The Memorial Day Shopping Fiesta and Family Barbecue Getaway (Nothing to See Here, Move Along, Move Along) kicks off today with the murders most foul of Stephen Colbert’s “Late Show” and CBS News Radio, along with any remaining illusions that Americans live in a functioning democracy.
There is no truth to the rumor that the new national anthem for our next 250 years — or perhaps 250 days? Hours? — will be the Beach Boys “Good Vibrations” reimagined by Black Sabbath. Or so we may hope, anyway.
One thing is certain: That cheery little ditty, along with an unauthorized Kid Rock cover of the Eagles’ song “The Last Resort,” will be in heavy rotation down in the Adolf & Eva Memorial Ballroom & Führerbunker. The lyric “Some rich men came and raped the land / nobody caught ’em” will be a huge laugh line for everyone save the slaves serving up the Big Macs and Diet Cokes.
Meanwhile, some good news: M-Day weekend gas prices are at a four-year high! But that won’t keep 39 million of us from cranking up the Family Yacht and burning a few tanks’ worth to spend time eating bad food poorly prepared and swilling tins of thin industrial lager with people we really don’t like all that much.
The Soma Double Cross takes five in the Elena Gallegos Open Space.
Last I looked go-juice was between $4.50 and $5 here in The Duck! City, which didn’t make AAA’s list of the top-10 Memorial Day getaways (the podium: Orlando, FL, Seattle, WA, and New York).
No worries here, bruh. I got my holiday shopping done early yesterday, before the ravening hordes could descend upon the grocery and strip the shelves bare like a cloud of fat betatted locusts. And today I ain’t driving nowhere, nohow, though I do expect to get out on a bike at some point. Yesterday was stellar in the Elena Gallegos Open Space; I saw only a few other trail users as I rumbled along on the old Soma Double Cross, and most seemed to be enjoying the wide-open space as much as I was.
Meanwhile, Republicans will be traveling home after shitting the bed in Congress. Here’s hoping their constituents have a few words with them about the horrible smell.
The ballroom bunker and slush fund for scumbags apparently were not the delightful amuse-bouche Admiral Palsy thought they would be, and the usual congressional dine-and-dash going into a weeklong recess was downsized to a dash, period.
Well! No dessert for you lot. Yo, Rubio! Send this shit soufflé to Vance with my compliments. That shameless hoor will eat anything and smile while he does it.
A tip of the Mad Dog fedora — the one with the “Press” card in the hatband — to Pat O’B for noticing that, unbeknownst to Your Humble Narrator, WordPress had surreptiously installed a “Report” button next to the “Reply” button in comments.
I’d been having all manner of hassles accessing the goddamn blog this morning, and I suspect that this shameless little attempt at speech-policing may have been the culprit. When the dust finally settled I slapped up the “Don’t touch that dial!” post as a heads-up, Pat commented on same, and hey presto! We were off to the First Amendment races.
First at bat: A.I. When I asked it, “What is this ‘Report’ button that has suddenly become an option in comments on my posts?” WP’s robot buddy told me:
The Report button in comments is a WordPress.com feature that allows readers to flag comments they find inappropriate, spammy, or abusive — it helps with community moderation. It’s shown to logged-in WordPress.com users viewing your posts, and reported comments get reviewed. You can manage your comments at Comments. Want to know more about your comment settings?
Uh, no. Fetch me one of your disgusting Meat-Things® at whom I may shout, and with all possible haste. Be advised that I have my “comment settings” at “phasers on full.”
A Happiness Engineer appeared after a short wait and spake thusly:
We would like to let you know that the report button under comments is a standard feature that now comes with Comment forms, this is so that all of our users can report any content they may find harmful or inappropriate. This doesn’t mean a comment will be deleted for being reported; it will only be flagged and go through our review process.
I threw a flag on that play:
I review comments. Not you. Me. It’s my blog. I can’t begin to tell you how angry this makes me.
I was a professional journalist for 45 years. I began blogging on WordPress ages ago. Everyone who visits my site sees a disclaimer about what to expect. Anyone who acts out gets warned, then blocked.
If WordPress is going to start deciding what is “harmful or inappropriate” on my blog, the blog I pay WP for, based on some undefined “review process,” I will look into taking my tiny little bit of business elsewhere.
The Happiness Engineer divined that my little choo-choo was headed off the rails and ran up the track a ways, waving a red lantern.
When s/he/they jumped back aboard, the story was as follows:
The Report button is part of a recent update to the Akismet spam-protection settings on your site. It’s not a change to how your blog is moderated and no one at WordPress will review or override your moderation decisions. If a comment gets reported through that button, it’s simply flagged to Akismet’s spam system; it doesn’t get removed or hidden from your site.
Uh huh. I’ve edited a story or two in my time, but I usually aimed for clarification, not simply topping it off with, “Just kidding!”
Long story short: If you have a WordPress blog, and this “Report” button appears in your comments, you can remove it in your Dashboard by going to Jetpack > Akismet Anti-Spam and unchecking “Allow visitors to report spam or inappropriate comments.” This bullshit is apparently enabled by default, and fuck you very much, meep meep meep.
I thanked the Happiness Engineer for helping me deny a hall pass to rat finks, stool pigeons and informers, and then added:
Adding this “feature” without a bit of warning is insane. Please feel free to tell Management that.
Come to think of it, if you have an email address for anyone in Management to whom I could express my extreme discontent, that would be helpful. We’re a tiny little group of overeducated First Amendment types, and more than a few of us have WP blogs. We’d like to kick this matter up your food chain if you have someone handy for me to yell at.
The HE promised to “share this internally,” added that my volcanic feedback “shows how this can look very different from what was intended,” and gave me an email address which may or may not be useful: support@akismet.com.
I wonder what Akismet’s robot thinks about this? Probably too busy trolling the Meat-Things’® cloud storage for actionable intelligence. If any.
“Have you tried turning it off and turning it back on again?”
Is it the State? Is it the Corporation? Aren’t they both the same thing these days? With Jesus as CEO, P.T. Barnum as COO, and Michael Corleone as CFO?
Whatevs. Ye Olde Blogge has been acting out this morning for no good reason, so if all you’ve been getting is the Jolly Roger and a hearty “Stand and deliver!” when you drop by, pay it no mind. It’ll either work or it won’t, just like everything else.
I filled out the paperwork and trudged that long mile between El Rancho Pendejo and our neighborhood Vote Center to begin the process of tossing out various rascals and installing others.
The hope is that in the end we will have elected some folks who will have the common courtesy to sell us out in private, where we don’t have to watch over our coffee and Cheerios. The no-holes-barred, open-air whorehouse that reopened on Jan. 20, 2025, has not been a boon to the Republic or the digestive tract.
In point of fact, it’s been the shits.
I persist in voting because it’s the only real alternative to armed insurrection. There’s always staying home on Election Day, but that helped get us where we are, so, nuh uh. And I don’t have a passport, so running-away is off the table.
What worries me is the suspicion that if we ever reach the “up with halberd, out with sword” point, we may find that His Excremency King Piggy the Sticky-fingered and his gombeen men have deployed a band of A.I. brigands to empty all our accounts before we can armor up at our friendly neighborhood boom-boom rooms.
“Up the rebels!” and all that, but if we’re going after them for keepsies I’d like to be packing something with more authority than my 72-year-old teeth and toenails.
Mad Blog Media 