that’s an inevitability

My fear is that when he dies, they'll just replace him with a body double. My even bigger fear is that they've already done that.

I had a friend in college back in the '80s who was a born-again Christian and a big Jim and Tammy Faye Baker supporter. After their scams and shenanigans had been publicly exposed. And it wasn't even that he didn't believe the news about them -- he did believe they were scammers and kept sending them most of what little money he had. If you want me to explain that mindset, I absolutely can't. It's something along the lines of "God works through disreputable people sometimes".

For me, what's so mysterious is not that people like this can be cheated out of their money. It's that people like this have any money to begin with.

Many of my coworkers are trumpers and they love to talk about "trump derangement syndrome". Whenever they bring it up I agree with them and say "yes, trump is highly deranged" and they get all apoplectic. "That's not what it means!"

I really hate paint on hinges more than anything else. It is so ridiculously easy to unscrew a door first. Maybe it's justifiable for exterior doors if you can't leave the property unsecured while the paint dries, but there's no excuse for interior doors.

I bought my house recently from a guy who had been renting it out for the last 40 years. He painted everything before putting it on the market but I didn't like the color. When I started the prep work for repainting, everything he put up peeled off like shelf paper. I was denouncing him as a total moron until the paint I put up did the same thing. In one room I even painted the walls and when I came back the next morning the paint had all flowed down to the floor and ruined the carpet.

Turns out the last tenant was a smoker and the walls were coated with nicotine. Had to wipe the whole house down with mineral spirits to get paint to stick.

And bad backs.

Eh, I bought a $142K house and my property taxes plus homeowner's insurance come to $4800 a year, which is $400 a month. What's insane is the condominiums in my district -- over $200K for a 2BR 1BA and you pay the larger property taxes and insurance and you pay condo fees of $800 to $900 a month, and cross your fingers that you don't get hit with any special assessments. You're basically paying $1600 a month to rent your own home.

I did exactly this. I only had to save up for ... 35 years.

Yeah, it's bullshit. A real American would have said "First month's rent. Last month's rent. Security deposit."

Not even just the lot rent. Eventually some pin-dicked investor type is going to buy the place, jack up the rents and kick everybody out. Good luck moving your "mobile" home.

I was working construction one winter and living in a house with four other guys. One of the roommates, without asking the rest of us, invited a friend of his to stay in our large walk-in closet. It was supposed to be just for a few days, but he ended up living there for months without paying any rent. One day I came home after work freezing cold and completely covered in mud, and this dude was sitting on the couch in a bathrobe watching TV. I heard the water running upstairs and asked him who was in the shower. He said "Bobby. And I'm next."

He was not next. He moved out that night.

Bah, why even go to that much trouble when they can just ask AI what the results of an election would be?