In the 1985 film Return to Oz, Dorothy is subjected to psychiatric abuse for her “delusions” of Oz.

Omaha the Cat Dancer started in 1978, dude.

Nah, there was private ownership of the means of production in Ea-nāṣir’s day, but capitalism didn’t come around until a few centuries ago.

Well, there are like five different things that people use “capitalism” to mean.

For instance, doctrinaire right-libertarians will insist that “capitalism” means the same thing as “a free market in goods and labor” even though the core institutions of capitalism — stock markets — were developed to finance colonial monopolies that used slavery. (Monopolies = unfree trade; slavery = unfree labor.) Capital markets don’t care about your freedom; they work just fine without freedom of anything but capital itself.

Meanwhile, doctrinaire communists will insist that “capitalism” is a historical stage followed by workers’ revolution creating socialism and eventually communism — despite actually-existing “workers’ revolutions” instead producing a new sort of monarchy and feudalism, in which power is held by a single dictator and his powerful supporters.

There are other uses. For instance, a lot of pop-progressives use “capitalism” to mean something like “the vale of tears, the fallen world, this age of brass and clay, the Kali Yuga” — the human condition! Anyone who thinks scarcity, poverty, or hierarchy are the fault of capitalism is ignorant of history; these troubles are much older than capitalism! Anything that Jesus or Buddha had to deal with, isn’t capitalism.

During the Cold War, “capitalism” sometimes simply meant “the geopolitical interest of the United States and Western Europe; as against those of the Soviet Union and Communist China”, and secondarily “access by American and Western European businesses to the materials, labor, and markets of ‘developing’ countries, typically without the people in those countries enjoying the freedoms that Americans and Western Europeans themselves enjoy.”

And of course, the only correct definition of “capitalism” is mine, namely “an economic system under which ventures seek funding by selling equity (partial ownership), principally through regulated public markets (i.e. the stock market).” It’s not about freedom and it’s not about America; capitalism is about shareholder value.

Relevant XKCD.

Chicken breast is the blandest part of chicken because it contains so little fat, and so much of the flavor of meats is carried in the fat.

Get some skin-on chicken thighs, salt them, and roast them in the oven. I assure you there will be more flavor there than in skinless chicken breast.

There are some fishes, like tilapia and halibut, that are about as mild in flavor as chicken breast.

In the US, sexual abusers have their own political party now.

If that’s his attitude towards #14, how does he feel about #2?

“Take the guns first, go through due process second.”

Homonyms do sometimes have completely unrelated etymologies, like with the word “Pussy” meaning coward, and being a slang term for the vulva. The cowardly definition came from a shortening of the word “Pusillanimous,” while the slang term came from women being compared to cats.

“Pussy” in the sense of “female genitals” is more likely related to “purse”, referring to the vagina’s pocket-like shape; and “pussy” in the sense of “weakling” is either ordinary misogyny or a reference to a kitten’s helplessness.

(And “pussy” for an actual cat is related to words for “cat” in some other European languages, like Romanian pisică; which ultimately come from the pss-pss call that is effective at getting a cat’s attention.)

If you want a funny etymological example though, take a look at the word “cleave”. In modern English it has two opposed meanings: “cling together” and “split apart”. This is because it was two different verbs in Old English, cleofan (the “split” meaning, related to “clove” and “glyph”) and clifian (the “cling” meaning, related to “clay” and “glue”)!

For when you need a cowboy steak.

I’d rather stare at the catus than care about status.

FRED: Hello, what’s this?
BOB: Oh, that? That’s the butt baker button.
FRED: The … butt baker button?
BOB: The butt baker button!
FRED: What’s the butt baker button?
BOB: Oh, the butt baker button bakes your butt!

TOGETHER:
Oh, the butt baker button bakes your butt,
Yes, the butt baker button bakes your butt!
If your butt’s cold and unbakéd
You don’t have to get it naked
The butt baker button bakes your butt!

September kids eventually figure out we were probably New Year conceptions.

Usually, “shit” is worse than “ass” as a swear word. And yet, in “this shit is ass”, the negative sentiment is carried by “ass”, not “shit”.

“I’ve looked at love from both sides now…”

Dude. Trees. Dude.

Trees, dude. Trees.

Antichristian, that is; in service to Mammon and to the Beast 666, Nero redivivus.

Ender’s Game came out before the Web. But like many science fiction authors of the time, Card was a very early Internet user and would have been familiar with Usenet newsgroups.

With a little bit of Hellboy.