Welcome back to "Ask Alex", where I answer all of your stupid questions with even dumber answers. Have a question you need answered? Tweet it, email it or submit it here and I will get to it (maybe) next week.
-------------------------------- Warning!!! Alex is super hungover and likely to give out particularly poor advice as a result. But that’s not going to stop her from doing it. She is also taking solace in her Thursday drinking buddy being substantially more hungover and suffering through it a whole lot more:-). I am still working through old questions that came out of #MisfitMischief a couple of weeks back, so I have one new one this week about Dungeons and Dragons and then a bunch of old ones about food, hot chicks, baseball players and dating problems... Let’s get to it!!! Submitted by: Sicariothrax If you were playing Dungeons and Dragons with @molratty @ThomasHCrown @TheRoadbeer @Hella_Right & @PolitiBunny what's your class? My class would probably be something like “Dungeons and Dragons 101: How the fuck do I play Dungeons and Dragons?” Buddy, you can’t ask me a Dungeons and Dragons question at Midnight on Thursday and expect me to read up on the game before I post this on Friday! I have, like, a job...and stuff. Also, as I have already mentioned, I am a little banged up today and reading comprehension is not going to be my strong suit. My searching tells me that a character's “class” is, more or less, its occupation. And using the 5th Edition Player’s Handbook, I learn that there are 12 classes: Barbarian, Bard, Cleric, Druid, Fighter, Monk, Paladin, Rogue, Sorcerer, Wizard and Warlock. Right off the bat, this little traveling party is in trouble because we brought a bunch of lawyers, a PE Bro-chick, a Twitchy editor and whatever Roadbeer is. Those don’t really seem like the most valuable set of skills if we are trying to, like, I dunno...capture a dragon or something. Is that what you do in Dungeons and Dragons? Capture dragons and put them in dungeons? If so, then I have some really bad news...if Game of Thrones is to be trusted, then putting a dragon in a dungeon is not a very good idea at all. It serves to make the dragons really, really angry, and when they eventually break out (which they will) they are going to have a lot of rage to take vengeance for. Unless you are a Targaryen, your face is likely to get melted off. {Digression...I think that Quentyn Martell’s storyline in A Song of Ice and Fire is my favorite example of the care that George RR Martin takes in writing these stories. He invested a huge part of a book into developing several complicated and layered characters and giving them a tenuous and difficult mission. All of that build up was for the purpose of one single paragraph that leads the reader to think “Wow...that seemed sudden”. You can’t surprise a reader unless you break the norms of storytelling, and nobody does that better than Martin does. I don’t know of any other author that would devote that much time, effort, detail and care into such a short payoff that is so minimally relevant to the broader story arc that it was entirely cut from the show} OK...fine...here goes. I’ll start by making @molratty the Cleric, since she seems to be the sort of all-around fighter/healer/magic user that we can use on this adventure. Clerics seem to be leaders, and I will gladly follow her into any dangerous cave that she sends me. Actually, wait...Mo keeps telling me to do stupid stuff that I end up regretting the next day, so maybe this was a bad idea. Too later, she’s in charge and we are moving on. I’ll make @ThomasHCrown the Paladin because he seems like he would make a pretty good holy knight. There doesn’t seem to be a character whose greatest skill is “getting his wife pregnant”, so I am going to have to take him a little out of his comfort zone. Crusading for good and order while casting divine spells seems like it would fit, though. Bunny is gonna be the Fighter. I mean...she seems like a master swordswoman to me, and I trust her to use skill, strategy and tactics as needed to tear up some serious shit on the battlefield. I’ll let her choose her weapon, but I am going to put in a vote for a huge black battle ax, cause that seems pretty bad-ass. RoadBeer can be the Barbarian. I am doing this exclusively because there are two kinds of Barbarians - Totem Warrior and Berserker - and I really wanted an excuse to link to this clip. You can go ahead and guess what kind of Barbarian he is going to be. Also...we are definitely bringing road sodas with us on this adventure. In fact, I vote that he hire a bartender to bring along and mix us drinks along the way. Bella is going to be our Monk...looking all non-threatening and passive in her robe, right up until she busts out some Jiu Jitsu shit and breaks your skull wide open! And I am going to make myself the Rogue, because she seems like a super sneaky bastard, and that is right up my alley. I have no problem cutting a bitch that needs cutting. There are also three kinds of Rogue’s, and you bet your woolen britches I’m gonna be the Assassin... OK...now onto the backlog of old questions! Submitted by: Lunatic Rex Which is the better breakfast concoction, haggis or black pudding? Goddamnit, Rex...I already told you I am hungover, cut it out with this shit! Talking about eating animal intestines and sausages made out of pig's blood is not going to solve this queasy stomach. [Update: an ice creak cookie sandwich for lunch did!] The answer is pretty easy, though...haggis is better because it has more in it and a lot more flavor (doubly better if it is in artificial casing). The organ meat might make you a little squeamish, but it’s a lot more flavorful than what goes into black pudding, and it is supplemented by minced onion and spices. When you add in the oatmeal to bulk it up a bit, it becomes a legitimately nuanced and flavorful dish. I can see where the texture would get to you, but there is nothing bad about it really. Black pudding, on the other hand, is just fat, oatmeal and pork blood. Taste-wise, it’s not that bad...it’s heavily salted and the texture of hamburger, more or less. But the color is really disconcerting: it’s legit black like squid ink. Also, the Brits insist on eating it for breakfast, which seems like a pretty retched way to start the day but shouldn’t be surprising out of a people whose culinary traditions can generally be summed up as “Boiling all food until it is devoid of color and flavor.” Speaking of which, I am not a big breakfast eater. I know that puts me in the minority, and I love bacon like any Constitution-loving American does, but I am not a fan of big, heavy breakfasts. I feel like it just sits in my stomach all day long like a bowling ball and makes me feel sluggish and gross. That won’t stop me from eating chocolate cake for breakfast, mind you, but I generally avoid heavy, greasy breakfasts. Hangover or not. Submitted by: CDP Is Marilyn Monroe really just the Derek Jeter of attractive actresses? My favorite part of this question is that I don’t understand the analogy at all!!! But, if we are asserting that both of them are overrated and not as good looking as their reputation? Then fine...I will run with it! Marilyn Monroe confuses me more as a pop culture icon than anyone else. She wasn’t a good actress, even though she did nothing but play a dumb blond. She’s not that attractive (oh, don’t give me shit over this...you know it’s true. She’s an average looking movie-blond with a super-annoying, always drugged-out lazy eye thing going on.) I know she gets points for getting naked on camera before everyone did it, and for establishing the standard formula for being an otherwise talentless “sex symbol”, but that is about it. And Jeter, as we all know, looks like The Rock had sex with a Muppet. Jeter was also a better baseball player than Monroe was an actress. Sure, he isn’t even one of the ten best Yankees of all time, was only the best player on his own team once (1999), has a wholly undeserved reputation for being a great postseason performer, hurt his team for ten years by refusing to cede his Shortstop position to the demonstrably superior Alex Rodriguez and should be ashamed to have accepted at least his last two Gold Gloves, but he was undeniably a great player. It isn’t his fault that the New York media insists on blowing everything that happens in New York out of proportion to the point that they claimed, almost straight-faced, that Jeter was nearly as good as Tom Brady. He showed up every day for 20 seasons, played the game the right way, won a bunch of stuff and was a credit to his team, the fans and the sport. The biggest differences, though, are in the way they conducted their private lives. Jeter managed to live in the most intense media market in the country as the face and spokesman of its most visible institution. He did it without ever angering anyone or causing controversy or speaking out of turn. He rarely made a PR misstep despite having landmines around him at all times. OK, so there was this, but you can admit that that is kinda of awesome. Marilyn Monroe couldn’t walk down the street without accidentally becoming a heroin addict or wrapping her car around a tree. While Monroe managed to get married and divorced three times before she was 35, Jeter avoided getting married at all until he was over 40. This may actually be Jeter’s greatest accomplishment...he dated a bevy of A-List bombshells in their prime, moved on before they got fat or crazy (looking at you, Mariah), milked every ounce out of being the biggest celebrity and most eligible bachelor in Manhattan, and then finally married right before he fell off the edge of his dating peak. Oh, and his wife is better looking than Joe DiMaggio’s! So, final analysis...I can see some potential in the analogy, but I am ultimately rejecting it. Jeter was better than Monroe. However, I will state unequivocally: Marilyn Monroe is the Joe Namath of attractive actresses. Submitted by: Raymond I just found out the man I am dating loves Bernie Sanders. What do I do? How committed are you to being gay? Mike Pence was telling me about some conversion therapy that does really amazing things these days… Or wait...do you mean “love” like “used to date and is still in love with”? Cuz that is a whole other beast, both because it is no way to start a relationship and because I don’t know how you could be around a guy who was sexually attracted to Bernie Sanders...that’s fucking weird. In all seriousness, though, this is an interesting topic...how different can the politics of two people be who maintain a healthy relationship? I feel like there have been a bunch of stories and anecdotes about things like this recently, most often along the lines of “can I date someone who likes Donald Trump?” but not exclusively written by people on the left. Clearly, having similar politics makes a relationship easier. It is one more thing you have in common and one less thing to argue over. But it is by no means a necessity, and there are millions of perfectly happy couples who clash over political philosophies. I wouldn’t say that my husband and I clash, (I’m not sure we’ve ever had an actual “fight”, to be honest) but we certainly have different political views. He is a pretty classic Massachusetts suburban liberal (not to be confused with a Cambridge/Newton/Brookline liberal, who is nuts, or a Boston working class liberal, who is socially quite conservative) and I tend to skew a little more libertarian. Certainly we agree on more than we disagree on, but there are still some pretty big differences. And there are lots and lots of people just like us, although usually the women tend to be more liberal than the men. Some of my fellow Misfits have acknowledged in the past that they have spouses from different spots on the political spectrum, and at least one of them was publicly shamed by a certain group of bloggers that everyone hates that I won’t mention. There are, if that is any proof, plenty of people who simply feel like it is either intellectually dishonest or morally unacceptable to love someone with whom you disagree, but I think that, on this (like so many other things) they are just straight wrong. Reasonable people disagree, and they also identify their partners by more than their political beliefs. Heck, James Carville and Mary Matalin manage to maintain a seemingly wonderful marriage despite coming from opposite ends of the political spectrum and both being professionally submerged in that during every minute of every day. People can make it work if they really want to. So, I guess I would say that you should view this guy as an entire person who has engaged your fancy for some reasons that are probably obvious to you. Clearly you disagree with his criteria for good Presidential candidates, but there is no reason you can’t work past that. Especially if he is super hot...that kind trumps everything else. Unless you already broke up, in which case I hope that bitch-whore dies in a fire with all the other leeching, flea-ridden socialists. Up Next Week: Anonymous in Fayetteville asks “I’m dating a guy who roots for the University of Arkansas. What should I do?”
1 Comment
In November of 2016, the American political left lost its collective minds. Normally rational, cool headed people, people I know well, were talking about burning themselves in the streets in protest (I’m not kidding). How did we get there? How did the loyal opposition turn from the party that was limited to accusing the right of simply being anti-elderly, anti-healthcare, anti-poor people to the party burning cities?
Let us take a very short trip into the recent past, back to January of 2014, where President Barack Obama first declared that if Congress was not going to comply with his wishes, he would launch his “pen and a phone” legislative strategy; which of course is not a legislative strategy at all. It was his open declaration to bypass Congress wherever possible in order to accomplish his ideological objectives. The man who developed his legislative agenda for America in Bill Ayers’s living room had launched the first salvo in the war on Constitutional process. The left, and their journalist allies, declared this to be a perfectly legitimate counterpunch to a “do nothing” Congress. In a move that was not talked about much, just a month later the Obama administration came very close to enacting a federal “rule” that would allow the FCC to place government monitors in newsrooms in order to ensure journalists only covered what the government thought it should cover. This, of course, was a monumental threat to Constitutionally-guaranteed free speech and a free, independent press. Stage two, if you will, in the war on process. Just eight months later, the country watched in horror as an increasingly militarized Black Lives Matter took justice into their own hands in Ferguson, Missouri. Without rehashing every detail, the reader is reminded that Michael Brown, who had just robbed a convenience store with his bare hands, was shot as he cornered a white police officer in his patrol car. Every witness, and there were plenty, substantiated the officer’s claim that he felt his life was in danger. The facts and witness statements meant nothing. It was time for the city to burn. And thus the Lunatic Left™ in America was re-born, and given legitimacy by the press and the non-Lunatic Left as necessary to protect the people against the very government their party has so dutifully grown. The American political left has always sought to erode the value of the Constitution, mostly because their ideas do not pass its protections. Due process, they argue, was written by “old, racist slave owners” and is thus illegitimate. The First Amendment does not apply to loosely defined “hate speech,” and is therefore illegitimate. The Second Amendment was never meant to cover high-powered, modern weaponry, and is thus illegitimate. The election of Donald Trump was a result of Russian meddling, and so it must be declared illegitimate. People really do still think that, that Trump’s election was invalid which grants the presidency to Hillary Clinton. This is not a lack of understanding of how the Constitution works, but rather simply disregarding the value of the Constitution in the American political process. So what do you do when you are a 22 year old living in New York City, and you have been trained your entire life that the Constitution is an outdated, racist document written by slave owners? Do you petition your congressman? Do you encourage the spread of Federalism, via the Tenth Amendment, which grants you all the liberties you claim are under attack? No. You can’t, because you have told anyone who would listen that the processes designed by our founders to protect your liberties are invalid. So what do you do? You riot. You burn cars. You shout NOT MY PRESIDENT. You shout down conservative speakers on college campuses. You don a vagina hat and declare that you have thought a lot about blowing up the White House. You pose with a beheaded model of the president in the name of “the arts.” You recreate Julius Caesar’s stabbing at the hands of Brutus, but with president Trump as Caesar. You release classified security information to the press in an attempt to take down national security. You carry a rifle to a baseball practice, verify that your targets are Republicans, and you shoot. The Lunatic Left has resorted to violence because they have convinced themselves that it is their only resort. There is no other way to protect themselves against the Nazis and the Russians currently in control of the United States. And this is a problem for the moderate political left to solve, but they are going to have to admit to a lot of political sins in order to achieve the peace. Long live The Republic.
Rex
Do We Really Need to Heat Our Homes?
DATELINE: 3 December, 2017. Alabama. 50 miles inland from the South coast.
In early June of this year, the Boston Globe republished this ridiculous piece of Luddite fluff from 21 July, 2013, as they do every year around that time. Many other hypocritical and self-important people with ‘good intentions’ write and speak on this subject as well. Especially in Europe, which I suppose makes sense, as many in the media and on the Eastern Seaboard want to remake America in the outstanding model the European Union has provided the world. Except for their positions on abortion, but that’s not what I’m talking about here. As a resident of the southern part of Alabama, where our winters are relatively mild but our mosquitoes have ticks in the hot and humid summers, I humbly suggest our neighbors in more northern climes not use any form of artificial (‘man-caused’) heating for their dwellings this winter. It turns out artificially heating an interior space is 2 to 3 times as expensive as cooling the same space. In dollars, sure. We all know that, but it’s a small price to pay to have warm happy people, right? Here’s the thing: It also costs more in terms of environmental friendliness. Thermodynamics has laws, but no courts. You can badger the witness with a Bic lighter or an ice cube if you don’t believe me. It takes significantly more energy to heat a space than to cool it. This is an undeniable, objective fact. You could look it up. I did. Any system we call “air conditioning” is designed to draw warmer air out of enclosed spaces, thereby cooling said spaces to a comfortable level. Any system we use for heating that same space is required to warm the ambient air to a comfortable level. If we recall elementary physics, heat rises. In real terms, this means heated air spends all of its time trying to escape cooler air. I’m sure there are some laws governing this, but I can’t be bothered to google that for you. But this explains in layman’s terms why it costs more in both money and Earth-killing, planet-destroying climate change anthropogenic global warming catastrophe OMFG… sorry, I got carried away. Anyway, warm “green” morons in the “smart” places cost Gaia a lot more than a few flyover plebes like me do so we can cool ourselves enough to sleep at night. As to the idea that one can just vent the attic and party in the basement: The water table here is maybe 10 - 12 feet down. I can’t even dig a pool, much less a basement. And the air doesn’t usually move in summer unless it moves so much that people on television panic about it. But that’s a moot point because there are no basements. We also don’t have a lot of high-angle, tall roofs. Wind is a bitch. For those of our friends up north who have difficulty overcoming hypothermia, I recommend something I discovered in the Republic of Korea. It’s called a “mink blanket,” but I don’t know if it is really made from mink. I also don’t care if it is. I do know that the first night I was in Korea, I was in a GP Small tent with five other dudes. And I know we took turns refilling the oil heater’s reservoir and I had to take a turn. That sucked. And I asked around the next day and a lot of people seemed enthused about these mink blankets. So twenty bucks later, I never filled the heating oil reservoir again. Those things are warmer than… never mind. I got kind of irritated because I tended to sweat under that blanket when it was maybe 10F outside that tent. Meanwhile, other guys were yelling about whose turn it was (to get oil, gorrammit!). ‘Fuck you dude, I’m warm’ is a valid argument in military tent life. So get yourselves a mink blanket and help our sun stay cooler next winter, my silly northern friends. We’ll be here, having slept comfortably in our global-warming-friendlier-than-you smugness waiting for you to join our quest to save the planet. Think of it this way, cold people: You’re killing the planet by keeping yourselves and your families warm. You cold, heartless bastards. xxxooo, Rex Hat tip to @hboulware for the idea behind this piece. Thanks Heather! |
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