Howdy y’all!

Big big news this week:

• I’m FINALLY out of technology hell as the school has given me my computer. One of the many perks of the job is a school supplied MacBook Air. It’s a Mac, but it’s better than the Kindle Fire for posting and preparing for classes.
• We closed on our house! It is official, we are hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt! It was a full week of Amazing Race-like antics and tasks as the bank wanted “proof” of residence in Cambodia in the form of a utility bill in our name. It doesn’t exist. The school, another amazing perk, supplies the housing and covers the utilities. Fortunately, a letter from the HR department was able to suffice. It was down to the last minute, though, literally.
• Ma Belle Femme arrives back in Cambodia this week. Unfortunately, she has to quarantine for two weeks in a hotel and not at home with us as had been the previous policy.
• I’ll need to get an advance from the school to cover expenses for the second week. Ma Belle Femme has all of our money. The notary fees and police check fee (visa requirement) blew a big hole in this summer’s budget. We’ll fall just short.
• Ma Petite Fille and I played one of our favorite board games, Eldritch Horror, this week. We played twice. One we lost, one we won. We had three characters die, one of which was tuned into a fish! To her credit, Ma Petite Fille soldiered on through all the setbacks that the game can throw at you. It’s a cooperative role-playing game. My favorite kind. Let us know about your opinions on board games in the comments!
• Allergies have been kicking my butt, lately, despite taking my medicine.

And that’s the news from around Ye Olde Blogge!

Reading From this Week

From the Twitter Feed

Twitter is full of interesting and confusing tweets. Most of them I can’t decipher. I guess I’m too old to. Now and again, though, I come across some stuff that is worth noting. Here are a couple from this week.

From the News

Marjorie “Maddog” Greene is up to her old tricks again. She’s suing Pelosi and friends over fines accrued for refusing to wear a mask on the House floor calling it symbolic speech — more like shambolic speech, amirite? It really is just more strikingly imbecilic antics from one of the GQP’s more strikingly imbecilic members, which would normally get a pass on the recommendations list from me if it weren’t for this paragraph:

Let us not contemplate the logical end of this argument, lest we be plagued by nightmare visions of Team Dipshit airing their pink bits in the well of the House in “protest” of tyrannical dress code requirements. Pants: Teach the controversy!

Masks Are ‘Compelled Symbolic Speech,’ Argues Marjorie Taylor Green In LOLsuit Against Pelosi

There’s a lot more snark and sarcasm where that came from, so read on siblings, read on.

Don’t send emails when your angry! is now science fact! Look no further than a study that compared the misinformation identified by both angry participants and not-angry participants. The angry folks thought a lot more misinformation was true than the not-angry group. Now, you know why the GQP tries to keep its base angry all the time. They are much easier to fool that way.

From the WordPress Reader

It’s a real mixed bag this week. We’ve got everything from lesbian porn to cybersickness, from Chinese communist political oppression to good ol’ free market American-made political oppression and a couple of lighter hearted posts all from various friends o’ Ye Olde Blogge.

You know, we don’t have enough delight in our lives, so from our favorite drawbridge keeper and friend of Ye Olde Blogge, Barb Abelhauser, we get her celebration of her second little librariversary! Who doesn’t love the free little library movement?

The political press if full of chilling news stories that are only getting chillinger. Scottie’s Toy Box brings us a nice summary of that news from a wide variety of sources. Whether you like your #COVID19 Delta vaccine-refuser snark or righteous take downs of the racist misogyny of the political press or just the usual Trump mishegas, Scottie’s got it all.

Like Boss Tweed once said, I don’t care who you vote for as long as I can pick who’s running. If you’re looking for signs of what the GQP Dystopia is going to look like, look no further than what is going on in Hong Kong. I gotta say The Hong Kong Free Press is always good reading, but this opinion piece on the Chinese Communist Party’s search for a multi-party system in HK that won’t actually represent anyone’s interests but their own is particularly interesting and instructive. “Elected” representatives that won’t represent anyone’s interest but the party’s, hunh?Sound familiar?

It’s not all in your head, your screen really is making you sick! From our favorite WordPress blog, Neuroscience News, we get scientific support for the notion that looking at a screen all day not only can make your eyes hurt, it can also make your head throb, mind spin, and stomach churn. It’s called cybersickness! Hunh. Really? Go figure. And, there are some real obvious things you can do about it: (1) Don’t stare at your screen so much. (2) Use the nighttime option that reduces blue light. And (3) zoom in on images and increase the size of your fonts. Well, I guess, you don’t have to read that article now… oops?

From one puny person is a lament about the seeming futility of blogging, especially when compared to the glory of other social media platforms, in her case Facebook and in mine, Twitter. From Renxkyoko comes an amusing piece that we all can relate to, I’m sure.

Everybody likes lesbian sex... except for gay men, maybe. It turns out that it is true. Even straight women are watching lesbian porn according to the bloggers over at Romantic Lesbian Erotica — I’m only looking at the articles, honest (haha, it’s all they have, but what articles, if you know what I mean, and I think you do) — report on a study from PornHub, the worlds biggest porn distributer that shows that lesbian is the most popular category for their female viewers — how do they know your gender? — and since only 5% of the female population identifies as LGBTQ+, presto magico, objecto ad absurdum, we can reduce it to straight women like woman-on-woman sex, too.

I gotta say without my WordPress Reader feed, my life would be a lot less interesting. And, now your life is more interesting, too. Have a wander through those links and tell us what you thought about them in the comments.

The #COVID19 Report

The Cambodia #COVID19 Report

It’s a mixed bag here in Cambodia as we head in to the opening of international schools — Asian schools run on a different yearly schedule.

The bad: All summer, the government has been threatening harsher measures in its fight against the spread of #COVID19, and it did enact some this week: (1) We are back on curfew. This time it’s from 9:00 PM to 3:00 AM. I don’t know how efficacious it is, but okay. At least folks can get to work and are home from the bars early enough to get a good night’s sleep. And (2) they’ve closed the borders to the provinces adjacent to Thailand. There’s been too many Cambodians coming over the frontier with #COVID19. Now we’ll confine them all to those two lonely provinces. I gotta say, if those provinces haven’t changed much from when I was out there in the year eight, they are the Wild Wild West.

The Good: There is actually lots of good news:

• New infections have been about 600 to 700 this week. Down about 11% in the running seven day average.
• They’re vaccinating children 12 and up. That started 1 August.
• Britain has donated enough AstraZeneca vaccine so that the elites — including international school teachers apparently — to receive a third booster dose.
• Once again, the PM has assured the nation that we are not going broke. So, the team owner has full confidence in the GM, who has full confidence in the coach, who has full confidence in the quarterback, so no one is going any where, right?
• They’ll have amassed 26 million total doses by mid-August. That’s enough for everyone of the 13 million people they intended to dose to be fully vaxxed. Remember, Cambodia’s population is only about 16 million total.

So, we may be able to have kids in school if they’re vaxxed and we all wear our masks by September or so. And, Cambodia may have done what the US and Australia seem incapable of, vaxxing its population and controlling the #COVID19 outbreak. We’ll see.

Other #COVID19 News

There were enough interesting #COVID19 stories in the news that I thought I’d list them here:

• In a huge surprise, research out of the University of Sydney (that’s in Australia, folks) reports that COVID Non-Compliers Are Less Open to New Ideas, More Extroverted and Driven by Self Interest. Hunh. Go figure.
• New polling suggests that partisanship isn’t the only reason for American resistance to vaccinating against #COVID19. It is for the white population, but for the disproportionately unvaxxed PoC, it is the usual suspects of having been wronged by the gov’t before making it harder to trust them now and being unable to get time off work or childcare to allow them to get vaxxed even if they want to. Hunh. You mean these policies and practices hurt communities of color first and worst? I guess they’re doing their job, then.
• And, friend-of-Ye Olde Blogge, Luck-It, has an article about how #COVID19 has changed peoples’ lives that includes a blurb by yours truly.

That’s everything that is happening around Ye Olde Blogge this week. Remember if you visit any of these fine blogs, leave a sign that you were there: like, rate, comment, or share on social media. It warms a blogger’s heart to know that someone has read their work.

Huzzah!
Jack

Image Attribution

“Eldritch Horror” by MeoplesMagazine is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0