Big dog.

Baby dog Izzy will be two years old in a couple of months, and I'd kind of hoped he'd have stopped growing by now. It doesn't seem to be the case. 

He's not crazy huge -- not like some dogs.

He's not even as big as Nipper was, let alone Tralfaz, who was pretty darn big. But there is a difference. Izzy is more of a cuddlemuffin than those two were. Nipper was all playah, all party all the time, and Fazzy was the eternal watchdog, stoic and humorless (except for when he'd let himself go and be a big goofball). Izzy wants to be close by, but he's getting a little large for it. 

For example, he really doesn't fit under the desk as well as he used to. He liked to lie down there with his favorite toys (feets!), but now bits of him spread out from underneath. I've rolled over his tail hair -- though not his tail -- by accident, to find I'd pulled out hair with the wheel of the chair. This kind of thing didn't used to happen. 

Or say I want a nap on the couch, a fairly common event. The other dogs had no interest in hanging around on the furniture, but you can't keep Iz off it. Now I'm sharing a couch, and there really isn't enough room for the two of us. Nevertheless, we nap as best we can. 

It's sweet that he wants to be close to his people, but it can be very tricky as well. I think we may need a longer couch. But actually, the one we have pretty much takes up the wall. So it looks like we'll have to move to a house with a longer family room. This is getting complicated. 

Presidents Day sale!

Hello, friends! We're celebrating Presidents Day here at Fredcoin, everyone's favorite cryptocurrency, with an amazing deal! You won't want to miss out on this one! But first, you need to ask yourself some important questions. 

Yes, friends, you need to say to yourself, "SELF! Do I want my wallet to be fat, like Taft? Or scrawny like Madison? Do I want my savings to be piled high like Lincoln? Or be peewee like, er, Madison? Man, Madison was a little dude, wasn't he?"

Well, of course the answer is: You want the big dough! You want to be raking it in like Trump before becoming president, not have to wait like Obama until afterward! 

But, you wonder, how can Fredcoin bring you the big bucks if it's just another form of currency?

See, right there, that's our secret: No one knows. The US Treasury is jammed with people who know a lot about money. Congress and the White House are full of money people. The Federal Reserve is all about the good old US dollar. And how is that working out? Your dollar has more shrinkage than the guys in the Polar Bear Club on New Year's Day. Meanwhile, at Fredcoin, we don't know beans about money, and 1 Fredcoin has remained equal to 1 Fredcoin ever since we started. QED!

And here's our amazing Presidents Day Fred, White, and Blue Sale: Buy 50 Fredcoin for one Grant, and we'll throw in another 20 for one Jackson! We must be nuts to make a deal like that, I know! Or maybe drunk! Oh ho! Which two presidents have a reputation for being prodigious topers? Aaahhhh, there you are!

Once again, I must ask if you want to be smart like our smarty smart presidents (Washington, Lincoln)? Dumb like our big dumbbell presidents (take your pick)? Or even so smart you come all the way around to being stupid again (Wilson)? Of course not! You want to be with the hip crowd! You want Fredcoin!

So remember, my fellow Americans, turn that flimsy US currency into rock-solid Fredcoin! And keep flying the Fred, White, and Blue! 

Between hibachi and low tide.

Surely no art form has managed to combine cooking, comedy, prestidigitation, and danger as the hibachi. 

We were at a celebratory dinner the other day and got a table with its own little griddle. "Griddle" seems like an insultingly low-class term for the art of the hibachi chef, to be frank. It comes from the Middle English gredil, or gridiron, but the flat surface isn't a gridiron, which is a grate. Another area where English has let us down.

You have to admire the showmanship of the hibachi, even if you don't like the food, although I do. The chef generally has a repertoire of stunts and jokes, flinging raw eggs and flipping things in his hat and whacking things to pieces and making ingredients dance and sing. This is always accompanied by good cheer, no matter how many times they've had to do the act that day, no matter how grumpy the patrons may be. These guys are pros.

And they're not always guys! For the first time at this restaurant we saw a female hibachi chef. She wasn't feeding our little crew, but I could see her in action, and she was doing her own version of the act. I guess she has broken the glass shīringu.

I have heard that traditionally in Japan, as in many places, chefs of any rank are considered menials, barely worth noticing. It seems strange for a country that gave the world the goofy Iron Chef, but perhaps that's helped change things. The show was wacky but the contestants always serious. In the West the great Auguste Escoffier made cooking at high level a well-respected career. Personally, I have always shown respect to people who are giving me food, if for no other reason than eating it is an act of trust. 

Also, I like to think that in America, we always respect people who work hard. Hibachi chef is no lightweight career. We salute you, chefs! Flame on!

De-meme-ing! Part 2.

As I noted yesterday, my friend Philbin (if that is his real name) was unable to post this hilarious meme of mine on Facebook. It was cited by the FB cops for violating community standards. Yesterday I tried to explain the joke, just in case any Facebook representatives were standing by.

Philbin protested the ban in the same way, arguing to the faceless Facebook police that this is a victimless joke and inoffensive to anyone who understands it. That cuts no ice with the idiots who man the barricades at Facebook. But to his credit, Philbin then decided to push the issue, risking time in Facebook prison, to find out what problem the idiots at Facebook have with this meme. 

Was it the template?

The template is a picture of conservative comedian and podcaster Steven Crowder, who appeared on a college campus with a sign saying "Male Privilege Is a Myth / Change My Mind". Crowder is a happy warrior, ready to take on anyone. After he posted this picture in 2018, it immediately became a meme, with all kinds of challenging statements, like "A Hot Dog Is a Sandwich/Change My Mind". People who never heard of Steven Crowder have used it. Others have made anti-Crowder statements with it. It's a meme; that's how they work. 

Is it offensive just on its face? My friend posted another, even more anodyne gag with the same meme to see what would happen. 

He did not get an angry warning about this one. However, he also did not get a response from his FB buddies, not even a mercy like. He checked his feed and discovered that the joke had mysteriously disappeared. Was it an accident... like a Russian window fall accident, hmm?

So he put this one together and posted it.

That did it.

You can disagree with the decision on one hand, and crap in the other, and see which fills up first.

Okay, so what is the problem? Do they hate Crowder? Many people on the left do. He makes fun of them, often in childish ways. Only leftists are allowed to make fun of people, especially in childish ways. 

Once more into the breach! Philbin made and posted this one: 

You can't get more Crowder than that, and yet it was allowed to stay.

We put our heads together (clunk ouch!) and decided that the "Change My Mind" meme has somehow gotten flagged as is at FB, regardless of how it's worded, either because people were using it for genuinely offensive content or (more likely) because it was being used to actually challenge people's beliefs, and that gave people the bad feels. It's hard to tell, but from all the information coming out about the willingness of Silicon Valley to censor "enemies" and how what most Americans believed in 1983 would put them on the "enemies" list now, I think it's safe to say Facebook is ceding to the usual crybullies on the left over this. And many of their employees are the crybullies on the left. But that's all just conjecture.  

What can we say for certain? That no one at Facebook has a genuine sense of humor or irony, and probably doesn't know anything at all that happened before 2010. That they don't believe in free political speech in any significant way, and think plugging up one meme is going to change anybody's mind. Irony alert! 

It's all just further confirmation that everything is the world is being run by the worst possible people. We have military brass who can't win a war, comedians who aren't funny, schools that can't teach, politicians who can't lead, singers who can't sing, corporations that can't make money, representatives who hate their voters, an entertainment industry that doesn't entertain, surgeons who mutilate patients, an energy sector that won't provide reliable energy, information technology that spews horse crap, religions without God, and social media that's antisocial. Everything must be sacrificed if it leads to that bright socialist future. 

That's a lot of gloom for one little meme-ban, I know, but it's hard to shake the feeling that everything is geared toward trying to make our lives harder, more expensive, more miserable, and definitely less funny.

De-meme-ing! Part 1.

A friend of mine (let's call him Philbin) wanted to post my super-hilarious and super-dated meme about Tommy Chong and Foster Brooks on Facebook. Much to our mutual surprise, Facebook's idiot censors rejected the post, saying it was offensive (violating "community standards," which would imply that the "community" is made up of drooling morons).

So, as a public service, I thought I had better explain this joke. I figured that they didn't get it. I have often said that dissecting a joke is like dissecting a frog, in that you can do it, but don't expect the frog to jump afterward. Nevertheless, since our Social Betters are A) stupid and B) ten years old and "literally know nothing," I thought I had better explain it from top to bottom. 

Don't worry, Facebook censors -- I am typing this slowly because I know you don't read very fast. Okay, here goes:

1) Tommy Chong:

Tommy Chong is a comedian and comic actor, best known as part of the duo Cheech & Chong with Cheech Marin. Chong was born in 1938, so he's not exactly some brash newcomer of whom Facebook could not be aware. Cheech & Chong were famous for drug-centered humor, as witnessed in their first comedy album, 1971's Big Bambu. They later made the most marijuana-soaked film ever, 1978's Up in Smoke. The movie was well-regarded among connoisseurs (my elder cousins) for gags like the pot-smuggling van made entirely of compressed marijuana and the drug-sniffing dog that gets killed just smelling it. Chong wasn't just kidding around -- he became a marijuana activist and longtime fighter for legalization. So Chong's connection to marijuana has been pretty well established for more than fifty years. 

2) CBD:

As has been recounted on this blog, CBD, or cannabidiol, is the magic compound in marijuana that doesn't get you high (that's Delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC) but supposedly cures everything. Maybe some people really have found relief from these CBD products, but the few people I know who tried them thought they were disappointing. I begin to suspect it was just a means of promoting the agriculture of marijuana, as George Washington Carver developed more than 300 uses for peanuts to help peanut agriculture. The difference is, most of Carver's inventions were useful. Be that as it may, Tommy Chong went all in on this, promoting his line of hemp-based products, notably those containing the magic ingredient CBD. So it's no offense to anyone that this former star stoner is promoting CBD; it's exactly the truth.

3) Foster Brooks:

Foster Brooks (1912-2001) was a comedian who had one schtick, but he was exceptionally good at it: He was a drunk. He had the knack for coming across as a cheerful, befuddled drunken man trying very hard not to appear drunk, and would stumble over words and make unusual statements in a way much funnier than any real drunk. In reality, Brooks was not a drinker, or had not been for many years when he became famous doing this bit. 

4) O'Doul's:

O'Doul's is one of the first successful U.S. brands of nonalcoholic beer, or rather beer with trace amounts of alcohol in it. This Anheuser Busch product has an alcohol content of .4%; a regular Budweiser has an alcohol content of 5%. So to get the buzz from one lousy can of Bud, you'd have to drink 12.5 cans of O'Doul's. It's still not recommended for people in recovery from alcohol addiction, but you can imagine how insanely difficult it would be to get loaded on O'Doul's. 

5) The Punch Line:

The comparison, then, is a simple one, that of a famous stoner who sells marijuana products that don't contain THC to a famous drunk selling beer that doesn't contain alcohol. Both guys were comedians who made a lot of comic hay playing people whose addictions were way out of control but were still funny to watch. So the meme is challenging others to disprove that this is a valid comparison. (This could be done by pointing out that Chong is still using pot while Brooks was not using alcohol, for one thing.)

6) Facebook:

So what's the problem? Does Facebook just not have a sense of humor? Well, no, it doesn't, because it's run by SJWs, but is that the whole problem?

Well, Philbin continued to investigate, and what he turned up is shocking! Tune in tomorrow for the revelation -- it's amazing! And if you disagree, change my mind! 

No man winter.

I don't want to jinx us, but except for a couple of nasty cold snaps, this has been the easiest winter I remember, and I remember a few. The worst weather we have had so far in New York actually started on the first day of winter. It was no joke -- Buffalo got it horribly, and with a body count. But since then it's been very light. When we have had precipitation, it's been warm, so it's been rain. And, Mr. Snow Miser, for the record I am just fine with that. Why, it's like living in the south!

Usually when the winter is warm in this neck of the woods you hear a lot of wailing about global warming, but not this year. No one wants steady, freezing cold, with back-breaking car-wrecking ice and snow measured by the yard. Maybe the big-time climate chaos enthusiasts are thinking, Well, Miami, sucks to be you, but I'm digging this. And I think they can probably relax about Miami too. (Remember the #1 rule of Climatology: If it fits the Narrative™, it's climate; if it contradicts the Narrative™, it's weather.)

Having said all this, I do seem to recall Januarys and Februarys that were deceptively mild, followed by Marches that were -- to put it mildly -- bastards. The worst is when we make it to March 21, or whatever day the vernal equinox falls on that year, and think we're home free, and BLAM! Blizzard. 

So you can bet I'll be keeping a weather eye on things here, and if we do get smacked late in the season, you can bet I'll be linking back to this page. Heat Miser is at his weakest early in the spring, and Snow Miser thinks it's funny to drop a bomb on us just when we think we're safe. Keep watching the skies!

Known for shoddy construction.