a page and a half of stuff I intend to get accomplished before she gets back, and despite spending several hours with an extra fifth-grader in the house this afternoon I managed to cross several items off of my list. Most of them were what a motivational speaker might call “quick wins,” but fuck it, they still count. I have a couple of Projects in mind for tomorrow, so we’ll see how we do.

I think tomorrow I’ll write the Obi-Wan review; I meant to do it today but the day got away from me and all the sudden it was 8:00, which is sort of the unofficial “Goddammit get something on the screen” deadline for blog posts around here, and the review is going to demand at least a little more thought than I think I’m ready for at the moment. I am also considering a Manifesto of sorts; a What Do We Do Now type of thing that no one will listen to and will never come true. And it’s all going to come down to vote, you morons anyway. I’ve blocked, conservatively, dozens of idiots today, and there will likely be more tomorrow as I continue to lose even the vaguest vestiges of patience with what are either young progressives without a single stitch of sense about how things actually work or, perhaps more likely, Russian bots.

That said, I can’t really blame The Youngs, at least not exclusively; I put this on Twitter already, but this little bit of Fucking Nonsense From People that Should Know Better showed up in my text messages yesterday, and, uh, I wasn’t in the mood:

Probably shoulda just typed STOP, as Kati-from-the-DSCC never responded and likely also wasn’t actually a person, but whatever. A fucking petition. No, I’m not signing a petition. Petitions are for twelve-year-olds. Nothing that mattered has ever been changed by a Goddamned petition.

(Prove me wrong, if you can; I’m pretty sure I’m right here, but if you know of a counter-example, I’d genuinely love to hear it.)

So, yeah, everything still sucks and I still hate it here, but at least for the time being I’m no longer, like, actively marinating in hatred. Progress? Sure.

#REVIEW: A bagel

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I actually meant to write a blog post at work today and ended up surprisingly busy for a Wednesday. I have gotten efficient enough this year that I often don’t have much to do on these non-student days, and today I managed to plan out the entire rest of the year and build a new desk chair, so I feel like things were accomplished. I have, as I said earlier this week, a few blog posts rattling around in the ol’ melon, as they say (I have no idea who the “they” is that says this, but it sounds good) and they have … somewhat different tones. The first is looking thoughtfully at differential discipline as it affects students of color, and particularly black boys, in school, and comparing a school model of discipline to policing. I will have to write it very carefully and expect some pushback, as the way I’m currently conceptualizing things may actually require me to be slapped around a bit.

Or I could review a bagel I had this morning.

The choice is pretty obvious, I think.

Let’s talk about Einstein Bros. Bagels and their Nova Lox bagel.

This is going to be the second food-related blog post in a week or so, and in fact it grew out of the Dagwood’s Supreme Twitter conversation that I memorialized here recently. You’ll notice that there are some replies here and there that didn’t make it into the post; one of them moved to discussing pastrami, and at some point later there I revealed the fact that I have never had lox. There’s really no good reason for me to have had lox (that’s a lie; I was a Jewish Studies major, for God’s sake) and upon realizing I’d made it to nearly 45 without having any I decided it was a problem I needed to fix.

Well, turns out there’s an Einstein Bros. Bagel place in town, and they offer a Nova Lox bagel, which probably isn’t as authentic as something you’d get from a kosher deli in New York or some shit like that but fuck it I live in Indiana and I’ll take what I can get.

Y’all! This is delicious!

I mean, it shouldn’t be surprising, as I’m a fan of five of the six ingredients that the food is made of so long as I think of lox as “smoked salmon” and not lox per se– I’ve probably had capers at some point or another in my life but I can’t think of when– and the textural combination of bagel, lox, tomato, cream cheese, red onion (the only kind of onion I can eat raw) and capers is Goddamned delightful. The capers pop, the red onion is crunchy, the bagel was chewy, and the lox, tomato and cream cheese all did their thing too. I could start the day with these on a regular basis if I wanted to.

The only problem? I also had a cup of coffee. Now, I’ve not had Einstein Bros coffee before– it was the first time I’ve ordered anything at all from them, in fact– and it’s entirely possible that their coffee, taken black, is simply more bitter than most coffees I’m used to. But I got the distinct impression that drinking coffee with this bagel was the rough equivalent of drinking orange juice immediately after brushing your teeth– there’s something, and I think it’s probably the capers, that enhances the bitterness of coffee until it’s utterly out of control, and I ended up switching to water because I couldn’t take it. That said, the taste of the bagel stuck with me all morning (in a pleasant way, mind you) and it was filing enough that I was able to make it to the end of the day without breaking for lunch.

10/10 yum yum would eat again

On Thanos’ ass

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My wife just showed me this tweet:

And I horribly disappointed her by not having the slightest idea what the hell could possibly be going on. Apparently– and you’re just going to have to believe me on this, as I refuse to look for it– there has recently been a discussion on The Twitter about why Ant-Man didn’t simply defeat Thanos by crawling inside his asshole and then growing.

Look, damn it, I need something more ridiculous than British money to talk about around here. These are the posts. 🙂

It is unclear exactly how much force Ant-Man is able to exert while growing. In fact, two damn near successive images from this trailer make the problem pretty clear:

You only need about the first thirty seconds, but you see two things here associated with growth: first, whatever system they have built inside the van is strong enough to fling another van off of its wheels and into the air. However, the system in Ant-Man’s actual suit isn’t able to put out enough force to break either the drop ceiling above him or the drywall around him. One assumes that you could use Pym particles to generate quite a bit of force, then, but that capability doesn’t seem to exist in Ant-Man’s suit, no doubt because his actual flesh is weaker than the metal frame of the van.

For the sake of argument, I’m willing to accept that Ant-Man or the Wasp are both able to shrink down enough to get inside Thanos’ suit of armor, and from there, provided that he is not actively clenching, one assumes they could work their way into his asshole if it were absolutely necessary. However, any suit that can’t grow Ant-Man with enough force to break drywall is surely not going to be able to overcome the pressure that the rectal wall of a man able to box the Hulk into unconsciousness could exert.

The good news for Ant-Man is that his suit does appear to have some sort of failsafe in it so that he can’t accidentally grow beyond the point where he hurts himself, or he would surely be larger than the room in the scene above, which I’m pretty sure is from a part of the movie where the suit was actively malfunctioning. I therefore posit that Ant-Man is only able to grow large enough, once ensconced in Thanos’ rectum, for Thanos to notice him, at which point one assumes that Thanos would clench, and things end poorly for Ant-Man, who has no particular level of enhanced strength or invulnerability, especially at that size. If his suit does not have the failsafe built in, Thanos clenches anyway, and one way or another the big purple dude is gonna need an oversized bidet to clean up the mess, which isn’t gonna be pretty.

The correct way, by the way, for Ant-Man or the Wasp to defeat a being on the level of Thanos is not to fly into his ass, but to fly into his ear. I’m pretty certain that the Wasp dropped the Hulk himself at least once by flying into his ear and directing an energy blast directly into his eardrum. Or, in a worst-case scenario, shrink down a bit more and head for his brain, which I’m pretty sure she did to the Red Hulk at one point.

Or, y’know, there’s always distraction. Yeah, this happened. God, The Ultimates was terrible:

I’mma be honest here

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I kind of feel bad, because I feel like you guys deserve at least one actual post with, like, some words today, but on the other hand I’m so tired I can feel it in my teeth.  I mean that literally, my teeth are tired.  Feels exactly like chewing on fresh-picked cotton.

So maybe I’m going to go to bed instead.  Go read about the cat again; that post seems to be getting some traction.  🙂