Jealous. Best my neighborhood has is skeletons playing pickleball.

Good to see that Mike's voice bounced back after the throat cancer.

Australia had been producing some absolutely killer punk and pub rock bands over the past while. Some of my favorites are The Chats, Amyl and the Sniffers, Ratsalad., The Gutter Girls, Mod Con, and Flangipanis.

From Japan: Otoboke Beaver.

From the Philippines: Tiger Pussy.

From Ireland: An Slua, Sprints, Gurriers, Nerves, Bucket, and some classic punk bands like Stiff Little Fingers, and The Radiators.

From Scotland: Cowboy Hunters, and Soapbox.

From France: Camera Silens, Rixe, Syndrome 81, Zone Infinie, and Tchernobyl.

Truth.

I just really wish someone would come out with a search engine that works like Google worked around 2004. There was a brief beautiful window of time where it seemed like no matter how obscure something was, if it existed on a publicly indexable website, and you knew the tricks for tweaking your search query, you could find it with Google. But I think I started noticing it going downhill not too long after they killed Google Video and acquired YouTube. Definitely after they also became a phone company.

It just seems crazy to me that we figured out how to do it over 20 years ago and then stopped almost immediately. And in all the time since then nobody has stepped up to fill the gap. Like, DuckDuckGo is better than Google now, but it's only because Google became terrible, not because DDG got better.

If the handful of veterans that I know are anything to go by, military nicknames are often directly related to the dumbest mistake they made during their enlistment.

The world of denim jeans is a super deep rabbit hole: fabric composition, fabric weight, the type of loom the fabric is made on, real indigo dye vs chemical dyes, etc., etc. But the vast, vast majority of the jeans you'll find in most stores these days aren't particularly high quality at all. They're rarely even 100% cotton anymore. Now most brands use a blend of cotton, nylon, and spandex. Where once they were made to be tough and durable work clothes, now they're mostly just made to feel comfortable immediately off the rack, not to last or be durable really at all. The fact that they wear out super fast just means they get to sell more jeans.

And you can't even count on any of the major denim makers to have consistent quality across their own brands anymore. Levi's, Wrangler, etc., make different quality jeans to hit the specific price points of the different major retail chains. A pair of Levi's you find at WalMart will be lower quality than the pair you find at Target, which will be lower quality than the Levi's you'll find at a higher end department or western wear store.

If you want 100% cotton jeans that are made like jeans were made before the 1990s, the terms you want to search for are "raw denim," and "selvage denim." Selvage refers to they type of loom the fabric is made on rather than the fabric itself, but denim made on a selvage loom is usually the high quality stuff. Raw denim can get pretty pricey depending on the brand. The cheapest option will probably be Levi's 501 Shrink-to-Fit jeans (not any old 501s, mind you. Specifically the Shrink-to-Fit ones). Some of the other less expensive raw denim options are brands like Brave Star or Unbranded, which run in the $100 - $200 range. Brands like 3sixteen and Naked & Famous are usually in the $200 - $400 range. And brands like Samurai or Oni are like $300 on up.

It's been a long time since I've watched it, but I think think they did Ally Sheedy's character dirty. The other characters got some kind of deep revelation about life, the universe, and everything, and pretty much all Ally Sheedy got was a new shade of lipstick. Her whole story arc basically boiled down to: just change everything about yourself and maybe the star football player will pay attention to you, because that's what really matters in life.

Back during his first term there was a story on the Risk podcast where an Asian guy told the story of going home after some time away at college and visiting the family that adopted him when he was a baby; and how, when he said he didn't support Trump, that family almost beat him to death right there in the living room. It was one of the most heartbreaking stories I've ever heard in my entire life. I think about that shit a lot.

Thanks for linking to an actual journalistic news outlet. All the other posts I've seen relating to this were for trash rags like TMZ, the NY Post, and the Daily Mail.

I feel like there should be a picture of Gir in between the hair dye and the Pick of Destiny.

Alcohol companies have had that figured out for quite some time.

It's a common problem on farms which don't provide adequate bathroom facilities for their laborers and/or don't allow a reasonable amount of time to use those facilities. Or to put it a different way: if your boss screams at you for being lazy and threatens your job every time you leave the field to use the toilet, you tend to just start shitting in the field.