Mostly_Gristle

Creating a need is not the same as creating a job.

Ulysses is a rough one. There are some novels that are so dense that you have to have already read it through once before you can really read it for the first time. I think Ulysses might take three or four.

I started reading it after hearing Robert Anton Wilson talk at length about why he loved the book. He made it sound amazing. And having read it, and read about it, I get why the people who love it really love it. It's a meticulously crafted, ultra dense, heavily embroidered, masterwork of English literature. You can spend years and years reading and re-reading the book, picking apart layer after layer, and still find new elements to explore, and new threads to pull, which still all end up being perfectly internally consistent. It's really an amazing literary achievement.

But it fucking sucks to read for the first time.

You need like a companion reference book, the Internet, a French to English dictionary for one of the chapters, and a map of Dublin. It's not entertainment; it's a project. And honestly, I've found it a lot more interesting to listen to Ulysses experts explaining the book than it is to actually read the book itself.

At my high school we had a teacher who had an advanced degree in Shakespeare studies, and she would teach a different play every quarter. They were great classes, but a single quarter was plenty of time for a very comprehensive look at each play. I can't imagine stretching it out over an entire year and have it be anything but absolutely tedious.

Look, my coke habit isn't a problem. Just shut up and help me cover the windows with this aluminum foil. It's the only thing that blocks the surveillance rays from the FBI agents that are hiding in the rosebushes. And watch out for the neighbor's dog. I'm pretty sure he's working with them.

Looks like someone is going to need to reform the Jane Collective.

Are they genuinely trying to stifle education, or is it all just racist bullshit?

That's the fun part: stifling education is the racist bullshit.

They've been anti-education since desegregation. Back in the '60s the Religious Right, particularly Oral Roberts, Jerry Falwell, and the people in that orbit, tried really hard to go through the courts and use their freedom of religion under the First Amendment to keep black people out of their church-based schools. Obviously they lost, but they have never forgotten how the mean ol' federal government defiled their perfect little angels by forcing them sit next to some filthy negro while they learn their multiplication tables or whatever. Ever since then they've made it their mission to destroy public education.

By the 1980s that Evangelical movement had become fully ingrained into the Republican party, and that drive to destroy public education came with it. It's what's behind the push for charter schools. It's what's behind the push for private school vouchers. It's what's behind Evangelicals astroturfing school board meetings, and sometimes taking over the school board itself. It's a big part of why public schools (inner city public schools in particular) have been chronically underfunded for longer than I've been alive. It was racism the whole time.

But yeah, whenever I hear a conservative use the word "woke," I've found you can pretty much always mentally transpose "woke" with "ni--er stuff" (or "fa--ot stuff," depending on the context) and whatever they're trying to say suddenly makes a lot more sense.

Brian and Bob were walking through the forest when they came across a set of tracks.

"Those are cougar tracks!" Bob exclaimed.

"Hell, no! Those are coyote tracks." Brain said.

"I'm tellin' you, I've been out in these woods since I was little, and those are cougar tracks!"

"There's no cougars in this part of the country. Those are coyote tracks!"

Then they both got hit by a train.

You do have the benefit of being right though.

The word octopus is a classical Greek word that comes to English via Latin. The Greek plural is octopodes, the Latin plural is octopi. But we don't speak Latin or classical Greek. We speak English. Because octopus is the English word for octopus it follows the English rules for pluralization, which is to add "s" or "es" to the end of the word. Cases can be made why octopi and octopodes could be technically correct, but for English speakers octopuses is the most correct.

They don't actually think Kamala is a DEI hire They just say "DEI" because they don't feel emboldened enough to openly call her the N-word. You know... yet.

Yeah, the saltpeter (potassium nitrate) is really the key ingredient here. It's the rapid oxidizer compound that gives your anti-Gorn cannon its boom boom. Without that, mixing all the other stuff together is just going to be smelly and disappointing.

Usually breading meat starts with dipping the meat into an egg wash before you dip it in the bread crumbs, so the yellow probably comes from egg yolk.

Would an X-Men/Star Wars crossover be any weirder than the Justice League/RWBY mashup that Warner Brothers did?