I’m celebrating Happy Fireworks Day!

I’ve got new neighbors that are probably about to hear, “Fire in the hole!” unironically for the first time. You can actually see the shockwave from my blackpowder signal cannon. Good chance the cops show up.

I usually use the cannon to vaporize 10oz of kerosene for a nice mushroom cloud of fire, but I’ll have to see how it goes.

I’m a pyro.

Y’all wear safety glasses if having bottle rocket fights or roman candle duels.

You can get concentrated permetherin, mix with water and apply with spray bottle to cotton clothes/socks. It bonds to the fiber and keeps the ticks off. Lasts several washes, longer if you don’t dry clothes with heat.

Much cheaper to buy the concentrate instead of the premix.

Spray outside, allow clothes to dry outside. Stuff is pretty much harmless to humans. When still wet or in concentrate, it is absolutely deadly to cats. After it has bonded to your clothes, it won’t hurt the cats. Doesn’t work if you apply it to your skin, the skin oils or something deactivate it.

Haven’t had a tick in years since I started using it.

I’m pretty okay with Duggar snark and Sister Wives snark. My girl follows all of it. Anything that spotlights the abuse inherent in fundamentalist Mormonism/Evangelicalism is mostly a good thing, in my book.

No clue about the particulars on this. Never heard of her before.

That’s a great Fitzgerald quote. I had to look it up. Written after The Great Gatsby but published shortly before, The Rich Boy is a novelette. From 1926.

1926. I fucking hate knowing history. I fucking hate feeling like Cassandra.

Sometimes a DIY icepick lobotomy doesn’t sound like a bad idea.

Don’t you just love this fucking bullshit dripping from the mouth of a parasite who’s never seen hard times?

I do actually agree with the core of this idea. Most people are not happy in a state of long term indolence. Most of us need ‘work’ to be happy. However, that ‘work’ might be carving sculpture, teaching children, breeding plants, or theoretical physics.

How many Albert Einsteins and George Washington Carvers died of blacklung from the mines this parasite inherited?

I thought Ghislane was the Mossad contact, wasn’t her father actually in Mossad leadership? Epstein was the ‘party’ boy, gag, and Maxwell was operations?

I’ll go with you.

I’m still going to want to have a hard talk with God about why She allows cancer babies and such…

Rock and roll. I’ve seen bad things happen when someone decides it’s a good idea to modernize a PC based CNC control. (I hate PC based controls). They get their own little fence to live inside where it’s always 1999.

At least the lathe isn’t running punch tape.

Don’t upgrade or mess with the control. Disconnect from the network if it’s on it. It should have RS-232. Throw a Pi or other SBC that does serial and a 12V level shifter; use that to feed it programs.

Also, make an image of the hard drive if it has one and start looking for a spare drive on ebay.

Telomere length is the only thing I can think of, but that’s totally a guess and I don’t know much about it. Telomeres, as I understand it, are padding at the end of DNA and shorten as you age.

Yeah, that tracks. She sounds like a sweetheart . It’s deprecated, but it’s not like a memo went out. It was much more common when I was a kid, I remember my grandfather griping about it and trying to make the change.

We moved North recently and I’m having the same problem with a different term. Lots of Italian in the area. I’ve always pronounced it eye-talian, it’s not a racist thing, I’m just a redneck and that’s what I learned. Some people find it offensive, so I’m trying to change it.

Well, I guess they find it offensive when they can understand me. Feels like I’m speakig a different language from everyone around here a lot of the time. I have an easier time talking to black folks than I do white, dialect is much closer. I regularly get jaw-drop suprise when I’m in public and say something.

Also having a hell of a time with Yes Ma’am/Yes Sir as there is high trans/enby representation in my social scene. I just apologize and move on. Southern charm and politness is a huge help.

I’m mostly self educated and my speech patterns are so stereotypically deep southern that most people assume I’m backwards. I was mostly raised in a Sundown town. All those inbred jokes and such. Black folks pick up that I’m not backwards faster than white because they understand me better. I find language and dialect fascinating, do a lot of involuntary code switching. When bullshitting with a group of white men around here, when I get comfortable, I unconsciously drop into full redneck speech and they really have a hard time understanding me.

As for colored, the below image is a good representation of why the term is problematic, it was used on Jim Crow signs. Calling a black man, “colored boy” is fighting words and roughly equivalent to the N word. I refer to white men as boys all the time but unless it is a mixed race group, I do not refer to black men as boy.

Yeah, it’s all going to be regional. I’m a redneck, and, to some extent, queer. However, call me those things with the wrong tone and we have a problem.

Minority is nice because it’s relatively short compared to groups-other-than-white and similar clunky terms.

“Minorities,” is now sometimes used in an insulting way, but it’s usualy obvious when someone is being a racist shithead.

At the end of the day it comes down to respect, intent, and tone. Basically, don’t be a fuckhead and be polite, folks will tell you how they want be called.

Minority is probably the best term when you’re talking about not-white.

In general, African American is seen as silly just like Latinx is. Caucasian American is used ironically as a mild insult: “That boy is such a Caucasian American that he keeps a loaf of whitebread in the glovebox.”

Brown people is also useful shorthand but you have to be careful as it can be insulting without proper irony. “Those rich old white guys sure do love killing brown people for oil.”

Re-read and climb off that high horse before you hurt yourself. I was also referring to the UNCF, Unitrd Negro College Fund. Goes hand in hand with the NAACP.

Both colored and Negro occur in these names as the organiztions are so old that those were the correct terms at the time.

Example not involving race:

Moron -> retard -> special as in special needs -> intellectually disabled

It’s called the Euphemism Treadmill. Moron was a medical term defining the degeee of impairment lile a hundred years ago and is used as a pejorative to this day.

I dare you to call a group of black guys colored or Negro. Hell, get video if you can.

Keep in mind, Jim Crow is still in living memory and i grew up with the double water fountains everywhere.

Colored is Jim Crow and Negro is a racial category that goes back to phrenology. Negroid was still used in anthropology as recently as the 90s, still may be a technical term, IDK. But, unless you’re talking about college funds or forensics, you have a good chance of getting your ass beat in the right crowd.

Unless you’re old as dirt and polite.

It’s a an old name that contains a deprecated and often insulting term for black folks: National Association for the Advancement of Colored people.

However, it’s not quite a slur. If you’re under the age of 70 and using it, you’re almost certainly using it as a slur. Plenty of old black and white folk in the south still use it as it was the polite term when they were kids.

The whole Tankie thing. Just like MAGAts but on the other side. They’re authoritarian left with lots of Chinese and possibly Russian influence. Far left most of us support are on the opposite end of the authoritarian/individualistic axis from both Tankies and MAGAts.

Was looking up tracks in a field guide the other day and ran across this super cute rodent, The Mountain Beaver.

Jerboa has served well as the replacement for me.

Please. Please. Please. Come on boys, just read the Constitution, you didn’t sign up for this shit.