I believe in a leftist philosophy, but I am finding it hard to join in with some online lefty communities. The purity tests and infighting just do not interest me. There are people who think if you slightly deviate from the proper leftist ideal you are then a "bad" person so then it is okay to harass a "bad" person.

Of course you can call someone horrible names and say they should die. They are a bad person and all bad people deserve that. Right?

Some seem more interested in calling out bad leftists than actual right wing fascists. If I hear "AOC is turning into Nancy Pelosi" one more time my eyes are going to roll out of my head.

And I think this entire voting thing has crystalized how I feel about this. I'm frustrated with how many people seem to be allergic to long term strategy and realistic goals. They value performative actions that yield no tangible benefit rather than long term problem solving, strategic thinking, pragmatic action, and building power over time.

The right to vote is precious but the act of voting is not.

It is not an endorsement.

It is a tool.

I'm using that tool and choosing who I'd rather argue with.

I'm voting for myself as a disabled person and a friend of trans people and as someone who doesn't want to protest migrant concentration camps in addition to the genocide in Gaza. I'm making a strategic decision that I hope will help achieve a better outcome for myself and other marginalized groups.

And on a more personal level, I had to watch my mother die a horrible, painful, lonely death because of an incompetent president. I don't think I can handle the trauma of continuing to see that horrible man in the news every single day. My motivations are multifaceted.

Spending time arguing with other leftists is a really poor use of energy. I'm not up to it and I'm going to spend what energy I have advocating for the best ideas that will help the most people.

I just turned 43, but I have to say, trying to figure out what Skibidi Toilet was, made me feel much older.

It's basically a bunch of 14 year olds (and younger) who have had their first taste of surrealist content and because it is so novel to them, they can't get enough of it. And it has become extremely popular.

It has a perfect storm of features built in to appeal to that age group. First and foremost, their parents don't get it. It frustrates older people. But it isn't objectionable enough for parents to put their foot down and say they can't watch it for arbitrary moral conflicts. It's like Baby Shark for tweens.

And so these young people get to truly explore what weirdness is. How it makes them feel. And it gets to be... just theirs. They get to claim ownership of it and have this community surrealist experience together and then laugh at their parents because they're all, "Okay, but why is the head in a toilet?"

Kids are exploring the limits of their imagination and finding the wonders of surrealism... in the most infuriating-to-parents way possible.

At tale as old as time.

I'm betting there were some caveparents thousands of years ago looking at doodles on the cave walls and just shaking their head.

"Grok, my son... what the shit is this?"

The cycle continues.

Sure, but also: It's Aeon Flux(well: without all the obvs kink context, I guess). So I guess: Spy vs Spy. Or Tom and Jerry!!! Or Red vs Blue. Oh wait this is SLAPSTICK!!!

Anyway, it's a story btwn two groups that are endlessly fighting/competing to one-up each other, but are also Silly(and also Horrifying). Like y'all say: kids have been eating this stuff up for eternity.

Photographers all know about polarizing filters. They remove reflections off the surfaces of objects. We use them to see into water or windows that are obscured by those reflections. But anything with an even slightly glossy surface has a layer of reflection on top. So if you have a shiny green plant, it can remove the shiny and reveal a very saturated green underneath. Polarizers also remove a lot of scattered and reflected light from the sky. Which reveals a deep blue color you didn't even know was there.

Here is a photo I took of my circular polarizer.

And the first thing I noticed when walking outside during the eclipse was the color of everything was more saturated, just like in that circle. Apparently, an eclipse significantly reduces polarized light and I got this creepy feeling because I was only ever used to seeing the world like that through the viewfinder of my camera.

The other thing I noticed was my outdoor lights. I leave them on all the time because I never remember to turn them on at night. And usually the sun will render them barely visible during the day. On a very sunny day they almost look like they are off.

But you can clearly see they are shining and even flaring the camera during the eclipse.

Our eyes adjust to lighting changes very well so it was hard to tell how much dimmer things were, but that is a good indication. I took this photo a few minutes ago and you can see how dim the lights appear after the moon has fucked off.

I did a calculation using the exposure settings between these two photos. The non-eclipse photo has 128 times more light or about 7 stops difference.

A partial Pringle eclipse cut the sun's light by 12700%.

I love watching How It’s Made. Though I wish they would go one level deeper. They show all of these manufacturing processes with gigantic proprietary custom engineered machines that spit out 4 billion Cheetos at once. I want to see how those are made. I want to see a show called How They Make the Things That Make Things.

That is truly some of the most creative engineering I’ve ever seen. Like, my brother designs airplane wings for fighter jets. Which is cool… but wings haven’t changed much in decades. He’s kind of a… re-engineer. (Sorry, bro.)

Whereas a custom built machine that sharpens dozens of pencils at once must have had some interesting trial and error problem-solving. How did they settle on this design and what other designs did they try?

Or how did they make this ice cream sandwich masturbation mechanism. 

I want to see the messy test footage of ice cream going everywhere on the beta version. 

Who engineers these things? How are they built? How much do they cost? 

I might have to go on a YouTube hunt. 

To date, these might be my favorite replies to a joke I’ve made.

Op, I agree with you but please dont phrase it like that

Sorry about that… Joe Biden’s Big Naturals.

The responses to this post keep delivering in hilarious ways.

I graduated high school in 99.

There was a student at our school named Wayne.

Wayne was gay. It was obvious. He was unable to stay in the closet even if he wanted to. To make matters worse, he was also Black. From a bullying standpoint, that was not a great combo. Both Black and white students made fun of him relentlessly. He was ostracized from the only community that may have given him protection. Only us theater kids stuck up for him, but not to significant effect.

Wayne was bullied so much that at one point he finally snapped and attacked his bullies with a lunch tray. I was actually seated in perfect line of sight and just sat there chewing my soggy fries in stunned silence. It didn't even seem real as I was witnessing it. The image of him wailing on his main bully as the food on his tray flew off is permanently logged into my long term memory.

The bully he attacked had blood all over his face and went straight to the nurse. Other than superficial cuts, he was not injured.

Before the attack, Wayne went to teachers for help. He went to guidance counselors for help. He went to the principals for help.

He did all of the things you were supposed to do. No one helped him. They wagged a finger at the bullies and warned them to stop.

Wayne's lunch tray melee was the only thing that worked. His bullies stayed far away from him. But a week later Wayne was expelled and the bullies were given no punishment.

So... no.

No one in my school talked about being trans.

Because the only way to survive being openly queer was to bash people with a lunch tray.

Graduated high school in 1990. There was one guy in my class who was bullied and called gay because... he liked wearing eyeliner. That's it. he had a girlfriend. He's still, afaik, straight and cis. But he wore one item of makeup and had a fashion sense and that was enough. I left my small town and went to college at an extremely liberal private college and immediately met trans and gay and bisexual and lesbian people and started considering my own identity, which it had not been safe to do AT ALL in high school.

And later learned that a number of people I'd known in high school were queer. By later, I mean 20 years later when we all found each other on facebook.

Kids started calling me a "lesbo" on the playground and beating me up for it while I was in elementary school. I became "boy crazy" as a form of self defense. If I was a slut, at least I wasn't a dyke.

It was a joke in my family that my youngest sibling hated dresses, which of course were mandatory for "girls." Ha ha, it's funny, ha ha. Because of course we just have to put up with wearing dresses.

That's my brother. Jake. He graduated from HS in 2001.

Fuck that asshole. We broke ourselves trying to survive. Some of us didn't.

If you were in the UK, there was a little thing called Section 28 that made it illegal for schools to discuss "homosexually" (which was the catch all for any non-het, non-cis identity) in a positive light. Three internet wasn't an easily accessible thing yet, and positive representation in the media vanishingly rare. Many of us who have grown up to be some variety of queer literally did not know there were options beyond Gay Man (predatory or tragic, will be dead from AIDS by 30), Lesbian (ugly and shrill, always predatory) or Transvestite (see Gay Man but more laughable).

Aside from similar experiencing similar levels of violence and ostracisation to those described by previous posters, would my mental health been better had I known I was bisexual and genderqueer at 15 (rather than 28 and 39 respectively) instead of being keenly aware that I was Doing Woman Wrong despite trying Really Hard to be normal and not sure how I was still failing? Almost certainly.

Do I remember Eddie Izzard describing herself in the mid 90s as "a lesbian with a man's body" and feeling a strong sense of kinship, albeit the other way around, and then immediately dismissing it because female "transvestites" didn't exist, so I guess I couldn't feel like that? Painfully.

So why didn't you get kids coming out at trans prior to 2000? Because if we weren't getting any non-conformity beaten out of us by peers/teachers/parents, we were beating it out of ourselves thinking we were the only ones who felt like this so it could be real.

Yall are talking 2000 and earlier but ik kids at my fucking school who are too terrfied to come out bc they're in a bad class.

I spent middle school clutching my identity in secret because if it came out I was more then a emo girl with funky colored hair we'd be fucking dead. Litterly.

We went to a good school, in a big-ish city. Our current school is considred one of the queerest, and yet we can still point out each and every closeted person we only know to be trans because they've confided in us.

Its still like this. It's better, but it's never been the time. It's been that if we come out, we're fucking dead.

Graduated high school in 1996. One of the first people I met in the school who wasn't awful to me was a splendid, but awkward individual who took me home and handed me off to their big sister as a more suitable mentor for a weird, loud, mouthy little baby lesbian.

Said person was several grades ahead of me, and graduated long before I did, but I remained very close with the sister.

Said person fully transitioned the minute we were all out of high school, and he was my manager at my first full-time office job. No, he never talked about being trans on campus. He would have been beaten to death by the other students. But he was trans, and the minute he could live his truth, he did.

in 2000 i was in fifth grade. the girl who sat next to me, inez, for reasons unknown, lied to everyone on her bus that i had told her i was a lesbian and spent all class trying to touch her. this was how i learned what lesbians were. the next day she got a seat change and all the girls in class who were in on the fun laughingly screamed and shoved me when i tried to approach them. this went on for a few weeks, until they found something else to bully me for. we were ten years old and i wouldn't hit puberty for another five years or understand that i was bisexual for another seven, but i sure learned very early not to get too close to anyone for any reason.

Penguins walking at 5x speed.

Help Save the FrogFamily Home

This community I’ve built has been so incredibly generous to me over the years. Part of me feels I don’t deserve to ask for another thing. But I am facing desperation and I don’t know what else to do.

I’ve had a rough couple of years. First, my beloved corgi, Otis, passed away. Then my mom’s health took a turn. I had to take care of her all on my own. And eventually, COVID took her from me. Then my dad’s body began to fail him. I had to be his full-time caretaker. I had to watch his body and mind slowly deteriorate until he finally passed away in March.

I wish I could just take some time to mourn my parents and heal my soul…

But life decided against that.

We tried to make plans so that I would be taken care of after my father’s death. That I would be able to stay in our family home for as long as I desired. But those plans are falling apart at the moment.

Lawyers and probate and debt collectors, oh my.

There is a chance we can get everything sorted, but all indicators show that it could take a while before that happens. Possibly a long while. And my disability payments aren’t even enough to cover the mortgage–much less all the other bills and expenses.

I need to buy time.

Literally.

I need to extend my financial runway long enough to get things sorted. The longer that runway, the better the chances are I can figure all of this out.

I need time to sell all of my parents’ valuable belongings. I need time to fix up our very large separated garage so I can rent it out as a workshop or storage. I need time to fix up the house so it is suitable for a roommate. And I need time to work with social security so I can possibly find financial independence for life.

Unfortunately, without that time, I could face homelessness. I’m sure I could find a place to stay for a while, but I would lose the only home I’ve ever known. The home my mom and dad spent a lifetime fixing up and perfecting. The place in this world I feel most safe and comfortable.

I’ve already lost so much recently. I’m not sure I could bear losing my home as well.

If I lost my home I’d probably have to live on couches for up to two years until government housing was available. And then I’d have to spend the rest of my days in a small single room apartment. I know there are people who would feel lucky to have that, but I’d really prefer to stay in my house if possible. And I don’t think anyone would blame me for wanting that. Especially when all I need to make that happen is a little time.

So I am asking all of you to help buy me some time.

Every $1200 equals another month I have to sort things out. I honestly don’t know how much time I need. I would hope 3 to 6 months would be enough. But the wheels of bureaucracy can move frustratingly slow. So the more time I have, the better the chances are I can save my home and secure my livelihood.

Thank you so much for reading this.

Check out the GoFundMe page here.

I found the thing to dunk on Elon for regarding the rocket launch.

A lot of experts in the rocket community were questioning Elon's decision not to create a flame diverter.

For those unaware, huge rockets like this usually have giant trenches underneath to channel the flames, exhaust, and debris safely.

NASA's Kennedy Space Center has a flame trench that is 571 feet long, 58 feet wide, and 42 feet high and is built with concrete and refractory brick and bisects the pad at ground level.

But giant trenches are costly and can make working on the rocket on the launch pad inconvenient. So Elon wanted to try forgoing the flame diverter even though he was launching the largest rocket ever built with the most exhaust ever output.

And now he covered an entire town with a layer of rocket dust.

Exploding the rocket was normal and expected.

Not giving a shit about the town around the launch site... fucking infuriating.

Note: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez graduated Cum Laude from Boston University. 

Wasn’t she working as a bar tender before she got elected?

Folks on the right always seem very concerned that AOC was a bartender. They ignore her prestigious education and the fact that she graduated with distinction. They ignore that she has relevant degrees. And they ignore that she worked for the nonprofit National Hispanic Institute gaining relevant experience in activism.

I’ve also noticed that conservatives constantly complain about “elites.” They propped up “Joe Six Pack” because they felt too many lawmakers were out of touch and they wanted people who understood the common folk. Blue collar workers are the heart and soul of America, right? 

Did you know that nearly half of congress is filled with lawyers? And the rest are mostly businessmen. What do lawyers know about my life? What do lawyers know about struggling to pay bills? What do lawyers know about what it’s like to hold a low wage job? How are they supposed to represent me and my needs?

Do you know why AOC worked as a bartender? Her father died and her mother’s jobs as a house cleaner and bus driver were not enough to fight foreclosure. So Alexandria put her career ambitions on hold and got a job as a bartender to help her mom. Conservatives are all about “family values” right? AOC valued her family so much that she worked a grueling job out of love for her mom. 

And you want to trivialize that?  

AOC knows my struggle more than Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump. I have confidence that AOC will represent me and my family’s needs more so than any lawyer or businessman who is just looking to enrich themselves. 

Maybe we need a few more bartenders and a few less lawyers. 

Harm Reduction

160,000 are dead. 

Our nation is descending into full blown fascism. 

Progress takes time. 

I wish we could flip a switch and have an army of AOC and Bernie style progressives running things. But it’s just not realistic to think we can get there overnight. But I do believe we can get there eventually. 

I’m voting for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. I am done complaining about the things I don’t like about Biden and Harris. I know they are not ideal. So I’m going to advocate to change Biden’s mind and push him towards policies I like. I’m going to advocate for better congressional candidates. I am going to advocate for better local officials. 

This “Kamala is a cop” rhetoric isn’t going to help with anything. This defeatist “they’re all the same” attitude isn’t going to help anything. This isn’t even the “lesser of two evils.” Biden and Harris are worlds away from the evil that is Trump and the GOP. It’s like saying a paper cut and decapitation are basically the same. The paper cut isn’t the lesser of two evils. It’s annoying and you want to get rid of it eventually, but at least you still have a head. 

I don’t want to die. I don’t want my parents to die. I don’t want my chronically ill friends to die. I fear if Trump gets reelected we will descend into even more chaos. Social Security and Medicare could be at risk. Both things I need to live. Things my parents need to live. 

I’m done shitting on Biden. And I’m not going to start shitting on Harris. I am going to support them and advocate everyone vote for them. They are the only viable alternative to Trump. 

I hate that he lost too, but the mourning period for Bernie is over. He supports Biden for president. We all should too. 

And, no, not voting is not an option. Don’t be that person. Perhaps you have good health and would be able to survive more Trump. But there are many who would not. Please think of them. Think of the people suffering in ICUs right now. Think of RBG fighting to stave off death.

Being sick for 20 years I know sometimes harm reduction is the only option. It always feels a bit like giving up and compromising. Because it is. But it keeps you moving forward. It allows for the chance to improve things later on. 

Look, Trump’s trying to get rid of Social Security.

I’m disabled, and I can’t work, and that’s my sole income. It’s not enough, but I have a place to live and food to eat. I don’t have family, and I don’t have friends who can afford to support me if that goes away. I would be completely fucked.

If Biden wins, he’s not going to attack Social Security, and I can scrape by for a while longer.

Refusing to vote means you are casting a vote for me to be homeless.

Please hold your nose and vote for Biden, and maybe we can start to dig out of this hole we’re in.

Episode 22: Flat Out Lies

Froggie’s Rules for Ruling Out Unruly Conspiracy Theories

Rule the First: Does this conspiracy require a large group of people to keep a secret for their entire lives?

Rule the Second: Does this conspiracy require hypercompetence in order to succeed?

Rule the Third: Does this conspiracy involve using the phrase “lizard people?”

By asking these three questions you can usually rule out most popular conspiracy theories.

First, people cannot keep their yaps shut. It’s just human nature.

Benjamin Franklin famously said, “Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.” An Oxford mathematician ran the numbers and found the longest the 411.000 NASA employees could keep the moon landing secret would be 3 years and 8 months.

Second, many conspiracies require a level of competence only seen in movies. Most actual conspiracies that are revealed usually have a colorful cast of characters. A bunch of dumb people who did dumb things that helped them get caught. Like, say, keeping a recording of people discussing a secret payoff to a porn star.

So conspiracy theorists believe that the really juicy conspiracies are perpetrated by brilliant masterminds. They think there is top secret technology being used. Most estimates say that top secret tech is maybe 10 years ahead. But for many conspiracy theories, these top secret government programs would probably need to be a century ahead. They assume hypercompetence that just doesn’t exist.

Humans are capable of amazing things. From towering structures that kiss the sky, to an SR-71 Blackbird that can travel 2200 miles per hour at 80,000 feet in the air, to telescopes that can peer deep into the universe.

Or going to the moon.

In 1969, we had the ability to get people to the moon. However, we did not have the capability to fake the moon landing. That might sound backwards, but it’s true.

The technology and engineering involved in faking the moon landing would actually be harder to create and more expensive than just going to the dang moon.

A simple example would be the long parallel shadows of the astronauts.

The Sun is 93,000,000 miles away. It’s literally impossible to create a light source that accurately simulates the Sun’s parallel rays. They’d need to put a light much closer to the subjects in the photo. This would cause the shadows to diverge and no longer be parallel.

The only theorized way to create this effect would be to assemble an apparatus with literally millions of lasers all bunched together as close as pixels on your TV screen.

This was just not feasible in 1969. It’s probably not even feasible today.

The best lasers back then were big and honkin’. Making it impossible to assemble a million of them into some kind of an array that would fit into a soundstage. They were also reddish-orange in color. Which means the photos would look something like this.  

And even if there was some hypercompetent 1960s lighting engineer that could miniaturize millions of lasers, make them white in color, and arrange them into a massive array… this impossible parallel lighting thingamajig would cost more than the entire 1969 budget of NASA.

Orrrr… there would need to be a hypercompetent computer scientist that could create a system that could render photorealistic computer generated images. Some kind of old school CGI.

Keep in mind that for Monsters University, it took Pixar’s render farm 29 hours to finish a single frame of the movie. Pixar’s supercomputer has 55,000 CPU cores processing these images.

In 1995, Pixar’s render farm had the computing power of half an iPhone.

For Toy Story, they had to create much simpler animation that was not photorealistic. The entirety of CGI in Jurassic Park amounted to 4 minutes and took 10 days to render.

NASA went to the moon 6 times and recorded hours of footage and took hundreds of photographs. So how could they render all of that footage?

The most advanced supercomputer in 1971 could do 1 billion instructions per second.

That sounds impressive!

And at the time, it was impressive!

However, an iPhone can do 3 times that now. And the most advanced supercomputer of today can do 200 quadrillion calculations per second.

Soooo…. 1000000000 vs 200000000000000000.

The point is, if you started to render a single photorealistic frame in 1969 it would not be finished yet.

Making matters even more difficult… all of the footage from the moon is on film. Film can be analyzed microscopically. You can see the grain even at high magnification. Which means they’d have to figure out a way to transfer the CG images to film without pixels. Or render it at 1 kajillian megapixel resolution so the pixels are so small they are indistinguishable from grain.

What I’m saying is… we went to the damn moon, okay?

Lastly, lizard people.

I don’t have much to say about them. Other than 12 million Americans genuinely believe shape-shifting reptiles control our government. Which is impossible because Trump’s shade of orange cannot be produced in nature. No organic being could change their hue to match Cheeto levels of orangitude.

I love Tom Hanks. I’ve always loved Tom Hanks. I loved Before Tom Hanks. And I love After Tom Hanks. Now, some of you are probably saying, “Froggie, there is only one Tom Hanks.” 

Ah, so young. 

You see, when I was a youth Tom Hanks was seen very differently. He was that cross-dressing guy. Eventually he did Splash and The Money Pit and he was that Generic Comedy Movie Guy. You liked him, but unless his movies were on cable you kinda forgot about him. Then he did Big and everybody flinched for a moment. It was a special movie and there were signs there was more to Tom Hanks than meets the eye. But then he did Turner & Hooch and everybody went back to seeing Tom as that Generic Comedy Movie Guy. 

He was like cotton candy. Sweet, enjoyable, but not a lot of substance. Empty calories from an occasional treat. 

Then there was Joe vs the Volcano. I actually went to see this in the theater. 

It was… somethin’. 

Some people were ready to put Tom out to pasture. His relevance as a comedy star was fading. His leading man abilities came into question. Tom was always very humble so he was like, “No big deal. I’ll be a character actor. I’ll just do supporting roles.” 

So he did A League of Their Own. He said, “There’s no crying in baseball!” and stole the movie. People changed their damn minds again. “He should be the star of a movie!” And I was like, “He was! …a bunch of times!” 

In comes Sleepless in Seattle. For better or worse, he helped birth a new age of Romantic Comedies. Mothers everywhere thought he was adorable. He was a bonafide star again and could call his own shots. But I’m not sure Tom really wanted to be Romantic Comedy Guy after being Generic Comedy Movie Guy. 

So he went a different direction. Thus began… After Tom Hanks. 

Tom’s next film was not a comedy. Not even a little bit. He played a gay man. Who had AIDs. And was dying. While fighting off homophobes with The Law. And his costar was dramatic heavyweight Denzel Washington. Tom was so committed that he lost a ton of weight to look sick. It was a heartbreaking movie with a beautiful performance.  

Before Philidelphia was released people were a bit confused. They were like, “Huh? Tom Hanks? He’s that cross dressing, mermaid loving, comedy guy who did a buddy cop movie with a dog named Hooch. What’s going on here?” 

And then the movie came out and pretty much everyone who saw it was like, “Holy shit. Where did that come from?” 

It turns out Tom Hanks could act. I mean, he could act. For the longest time people saw his goofy face and curly hair and didn’t really test his range. He didn’t belong in a movie fighting a volcano. People had been selling him short for years. But he never complained. He was always just happy to be working. He just waited patiently and when he saw a shot, he took it. 

Tom went off to the races. Forest Gump confirmed it. It wasn’t luck. Tom could definitely act like the dickens. Then came Apollo 13. Houston we have an actor. 

He did Toy Story and was like, “How about I kick start a revolutionary new form or movie-making?” DONE. 

Then he was like, “I want to be an action hero, but with feeeelings.” Saving Private Ryan. DONE. 

Then he was like, “Those romantic comedy moms were so nice to me and kinda saved my career.” You’ve Got Mail. THANKS MOMS. DONE. 

Then Tom got a little crazy. “What if it really hurt when I have to pee?” The Green Mile. DONE. 

“I want to act, but I am sick of other people.” Cast Away. DONE. 

“I should throw that Leo DiCaprio kid a bone.” Catch Me If You Can. DONE.

[Leo powers up.]

“Accents are fun.” The Terminal. DONE. 

“Okay, what if I test out this motion capture technology that isn’t quite ready and demonstrate the greatest example of what the Uncanny Valley is?” The Polar Express. CREEPILY DONE. 

“I want… MONEY. Make it rain!” The Da Vinci Code. DONE. FRANCHISE INITIATED. 

“Let’s get weird.” Cloud Atlas. CONFUSINGLY DONE. 

“Maybe I should go back to just acting good and stuff.” Captain Phillips. DONE. 

“I enjoyed being a captain and acting good.” Sully. DONE. 

At this point, Tom had DONE it all. But I think a new challenge lies ahead.

Hollywood had a dilemma. Mr. Rogers was the purest being to ever grace this planet. Who is the least scummy person in the industry? 

Tom Fucking Hanks. 

Ack, sorry Mr. Rogers. That was uncalled for. 

Tom Hecking Hanks.

And that brings us to today. Tom Hanks is going to be Mr. Rogers and I really hope it’s amazing because Fred deserves nothing less. And I think he wold approve of Tom telling his story. 

I’m not sure I’ve seen another story quite like Tom Hanks. He was so close to becoming a forgotten Generic Comedy Actor Guy. He could have easily become one of those people discussed on “I Love the 80s” where the talking heads are like, “Whatever happened to that guy?” 

I’m very glad that didn’t happen. Tom seems like a genuinely good guy. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a story where someone was like, “That Tom Hanks is a real douche.” He still seems to be madly in love with his wife. They’ve been together for 30 years! I wonder if that is some kind of Hollywood record. He’s a good father. A good friend. A great spokesman for WWII vets. And he is always willing to make a fan’s wedding memorable. 

He just inspires me to keep trying to be a better me. He inspires me to be a sustainable better me. 

And for that I’d like to say…

This was a great TED Talk. Thanks.

For those of you too young to have seen most of his early movies, just…. imagine if Will Ferrell had done Elf and Anchorman and Stepbrothers…. and then in 2009 won Sean Penn’s Oscar for Milk.

I am so fucking angry that this post does not mention Tom Hanks’ greatest role of all time, The ‘Burbs. Which costars Carrie Fisher, by the way, so if you haven’t seen it yet, you’re welcome.

joe vs the volcano is good

Tom Hiddleston ghostwrote this post

Pro Fetus. Anti Baby.

I was just in a forum discussing abortion in Ireland. It was every bit the clusterheck you would expect. It made me think of similar discussions about abortion in the US. One of the things that bothers me the most is how shortsighted pro-life folks can be. Forget the ethics. Forget the arguments of when life begins. Let’s say their wish is granted and abortion is illegal. Let’s say it works like a charm and all abortions stop.

Now what?

The foster system is overwhelmed with 428,000 children. One in five kids are on food stamps. The adoption system is so backed up, people sometimes have to wait years to get approved. 

So why don’t we add ~700,000 more kids to that? Sorry. 700,000 infants. Every year. 

Now what?

What is the big plan to handle this influx? I assume every pro-life advocate is ready to open their home to a few infants each. I propose if you have ever hassled someone at Planned Parenthood, you are first in line for a special needs child. Or perhaps one addicted to drugs. If you work at a Crisis Pregnancy Center you are responsible for the funeral costs of mothers that died during childbirth. If you RUN a Crisis Pregnancy Center, you must pay all the medical costs for babies in the NICU. And if you have ever held up a sign with a picture of a late term abortion fetus, you must watch each of them pass away from horrible conditions. I mean, that’s usually the result of stopping late term abortions. Seems only fair. 

I think before anyone has the right to lecture me about how I advocate the murder of babies, they need to show me their 10 point plan (using PowerPoint) that details how we will provide all the needs for 700,000 infants per year.