Anybody else feel as though they should tuck Old Glory away and fly the Jolly Roger this Memorial Day weekend?
Whenever our fellow Americans get their bib-’alls in a bunch and saddle us with some featherbedding fascist who’s only passing through to rob the savings and loan, poke anything with a pulse, and then burn the whole town down to its foundations, why, I think about how refreshing it would be to rock the hammer and sickle, skull and crossbones, or an upside-down stars and stripes on national holidays.
Someone up the road a ways is doing the latter, perhaps in response to a neighbor who did likewise during the previous administration. A quiet little tit for tat. Haven’t heard any raised voices or gunfire yet, anyway.
I don’t know who I’d be trying to impress with any kind of alternative flag display, though. El Rancho Pendejo sits at the bottom of a cul-de-sac and is seen mostly by the people who live here, the mailman, various tradespersons, and the drivers of a steady stream of delivery vans, though that torrent has become more of a trickle as the economy struggles with a distinct kink in its hose.
It all seems mostly performative, anyway. Like the mouth-breathers flying Trump flags from porch and pickup. Lets you know whom to visit at 2 in the morning come The Revolution, to be sure. But they’re starting to look like an endangered species in any event. Fingers crossed.
Back when we were new to the Greater Patty Jewett Yacht & Gun Club Neighborhood in Bibleburg, our next-door neighbor Marv, a veteran, explained that he flew the flag to make sure that “those guys” (his words) didn’t think they were the only ones entitled to do so.
Maybe that’s the example to follow. Memorial Day isn’t about “those guys.” If it were, we’d all be flying pirate flags for sure.
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.
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.
Somehow I’ve managed to bollix my back again, possibly the upshot of doing a wee bit too much of what’s supposed to be fun and good for me.
P’raps at my advanced and ever-accelerating state of disintegration it’s not smart to follow a 120-mile week with a few days of caroming various cyclocross bikes and a rigid mid-Nineties 26er off rocks in various calibers while rolling the foothills trails? Plus a trail run and adding a couple elbees to the ol’ dumbbells, like a dumbbell?
Well … you know what we say about “smart” and Your Humble Narrator — rarely seen together, like Clark Kent and Superman, and without all that useful Kryptonian super-strength and invulnerability, too.
Anyway, shit took me right out of the game. I never know precisely what triggers this old injury, acquired in college while delivering appliances for beer money. And there’s no curing it, not since we headed south from Bibleburg and my miracle worker Doc Lori took that long road west.
So when it pops round like the taxman, a cold-calling insert-your-home-improvement-project-here rep’, or a chirpy acolyte of the Campus Crusade for Cthulhu, I just wait it out. No sudden movements, no heavy lifting, and definitely no bicycling. A little gentle stretching, a few equally gentle walks, spasms working their way up and down the carcass looking for structural weaknesses, and, inevitably, finding them.
A severely restricted news diet is a must as well. Ping-ponging between the hysterical laughter of disbelief at the countless teensy weenies being so fiercely trodden upon and a shrieking “Follow Me Up to Carlow” rage (up with halberds, out with swords, etc.) is not a balm for the slowly recovering organism.
Thus the lack of recent bloggery. I’m feeling much better now, thanks. Though I can’t remember where I parked my halberd, goddamnit. ’Twas a nice Rivendell model too.
The lone GS-1 running the National Weather Service must’ve lost her Magic 8-Ball and is reduced to winging it, calling for “a slight chance of snow showers” here before 8 a.m.
As that hour has come and gone, we will not be breaking out the cross-country skis anytime soon.
Still, the weather is finally more or less seasonal for a change, so I can probably leave the lawn mower in the garage for a while, too.
Mad Blog Media 