Memories are Funny

While I was looking through my scanned photo albums to locate the photos I used in the previous post, I naturally went down a rabbit hole. It wasn't the rabbit hole that surprised me as much as seeing that so many of these photos directly contradicted what I had in my memory of the events. And it wasn't details so much as times.

The only explanation—other than a wildly faulty memory—is that I know my parents were notorious for shooting a roll of film over the course of weeks or months and then often waiting an equal amount of time before getting the pictures developed (A lot of Christmas pictures are date stamped March or April of the following year!). So even though a many of the scanned photos in my collection have the processing date on the border, those can't be taken as accurate indicators of when things actually happened, and I realize that. Adding to the confusion is the fact that when my parents divorced, the original photo albums were split up, destroying the accurate timeline that had existed in those albums throughout my childhood and teen years. When my grandmother moved in with my Mom several years after the divorce and Mom decided to fold her photos into the already messed up albums based on date stamps things went from bad to worse. Six feet of snow in October? Okay, it's possible I suppose, but it's far more likely it was six feet of snow from the previous winter and the pictures didn't get printed until the following October.

And don't even get me started on the duplicates I'm still weeding out.

This still doesn't explain how I remember that Dad traded the yellow truck with the camper in on a new gray truck, but the date stamps indicate just the opposite (and my sister looking younger in the gray truck picture than she is in the yellow truck one!).

Faulty memory? Mandala Effect? More likely just the fucked up date stamps…somehow.

Life Under a Blue-White Sun

While these pictures were taken on earth, it has been surmised that the vegetation on any habitable planets orbiting blue-white stars would be red in order to absorb the maximum amount of blue light hitting those worlds.

In those cases the oceans would also tend toward red due to the plankton in the surface layers absorbing all the blue light.

This is Satire, Right? RIGHT?!

From Dash Macintyre:

Trump's White House Chef Just Published A Tell-All Book About His Eating Habits

Former White House Executive Chef Elizabeth Markowitz has just published a memoir about her time cooking for President Trump, and in it she reveals she only got to show off her cooking skills during rare state visits from foreign dignitaries because of Trump's exclusive taste for fried foods.

"The former guy had the palette of a six-year-old," Markowitz writes in her introductory chapter. "Honestly, the job was incredibly boring because Trump really only utilized my talents to be a glorified fast food delivery girl. I knew all the McDonalds and KFC window station employees by name. After a year I resigned because I had an epiphany one day that I hadn't gone to elite culinary schools or subjected myself to the rigorous security vetting by the Secret Service just to drop a thousand bags of french fries and chicken into the fryer."

Below are several preview excerpts Markowitz's publisher has shared:

        • Trump loves M&M candies in his ice cream, but made Chef Markowitz remove all the brown ones. Her predecessor was fired when Trump found a single brown M&M he had missed.
        • Trump claimed to French President Macron that he invented the recipe to the McDonalds Big Mac sandwich.
        • When Trump eats tacos and some meat or lettuce falls out, he yells out to whoever is dining with him that "the wall just got ten feet higher!"
        • Trump's favorite pizza topping is sauerkraut.
        • Trump critiques the Diet Coke cans he drinks like a scotch aficionado would rate a fine whiskey, and often makes comments on each can's flavor profile as well as how it smells "on the nose."
        • Trump leaves lipstick stains on all the straws he uses.
        • Trump often comments to dinner guests that global warming can't be real because ice cream still exists.
        • Trump forbids vegetables from being served. Markowitz once described asparagus, and Trump said he had never heard of it. When shown a picture, he claimed it was "fake news."
        • Trump delicately takes off all the skin of his fried chicken with a knife and fork, and sets it to the side of his plate. Then, he removes all the lean meat and discards it. The fat that's left he wraps up inside the pieces of skin and eats it, often slurping the fat out of the middle like it's an oyster. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe threw up the first time he had dinner with Trump and witnessed this.
        • The only part of a turkey Trump eats is the breasts. He and Stephen Miller have had several dinner discussions on what they think human breasts taste like. Miller described the taste with such vivid detail and creepy confidence that Markowitz believes he has actually eaten human meat before.
        • Trump is adamant that Obama "had to have" eaten more fried chicken than him, despite vigorous disagreement from every White House staff member.
        • Trump goes through a 20-oz ketchup bottle every week.
        • Trump changes into stretchy pants before every meal because he says buttons are "rigged against him."
        • When world leaders dine with Trump, he reaches across the table and eats off their plates, which he calls a "power move" to assert dominance.
        • Every night Trump eats three servings of the dinner's dessert, and tells the table "I'm never like this, I can't believe how bad I'm being tonight."
        • At the end of dinners, Trump pops off the cap of a Sharpie marker and starts huffing it, holding it like a cigar and sticking the tip deep inside his nostril. He offers markers to everyone else at the table in a fancy wooden box, but few partake with him. Ted Cruz once did, and blacked out.
        • Trump sprinkles ground up Adderall pills in his ice cream.
        • On Saturday mornings Trump always requested 8 pancakes arranged in two stacks with strawberries cut into circles placed in the middle of each stack so they looked like boobs. Then he wouldn't eat them, but would just stick his face into them and make motor-boating sounds.
        • Trump occasionally has his daughter Ivanka "pre-chew" his food for him. Chef Markowitz overheard him telling Jim Jordan it's the closest he'll ever come to making out with her.
        • Trump often makes his son Eric try his food first to make sure it's not poisoned.
        • Trump and his adviser Stephen Miller once bragged about the biggest restaurant bills they've ever racked up and not tipped their servers on.
        • Trump once ordered Markowitz to spit in any food served to his former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, and demanded he see her do it.
        • Trump once told an entire women's college softball championship-winning team during a White House luncheon that they'd all be hotter if they each lost 15 pounds.
        • Trump made Lindsey Graham eat three plates of lasagna, and then throw up in Ted Cruz's open mouth in exchange for endorsing each of them.
        • Trump literally not even one time dined with Melania.
        • The few times that Trump's son Barron came downstairs to eat at the same time as him, Trump called him "Boy," and treated him like a server, apparently unaware of who he was.

[Originally published in my book Satire In The Trump Years: The Best Of The Halfway Post available on Barnes & Noble and Amazon!]

How sad is it that ninety percent of this sounds perfectly reasonable—and expected—behavior from Trump.

Trump supporters generally only go to rallies so Trump can explain to them who's to blame for the fact that they hate their own lives." ~ Bill Palmer

I Saw This and Thought We Could All Use a Laugh

Snow White, Superman, and Pinocchio are out for a stroll in town one day.

As they walk, they come across a sign: "Beauty contest for the most beautiful woman in the world."

"I'm entering," said Snow White.

After half an hour she came out and they asked her, "Well, how did you do?"

"First place," said Snow White.

They continued walking and saw a sign: "Contest for the strongest man in the world."

"I'm entering," said Superman.

After half an hour he returned and they asked him, "How did you make out?"

"First place," answered Superman. "Did you ever doubt?"

They continued walking and saw another sign: "Contest! Who is the Greatest Liar in the World?"

Pinocchio said, "This is mine."

Half an hour later he returned with tears in his eyes.

"What happened?" they asked.

"Who the hell is Donald Trump?" sobbed Pinocchio.