“Big, beautiful submarine captains come up to me. Covered with muscles, muscles like nobody has ever seen before. Tears running down their cheeks. They say ‘Sir, thank you for sending us to the South China Sea! Nobody ever sent us there before!’ But I don’t get angry! I should get angry and sometimes I do get angry, but with these captains I don’t get angry. They say ‘Thank you, sir! Thank you!’ But nobody ever thought of South China before! I came up with that, but nobody gives me credit for South China!”

“Anyone can become President.”

Me, thinking about Abraham Lincoln or Bill Clinton: “Yeah!”

“Anyone can become President.”

Me, aware of Donald Trump, with Tucker Carlson waiting in the wings: “Oh no!”

I’m just imagining being the poor sap working for a foreign power trying to extract useful information from his cottage cheese brain.

“Do you have nuclear subs in the South China Sea?”

“We have to be extremely vigilant and extremely careful when it comes to nuclear. Nuclear changes the whole ballgame. … The biggest problem we have is nuclear — nuclear proliferation and having some maniac, having some madman go out and get a nuclear weapon. That’s in my opinion, that is the single biggest problem that our country faces right now.”

“Where! Are! The nuclear! Subs! Deployed!”

“Look, having nuclear — my uncle was a great professor and scientist and engineer, Dr. John Trump at MIT; good genes, very good genes, OK, very smart, the Wharton School of Finance, very good, very smart — you know, if you’re a conservative Republican, if I were a liberal, if, like, OK, if I ran as a liberal Democrat, they would say I’m one of the smartest people anywhere in the world — it’s true! — but when you’re a conservative Republican they try — oh, do they do a number — that’s why I always start off: Went to Wharton, was a good student, went there, went there, did this, built a fortune — you know I have to give my like credentials all the time, because we’re a little disadvantaged — but you look at the nuclear deal, the thing that really bothers me — it would have been so easy, and it’s not as important as these lives are — nuclear is so powerful; my uncle explained that to me many, many years ago, the power and that was 35 years ago; he would explain the power of what’s going to happen and he was right, who would have thought? — but when you look at what’s going on with the four prisoners — now it used to be three, now it’s four — but when it was three and even now, I would have said it’s all in the messenger; fellas, and it is fellas because, you know, they don’t, they haven’t figured that the women are smarter right now than the men, so, you know, it’s gonna take them about another 150 years — but the Persians are great negotiators, the Iranians are great negotiators, so, and they, they just killed, they just killed us, this is horrible.”

When asked whether Vance believes Robinson’s denial that the comments were made by him, Vance said that the situation needed to “play out.”

“I don’t not believe him, I don’t believe him — I just think that you have to let these things sometimes play out in the court of public opinion."

Remember that for Republicans it’s not a matter of how despicable a candidate is, it’s only a matter of if they’re popular or not. Vance came right out and said that the truth doesn’t matter, just public opinion. If 50.1% of voters in North Carolina were going to vote for Robinson, the GOP wouldn’t care what he said. If that number was 49.9%, it wouldn’t matter if he was an amalgamation of Jesus Christ and Captain America, they’d throw him to the curb and claim they’d never heard of him.

They have no principles. The only thing they believe in is power; getting it, and using it against the people they hate. That is their only true ideology.

A fair number of the original artists have been outlasted by Al, but I deeply wish we could get an album of them covering Weird Al’s style covers. I think TMBG would be up for it, and I suspect you could get Trent Reznor to cover “Germs.”

There’s a tough lesson I learned about trying to get my friends into board games: It’s easier to turn gamers into your friends than it is to turn your friends into gamers. I’ve learned that some of my friends are never going to share my interests as much as I’d like, but that just means I needed to find people who were already in whatever hobby and start hanging out with them and some of them will eventually be your real friends.

Making and keeping friends as an adult is way more difficult than it seems it should be, but it’s a painful reality.

Granny Gazoot! Let’s have a toot! And when I count three!

Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.

–Jean-Paul Sartre

But if the viewer speaks French then they would understand the French audio dialogue, so if a (deaf) viewer speaks French, then they ought to have the opportunity to read the French subtitled dialogue.

Adjacent pet peeve: When there’s captioning, and a character in a movie speaks a foreign language, and the captions read “[Speaking in French]”, or even worse, “[Speaking in foreign language]”.

Just caption “Jette-le à l’arrière du camion et emmène-le hors de la ville.”! If I do or don’t speak French, and if I can hear or if I’m deaf, then the caption would serve the same purpose either way!

The Disney movie Moana made me furious with this, in the flashback during “We Know the Way,” when the islanders are singing (I assume) Polynesian, but the lyrics are just “[Singing in foreign language]”. The fuck, Disney?! You’re usually good at translation!

Doesn’t Michael Bolton call the efficiency guys “cock goblins” in Office Space?

Dirt-wit, Trump-nozzle, and Wank-clown are clearly underutilized profanities.

PLEASE ADOPT VERIFICATION CAT TO CONTINUE

“To prove that you are human, donate $$$ to Doctors Without Borders.”

“To prove that you are human, register to vote.”

“To prove that you are human, adopt a pet from the local animal shelter.”

Did you catch all-despising baby skull last night?

Kamala is the best version of a normal politician fighting against Trump. It remains to be seen if that’s enough, because he’s just so goddamn weird that it’s difficult to even compare Tool A to Problem B.

I think she’s incorporated virtually all of the strengths of any of her comparable peers, and almost none of their weaknesses. I think that, given the nature of the opponent and his total lack of seriousness, she said everything I would reasonably hope she would have said during this debate.

I also think that I don’t properly understand the collective psyche of the American electorate. I don’t understand how the election could be this close, when it is a choice between a serious, competent, passionate, talented professional, and a man who is literally a collection of all of the worst possible traits a person could have. That it could come down to such a narrow choice is a mystery for the ages.

Hell, not even the fucking Nazis themselves claimed that they weren’t deliberately operating death camps. Here’s Rudolf Höss, commandant of Auschwitz:

Technically [it] wasn’t so hard—it would not have been hard to exterminate even greater numbers… The killing itself took the least time. You could dispose of 2,000 head in half an hour, but it was the burning that took all the time. The killing was easy; you didn’t even need guards to drive them into the chambers; they just went in expecting to take showers and, instead of water, we turned on poison gas. The whole thing went very quickly.

And here he is, after his trial, four days before his execution:

My conscience compels me to make the following declaration. In the solitude of my prison cell, I have come to the bitter recognition that I have sinned gravely against humanity. As Commandant of Auschwitz, I was responsible for carrying out part of the cruel plans of the ‘Third Reich’ for human destruction. In so doing I have inflicted terrible wounds on humanity. I caused unspeakable suffering for the Polish people in particular. I am to pay for this with my life. May the Lord God forgive one day what I have done. I ask the Polish people for forgiveness. In Polish prisons I experienced for the first time what human kindness is. Despite all that has happened I have experienced humane treatment which I could never have expected, and which has deeply shamed me. May the facts which are now coming out about the horrible crimes against humanity make the repetition of such cruel acts impossible for all time.

Doesn’t really sound like the statement of a guy who was trying to claim it didn’t fucking happen, or that it was anything but a deliberate crime against humanity.

Blame it on the bossa nova!