It’s really weird how this map shows US 91 just sort of ending in the desert, when wikipedia documents that it went all the way down to Long Beach. This just came to my attention because as this map is constructed, there was no direct federal route between LA and Vegas, which is again like really weird
There was a big renumbering of highway routes in California in 1964 to deal with the way that a history of road construction by multiple authorities left absurd disjunctions and redundancies between named, numbered, and natural through-routes.
It’s really weird how this map shows US 91 just sort of ending in the desert, when wikipedia documents that it went all the way down to Long Beach. This just came to my attention because as this map is constructed, there was no direct federal route between LA and Vegas, which is again like really weird
There was a big renumbering of highway routes in California in 1964 to deal with the way that a history of road construction by multiple authorities left absurd disjunctions and redundancies between named, numbered, and natural through-routes.
oh another thing that’s worth pointing out. all those red-triangle campgrounds along the coast? the coast in that area is like a tiny sliver between the ocean and the mountains, those were areas that were owned by early land barons who raised food there when California was undeveloped and the imperial trade outpost of San Francisco had to be fed by coastal shipping or the Sacramento Delta
later on when they developed inland transportation the barons ended up giving those lands (now useless, because they’ve got terrible overland access) to the state as part of a deal to blow off a ga-huge tax bill
when I rode Blue Bitch up the PCH you’d see these campgrounds and recreation areas clustered in packs around old watering holes in areas that seemed mostly based on the tourist traffic up the coast
maintained at the request, I assume, of the lobby for people who actually live like those car ads
Oh my lord this is interesting. It starts out like you’d expect - more PC generation wars, this time in a punk context, and then you visit the callout/boycott site they mention, @boycott924gilmanstreet, and even when you read the callout post it starts out like you expect like
- this place books bands with lyrics that valorize rape culture and don’t support our mission of providing a safer space
- and they didn’t really care about bathrooms and trans-frendliness
and then it takes a jag and for a while it’s like
- AND THOSE FUCKERS BOOKED GREEN DAY, THE MAJOR LABEL SELLOUTS!
and fucking record scratch and that is ~*~AMAZING~*~
also, also, “forced fingerbanging”. That’s this amazing wreck of a phrase that’s a synecdoche of this whole generation gap, the “forced” starting out in the modern harm/consent idiom but then realizing midair that no one’s going to go for what, the clinico-punitive “digital penetration”? and they’ll have to use the earthy Dirt Punk “fingerbang”
This is dumb as hell, but hey, it’s kontextmaschinebait. This bit though:
So should we start interpreting “Bad Blood” in a whole new light? Hearing “You Belong With Me” as a secret conversion anthem?
The Tayswift alt-right anthem is Change, for fuck’s sake.
the real significance of this is that “buzzword X + buzzword Y, bang them together and write around” is the classic aggregation strategy, and “Taylor Swift” has ranked a slot for a while now and this is “alt-right” just now debuting as eligible
Anonymous asked: You, uh, know that the vast majority of Taylor Swift's songs aren't written by her, especially her most popular ones right? And that a lot of the stuff you've been gushing on her about is only half or quarter or not at all decided by her? Of course pretty much all celebrities are like this, but still. I'm the best friend of somebody who pretty close to the inner workings of her team, and from everything I've seen she's very smart sure, but nowhere near where you seem to think she is
I hear she’s single again, you think your friend could set us up?
There is a Pope in the Cars universe. This means that there is Catholic Christianity, which means there was a Jesus car who was crucified. Jesus Chrysler was crucified by car Romans under Pontiac Pilot who washed his wheels. A car was nailed to a cross and ascended to Heaven.
I wonder exactly which day it was that the amount of time Comedy Central had spent broadcasting The Daily Show finally caught up to the amount of time they had spent broadcasting PCU
This was supposed to be a culture war joke, in fairness on further reflection I was like “yeah but maybe put all the hours of South Park, Tosh.0, and The Man Show on the PCU side too.” Maybe the Kilborn years, even.
Okay, for the benefit of all the followers I’m getting with absurd ages in their profiles, let me explain this one.
When Comedy Central started in the ‘90s, they didn’t have much original programming, and what they did was mostly one-off (but frequently rerun) specials - filmed standup sets, basically.
So what they ran was mostly secondhand content they’d picked up rights to, and what was most common were these two movies, I swear to god I’d seen them run back to back and then over again, I’m pretty sure I’ve seen the same one run twice in a row. One was Throw Momma From The Train, a Danny DeVito comedic riff on Strangers On A Train.
The other was PCU, a campus comedy in the Animal House vein starring a visibly balding Jeremy Piven. It was a lovable frat fighting the dean and his Young Republican lackeys, but (because “boat shoe and dinner jacket-wearing WASPs” were overdone and increasingly anachronistic as villains by then) there was a third faction that took the brunt of the mockery: earnest, censorious social issue activists. Thus the title. The climax involved the activists protesting the big frat party (tagline: “Everyone Gets Laid”), but then realizing “holy shit, we’re against drinking, sex, parties, freedom, and fun, we’re the bad guys” and giving up and chilling out and hooking up with the frat members.
Because obviously you were supposed to see that as the only acceptable position for anyone with any pretensions to being cool and with it. Like I said, ‘60s-derived social liberalism used to offer something for everyone.
If you don’t know who Howard Stern is, he was the foremost crude “Morning Zoo” radio DJ in the country.
Like, in the '90s, white, blue collar (or “dudebro”) tits-n-beer vulgarity was plausibly coded left/liberal/Democratic. And that’s a little disorienting to remember.
I mean hell, Benny Hill was aired in part by an official arm of the most socialist Anglosphere government ever. Benny Hill.
If you’ve never seen Benny Hill, it’s from the British “light entertainment” tradition, a little variety but kind of sketch comedy, only a lot of the “comedy”
was basically dirty old man leering. Sketch leering. Episodes famously ended with sped up comedic chase scenes where Benny would try to catch and grope some pretty young girls, then turn and run away as they tried to catch and punish him.
Now by the '90s that was already a bit off, but still, it ran in reruns on Comedy Central. It ran on fucking PBS.
If you ever wonder why intelligent educated sensitive me is wary of if not actively hostile to so much of what passes for modern cultural liberalism, it’s because it pattern-matches so closely not only to the apocalypse visions conservatives were warning of when I was growing up, but to the liberals’ versions as well.
