Jenna McKenna dot com

Worser choices make better stories

JennaMcKenna on Patreon

recent posts

links

James McKenna SaatchiArt

I am a real person.

help Jenna art

PayPal

Click to Donate

Ko-Fi

Buy Me a Coffee at ko-fi.com

  • The gifted and talented scam

    Thinking about all the memes about how gifted and talented kids grow up to be anxious, unhappy adults and it occurs to me: why would anyone have expectations of happiness, satisfaction, or personal fulfillment under capitalism? Gifted and talented programs are intended to identify children who learn efficiently and require fewer cognitive cycles of exposure and practice. This means they will be cheap to train for and in the workplace. W

    hat workplace? Any workplace that needs bodies. What the worker likes or loves or cares about or wants to be good at are irrelevant. What is good for the worker or their family or community is irrelevant. It’s just selecting and honing tools.

  • I dreamed

    I was turning into a butter hag, which is fine, but on waking I was amazed that I had remembered the word cailleach *in my sleep* and also to use the genitive for butter.

    Mar sin anois is cailleach ime mé.

    Mar sin ar maidin, chlóis mé an fonn seo:

    Paddy Carty: “Oh! Hag you have killed me”

    Níl a fhios agam cé atá ag seinm mar níl feadóg mór ann ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

  • D’Angelo died at 51 and that sucks

    Read this pretty good piece about him.

    Then read this pretty good piece about Daniel Day-Lewis, still alive at 68 (and no complaints from me).

    They seem to have a lot in common, don’t they? What seems to be the major difference (or differences) between them?

  • It’s all about the ploughing

    Anna Marie McHugh, Assistant Managing Director of the National Ploughing Championships in Ireland, speaking from the 2025 championships in Screggan

    https://youtu.be/91x68GMgOmc?si=0XvGEBGiq8ciqFXX

  • Assata Shakur Rest In Power

    https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/9/26/assata-shakur-us-black-liberation-activist-exiled-in-cuba-dies-at-78

  • The problem with states

    is that just because somebody has to get born someplace then they get claimed for that place if they make it big. How could anyone say Kevin Rowland or Dexys are British?

    Image from Wikipedia

    Seriously?

  • There is not

    enough steroids in the world

  • Water and power

    Why can we not have drinkable tap water for a reasonable cost? It cannot be difficult to take a sample of great drinking water — say, NYC tap water or the well from our old house in the sandhills — do a spectral analysis, strip the base water to zero with filtration etc, fix the pH, add the minerals in the right concentration, and serve? Even if you couldn’t feasibly throw all that through city pipes, why is house-level filtration & taste so absolutely shitty until you pay a bajillion dollars?

    Water, water everywhere, nor ary drop to drink

  • Man, the stuff people save

  • Song/s of the day:

    I never don’t have a song playing in my head, day or night. Sometimes a song I love; sometimes a song I hate; mostly a song I can ignore, or that has a beat I can work with. Sometimes the music is so clear it’s like an auditory hallucination. Frequently two songs that have common or similar elements will tag team me, switching off with one another when the music gets to the part they share. Sometimes I’ll get stuck in a loop of the song and it will push my dreams around. If I hear a new song that’s too catchy to shake, I’ll have to look up the lyrics and learn to sing it so I can make it end.

    These are today’s songs (for this morning, anyway).

    “Plastic Jesus” Eddie Marrs
    “Rocky Road to Dublin” The Pogues