From the GREAT STATE OF MAINE…
Pre-gobble gobble preparations (with a shocking villainous twist)
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Wherever your travels take you over the holidays---whether by plane, train, automobile, blimp, or a twisted-up blunt on your living room couch---have a safe and stuffy-facey one. In fact, go ahead...take the rest of the day off.
Cheers and Jeers starts below the fold...[Swoosh!!] RIGHTNOW! [Gong!!]
Cheers and Jeers for Wednesday, November 21, 2018
Note: Here’s what you can expect C&J-wise for the rest of the week: special Thanksgiving edition tomorrow, regular C&J Friday, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria, and Grandma’s sour-apple marshmallow jello with salt-pork bits and raisins that you will eat because she’s been working on it since July. Taking a quick break on Monday. Back Tuesday. ---Mgt.
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By the Numbers:
Days 'til Hanukkah: 11
Days 'til the 37th annual War on Christmas Prelude in Kennebunkport, Maine: 8
Number of Volkswagen plants in Germany now in the process of converting to electric vehicle production: 3
Size of the theme park business globally in 2017: $45 billion
Estimated boxes of Stove Top stuffing sold for Thanksgiving: 60 million boxes
Estimated number of pumpkin pies that'll be consumed tomorrow: 5 million
Number of Republican congressmen who will get their head stuck in a can of cranberry sauce tomorrow, including Louie Gohmert: 3
Random NFL Score
Los Angeles Rams 54 Kansas City Chiefs 51
Highest-scoring game in the history of Monday Night Football
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Mid-week Rapture Index: 180 (including 5 Debt &Trades and 1 scourge of demon yoga). Soul Protection Factor 24 lotion is recommended if you’ll be walking amongst the heathen today.
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Puppy Pic of the Day: At Duke University, puppy kindergarten is now in session…
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CHEERS to Georgia Wars, Episode II: A New Hope. Sorry to say (again) that Stacey Abrams, who still plans to run for office again, couldn't quite muscle past all the voter suppression laws on the books enough to score a gubernatorial win in Georgia. But there's another race comin' up December 4---two weeks from yesterday---that would hardly qualify as sloppy seconds. It's the race to replace former state Secretary of State Brian Kemp---yeah, the Republican who voter-suppressed his way to a narrow win over Abrams. Whipsmart Daily Kos Elections guru Stephen Wolf (motto: I never sleep so you don’t have to never either, not like me anyway”) explains what's at stake if Democrat John Barrow wins:
A Barrow victory would be key for protecting voting rights, as he has pledged to reverse Kemp's illegal attempts to suspend voters'registration applications over trivial discrepancies such as misplaced hyphens and end Kemp's mass purges of eligible voters simply because they vote infrequently.
Barrow would also advocate for same-day registration and nonpartisan redistricting. In addition, he’s vowed to replace Georgia’s paperless electronic voting machines with a more secure method that has a verifiable paper trail, something that Kemp actively fought in court even though major election security failures marred Kemp's tenure.
Barrow’s win would practically guarantee wins at every level in the uber-wave election in 2020, including flipping a Republican governorship that no one on Team Blue will forget screwed them shamelessly and dishonestly in 2018. If you can help out with a few bucks for Barrow's coffers (it's gonna be a helluva fight and with the holidays time is going to fly, so do it now) the Act Blue link is here. C&J is donating $25…a buck for each of the times we plan to jump and down really hard when we hear John Barrow won. But we're keeping another $10 in-pocket to start our "Great job, Billy, now you need two knee replacements, ya dummy" fund.
CHEERS to gettin' outta Dodge. Thanksgiving is looming like a 20-pound platter of mashed potatoes, and Triple-A predicts that there’s a 90% chance travelers will scream, curse and smell kinda gamey between now and next Tuesday---the highest level since 2005. So if you're going by plane, prepare for lots of seat-back kicking. Meanwhile Triple-A also says more of us will be on the roads compared to last year, with a little over 54 million expected to venture at least 50 miles from home (a residual effect of the Obama economic recovery, of course):
The 2018 holiday weekend will see the highest Thanksgiving travel volume in more than a dozen years (since 2005), with 2.5 million more people taking to the nation’s roads, skies, rails and waterways compared with last year. For the 48.5 million Americans planning a Thanksgiving road trip, INRIX, a global mobility analytics company, predicts travel times in the most congested cities in the U.S. could be as much as four times longer than a normal trip.
Drivers in San Francisco, New York City and Boston will see the largest delays---nearly quadruple normal drive times. In most cases, the best days to travel will be on Thanksgiving Day, Friday or Saturday. Drivers should expect increased travel times on Sunday as most holiday travelers will be making their way home after the long weekend.
Motorists can expect to pay the highest Thanksgiving gas prices in four years, with a national average of $2.79 as of November 1.
If you'll be among the road-trippers, please be safe and practice proper driving etiquette: the right hand is for texting, the left hand is for flipping the bird, and your lap is for catching up with Netflix.
CHEERS to Saving Our Souls. It's a well-known fact that on today's date in 1906, "S-O-S" was adopted at the International Radio Telegraphic Convention in Berlin as a signal that a ship is sinking and the band is already on their next-to-last stanza of Nearer My God to Thee. Less well known: On November 21st, 2016 every country in the world gathered to approve an alternative numerical signal that means impending disaster happening on air, land and sea: "1-20-17."-
CHEERS to number…38??? The blue wave keeps crashing through the gates of Paul Ryan's little House sandcastle. The latest red-to-blue flip is Salt Lake City Mayor Ben McAdams, 43, and pardon my less-than-magnanimous welcome, but he has all the markings of a no-good blue dog Democrat who wants Nancy Pelosi locked in leg irons and summarily back-benched.That's what I'd heard from our local neighborhood drunks, anyway. So I checked out his issues page and found this:
» He's progressive on Obamacare: keep it, expand it, including Medicaid as far as the eye can see
» Criticized the GOP's daylight robbery of the middle class disguised as a middle class tax cut, but supports a balanced budget amendment in the constitution—yuk.
» Education: led Salt Lake County in a first-in-the-nation partnership to enroll thousands of economically disadvantaged children in voluntary, high-quality preschool; more access to student loans, and more transparency in the system.
» Emphasizes increasing the supply of renewable energy, along with research and development of new technologies.
» More legal immigration; undocumented immigrants to come out of the shadows and more recognition of the important role immigrants play in the U.S. economy. Supports DACA.
» His stance on abortion: Wants to see fewer abortions via education and greater access to contraception, but "decisions about terminating a pregnancy should be made by a woman in consultation with her physician, family members and faith counselors she trusts.”
» "The highest ranking Dem in Utah" is also staunchly pro-LGBT.
Oh, he sounds reasonable to me. His no vote on Pelosi will be forgiven and forgotten. It's theatre. But I'll worry just a little if, after that vote, he doesn’t bow his head, put his hand to his forehead, slowly pull it down while saying: "Aaaaaaand…scene."
CHEERS to mostly smooth sailing. If you're traveling today in your 2018 Tesla electric jetpack, you'll freeze your bootie off if you head to the northeast and get damp along the west coast (douse those fires!). But otherwise...sunny and pleasant. This is what the Turkey Day map looks like, according to Accuweather's Atari 2600 forecast computer:
The gays, feminists and pagans are quick to point out, by the way, that any weather messes this holiday are not their fault. Responsibility rests solely on the homophobes, the Nazis and their cousins the conservative Bible thumpers. It’s the blue wave---they're taking it very hard.
CHEERS to reaching dry land. On November 21, 1620, after being denied boarding passes at Heathrow because they were on the no-fly list, a bunch of renegade "pilgrims" from England with a bad case of B.O. and no sense of humor landed in New England after 66 days at sea and promptly got all quill-crazy, signing the Mayflower Compact:
“...to enact, constitute, and frame just and equal laws, ordinances, acts, constitutions and offices, from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general good of the Colony, unto which we promise all due submission and obedience."
Upon which they immediately went to work crowding out the Native Americans, killing suspected witches, and careening all over the damn place without using their turn signal once in crude internal-combustion machines, thus earning them the name “Massholes” early on.
But they were #1 in gay marriage rights, they’re very good at calling their mothers, and ya gotta love that Red Sox team they put together---Mookieeeeeee!!!! By the way, the Mayflower was destined for the northern edge of the Virginia Colony, but they ended up dropping anchor in a totally different place: Provincetown, Massachusetts. After spending several years reviewing all the available evidence, I've come to an inescapable conclusion: GPS sucked back then.
CHEERS to spinning in circles. On this date in 1877, Thomas Edison announced to the world that he had invented the phonograph machine. In fact, he broke the news via a phonograph recording, which sounded like this:
"Hello, is this thing on? Testes...testes one two three.
We begin bombing the Russians in 30 minutes. Ha ha! That always cracks 'em up at the Elks Lodge! But seriously, folks. Mary had a little lamb---her parents were mortified.
I just can't help myself... You folks fly in from out of town? I bet your arms are tired! I slay me... Oh, by the way, the walrus will be Paul and Luke will be Vader's kid. Oops…'Spoiler alert!'
I'm bored. Can I go home and invent the light bulb now?"
Only known cure for Restless Inventor Syndrome, according to doctors: take out two patent applications and call me in the morning.
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Ten years ago in C&J: November 21, 2008
WHOOPS to the understatement of the week. "Oh, great." And with those words astronaut Heide McButterfingers, in the process of making repairs on the International Space Station, watched her tool kit float off into space, where it will one day collide with and destroy an Inkydinkyalite spacecraft rushing to save Earth from ecological destruction by our own inhabitants. But even worse, the bag also contained the only key to the mini bar. Let's just say it's a little tense at the space station breakfast table this morning.
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And just one more…
CHEERS to Bezos vs. Bozo. Last week’s SNL may have opened by lampooning Laura Ingraham’s (Kate McKinnon) and “Judge” Jeanine Pirro’s (Cecily Strong) “feel facts,” but the best burn was left in the capable hands of host Steve Carrell’s chrome-domed Amazon/Washington Post owner and Trump arch-nemesis Jeff Bezos. It’s the first time I’ve been able to almost see the building of two Amazon mega-centers with over a billion-dollars of taxpayer’s money in a positive light. Almost:
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Have a nice Wednesday and, if I don’t see you here tomorrow, a pleasant gobble-gobble day. And before I forget, I hereby pardon all the tofurkeys. Floor's open...What are you cheering and jeering about today?
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Today's Shameless C&J Testimonial
Bill in Portland Maine, An Ass
---Wonkette
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