Notices by M.S. Bellows, Jr. (msbellows@c.im)

@steter @ai6yr @david Do tell.

@bud_t @ai6yr @steter @david Wait til those kids learn about the Buena Vista Cafe in San Francisco.

@steter @ai6yr @david And every single one of them grew up to be an assferret.

@ai6yr @steter @david It's okay: you don't need to censor the word "assferrets" because they're actually a lab-created cross between a donkey and a close relative of the weasel.

@ai6yr @steter @david Darn you! Darn you to Heck!

@david @ai6yr reminds me of the time decades ago when I was at an auto upholstery place near Beverly Hills getting something minor done to my car and noticed a brand new, top of the line, totally tricked out Range Rover parked in front. Asked the guy why a brand new car would need upholstery. Him: a specific musician had it driven directly from the dealer to the upholstery shop to have all the leather upholstery replaced with a different color he liked better.

This answers the question, "Did hip hop artists back in the day have money to burn?"

@Weirdaholic @alice Monopoly players each start with $1,500. If they play the game according to its capitalistic rules, one becomes rich, the rest lose everything, and the bank still is wealthier than any of them.

But if the players decide to ignore capitalism, they could just split all the money that came with the monopoly set: $20,580. If there are four players, that's over $5,000 each, or more than three times what they start with – plus countless houses and hotels.

Doesn't it make more sense to tell capitalism to fuck itself, divide all the wealth equitably, and then, I don't know, go play Jenga or something? #DemSoc

@steter @Kierkegaanks Don't need a cell phone. https://spydrill.com/button-camera/

@Kierkegaanks I hate you a little.

Well, darn. We had scheduled junk guys to come take away the ancient upright grand piano by an excellent maker that no one ever learned to play and that has been living in our garage for the past 15 years, but my wife spontaneously called a piano tuner to check it out first and he came yesterday and said it's actually a very good piano in fine condition and doesn't need much work and he will come back and clean it and adjust it and even replace some broken ivories and tune it, all for $180.

And my wife says I need to learn the piano because it will be good for me. (Our daughters refer to things like this as "parent enrichment activity," as if we were housebound pets who need stimulation and exercise.) So I guess we need to figure out where in the house we can put an upright grand piano, which is not exactly small, and then I need to learn to play piano.

@ComicContext

@shoq What's the beef? Comey was merely saying that Trump should escape criminal liability altogether!

"Klein's book The History and Stories of the Best Bars of New York claims that, during Prohibition, the [NY] police would call [Chumley's] bar before making a raid and tell the bartender to '86' his customers. This meant that they should exit out the 86 Bedford Street door, while the police would come to the Pamela Court entrance." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/86_(term)

@acdw @Szescstopni @darth_hideout @noondlyt @MissConstrue @ai6yr You're all out of date. There's only one reindeer left.

@cstross
Them: "American conservativism is a legitimate political movement advancing sincerely-held, patriotic American ideals and is not at all a front for pro-Russian foreign operatives trying to destabilize our country."

News story: "The [former, pro-Putin] Hungarian government has been bankrolling the Conservative Political Action Conference for years."

@benroyce One of the things I like best about democracy's victory in Hungary is that it provides an irrefutable argument against those who claim "voting doesn't matter" and "voting can't change totalitarian regimes." Of *course* voting matters! Orban is gone! Everyone needs to vote, every time! (And we can still protest, throw sabots, etc. It's not either/or.)

I had a small hole in a pair of tan jeans and our wonderful adult kid @thewoodbinewitch offered to visibly mend them and this is what they did in about ten minutes and my mind is blown that Lyricdancer and I somehow created this talented generous human. Wow. How? Wow. Isn't it creative and beautiful?

The first American to summit Qomolangma (Mt. Everest), Jim Whittaker, passed away this week at the age of 97. He also was the first full-time employee of REI, later its president, and founded Rainier Mountaineering. I had the honor of meeting him several years ago. From everything I can tell, he was a good man. RIP.

My younger daughter just called me from Portugal and announced that she's engaged!!!

They're vacationing with friends, they were in a beautiful old building looking out over a beautiful valley, and Amelia thought, "this would be a perfect place to ask him to marry me," and then, "hey, I could ask him to marry me!" And so she did, and he said yes. (He was planning on asking her fairly soon, but she was unemployed for quite a while and economically reliant on him and he wanted to wait until she was completely stable so her answer would be unbiased. But she beat him to it!)

He's a fine young man and this is a very happy day.

@StefanThinks Good for you! If you ever want a new one, I can recommend the fedoras made by my friend John Penman. Literally and objectively the best in the world.
http://www.penmanhats.com/

@headlines_bot @steter
Jesus, humans are terrible sometimes. "[Actress Kim] Novak and [singer Sammy] Davis first met in 1956 and their romance quietly developed over the following year. Davis regularly visited Novak on the set of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, and the two spent Thanksgiving and Christmas together. But in 1958, their relationship was outed by a gossip columnist, sparking worries at Columbia Pictures that a public backlash against their star Novak for being in an interracial relationship would hurt the studio.

"Novak publicly denied she and Davis were in a relationship, but the Columbia boss, Harry Cohn, hired crime figures to threaten to blind Davis or break his legs unless he married a black woman within 48 hours; just nine days later, Davis married a black woman, the dancer Loray White. The pair never lived together and commenced divorce proceedings nine months later."