Hey, it finally wintered in winter on Friday night. And I was pretty damn happy to see snow.
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RSVP, maybe?
Do you leave party hosts in the dark?
Under the name “Party Host,” someone wrote to Washington Post advice columnist Carolyn Hax asking if they should chase people down for an RSVP to an upcoming gathering. “Party Host” said most of those invited selected “maybe” or didn’t respond, and PH doesn’t know what to do.
Hax replied: “Collectively, our manners are atrocious right now, at least judging from the spike in mail from frustrated hosts.”
She went on to say that “people are overtaxed and overwhelmed and loath to close off the option of just curling into a ball at home come party time — understandable in an emotional sense, but unforgivable in a courtesy sense.”
I invited friends and work colleagues to a gathering for my upcoming birthday and wrote on the invite that I “won’t be offended if you do a pit-stop greeting because we all have our social limits.”
To account for last-minute no-shows or drive-by well-wishers, I lowered the headcount the restaurant needed for appetizers, and, in the invite, encouraged people to buy dinner if they so chose.
President Biden in East Palestine
President Joe Biden was in East Palestine, Ohio, on Friday.
While the story should have been focused on why Norfolk Southern continues to not care about the people whose lives were forever destroyed by the February 2023 derailment, most of the corporate media stories I can find blamed President Biden for, among other frivolous things, not physically going to the town until now — despite the federal government being on the scene and being in direct communication with local officials shortly after the incident.
To be clear, capitalism is what derailed the train.
The Pittsburgh Trib really trib’d by using “hostile” in the headline and making the entire story political.
WTAE’s story wasn’t much better, allowing a man to say President Biden has done nothing for the community without explaining what the federal government has done and without holding Norfolk Southern accountable.
That story also noted that there were some pro-Trump people there. But the story failed to note Trump gutted train safety regulations.
Anyhow, the local media failed to highlight that President Biden said the government will continue to hold Norfolk Southern accountable.
"There are acts of God," President Biden said. "This was an act of greed that was 100% preventable."
Target closes self-checkout lanes
Target, what the hell are you doing?
On a few recent visits to Target, I was forced to stand in a long line for one human-staffed checkout lane to buy just a few items.
The self-checkout area was closed. The first time, I assumed the system was down.
On a visit a few days later, the same thing. Each visit, I had a few items and ended up waiting just to check out when I could have been in and out at self-checkout.
Well, it turns out, Target cut the hours self-checkout areas are open while at the same time only keeping one or two employee-staffed checkout lanes open, forcing customers to wait in long lines.
According to news reports and an employee Reddit thread, employees across the country have said self-checkouts no longer open until as late as 11 a.m., and, in some cases, close as early as 8 p.m.
That has been my experience with self-checkout closing at 8 p.m.
Target previously tested a self-checkout policy that allowed only 10 items at a time to be purchased. Not all stores were part of this test.
While Target has not publicly confirmed the latest self-checkout change, the retailer has in the past tried linking fabricated crime statistics to store changes.
One of the lies Target and other retailers spew is that organized crime accounts for half of all inventory loss. This is factually not true.
Shoplifting (which is considered different from organized crime, by the way, and is ambiguously defined by the National Retail Federation) is difficult to track. That doesn’t stop some politicians and others from using fear tactics instead of facts.
Corporate media and retail executives help to fuel the fire of fear without facts, too. Surely, we all recall when Walgreens cried foul about shoplifting.
Country music seemingly forgets its roots
“We do not play Beyoncé at KYKC as we are a country music station.”
That was the message the manager of a country radio station in Oklahoma sent a listener who had requested Beyoncé’s new song, “Texas Hold ‘Em.”
What Roger Harris, KYKC’s station manager, did was fuel the flames of a debate that centers not only around how Black musicians fit into the country music genre but that Black musicians helped to originate country music.
Country music’s roots are traced to the banjo, which was brought to the Americas by enslaved Africans. The banjo “became a central part of slave music and culture in the South,” Time magazine wrote in 2019.
Through the first two decades of the 1900s, Black and white hillbilly (the early name for “country music”) musicians often appeared together on recordings.
“As a result of exchanges and borrowing and theft and parody, southern music pre-World War I was fundamentally multicultural,” country music historian Patrick Huber told Time in 2019.
But beginning in the 1920s, as the genre began to become commercialized, the music industry divided releases into “hillbilly records” and “race records.” This was done under the belief that people buying music would do so based on their race.
Because of this, many Black performers went uncredited and were replaced in marketing efforts.
In a rant, actor John Schneider, who was in “Dukes of Hazzard,” compared Beyoncé to a dog and said she doesn’t belong in country music, apparently unaware of country music’s roots.
Beyoncé did say her song release would “break the internet.”
Briefly
» Fresh off his civil fraud case defeat in New York in which he was fined $355 million, Donald Trump on Saturday hawked $399 gold high-tops with American flag logos at SneakerCon (yes, it's a thing) in Philadelphia.
» Jimmy Carter, 99, the longest-living president in the nation’s history, marks one year in hospice on Feb. 18. When he entered hospice in 2023, his family had prepared for his life to end within a week.
» For the first time in almost 60 years, a state has formally overturned a so-called “right to work” law, clearing the way for workers to organize new union locals, collectively bargain and make their voices heard at election time.
» The decades-old Pittsburgh wedding cookie table tradition was featured on the “3rd Hour Today” show. The story shared how social media has helped to spread the unique tradition.
And, finally…
Icons. 🐧