Phthursday Musings: Rousing Q&A #2

Well, we did this once before, and maybe it worked, so hey let’s do it again.

DickLugarMellencamp asks: Since we all know that mayonnaise is the supreme condiment what other egg product would make life not worth living if it were to disappear?

There is an easy answer to this question: “uhh no”.

I am interested however by the embedded question: What do we consider to be an “egg product”? It turns out that the USDA has answered that for us:

So if you scramble yourself an egg at home, that’s not an egg product. If you bake a cake at home, that’s not an egg product. An “egg product” has to be something where the egg is “broken” at a USDA-inspected plant.

Since it turns out that we can still eat eggs even if egg products went away - hell, you could even make your own mayonnaise - then life will continue to be worth living.

Therefore, the easy answer is also the correct one:

FoxyFriend32250 asks: Climate change: How long until cannibalism reigns?

Max Cavalera provides the correct answer to this question:

Obligatory:

ElbowElbowElbow asks: If you could go back in time to 1995-2005 and prevent one present day Big Tech company from emerging, who would it be and why?

Facebook.

Big Tech involves a whole host of problems, none of which I’m interested in minimizing. A lot of those problems though strike me as problems having to do with scale, with inadequate governance… problems where if it wasn’t one of them, it’d be another. Amazon, for example, I believe that someone was going to figure out a lot of what they figured out, and that a lot of their most ruthless business practices are right out of decades-old or even centuries-old playbooks. I’m not saying that’s the case with everything, and I’m not really interested in arguing that it all makes Amazon better, but the question at hand is about who I would want to prevent from emerging.

Facebook, I believe, is the biggest outlier in this respect: What makes them so bad is not just a matter of scale or degree. Facebook’s algorithms have directly contributed to a true degredation of social structure in America and beyond, and I am not at all convinced that someone else could have brought to bear the combination of scale and method and could have done so much damage.

I suspect someone who’s read even more deeply into such things could make a strong case that the above paragraph applies even better to Google. But I think Facebook’s delivery mechanism has more directly contributed to what I’ll call the aggregation of hate in open spaces.

And it just didn’t need to be this way. Facebook may have had a lot of flaws intrinsic in what it was and what it was about, but I don’t think where we’ve gotten to was inevitable. I think that Facebook, as a corporate entity, and as embodied in its leader, is the most psychopathic of all of Big Tech, and yes, I realize that is saying a lot.

ForestCityPessimist asks: War is still raging with the Albanians and who ever. Why?

First, I’ll answer it in the abstract: Why is there a fire? Because someone decided there needed to be a fire. Why is there still a fire? Because either someone still wants there to be a fire, or because the fire someone wanted took on a life of its own and is out of control.

Less abstract: I realize the question can refer to many overlapping things but what I first thought about is this long article from Fair Observer from a couple years ago about Albanian blood feuds.

Albania as a distinct country dates to just before World War I, in the aftermath of the various Balkan Wars of the early 20th Century. I have not read closely into Albania per se and the greater Albanian diaspora / the particulars of the Kosovo debate are not in my wheelhouse. That said, how I learned it is that after World War II, Albania was the most “backward” country in Europe, and the Fair Observer piece bolsters this.

I have to admit to some skepticism about the whole “backward” thing, for two reasons. First, I suspect that a lot of that, over time, has been anti-Muslim. But I also suspect that a whole lot of that has been because of wrangling by other European powers who do or don’t have an interest in keeping parts of Europe in a “backward” state for some reason or another. Along similar lines, I think at some point in time, it became convenient / useful to scapegoat Serbia in particular.

It’s always morally easier to believe that “one side” or the other is “backward” or “the bad guys” or whatever. But I don’t think the Balkans lend themselves to such easy moral calls. A lot of people in a lot of places bring the fire.

Speaking of the Albanian diaspora and fire, here’s my second mention this week of Xherdan Shaqiri (who currently plays for Chicago Fire FC), a video which ties the Shaqiri / Xhaka double eagle celebration at the 2018 World Cup in with broader history. It’s not perfect but it’s a pretty solid 10 minute overview:

TinyTyne asks: Over/under on Brendan Rodgers surviving past Halloween?

Leicester’s next matches are Aston Villa, Tottenham, Nottingham Forest. Rodgers won’t last beyond Forest if they lose that one.

I’d say three to one he’s gone by mid-November when the World Cup break starts. In my mind the problem is less that he might lose the locker room and more that there’s no real point for him in sticking around if it’s clearly a lost season. He’s still got to be considered a very viable candidate for the Big Six, and I’d consider him an especially likely candidate for the Tottenham job when that inevitably opens back up. He’s got more face to save by gracefully exiting the mess at hand, I fear.

Also, did someone say relegation battle?

RhetoricalJhonny asks: Do they know it's Halloween?

This question is the title of a charity record and the video is shared below, but I’m going to answer the question like this: No, they don’t. I for one was unaware of this song, so I assume “they” were unaware too.

There’s quite a cast of musicians involved in this crazy thing!

ForestCityOptimist asks: Will Stacey Abrams win in Georgia?

My gut hunch is… no. It is very possible that Raphael Warnock wins the Senate race, but Brian Kemp wins the Governor race. That’s how Georgia is polling right now.

If the Democrats decided that the Georgia races were absolutely their highest priorities, maybe that’d be one thing. But the Democrats have to be on the defensive in a whole lot of places, and at the moment, I don’t outright sense that Stacey Abrams is the absolute top priority for the Democrats. Holding onto Congress sure seems to be the big thing. Now maybe that means Warnock is the candidate they need to do the most for, and wouldn’t that also help Abrams? Maybe, but maybe not.

So my hunch is no.

TrueTrueTrudy asks: Why are bats being found in peoples houses a lot now!??

Baseball is still the American pastime and don’t you forget it.

Here is former Cub and former Cardinal Bob Tewksbury explaining things for you:

ParsonWeems4Eva asks, in part, in response to last week’s musings about Stewie: Have you ever put Stewie into one of those hamster balls, and let him run around the floor?

Hamster balls are dangerous and stressful!!! Don’t take my word for it though, take Victoria Raechel’s word for it:

Buy3GlockenspielsGet1Free asks: If Ted Nugent won the Republican nomination in an election where only solo-billed musicians with a Billboard top 100 presence from 1971-1978 were allowed to run, who would be his running mate and who would be the ideal opposition ticket?

This question is brutal, because you come up with an idea, but that person is no longer alive, or didn’t actually make it that high in the charts, or it wasn’t in the ‘70s when they did. Also the question so happens to eliminate almost all country musicians!

So after fighting with data for a while I decided to do it like this:

Ted Nugent’s highest ever position on the Billboard Hot 100 was #30 with the title track “Cat Scratch Fever” the week of October 8, 1977.

So I picked a running mate and ideal opposition ticket from the same chart:

Running mate: Looks like this will have to be Debby Boone, country singer who eventually turned Christian singer. Oh, I looked up some of the other options, but she is the most obvious fit here.

Opposition ticket: Linda Ronstadt. Actually I was thinking Linda Ronstadt all along without even looking up the Billboard week. I mean, it’s got to be Linda Ronstadt, right? She’s got the right politics, and she would completely kick Ted Nugent’s ass. Her running mate would of course be Jimmy Buffett, because the Democrats are incapable of fielding a ticket that doesn’t involve severely pissing off huge chunks of their base with their endless bullshit, while obliviously thinking they’re somehow making everyone happy.

Anyway! That particular week, Linda Ronstadt was at #40 with her version of Roy Orbison’s “Blue Bayou”. Here you go:

ThisAmericanWife says: You’re all freaks.

That is not a question.