CSotD: Cold Fries on the Doorstep, I couldn’t take one more step

I’m a Houston Texans fan, so I was up late watching Monday Night Football last night, which gives today’s Moderately Confused a little extra punch.

I’ve seen the ads for boxes of ingredients that let you make your own meals without shopping and, depending on the cost, that could make sense, though having it happen more than once a week feels like a sort of dependency I wouldn’t want to encourage.

Also an invitation to waste, with uncooked meals piling up because other things intervened, life being what happens while you were making other plans and all.

Also, I should admit that part of my starving-artist lifestyle is enabled by my being a cheapskate, and I don’t like paying for a restaurant meal that I could have made myself which certainly means I don’t want to pay for someone else to do the shopping so my home-cooked meal costs the same as if I’d have someone else cook it and do the dishes.

Okay, and I’d rather go get the pizza or the dragon-and-phoenix than pay for delivery plus tip the driver.

But last night I was watching ads from McDonalds and Burger King that offered delivery.

First of all, that’s highway food. If you’re already home, you can put together a better burger in about the time it takes to decide you want one.

The thing you can’t do as well is the fries, but the fries are a gamble even at the drive-thru, because, if they’re not hot, they’re just pasty, greasy potato things.

You have to start eating the fries while you’re driving off the property and, in fact, McDonald’s used to run an ad about the family being pissed because the father ate the fries on the way home.

I’m not paying extra for someone to bring me cold fries and a burger I could have made myself.

But evidently plenty of people are.

And as Stahler suggests, even that system is too terribly labor intensive.

 

While some people are having things delivered to them, Pearls notes the number of people who are delivering themselves.

As often noted here before, I’ve been in the periphery of enough surveillance that I’m not terrified by Men in Black being able to assemble data because I know how inept they are at sorting through the haystack.

Like, y’know, having scads of dubious phone intercepts in Arabic but not enough translators to find out what they say, or having flight schools asking them why some strange foreign fellows want to learn how to take off but don’t want to bother learning how to land.

It’s only tasteless to mention that tomorrow, and, anyway, I was pissing and moaning about the police state well before that.

For instance, I wrote a piece about the craze of fingerprinting kids back in 1994, and, like Rat, I’m not sure if it made me brilliant or simply paranoid.

Ditto with this piece about the use and misuse of DNA data, which, as they note, is handy in re-uniting refugee families but exposes a lot of personal and family information.

Though I do like those ads where someone says that, thanks to having taken the test, they learned their father, who they always thought was Italian, was really Lithuanian, which came as quite a surprise.

Especially since, growing up, there weren’t any other Lithuanians in their neighborhood except the postman.

 

Speaking of 9/11 and Ay-rabs and such, Bill Bramhall is only one of a fleet of cartoonists who joked about putting the Taliban negotiators up at a Trump Hotel, but he gets the nod for tying it in with the Air Force junkets in Scotland.

Plus he put in a little visual joke: Two people actually staying there to play golf.

When Trump tweeted that he was cutting off talks with the Taliban, there were people who questioned whether he even had any talks going on with them, which is a pretty sad reflection on his credibility.

In fact, NPR reported that the Taliban were, indeed, expecting to meet for talks. And only heard about the cancellation from Trump’s tweet, because that’s how grown-ups do these things.

The rightwing began to be offended that he was talking to the Taliban, especially right before the 9/11 anniversary, only then it quieted down and I guess they remembered that Dear Leader is incapable of error.

Which brings us back to the Air Force and Scotland, which we are assured happens all the time and was perfectly reasonable and I’m sure they were refueling there just as regularly and parking airmen at the Trump resort just as often in 2015 as they are today.

And that it would be disloyal to ask to see the records.

Loyalty counts for a lot these days.

Which brings us to our

Juxaposition of the Day

(Matt Wuerker)

 

(Tom Toles)

We haven’t yet had confirmation on the NYTimes report that Commerce Suckup Wilbur Ross threatened to fire anyone at NOAA who put science above bracing up Dear Leader’s predictions, but there’s all sorts of other evidence of a Cult of Personality taking over the nation.

And, as always, it’s not the crime but the coverup.

Mike Pence could have stayed in Dublin and gone to visit family from there, not vice-versa, but the real damage, as Wuerker more-than-suggests is in the humiliating, degrading hustle to explain his choices as anything but what they were.

However, we’ve always had a few ass-kissing VPs, and Pence isn’t the first one who has had to show his loyalty with a little buck-and-wing.

Rallying the Defense Department in order to shower money on Dear Leader, as Toles depicts it, puts matters in a whole other category and they’d better come up with those records and they’d better look good.

Shit does tend to roll downhill, but captains lose their commands for things that happen when they’re not on the bridge.

There’s a helluva difference between fiddling with Air Force Two’s routing and sending a steady stream of zoomies off to party at the CiC’s palace.