I got a screwy one for ya.
This is my review of Pipeworks Cherry Lime Rye:
The Ref begins at a mansion in… *checks notes*
*shudders*
…Connecticut. Here a cat burglar named Gus manages to botch a haul of jewelry from Martha Stewart, or whoever. As far as I am aware only thing I’ve ever seen set in Connecticut is Turn: Washington’s Spies and the Gilmore Girls. The former was great because they let Angus MacFadden fly his Scottish freak flag, and the latter I will pause for you to swoon over Lauren Graham.
Good? Okay lets continue.
Gus, played by America’s favorite chain smoking dickweed, Dennis Leary, manages to escape the enormous dog the owner left in charge of the mansion. He finds his getaway driver fled the scene and comes across Lloyd and Caroline on their way back from marriage counseling. After a brief moment of Dennis Leary getting annoyed and telling them to shut the fuck up before I shoot you both, he ends up taking them hostage in their home. This being Connecticut, they don’t have any means to turn the tables on Gus and are forced to do what a man with a gun tells them to do. Also neither of them trusts the other enough to actually work together against a man taking them hostage. Besides, he’s rocking the 90’s movie standard Beretta 92F and actually has pretty decent trigger discipline, so better just do what he says.
Now this movie is basically Dennis Leary being an asshole that is stuck as a de facto marriage counselor between some adulterous AWFL and her husband played by Kevin Spacey. Do they have children? Oh yeah, the kid is a shitbag. He’s is a privileged twerp that tries to tag along with Gus but is rebuffed because he’s a privileged twerp. He is home from military school, and has a duffel bag filled with cash from blackmailing the school’s commander. The situation only deteriorates when extended family show up for Xmas dinner. Gus is forced to pose as their marriage counselor working on a novel therapy, at dinner, on Xmas eve…of course to maintain appearances he takes the actual counselor’s name: Dr. Wong. There are other characters of course to make me believe Connecticut is an early stop along Dante’s Inferno, such as a neighbor dropping off fruitcake and getting drunk off his fat ass, and the military school commander coming back for his money.
Gus eventually gets in contact with his getaway driver and arranges an escape via a stolen boat. Not before everyone decides the actual villain in this story is the mother in law, and this common enemy is what keeps the marriage from falling apart. The son knows a trail to the docks through the woods, and takes Gus to his escape.
Can they make this movie again? Probably not, our culture is not suited for black comedies anymore so the number of people that will actually find this humorous is limited to the number that find Dennis Leary funny. I have to wonder if he’s not sufficiently leftist enough because they did him dirty on this one, since it was set during the holidays but released in springtime so it was always destined for a second rate cult following. Also, the trigger discipline.
Like this movie, this is meant for a niche audience. On the surface I will admit I just happen to like the cherry lime combination….in any other context. This is something of a cruel joke. Its a sour ale, but they don’t call it that. I guess its a rye ale, but that’s again a cruel joke. You know what? Give this to your mother in law. Pipeworks Cherry Lime Rye: 1.9/5
I like a cherry lime ricky, but not beer.
cherry lime ricky
Paging Marina Dunham?
OH YOU REMEMBERED!!!
I love you so much, JI.
The Ref is one of my all time favorite Christmas flicks. Watch it every year. The moment when Kevin Spacey and Judy Davis both break from their argument to simultaneously yell “FUCK YOU!” at their therapist puts me in stitches even after seeing it about 50 times.
Christmas In Connecticut is too obvious. Mystic Pizza? Beetlejuice? The Ice Storm?
I was going to mention Christmas in Connecticut too
There’s also Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House.
Several of Eugene O’Neill’s works are set in Connecticut, and the movie versions retain the Connecticut setting, notably “Ah, Wilderness” (the 1935 version is quite good) and “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” (well-acted, but a difficult story to watch).
And I believe the TV show Who’s the Boss was set in Connecticut.
“Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House”
I’ve seen that one. I love the scene when the wife is describing paint colors.
Also, that movie with Burt Lancaster “swimming” home.
Does your wife love that scene?
The Burt Lancaster movie is “The Swimmer”, based on a John Cheever story IIRC. I didn’t care for it.
Bewitched, too.
Basically anything “well-off suburban New York”. Except Dick van Dyke which was Westchester, I think.
“Red, green, blue, yella, white.”
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0040613/quotes/?item=qt0330548
The Swimmer’s worth seeing once (I haven’t read it). Young Joan Rivers at the end!
Auntie Mame! Partly tri-state, partly Christmassy.
Here’s an earworm for ya, rhywun.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLwizfTmf30
I remember enjoying The Ref. But I haven’t seen it since if first came out on VHS.
There was a time where I felt bad for Milo Yiannopoulos. He was the target of a coordinated media hit job to smear him as something based on something he didn’t actually say. It came from the left and right because they didn’t like his tone and who he was.
He seemed to take it all in and embrace the idea that he is an irredeemable piece of shit and set about proving his critics right.
I mean, I guess there’s like a 1% chance he’s telling the truth about Benny Johnon’s homo escapades. But otherwise he’s just attacking a guy who actually seems like he’s a relatively decent human being given the MAGA sphere he inhabits. He’s also one of the few guys on the right who doesn’t think men who like video games are the source of all society’s problems. Like Walsh things aren’t going to get better in this country if young men put the controller down and have 10 kids they can’t afford, you out of touch fuck.
Milo is Milo. It’s in his nature.
Is the reviewed beverage a joint venture between Pipeworks and Sonic?
If not, then surely inspired by it.
Sonic partnered with a different brewery a while back. Dunkin Donuts has partnered with a brewery (off the top of my head, it’s been Harpoon) for years doing coffee beers. Locally, Swensons has partnered with Hoppin’ Frog brewery for several shandy collaborations as well.
The Ref begins at a mansion in… *checks notes*
*shudders*
…Connecticut
Connecticut is the Fifth Ring of Hell.
This being Connecticut, they don’t have any means to turn the tables on Gus and are forced to do what a man with a gun tells them to do.
There are people in Connecticut with guns.
Which, if they were in the movie, it would be a short movie.
William F. Buckley is in the movie?
I’m missing a joke here.
Give this to your mother in law.
Cold.
From the ded thred….
Tim Walz:
Let’s check in on this claim, shall we?
On Minnesota’s homeless….
https://spokesman-recorder.com/2025/12/12/minnesota-homelessness-crisis-winter-shelters/
On Minnesota Education Stats….
Less than 1/2 proficient at Math. Less than 1/2 proficient at Reading. A shade over 1/4 proficient in science.
https://rc.education.mn.gov/#assessmentsParticipation/orgId–999999000000__groupType–state__accountabilityFlg–FOC_NONE__test–allAccount__subject–M__year–trend__grade–all__p–3
Great job, guv’nor. Minnesotans may want to beware the fumes from all the gaslighting. Don’t dare strike a match.
1. How many homeless families, particularly long term homeless, are there? Saying families are being turned away sounds more like propaganda. I’m sure there’s a handful of heartbreaking cases, but that’s not the norm.
2. Minnesota has a homeless pop of roughly ~10k. That’s not nothing, but this isn’t California which has like a third of the homeless in the country. They are slightly above average on a per capita basis.
https://usafacts.org/articles/which-states-have-the-highest-and-lowest-rates-of-homelessness/
The leaders are all blue states, though. Arizona is the highest red state and they’ve become purplish thanks to fraud and immigration from third world shitholes like the People’s Republic of California and those south.
Minnesota has a hard ceiling on homeless because it’s a fucking Tundra in winter. It has nothing to do whatsoever with policy. If they had CA, or even western WA or OR weather, they’d be just as filled with homeless as those others.
Minnesota has a hard ceiling on homeless because it’s a fucking Tundra in winter.
I said the same thing about NH, but the homeless population has been growing until recently.
Manchester’s mayor, after a Supreme Court ruling on ordinances prohibiting public camping, started aggressively enforcing Manchester’s ordinance prohibiting public camping.
Nashua’s city government got tired of complaints from downtown businesses about homeless disrupting their businesses, and so passed an ordinance prohibiting public camping. I have not heard word on whether or not the Nashua police have begun dismantling the homeless camps in Nashua.
I hope it’s better than it sounds. The movie, that is.
The “beer” is beyond hope.
I say again: Red Chair, from Deschutes, is good stuff.
I would see this more as a summer beer, I just picked up a mild and a coffee brown ale to stock my fridge for the weekend.
Aren’t all chaps assless?
I seen some chaps in England who had buttocks.
Smoke detector update:
San Francisco shows its true colors after a few days.
The damn smoke detector is broken, even a new battery at 3:00 AM (installed by me) did not fix it.
I installed it because there is no engineering staff overnight at this 100 year old building.
At 8:00 it started chirping again. They called engineering, who had us as low priority until I went down there. Engineering had to remove the detector.
Manager is not comping us a night, which he should. Mrs. R.J. Is a former Hilton Insider and this story is going to get out. Fucking idiot. This place is mismanaged. I get the Hell out of San Fran tomorrow morning.
Sorry 🙁
At least the wife is sleeping for a couple of hours. I took the daughter to the lobby to play Catacombs of Awfulness and Cryptid Trumps.
https://www.etsy.com/listing/4391292720/catacombs-of-awfulness-48-rooms-card
Do they have one of those decontamination chambers like you see in movies so that you can wash fecal particulates off before getting on the plane?
You know, I was really going to take pictures of poo piles and talk about it. But North San Fran is almost 100% clear of bums and associated fecal deposits. It’s all South of here.
I am in Union Square. The mayor is at least smart enough to not horrify the tourists.
A buddy of mine visited there like the week after Xinnie the Pooh’s junket and said it was immaculate.
I was in my storage “attic” (actually an uninsulated space off the upper floor) this morning hanging up some clothes since my upstairs space has no real closet space. The smoke detector that I put there Thanksgiving weekend was still chirping two weeks later.
That is awful R.J. Here’s hoping you get some sleep on your flight.
Sorry RJ
The Ref is an excellent movie, but probably impossible to remake. Hence a double BINGO.
TWIP
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2025/12/the-week-in-pictures-its-beginning-to-look-a-lot-like-christmas-edition.php
Thanks, I forgot.
Re: Thanksgiving with the Democrats comic,
1. Obama and AOC had to be labeled, but no one else?
2. Why is the pot that Fetterman is carrying labeled “Reason”?
3. I guess Newsom’s flaming dinner plate is a Pacific Palisades reference?
1. Lots of the other people are labeled, too.
2. He’s the closest thing TEAM BLUE has to a voice of reason?
Trading Places is a Christmas movie, featuring Jamie Lee Curtis’ large and shapely breasts.
Another fine Christmas season movie, and fine breasts.
I’ll bet you a nice crisp dollar that you’ll have multiple laughs.
No, it’s a New Years Eve movie.
The Apartment is both Christmas and New Year’s Eve.
Sigourney Weaver >> Jamie Lee Curtis
No
Go is a Christmas movie, as is Rambo.
Dennis Leary (Not I’m an Asshole)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-f_dxLiuXuw
Not funny? Oi’ll fight yez!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTRrZcEsjFU
New research reveals that pub goers prefer a new style of service – with more than half (55%) leaning towards pre-booking, ordering digitally and forming a line away from the counter as opposed to spreading out across the bar – in Propel
https://x.com/PaulCharity1/status/1998281578644914563
if I go to an english pub I do not want to have to order a pint from some app.
The point of digitization is to make things better.
In my experience, requiring an app almost universally makes things worse. I’m at a point to where if an app is required, I simply won’t go.
FIFY
They managed to almost kill pub culture in London. Most bars don’t have seats at the bar anymore, locals I chatted with said the bar stools never came back after the ‘vid lockdowns ended.
As if the smoking ban hadn’t been enough.
Toxteth:
I did appreciate the lack of “no alcohol behind this point” signs, as people would just carry their pints outside to smoke.
Related to OMWC’s links. Here is your nut punch for the morning.
https://www.jpost.com/middle-east/article-880216
Why the fuck are we still in Syria? The odds are that the wounded and dead are from the Army Reserve or National Guard.
Because Jolani, or whatever name he is using today, said something nice to Trump. So once again Trump gets rolled by flattery.
Here’s the second nut punch in the story: “The attacker was a member of Syrian security forces, three local officials told Reuters.”
Cementing the Reagan-esque legacy with his own version of the Beirut barracks bombing.
We’ve always been in Syria?
Another week of you taking one for the team. Thanks for doing the work so we don’t have to.
Rising star
Crockett, a rising star in the Democratic Party, announced her Senate bid Monday and addressed people’s concern over her intended exit from the House to the upper chamber.
“There are a lot of people that said, ‘You got to stay in the House. We need our voice. We need you there.’ And I understand, but what we need is for me to have a bigger voice,” Crockett said at her campaign launch event.
She knows how to fix this country good.
What a tireless and selfless public servant. Doesn’t come off at all like a narcissistic psychopath.
Now I’m just picturing Carville’s tongue up her ass – and both of them quite happy about it.
I am in Union Square. The mayor is at least smart enough to not horrify the tourists.
Have you been to the Exploratorium? Does it even still exist? I heard they moved it out of the exposition park.
Don’t know. We had one real tourist day, did Muir Woods and several other old places.
Daughter correctly pointed out that private money made all the cool things through about 1910, then the place kind of froze in time.
Government intervention is a horrible thing.
In June 2020, 1,200 health professionals signed a letter that “prioritized opposition to racism as vital to public health.”
A large shift in Republican views on science followed. In 2019, 70% of R’s said science has had a mostly positive effect on society. In 2021, it was 57%.
https://x.com/data_depot/status/1998820621543944462
I wonder if anything else occurred during 2020 and 2021 that may have affected public perception of
scienceThe Science™.Nope. Nothing. It never happened and, if it did, it was good.
Yeah, I can’t think of anything. Must just be that Republicans are racist.
When did The Science retire from the government again?
Noted hard headed realist and political philosopher
In her most expansive diagnosis yet of what she cast as the country’s broken political system, the former vice president told members of the Democratic National Committee here that repair would require more than moving past President Donald Trump.
“We must be honest that for so many, the American dream has become more of a myth than reality,” she said.
I thought the American Dream was a pernicious falsehood intended to keep the rabble in chains.
The American Dream is really a nightmare of false consciousness; people will only wake up to their true misery once Democrats have full control of govt.
“Both parties have failed to hold the public’s trust,” she said in her Friday evening speech, drawing scattered claps from the crowd. “Government is viewed as fundamentally unable to meet the needs of its people. In these and so many other ways, the people feel that the very institutions that were designed to support them have failed them. They are not wrong.”
Muh Nanny State!
Be thankful for the support that crutch gives you [after we’ve kneecapped you].
He is on paid leave the duration of which is not over…
https://www.motor1.com/news/780585/jaguar-design-boss-gerry-mcgovern-fired-denied/
You have heard of the ‘Out Of Africa’ hypothesis but have you heard of the ‘Out Of England’ hypothesis? The evidence is adding up
https://x.com/kunley_drukpa/status/1999207841186332920
I’d buy a gun!
Welcome to NYC.
Welcome to NYC.
Nice. Double post AND it dropped the link!
https://abc7ny.com/post/macys-herald-square-nyc-stabbing-tourist-california-stabbed-changing-baby-store-bathroom/18279401/
When did The Science retire from the government again?
That’s DOCTOR The Science to you.
Kerri Aherne, the woman who allegedly stabbed a tourist from California in a Macy’s bathroom as the victim was changing her 10-month-old daughter, was previously arrested in Massachusetts for threatening to kill Senator Elizabeth Warren, according to the Manhattan district attorney’s office.
MAGA confirmed.
Miss Finland Sarah Dzafce stripped of crown over racist gesture in social media post
Miss Finland Sarah Dzafce was stripped of her title on Thursday, weeks after competing at the Miss Universe pageant over a racially charged social media post.
Dzafce, 22, posed for a photo pulling the corners of her eyes with the caption “kiinalaisenkaa syömäs,” which roughly translates to “eating with a Chinese person,” in a social media post from late November.
The troubling image was shared on the anonymous German app, Jodel, by a friend who allegedly made the caption without Dzafce’s knowledge, the Helsinki Times reported.
The beauty queen initially claimed that she was suffering a “severe headache” and was rubbing her temples
Bizlet
@bizlet7
Why do none of these beauty queens ever reflect the actual countries that hold titles in?
Finnish women are supposed to look like retarded Swedes not some Mediterranean.
https://x.com/bizlet7/status/1999844590937887022
Risk
“This is a deeply disappointing day for California’s coast,” said Linda Seeley, spokesperson for Mothers for Peace. “The Commission had a chance to put safety and marine life above corporate convenience — and it failed. PG&E’s cooling system destroys marine ecosystems every single day, and its seismic data are decades old. Approving this permit unnecessarily places the Central Coast at great risk.”
If it saves one plankton…
All right, so, I haven’t been around because I’m the breadwinner at the moment. However, being the breadwinner never fails to fill my creative well. I’m working on a departure from my usual books, a concept I’ve been cooking since 1998 or thereabouts, which now has completely changed because I’m older and wiser.
ANYWAY.
This involves magic. And fairy tales. And urban legends. And monsters. And deities, demons, and demigods.
So, those of you who read fantasy or paranormal or whateverthehell I’m doing is called, do you prefer strict magic systems (i.e., based on “sufficiently advanced technology”/science/physics) or not, and why, and also, do you care if the wielder doesn’t know how it works, just how to make it work?
If the magic is “whatever happens just happens”, I devalue the story because it eliminates any obstacle. If magic can do anything, and there’s no rules, there’s no stakes. Now, the rules don’t need to be spelled out in the text, or even overly discussed by the character, but they should exist in the background. The rules should at least make some kind of sense, but don’t necessarily need to be complete and cover all situations.
Off the top of my head, I’d say Butcher, Goodkind, and Jordan did these kind of systems well. Even when something unknown happens, it still fits into the framework established. Heinlein did a really fun take on it in Magic Inc., Niven and Pournelle also collaborated on some books with a similar frame work.
I prefer internally consistant systems, even if the user isn’t sure what those rules are it should obey them.
If the character is wrong and/or ignorant, it would be nice if there were clues for the reader to figure out what the rules are.
Agree with Neph and UnCiv. Magic should have very definite limits and even costs to using it. A dose of mysticism/metaphysics doesn’t hurt to sort of sketch out the limits/rules.
i do not like strict rules magic it seems less magical… also I like it when magic has some cost not just an endless superpower though the cost can be subtle. But magic needs to have some form of rules and limitation even if the borders are fuzzy. I also like the idea of magic being personal you do not just learn a spell but adapt it to yourself, find a variation that works for you if that makes sense.
@Bro, I read your comment about Trump last night to my husband. We both howled because it’s SO TRUE. My husband added that he’s a good troll, and I said, “Yes, but is he clever enough to troll on purpose or is he just falling into all the plot holes the left leaves lying around?”
I read somewhere (here?) that Denis Leary poached a lot of his material. I liked him a lot back in 90’s and remember how funny I thought his Asshole song was the first few times I heard played by the morning radio shock jocks which were popular back then. He was also perfectly cast as Christopher Walken’s bodyguard in Suicide Kings, another underrated movie.
Fish boots?
And more commentary on the nickfuentes piersmorgan thing 🙂
https://x.com/Anarseldain/status/1998470578705985678