Category: [Uncategorized]

I imagine there’s a surprising number of those in that specific place. First thing I’d do is check sure there’s no holes on the premises that look like they’ve been dug from below…

How badly do I need an answer to that question? Not badly enough, I suspect…

I thought this last one couldn’t possibly be real, but a quick Google search demonstrated otherwise. Alas, there was no actual source that I could see (I would LOVE to know who coined this astounding phrase), but I did find a book review from 2008 so that at least predated brother Adam’s citation. I wonder about some of the idioms and slang he posts, except when they’re obviously jocular ones, but it appears he’s not the originator here… Still, if we can’t quite determine where it did come from, we need to find contexts for reintroducing “give one’s arse a salad” into conversation…

Yeah, nah, get fucked with that:

Australians’ proud reputation as a pack of cunning linguists has taken a hit from a study finding they come only third in the swearing stakes online.
The research found Australians were more restrained – online, at least – than potty-mouthed Poms and vulgar Americans.
“What the feck?” as the Irish would say – “feck” being their preferred profanity relative to other countries’ use of the word, according to the research.
For the British it’s “cunt”, and for the US it’s “asshole”. For Australians, disappointingly, it’s “crap”.
“We were super surprised by that,” says Dr Martin Schweinberger, from the University of Queensland’s school of languages and cultures.
“We expected it to be ‘fuck’ or something.” […]
But there is a heartening twist to the tale that shows Australians are not here to fuck spiders.
One is that the Global Web-Based English Corpus (GloWbE) dataset the researchers used did not include blogs for Australia – and blogs are typically more sweary than general online content. But it did include them for other countries.
“If we had blog data for Australia it might have pushed us to second place,” Schweinberger says.

Fairly sure if this blog had been counted I could’ve taken us to the top. Still, now Australia has something to aspire to…

Just “mostly”?

Going through the archives tonight, I spotted this:

The time stamp on this picture from when I originally saved it is January the 5th, 2020. I wonder what brother Nooruddean here makes of this now, given how the Twenties has gone since then…

Someone posted this on Threads:

A somewhat… ungenerous thought, but it did remind me of her first statement after the shooting:

“Yes, there had been some threats basically I don’t know, a lack of coverage? I don’t know details,” she told NBC News. “I just know that he said there were some people that had been threatening him.”

Which I must say struck me at the time as at least slightly odd… I mean, your husband admits he’s been getting threats over his work and you don’t try to find out why? If a loved one of mine told me that, I’d be hammering them for all the information I could get out of them in order to, you know, start making sure those threats didn’t progress. Maybe she was in shock at the time and I’m being unkind here.

Or maybe not?

The slain UnitedHealthcare CEO had a criminal record for drunk driving and was secretly separated from his wife for years before he was shot dead in Manhattan on Wednesday, according to public records. Minnesota court filings show that in 2017 Brian Thompson was arrested and convicted on charges of fourth-degree driving while impaired, for which he received probation. In addition to legal troubles, the executive, who was gunned down in what NYPD has labeled a “premeditated, pre-planned, targeted attack,” also seems to have faced recent marital issues. Based on property records, voter registration forms, and reports from neighbors, Brian and Paulette Thompson had lived in different homes less than a mile apart in Maple Grove, Minnesota, for the past several years, The Wall Street Journal reported. In 2018, Thompson bought a five-bedroom second house for around $1 million, while his wife’s residence remained in another house nearby, also worth about $1 million, based on Zillow listings and public records.

Mr Voorhees above may not have been entirely wrong? I don’t know. Anyway, just another kind of grubby detail in this story…

It appears they got the UHC shooter already.

New York prosecutors have filed murder and other charges against Luigi Nicholas Mangione in the killing of UnitedHealthcare’s CEO, according to an online court docket.
The action brought an end to a tense five-day manhunt for the suspected killer.
Mr Mangione remained jailed in Pennsylvania, where he was charged with possession of an unlicensed firearm, forgery and providing false identification to police.
Police arrested him on Monday after he was spotted in a Pennsylvania McDonald’s by a customer who thought he looked like the suspected killer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.
The 26-year-old was in possession of a gun, silencer, fake IDs, and a handwritten document suggesting he had “ill will towards corporate America”, police said. […]
On Monday, Mr Mangione was sitting in the rear of the McDonald’s, wearing a blue medical mask and looking at a laptop computer, when he was arrested, court documents said.
A customer saw him and an employee called 911, said Kaz Daughtry, an NYPD deputy commissioner.
Altoona Police Officer Tyler Frye said he and his partner recognised the suspect immediately when he pulled down his mask.
“We just didn’t think twice about it. We knew that was our guy,” he said.

Wasn’t expecting that at all. I had a distinct feeling it would take a lot more time and effort than this. Also wasn’t expecting brother Luigi to be… well, a Unabomber-esque crank, or at any rate that’s the perception the media seems to be trying to push; this article goes so far as to note that the book study group he founded back in Hawai’i actually studied Kaczynski’s manifesto at one point (albeit as a “joke”?), and there’s a somewhat peculiar purported screenshot of his Twitter circulating at the moment in which he offers interesting solutions to the Japanese birth rate problem. Uncertain how authentic it is, but I’ve seen someone else post another screenshot of him linking to a Jash Dholani piece… so.

The oddest detail in all of this, of course, is that he was evidently carrying his own manifesto or whatever it is with him when he was caught. Which is a bit of a head-scratcher until you consider the speculation I’ve seen that he wanted to get caught, because he wants to go on trial and use that as a massive public platform for his beliefs and opinions. Doesn’t really make much sense otherwise, to be honest.

It’s got even more so in the weeks since this was originally published.