I remember hearing in a video years ago that the most popular ride to work at in Disney World was the Tower of Terror, because it was the only place you didn’t have to pretend to be happy all the time - gloominess was part of your character.
I am SO pleased to see that the staff at the Edward Gorey museum have embraced this. I would gladly go back to a minimum wage front desk position if I got to tell guests “I suppose I must let you in. Feel free to wander the first floor. The director might come downstairs and give a talk. He might not. Life is full of disappointments.” A++, only made better by the many children running around underfoot trying to find various murder weapons in the gashlycrumb tinies scavenger hunt
This is their contact page btw
Signs from behind the desk at the Edward Gorey House
I am forever grateful to an archivist mentor I worked with in grad school for some resume advice she gave me and thought maybe others would also benefit from it.
Keep a Master Resume.
This is not the resume you send out. This is a detailed resume of every job (with dates and location, supervisor and location phone number are a bonus) and as many skills/duties/accomplishments you can possibly think of for each and every one of the jobs and education programs you can think of.
She showed me hers, it was about 25 pages long, and formatted exactly like a regular resume for ease. Every time she would learn a new program/skill, she’d add it. Change in title or duties, add it. Complete something big/special/complicated/new to her/professionally significant, she would add it. This way when she went up for a promotion or raise, she had a detailed record of highlights to pick from to show she deserved it. There was no “when was that? Did I submit that last round of reviews?”
Applying to a new job? Pick and choose items from your Master Resume to plug in to the resume or CV you will be sending based on the job posting. You don’t need to rewrite it, just cut and paste relevant details.
I am applying to a job not exactly my field but with enough skill cross over that I feel I would be a good fit. Being able to build out a resume by cutting and pasting from the Master Resume is saving me so much time and energy. The info is there, I just need to plug it in to the file I send. Since both are already formatted, piece of cake!
“As every member of the bar of every federal court knows (or is presumed to know),” the federal court pointed out to some of its members, Rule 8 requires that complaints be limited to “a short and plain statement of the claim showing that the pleader is entitled to relief.” But if every lawyer knows it, why did the judge need to say it? Because he had just been forced to read an 85-page complaint in which the first 79 pages were devoted to “often repetitive … but superfluous allegations” that mostly praised the lawyers’ client while also insulting the defendants.
Why would someone write a complaint in such a way? The citation itself offers a clue. SeeTrump v. New York Times Co., No. 8:25-cv-2487-SDM, 2025 WL 2680597 (M.D. Fla. Sept. 19, 2025).
This is one of the many cases that the President of the United States has filed in order to complain that somebody said something bad about him. He is frequently right about that, but tends to overlook the fact that the speakers are frequently right, too. And even if they aren’t, because he is a “public figure” the First Amendment still protects them unless he can prove “actual malice.”
Well, feel free to debate the merits of this and other such cases amongst yourselves. The people we are directly mocking here are the lawyers who needed or agreed to write 85 pages (with 77 pages of exhibits) to state two simple defamation claims. The “short and plain statement” part of Rule 8 is rarely invoked against anyone who isn’t already a prison inmate (their complaints are often short but rarely “plain”), but the judge was within his discretion to invoke it here.
Personally, I would invoke it against any complaint that includes a first paragraph like this one, the kind that, as I have bitched about before, repeats information that was in the caption just a few inches above and assumes the reader is a complete idiot who won’t be able to figure out who’s who unless you define even obvious things for them:
Plaintiff, PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP, by and through his counsel, sues Defendants, NEW YORK TIMES COMPANY (the “New York Times” or the “Times”), SUSANNE CRAIG (“Craig”), RUSS BUETTNER (“Buettner”), PETER BAKER (“Baker”), MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT (“Schmidt”), and PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE LLC (“Penguin”) (collectively, “Defendants”), and alleges as follows:
I just noticed that the only person not treated this way in the paragraph above is PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP himself, and I’m guessing that wasn’t an oversight.
Anyway, paragraphs like that are unfortunately not enough to trigger Rule 8 (yet), much less the caning they deserve. Here it was the 70-some pages that followed, mostly devoted to statements like this: “With the overwhelming victory [in 2024], President Trump secured the greatest personal and political achievement in American history.” Compl. ¶ 2. Well, we can all agree that losers like Neil Armstrong (“Armstrong”) and Abraham Lincoln (“Lincoln”) should be embarrassed by their paltry contributions, but the point here is whether this allegation might lend support to a viable defamation claim. Some would say no, because even if one disagreed with the assertion above, and the defendants very well might, that would be an opinion, not a fact, and therefore not actionable.
Nor is it immediately clear, for example, why the fact that [the name of] Donald Trump has written [appears on] many books would be relevant (or why the covers of those books must be shown), or whether his dad was “successful,” or whether The Apprentice‘s ratings were directly attributable to the identity of the host, or … well, you get the idea.
In any event, here the judge did not reach the merits, holding only that 79 pages of the foregoing is more than a reader should have to endure, and under the circumstances, more than Rule 8 allows. He struck the complaint and said any amended version may not exceed 40 pages.
It didn’t bode well for the plaintiff that this case was assigned to Judge Steven Merryday, not because Merryday is known to be anti-Trump but because he is known to be anti-BS and also quite creative. He’s already been mentioned here at least three times for those reasons, including in “How to Start a Brief,” cited above. See also “Judge Denies Motion for Continuance Based on Eclipse” (Aug. 21, 2017); “Judge Won’t Continue Trial so Attorney Can Enter Hemingway Look-Alike Contest” (June 29, 2012). None of that means this plaintiff won’t get a fair hearing from Merryday, but it does mean the amended complaint should come in under 40 pages.
We’ll know in a few weeks (if the government is open by then).
Cards Against Humanity, the often-vulgar card game, has launched a limited edition of its namesake product without any instructions and with a detailed explanation of each joke, "why it’s funny, and any relevant social, political, or historical context."
Why? Because, produced in this form, "Cards Against Humanity Explains the Joke" is not a game at all, which would be subject to tariffs as the cards are produced overseas. Instead, the product is "information material" and thus not sanctionable under the law Trump has been using—and CAH says it has obtained a ruling to this effect from Customs and Border Patrol.
"What if DHS Secretary and Dog Murderer Kristi Noem gets mad and decides that Cards Against Humanity Explains the Joke is not informational material?" the company asks in an FAQ about the new edition. (If you don't follow US politics, Noem really did kill her dog Cricket.) Answer: "She can fuck right off, because we got a binding ruling from Trump’s own government that confirms this product is informational and 100% exempt from his stupid tariffs."
Pre-orders for the $25 product end on October 15, and it will allegedly never be reprinted. All profits will be donated to the American Library Association "to fight censorship."
This is the way
Now, I would never claim that Cards Against Humanity is a particularly highbrow form of entertainment; for instance, the website promoting the new edition opens with "Trump is Going to Fuck Christmas" in giant white letters. (That headline refers to Trump's tariffs... I hope.)
"This holiday season, give your loved ones the gift of knowledge, give America’s libraries the gift of cash, and don’t give Donald Trump a fucking cent," the site says.
Some of the cards and their explanations are more literate than you might expect. For instance, English majors and poetry lovers may recognize the source of this quotation, found on one of the game's cards, as the final lines of T.S. Eliot's "The Hollow Men":
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
Cards Against Humanity mucks this up a bit by printing the final line as "Not with a bang, but with _____________" (extra comma, extra "with"). Ouch. But it redeems itself slightly by adding a nice note about the time and context of the composition, noting that the "humor comes from a juxtaposition of the poem's grandiloquent language with Cards Against Humanity's often crude, low-brow jokes." Hopefully, it inspires at least a few people who have never before heard the name "T.S. Eliot" to read some of his verse.
(If you want to give it a go, the greatest hits are probably "The Waste Land," "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," "The Hollow Men," "Journey of the Magi," "Ash Wednesday," and Eliot's long late masterpiece "The Four Quartets." Eliot is also responsible for the poems that served as the basis of the musical "Cats," which eventually became a feature film featuring human performers who at one point in development had feline buttholes. According to reports from inside the production, "The job of editing out all of the buttholes was ultimately left to one crew member who was hired specifically to excise unintended buttholes." Eliot would have hated everything about this sentence.)
CAH has done this sort of thing before. In 2017, the company bought a small plot of land in Texas on the US/Mexico border to "make it as time-consuming and expensive as possible for Trump to build his wall." In 2024, CAH sued SpaceX, saying that the rocket company had moved construction equipment onto CAH's Texas land without permission.
After the demise of Napoleon's Empire, the Congress of Vienna (1814–15) redrew the map of Europe. What is now Belgium was incorporated into the new United Kingdom of the Netherlands. One small area bordering the Netherlands and Prussia, however, was granted an unusual status: a 900-acre strip of land that remained independent and neutral for over a century.
This territory, known as Neutral Moresnet, was 1 mile wide and 3 miles long. In the modern era, only Vatican City and Monaco are smaller.
The peculiar arrangement came about because of the presence of a valuable zinc spar mine, named Altenberg in German or Vieille Montagne in French. In the 19th century, deposits of this kind were rare: one of the few other places in Europe where Zinc was being processed was Bristol. Neither the Netherlands nor Prussia was willing to concede the mine, so they both agreed to administer the district jointly as a neutral condominium in 1816.
Neutral Moresnet had its own flag (based on the emblem of the mining company), coat of arms and anthem (set to the tune of O Tannenbaum), but it did not have its own currency. The French franc was the legal tender, although the currencies of Prussia (replaced by Germany in 1871), the Netherlands, and, after 1830, Belgium were also in circulation.
Life in Neutral Moresnet was dominated by the mining company, which wasn't only the major employer but also operated residences, shops, a hospital, a school and a bank. It also founded shooting clubs, a concert band, a carnival club and a gymnastics club.
When the mine was exhausted around 1885, the survival of Neutral Moresnet was in doubt. In August 1903, a casino was opened after the Belgians closed all such resorts in their territory, but Prussia soon forced it to shut down. The production of hard liquor in several distilleries also generated income. In 1908, Dr. Wilhelm Molly, the mine's doctor, proposed to turn Neutral Moresnet into the world's first Esperanto‑speaking state, named Amikejo, or "friendship-place". The World Congress of Esperanto even declared Neutral Moresnet the capital of the Esperanto community.
Germany annexed it during the First World War,but the Treaty of Versailles awarded the territory, along with several nearby villages, to Belgium. Neutral Moresnet was renamed Kelmis (in French: La Calamine) and converted into a Belgian municipality in 1920. Today, it’s in the francophone Walloon Region, but belongs to Belgium’s small German-speaking community.
Visitors can learn more about Neutral Moresnet at the Vieille Montagne Museum, housed in the former mansion of the mine's director. Of the 60 border markers for the territory, more than 50 are still standing, and traces of the open-air mining operations can still be seen in the landscape. Kelmis is also the only place on earth where the yellow zinc violet grows. The former quadripoint (Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, and Neutral Moresnet) on top of the Vaalserberg is now a tripoint, marked by a border marker.
The mining company Vieille Montagne survived the dissolution of Neutral Moresnet and continues to exist as VMZINC, a part of Umicore.
Approximately every human being on the planet has been texting me about the Qatar air base story:
Secretary of War Pete Hegseth announced Friday that the Pentagon has agreed to host a new Qatari Emiri Air Force facility in Idaho, saying that the nation has played a “core part” in securing the Gaza peace deal.
Hegseth made the announcement during an enhanced honor cordon arrival ceremony at the Pentagon for Qatar’s Minister of Defense Saoud bin Abdulrahman Al Thani.
“Today, we’re announcing a letter of acceptance in building a Qatari Emiri Air Force facility at the Mountain Home Air Force Base in Idaho,” Hegseth said.
Qatar is a small country that has purchase extremely fast, extremely expensive fighter jets. In this Qatar is similar to Singapore, which… also has an airbase in Idaho.
The U.S. Army Flight Training Detachment includes six Army National Guard pilots who fly with RSAF pilots. The arrangement is one of several arrangements the RSAF has with the U.S. military. RSAF pilots rotate through the training station in Arizona to train in desert environments and alongside U.S. pilots.
“It’s the best job I’ve had in the Army by far,” said Denton. “It’s a lot of fun. There’s a lot of uniqueness to working with other countries. It’s rewarding to break through those cultural barriers, and you can see the smile on their faces when they go out and accomplish something.”
While at the OCTC, Denton said RSAF pilots conducted individual and crew-level qualifications and worked with Marine Joint Terminal Attack Controllers to simulate providing close air support. Each engagement is recorded, allowing crews to review their training run while receiving real-time feedback from senior pilots, master gunners and range personnel.
So… it is not an arrangement without precedent. It is true that there are a variety of fishy things going on with Trump’s relationship with Qatar (and some of those are manifesting in the effort to broker an Israel-Hamas deal), and it is quite possible that this represents a payoff for Qatar. But it’s not nearly as surprising or alarming when you appreciate why countries that have basically no airspace might want to conduct training in Idaho, which has rather a substantial amount of airspace.
That said, fun to watch MAGA freak:
Never thought I’d see Republicans give terror financing Muslims from Qatar a MILITARY BASE on US soil so they can murder Americans.
I don’t think I’ll be voting in 2026.
I cannot in good conscience make any excuses for the harboring of jihadis.
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