Itâs so easy to label people these days. From the way folks have been talking, youâd think everyone falls into two buckets: those who voted against the mayor who promised to blow up the city and those who voted for the mayor who promised to blow up the city. And now that the mayor, whom I voted for, is blowing up the city, as he promised, Iâm one of many people who are being unfairly blamed for something I didnât want. Okay? I didnât want the mayor to blow up the city like he mentioned many times; I just wanted him to fix the old bowling alley like he promised in passing once. Anyone saying Iâm partially responsible for the explosions is just a sign that they have no argument.
Before you rush to cancel me, try to remember the mayor made lots of promises, and I didnât expect him to keep them all. Yes, he promised to turn our playgrounds to glass and take a blowtorch to the schools; yes, he said that he was going to use napalm on every grocery store, but, as I said, he also promised he was going to fix the old bowling alley.
Oh, how I loved that bowling alley as a kid. Itâs been closed for twenty years, so when the mayor mentioned heâd fix it if we elected him, I had to give it a chance. To be fair, he was also the mayor a few years ago, made the same promise, and failed to fix the bowling alley then. But he did live up to his promise to reintroduce smallpox into local daycares, so at least you know he can get things done, unlike the other guy who did neither of those.
Iâve seen all the attacks online. You use the mayorâs own clear statements of purpose against me just because I consciously chose this. âThe mayor said he was going to blow up the city.â Yeah, metaphorically. âThe mayor brought up his desire to see the residents of the city cleansed by flame in every speech.â Sure, if you take it out of context, maybe. âThe mayorâs election slogan was, âBlow It All Up and Watch Them Suffer,ââ which is scary only for people stupid enough to take him seriously. The fact that he had to go so far as to pour gasoline all over the Burger King before throwing a Molotov cocktail through the window shows what his opponents have pushed him to do. Itâs really his critics that have kept him from fixing the bowling alley.
Let me reiterate: I do not approve of the mayor locking the doors of the mall and igniting a bus full of C4 in the food court. I may have worn a shirt that said, VOTE FOR THE MAYOR WHO WILL BLOW UP THE MALL FOOD COURT, but that was just my fun way of saying I only cared about the bowling alley. It makes me sad that you think I wanted people to get hurt by this. Especially when itâs something that directly affected me for the first time in my life, when my nephew was accidentally trapped in that mall when it exploded. Give me a little grace here. Plus, my nephew voted for the other candidate, so itâs kind of his fault that he ended up there to begin with.
Is it so bad that I wanted the bowling alley back? Maybe thatâs what youâre really mad about. You wanted the mayor to fail. The negativity around the smell of roasting pig is just a facile attempt to distract from his potential future successes. I bet the mayor is about to fix up the bowling alley, and Iâll walk in, and Iâll be twelve again, and all the adults will be so tall, and it will be my party, and everyoneâeven the kids who donât like meâwill have to sing happy birthday. The previous mayor said that rebuilding the bowling alley wouldnât make it 1996 again, which, to me, is unacceptable.
Itâs disgusting and, frankly, counterproductive to point out that I voted for this. To imply that I had personal free will and agency when I walked into a voting booth and picked Mayor Bomberman is insulting. Here I am, admitting that I did not actually want the mayorâs biggest promise to happen, and youâre criticizing me for directly being part of the reason itâs happening. You should be praising me for being able to admit thatâwell, not that I was wrong, heaven forbidâbut perhaps my faith in the mayor who was arrested thirty-four times for arson was misplaced.
At the end of the day, you can imply that I âwanted thisâ as much as you like. You donât know whatâs inside my heart. The mayor said heâd fix the bowling alley. Just because he hasnât fixed the bowling alley and announced that heâll never fix the bowling alley, doesnât mean Iâm dumb or a fool. And while he may have also promised heâd re-segregate the city, crash the cityâs economy, and turn the cityâs only remaining functional hospital into a big Jersey Mikeâs, I can guarantee that I only wanted the Jersey Mikeâs.
So, no, Iâm not âhappy nowâ that our zoo has been turned into an open-air animal mausoleum. But of the options I had, only one mayor promised to completely change the city. And you know what? At least he is doing something. It may kill a lot of people. It may leave others without homes or jobs. But I respect a man of action, regardless of what that action is and whether or not itâs going to make things better or worse.
Now, Iâll just sit back and wait for the bowling alley to get fixed.
Sometimes I love the internet, actually. Incomprehensibly huge place but also so small. Saw a video on Instagram where Crayola was announcing theyâre coming out with a box with some limited edition previously retired colors, including Dandelion. This video had hundreds of comments and almost all of them where âomg whereâs the dandelion crayon girl sheâs going to be so happyâ and it was such an unimportant thing, but it was just cute
The tags on this post are also full of people happy for the dandelion crayon girl đĽš
Update!! Dandelion crayon girl got her promo box!!
Balsamic vinegar is made by aging a reduced grape syrup in barrels with “mother”, which is a kind of bacterial slime that develops naturally in the vinegar over time. True balsamic vinegar goes through a very particular process of aging it in a series of smaller and smaller barrels, transferring it from one barrel to the next either every year, or every few years, depending on the process, and then adding fresh syrup to the largest barrel and continuing the process. The slimy film that forms on the insides of the barrels is the mother, and due to the increased concentrations over the years, the mother in the smallest barrel is most potent, and is sometimes partially removed and used to seed new batches of vinegar, so production can be expanded. Scraping the mother from the bottom of the barrel is how you multiply the goodness, the sweetness, and the quality of your balsamic.
If you’ve ever bought a bottle of apple cider vinegar and thought “what’s that cloudy stuff at the bottom?”, that’s the mommy â¤
This is also a part of what makes a high quality balsamic, well, high quality. And part of what makes it expensive. Good quality balsamic is all about age, both the age of the batch itself, and the age of the mother that seeds it. Balsamic has to be at least 12 years old, but you can age it much longer, and many places do. As for the mother, that requires literal lifetimes. Some of the oldest balsamic producing families in Modena have mothers that have been kept alive for centuries, passed down through the generations to seed new batches year after year after year, hundreds of years over. The bacterial cultures develop unique and incredible flavors in this time, and you can really taste it in the end product. It’s the kind of flavor and quality only age can offer.
we have entered laika’s autism zone. u will learn food and cooking facts, whether you want to or not.
Just a quick note from your friendly neighborhood bookworm/indie author
if you use kindle for the majority of your library, they will be shutting down the function that allows you to download your files and transfer them via USB on the 26th of February. Which doesn’t sound like a huge deal, but this also means that if a book is taken off Amazon for any reasonâlike it being bannedâthey can scrape it off your kindle as well. So maybe backup your library?
How to Download Your Kindle Books (with screenshots)
From your Amazon homepage, click “Account & Lists” then click “Content Library”
Click “Books”
Find the book you want to download and click “More actions”
Click “Download & transfer via USB”
Click the button next to your device, then click “Download”
That’s it! Your book file is now downloaded to your device. To my knowledge there isn’t a way to bulk download everything, which means that your have to download books individually. (If anyone knows how to download multiple books at a time, please let me know!)
I use the free software Calibre to organize my ebook files. This video gives a good basic overview of how to download your ebooks from Amazon to Calibre, and also goes over how to use Calibre to transfer your ebooks to Kobo. I recently got a Kobo and have slowly been transferring my ebooks to it, and it is actually pretty easy!
If you’re looking for ways to get ebooks without supporting Amazon, check out Smashwords, Bookshop.org, or see if your favorite author/publisher sells ebooks directly from their website.
I once went on a boat trip where one of these guys ended up flying INTO the boat. Smacked someone right in the side of the head too.
They smell really bad, FYI.
So, to get it back in the water…on the fly, with no internet let alone time to Google the safest possible technique if such a thing even existed, we figured the best way to make the landing feel most natural to it would be to, in fact, throw it like a paper airplane.
It was every bit as satisfying and goofy as it looks like it would be.
amhrancas 