It's a mean old world

 

You live and learn.

Lots of people pray while flying, especially during turbulence and while landing.  British airports encourage prayer while waiting to board or claim baggage with designated "prayer rooms" at all the major ones I could research.  The structure above is in the Bristol Airport and is being criticized because it clearly started out as a shelter for smokers, or possibly a place to catch a bus.  Since it says "multi faith" I wonder what happens when members of competing faiths want to pray at the same time.   Those Pentecostals tend to be noisy.  A quick search reveals that American airports offer similar facilities, although Lonely Planet advises that "organized services" are no longer permitted.  I think my favorite is "Our Lady of the Airways" at Logan, which sounds decidedly Catholic.  How did I not know about this?  It's hard enough getting a cab.  Now I want to know about Russian airports -- icons and incense?  Given Aeroflot's safety record...

With fascist politicians winning elections in Argentina and the Netherlands it shouldn't be a surprise that dear, dirty Dublin is seeing riots.  What the Garda commissioner called "a complete lunatic hooligan faction driven by far-right ideology" stabbed two adults and three children before setting a police car on fire in Parnell Square.  Four buses and a tram were also destroyed.  They don't like immigrants.  

Naomi Biden shared this photo of her grandfather and the rest of the family after their annual "Polar bear plunge" in the waters off Nantucket.  Will Fox News call it "fake" or revive the "body double" legend?  Will Newsmax decide that only someone senile would go swimming when the air temperature is 45F?  Either way, we're about to be gaslit.

And why are food prices so high?  The $90 turkey and the $78 airport burger (with fries and high-end Scotch) have already become part of the narrative despite falling inflation.  Well, here's a possible reason.  Until he decided to pursue the Republican Senate nomination in Indiana, John Rust was CEO of Rose Acre Farms, which was found liable in a plot to fix the price of eggs.  A civil jury decided that Rose Acre and other suppliers held back product between 1999 and 2008 in order to raise prices.  I'm sure they stopped doing it when sued by General Mills, Kellogg, Nestle and Kraft.

By any measure Stuart Seldowitz won Asshole of the Day honors for Thanksgiving.  The former National Security Council and State Department employee was filmed taunting a man selling halal sandwiches from a cart on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.  No fists were thrown -- the vendor showed admirable restraint -- but Seldowitz was arrested after video emerged.  "Did you rape your daughter like Muhammad did?" he asks.  "The mukhabarat in Egypt will get your parents.  Does your father like his fingernails?  They will take them out one by one."  And so on.  Seldowitz calls this wanting to engage the vendor in a discussion of current events.  The NYPD calls it a hate crime.  The vendor says it's been going on for two weeks.  Seldowitz worked in the State Department's Office of Israel and Palestinian Affairs between 1999 and 2003, so he'll probably claim PTSD.

Tim Alberta's book The Kingdom, the Power and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism reveals that when Tony Perkins endorsed Ted Cruz in 2016, Trump accepted the news philosophically, calling the Family Research Council founder "a so-called Christian" and his associates "real pieces of shit."  He isn't going to be any happier with Iowa evangelical Bob Vander Plaat's support for Ron DeSantis.  Vander Plaat thinks Trump isn't sufficiently anti-choice despite the three forced birthers he rammed onto the Supreme Court.  Yes, but what has he done to criminalize drag?

No, it wasn't a car bomb that panicked the northern border; it was a middle-aged couple from Grand Island who wanted to attend a KISS show.  When it was cancelled they went to a casino instead and crashed their Bentley while speeding through Customs.  Which is infinitely sadder but not terror-related.  (People in their fifties who like KISS?)  Don't relax just yet, though -- Canadian "super pigs" have people locked and loaded in Minnesota, North Dakota and Montana.   A professor at the University of Saskatchewan calls them "the most invasive animals on the planet."  I call them a chance to save money on your New Year's ham.

When somebody sneezes normal people say "Gesundheit" or "Salud."  Do you think Trump says "God bless you to ALL including the racist and incompetent attorney general of New York, radical-left Trump-hating psycho Arthur Engoron," etc?  Based on his Thanksgiving greetings urbi et orbi it's a good bet.  Forty-nine posts in one hour ending with "MASSIVE CARAVANS THROUGH MEXICO" -- somebody's warming up for the Festivus Airing of Grievances.

I'm not sure who drew this but there's a better view at Daily Kos's "Bookchat:  Dickens understood MAGA as if he could read chromosomes."  So I guess I have to read Barnaby Rudge.  I've been putting that one off.

In 2010 33 miners were rescued from a mine in Chile after being trapped underground for more than two months.  The world was riveted.  Which makes me wonder why there has been relatively little attention to the 41 workers in a collapsed tunnel under the Himalayas in India.  The woman who died from the heat at a Taylor Swift concert in Rio got more space.  I'm still seeing (not reading) remembrances of Matthew Perry.  Nothing in today's Independent but here's a woman who says she's allergic to Christmas.  You come sit by me, dear.