The Muppets ranked and Rita Moreno

People have strong feelings about which Muppet is the best. I am one of them. The people at Pop Culture Happy Hour asked their listeners to vote for their favorite and they got more than 18,000 responses with over 150 Muppets receiving votes. Some extremely tough questions had to be addressed, such as what Muppets qualified. (The answer: “Any Muppet from any property or era was eligible, including The Muppet Show, Muppet Babies, Fraggle Rock, Sesame Street, Labyrinth, etc.”) Then before tabulating the results, there were other issues such as should Statler and Waldorf, Bert and Ernie, or Dr. Bunsen Honeydew and Beaker be considered as individuals or as pairs. Only Statler and Waldorf were considered as a pair, which I agree with.
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Are Christian nationalists killing Christianity in the US?

A recent Gallup poll shows that the number of people who belong to a church, mosque or synagogue is dropping rapidly and that this may be due to a reaction to aggressive Christian nationalist politics. (Thanks to reader Jeff for then link.)

Just 47% of the US population are members of a church, mosque or synagogue, according to a survey by Gallup, down from 70% two decades ago – in part a result of millennials turning away from religion but also, experts say, a reaction to the swirling mix of rightwing politics and Christianity pursued by the Republican party.

The evidence comes as Republicans in some states have pursued extreme “Christian nationalist” policies, attempting to force their version of Christianity on an increasingly uninterested public.
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The Mrs Sri Lanka competition turns into chaos

I had not been aware of this before but apparently there is a parallel competition to the Miss World competition called Mrs World, with corresponding competitions at the national level to select those who will take part. I would normally not have known about it but my sister in Sri Lanka asked me if I had heard about the sensational events at the recent Mrs Sri Lanka contest so I looked it up and, boy, it was a disaster of epic proportions, far outstripping the Steve Harvey debacle from 2015 when he declared the wrong winner in the 2015 Miss Universe pageant.

Here’s the story.

Caroline Jurie won the Mrs Sri Lanka competition in 2020 and went on to win Mrs World. The 2021 Mrs Sri Lanka competition was held two days ago and the winner was declared to be Pushpika De Silva. At that point, Jurie created a sensation when, soon after she had done the traditional act of crowning her successor, she returned and forcibly took the crown off De Silva’s head and placed it on the head of the first runner up, declaring that the winner was divorced and thus not eligible.
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Christian evangelism and the QAnon cult

An interesting fact about the QAnon phenomenon is that even though the mysterious Q has not been heard of in over four months, suggesting that following Trump’s defeat they are trying to wash their hands of this whole thing, the cult keeps going on, though there has definitely been some attrition as some people’s hopes were dashed when Biden’s inauguration went ahead without Trump swooping in and arresting everybody.

Another interesting thing is that the cult members are not easy to pigeonhole and are all over the place, except for one common factor.
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Jordan Klepper tries to become ‘a good guy with a gun’

He realizes that playing the hero if a ‘bad guy with a gun’ lets loose in a public space is not that easy.

It came out during the NRA trial that Wayne LaPierre, the head of the NRA who loves talking about good guys with guns being the only people who can stop bad guys with guns, hid out on a friend’s yacht because he feared being the victim of shootings.
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The case against tipping

Alex N. Press writes about her own experiences as a waitress to illustrate pernicious effect that tipping has in the sub-minimum wage businesses such as restaurants

Overall, 71 percent of women restaurant workers report being sexually harassed at some point during their time working in restaurants, the highest rate of any industry. While much of this harassment comes from customers, 44 percent of respondents say they have been harassed by a supervisor, management, or restaurant owner.
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But the report, coauthored by Catherine MacKinnon and Louise Fitzgerald, shows that it isn’t simply restaurant work in itself that creates the conditions for harassment; reliance on tips compounds the problem. Relying on tips is already a problem for any worker who hopes for even a modicum of predictability in their income, and in matters of harassment, it aggravates the issue.

“Tipped workers were significantly more likely to have been sexually harassed than their non-tipped counterparts,” write the authors, with 76 percent of tipped workers experiencing harassment, compared to 52 percent of non-tipped workers. Further, tipped workers were sexually harassed more frequently in every way measured in the survey — likeliness of being treated in sexist ways; likeliness of being targeted with sexually aggressive and degrading behavior; and likeliness of being coerced or threatened into sexual activity they did not want — than non-tipped workers.
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It gets crazier and crazier

We have a man at Disney World refusing to have his temperature checked and then being charged with trespassing, handcuffed, and escorted out of the premises.

A man who was arrested after refusing a temperature screening at Disney Springs in Florida told authorities that he couldn’t be told to leave because he had spent $15,000 on his vacation.

The man, Kelly Sills, a tourist from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, bypassed the Orlando attraction’s medical screening in February and refused to get his temperature checked when asked by Disney employees, according to a report from the Orange County Sheriff’s Department.
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Sills also claimed to be a Disney stockholder at another point.

What is surprising is that he was wearing a mask. For some reason, having his temperature taken with the remote sensor that takes a couple of seconds, tops, was too much for him. Did he know he had a temperature and not want it revealed? Or did he think that the thermometer was sending radiation towards him? Some people do believe this, not understanding that the thermometer measures radiation coming from the person.