With California under mandatory masking, it’s hard to tell what kind of mood people are in when you’re in public. So here’s some cheerful cheesecake.

Mildly Related Anime

I want to see an inverted harem comedy where each of the girls gives up and finds a guy who’s into her and willing to commit to a real relationship, leaving Our Hero progressively more alone until in the final episode, he ends up the Best Man at their mass wedding. Call it Shoumi Kigen! (賞味期限, “sell-by date”). The beach/hot-springs episode would come at the beginning.

Unrelated, Singin’ “Bye, bye, canceled Eskimo Pie”

I don’t know that I’ve ever seen the “Eskimo Pie” brand of ice cream sandwich in a store, but now I never will. Honestly, I can’t see them introducing a replacement product at all; you can’t keep brand loyalty if you don’t keep the brand. Without the name, logo, or mascot, they’d just be another new product in a crowded market. I nominate “Effrontery Bar” as the new name, with an angry middle-class white woman as mascot.

Still Unrelated, Dear Delonghi,

Hire a proofreader for your next small-appliance manual:

Back to the cheesecake…

more...

Mustard is cut

Spoiler alert! If you were wondering what a hot MILF like Honey sees in the ancient master Mustard, you find out when you fight him for the first time.

(quick take: the DLC doesn’t add a whole lot to the game except more raids and more mons, and you can pretty much faceroll through the brief story; there’s no standout feature, and the difficulty scales exactly like the original Wild Area, with only a few things gated by your progress in the main story; pretty typical DLC, in other words)

Scooter Science!

Researchers paid by Lime say using Lime is safer than using Lime’s competitors. Well, higher chance of escaping Corona-chan, perhaps, but lower chance of escaping riots. Or carrying packages. Or staying out of the weather. Or travelling non-trivial distances.

Mask Harder, Peasant!

CA governor Benito Newsom has issued a new statewide wear-the-fucking-mask order, to make your hot summer-y days as unpleasant as possible. I continue to be glad that it’s generally 10-15 degrees cooler at my house than up in Silicon Valley.

Unintended consequences?

If they keep canceling all the brand-spokespersons-of-color, doesn’t that mean that soon the only faces you’ll see on boxes will be white? Certainly no corporation is going to take the risk of creating new brand mascots that incorporate appropriate any identifiable “ethnic” features, for fear of being canceled when the ground shifts again.

Also Uncle Ben and Mrs. Butterworth. I imagine the last to go will be Colonel Sanders, Chef Boyardee, and the Quaker Oats guy, so I guess white privilege is good for something after all.

(never mind that both Sanders and Boyardee (Boiardi) were real people who really founded the brands that use their name and likeness; facts don’t matter to angry mobs or their appeasers)

Disclaimer: my great-great-great-great-grandmother was named Jemima. Probably not in the syrup business, though.

Update via Insty

Update

Cream Of Wheat guy to be canceled for not staying in his lane. Someone’s probably upset that he’s happy and dressed like a successful professional.

Janky Panki

At the temporary low price (it’s back to $9.99 when I look on Amazon, logged in or not), I read The Pursuit of the Pankera, the abandoned draft of The Number of the Beast resurrected as a posthumous Heinlein novel. It was not a waste of my time, but it gradually fell apart until it ended in abruptly disconnected scenes. I was correct to wait for the price drop; half of it is a novel I’ve already read, and the other half is Heinlein writing fanfic.

Corona-chan by the numbers

According to the CDC (preliminary numbers), from February 1 to June 6, 1,091,256 people died in the US, 95,608 of them from COVID-19. 81% of COVID-19 deaths were age 65 or older, compared to 75% of all deaths. Deaths from any combination of pneumonia, flu, and/or COVID-19 added up to 166,265, of which 80% were age 65 or older.

Somewhat Related

I assert that the only reason to pursue Stacy’s Mom is for the chance to become Stacy’s Daddy. This is related to COVID-19 statistics for the sad reason that one of the songwriters died of it.

Unrelated assertion

According To Experts, the risk of spreading COVID-19 in a public gathering is inversely proportional to the risk of spreading FAHRENHEIT-451.

Related to Unrelated assertion

The “anti” in Antifa is precisely equivalent to the “in” in Inflammable. Ditto “anti-racist”.

Good Eats Reloaded

It’s probably for the best that the chocolate éclair and pastry cream episode didn’t air earlier in lockdown season.

Completely Unrelated To Anything Else

I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that Nanami Sena’s swimsuit is not available at JC Penney:

NSFW

Ice? Ice, baby!

The ice-maker in my Samsung fridge is, well, frozen. I can’t tell for sure because I can’t get it open, and while it was willing to dispense some ice, the stuff that’s jamming it shut is apparently out of range of the corkscrew.

So I need to go buy a bunch of ice, unpack the fridge and freezer, and unplug the silly thing until the offending chunks melt. I have the cooler capacity to do this; I just don’t want to.

I was going to do something with a theme today, but then the software update on my Synology NAS failed, a reboot got stuck at a blinking blue light for more than 20 minutes, and I feared it would need major surgery. A hard power-cycle didn’t produce any change, so I was prepping to follow the “blinking blue light of death” FAQ (which involves pulling all the drives, reinstalling onto a scratch drive, then reinserting all but one disk of the first volume and doing a repair), when it suddenly came back to life. The only thing I’d changed was disconnecting the USB cable leading to the UPS, so I’m guessing there was some disagreement between the two.

Glass TTYs Hardest Hit

The Lurn2Codh Police are busily extracting all “offensive” terminology from computing: male/female, master/slave, blacklist/whitelist, peek/poke, parent/child, fork/exec, kill/killall, dump/restore, finger/man, nice/renice, strip/tail, true/false, zip/unzip, etc, etc. This isn’t new so much as it is becoming more visible as part of signaling to the mob that you don’t want to get burned, metaphorically or literally. I find it completely hilarious that GitHub is going so far as to rename the default branch in software projects from “master” to something not-currently-protested like “main”.

Of course, promoting one branch over another is inherently problematic; all branches are equally important.

more...

On Friday, Monterey County approved the partial reopening of additional classes of business, including campgrounds, gyms, hotels, card rooms, racetracks, bars, wineries, zoos, and museums. So we’ve got that going for us.

In theory, the local mall has been open for a week, but most stores inside it were still closed until today, when it looks like about 2/3 of them will be back in business, including about 4/5 of the food court resturants and snack vendors. The closures aren’t simply by category, so this may reflect how well they were able to survive being shut down; Cold Stone Creamery is open but Dairy Queen is not, Auntie Anne’s is open but Wetzel’s Pretzels is not, etc. Sears is closed, but they effectively went out of business years ago, so they don’t count.

It is strongly “suggested” that you socially-distance your cars, carefully choose which entrance you park near based on the stores you plan to visit, and participate in all ritual activities. Or their security teams will violate your social distance and forcibly eject you.

Sad thing is, I had very little reason to visit that mall before Corona-chan came to town, and the only reason I can think of for going there now is maybe to take a walk someplace other than down the aisles of a grocery store.

Now that you’ve come to your senses, I will buy your book.

When I went to replace my cheap-but-sturdy Okabashi sandals, I was under the impression that they were typical foreign-made discount crap that I just happened to have found two decent pairs of (8-10 years of heavy use, and only one strap out of the four has broken). The fact that I found them heavily marked down at the end of the summer season at a drug store contributed to this impression.

Um, no. The Japanese-derived name was chosen by founder Bahman Irvani when his family fled from Iran to Buford, Georgia in 1981, based on his interest in reflexology and Japanese design. They’re a 100%-made-in-USA footwear company with decades of community involvement and military support.

And they’ll give you a discount if you send back your old ones for recycling.

Their site gives no hint as to which “oka” and “hashi” they used to form their name. It could be “hill bridge” 岡橋, which is a surname pronounced either Okahashi or Okabashi, but all the companies I found in Japan with those kanji use Okahashi. It could be “land + end” 陸端, a kanji compound that seems to be primarily used in China. It’s unlikely to be “hill + top” 岡端, because that compound gets read as Okahata or Okahana instead of the valid “hashi” reading. Pretty sure it isn’t “male-deer + chopsticks” 雄鹿箸. Highly unlikely to be related to okabasho, “unlicensed red-light district” 岡場所.

Given the reflexology connection, I’m guessing it came from a foot chart. Specialized jargon often gets excluded from dictionaries. Although “Land’s End” has a nice ring to it…

“They all look alike” never goes over well

The bar employee who previously insisted that George Floyd had a history with the cop charged with killing him now claims that he mistook Floyd for another black employee. Oopsie.

“You can have the English language…”

“​…when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.”

I need a style checker that replaces phrases like “subconscious bias” with “accuracy and precision”.

My reflexive reaction

The Economist: Our model says Biden will beat Trump.

J: Really? What does your actress say?