Coming from one of those toxic families...they aren’t doing it for me. They are doing it so the other tables look at them, and maybe they get something free, and (on her bday or my spouse’s) my MIL gets to brag about how everyone says she can’t be x years old or have kids x years old for about a week after. 

Let’s do birthdays together. My in-laws have to have them at whatever place they might see a Real Housewife and a $70 steak and will complain until there’s singing. By waiters making more annually than I do, so it’s bad all the way around for me. 

Tangential Olive Garden question for the serverati:

I stopped drinking milk a long time ago because I grew up in dairy country and got tired of the subsidized people with nice cars and undocumented laborers crying crocodile tears about their hard lives. The recent articles have just been non-dairy whipped topping.

A month later...

I ask myself this a lot. My deep-red representatives (state and federal) are so pro-Trump that i’m almost afraid expressing my concerns will just be watch list fodder. 

This summarizes something I’ve seen a lot with the old Italians in my town, who weren’t “white” until the Hispanics started moving into town and who now sound like Klan dragons when they talk race. The Swedes still don’t let them own anything, though. 

This is why I’m glad my only reviews were a coworker and my mom. Pretty much my only sales, too. 

Like I said elsewhere, I grew up in dairy country and I have never met a group of owners and managers less able to pivot than dairy farmers. Their usual response to decreasing prices was to buy more cows and dump more milk in a fit of pique, hoping to shame people into buying more gallons at the Stewarts. 

I grew up in dairy country where the heavily-subsidized farmers constantly decried stagnant milk prices and voted straight GOP. The sort of people who were failing at capitalism and blaming the consumer/market instead of their own inability to adapt to it not being 1955 anymore.

Having worked for some sports teams over the years, I’d take the position that hockey players are ill-educated but baseball players are incapable of education. There’s just nothing there to work with. Cognitively, I mean. As the point of the article attests, there’s a lot to work with otherwise. 

In my day job I have a whole folder of reports on jail suicides. Almost all of them follow this pattern. 

Good.

One of my gripes with NWSL, as much as I love it, is they really seem to do a lot of the partner deals. Maybe because it’s the only league where people are so openly out, and it does happen elsewhere more quietly, but from the uniqueness of it people can draw the conclusion that it’s not a real or serious sports…

I would love to see those three players get out of WAS. Pugh feels like her game isn’t growing anymore, but then that’s the standard story for a wunderkind who plateaus and hasn’t had to push as much. (I’m saying this with regard to athletes who have worked their entire lives harder than I’ve worked in a day, but I…

I love some NCC, being in the old WNY Flash market and feeling a connection that somehow Hinkle and Mathias haven’t broken...but expansion to thin that team out a little will be good.

I was amused--if “amused” includes fiery rage--by various hot takes by people opposed to this hire because they’ve created this myth that Rapinoe ordered the hiring of her pro coach and, in their flag-humping hatred of her, they oppose Vlatko. 

My mom and dad both have (varying degrees of) gout. My dad used to down beer (crappy stuff that was probably laden with asbestos or something) and my mom had maybe six a year. It’s just one of the factors, but an easy one to triangulate. 

I enjoyed this, as it really highlights the shitheaded ideas Spanfeller’s ilk have about people who aren’t fabulously wealthy and therefore are part of the criminal class.

So, the Lovie Smith playbook?