Oh it gets better.

The statue — which rises 15 feet atop a 7-foot base — was commissioned and bankrolled by a collective of crypto investors seeking to boost visibility for their memecoin, $PATRIOT, according to The Daily Beast.

Sculptor Alan Cottrill told The Times in February that he agreed to create the bronze figure for $300,000 but complained that the investors were slow in paying. In November he proposed coating it in gold leaf.

His suggestion went down like an offering of water “to a person dying of thirst,” he said. “Immediately everybody jumped on board.”

There is a British comic strip called Buster Gonad and his Unfeasibly Large Testicles. It is an absurd, immature joke about a man with ridiculously enormous spasmojesticles whose titanic sperm factories keep causing him trouble. It’s fun when Star Trek predicts the future; when Viz does so, it makes me want to start liking alcohol.

Here you go

I’m reading The Ottomans: Khans, Caesars, and Caliphs by Marc David Baer. One of the numerous things he talks about is attitudes to wine in the Ottoman court, which set the time for all of contemporary Türkiye. Baer compares Turkish attitudes toward wine with similarly positive attitudes in Iran and the Arab nations, also noting that the Ottomans and Safavids both condemned each other as being drunk as good Muslims must never be. (The Ottomans and Safabids were constantly calling each other blasphemous for indulging in the very things they themselves loved doing).

The idea that all alcohol is haram is actually pretty recent. Muslims in the medieval and early modern eras interpreted the Qu’ran as forbidding specific types of fermented beverages rather than banning alcohol altogether, let alone all intoxicants as is generally the case today. Arab, Iranic, and Turkish poets wrote epic paeans to the greatness of wine and waxed lyrical about how it brought one closer to God and so all Muslims should drink it. Christian European diplomats complained that Muslim Turkish dignitaries outdrank them hard, and nobody could put away wine as well as the sultan.

Ever since Muhammad, at least some Muslims have interpreted the Qu’ran as banning any consumption of alcohol, but it’s unclear when this position became the dominant one. I know that wine flowed freely in the Ottoman court into the 17th century, so it was probably only some time in the Modern era.

We raise our cows in fields.

And if everybody did that, society would utterly collapse as almost no necessary work got done.

A bunch of Protestants think the Pope is the Antichrist, but apparently Vance identifies as Catholic, so yeah, he’s defying God. Catholic doctrine also holds that the Pope is infallible when ruling on theology.

Basically:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZiCl7j9mowk

I bet the Eurasians are the ones spreading the lies. There’s a reason we have always been at war with them.

The living space features three bedrooms and 3 1/2 baths and a detached guest house.

Price sounds about normal for San Francisco Bay. The more interesting question is why it has half a bath.

I am entirely in favour of Mark Zuckerberg holding the bag when “AI” finally implodes.

Unless you live in Waterford, the song is accurate.

Bikes aren’t allowed on motorways, and if you sneak past the checkpoints you have a good chance of dying.

I live in Tipperary. A while ago I had an interview for a job in Louth, and one of the interviewers asked me if I would be driving the breadth of the country every weekday; her tone of voice and body language suggested this was a perfectly reasonable thing to do, and more plausible than moving house.

I answered no, I’d move, because people who drive across multiple counties 10 times a week are lunatics. Turned out one of the other interviewers was a lunatic.

What did/does he do?

I’m sorry, I thought this was Cards Against Humanity.

mbin mentioned!

Also there’s Sharkey, which is basically Misskey but in English.

Akkoma is like independent Misskey or something.

WriteFreely is a blogging platform.

No idea but I’ll tag @apps@toot.fedilab.app in case they know

They’re not all shagging at the same time