Cool and clear, maybe even sunny and warming later. Yesterday turned out quite nice. Sun stayed out, and it warmed up, but not so much that you started sweating. Having today the same would be great. Also great if I could enjoy it, instead of just moving through it.
Did a bunch of stuff yesterday, only some of it actually on my list. Laundry, dishes, vacuuming, meeting with the tiger mom who is buying our piano, picking up the place–domestic bliss in other words. Then I did an auction pickup, went by the car repair and tried to get my Expy in for service. Nope, missed my chance, too busy. I guess I could try another place, but in my mind this guy has replaced my long time service place that shut down. Unfortunately he’s short staffed, which makes everything harder. Lotta that going around btw.
Went to a school thing later, a banquet for student athletes. BBQ was pretty good. More white coaches than there were white students in the room… My 5′ 8″ blondie gets a lot of attention from the short and dark student body. I’m getting the impression they think she’s “exotic” but not “wife material”. That’s fine with me. We’ve been invaded. It will only get worse from here.
I spent some time talking with my cleaning lady. She’s legal, but an immigrant. She told me that all her customers think really bad times are coming and they are getting ready. She is too. We’ve talked before about vac sealing and freezing meat, and she’s not dumb, she sees the stacks. She asked me what I thought, so I told her. Violence. Shortages. Upheaval. Massive inflation. Economic collapse. (something that is FAR from unthinkable for anyone from south of the border, btw. It’s the normal state of affairs they’ve lived with their whole lives. They have no reluctance to consider it as a possibility.) She said she is trying to sell one of her trucks, the one she considers a “personal” vehicle. “It’s just sitting there, not earning anything.” And she is thinking about taking her money and going back to Mexico, to one of the American expat communities. If she does, it will likely work out better for her than the expats, when the S hits the Fan. It’s easier to be poor in your home town, near family and friends.
Without considering any moral arguments, think about that.
And make plans. Because some of the invaders will be STRONGLY incentivized to stay, even if some do leave. Native born citizens are sorting themselves geographically, and a reverse dust bowl pattern is already emerging. I’ve talked to and seen other people who are moving back to family and familiar places. S is getting real, yo… (to use a meme.)
Who you are with, and where you are, is likely to make a huge difference in your life for the next 2, 5, or 10 years.
And what you’ve stacked, of course.
nick
I can trace my family tree to before Utah was a state. I have a document written by my grandfather’s uncle that details the family history on my mother’s side. My father’s side I have no idea.
He was a coward in my opinion. He got married to avoid the Korean Conflict, then got my mother pregnant to avoid serving, I was shortly after because with two kids he got deferred again. He liked his nephews more than his own kids as his nephew was into hot rods, his kids not so much. Abandoned his family when I was eleven and I had very little contact since. Apparently the result of many affairs, one of which got him fired from the sheriff’s department. The last time I saw him alive was in December of 1973. I was traveling to my next duty station, stopped for a couple day visit. He instead chose to spend that time with his hot rod buddies. On the second morning when he left to visit his friends, so did I. He never met my wife nor saw his grandson.
Weather liars lied again. Misty moisture from the sky is hitting me in the face this morning.
n
Greetings from Trinidad. It’s 83oF and raining. The Hilton we are staying at is old but clean. MrsAtoz is a Hilton Honors member, so we got an upgraded room and access to the Executive Lounge. I just ate a huge amount of bacon and eggs, plus 8 cups of coffee. Gotta maximize the freebies.
We are taking a boat tour to view the sunset, snakes, caymans, and other local creatures. The exchange rate here is 7-to-1 in favor of the US dollar, but inflation is rampant in T&T. Crime and corruption are up, too.
Return trip is Sunday via Miami.
@Mratoz, that sounds like fun! Stay safe… Miami is probably more dangerous.
n
LOL!
INSURRECTION! US Capitol Locked Down, DNC HQ Evacuated as Police Repel Pro-Hamas Protesters
I wonder how many will spend a year in solitary confinement, and then get a 20-year sentence?
For that experience you could travel to Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit, or the suburbs of DC.
Why are they protesting here? The US, nor the DNC are involved in the war. If they really want to get their message across let them protest in Israel. In fact, I think it is good idea to put them all on a cargo plane, tight pack, and shove them out over Israel.
Why these clods protest here in the US over something overseas is beyond stupid. Of course, over in those other locations they would simply have been shot.
I wonder how many will spend a year in solitary confinement, and then get a 20-year sentence?
– accounting for rounding error, I’m going with … zero.
n
Milwaukee.
No one goes to Milwaukee since LaVerne and Shirley left.
Just in time to distract from the Jesus Truck debut debacle …
https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/15/world/spacex-starship-launch-license-faa-scn/index.html
@Lynn – If you are making the road trip, I’m not sure how far from the pad is “safe”. Reportedly, concrete was falling from the sky in Port Isabel.
Maybe South Padre Island up near Sea Turtle Inc. We always stay at the La Quinta there.
We had decent German food at Mader’s and found the Miller tour to be worth the time even though we don’t drink.
The Harley Davidson museum is okay, but even that company has gone off the deep end of woke with a whole hallway devoted to artwork from the book “My Papi Has A Motorcycle”.
And about $100,000 in vehicle debt between the bike and his truck, on a household take-home of $70k/year.
What I wanted to see in Wisconsin was in Spring Green, Taliesin and The House on the Rock, but since we were up there, we did the usual whirlwind tour.
At some point, we have to finish our abbreviated tour of Tennessee.
I do recommend Spring Green, but, if you go, try to hit Taliesin at a time when the more comprehensive tours of the estate and buildings are scheduled.
The House on the Rock Resort is actually closer to Taliesin and was a decent place to stay. Just be aware that they are not open on nights before the attraction itself is closed.
The Taliesin visitor center is right on the highway into town, originally designed by Wright, shortly before he died, to be a restaurant, which it was for a couple of decades. IIRC they are open daily, even if tours are not running.
I had the misfortune to work in a FLW designed theater. The main design motif was a cylinder. It looked like a red wedding cake. It was originally designed for some city in India, iirc, but ended up built in Phoenix. Couldn’t get a modern truck down the curved driveway to the loading doors, so we hand carried whole shows…
Also worked in a hotel in Scottsdale that was a FLW design. It was not horrible to work in, but the spaces are kinda weird. The hotel itself is very normal.
Since he designed all the interiors and built ins and fittings for a house too, they were hard to modernize or renovate so they stop being residences. Which has a certain irony…
n
Note the gaslighting – and note it’s modeling which we all know is just lying (or guessing) with computers
n
Starship launch: I will try to watch the live stream. I have lectures at that time, but I can at least peek in during breaks. Heck, if the timing is right, I’ll put it on the projector.
Dunno how many space geeks I have though. Today, I used a sci-fi example. Before starting, I asked how many of them read science fiction. I did not expect the answer to be…zero.
🙁
https://hotair.com/david-strom/2023/11/16/new-york-times-opinion-columnist-doesnt-know-hamas-runs-gaza-n592885
Elizabeth Spier writes an op-ed for the New York Times aboyt Gaza. It s Twitter thread she reveals that she doesn’t know Hamas runs Gaza.
David Strom calls her “a special kind of stupid”. I disagree. Nothing special about her. Her progleftard cred qualifies her to write for the Times, be it Gaza, global warming, gun control, kungflu, or any other topic.
Fail them all. They’ve already failed at life.
“A commonplace kind of stupid” needs to enter the vernacular.
Wright’s buildings are usually maintenance nightmares as well.
Even though Taliesin burned twice and rebuilt, another irony is that the Taliesin Preservation violates Wright’s intent that the estate building deteriorate to ruin once the last of his apprentices passed.
One apprentice still lives on the property at 99 years old. Any of the surviving students have the right to reside on the estate for life as part of the tution.
The preservation effort is relatively recent, started in 1993 after the Ken Burns film on Wright became the director’s follow up hit to “The Civil War”.
The estate even hosted new apprentices up until Covid.
Here in the US, Barnes & Noble is seeing new life thanks to Manga and the unwillingness of Kinokuniya to take cash as part of their effort to support the agenda.
Every Barnes & Noble store I’ve been in within the last year has a larger Manga section than Sci Fi/Fantasy or even Mysteries.
Reverse Polish Notation used to be commonly understood among CS undergraduate students thanks to the dominance of HP calculators in engineering 30 years ago. Thanks to TI’s efforts and Carly Fiorina’s stupidity, RPN is a foreign concept to many students these days.
Fixed the question for you.
“Harry Potter” solved the reading problem for about 20 years, before JK Rowling became an enemy of Woke.
Who knows what the future holds. Despite Rowling being a political non-person, a reboot of the movies is in the works as a miniseries at Warner-Discovery, and a third themed “land” is on the way to Orlando along with Super Mario and friends at the new Universal park opening in 2025.
I just saw an article about Universal readying the hotels to open early, lending credence to the rumors that high dollar groups at the Orange County Convention Center may be able to arrange early access to Super Mario starting in January 2025.
>> By Wednesday, Haley had somewhat amended her stance. Asked on CNBC if she was advocating a ban on all anonymous social media posts, Haley said that, while she believed “life would be more civil if we were able to do that,” she was focused on foreign-based actors, not U.S. citizens.
What is she running for? POTUS or 6th grade class president? Does she not have a campaign manager, a PR person, other senior advisors with whom she can vet these positions before making herself look foolish in public? Or does she just make up this cr@p off the cuff?
Politicians…geez.
It’s all a grift.
As I understand the rules, you can run for “whatever” and after accounting for office and travel expenses, all of the sweet sweet campaign funds collected from the folks you have fooled into thinking “you are The One” slide right into your pocket… tax free.
“SpaceX to Conduct Second Starship Flight on Saturday”
https://www.pcmag.com/news/spacex-to-conduct-second-starship-flight-on-friday
“SpaceX receives FAA clearance to finally conduct a new launch test of Starship after April’s test flight exploded 24 miles up, resulting in a large debris field.”
Cool ! Watch out for falling debris !
D. D. Harriman is back.
The line will play well with Wine Moms … just like Nikki Haley and her advisors.
The other day I babbled about how the hose end shut-off valve on the pipe that feeds water to the bird waterer was leaking. And while replacing it, the power turned back on and I was soaked. Good times.
Anyway. That’s fixed. It seeps a bit, might need some teflon tape. Maybe it will lime up.
Now, the leaky faucet that’s been filling the big flowerpot saucer for cat water? Ok, a new hose washer in the valve from the bird pen and I have it cranked WAY down. Instead of the pan filling in 20 minutes or so, it is now so far, ¾ of an inch deep after an hour and fifteen minutes. It’s a somewhat fast drip…. so it’s enough for the faucet or hose to not freeze. The pan of water might freeze, I’ll deal with that when it freezes.
I call it a win.
I was trying to pay bills online, and again couldn’t access my bank from Safari on OSX, and used the old Win10 laptop (so glad I never upgraded the RAM enough for Win11). I was going to report it, but the “Contact Us” link went to a dead page. I should probably get a new bank…
Then it occurred to me, what about Brave for OSX? It does use WebKit, as Apple demands, but what if it is the way WebKit is implemented by Apple & Safari, not WK itself.
Turns out Brave can access the bank OK.
Win11 23H2 somehow decided the system tray calendar should be in something that looks like Chinese. What a super duper OS upgrade!
Which is rather useless to me. It does look pretty. Like lace doilies.
There’s other stuff that is supposed to be showing but I don’t have an MS account because stashing my stuff on The Cloud ain’t happening.
I can now officially turn off the date/time in the system tray. Shrug, that showed up a month ago. How about being able to unstack clock and date and have a font larger than 6 point whatever? I have a 32 inch monitor, plenty of room. How about I don’t have to click the clock two or three times so the damn calendar shows long enough to let me read it? And stay showing until I click again?
Another so called big deal is being able to have every instance of whatever program as a separate icon on the taskbar. Hovering is so hard?
So far 23H2 is just a small service pack. Most of it, as far as I can tell, has been stealth installed in the last two months. Er, not exactly but sort of like adding IE4 to Win95 but much less.
What? Wait? Oh, Babs doesn’t want Trump to win.
Ok, I get it now.
I’ve already got my choice for the Texas primary, but if I thought it would hasten Streisand’s exit from the country even by a millisecond, I’d hold my nose and vote for the Orange Man even without the Mea Culpa I think is necessary.
https://www.breitbart.com/entertainment/2023/11/14/watch-barbra-streisand-says-she-cant-live-in-u-s-if-trump-becomes-president/
In other words, Yentl isn’t going anywhere.
Have any leftards actually left the country after Bush/Trump/any Republican won office? I remember that some singer (?) went to France (?) for a while around 2017, but that turned out to be a contract and she (?) returned to the US after the contract ended even though TrumpLiterallyHitler was still in office.
The long weekend extending into yesterday, was taken up installing a little pathway in front of the house. I am tired of tracking in burrs and stickers myself, and have company expected for Thanksgiving.
Unfortunately I ran out of time (started raining about 2pm yesterday) and back strength, so it ended up just being garden pavers with a brick border and a shallow base. It looks OK for now, and in the spring I can pull it out, recycle most of the materials, and put in a nice real pavers path.
Once again I was bit by the fact that the previous owner/builder had no sense of symmetry or straight lines – the driveway the path is along bends 3″ to the south on one side, and 9″ on the other, and isn’t quite perpendicular to the house. The gap between it and the house is 43″, not 36″, or 40″, or even 48″. So a lot of jiggering here and there with some judiciously placed expansion joint fillers until a compromise that looked OK was found.
Ah well, no one cares but me, and even I don’t care all that much.
I call it a win.
Yeah, they talk tough about leaving the US to somewhere else. Canada? Somewhere in Europe? And yet, they never GO the eff away.
Oh wait. They are all Hollywood folks. Just a bunch of dancing monkeys that are easy to ignore.
I should care what they have to say? Why?
Yeah. I get that. But you do care. Otherwise it would not bother you.
Another so called big deal is being able to have every instance of whatever program as a separate icon on the taskbar. Hovering is so hard?
It is the double clicks to get the correct version of the app that torques me off.
And now I see that hover works instead of the first mouse click. It was not working before the 23H2 patch.
Fine Chinesium.
I was told that there is a much better nuclear radiation detector made in the USA that also detects alpha waves unlike the Chinesium brand. “Mazur Instruments PRM-9000 Geiger Counter and Nuclear Radiation Contamination Detector and Monitor, 0.001 to 125 mR/hr Range, +/-10 Percent Accuracy”
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B008TVSQU8?tag=ttgnet-20/
Only $679.
“The end of the standalone application”
https://www.computerworld.com/article/3710389/the-end-of-the-standalone-application.html
“Microsoft has pulled cloud support from Office 2016 and 2019. The day of the standalone software you actually “own” is over.””
Not good.
“Microsoft Looking Into Windows Activation Failures After Hardware Swaps”
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/microsoft-looking-into-windows-activation-failures-after-hardware-swaps
“Windows 10/11 activation failures might be caused by Microsoft closing free upgrade loophole”
Don’t touch that PC !
I got used to LibreOffice and LaTeX in grad school. I keep a copy of Office … 2007 … ? … around just to make sure the *.doc version of my resume is clean.
I haven’t fired up Word on my primary desktop in two years, ever since the interview process for the current job. Geesh, time flies.
This employer’s recruiter droids called as soon as my termination from the tolling company was ruled as having been ‘without cause’ by TWC. Strange how that works, but I won’t think about it too much.
The online application for the job asked if I had ever been fired and had additional space for details. I checked the “yes” box and wrote, “Terminated without cause per TWC tribunal hearing decision, case number XXXXXX”.
Good enough!
I’ve been using the same Fedora Linux installation on my home server across three motherboards for nearly 20 years. Every now and then, when the warranty expires, I image the disk to a new drive to avoid problems, but I’ve never encountered a situation where the OS refuses to boot after swapping CPU/board/graphics.
Right now, I’m dealing with my son’s Windows 10 install which was relatively recent but now refuses to boot, with the message that the automatic startup repair could not fix the machine.
“Multiple Organs in Transit for Multiple Patients” Delayed By Pro-Hamas Shutdown Of San Francisco Bay Bridge
“Protesters were lying down with white sheets over their bodies … [and] parked their cars on the bridge and threw their keys into the bay”
https://legalinsurrection.com/2023/11/multiple-organs-in-transit-for-multiple-patients-delayed-by-pro-hamas-shutdown-of-san-francisco-bay-bridge/
At some point they will screw the wrong people and get tossed in the bay themselves.
Until that happens, the standard should be to keep them in jail for the same number of person-hours that they stole from people’s lives–that’s per protestor, not divided among them.
@SteveF
“A commonplace kind of stupid” needs to enter the vernacular.
How about:
“A commonplace kind of progleftard stupid”
@EdH
Concrete careth not the width of the gap.
heads up:
Census Snoops
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2023/11/census-snoops.php
“Anyone can make fake ID’s nowadays. If I call the U.S. Census at 800-923-8282, how can I verify your identity?”
Get a photo of them. If they can’t tell you how to verify, post the photo on Next Door as a suspicious person who claimed to be with the goobermint but refused to be verified. Extra points for photos of their car. Don’t show the plate, as ND will probably take it down.
IF you can verify their ID–doubtless after multiple transfers–make sure you get a direct number, so you can post it later for other careful people.
THEN resume the conversation:
“Thank you for waiting. Nikki Haley says that we shouldn’t be anonymous on the internet, and I think that is even more true in person, don’t you?
“Now, who has been making claims that I victimized them or I was victimized? Has Amazon been leaving the microphone on again?”
Be polite. Be reasonable. Make sure to work it in that you don’t believe they can protect anyone’s data after the obvious system hacks of the 2020 Census that inflated counts in some Democrat states.
Ask them if they have a personal phone. Is it turned off? If not, did they know that the geo-tracking history of their phone is a violation of Federal confidentiality laws as applied to census workers?
Canceling Magellan
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2023/11/canceling-magellan.php
Mia de los Reyes is a Spanish name. There is no indigenous Spanish-speaking people in the Americas, the language was brought here by some of the most brutal murdering enslaving “explorers” in history.
What’s in your DNA, Ms. Reyes? Maceta pava negro?
Post their photo everywhere, tagged as a suspected pedophile and kidnapper. Why else would they want to talk to my underage child?
Rapists and retards. Rapists from the surname. Retards from evident reasoning ability.
Yeah.
Earth.
Who wants to live on a planet named after dirt?
Uncovered Documents Show Bud Light Misled About Relationship With Dylan Mulvaney
The Lie:
The Truth:
https://redstate.com/bonchie/2023/11/16/new-uncovered-documents-show-bud-light-lied-about-relationship-with-dylan-mulvaney-n2166433
Misled my apple cider.
Grandpa would have called it a darned lie.
Used to be $6 million got you a man. Don’t know what the price is now, but $185,000 didn’t get close.
>> https://www.breitbart.com/entertainment/2023/11/14/watch-barbra-streisand-says-she-cant-live-in-u-s-if-trump-becomes-president/
And she didn’t leave in 2016 because why?
Does anyone care what Babs thinks? Why?
Who is giving her a platform?
n
@EdH: Been there and done that – a decent provisional solution that works is better than no solution.
Actually, the problem is that other people care. It is annoying that sports figures, actors and other promis have such an outsized audience for their generally uninformed opinions.
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/11/american_jews_are_stupid_in_almost_identical_proportion_to_gazastinians_being_evil.html
Good quote at the end of the article:
In future years–perhaps after the extinction–the disconnect between measure intelligence and self-preservation will be studied. For now such mindlessness begs the question: Why try to help those that will not help themselves? The bright side is that the same zealots targeting jews unmask themselves with their own words as enemies to a wide swath of the American populace that is much more likely to rouse to anger and stay roused until the problem is eliminated.