Witty Banter

"How is claiming they drowned a Hilux possibly underselling it" GREAT question.

To start with a little disclaimer, Top Gear's Hilux did not start off, as in the video above, in pristine condition. It started off with nigh-on 300k kms (for you yankees, that's about 8.4 million Boeing 737 wingspans) and a condition to match.

And it's only once careless driving around town yielded zilch in given shits...

(look, I found a local newspaper picturing it being driven around!)

...that they decided to drown it. Now, the underselling part: if you told me that they drowned a pickup the first place my mind would go to would be "driving it through a river a bit too deep for it, perhaps as deep as its height, until it stalls and then tugging it back out". You will concede that's rather different from tying it down on the seashore with the second highest tide in the world...

...and leaving it there until it engulfs the whole truck...

...only for the ropes to snap...

...and for the truck to be lost to the tides for FIVE HOURS.

(and for those wondering, yes, just as promised, well within an hour and the mandatory limits of basic tools and no spare parts, up the mechanic made the thing fire and away the presenter drove it - I must imagine doing a number on his clothes in the process.)

Oh also I would have mentioned the caravan.

Or at least the wrecking ball.

But hey, at least the fire was mentioned.

Still, I feel it's criminal to leave out how they celebrated it surviving all it did: by parking it at the top of a 23 story building for all to see! :)

Wait NO-

Well, that was uncalled for. Given what it survived, it deserved to rest in a museum instead of being unceremoniously cleared out with the other chunks of public housing that buried it.

Or at least, given that buried it wasn't...

...to be tumbled down from the rubble utop which it sat...

...and be fueled up.

"be fueled up", pfft, what for?, I hear you say. And you are right.

Look at that thing, you say.

Let's be serious now, however pretty of a story it would be that's not a truck that will do anything remotely in the ballpark of firing up, let alone running.

And again, you are right.

The battery was disconnected.

Sorted that, tho

"You can't be serious." Oh darling I sure can! "Well the presenters can't then" no no, I assure you, it lived. Go see it for yourself! It's at the National Motor Museum in Beaulieau, England!

A decade ago, everyone said rotating applications of different herbicides was key to stopping herbicide resistance.

Then, around 2015, evidence from a large study emerged saying that this actually causes weeds to be MORE resistant, so the best thing to do is to spray a combination of multiple herbicides mixed together at once.

Now that is being called into question too. Whoda thunk it...

Herbicide resistance among weeds is only getting stronger. Recently, scientists found an annual bluegrass (Poa annua) on a golf course that was resistant to seven herbicide modes of action at once. Seven. SEVEN. Amaranth plants been found with resistance to six herbicide modes of action at once. Twenty years ago, the narrative was that resistance to glyphosate (Roundup) was unlikely to become widespread; today it's the second-most common type of resistance.

What's more, plants are developing types of herbicide resistance that are effective against multiple herbicides at once and harder to detect. Instead of changing the chemical processes within them that are affected by the herbicides so the herbicides don't work as well, they're changing the way they absorb chemicals in the first place. Resistant plants are producing enzymes that detoxify the herbicides before they even enter the plants' cells.

It took Monsanto ten years to develop crop varieties resistant to Dicamba (after weeds made 'Roundup Ready' crops pointless). Palmer amaranth evolved Dicamba resistance in five years.

So I asked, "Why are all the proposed solutions dependent on using more herbicides, when we know damn well that this is going to do nothing but make the weeds evolve faster?"

The answer is that chemical companies have the world in a death grip. They can't make money off non-chemical solutions, so chemical solutions get all the funding, research, and outreach to farmers.

But why do chemical companies have so much power?

One of the biggest reasons is the U.S. military.

In the Vietnam war, all of Vietnam was sprayed with toxic herbicides like Agent Orange, which was incredibly toxic to humans and affected the Vietnamese population with horrible illnesses and birth defects. Monsanto, the company that made the herbicides, knew that it did this, but didn't tell anyone. The US government didn't admit that they'd poisoned humans on a mass scale until Vietnam veterans started dying and coming down with horrible illnesses, and even then, it took them 40 years. (My Papaw died at 60 because of that stuff.) And the soldiers weren't there for very long. As for the Vietnamese people, the soil and water where they live is contaminated.

Similarly, during the "war on drugs," the US military sprayed Roundup and other chemicals on fields to destroy coca plants and other plants used in the manufacturing of drugs. This killed a lot of crops that farmers needed to live, and caused major health problems in places such as Columbia. The US government said that people getting sick were lying and that Roundup was just as safe as table salt. (A statement that did not age well.)

So chemical companies make money off arming the USA military. The American lawn care industry, and the agricultural system, therefore originates in more than one way from the United States's war-mongering.

The other major way is described in this article (which I highly recommend), which describes how after WW2, chemical plants used for manufacturing explosives were changed into fertilizer producing plants, but chemical companies couldn't market all that fertilizer to farmers, so they invented the lawn care industry. No exaggeration, that's literally what happened.

This really changes my perspective on all the writings about fixing the agricultural system. The resources are biased towards the use of chemicals in agriculture because the companies are so powerful as to make outreach and research for non-chemical methods of agriculture really hard to fund. All the funding is in finding new ways to spray chemicals or spraying slightly different chemicals, because that's what you can actually get ahold of money to look into. It is like the research has to negotiate a truce with the chemical companies, suggesting only solutions that won't cause lower profits.

Meanwhile my respect for Amaranth is skyrocketing.

The Palmer amaranth I described above is reported as resistant to atrazine, bromoxynil, chlorsulfuron, fomesafen, glyphosate, imazamox, imazethapyr, lactofen, mesotrione, metribuzin, pyrasulfotole, tembotrione, and thifensulfuron-methyl.

On Tumblr you can win so decisively, you force that blog to deactivate and then that post will drag around that user's dead fucking body for all of time.

Stop everything you’re doing and go download and install Firefox.

If you’re saying, “well, I need Chrome because I need such-and-such extension for my job”, the computer will not explode if you install another browser. Use Chrome ONLY for work tasks and use Firefox for everything else. If you’re concerned about losing your bookmarks, Firefox can import your Chrome bookmarks.

[ID: Firefox Library window. The “Import and Backup” panel is expanded, displaying the option, “Import Data from Another Browser”, which is also circled with a red MS Paint ellipse. ID end.]

Be sure to add the multi account containers extension to your firefox, which allows you to be logged in to multiple accounts on the same website at the same time in the same window but in different tabs.

look on my five open tumblr accounts (not sideblogs, accounts!) ye mighty and despair.

Firefox is super good, folks. It's good in a general "google shouldn't own everything in the entire fucking world" sense AND in a "this is an actual good product that does lots of cool shit" sense.

ALSO make sure to add the Ublock origin extension on Firefox - I haven't seen a youtube ad in five years and you don't have to either.

While you're at it, why not add the Wayback Machine extension so that if you go looking for a page that has been taken down the wayback machine will automatically offer you an archived version instead; also handy for documenting people's shitty takes and winning arguments after they delete the original post!

Worried that Firefox is going to slow down your computer? In benchmarks, modern versions of chrome and firefox are pretty much the same speed but you can still install the auto tab discard extension ANYWAY so that it will snooze unused tabs in order to keep your computer running faster. Set it to sleep, discard, close, and store tags at your discretion!

And while you're at it: install Firefox as your mobile browser for android and add those extensions to your mobile browser! Mobile adblock is here, baybee, save your data and enjoy a better mobile experience! And install it on iOS! iOS can't add extensions, but at least it's better than safari, and if you want a somewhat more private iOS browsing experience try firefox focus for iOS (which is also available on android but you can accomplish the same thing with extensions).

And the thing is, when he came back to his studio, he’s not allowed to have crowds there either because of New York’s restrictions.

But without fail, every other joke, you can hear this one, single woman laughing in the background.

That’s his wife.

Covid restrictions don’t apply to his spouse, and everyone else in the studio has a job, and has to work, so she’s become the only person in the room left laughing at his jokes.

She doesn’t laugh every time. You can tell she’s not doing it on cue, because there are some bits she clearly likes better than others. Some bits where she is laughing her ass off, and some where she just chuckles.

But my god, every time she laughs, Colbert’s face lights up like the sun.

Like, even if every other person on earth was dead and gone, if he was on his deathbed and breathing his last breath, he’d still make a jokes, just to make her laugh again.