In no particular order as I feel all would perform equally well at the task, while also being superior to the person who actually, regrettably, holds the title:
a bowling ball
a toilet plunger
a smooth, round rock
a 25 year old Twinkie
a piece of lint
This is actually a trick list because it could include every inanimate object in existence, including those from other dimensions.
I don’t know why I picked today to take a vague potshot at the worst modern U.S. president (and, I would argue, the least qualified president ever). Perhaps The Rains have made me cranky.
Not even halfway through September, with it still officially summer and me still dressed in shorts, Safeway begans selling eggnog.
Save On Foods had already started selling pumpkins before that, and every place that has a “pumpkin spice” drink like Tim Hortons and Starbucks rolled them out to officially start this year’s blurring together of all holidays.
It has happened slightly earlier this year compared to previous years, so retailers are still testing how far they can push this nonsense. I predict we’ll have August eggnog within a few years.
I kind of hate everything right now because of this.
Bah humbug, you might say.
(By the way, if this all sounds familiar, it’s because I wrote a similar rant last year, when eggnog appeared in October. How we have progressed!)
This is the President of the United States. You know, the person more than 62 million people voted for. The bar for acceptable, respectable behavior by a president is now so low it is below ground. It will be generations before the presidency recovers from this thin-skinned, dull-witted infantile blowhard, if it ever recovers at all. I’m not sure it will.
And good job, too, to the Republicans who will stand by and say nothing–or even defend him–as they go about their work of dismantling the United States to better serve the rich few at the top.
I used to think this lazy, ignorant man might resign because the presidency is hard work. I never imagined he’d just not do the work (and what little he actually does is borderline incompetent most of the time. The rest of the time it’s just plain incompetent).
It is difficult to summarize all the stupid, awful things Trump has done since taking office since there are so many stupid, awful things to catalog–and it’s barely been over four months since he was sworn in (I’ve been swearing the last four months, too).
The good news is that he still hasn’t blown up the world. Yet.
As of today, his Gallup disapproval rating is 53%. That’s actually below peak disapproval of 59%. Bafflingly, 41% approve. This number astonishes me. It means that, on average, four out of every ten Americans will tell you that they approve of the job Trump is doing.
This is the same Trump who has been a reckless, racist, blithering, embarrassing, narcissistic disaster of a president. He has bumbled more in four months than the worst presidents could manage over eight years. He makes dumb little kids seem smart.
It has some history on the origins of this dubious “holiday” but rightly focuses on how dumb and annoying it is. It’s basically a day to be a mean liar like Donald Trump or that guy who tells a joke that everyone politely laughs at in an obligatory way.
A lot of internet sites and companies that take part seem to be going through the motions now so maybe it is finally starting to die out. Blizzard is phoning it in through lazy fake patch notes, Google has recycled a Pac-Man gag in their maps. Here’s hoping the time and effort invested in these fitfully amusing stunts are put into something more useful, like providing hair brushes for cats.
This Gallup poll shows Trump’s approval rating now stands at 36%. This is a little over 60 days into his term as president. You know, when the president is normally still popular, having just been elected.
Trump’s current 36% is two percentage points below Barack Obama’s low point of 38%, recorded in 2011 and 2014. Trump has also edged below Bill Clinton’s all-time low of 37%, recorded in the summer of 1993, his first year in office, as well as Gerald Ford’s 37% low point in January and March 1975. John F. Kennedy’s lowest approval rating was 56%; Dwight Eisenhower’s was 48%.
But good news! It can get worse, as these past presidents have demonstrated:
Presidents George W. Bush (lowest approval rating: 25%), George H.W. Bush (29%), Ronald Reagan (35%), Jimmy Carter (28%), Richard Nixon (24%), Lyndon Johnson (35%) and Harry Truman (22%) all had job approval ratings lower than 36% at least once during their administrations.
Mind you, these presidents actually had to do stuff to earn those low approval ratings. Trump is just naturally gifted.
The latest polling came after the Republicans pulled their American Health Care Act from a vote in the House. These are the same Republicans that railed against the Affordable Care Act (ACA, or Obamacare as many called it) for seven years, vowing to repeal it and replace it with something better. Finally, with control of all three branches of government–the House of Representatives, the Senate and the Presidency–they couldn’t do it.
Trump blamed the Democrats for not voting for a terrible plan. The Tea Party (“Freedom caucus”) want to burn down the country and were opposed to the AHCA because it didn’t have enough burning. Enough of the few sane Republicans balked that they realized it was unlikely to pass, so it got pulled. Trump also blamed the Tea Party contingent. He did not blame his own foolish brinkmanship (demanding a vote on a Friday before they had enough votes). He figured he could boss his party around and found out he couldn’t.
Because he is an untalented idiot.
Because he has more ego than sense.
Because his father handed him a fortune and he only excels in spending it poorly and having businesses go bankrupt, showing all the savvy of a damp towel.
And yet I still come back to 62 million Americans voted for him. And the average Republican still loves him, even as his first two months has been a string of disasters and embarrassments.
Because, apparently, 62 million Americans really like having an untalented idiot in the White House. One of their own, perhaps.
I subscribed to a Pinterest newsletter until it started regularly including content that I was not only not interested in, but found unwelcome. This happened despite specifically indicating what my interests were. Somehow I still ended up getting loads on “pinterests” featuring topless tattooed women on motorcycles. I mean, if you like that, great. But I don’t and Pinterest really, really thought I did.
I subscribed to a Medium daily digest and the first one I got was an unusually rich trove of interesting topics and info. This proved to be a fluke as it subsequent digests were nothing but self-referential articles about getting more people to read your posts on Medium mixed in with right-wing screeds or poorly-written and unoriginal stories. I’m perfectly fine with being unoriginal, provided the spin provided is interesting or well-constructed. Instead, I find articles where the rules of English have been tossed aside in favor of a weird quasi-informal tone that reads like something halfway between a Facebook post and a text message.
I unsubscribed to the Medium digest.
The Pocket digests still arrive every few days but I find I’m looking at the stories less, in part because some of the digests are thinly-disguised collections of links to support the inevitable “sponsored” story (which is really just an ad) and also because the political stories are almost uniformly depressing these days and much of the rest of the news is the same as well. It feels like hope has been crushed down in favor of the rich and stupid being allowed to shape our inevitably dismal future.
Mostly I wonder if it will ever be possible to filter this kind of stuff so it shows things I find genuinely interesting, while at the same time avoiding the creation of an echo chamber where I only get news or exposure to ideas I already accept. I keep at open mind and I’m always willing to listen (within reason). I imagine a world where I didn’t have a Facebook finger. The Facebook finger is represented by the ‘swipe down’ gesture used by my index finger as I go through the Facebook news feed, vainly hoping for something that isn’t a regurgitated meme, insipid “like and share of you agree” bit of inspiration or an allegedly cool thing/video someone (along with thousands of others) found.
But I don’t think it will ever be possible, at least not until the far future (if we as a species make it), so for now, the only way to filter is to do it manually and suffer the memes, the self-indulgent nonsense and the “you’ll find this interesting!” stuff that is actually the opposite of what you’re looking for.
Here’s an incomplete list of things that sucked in January 2017:
snow on New Year’s Eve that added to existing snow and has persisted through the entire month on the trails where I run, making jogging possible only if I include slipping, falling and fracturing bones
the mailbox in the building got broken into (on a Sunday when there’s the least amount of mail to steal) and it’s been out of commission for real mail (they’re still delivering junk mail, yay) for a few weeks, with replacement locks that may not be installed until as late as mid-February
I only lost 1.7 pounds. Better than gaining but still a bit disappointing
everything Donald Trump did in his first 11 days in office. After only eight days he had a negative approval rating and has lived up to every sensible person’s worst fears. A thoroughly awful person and a terrible, awful president. Shame on everyone who cast a vote for this vile excuse for a man
Donald Trump officially became the 45th President of the United States today. Sad!
He and his cronies are already busy undoing every positive thing Obama accomplished. They’ll probably keep on with the bad stuff, though (drone killings, chasing after whistleblowers, etc.)
I can’t conceive of a scenario in which the next four years won’t be terrible. I have said it before but I am still utterly astonished that 60 million people voted for someone so obviously unfit for the role. I’d say America deserves what it gets but everyone in the rest of the world will have to suffer, too, and that sucks.
My best hope remains with him (and Pence and well, every Republican) being kidnapped by Bigfoot. I suppose it would require a Bigfoot army. If I can get one thing for Christmas, then, it would be a Bigfoot army. Come on Santa, make it happen.
In three days Donald Trump will be inaugurated as President of the United States.
It sounds like the start of a terrible alternate universe novel and yet here we are with reality saying otherwise.
As much as I think he will be a terrible president–he is a terrible person and wholly unsuited for the role 60 million American idiots voted him into–his choice of Vice President is vile in its own way so even fantasy scenarios of Trump not completing his term (gets bored, impeached, kidnapped by Bigfoot, etc.) are unsatisfying, knowing that things would still be bad, just a different kind of bad.
Mostly I just can’t believe so many people voted for him. I used to be fairly cynical when I was younger but as I matured (or at least got older) I mellowed and began to look at my fellow human beings as at least decent and reasonably intelligent types.
But over 60 million voted for Trump. It’s not just mindboggling, it is, to me, literally beyond comprehension. I’ve read a lot of the reasons he got crucial votes in the so-called rust belt that enabled his electoral college victory (there is some solace in that he did lose the popular vote by about 2.8 million) but none of the reasons can compare to the nigh-endless list of why he is completely unfit to be president. Nigh-endless, I say! It’s depressing.
Anyway, here’s hoping the media relentlessly savages him as he deserves. He’s so thin-skinned and petty that maybe he will resign in frustration after all the means things people say about him.
I’ve never been more willing to believe that I’m just having a long, fantastically elaborate (and horrible) dream than I have this past month.
On the one hand I am (morbidly) curious to see what happens. On the other, I expect nothing less than complete disaster, which dampens the curiosity by a factor of about a billion.
It’s like the entire world is getting a lump of coal for Christmas. And I’ve been good this year! Mostly!
The best thing about November was the day it hit 18ºC thanks to the Pineapple Express. I was not expecting t-shirt weather this month.
I also resumed running, so that was good.
Almost everything else sucked, to various degrees. I’m not even going to attempt a list, it would just be sad and depressing. Instead, I will blow a loud raspberry at November 2016 and hope that December is better.
