Shrove Tuesday
The last day before the beginning of Lent on the Gulf Coast that once belonged to France, it is Mardi Gras, “Fat Tuesday”: Laissez les bon temps rouler!
It was first celebrated in Mobile, Alabama, but the big show these days is in New Orleans, and it is a holiday in the state of Louisiana, because people wouldn’t show up for work anyway, so why fight it.
The tradition is to serve King cake, which is a circle of cinnamon bun dough with a white frosting on top sprinkled with sugar colored purple, gold, and green. If that weren’t bad enough, they put the figurine of a baby in the dough, and whoever finds it in their piece is supposed to be lucky. Actually if you find it and don’t choke on it, I guess you are lucky. You should use a small ceramic figurine, as some of the cheap plastic versions melt in the oven [yummy].
16 comments
I’d love to see another Mardi Gras! I was lucky to attend on in the 80’s when I was in the USA. Was a treat for us from GD. Was a great week! Good memories…
Some parts of FL have had enough of the GOP! Hopefully, this trend will continue! 😀
Democrats flip 36th GOP-held state legislative seat with Florida win
It was the soggiest Mardi Gras in years, locally we had over 7 inches of rain on one day. However, with enough alcohol in your system you wouldn’t have cared.
They have Tea-partied themselves into pissing everyone off and Trump is suppressing sane Republicans while energizing the opposition.
Hi Bryan! I hope you are felling a lot better!
Twitter is going nuts over the high School shooting in FL. Just crazy!
GQ has some details & links to others.
The Florida Shooting Had All the Red Flags
There has been a table released by someone following the money, that shows how much (over $100 mill) the NRA invested in the Dotard/GOP campaign & election. Was wasted. A report released a couple days ago shows US gun sales are @ an all time low & have been since Dotard was elected. Remington is filing for bankruptcy & S&W are considering it. Won’t really do much as the same report also said that most of the current *redneck* gun owners have an average of 17-20 guns per household & some have over 120! So, it’s likely the worst crazies already have the guns.
It’s just insane. 🙁
The shooter was a rightwing Trump supporting neo fascist. They can talk all they want about immigrants and foreign terrorists, but those teachers and children were murdered by a member of the GOP base.
Remington Arms and Smith & Wesson are being killed by vulture capitalists who bought the companies to loot them by borrowing against all of their assets.
I had to work, so I celebrated Mardi Gras by cooking up a big pot of red beans and sausage and rice and bringing it to work. We had a nice meal.
That was a nice thing to do Badtux! 😀
I am impressed, Bryan, with the many survivors teachers & kids that have taken to both MSM & mass-media to call out the NRA, GOP & Dotard. The kids especially are very motivated. A couple teachers found out about a fund-raiser in FL just after the attack for Paul Ryan & he had them escorted out. So they started a protest.
Teacher Confronts Paul Ryan At Florida Fundraiser: ‘You’re Here Celebrating The Death Of 17 Children’
I really don’t think the GOP or Dotard have much time left. 😀
A US T friend (part of the large #GeeksResist group) just posted this! Just when I thought things could not get any more surreal or crazy… I should have known better!
Make Dating Great Again! Find Your Pro-Trump Match Today
And… It’s NOT a joke! Hmmmm…. The parent Company is reg’d in FL & runs several *dating* type sites, including for Veterans etc.
Friends Worldwide Inc.
1504 Bay Rd, Ste 672 – Miami Beach, FL 33139
As much as I love red beans and rice, that will have to wait a little while longer. Like black-eye peas on New Years, it is a Southern tradition that doesn’t involve deep frying or mayonnaise 🙂
Florida is not going to be a good place for the GOP to hold fund-raisers for a while, which doesn’t look good for the mid-term election.
The dating site is good news – the lack of genetic diversity will eliminate the “strain”. 👿
Hmmm! You could well have a good point about the dating site! 😆
Another NRA link:
Florida Shooting Suspect Took Part in Training Program That Received NRA Grant
John Oliver had a good piece on the shooting in his first episode back:
John Oliver praises Parkland massacre survivors for refusing to be told it’s ‘not the time to talk about gun control’
And Student’s, Parent’s, Teachers and everyone up to University Snr. Lecturer’s and Dep’t Heads have joined forces to create a rapidly growing movement against gun violence and the NRA. I’d say the tipping point has finally been reached!
It’s it just amazing how Humans have to be forced to breaking point before most will do anything?! I really don’t think most Humans have any kind of rational survival instinct! *sigh*
And then… The World returns to normalcy with this:
Missouri Third-Graders Selling AR-15 Raffle Tickets For Their Baseball Team
Unbelievable. Well, it should be… it isn’t. *shrug*
The gun raffle in Missouri is because the father of one of the kids is a gun dealer who donated the weapon. It is still an incredibly brain-dead concept. In New York the idea is flat illegal. I would have insisted that you had to pass a background check before you would be allowed to buy a ticket, but I tended to be a PITA about things like that.
The NRA used to be about gun safety and conservation, emphasizing hunting and target shooting. Then it was ‘captured’ by the gun manufacturers and became their lobbyists. Their answer for everything is buy more guns. They are “drug dealers” selling death as a dream of a time and place that never existed.
The thing is the AR-15/M-16 is a piece of shit as a weapon. It can pump out a lot of rounds at close range, but you can’t be certain what you’re going to hit beyond something in front of you. I was very happy when I shifted over the S&W revolver for qualification and turned in the plastic weapon card with the serial number of an M-16 that I actually saw maybe once a year to qualify. The Air Force had tight controls on weapons, even in combat zones.
The kids have had it politicians and intend to clean house on the gun issue. We had an assault weapons ban before and we can have one again. We can have better background checks and can eliminate the exceptions for gun shows and private sales. There are exemptions for every right in the Bill of Rights, no matter what the NRA tells you.
Yes.
At least one gun owner in Florida has seen the light. He surrendered his AR-57 for disposal.
“I Do Not Need This Rifle”: This Man Gave Up His AR-15–Style Gun Because Of The Florida School Shooting
Hopefully, this will start a trend. Unfortunately, we all know that the real crazies, who really should not have a weapon like this, will even consider getting rid of them. But just maybe, it will make some politicians think harder. *shrug*
I wouldn’t trust them in Florida. I would strip it down and take it to a blacksmith. A decent hammer after heating can ensure that the weapon is “disposed’. Some places, possibly Florida, won’t allow the police to meltdown confiscated weapons, but require them to be sold. You can make money from scrap metal, you don’t need the same guns showing up at crime scenes year after year.
The AR-15 is actually pretty accurate if you fit it with a scope. Ranchers out west use it as a varmint gun because it shoots longer and flatter than a .22 rifle and thus works better on the wide open prairies. Of course, with a .223 caliber, that’s all it’s good for — varmints. Or piercing body armor in order to kill people when aimed at center of mass, but it was really designed in order to be able to carry lots of rounds, not because it was the most effective rifle for killing people on a one-to-one basis. It was designed so that our soldiers could carry lots of little bullets rather than fewer big bullets with them so they could injure more enemy soldiers, not because it’s great for shooting anything bigger than varmints. Of course, put enough bullets into someone, or hit something critical, and they’re dead even with that little .223 bullet… and the AR15 is designed to be able to put LOTS of bullets into people…
Do I think people need an AR-15. Nope. If you need the flatter longer trajectory of the .223 round for hunting varmints on the prairie, just chamber and re-barrel a .22 bolt action rifle for that round. (Most .22’s of course have a tubular magazine and shoot rim shot, you can’t put a center-fire round in a tubular magazine, but there’s a few that are bolt action with a box magazine). Hard to do mass shootings with a bolt-action rifle…
There have been real varmint rifles available forever – bolt action, scoped, in .22 variant center-fire calibers. We always used the rim fires for plinking. A Savage Arms pump .22 rimfire was the first firearm I ever handled, and the town dump was the ‘firing range’ of choice. You could occasionally shoot a rat, but that was the extent of my varmint shooting. You have to go North and West for marmots and prairie dogs for the .22 Hornets/.223 rounds to be popular.
The first semi-auto rifles I ran into were Garands that started to replace 1903 Springfields for deer. .30-06 was the deer rifle caliber when I grew up. The WWI and WWII vets were comfortable with it.
Yes, you could carry a lot of ammo, but most of it was wasted, which is why the M-16 was replaced with the M-4 which has a 3-round burst instead of a full auto selection. I fired the M-16 and an Uzi on the range during the police academy. They were a waste of ammo. In law enforcement you need to ID the target and take it out without wounding/killing a lot of by-standers. Guns aren’t magic, they’re tools. You need training and experience to learn how to use them properly. You also need the right ‘tool’ for the job.
The M-16 was replaced by the M-4 mostly for weight and compactness, not because of the 3-round burst vs auto selection. The auto-fire capability was removed from active duty military M-16 weapons by 1986 when the Army moved to the M16-A2 rifle (the Marines had moved to it three years prior). That is what introduced the 3-round burst mode (it has no fully automatic mode).
The M-4 was based on a cut-down M16-A2 and was intended to be a compromise between a rifle and a carbine so that the military could issue only one light weapon, rather than having to also have the XM177 carbine to issue for urban warfare where the M-16’s barrel was too long. This great plan on the part of the military geniuses in the Pentagon finally came to fruit in the mid 1990’s when they got the Army (but not the Marines) to buy into the M-4. The Marines continued to carry the M-16 until a decade of our most excellent war in Iraq finally convinced them that they, too, needed a more compact weapon to deal with all the urban warfare they were doing, and they finally switched to the M-4 too.