There are over 30 billionaires in mainland China. The wealthiest citizen of the PRC is the 8th richest person in the world.

For much of the novel, Chandler is the sole occupant of the Devil House in Milpitas, California

For a second I thought this article was saying Amy Berg directed the video where Wood was raped, and I was horrendously confused. Luckily I thought “That can’t possibly be true” and went back and re-read it, before leaving a comically incorrect comment.

To listen to more new music. I mostly listen to music that was recorded before I started grade school (and I’m almost 50), plus some stuff from my teenage years. Most new music is that gets mainstream exposure is... I don’t to say it’s bad, I’ll just say I’m not the target audience. But I recently discovered Her’s,…

I recently re-watched this movie and my takeaway is that heavy metal is bad, but playing with your parents’ poorly-hidden firearms is good. Having grown up in the suburbs during the 1980s, that tracks.

Rice seemed to have a perpetually adolescent mindset to her, constantly making declarative lifestyle changes, and then making equally declarative breaks with them. The south sucks, I’m moving to California! I’m reclaiming my roots and moving back to New Orleans! Actually fuck that, back to California! I’m a Christian…

She has volunteers that she doesn’t even pay! That’s a cult! Just like everyone who’s ever volunteered at an animal shelter or food pantry!!

Agreed. I watched the first season and thought it was enjoyable if low-brow, but very soon found out how ridiculously biased it was against Baskin. (Among other things, they presented a feeding cage as something a tiger was kept in 24/7, out of some need to show all these people as cruel and inept.) Season 2 clearly…

Mostly I like the show, although I agree the timeline jumble can be hard to to track. My biggest problem is the scenes with the Sacklers, and especially Stuhlbarg’s performance. I get that the Sacklers are the villains of the piece—I’ve read Beth Macy’s book, Sam Quinones’ Dreamland, and Patrick Radden Keefe’s Empire…

I came for the exposure of the Warrens as grifters, I stayed for the story about how Lorraine claimed to have met Bigfoot. Apparently he just had an infection in both feet, normally they aren’t that big!

Last night I started Maria Judite de Carvalho’s Empty Wardrobes, which is November’s “read more books by WOC and/or non-American writers” project. It’s not terrifically interesting, but it’s not very long so I’ll finish it.

Yeah, I thought that sounded like bullshit when I read it. It reminded me of the hysteria about people giving out edibles to kids for Halloween. Drugs are expensive! No one is giving them to total strangers for free! Eight people were crushed/trampled to death, can we not make up urban legends about phantom drug…

Nope, it wasn’t even remotely like the resistance to the Covid vaccine. My mother grew up around the Texas/Louisiana border, which was then and is now one of the most conservative places in the nation. She had a neighbor in an iron lung, and was 13 when Salk’s vaccine came into use. Parents were lined up outside of…

A lot—I would venture to say most—of the reaction I’ve seen to this on the leftie corners of the internet has been along the lines of “Oh noes, Lovato took too many drugs and now they are insane”. People tripping over themselves to excuse this shit should probably remind themselves that Lovato definitely isn’t…

David Icke is on Gaia. He’s the originator of the “Jews I mean Lizard People run the world” conspiracy theory. Whether Lovato knows or wants to admit it, she’s taking money to espouse deeply racist conspiracy theories. Alex Jones doesn’t get a pass from me for doing that; I’m not going to give one to Lovato just…

Those kids appear to be Zoomers. Unless it’s a Boomer smoke monster of the type who still thinks of “Millennials” as little kids, and not people starting to lose the cartilage in their knees. In which case: well done.

aCtUaLlY iT wAs FlAvOr-AiD

Oh, so she’s getting actual medical treatment, not dOiNg HeR oWn ReSeArCh? Ironic that an anti-vax dipshit is playing a scientific genius.

Oh no all those articles about how JACKED AND SWOLE Kumail Nanjiani is now were for nothing

I’m back on Lords of the Horizons: A History of the Ottoman Empire by Jason Goodwin. I was on vacation last week and opted to re-read some true crime favorites (Midnight in Peking; Black Dahlia, Red Rose; The Man From the Train), which I guess is my literary comfort food. It’s interesting and Goodwin has a wryly…