Drink now

Here’s something else I saw recently at the grocery store:

Look, I’ve been drinking wine for a long time. And Champagne (and méthode champenoise bubblies) is my substance of choice. But I do not believe I’ve ever seen “user friendly” as a characteristic of, well, any beverage.

But hey, I’m just a bozo on the bus.

RDA

I saw this product line at the grocery store a while ago.

The bars have dates in them so I’d never buy one, but I thought the last ingredient was interesting:

Keep shining

The Mother of Parliaments is shut down while BoJo the Clown tosses his toys out of the pram. And Cadet Bonespurs is omni-raging against investigations into using his office to prop up his failing businesses, against hurricane Dorian not following his instructions to strike Alabama, against the Afghanis and the Taliban not serving up an opportunity for a Nobel Peace Prize, against John Legend a and Chrissy Teigen for no particular reason and against his (now) ex-NSA adviser, John Bolton.

Also, it turns out that the CIA extracted a valuable asset high up in Putin's government in 2017 because it was clear that Blabbermouth 45 was likely to tell the Russians all about him. Meaning the intelligence community decided more than two years ago that the occupant of the White House cannot be trusted with confidential information.

Seventy-five years ago the Anglo-American alliance spearheaded the destruction of on eof the worst dictatorships known to the planet, and here we are in 2019, both of us in crazytown.

I’ll say one thing about this: it’s interesting that the Tories—for all their toffee-nosed elitist classist bullshit—have decided that there is, in fact, a line, and they won’t cross it. BoJo is in the soup as a result of not reading the lapsang souchong leaves in his Wedgewood cup, and discovering that his Conservative brethren are actually chordates. Would that the GOPigs here could find even cartilaginous backbones and give the Kleptocrat even the tiniest kick to the cojones.

Well—I’m not going there. A couple of days ago a friend posted a video on Facebook in which he sang a WWII standard in memory of his recently-deceased brother. I can’t give you that one, but here’s Vera Lynn singing her signature piece.

We can all look forward to—and work toward—some sunny day.

Positivity

A while ago I saw these two cars parked fairly close to one another somewhere around Northern Virginia.

I don’t know whether they share owners, but they’re both Benzes, they have the same Virginia license plate design and their messages are remarkably similar.

Gratitude Monday: fresh colors

Someone on the cluster board must be looking to sell their townhouse, because there’s been a lot of talk about “more updated lighting” and “freshening up cluster colors”. I don’t know what’s going on with the lighting, but they’re apparently serious about the paint. We’ve been bombarded by missives from the management association to go take a look at the samples painted on two units and vote for our preferred colors.

So this weekend I walked over to the two townhouses and here’s their idea of “freshened-up”:

The thing that popped into my mind on seeing them was the faux “seaport” cluster of shoppes that surrounded the Queen Mary in Long Beach. I would prefer they paint my house jungle camouflage than anything calling itself “Boone Nut”, “Weimaraner”, “Chambourd” [sic], “Dinner Party” or “Mysterious”. Pretty sure I’ll lose this, tho.

Nonetheless, I’m not here today to kvetch about the cluster board’s utter lack of taste, but to tell you about what I found on my way across the common property to the Palette of Pretension. Because one or more young person(s) apparently has a palette of chalk, and has used it for the good of humankind. Viz:

(I’m not entirely sure what that long rectangle represents, but it must have had meaning for the artist.)

And today I’m grateful that I happened to cut across the tot lot while these drawings were still intact, because they lightened my spirits and we all need lighter spirits.

I just wish the cluster board had consulted the kids about color schemes. I’ll take “Tree of Life” or “Flying Saucer” over “Boone Nut” or “Mysterious” any day.