Ghost of LL

The Brazilian angle is interesting. Brazil doesn't have a mutual-defense agreement with Guyana, but it does have a close relationship. The only road through the Amazon crosses the Brazilian border into Guyana in the Esequiba region. And that has been a major Brazilian infrastructure project over the past decade as Brazil has sought an overland route to Caribbean ports. One would expect that Lula would be somewhat indulgent of the Maduro regime and Venezuela generally. But that road is of such a national interest to Brazil that Lula may have to take a stand against Venezuela on this one.

Arlington. And yeah--you want to knock up his date. Particularly if you like girls with the ass of a marathoner.

Mrs.LL laid down the law months ago that there would be no discussion of politics at Thanksgiving. And Mrs.LL's edicts are generally followed by anyone who doesn't want to lose a testicle. There were two minor exceptions: A brief discussion over the kitchen island between her mildly-racist-but-solidly-anti-Trump father, her similarly situated brother, and her MAGA/Qanon-adjacent cousin about race. There's kind of the usual arguments against CRT and the denial of systemic racism in America. And then I bring up redlining. Blank stares all the way around. So I quickly give a lesson on what redlining was and its ongoing effects. And after 20 years around these people, they know I'm not bullshitting or making stuff up, so there's just a general "Huh--I didn't know that." I don't know that it changed any opinions. But it ended the conversation. And perhaps it planted the seeds of further thought. The other one was with my nephew. He's young and idealistic. He says he's voting for RFK Jr. Oh, and he's in a swing-ish state (Virginia). I absolutely went off on him. I told him he might as well vote for Trump, and that would mean among other things that his super-hot girlfriend that he brought to Thanksgiving wouldn't be able to get an abortion if one slipped past the goalie. And he'd get to explain to her why she had to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term because of his disdain for the two-party system. I think that one may have had more impact.

That's pretty great. So how does a film get a nomination?

Yeah—friendly fire.

Was that guy doing CPR?

This is what I get for watching Big10 football—it’s both boring and awful at the same time.

It took more more time than I am comfortable admitting for the thought, "jeez--USC's nonconference schedule is really Big10 heavy next year" to pass through my head.

Ha—fucking refs fuck us on the spot, so we get a play that you only could get in 3rd-and-1.

How on earth was that a tackle in bounds?

If this game were called straight, you might expect to see a call for a late hit.

The booth didn’t get the memo from the conference.

Did Huard just have an orgasm?

Why do only Nazis build rockets?

I would hope so. They're called "accountants." And I would expect that someone with that kind of money would have an accountant.

That struck me, too. There's not much ground clearance. And the entire thing looked really very low to the ground.

Jesus, I saw a cybertruck for the first time last night on 360, and it's even worse than the pictures indicate. I don't think I had seen a photo of the thing at night, but it's headlight configuration is completely absurd. It's just one long lightbar on the top of the (non-existent) grill and then two little lights down where fog lamps might ordinarily be.

We did something very similar early in World War II. Under the Neutrality Act, we could not fly military aircraft to a delivery point within a combatant. So we'd fly Lend-Lease planes to airfields very close to the Canadian border, and the Canadians would cross and tow them across to an airstrip in Canada.

You wanted that team gone because the editing was done to make you want that team gone. That team was the "heel." But they played the heel only because that's how the producers edited the footage after the race was concluded. And it made sense to make that team the heel knowing that they kept tenaciously sticking around through non-elimination legs, which ended up infuriating you (and probably me) and made for good television. Look at the last leg, though. Do you think they're going to have that dance troupe come in a day early on the spur of the moment? Do you think they'd be able to have that ballroom available a day early with no notice? Fuck no--this shit is planned out months in advance. And maybe you plan for that ballroom to be booked for eight hours, but that doesn't mean you can change the booking the day beforehand.

In my household, the proper name of a poster on this very site is used as the word defined as "to shart oneself" after a particularly infamous incident at a Dallas-area country club. As in, "Fuck--I had to race back to the office after having lunch at the Chili Parlor because I was about to @DDD Dad myself."

But not really, because you have to have all this shit set up. You have to have all the people in place at the challenges, and the venues of for the challenges need to be shuddered to the public/their normal operations. You can't just have teams showing up a day earlier than anticipated because the producers decided at the last minute that a particular team was in danger of elimination. And for the record, I'm very skeptical of the hypothesis that non-elimination legs weren't pre-set at the beginning of the race. Fan favorites are only fan favorites because of how the producers edit their footage after the race is concluded. So they're not worried that any particular team is going to get eliminated. They're going to edit the footage to make the surviving teams more popular.

I don't agree. As noted above, the non-elimination legs always seemed timed to avoid eliminating a fan-favorite or otherwise interesting team. Probably just coincidental, but it raised the prospect that the results were rigged. With the "keep racing" legs, there's no possibility of that. They have to have the challenges up and running well in advance. So there's no way the producers can make a last-minute "let's make this a non-elimination leg" decision to preserve a favored team. As to this last leg, I think we all saw what that long flight from India to Frankfurt in coach can do to one's mental acuity and temperament. Now's when we get more fights and more muddle-brained decisionmaking.

Playing Minnesota will cure a lot of what ails a power play.

Ok--so in this scenario there's a big question that I think we could use some insight from current/former waiters and bartenders. GF ordered a bottle of chardonnay. I assume she then took the bottle to the table and drank that for the rest of the mean, right? So your waiter would've sold you the bottle of chardonnay at the table had you just ordered two glasses at the bar. But instead, he missed out on that sale (and the resulting tip) because you got your drinks at the bar. So the question is this: do the bartenders share their tips with the waiter? I know in most places, the waiters are expected to tip out the bartenders. I don't know that I've ever heard of it going the other way. So my suspicion is the answer is "no." If that's the case, then I short-tip the bartender a little bit and I tip the waiter on what he would've gotten had I ordered the bottle from him. So in practice, let's say the bottle was $100 (just trying to make the math easy). Ordinarily, I would tip the bartender $20. But in this scenario, I might tip the bartender $5 or $10 on the bottle and tip the waiter at my table $10-15, depending entirely on how much time I spent at the bar with that bottle and whether GF ordered another glass at the table after finishing that bottle.