Don

Saw Taylor Tomlinson’s new hour in KC tonight. Really really really good. Her stage presence, material, timing, feel, etc… are just top notch. Whenever I see a comic’s new material I kinda expect to be disappointed, and this was like the polar opposite of that.

Their postgame around the league highlight crew is terrible

Looked like a real team out there tonight

Just now, T.G. said:

Neto is baseball's equivalent of a gym rat

For real. For being a year out of college the dude has an unreal feel for the game.

Ballplayer

Real bad job on that 2-0 pitch by Wallach 

Just now, Don said:

Neto is one of those dudes where the stats just don’t tell the full story. A little like young Eckstein. Just a dude that finds ways to help you win games

And then he immediately catches everyone napping for a SB

Neto is one of those dudes where the stats just don’t tell the full story. A little like young Eckstein. Just a dude that finds ways to help you win games

Clean peanut

Fubar

An Arnold Schwarzenegger-led spy comedy/family drama that is good at being neither of those things. Absolutely overflowing with cliches, and it knows that it is. Fortune Feimster is in this for reasons that don’t entirely make sense for her or the show. This show is objectively bad, yet I’ve watched the first seven episodes in the last week.

I started off as a Journalism major and just found the content of the coursework excruciatingly boring. It seemed like every class was a review of the same general advertising concepts with new terms for them. So I switched over to History, mainly because I found the coursework interesting at least. About a year and a half into that I was talking to a bartender at my favorite local place who was also a graduate teaching assistant. He was teaching a Cartography class for the upcoming semester, but he needed a minimum number of students to keep the class from getting cancelled (thus losing him a decent chunk of money), so I agreed to sign up for it. I ended up taking to it really well, and I changed my major to Geography with an emphasis in Geographic Information Systems. Finished with that degree along with a minor in History, and somehow ended up becoming an engineer in my post-college professional life.

Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History did a podcast series called Ghosts of the Ost Front about ten years ago that is excellent. That theater of the war was just unrivaled in both scale and mutual brutality. 

Quick question for anyone with employment law/HR knowledge.

So I recently noticed that my last several paychecks have all been for the same exact amount (for the last two months). I thought that was odd since I’m an hourly employee, and the number of hours I work in a pay period tends to have a little variance (usually between 80 and 85 per two weeks). I email HR/Payroll about it, they ask me to give them a call, so I do. They proceed to tell me I’m a salaried employee and the number of hours I work in a pay period doesn’t matter. I explain that I’m in fact a non-exempt hourly employee, I agreed to accepting my current position in the capacity of a non-exempt hourly employee, and I’ve never received any notification that my status was changing, nor have I signed any acknowledgement of such a change.

HR’s response (again, over the phone) was basically “tough shit man”. They contended that my position never should have been hourly to begin with, and that any change to that is simply a correction of a prior mistake. I re-iterated that I had negotiated my current pay at an hourly rate (I’ve had the same job title since December 2021), I had been receiving pay for overtime hours worked as recently as March of this year, and I (once again) had never been notified of any change to that arrangement. After the call I emailed them pay stubs showing overtime pay from this year, and a screenshot of our time tracking system which STILL classifies me as a non-exempt hourly employee. 
 

So my question for anyone with experience in these matters is whether or not I have any sort of recourse if they come back and say “tough shit” again? I’d think the lack of notice on their part/no signed acknowledgement of a change on my part would expose them to some sort of liability, but what do I know? Anyhow, if they’re not willing to correct the situation, what should my next steps be? 

8 minutes ago, Tank said:

we're wondering if at some point the daughter stops being the worst person in the history of humanity.

17 hours ago, Tank said:

we finished S2 of Yellowstone. it's a good series. If you're a fan of "rich land owning family vs. the world" kind of shows, you'll enjoy this one. They also throw in a healthy dose of cowboy stuff and native american/reservation life. 

The first two seasons are really good. The third season gets a little more fast and loose with the plot, and by season four it's 1000% off the rails. Still fun, but more and more unbelievable as the show goes on.

I got talked into my major by a bartender.

Watching the guy play, he certainly passes the eye test. He just looks like he belongs here. Seems very comfortable at this level for a guy that was playing games against the Radford Highlanders and Presbyterian Blue Hose a year ago. He seems super hard to project though. Like is this dude gonna be a .240/.290/.350 guy two years from now? Or maybe a .300/.350/.480 sort of dude? Absolutely no clue. I could see it going either way, though I'd definitely like to think the latter. My personal guess (ok, maybe hope) is that he turns into an Edgar Renteria sort of hitter. So maybe not entirely in line with that second slash line, but fairly close to it. I really don't know. But I definitely like the way he's starting off.  

The Diplomat (Season One):
New Netflix show about a freshly-appointed US ambassador to the UK (Keri Russell) dealing with an international crisis amidst complex political relationships on both sides of the Atlantic. Good writing, good acting, good character development. Just an all-around well put together show. I think Netflix has already committed to a second season, and I'll definitely be watching that when it comes out. Also, Keri Russell is hot. 

1 hour ago, Alfred O. Griffin said:

I actually might order the sauce to try, but probably not gonna jump on the 12 pack. That kind of blind commitment is reserved for Costco.

Yeah, I’m sure they have individual bottles available online somewhere. They’re available in most grocery stores around here.

Gates definitely isn’t the best barbecue in KC overall, but their sauce definitely is. It’s a lot more peppery than other sauces you’d find in KC, and not nearly as sweet as a lot of the others. It works really really well on burgers too, strangely.

https://gatesbbq.com/product/40-oz-classic-only-bbq-sauce-case/
 

Sisu

Went to see this last night. Really well put together in terms of how it looks, feels, sounds, etc… The story is pretty straightforward and uncomplicated. It’s about killing Nazis, plain and simple. Basically John Wick meets Inglorious Basterds, while looking and feeling like a 60s-era western, all set in 1944 Finland.

Netflix - War Sailor:

A newly released Norwegian short series (three episodes) about merchant marines in WWII. Specifically tracks two friends and one family from shortly before the war until a few years after. EXTREMELY well-made and acted. One of the better things I've seen in a long time. That said, it is F-ING ROUGH. Like horrifically, viscerally, deeply sad and intense. Several times I found myself thinking the scenes they were showing were much more realistic depictions of the sad, scary stuff that can happen when being hunted on the open sea than the (somewhat) glamourized version of death and destruction that you see in a lot of war films. It just sort of highlights the lack of control people have when the world is going absolutely insane around them, and you really get to understand how thoroughly reasonable it is when people slip into various forms of madness as a result.

All in all, a deeply unpleasant series that is really really good and well worth a watch. 

Honestly 4 games seems about right.

I'm sure we've gone over this already at some point in this thread, but we all know that A's fans are trash people, and that Oakland is probably the least favorite place for visiting players in MLB, at least partially due to the organization facilitating their fans being generally shitty to opposing players (crap ballpark too, I'd guess). Sucks that Rendon will have to get suspended for this, but it is fair, and he should have known better. That said, Frank Francisco only got 16 games for throwing a chair into the crowd there and breaking a woman's nose (because the A's have their bullpen along the foul lines and have taken basically zero steps to stop their fans from harassing opposing players... and the chair hit the wrong person).

O’Hoppe is the truth