She really does look different. But it has to be her -- it's too insane to think that BP would, what, stage a pap shot with Prince William and a fake Kate? Maybe she had a facelift?
ogged is out looking for Kate Middleton.
The judges will give it to you, but I just started, because of what jms says. It's too crazy!
They might have just killed her by accident and don't have a plan.
The second google result for "facelift recovery time" says it takes "around three months," which is the length of time that Kate has been missing, so that's my theory now.
They've got closer shots of Bigfoot.
No, this finally, is the real Kate. It's been a body double all the years prior.
That's really going to help the people writing crosswords puzzles.
WTF is going on in the Nebraska legislature?
Whatever it is, there's only one camera to record it.
Didn't ZUUL try to take over Nebraska in the remake?
Is this like that time in 2020 you all spent months being sure Joe Biden was senile or dead?
She really does look different.
Yes, she's been seriously ill and had surgery.
She really does look different.
She's been out wuthering, on a height.
She's been out wuthering
I thought this was a made up word but I looked it up and it means "blowing strongly with a roaring sound"
Yes. Hell on the laryx. Someone really should have stopped her earlier.
11: Same thing that's happening in all other Republican-controlled state legislatures.
The fake photo was weird, and it's weird that the only video is far away and grainy, but come on, that's her.
I too was annoyed at the jumping to conclusions, but I think it's mostly recreational.
Wuthering isn't recreational. It is a solemn royal duty.
Sssshh. Kate and Melania have switched places; pass it on
The theory that the video is from December is a better theory than the body double one, but it's probably just her and she doesn't want good photos taken because she doesn't like how she looks.
The video/photos don't particularly look like the usual images of her, but, it's blurry and far away and the various AI image cleanup tools people are using are prone to confabulating details in ways that can make the image look quite unlike the person it actually is.
All I can say is that the peripheral presence in this whole mishegoss of someone known as the Marchioness of Cholmondeley is the funniest thing ever somehow. I can't stop making up alternative titles: the Muskrat of Chutney. The Matador of Chicharrón.
I'm also going to hold all British commenters accountable for their tabloids feeding the flames.
33 makes me wonder, are there so many great Jewish American comedians because Yiddish is an inherently funny-sounding language to English speakers ("schmaltz", "meshuganah", "nudnik" etc) - a bit like Italian being an inherently good language for opera - or do we just think Yiddish is a funny-sounding language because there have been so many great Jewish American comedians?
Crucial update: a recent photo of Queen Elizabeth shows signs of tampering as well. You know what this means: Queen Elizabeth is dead!
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/mar/19/queen-elizabeth-ii-family-photo-digitally-enhanced-getty-images-flag
Obviously, "putz" is the greatest word ever.
I will note that the Marmoset of Chimneypot appears to be married to Earl Rocksteady.
The "Putz of Cholmondeley" would be the best title.
The Marmoset of Chamberpot, surely.
They've finally come up with technology to get all the kids smiling in a photo at the same time and for some reason using this is bad?
The Marcheese of Chembleydale.
I just learned about the real historical person named Clotworthy Skeffington, 4th Viscount Massereene. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu could have been Lady Mary Skeffington if she hadn't gotten out of it.
Phoebe Maltz (remember her?) has a good piece on the weird family history of the Marquess of Cholmondeley. Turns out he's an Iraqi Jew, and also a Rothschild.
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu could have been Lady Mary Skeffington if she hadn't gotten out of it.
Good thing she did, too, or everybody would have died of smallpox.
WTF is going on with the US Supreme Court? you ask. Two cases decided today.
1. East African native US citizen gets put on No Fly List while in Africa on business, FBI tries to recruit him to spy on his Portland Oregon mosque. Fuck off, he says. Travels to Dubai, where, at the behest of the FBI, he's arrested, tortured, etc., still no interest in spying. He is allowed to travel to Sweden, where he knows someone, and files suit in the US claiming the adding him to the no fly list was unlawful, unconstitutional, etc. [Swedes fly him home to Portland in a private jet.] FBI says, 'ok, fine, you're off the list,' and the district court dismisses the case as moot. Ninth Circuit reverses, saying 'what's to say they won't put him right back on the list?' FBI says 'OK fine, you're off the list, and we're not going to put you back on based on what we know now.' Case dismissed again as moot, and again the Ninth Circuit reverses: if you don't come clean about why you put him on the list, then he can't avoid conduct -- like attending that mosque -- that puts him back on the list. Anyone care to guess? Gorsuch says 'Ninth Circuit got it exactly right.' Alito write separately to say 'just to be clear, we're not saying the government has to reveal classified information!' Jerk. Does anyone believe that putting this guy on the list wasn't discrimination?
2. The immigration statutes limit judicial review of some kinds of cases to questions of law. What don't this mean when there are mixed questions of fact and law? In a 2020 case, the Court had held that a court could review a mixed question. So in this one, the majority, led by Sotomayor, says ok, that's the rule. Jackson concurs saying 'I think that 2020 decision was wrong, but it was made and we should follow it: if Congress thinks we're reading the statute wrong, they should change it.' Roberts dissents saying 'I don't think that 2020 decision compels this result,' and then Alito (joined by Thomas & Roberts) dissents saying 'the 2020 decision was wrong, I was against it then, and anyway, you're stretching it beyond what it (wrongly) held.'
Oh, and here's the underlying story. The mixed question is whether deporting Wilkinson would present an exceptional and extremely unusual hardship for M. The immigration judge said no, but can an actual court second-guess that.
In 2013, Wilkinson had a son, M., with his girlfriend Kenyatta Watson. Both M. and Watson are U. S. citizens.
Wilkinson lived in Pennsylvania and worked to support M. and Watson. M. lived with Wilkinson and Watson for the first two years of his life. Then, because Wilkinson could not take care of his son and work at the same time, he and Watson decided M. would have a better quality of life in New Jersey with his mother and her mother. Wilkinson took the train to visit his son every weekend and provided almost half his monthly wages ($1,200 per month) in informal child support. M. suffers from severe asthma, which requires hospital treatment multiple times a year. Wilkinson helped M. with his inhaler and medications and knew his regimen well. Watson suffers from depression and does not work, so she also relies on Wilkinson's financial and childcare support.
Wilkinson worked as a handyman and a laborer in construction. In 2019, police found drugs in a house where he had been hired to work on repairs. Despite Wilkinson's protests that neither the house nor the drugs were his, the police arrested him. When Wilkinson appeared in a Pennsylvania courthouse to contest the charges, he was arrested and detained by federal immigration officers. The criminal charges were ultimately withdrawn.
M. was seven years old when Immigration and Customs Enforcement detained his father. Afterwards, M. began to exhibit behavioral issues. M. became sad, acted out, and broke things. M.'s teacher texted Watson every day saying that M. was no longer focused and needed to talk to a counselor. Wilkinson called his son every other day from immigration detention. When M. hung up the phone, he cried and said he wanted his father to come home.
Whom among has not progressed through a few titles:
Viscount Malpas -> Earl of Rocksavage ->
The Most Honourable The Marquess of Cholmondeley
Also, Baron Cholmondeley of Witch Malbank.
I am also enjoyiing the heraldry description.
Cholmondeley of Cholmondeley Arms: Quarterly
1. Gules, in chief two esquires helmets Argent and in base a garb Or.
2. Lozengy Argent and Azure, a bend Gules, fretty Or. [Cheney]
3. Argent three capons Sable. [Capenhurst]
4. Quarterly Argent and Gules, in the second and third quarters a fret Or. [Dutton]
5. Argent, on a bend Gules three escarbuncles Or. [Thornton]
6. Vert a cross engrailed Ermine. [Kingsley]
7. Or, a saltire Sable. [Helsby]
8. Azure, on a chevron between three garbs Or, a crescent for cadency. [Hatton]
9. Azure, an estoile within the horns of a crescent Argent. [Minshull]
Crest: A demi-griffin segreant Sable, holding in the claws a helmet as in the arms Argent.
Oh, looks like the Supreme Court is fucking up the southern border with a shadow docket ruling. More later.
Spending the past two decades here really paid off when I was spontaneously able to correct someone's pronunciation of Cholmondeley the other day.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-68609361
It's all about bored women on TikTok...
Anyway, on the veldt, women had to figure to figure out which men would kill them in early middle age so they could bring in a similar looking, but younger, woman.
You know, actually, I'm not sure the last time Ogged has been seen in public. Are we sure he hasn't been replaced by AI?
31: "she doesn't want good photos taken because she doesn't like how she looks."
Then she's chosen a pretty peculiar line of work!
On conspiracies and wild speculation: so most of the time, as far as I know, Thomas Friedman is just kind of boring and banal like 99% of U.S. newspaper columnists, but -- is there some kind of extraterrestrial event that leads him, every so often, into mind-liquefying idiocy? Or have I been Twitter-sober long enough that I've lost my tolerance for this kind of thing and it's just another day?
Not sure, he's been one of the Three Morons from Hell (Friedman, Dowd, Brooks) for me for a long time. That that trio should be the top columnists at the country's paper of record for many years was a harbinger of our current political state. And not really an indictment of the Times per se, but rather just an inane reflection of our twisted through the looking glass political discourse.
That said, Friedman just wrote something unbelievably fatuous even for him but I forget what it was. Assume that is what yo are referring to.
Life is better completely ignoring all three of them. Not as good as it might be if reasonable people had their spots, but that's apparently not in the cards.
I don't think I've thought about Friedman in many years -- in fact this was the last time we crossed paths -- but his "real World Wars" remarks ended up in front of my eyeballs yesterday, and I was truly dumbfounded. I've got nothing but hand gestures. I agree that it's best to forget quickly.
63: Same, but yes it was in fact the "real World Wars" that I had seen somewhere recently.
60: They're in the business of driving eyeballs, so I figure they sprinkle in something weird/controversial from time to time for its own sake. And with how often they write, they're bound to miscalibrate some of the time and go from gratuitously silly/stretching to just ridiculous.
Kate just posted a video to exTwitter. She has some form of cancer and is starting chemo.
I guess that makes ajay the face of sober responsibility. Huh.
But don't worry, I'm sure the bizarre creepy obsessive conspiracy theories will turn out to be true about something for once eventually.
It is a terrible shame that she's sick. But she's a famous person with a 'job' that involves making regular public appearances and an active, professional public relations team managing her image (not necessarily at her direction or in her best interest); the way they handled it invited speculation. Some of the speculation was certainly kind of gross, but the fact that there was people were wondering what on earth was going on when the public information deliberately released made no sense ('scheduled' surgery; an active denial that she had cancer; long disappearance from public view with the photoshopped picture which, considering what she looks like in the video, really does appear to be showing her from before her health problems became apparent) doesn't mean they're ghouls, it means that they're interested in her in precisely the way the Royal Family has deliberately fostered interest.
I'm not blaming her and her family for not publishing all the details of her medical situation immediately, it's a hard position to be in. But the publicity around it was badly handled, and most of the public who were interested by the spectacle created by the badly handled publicity weren't doing anything wrong.
Individual starlings are responsible for the murmuration, but we fell for and rewarded (with attention) the clickbait artists. Again.
I'll note that we still haven't seen a photograph of ogged, ajay, and the Marquess of Cho. all in the same room.
are NOT responsible.
As you people have seen for 20 years now, somehow my most frequent typo is leaving out the word NOT.
Ok so what's actually your most frequent typo?
It is indeed surprisingly common for creepy obsessive stalkers to blame their victims for their obsession. How dare she thrust herself into our thoughts like that!
I literally trained the man who shot Kate Middleton point blank in the head* and I still managed to be less weird and obsessive (and more right) about her state of health than people living 8000 miles away from her.
*paintball. But it sounds better if I don't say that bit.
I just got 73, so thank you for 76.
75 and 75 are remarkable for the lack of any sort of denial of the implications of 71 last.
Or maybe they're not remarkable. I don't even know any more.
I did not stake out ogged at lunch. I went to buy nice shoes instead.
That's not how they execute Princesses of Wales. You need a car.
I thought the creepy obsession was weird but the obsessives weren't actually wrong that the palace was hiding something. It just turned out they were hiding something sad rather than something salacious.
I just figured maybe it didn't occur to King Charles that his son might not want his first wife dead.
"the obsessives weren't actually wrong that the palace was hiding something. "
I need you to understand that not telling you something is not the same as hiding it.
I did not stake out ogged at lunch
We also checked out Squirrel Hill, and drove by the very nice houses at the top.
I live in the poor part of Squirrel Hill.
It's quiet enough that at night in the summer the crickets are the loudest thing and I can be in Oakland in a half an hour by public transit.
I can be in Oakland in a half an hour by public transit
Is there a there there yet?
Some of the speculation was certainly kind of gross, but
...it would have been irresponsible not to speculate!
Deranged American tiktok women with too much time on their hands, and also possibly... https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/03/24/china-russia-fuelling-attacks-princess-wales-after-cancer/
Part of the issue is that the creepy intrusiveness of celebrity media is of a piece with its audience's characteristic mix of parasocial identification and judgmental nastiness. The first is a product designed to sell to the second. The second is an audience defined by the first.
But that's just really bog standard celebrity/media criticism; you could have said that about the fan mags of the 1930s, or the same kind of audience and Princess Diana in the 80s and 90s, or TMZ in the 2000s.
The really weird bit was a subculture defined by posting heavily reworked media behaving as if it was 1880, Fox-Talbot was still around, and "from today, painting is dead!" No, no, you can't rely on the photos you yourself post on the 'gram as literal evidence, let alone ones issued by a celebrity-management bureaucracy!
its audience's characteristic mix of parasocial identification and judgmental nastiness
My impression is that this seems to happen a lot more with female public figures? You don't get a lot of people online behaving as though, idk, The Rock or Tom Holland are actually their close personal friends/bitter personal enemies. Or maybe you do and it's happening in bits of the miasma I don't visit.
As is now inevitable, that comment was preceded by a brief period of agonising over whether I meant to say Tom Holland or Tom Hollander. The addition to the mix of a second entirely separate Tom Holland who writes pop history books has not improved matters.
But that's just really bog standard celebrity/media criticism; you could have said that about the fan mags of the 1930s, or the same kind of audience and Princess Diana in the 80s and 90s, or TMZ in the 2000s.
Or indeed the Prince Regent/Princess Caroline business back in the 1810s and 1820s. One bit of "Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell" that was very ingenious and really rang true was the very public literary feud between them, with England divided into Strangeites and Norrellites.
95: These comparisons are often dicey. The obvious parallel case is Charles, but he announced his cancer, didn't disappear without explanation and didn't put out an altered photo.
I'm not sure what ajay's critique here is. I get Alex's point -- a lot of morons say silly things on the internet. But in fact, one of the conspiracy theories turned out to be true. (My response to my fellow conspiracy theorist wife: "Told ya.")
So the question for ajay is: How does one properly comport oneself in this situation? Is it inappropriate to wonder what's going on and to speculate? Or is it the nature of the speculations that constitute the offense?
It would be irresponsible not to speculate.
I'm not sure how rumors about people with no actual governing responsibility would "destabilize the nation" unless people are already planning their next day off to stand in a five mile long coffin viewing queue.
What galls is the utter disconnect between significance and attention. Compare Austin. Has this even previously been mentioned here, among a collection of the best-informed and most conscientious US voters?
I knew of it. I don't think I mentioned it here.
Kate didn't "disappear without explanation". The Palace literally announced, in January, that she had gone into hospital for surgery and would be spending two weeks in hospital, and would be off duty until after Easter. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/jan/17/princess-of-wales-in-london-hospital-abdominal-surgery That was the explanation, that's exactly what happened. They also said, wrongly, that her condition wasn't cancer. After the surgery they discovered that it was. That wasn't announced until March but, frankly, you don't have a right to know every detail of someone else's medical condition.
But in fact, one of the conspiracy theories turned out to be true.
Which one?
It should have been inherently obvious to anyone except for those with a pathological tendency to develop deranged parasocial fixations on attractive women they have never met that, if the Palace wasn't going to try some massive disinformation op to conceal the cancer diagnosis of the actual monarch, it was hardly likely that they'd get into all this maskirovka stuff for the Princess of Wales.
I thought the actual monarch was a disinformation op to conceal the stuff the elected people are doing.
What galls is the utter disconnect between significance and attention.
But we all understand why this happened, right? Austin always gets less coverage than the royals for reasons that don't seem necessary to explain. And Austin provided us with a quick and fairly complete narrative. The story was basically over the moment we found out about it.
That wasn't announced until March but, frankly, you don't have a right to know every detail of someone else's medical condition.
I can agree with that, but I don't hang out in a part of the internet where people were expressing this type of entitlement. People were wondering what was going on, and the Firm made choices that fed that curiosity.
I mean, if you're going to have a monarchy along the lines of the UK setup, it seems that the whole point of it is to exist in the public sphere. That doesn't entitle anyone to anything, but the whole monarchy situation is designed to produce interest in the doings of the royals.
I think the post title covers the layers Trump legal development. Any lawyers care to opine about why Trump always gets special treatment to avoid any consequences? I haven't read anything about the appellate reasoning, just that they cut the bond to some number he probably can raise and gave him yet another delay of 10 days.
People are trying to speed the revolution by offering blatant and persistent advantages to the rich and reactionary.
It sounds like there was no reason given at all, it was just an order? And also they stayed without bond the special oversight provisions which means Trumpmcan just embezzle the bond funds from his company and then get indicted for that 5 years down the road. Fucking legal möbius strip.
Wrong "rein" here.
"This monumental holding reigns in Judge Engoron's verdict, which is an affront to all Americans," Habba said in a statement.
The popularity of the former president is not rooted in his -- or his employees' -- attention to detail.*
*I'm assuming this is Habba's error, and not Reuters'.
Multiple sources quote Habba with "reigns." The Washington Examiner cleaned it up for her.
It's also an unclear referent. Ambiguous whether it is the verdict, or this latest decision, which is the affront...
$175 million is still a non-trivial amount of money. Maybe he can fund a bond that size, but I'll believe it when I see it.
Here's this: https://www.garbageday.email/p/got
Yes, the #WhereIsKate hashtag was initially spread by the Sussex Squad, a royal fandom subculture that hates Prince William and believes Kate is, at best, sort of racist. And a lot of the early gossip was motivated by an impulse to give Kate a taste of what Meghan Markle is still experiencing at the hands of the UK media. But if you're looking for someone to blame all of this on, it's clearly Kate's press team and, by extension, everyone in her life that supposedly cares about her. There were countless moments where her press team could have squashed all this, but they didn't. Instead, they let a woman who had just discovered she has cancer become a global laughing stock and, at one point, made her apologize for it! Absolute sicko shit.
But this is also just how our various institutions work -- or more accurately do not work -- now. Over the last 25 years we have slowly uploaded every part of our lives to a system of platforms run by algorithms that make money off our worst impulses. Well, the ones brands are comfortable advertising around. And for years we have wondered what the world might look like when we crossed the threshold into a fully online world. Well, we did. We crossed it. This is what it looks like. And it is already too vast and complicated and all-encompassing to blame any one individual for how it functions. If we want something new, we'd have to smash the whole thing and I don't think that's going to happen. So let's hope PR people, at the very least, can figure out how to deal with it going forward.