A Boxing Day Story: Revenge of the Bumpas Hounds.

(Yes, I know about It Runs in the Family. It’s not bad, but it’s not the same. Haven’t seen the others.)

I took one for the team and went to Fox News to read the user comments on the first story I could find about this. It’s pretty telling that even there, the overwhelming sense I got – in between the “Obamacare is why healthcare is so bad!” and the “where’s Hunter’s cocaine, Mister FBI?” and the “our so-called nation is secretly run by acolytes of a shady transnational world government” – is that they don’t understand why this is getting any more attention than any other random street crime in the big bad city.

Even MAGA doesn’t care; wrong kind of billionaire, I guess.

If it’s in the book, then point happily conceded. If not, I reckon it could work either way. Everybody hates depositions.

You just made an enemy for life.

It may not be a direct reference to the book, but I would just about bet that the author didn’t come up with the bon mot from scratch.

“Depose” in particular is interesting. It could certainly be a broader social comment about a perceived ruling class, but it also has a specific meaning in the context of civil litigation. I would imagine that some glib corporate attorneys have used those exact three words in sequence, in connection with UHC and others: Deny the claim, defend the lawsuit, depose the patients, where “depose” means conduct a lengthy and expensive and stressful set of questions, done outside the courtroom and with very little off limits because it’s expected the judge will rule on admissibility later. All of it wears out the claimant, who clearly needed the coverage and will almost by definition lack the same resources to pursue the lawsuit.

Well, this would track, since Trump himself, despite embodying virtually every other vice and bad character trait imaginable, has through some quirk of his toxic upbringing decided that being a drunk is completely unacceptable.

There was a button. I pushed it.

I’m still reading tea leaves of course, but while he may well have been completely right about literally everything, I sense that what changed was his tolerance for BS, combined how much the administration valued him.

Regardless, it’s still an absolute shame. Of course the personal tragedy for his family, and then professionally, either this poor guy was railroaded and mistreated, or else he missed a chance for a productive final act in his career.

What a sad situation. I googled around and went through some reddit threads and found my way to the final email. It was lengthy and one sided, and got off in the weeds towards the end, but the “ethics” complaints he felt it worthwhile to share were mostly centered around “lying, incompetence, hypocrisy, information hiding, etc.”

They boil down to, “They are taking my meeting space to give to a new professor and they waited until the last minute to tell me and fed me some BS about it,” and “the MechE department won’t be recommending my course for a certain requirement any more, and they didn’t tell me until long after they’d decided.” There were other grievances about the university not making lasting change after George Floyd, not taking his concerns about imminent environmental collapse (or the university’s role in preventing it) seriously, and a last-minute cancellation of a monorail proof of concept he wanted to do between two parking garages.

Honestly, it sounds like he was struggling and felt the weight of the world on his shoulders, and was no longer psychologically equipped to handle intense, but likely common, levels of office politics, academic fiefdoms, and baroque bureaucracy. Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear his workplace saw the signs, and simply treated him as difficult but ensconced, an inconvenience to be avoided.

Good point.

Eventually, some clerk or staffer is gonna spend a lot of time in jail but also become a folk hero.

Given Trump’s tendencies, I’m not sure I want us jumping in right away. He’d probably pick the worse side.

I kind of like the idea of impeaching Biden solely to allow Kamala to be president for a few days/weeks, meaning Trump has to toss all his “47” merch and have it re-made with “48.”

Oh, and also constitutional guide-rails I guess.

Yes, but the 400 had it on a spillproof membrane like you’d see on a fast-food cash register. The later models improved the layout but most had much worse switches than the 800.

That would probably be a Saladin or or Hermes class. Created for a reference book, but canonized when the book’s drawings were digitized (or maybe more likely traced) to go on an illuminated display in the background of ST2 and 3.

For other single-nacelle ships, TNG had the Freedom class, the JJ movies the Kelvin class, and SNW the Archer class.

That Starfleet HQ I don’t think was ever canonized (anybody know better?), though it has a few very vague conceptual similarities to Spacedock One and implied narrative similarities to Discovery’s combined HQ station.

800. You can tell because the keyboard doesn’t actively make you want to kill and/or die.

Ooh, this is a good excuse to post the Todd Snider song. Picked a recent live version because a Todd Snider song without affable Gen X stoner anecdotes is barely a Todd Snider song at all.

My kid just got me to try Beat Saber on her VR headset.

Nobody told me there would be crouching.

Certainly, the two never seemed to have much on screen chemistry despite both being great actors in their own right.

It seems like Star Trek of the era had a real blind spot for directing actors. If you weren’t an extremely self-assured performer coming in, you would have to be a regular to cobble together enough takes and screen time to develop (or maybe just get the audience to accept your quirks/limits), especially with a setting that requires a little imagination to inhabit. Even then sometimes people never did quite sell their roles, and much like the Star Wars prequels, I think the direction had a lot to do with it. I think some actors just need a type of direction that was not forthcoming at the time, though I put it on the entire braintrust and the expectations of the era, rather than individual directors.

Rosalind Chao never made me believe she was doing anything other than reading lines, and it made it that much easier to dismiss the relationship or focus on the shriller scripts.