Once upon a time…

The best part of capitalism…

…is keeping your pets safe.

Laissez le bon temps rouler

America went from stuffing turkey to becoming the “Shopping Dead”, a mauling at the malls. It is the time of Seasonal Insanity.

Pantsless man dies in police custody after Whataburger rampage, Texas cops say

Houston police say a man in his 40s was naked from the waist down when he walked into a Whataburger on the southwest side of town and started terrorizing employees and the Thanksgiving night crowd.

Then, hours later, after being detained by police, he was dead, Assistant Chief Larry Satterwhite said in a news conference late on Thanksgiving night. Police were called to the Whataburger on Bissonnet Street just after 7 p.m., according to KTRK. [snip]

Guess he had a surfeit of turkey and wished to share his Thanksgiving indulgences.

SEASON’S BEATINGS: Black Friday shoppers throw punches in Walmart, wrestle TVs in merch scrum

It’s Black Friday, and you know what that means: People trading in their dignity for discounted toys and paper towels.

Two men brawled in the aisle of a Walmart on Thanksgiving evening. It’s not clear what the tussle was over, but women jumped in and cursed them out.

Others wrestled TVs as they went on sale:

There was more chaos at another store as shoppers bypassed the orderly arrangement, jumping over railings. A worker could be seen pushing consumers back, but that didn’t deter some who wanted a deal:

Meanwhile, there was a shooting at an Alabama mall.

WSFA reports on the incident at the Riverchase Galleria in Hoover:

Witnesses say they heard two separate rings of gunfire, with the incidents reportedly happening between JCPenny and Footaction near the food court. There is a heavy police presence outside the mall as authorities attempt to clear the area.

A woman told WVTM she was sitting near the area where the shooting occurred.

“We just heard a lot of pops — pop, pop, pop, pop, pop,” the woman said.

“We’ll never do another Black Friday again. Ever. No more malls,” she said.

The attacker is reportedly dead. [snip]

One wonders how desiring a big screen TVis worth shooting at an event. Couldn’t he just thrown punches like the other revelers?

If you’re still dealing with holiday debt, there’s no need to be Scrooge

For some people, opening up a credit card statement is like a visit from the Ghost of Christmas Past.

Holiday shoppers are expected to spend generously this year, with the National Retail Federation estimating the average consumer’s outlay at $1,007 for everything from gifts to food to holiday attire — a 4.1 percent increase from last year. Another analysis, from NerdWallet, anticipates an 18 percent jump on gift spending alone, to an average total $776.

But that doesn’t give the true picture of the cost: 28 percent of shoppers are entering this holiday season still paying off debt from last year’s festivities, according to NerdWallet.

Experts say that if you’re among those still lugging around debt from last year, now is a good time to pause and strategize, before Black Friday week sets off a long stretch of frenzied spending.

“If you’re going into the holidays with debt, your first priority should be to focus on paying it down,” said Bruce McClary, vice president of communications at the National Foundation for Credit Counseling. “Everything else should be secondary. The worst thing you could do is dig yourself a deeper hole.” [snip]

Yup, you owe your soul to the credit card store.
So many people are carrying debt and little savings. This economy will change leaving people strapped with a diifficult time paying the debt and rent.

Laissez le bon temps rouler

You know that this is for the people.

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Laissez le bon temps rouler

Show and Tell

The teacher gave her fifth grade class an assignment: Get their parents to tell them a story with a moral at the end of it. The next day, the kids came back and, one by one, began to tell their stories.

There were all the regular types of stuff: spilled milk and pennies
saved. Finally, only Janie was left.

The teacher asked: “Janie, do you have a story to share?”

”Yes ma’am. My daddy told me a story about my Mommy. She was a Marine pilot in Desert Storm, and her plane got hit. She had to bail out over enemy territory, and all she had was a flask of whiskey, a pistol, and a survival knife.

She drank the whiskey on the way down so the bottle wouldn’t break, and then her parachute landed her right in the middle of 20 Iraqi troops.

She shot 15 of them with the pistol (until she ran out of bullets),
killed four more with the knife (till the blade broke), and then she
killed the last Iraqi with her bare hands.

”Good Heavens,’ said the horrified teacher. “What did your Daddy tell you was the moral to this horrible story?”

“Stay away from Mommy when she’s been drinking.

Laissez le bon temps rouler

And here’s another place where schadenfreude plays a huge role. These NFL bozos managed to setup a big salary diminution for themselves.

‘Sunday Night Football’ Ratings Fall To Season Low As Chiefs Top Bengals

[snip] Proving to the recently boasting NFL that ratings are an ultimately fickle affair, and that what was going up can also come crashing down, the league and NBC’s primetime flagship stumbled hard from last week and last year. Free of primetime MLB and NBA rivals, showcasing lesser-market teams and coming off a packed NFL day that nearly saw fisticuffs between the Philadelphia Eagles and the Carolina Panthers over national anthem protests, the Chiefs-Bengals game drew a 11.0/19 in metered market ratings.

With the largest SNF blowout in three years, last night’s game fell 25% in the early metrics from the Chiefs-Patriots battle of October 14. That’s a season low for SNF so far, down 11% from the previous low of the Week 4 game between the Baltimore Ravens and Pittsburgh Steelers.

Compared to last season’s Week 7, the Patriots’ 23-7 victory over the Atlanta Falcons on October 23, 2017, last night’s SNF dropped 13% in metered market numbers. Last year’s game also faced the Season 8 debut of The Walking Dead on cable.

The Chiefs-Patriots SNF matchup October 14 went on to pull in a 7.0/26 rating among adults 18-49 and 21.11 million viewers overall in the final numbers. [snip]

One can bet on “Baking with Martha” or what ever in hell her show is called has better ratings, against the odds, and be a winner.

Just desserts

The lawyer who manufactured a spurious witness against Kavanaugh now finds his testicles in a vise.

Big Loss for Michael

Avenatti as Judge

Orders Him to Pay

Up $4.85 million

Michael Avenatti must pay $4.85 million to a former colleague who claims the lawyer stiffed him out of millions in profits, a Los Angeles judge ruled Monday.

The decision comes as Avenatti floats his name as a contender to oppose Donald Trump in 2020, and makes appearances at Democratic events ahead of the midterm elections—including in New Hampshire, where he was slated to speak Monday. The attorney launched a political action committee, Fight PAC, to bolster his efforts.

But as The Daily Beast reported, Avenatti and his current and former companies owe millions in unpaid taxes and judgments—including the $4.85 million settlement to the former employee, Jason Frank. The lawyer’s tangled finances will likely come under scrutiny if he does officially announce his candidacy. [snip]

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Dining and dog sex get into the medical journals where it gets passed on to you. All that nonsense about eggs, coffee and fats were put out by hoaxers; people and doctors bought it and…well you know the results.

Hoaxers Slip Breastaurants and Dog-Park Sex Into Journals

One paper, published in a journal called Sex Roles, said that the author had conducted a two-year study involving “thematic analysis of table dialogue” to uncover the mystery of why heterosexual men like to eat at Hooters.

Another, from a journal of feminist geography, parsed “human reactions to rape culture and queer performativity” at dog parks in Portland, Ore., while a third paper, published in a journal of feminist social work and titled “Our Struggle Is My Struggle,” simply scattered some up-to-date jargon into passages lifted from Hitler’s “Mein Kampf.”

Such offerings may or may not have raised eyebrows among the journals’ limited readerships. But this week, they unleashed a cascade of mockery — along with a torrent of debate about ethics of hoaxes, the state of peer review and the excesses of academia — when they were revealed to be part of an elaborate prank aimed squarely at what the authors labeled “grievance studies.”

“Something has gone wrong in the university — especially in certain fields within the humanities,” the three authors of the fake papers wrote in an article in the online journal Areo explaining what they had done. “Scholarship based less upon finding truth and more upon attending to social grievances has become firmly established, if not fully dominant, within these fields.” [snip]

The authors — Helen Pluckrose, James A. Lindsay and Peter Boghossian — said that four papers had been published; three had been accepted but not yet published; seven were under review and six had been rejected.

Embarrassed journal editors quickly stamped the word “Retracted” across published papers this week, while the hoax drew appreciation from scholars who tend to be skeptical of work focusing on race, gender, sexuality and other forms of identity.

“Is there any idea so outlandish that it won’t be published in a Critical/PoMo/Identity/‘Theory’ journal?” the psychologist and author Steven Pinker tweeted.

Yascha Mounk, a political scientist at Harvard, called the hoax “hilarious and delightful” on Twitter. In an interview, he said of the authors, “What they have shown is that certain journals, and perhaps to an extent certain fields, can’t distinguish between serious scholarship and a ridiculous intellectual hoax.” [snip]

But where some saw a healthy unmasking of pernicious nonsense, others — including a number who work far from the more outré realms of the humanities — saw a sour, nasty rerun of a culture-wars chestnut that proved little more than that you can always fool some of the people some of the time. [snip]

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If you haven’t been either the plaintiff of the defendant in court, this depth of this nuttiness might not reach you. These make “Night Court”, that TV show of long gone sane. This covers the Yuppies to the MD’s in the chair.

How Do Court Reporters Keep Straight Faces?

These are from a book called Disorder in the Courts and are things people actually said in court, word for word, taken down and published by court reporters that had the torment of staying calm while the exchanges were taking place.

ATTORNEY: What was the first thing your husband said to you that morning?
WITNESS: He said, ‘Where am I, Cathy?’
ATTORNEY: And why did that upset you?
WITNESS: My name is Susan!
_______________________________
ATTORNEY: What gear were you in at the moment of the impact?
WITNESS: Gucci sweats and Reeboks.
____________________________________________
ATTORNEY: Are you sexually active?
WITNESS: No, I just lie there.
____________________________________________
ATTORNEY: What is your date of birth?
WITNESS: July 18th.
ATTORNEY: What year?
WITNESS: Every year.
_____________________________________
ATTORNEY: How old is your son, the one living with you?
WITNESS: Thirty-eight or thirty-five, I can’t remember which.
ATTORNEY: How long has he lived with you?
WITNESS: Forty-five years.
_________________________________
ATTORNEY: This myasthenia gravis, does it affect your memory at all?
WITNESS: Yes.
ATTORNEY: And in what ways does it affect your memory?
WITNESS: I forget.
ATTORNEY: You forget? Can you give us an example of something you forgot?
___________________________________________
ATTORNEY: Now doctor, isn’t it true that when a person dies in his sleep, he doesn’t know about it until the next morning?
WITNESS: Did you actually pass the bar exam?
____________________________________
ATTORNEY: The youngest son, the 20-year-old, how old is he?
WITNESS: He’s 20, much like your IQ.
___________________________________________
ATTORNEY: Were you present when your picture was taken?
WITNESS: Are you shitting me?
_________________________________________
ATTORNEY: So the date of conception (of the baby) was August 8th?
WITNESS: Yes.
ATTORNEY: And what were you doing at that time?
WITNESS: Getting laid
____________________________________________
ATTORNEY: She had three children, right?
WITNESS: Yes.
ATTORNEY: How many were boys?
WITNESS: None.
ATTORNEY: Were there any girls?
WITNESS: Your Honor, I think I need a different attorney. Can I get a new attorney?
____________________________________________
ATTORNEY: How was your first marriage terminated?
WITNESS: By death.
ATTORNEY: And by whose death was it terminated?
WITNESS: Take a guess.
___________________________________________
ATTORNEY: Can you describe the individual?
WITNESS: He was about medium height and had a beard
ATTORNEY: Was this a male or a female?
WITNESS: Unless the Circus was in town I’m going with male.
_____________________________________
ATTORNEY: Is your appearance here this morning pursuant to a deposition notice which I sent to your attorney?
WITNESS: No, this is how I dress when I go to work.
______________________________________
ATTORNEY: Doctor, how many of your autopsies have you performed on dead people?
WITNESS: All of them. The live ones put up too much of a fight.
_________________________________________
ATTORNEY: ALL your responses MUST be oral, OK? What school did you go to?
WITNESS: Oral…
_________________________________________
ATTORNEY: Do you recall the time that you examined the body?
WITNESS: The autopsy started around 8:30 PM
ATTORNEY: And Mr. Denton was dead at the time?
WITNESS: If not, he was by the time I finished.
____________________________________________
ATTORNEY: Are you qualified to give a urine sample?
WITNESS: Are you qualified to ask that question?
______________________________________

And last:
ATTORNEY: Doctor, before you performed the autopsy, did you check for a pulse?
WITNESS: No.
ATTORNEY: Did you check for blood pressure?
WITNESS: No.
ATTORNEY: Did you check for breathing?
WITNESS: No.
ATTORNEY: So, then it is possible that the patient was alive when you began the autopsy?
WITNESS: No.
ATTORNEY: How can you be so sure, Doctor?
WITNESS: Because his brain was sitting on my desk in a jar.
ATTORNEY: I see, but could the patient have still been alive, nevertheless?
WITNESS: Yes, it is possible that he could have been alive and practicing law.