144 Comments

Oh, man, conservative templates never change, only the details. Ditto for their inability to handle facts properly when bothering to use them.

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I gotta check out some of these Bowery Boys films you sometimes reference. I'm 52, and only vaguely remember them being played on cheap local TV stations back when I was a kid. Any specific recommendations?

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One of the cheapass Chattanooga stations i grew up with ran all the Bowery Boys movies (with a number of other 30s and 40s B and C pictures) and I always found them rather bizarre'.

Once you get the template of the Right media routines, it's so predictable...,

https://youtu.be/liQB7ZycEOg

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None! They're not good, and if you're not charmed by Leo Gorcey's malapropist mug and Huntz Hall's simpering schlemiel you'll find them unwatchable. But find a relatively early one (they kept the act up into the 1950s) and you might get some of the pleasure I got out of them when Officer Joe Bolton showed them on WPIX.

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Monogram Pictures was one of the "Poverty Row" studios, and it shows in the production values. They specialized in urban mystery stuff just like Republic specialized in Westerns. Production values were so low you could almost say they invented film noir.

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Hey, do you know how much lighting costs?

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Easier to not expose the film at all, no?

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And *that’s* how Weimar Germany made The Cabinet of Dr Caligari.

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Hey! WPIX is where I worked summers to put myself through college. Night shifts and weekends in engineering, running commercials and old Twilight Zone episodes.

Best-paying job I ever had. But I am glad I never returned to it because nobody made it out alive.

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Nice! WPIX helped get me through junior high with midnight showings of Star Trek every weeknight. I'd pretend to sleep, then sneak downstairs after my parents went to bed, hope it was Balance of Terror or Amok Time, not Spock's Brain. If the parents went to sleep early, I'd catch the 11:30 Honeymooners.

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WPIX played a huge role in my formative years, with Chiller Theater (hosted by the legendary Zacherle). The opening montage is still with me in memory, and will probably still be there when the final stages of Alzheimer's makes me forget everything else.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bcIGSaPnqc

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Cool! It inspired me to go looking on Youtube for the intro to Creature Features, the late-night horror movie show on WGN in Chicago. Haven't heard this in 40 years, but man that music still gets me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_otKgJ-6Sjc

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HT also to Bob Wilkins on KTVU in Oakland, for his own Creature Features. The power of a slightly larger than average cigar.

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After I moved to the Bay Area in the mid-70s I got to experience Bob, too. Good times.

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I'm a big fan of old movies, and usually I'm the one encouraging people to take some time to rediscover the treasures of Old Hollywood instead of just taking what's in their NetFlix stream this week, but as far as I'm concerned, I'm hoping every last Bowery Boys movie was printed on nitrate film stock and their whole damn oeuvre vanishes in a warehouse fire.

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They are useful for the moxie of their accents, ya know?

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I admit I enjoyed the Bowery Boys as a young one! I got a kick out of how they talked; but I'm not sure I could get through one of their movies now.

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I'm a so-so fan of old movies and I've never seen one. All this talk though is making me curious. With low expectations, of course.

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If nothing else, the Bowery Boys serve as a reminder that the 40's weren't all Casablanca and Citizen Kaine.

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Crow T. Robot for the Film Anti-Preservation Society: “Some films aren’t deteriorating fast enough. FAPS transfers these films to volatile silver nitrate stock.”

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A little bit like the Little Rascals/Our Gang shorts. I know people still have fond memories of those, but: bad child acting and racist tropes galore.

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Oh, man! These horrible new things about eating bugs! I mean, really--what White man would eat bugs? BUGS, fer Christ sake!

Now, hand me my box of chocolate-covered ants. I'm busy working on legislation that will stop the FDA from regulating the food industry so closely because, eh, what's a few roach legs-n-eggs in your hotdog?

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Back in the 70s or so, a lot of folks pointed out that the FDA had a certain tiny "eh, fuck it" percentage of bug parts they'd allow in food, because massive food processing industry and limited FDA resources.

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So about the bug eating thing, I did order some bug (really made from bugs) candy bars off the internet (source of all evil). I could not eat even a bite. I'm no Steve McQueen, speaking of old movies. On the other hand it did come from Australia where they eat vegemite, so as you say there is no accounting for taste.

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I don't think I could overcome my cultural revulsion to eating anything that still looked like a bug, but if something used protein powder made from bugs I think I could try it. I've never tried vegemite, though, and don't feel any inclination to try it.

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A Scottish friend of mine was repulsed by an English product even worse than vegemite: Bovril, made from beef extract. I have no idea if it’s still made or if the factory was burned to the ground and the earth salted after.

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Everything goes better with just a pinch of salt.

Which reminds me I'm gettin' low – better go pinch some more!

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The last few WI State Fairs have had a booth that sells insect food. I haven't tried it.

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I mean, insects are arthropods like crabs and lobsters are, just smaller.

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You first

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This is also a variation on their belief conservativism itself can never be wrong or fail -- it must be liberal mind control or the media or the juggernaut of the "decadent" dominant culture.

You can see this most recently in their reaction to liberal victories in Wisconsin and Chicago. It is apparent to anyone paying attention that restricting abortion access is a huge loser for conservatives almost everywhere and their transgender bullying is getting almost no traction either. But will they abandon these policies? Hell to the no. Time to double and triple down, and scream their message even louder, obviously people simply haven't heard their very good arguments yet.

I mean, look at the latest legislation in Kansas, where Republicans will require a genital inspection before kids can play sports: “If your daughter wants to play girls’ lacrosse, she’s first going to have to pull her panties down and let us take a look.” And they will be totally surprised when they learn that strangely enough, most parents do not like this idea.

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it'll be okay with those parents once they learn that it's the local pastor doing the inspecting.

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On the bright side, it will be nice for the pastor to get paid for what had previously been only a hobby ( I'll show myself out...)

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Matt Gaetz wasn't available?

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And Jim Jordan only likes looking at older boys.

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Ah, but can you be SURE they're boys? Better have a look, Jim!

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"strangely enough, most parents do not like this idea."

Maybe the idea is to separate out the true believers who will let you do anything with their kids from the normies? There will be fewer, but better Republicans.

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Hearted albeit repulsefully.

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tell me more about these 'new jacks', and I may subscribe to your newsletter.

like you, I did notice this bug eating mania sweeping the fringe right wing news a while back, and like you, dismissed it as the moment's idiocy. please nobody tell them about the allowable amount of insect debris in our various food products.

just another example of throwing shit against the wall to see what sticks. who could possibly keep track, or want to, of all that? it's enough that some outrage-deficient shut in somewhere will send this month's welfare check to the requisite address. mission accomplished!

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Or the cochineal insect food dye that's pretty ubiquitous...

At least beaver anal scent glands used in flavoring is from a mammal...

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Yeah, but even Queens Man is a mammal, so not certain that's a valid endorsement.

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Ah yes, Miscellaneous Insect Parts.

The FDA directives are good reading, if not good eating.

Also, don't know how y'all feel about the political slant of CNN, but at least they fight the fight, eg: "Shocking "filth" legally allowed in your food" is a quote I found in a link when I looked up MIPs.

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Been a while since I looked at the FDA regs, but aren't rat feces permitted in small amounts?

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"mammal feces" generally, yes.

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"Dilution is the solution for pollution" doesn't just work for Lake Superior.

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(See also, Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal.)

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See also: 1970s George Carlin

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You think that's bad, Michelle Obama tried to force us to eat vegetables!

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Okra!!!

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I like okra: just not the way my mom cooked it..

I've had a bhindi in an Indian restaurant that was thinly sliced, batter fried, and topped with a biranyi sauce....heavenly.

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Nothing withstands the charm of biryani.

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I got addicted to the fried okra from Church's when I was in South Carolina.

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(My Black Card was pulled years ago as I like neither okra nor watermelon.)

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As a non-Southerner living in the South, I am constrained to point out that frying is the ONLY acceptable way to prepare okra. Every ofher method leads only to sorrow and recrimination.

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Gumbo, is a soup/stew thickened with okra (and roux. of course).

Try it , you'll like it.

I even will eat stewed okra and tomatoes...

Mom dredged okra in cornmeal, and then pan fried in, preferentially in bacon grease.

Sometimes she'd add slice potato, like Granny did.

It is not a fond memory....

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Did your mom have a big bowl of boiled potatoes in the fridge, ready for slicin' right into the bacon fat? Saves time if you don't start at raw.

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No: that sounds sensible, but maybe you got the okra cooked to her preferred doneness with raw potato. She liked the okra with a crunch. As ours was a "clean your plate" house, I had to eat it. Had to be an adult to try okra cooked better.

And it's grown on me.

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1. I love gumbo. (I eat everything; it has been said of me that the list of foods I won’t eat is the world’s shortest list.) 2. (s)Notwithstanding the above, I was trying to avoid referencing okra and its tendency to create byproducts resembling phlegm.

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My wife's grandmother, who was from Kentucky, boiled all her vegetables, including okra.

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STOP STOP STOP IT NOOOOOOO

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Here's a horror story for you: when my wife was young and her grandma was living with her and her parents, grandma would out a pot of green beans on the stove on low heat before they went to church on Sunday. So, the beans cooked the whole time they were gone.

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“Cooked” is doin’ some really heavy lifting here

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I think Campbell's vegetable soup has, or used to have, okra in it, and I always kind of liked it. Never had it otherwise.

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That's not all, I believe exercise was involved too! [cue photo of box of eyeglasses from Auschwitz]

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The New World Order wants their slaves fit and trim!

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But not *too* fit and trim. What if they start fighting back?

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I too fall prey to the suggestive prose of those 'eat yer beetles!' articles.

I mean, I can just feel the crunchy leg parts snappin' and getting stuck 'tween my teeth (or, like US Tobacco, "between my cheek and gum"), the gooey innards oozing toward my throat, and the little eyeballs popping one after the other (or in the case of flies, after the other, after the other, after the other...)

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Mmmm . . . Fly eyes . . . Foamy!

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"How can ye have any puddin' if you won't eat yer beetles?"

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Wingers have a compulsive need to be victims of us dastardly liberals, who are always trying to make them do something or other.

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One of my fellow students in UCLA graduate school was an Episcopalian minister named Gary Hall--who just happened to be Huntz Hall's son!

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Did you ask him about his old man?

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Yes, although he didn't say much other than to say he was a great guy. Incidentally, when I was in college, I worked at the college radio station, and at the end of every semester we did a parody newscast. The college had a building called Hunt Hall, and we did a story about how they were going to remodel it and change the name to Leo Gorcey. Good times.

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I remember reading about 'cricket-flour' becoming a Thing about 8 or 10 years ago. Still haven't even seen it outside of clickbait web articles.

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Beyonce is a goddess.

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What do those clowns think crayfish are? 😀

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Mudbugs!

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C'mon...everybody knows they're crawdads!

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I typed CRAW and the spell check put CRAY. Haha sorry

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Fret not. Happens to the beast of us.

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"Goddamn librul spell-check and its elitist spelling! You're not the boss o' me!"

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“Craydads”?!! WTF

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A Jewish friend's Yddishe baba called them "seppulpukah" (sp?), which he said meant "crawly shit"..

Mudbugs ain't kosher, either...

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Another one that was news to me was the outrage over the 15-minute city concept. To wingnuts, this was yet another liberal conspiracy to take away their cars, homes, and personal autonomy and cram real Americans into vegan ghettos with mandatory race-mixing on public thoroughfares and forced "urban" diversity. What's weird is that the entire anodyne 15-minute concept is about as close as you can get to plonking an all-American small town into a dense environment comprised of a bunch of similar small towns. (The outrage is particularly nuts from people who live in sterile engineered environments called something like "The Villages.")

Fits the pattern at any rate.

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That's a good one.

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They often characterize this as "the war on the suburbs" -- as if it could only *be* the suburbs if you couldn't get anywhere on foot. https://curepolicy.org/the-left-wing-war-on-americas-suburbs/

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OK, I know it's not fair to pick on typos, but "We see people fleeing people our cities today..." is pretty damn funny. "People, people fleeing people, are the luckiest people in the world..."

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My mom hated that song because she had an aversion to "p". I am not making this up.

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So ppppppoppppping ppppppeeee’s was real aggro?

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Well, when SHE did it it was OK...when WE pointed out what she was doing we soon knew better...

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“Nobody lives there anymore. It’s too crowded.”

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Everyone left California because housing was too expensive.

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I miss Yogi Berra…

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My favorite Yogi moment was getting the 1984 Sports Illustrated Baseball Preview issue with him on the cover. The Header was "Yogi's Back!". The photo was taken from behind him...

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Well, seein's how the suburbs literally attacked the cities - via massive demolition explosives, heavy machinery, concrete by the acre-foot, and freeways – looks to me like the suburbs won that war long ago, and we're only waging a spider monkey (not even a gorilla) campaign to slowly claw back a few relatively liveable sites...

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Guess who? “The streets are filthy, they’re covered with people basically lying, on drugs. They can’t even stand up. They’re falling over. There’s so much crime in the city. I can’t comprehend how people live there.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/apr/06/marjorie-taylor-greene-new-york-city-disgusting-filthy-repulsive

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Shall we respond with a few comments about the gret stet o'Georgia?

Never mind...

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The funny thing is no liberal member of Congress would bother to say a word about Green's constituents, except maybe to note a lack of indoor plumbing as a reason to increase funding for rural sewer systems in the next infrastructure bill. Democrats come to Congress to work, so they tend to focus their thoughts on that. With Green it'a all smack-talk and no work so she's free to opine on anything that pops into her field of vision.

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Yeah man, that struck me too. Just really love the picture Green accidentally put in my head: Adam Schiff visiting her district and then telling the press, "Woo, it smelled like pigshit, everyone's allllll FUCKED UP, I saw crimes!"

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From what I gather, this is my sister talking about downtown Rochester, which is why she lives out in the rural sectors where it's a 15 minute drive to the grocery. Meanwhile I'm looking tomorrow morning at an apartment in Neighborhood of the Arts, where shit can be walked to and there's a British-style pub I've been meaning to check out.

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Report back from the pub.

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Ah, the suburbs, where every housing development is nothing but cul de sacs and dead end streets and "courts" (full disclosure: I live on a court at the end of a "private road." Yes, I Am Fancy), so forget about finding your way out.

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And they rail about the tyranny of taxes and zoning ordinances but accept the myriad covenants and assessments of their PUD homeowners association.

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Something something freely-entered-into contract, "You don't have to live here if you don't want to" even though the same could be said of San Francisco.

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Well sure, but their point is not only would they never think of living there (even tho that's where the money is and their youngs at least know it), more pointedly they are certain that their hard-earned workin' man's tax dollars are the moneys that went there.

Doubly enrageifying.

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It's the same thing as "they're indoctrinating our kids" by introducing them to radical concepts like history and science. Meanwhile, they try indoctrinating their own kids with churches and religious schools, and can't quite understand why those kids end up becoming atheists.

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Worked for me!

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Like their omnipotent god, right wingers’ red blooded men are surprisingly weak and in need of help defending themselves from enemies, real and imaginary.

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It must be hard for courageous patriots like them to be afraid all day, every day.

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The fear is real, because your more liberal free-thinkin' sorts have a pretty impressive track record of taking stuff from the counterculture into the mainstream, spawning multibillion dollar industries in the process. Just look back at those hippie signifiers blue jeans, organic foods and solar energy. Or, for another example, yogurt, once something you'd make at home or buy in your local food cooperative, now sold in plastic tubes for kids to suck on (pack it full of high-fructose corn syrup and artificial colors and flavors and Americans will eat ANYTHING.)

BTW, one of my mom's favorite comedy routines back in the day (think it may have been Bob Newhart?) was about the first man to eat an egg: "You ate WHAT? From WHERE?"

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"(pack it full of high-fructose corn syrup and artificial colors and flavors and Americans will eat ANYTHING.)"

As long as it's packaged in non-recyclable containers.

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Well, I guess we've solved the bug eating problem. Right co-ingredients, right packaging. It'll be at McDonald's next week. We libs are almost as smart as they think we are.

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Right, we've got our pick of woke corporations to choose from as partners in our eeeevil scheme. Disney-branded, served at McDonalds.

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1.5 marks. Woulda been 2 but you pronounced eeVILLE (like Coupe DeeVILLE) incorrectly.

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