Well, possums, we were bad. We neglected you last week AND this week; what is it about Tuesday that makes it so damn difficult to liveblog the Covid briefing?
I’ll tell you: my god damned alarm not going off. What, after all, is the point of technology if we cannot use it as a convenient excuse when we want. My phone has many thousands of times more computing power than was used to send the Apollo astronauts to the moon, but what do I need it to do? Provide plausible cover for when I sleep in.
Mission. Accomplished!
Moving right along, or left along, which is more to my anarchal communist taste. Tastes. But the less said about those, the better…
The Irish variety is rarer than you might think
We, meaning me, are calling you, meaning you, “possums” because
hopefully there is more than one reader of this blog these days
Armie Hammer has ruined “kittens” forever
wemeaningme aremeaningis big fansmeaningfan of Dame Edna, and Dame Edna loved her possums
Possums, would it embarrass you if I told you I loved you?
— Dame Edna Everage (@DameEdnaEverage) July 10, 2019
See, wemeaningme wouldn’t lie about that
Anyhoodle, we missed both last week’s and this week’s Tuesday briefings, so we’re going to do a twofer today on Tuesday. Yes, you can mark your “Alliteration” square.
Here’s the video from today, since we’re doing these in reverse order because wemeaningme aremeaningis arbitrary that way. 33,000 views so far, one of the more popular ones.
Well, kittens, we’re going to have to come up with something else to call you, as it appears that skeevy Armie Hammer uses the term to describe the women in his bizarre sexual fantasies. Not that we’re against bizarre sexual fantasies. No, perish the thought! But his involve cannibalism. And, after having met Willy Pickton, there just isn’t enough brain bleach on the planet to scrub that image out of my head. We don’t want you messed up in that!
Susan Sontag and Linus hang out a lot
I got into an argument recently on the internet (imagine that! Me!) about whether or not Pickton’s pork ended up in grocery stores, and in doing the research I discovered…well, long story short: it’s worse. It is, in fact, very possible and even very likely that human remains ended up in a wide variety of consumer products, because he apparently took his victims’ bodies to the same rendering plant that he took his pork, and the uh, “outcome” of that plant ended up in mass-market products from lipstick to …. well, who cares what else, really? I’ll never look at my $35 Nars the same way again.
A friend of mine was paid a great deal of money back in the day by the pork marketing board, because after the details of the Pickton case came out the price of pork fell through the floor, for obvious reasons, and he managed to get it up again. No such issue at the Lipstick Marketing Board. But, ew. Let us bond with the concept of motivated forgetting, and put it behind us.
Indeed, let us forget that with extreme prejudice. We interrupt this dark interlude to remind you that, thanks to TikTok, sea shanties are trending on all platforms.
So, readers, let us try to put that behind us and move forward in the very Canadian spirit of “we shall never speak of this again.” Which brings us to the Philosophy of Forgetting, which I didn’t even know was A Thing, or if I did, I forgot it after my TBI.
Related: the very internet-native concept of the Eternal September, which is the state of always having so many new users unfamiliar with the basics and protocols that it always feels like the first day of school. Right now, we have an Eternal September for democracy itself, hell, for critical thinking in the first place.
I grew up in a Canadian household and my parents were Conservatives, but back then Conservatives weren't the kind of people who would see a pandemic that was killing thousands of people as an opportunity to make their political opponents look bad, as they do now.#differenttimes
Well, the Covid Briefing Bingo, also, is going well. Trudeau hasn’t shown up yet even though it’s at his own house, and my blog’s inexplicably adding page breaks to the post in between every paragraph. So, mark your “Technical difficulties” square.
Zoom, zoom, here we go, kittens, roaring into today’s Covid-19 Briefing Bingo like a 1966 Honda Superhawk hitting the highway, or a masterpiece of narrative philosophy (it’s called a parable) hitting the best-seller list. Whether you call it Quality, as Robert Pirsig did in his 1974 novel/parable/revolutionary work of technological philosophy, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. (PDF)
Or whatever they called it in Godel Escher Bach,(PDF) which I’m too rushed to look up or remember right now. There’s the whole text: YOU look it up.
You know it, The Thing. The Grand Unified Theory of Philosophy, the Thing which unites the principles of Aesthetics, Ethics, and Logic, the Thing which is also called anything from The Godhead to The Buddha to The Force to “buh muh rights!” because human beings can never agree on a goddamn thing, can we?
Anyhoodle, here we go with our video from CPAC. 12,000 views, kittens. It seems Canadians are taking this all a bit more seriously than in Ye Olden Dayes of like, a month ago, when they’d get 1,000 views on a good day. Perhaps the audience is attracted to that ineffable, ultimate characteristic of Quality which we were just discussing above? Or maybe they’re just big fans of the best hair in politics. Who knows?
Speaking outside his home in Ottawa, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau provides an update on the federal government’s response to the ongoing COVID-19 (coronavirus disease) pandemic. In his remarks, the prime minister comments on his latest cabinet shuffle and announces that Canada has reached an agreement with Pfizer to purchase an additional 20 million doses of their COVID-19 vaccine. Responding to questions from reporters, he discusses the rollout of vaccines and addresses speculation about the timing of the next federal election. (January 12, 2021)Continue reading →
Starting late, kittens, rushing to get this posted. Consequently, today is all about minimalism. Which is, of course, a bougieaffectation, but we can argue about that later.
Here goes:
Video, with 741 people staring at the de-porchscaped front steps of Rideau Cottage:
Speaking from outside his home in Ottawa, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau discusses the federal government’s response to the ongoing COVID-19 (coronavirus disease) pandemic.
And, wow, CPAC Captioneer is well and truly Over It. Those captions used to run to 300 words!
Good morning or possibly afternoon, kittens. We’re back online and losing the struggle to gain control of the television so I can do the Covid Briefing Bingo, so I’ll be Laterblogging it today.
In adherence to our new naming convention, today’s bingo is named after one of the great works of philosophy: in this case, Aristotle’s The Nicomachean Ethics. Couldn’t really call it the Covid Briefing Bingo ethics, because, well, in the dirty, dangerous world of political bingo calling it doesn’t really pay to work out an ethical framework.
If the Internet was built in the middle ages, Aristotelian gifs would be a big deal.
