I dunno. There's that video where the guy pauses his game, looks out the front door, and sees the steppe. Had the chance to take an overnight ferry recently. Standing on the observation deck past midnight, staring out at the darkened islands slipping slowly by, feeling the thrum of the engines and the wind on my face. Mrs. A said she could see my grandfather on me in that moment. He commanded a warship tasked with killing her grandfather. They both made it through, but they're both gone now. See you at Yasukuni. Heritage? No, none thank you. Nor future. Just one of those buds that never flowered, a bump on a bare branch. The way I always wanted it. The planet doesn't have long now, only five billion years or so, but the biosphere is approaching one of those evolutionary bottlenecks, and I think if I really tried, I could make it to the Extinction. Probably not, they keep throwing around numbers like “by the end of this century” and with my current age, genetics, and baked-in health decisions, that's not in the cards. But there's always hope. Hope that things could speed up, that is. See you at Yasukuni.
So yeah. I know fad diets, crash diets, are unhealthy, but hey, I'm bored. Very little in the way of work for the next month or so, and Mrs. A is spending most of her time helping out her dad or visiting the hospital, so it's just me at home. That means I've got complete control over my food consumption. During the semesters, breakfast is a breakfast bar because time, and I usually eat lunch in the faculty cafeteria. Bland, nutritious (?), lots of rice. Dinners with the missus, could be anything. School breaks though, I'm at home, and my diet tends to be more... random. Plus, I don't get in nearly as much exercise, at least in the winter. When school is in session, I'm on my feet at least four and a half hours a day, and I generally walk/run/cycle a few kilometers before work, but on break, especially winter break? I'm a couch potato. But I start back at school in about a month, and the weather is getting warmer, so I'm back to PT, trying to make sure they don't need to roll me into the classroom on the first day, and then this crash diet pops up in my facebook feed. I'm not going to reproduce it here, but it's the one with a lot of boiled eggs and salad. Kind of Atkins-ish. Like I said, I know these things aren't safe or healthy, but I'm bored, so I thought I'd give it a shot for a bit. I figured it was probably a scam, unlikely to produce the claimed 24lb (11kilo) weight loss in two weeks. I also figured that any effects would kick in fairly gradually over the allotted time. Nothing in it is, by itself, unhealthy. Boiled eggs, fruit, green salads. Lacking in carbs, but my diet, especially during the break, is hardly on the Olympic training level. Gummi bears, Red Bull, pizza, grilled cheese sandwiches, and plenty of beer, with occasional binges of salad when my teeth start to loosen up. So how bad could it be? It's day two. I've had endless, particularly foul diarrhea, my kidneys ache, my balls ache, and I feel a little light-headed. No energy. No way I can keep doing this, so when I went to work, I decided to grab a sandwich from the convenience store. Nothing like two slices a white bread, two slices of ham, and a glop of mayo to restore one to health, is there? Store was closed for inventory, so interim dinner is a bottle of local Gatorade-analog. But I've lost nearly five pounds already. In two days.
This started out as a "Not Happy" thread post that kinda got away from me. I hope @John-Wayne doesn't mind me using his quote as the epigraph, if it's a problem, let me know and I'll remove it. I've been watching a lot of restoration videos lately, where people buy old semi-junked machinery and tools at swap meets and flea markets and restore it to new or better-than-new condition. I find it relaxing. But youtube thinks it's related to trapping mice. Kept suggesting mousetrap, rat trap videos until I finally broke down and watched one. Rats and mice are pests. They can be a health hazard. The idea of live-trapping them and releasing them into the countryside to be owl-food as God intended is impractical. I recognize these facts. But the way the poster had rigged up a stun-gun to a coil of wire inside a cage they could get into and not out of, and the terrified hopping about as they sought to avoid the pain, the desperate squeaking, the twitching and spasming as their bodies finally completed the circuit, the flames that began to spring from one little beasty's paw, none of this horrified me as much as the comments section... ...where the braying crowd, unprompted, denigrated animal rights activists and vegetarians and recommended points of particular agony with lip-smacking glee. When I'm dictator, we'll bring back the gladiatorial games, but there'll be no TV or internet broadcast. Live audience only. And the "performers" will be chosen by lottery from the ticketholders.
The Baby Boom generation is generally defined as people born between 1946 and 1964. My generation, Generation X, is defined as people born between the early to mid-1960s to the early 80s. Millenials don't have as sharp of lines, but I've seen 81-96 when I looked around. So let's put that on the back of the envelope. So if we define childbearing age as between, say, 18 and 35 (yes, it is creeping upwards, and yes, creeps have managed to push it downwards since time immemorial, but let's just go with that range, shall we?) an older boomer (my mother, for example) could have spawned a mid-range Gen Xer like me (she was born just after the war, I was born in 1971). A younger boomer, born in 64, could have a child who is outside even the range of the Millennials, having been born in 1964+35=1999. So basically the whole Millennial generation is the spawn of the Boomers and the Gen Xers. You think they gave the participation trophies to themselves? You think participation trophies undermine recognition of real achievement?
So there are two trials going on in the states now where armed men claimed that they had to kill unarmed men because if the unarmed men took their guns, the lives of the potentially unarmed men would be in danger. If you're so scared of the gun that *you* brought to the fight, you're definitely doing something wrong. Kind of shades of "Tunnel in the Sky" where the MC was warned against bringing a big gun with him because it would only give him the illusion, not the reality, of safety. That's all, just some unfocused musing.
Eight years since the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown. It was my day off, vacation time, I was sitting at my computer doing something, gaming, whatever, when the world started to sway gently back and forth. I looked up at the light cord, because that's where you look, dizzy spells and trucks going by don't cause penduluming, but there it was, swinging gently. Earthquake, but not a bad one. But... It just kept going on. Usually these things last a few seconds, but this one just kept going and going. Six minutes, I found out later, although I don't think I felt all of that. I was over 700 kilometers from the epicenter. But still, it rumbled and rocked for a while, and I went back to my game. Earthquakes happen here, there's that pause when you decide if you need to be worried or not, and then you go on. It was nearly three in the afternoon, I didn't check the news. Why bother? Met Mrs. A for dinner at a local izakaya pub, and looked up at the TV. There were burning houses being swept inland through the rice paddies, and the numbers at the bottom of the screen were talking about dead and injured. I picked up my phone and emailed my family back home while Mrs. A checked on hers. Everyone was okay, but whatever plot armor you think you have in your life is useless when the sea comes calling. The video below isn't mine, and it's definitely not for younger or more sensitive viewers. It's safe to assume that almost anyone you see who isn't within arm's length of the camera didn't survive. Per Wikipedia, that's 15,896 of them. And 2,537 still listed as missing. Watch as much as you can stand, or don't. You won't be a better or worse person either way. And no, I don't like the title, but it's accurate.
TMW you're walking home from dinner with your wife and there's a group of young gaijin outside the local market enjoying a few (!) drinks and one of them shouts at you "Oh my god, is that my dad?!?" Well, true, I take my styling cues more from Leonard Cohen and/or Mad Men than from Jay Kay or P. Diddy, but considering that the young man shouting at me looked to be in his early 20s and I'm in my late 40s, I wondered what sort of point he was trying to make. I suppose if he could give me a list of his mother's tattoos and favored coital vocalizations we could tell for sure, but, well, yeah kid, I look old enough to be your dad because I'm old enough to be your dad. Doesn't bother me, does it bother you?
Just got back from xXx: Return of Xander Cage. No spoilers, but it was a lot of fun. If you see it on the big screen. Like most action flicks, I don't think it would translate well to my living room. Oh, also, I saw it in MX4D, which is the Japanese variant of the 3d theater with seats that tilt, bump, poke you in the kidneys and buttocks, spray blasts of air, water, and scents at your face, and tickle your ankles. So, kind of like that uncle that doesn't get invited by for Thanksgiving anymore because it violates the terms of his registry. But anyway, this is definitely the right kind of movie for that. Not a spoiler, but there are a number of fight scenes that are made even more interesting by getting harmlessly smacked around by your seat. On the negative side, there are also a number of scenes where cars smoke their tires, and, well, I couldn't identify the scent, but it was nowhere near burning rubber. Computer packaging, maybe. Odd point. I don't think of myself as a Social Justice Warrior, more of a Social Justice Weekend Reservist maybe, so I don't base my viewing choices solely on whether I expect everyone to be well-represented. Sometimes fun is just fun, but I was kinda surprised when I realized that, while the movie has roughly zero well-fleshed out characters, there are three Tuff Grrlz, two Smart Girls, and it passes the damned Bechdel Test. I mean, of course there are approximately 49 sets of self-propelled breasts and seven bikini-clad fuck-muppets, but it seems that as soon as they got their tops off, Xander bored them all to sleep... Anyway, it lags in the middle a bit, but, and this may be the 4d talking, I was quite entertained by the end of the film. As good as the original? Not sure, but it beat the hell out of Suicide Squad, so worth the ticket if that's your sort of movie.
Some years ago— <you the man dog> never mind how long precisely— <pound the keys!> I had a problem with my computer. I was sitting there on a warm summer's day, burblsmacking along at something or other when I heard a sharp, physical <SNAP!> from the tower of the desktop. No smoke, no fire, no clue. I shutdown and restarted, and life continued as usual for... a while. A year? Six months? I never really noted the initial noise. Maybe it had been a sound effect? So a while later it happened again. Again in a hot season, but this time the noise was followed by a failure, the computer rebooted itself without being asked to, without going through all the motions of “...has not been properly shutdown, would you like to continue?” &c. But it started up fine that time until a Third Impact a short time later, and then things started to get all Hollywood janky. Images not loading, screen flickering, clicks just not clicking whether offline or on. So I took it to the local repair shop a mile up the road. Without a car, that's stuffing a compact desktop tower into your Jansport Mozambique and hopping on your bicycle in the late summer heat. They took a look at it. They said it was a burnt-out fan. I paid them some moneys to replace the fan. But when it came back it still didn't work right. The problems continued, so I took it back to them for another look, and they found out that it wasn't a problem with the fan. It was a problem with some capacitors that had blown. Little aluminum cans, a row of four of them, and three had popped out like the Champagne Popper fireworks I bought as a kid, streamers of brown packing material sprayed across the circuitry. Somehow they hadn't noticed. They refunded my money but told me that those capacitors were an integral part of my motherboard, and that my computer, five years since I'd purchased it, was six years out of date. The told me I needed a new computer entirely; that generation of motherboard was no longer available as a replacement part. So I tried to keep it going, but after a week or two I realized it was hopeless and went down to the electronics store to get a new one. The old one had lasted slightly beyond its projected lifespan, after all, and this is just the way of the world with electronics. No harm, no foul. All of the above is 100% true and factual, to the best of my recollection. I'm two computers and roughly ten years past those events. Spoiler: -Paul Harvey All of the above is 100% true and factual, to the best of my recollection. I'm two computers and roughly ten years past those events. But I don't blog about planned obsolescence. Some years ago, never mind how long precisely, my mother suffered a stroke. And a heart attack, but I don't remember which one happened first. She had been descending into a spiral of cliches anyway (“Life is real, it is what it is, so Vera says to me, she says, Vera says...”) The display was readable, but a little janky. And then last October, right around her 74th birthday, she had another stroke. A big one. It blew the last ten years out of her head. She missed the cats, but the wrong ones. She knew the house, but hadn't lived in it yet. She had been a woman who would talk the ear off of a lamp-post, bragging about her son who lived in Japan. Her roommate at the care facility said “She don't talk much. Your mom's a pretty quiet woman.” I had the chance to go back in February 2020. Coronavirus was just “a disease that had been reported in China” at the time. And last Friday I got word that she'd died. So there we are. No new motherboard available for the 1946 model at this point in time.
Some spoilers will follow, but I'll try to keep them minor and not hitting any key plot points. A Broomhandle? Really? Computers? Maybe. Wait, what's that captain's rank? Wrong boots. Well, the Army changes uniforms faster and more frequently than a Japanese bride changes her dresses, but that hat don't look right to me. A pay phone? How did four Hueys and a Chinook just change into twelve Hueys, a Chinook, and a Sea Stallion? Does the Army even have Sea Stallions? They set up quick. Computer graphics? No. Ooh, he's big this time. You know what tactical advantage aircraft give you over ground-based forces? Altitude. Yeah, I suppose I'd probably panic and try to take down something the size of an insurance company office building with a 5.56 too, but it does get old. Really, I'm cool with the physics of giant monster movies, but I wonder if there's a vet in the house who could tell me how many rounds from an M-16 it would take to kill, say, a blue whale? Wow, they were close to the base camp. Is that a longslide? Wait, first, where is your goddamn barrel bushing? WTF, over? I like that captain. Don't like the fact that his guys address him by his last name, but he's got his head on straight. Whoops, no he doesn't. "Y'know why I carry this? So that when I run out of ammo, I can use it as a club without having to test the 'Mattel' legend." -later "Y'know why I carry this M-79 and a whole bandolier of grenades? Neither do I, apparently." Strangely bent dog tag. I've probably listened to more static than most of you have, but I've never heard static that sounded like that. Maybe it's from the storm, but the static makes the same sound as the bug, just in a different register. Lazy. Nope, no serrations then, sorry. P-51? In the Pacific? Wikipedia says it's just barely possible, but not bloody plausible. Hey, do you think if you got all the natives to hold hands, and then had one of them lick a 9-volt battery, they could run Windows 3.1? I like that door mechanism at the base of the wall. Seriously, that's pretty cool. Heavy, but cool. "Set up the fifty?" What frackin' fifty? This is the first time, IIRC, the fifty has ever been mentioned or shown. You do know that a fifty is about a three man item, as far as carry, don't you? Without ammo. And that you don't "set it up" without a whole bunch of fitting together, setting headspace and timing, all that jazz, by which point the baddies will have you well and truly overrun. Those critters' heads look familiar, but I can't think of where from. Pen and ink, I think. Flamethrower? Wait, I did see that earlier. But really, is Air Cav going to carry a flamethrower on a civilian survey mission? "Motherfucker*" sure seems to have a lot of ordnance for someone who thinks he's just keeping a bunch of scientists from getting eaten by inexplicable polar bears and smoke monsters. That same strange bend in the dog tag comes up again, on a different tag. Interesting. That's one hell of a flash. "Mother-" Count to five. Lather, rinse, repeat, count again. Line drive on the first-base line, he's outta there! Okay, we'll file her under "giant monster physics". Not one of the aspects of those (un)natural laws I've ever been terribly happy with though. More helicopters? I wish Kong were more apelike. As above, file under "giant monster physics", so he needn't be a copy of a silverback, but quadrupedal locomotion as the default would have looked better, IMHO. Maybe I'm getting old, but that kid doesn't look 28. Okay, despite all the above glitches, I did basically enjoy this movie, I just wish that they could have found a couple hundred bucks out of the $185,000,000 to hire a military consultant for an afternoon or so of fact-checking. Another complaint is that, for me at least, I just didn't get a "1973" vibe off any of the characters. In contrast, see the "Luisa Rey" sections of "Cloud Atlas". Those characters felt 1970s, these, for the most part, did not. And now I see that there was a post-credits Easter Egg I didn't stick around for. Dammit! *a friend's nickname for Samuel L. Jackson. "Oh, look, Motherfucker's in that movie. I like him!"
Io, on Netflix. Painful painful painful awful fucking shitty horrible piece of crap, the writer(s) should have their everything revoked. I'm not going to spoiler-wrap this because I want to save you from the movie, dammit. First ten seconds or whatever, "Some people say it was the pollution, I call it human nature." "sending ships to other planets to harvest their geothermal energy." You what?!? No, I don't care about the terminology, but Earth isn't short on geothermal energy last I checked, and just how the fuck do you "harvest" geothermal energy? What's the transmission or storage medium you're planning on using? Wait, they've just "harvested" half of Io's geothermal energy. Anybody in the back know where that energy comes from? Anyone? And they're gonna use it to colonize Proxima Centauri b. You think Beijing smog is bad, try living in a triple system practically inside of a red dwarf star with aurora borealis that you could microwave popcorn to. Oh, wait, she's gonna make bees evolve to deal with the shitty air pollution. Let's take a sterile worker bee that has evolved to and grown up in decent air and put it in a fish tank filled with an atmosphere so polluted and oxygen-starved it won't sustain open flame. Shit, the bee didn't evolve in time because that's not how fucking evolution works!!!!!! If the writer grew up near the beach, but never learned to swim, do you think they'd evolve some fucking gills if I held their head underwater long enough? I'm turning this piece of shit off. I spend hours poring over aerial photos of LA, consult with my person on the ground @Shenanigator to see what the real feel of neighborhoods are, research care packages for the homeless, dig through Dante, ask my dad about the physics of micro black holes, create memberships on hobbyist forums to ask questions about my characters' potential hobbies all in the name of getting it as right as I can, and find that someone has chucked several million dollars (yes, I looked, and no, there are no budget figures available. Moon, starring Sam Rockwell, cost $5 million though, so that's a decent rule of thumb comparison, IMO) at this piece of shit?
In response to something @Tenderiser said in the Things you didn't know you didn't know thread: That's funny. My best friend out here is English, my textbooks are split about 50/50 between American and British English, and I know that, when I go back home, my friends occasionally comment on my speech patterns, but I didn't know I could do UK-iain online as well. True story: I did a summer study abroad in Istanbul when I was in college. The first day I arrived, the moment I stepped out of my hotel, I was accosted by a rug merchant. In Sultanahmet, which is the prime tourist destination in all of Istanbul. It looks like this if you look one direction: View attachment 22973 And like this, if you turn the other way: View attachment 22974 Istanbul has been a trading crossroads city for millenia; the people there know how to buy and sell. So this guy walks up to me and says "Hello, America! Welcome to Istanbul, please, come with me!" and takes me to his rug shop. I tell him it's my first day, I'm not buying anything my first day, not going to happen, so he takes me to his uncle's rug shop, which has a better selection. We have tea at both places, I admire the rugs, but continue not to buy anything. Finally, he says "You really aren't buying today, are you? Okay, let's go drinking," and takes me to a series of open-air bars and bufes (standing places where you can get a beer, soda, fresh-grilled kebap, whatever). He pays for most of it, only allowing me to buy one or two drinks, because the Turks are a hospitable people, and once he saw I wasn't a customer, I became a guest. We'll meet him again later. So I was in Istanbul for about two months. Towards the end of my stay, a friend and I decided to visit Aya Sofia again. Outside the museum, there's always a small crowd of licensed and unlicensed tour guides, looking to add some value to your trip and cash to their pockets. Fair enough. The first guy, that first day, had taken one look at me and known I was American. When I went there again, years later, with Mrs. A, they'd call "Hey, Japonais!" to her, somehow being able to tell that the Asian girl with the white guy didn't have a hyphen after "Asian", and further narrow it down to Japan. But near the end of my first trip, as I was walking up to church-mosque-museum, a tour guide called out to me "Deutsch, nein?" I shook my head no, and kept my mouth shut. "Russki?" Another shake. "Ah, Aussie mate?" Mm-mm. So he ran down the list of every place a white person could plausibly come from, never hitting on America. I'd lost the walk, I wasn't invisible, but I was stealthy as hell, and that's a good thing. Anyway, remember my friend the rug merchant from my first day? Six or so years later, when Mrs. A and I were honeymooning, we were on our way up to Beyazit when I saw a face amongst all the other Turkish faces that looked familiar. He smiled and said "Iain! You're back! I have a new shop. Come with me, yes?"
Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel This is what Douglas Coupland would write if he were a better writer. That's not to say that he's not a good writer, in fact, I think he's a very good one, but when I read this, I couldn't help but compare it with some of his work, and the comparison didn't come out well. Perhaps it's just the Canadian thing, although most of it takes place in the US, the book starts in Toronto, and it has a certain Canadian feel to it, at least to my eyes, but it tread paths that Coupland has previously been down in Girlfriend in a Coma. Yup, it's a post-apocalypse book, so if that's an outright deal-breaker for you, stop reading here and move on to something else. Seriously, I won't judge you, anything to do with the Singularity or transhumanism and I'm out mid-sentence. But anyway, I'll keep this so that there are only the most minor of spoilers, the kind of thing that you'd learn by reading the cover blurb. It's post-apocalypse, post super-swine flu, the kind of flu that leaves you cooling on a slab less than a day after exposure, the kind that's so transmissible that the remaining human population is a rounding error. But what sets this apart from so much post-apoc is that everyone is affected, nothing holds, nothing really rebuilds, there's no Bartertown, no Water and Power Authority, no Capital District, just a whole bunch of people stumbling through as best they can. Closer to The Road than I Am Legend. And while it's muted and minor key throughout, it takes place in the American Midwest, near Lake Michigan, which gives it a certain appeal to me as I understand the seasons, the terrain, the people. Technically its SF, but it was published in 2014, and the world ended about then, so there is not a single thing in the book that does not exist in our current culture and tech level, and most everything that does isn't even decorative anymore. Who carries an iPhone when there's no way to charge it, no signal, and no internet anymore? It's not SF, it's literature, but literature with a small “l”. Mandel won an Arthur C. Clarke award for it, but... I dunno, I have a certain contempt for modern literature, there's a subset of authors that I can't help but feel put down their final edit and start thinking about their Mann-Booker acceptance speeches. The books that are meant to be commented on sagely, displayed, read with an eye to allegory and symbolism, quoted at dinner parties with the Right Sort of People, perhaps even, if one is very lucky, banned by some red-state school district, but not actually read for enjoyment. This isn't lowbrow, far from it, there's a lot of thought put into things, it's all about connections, in a way, but I found myself just liking it, wanting to keep going. From a writer's view, there are a couple things I found interesting as well. There are characters whose names hint at their ethnicity, but they're not described physically except in the most general terms, but there are other characters who are covered in minute detail, down to the sounds of their voices, because that appearance is relevant to the plot. There's a gay character who we know is gay because when we're in his close third sphere, he thinks about his boyfriend, but that's it. There's no sex, hetero or otherwise, save for the occasional threat of rape, but anything that happens takes place well off-screen, so his orientation doesn't matter except to flesh him out. There are a lot of things that go undescribed, but the author has an amazing way with description when she chooses to. Very minor spoiler plot-wise, but one of the best lines in the book language-wise, so skip it if you choose to: Spoiler “It isn't like any dog [she's] ever seen...it looks like a cross between a fox and a cloud.” That, gentle readers, is how you describe a white Pomeranian. Anyway, a highly recommended book. I rationed it, and at ~330 pages, it lasted me the weekend.
So I belong to a Facebook group for my hometown. It's a place I ran screaming from repeatedly and will probably never live in again, but there was a Dorsai short story about the most beautiful place in the world that some might recognize. And a 98 year-old woman from that town recently passed away. Preceded in death by her parents, her husband, her sister, and one of her children. And her entire high school class. She was the last living member of the class of '41. I have friends who are younger than me, but to outlive all your friends, your earliest friends, would not seem to be a blessing. "Do you remember that time when...no, I suppose you wouldn't."
Marijuana definitely isn't legal in my present jurisdiction. Not sure about back home, doubt it. Wait, no, an old friend of mine who used to be quite the recreational enthusiast now has a prescription for it. "My partying days are over, Iain, I actually need this stuff now to cope with the nerve damage." He shows me the scars. So, what are the medicinal properties? This is something that needs to be looked into. Some of my (former) facebook friends were of the tribe that believes that it cures glaucoma, acts as a palliative for chronic pain, can stimulate appetite in chemo patients, helps with eczema, restores hair loss, cures all forms of cancer, Morgellon's, improves orgone energy retention, balances the chakras, and makes your fingers fing more efficiently. Some of these things may be true, and we should let the doctors and Big Pharma have a go at them. And y'know what? I'm not opposed to legalizing it for recreational use as well. I haven't tried it. The early years of my adult life were spent in jobs where it was a definite, ultra-strict no-no, and like I said, where I live now? Not only do I believe in obeying local laws when you're a guest, but there have been celebrities arrested here for possession of hundredths of a gram of the stuff. The residue in the baggie, basically, and it cost them their careers. I can almost see Willy Nelson shaking his head through the haze. And I've had friends whose lives were wrecked by illegal drug use, and friends whose lives were wrecked by legal drug use, and friends who pulled out of tailspins, and I know some good, teetotalling, churchgoing folk who got all wobbly nonetheless. It's not something I've done more than a cursory bit of research on, but it seems that the primary danger is that we don't currently have a test to reliably measure the amount of THC affecting your system at the time of arrest. Like, DUI. This needs to be looked into, but I'm sure that Big Pharma and the docs will be more than happy to, once they know there will be customers for the test kits in the form of every damn law enforcement agency in the country. But there's a point here. The legalization folks. Those damn legalization folks make me question whether or not it's the right thing to do. Watch someone talk about wine. Tannins, notes, vintage. Whisk(e)y: Subtle flavors, the effect of ice, mixers, cocktail recipes. The martini maniacs who will spill blood over how much vermouth to add. Winston Churchill would supposedly raise his glass in the direction of France and call it good. Now watch someone advocating for legalized recreational marijuana, giggling and snorting and making jokes about "chronic" and "wake and bake" and how their mother was getting high when she was pregnant so they've basically been high their whole life. Yup, there are drunks. Yup, I'm a drunk, from time to time. Yup, Orson Wells was sloshed while they were making that one commercial, but it didn't air with him slurring and staggering. Fucking stoners, giving their opponents material every time they open their mouths without inserting a bong, and twice when they do.