Cool, like jazz. But moist, like cake. And clear, if I get my way. Dunno if the universe will feel like it though. It got into the 60sF yesterday and I took off my jacket and overshirt when I started sweating… but only in the sun. Shaded areas were still cold.
I did auction stuff in the morning, then a pickup in the afternoon. I took one load of stuff from storage to shop, but I’ve got a half dozen more to do, and nowhere in the shop to put the stuff. I have been just dumping stuff in, but will need to organize it a bit better to make room for the rest of it. Crazy.
Took the truck to the mechanic but he begged off until Thursday afternoon. He had some emergency work to do on two cars and his bays were full. I’m ok, it’s running and driving ok. I can wait.
When I got home I put out some more decorations.
Today I’ll do more of the same. I can put out some inflatables, and hang some lights. I can also move the stuff at the shop, and take another load there. It would be nice to get my shopping done for the non-prepping hobby potluck, and get my white elephant gifts wrapped too. Kids both have other commitments so it’s just me and the wife. They kids usually enjoy the dinner and gifts. The guys look forward to seeing them, as they’ve grown up attending, and they work the yearly show with me.
Oh, well, time passes and kids grow.
And stacks age out, so go through your stuff and start replacing the breakage. The good stuff isn’t gonna stack itself.
nick
Wednesday. Breakfast time.
Testing “Fruit & Fibre” cereal from Aldi. It looks and tastes indistinguishable from the Kellogg’s product of the same name.
The get-up of the packaging is so close to the original that I can only surmise Aldi and Kellogg’s have entered into some kind of licensing plus brand sales deal. I suppose it is better for K to sell some reboxed product to A, than to have A commission another manufacturer to make a competing product, on which K earns zero.
Tasty. I added an overripe banana, because I have no chickens who would enjoy it.
Smetana’s “Moldau” on the radio. Fresh tea. Almost as good as a holiday.
Have a beautiful Wednesday!
Nick, don’t forget Louis Vuitton. It’s almost Christmas…
Move coffee away from keyboard before reading this short Christmas story.
Are you Aldi North or Aldi South?
Aldi North runs Trader Joe’s in the United States, a high end store chain, and a deal with Kellogg’s for private label products wouldn’t be surprising.
Aldi South runs the US “Aldi” stores which target the chain’s traditional demographics.
An “Aldi” in the neighborhood can be a bad sign about the neighborhood economy.
Our Aldi positioned itself as a high end Euro shopping experience. More like Soviet in my opinion. The young mommies loved that we were getting an Aldis.
———–
46F and still. Sun is coming up. I’ve risen but I won’t be shining for a while. Females are awake, and lunch is made.
I could start the coffee…
n
If a lot of military families living in an area, Aldi will adjust the marketing in the stores to make the transplanted spouses feel more at home, putting a shelf unit of German/EU foods up front in a prominent location.
Georgetown and Temple Aldi stores are like that.
Killeen’s Aldi goes all the way and is what I imagine an Aldi in Germany is like.
Unnatural disaster day. First installment of property taxes due. What ass decided two weeks before Xmas was a good time. People with mortgages usually have an escrow account that pays and so they don’t notice. Others like myself plan but it’s still painful.
Will do payment online after coffee.
Taxes should be due the day before Election Day, to remind people that votes have consequences.
27F here in the California high desert. The prediction was for 46 originally, then 40, then 36.
It was a beautiful day, maybe 70, but I went outside to do a chore around 8 PM last night I guessed it would be freezing.
This breakfast cereal packaging had the Aldi Süd (South) logo.
I notice that since the feuding Aldi siblings died, their heirs have wisely gone for rapprochement between the Nord and Süd businesses. Now one often sees products with both logos. There must be economies of scale and increases of grouped purchasing power to be made.
I find Aldi Süd is generally a little bit more upmarket than Aldi Nord, but Nord is definitely catching up. Both carry Trader Joe’s branded items.
We are fortunate, as the BOL has both Aldi Nord and Aldi Süd within easy distance, as well as Lidl (Aldi’s biggest competitor). I am not keen on Lidl for groceries – I find the quality of Lidl’s own-brand items patchy compared the Aldi equivalents.
Lidl carries more branded goods than Aldi, and claims to do so at a discount compared to other supermarkets, but we don’t really buy a lot of branded goods, so that doesn’t influence me much or at all. Lidl does carry a line of tools under the “Parkside” brand, some of which are remarkably good value for money, so I will generally poke my head in if I am passing a Lidl anyway, just to see what is on the shelf.
I got a bucketful of pliers recently, that Lidl had remaindered out at a buck apiece. The tool steel in the items alone is worth more than that to me, and I can modify those pliers to my heart’s content for specific tasks, including welding on them with my sub-100-buck Lidl TIG welder. That reminds me, I need to get some shielding gas bottles for it…
“Vertx Everyday Tactical Fanny Pack 2.0-100% Nylon Fanny Pack for Men and Women with CCW-Ready Design and Rapid Access Tab”
https://www.amazon.com/Vertx-Everyday-Tactical-Concealed-Outdoor/dp/B0DLNLHTCP?tag=ttgnet-20/
Interesting.
The entire ”contribution” to Social Security should be seen by the employee’s pay stub, including the so-called “employer’s share”
What a crock.
@brad
The DOJ has a fraud webpage, and the FBI has an internet fraud webpage.
If you have not already, look them up and report your information.
Make a list of everything you have done and send it as an attachment to a cover letter to DOGE, copying the White House.
The BillG avatar in WinSux took his tiny 2-electron phallus in hand and stroked a reboot last night. Firefox came back with tabs this time, but no bookmarks and no links on the new tab page.
I’ve been having a weird thing the last week or so where firefox loads the page but it’s totally empty. The tab thinks it loaded, but nothing. Reload gets me the page as expected. It’s happened with different sites too.
n
The entire ”contribution” to Social Security should be seen by the employee’s pay stub, including the so-called “employer’s share”
What a crock.
Don’t forget Medicare. The only tax that scales with ALL income. And is going broke also.
The 43″ TCL tv that I use as a monitor rebooted last night as well. I wonder if it is phoning home to rebooted Windows servers somewhere?
“Vertx Everyday Tactical Fanny Pack 2.0-100% Nylon Fanny Pack for Men and Women with CCW-Ready Design and Rapid Access Tab”
https://www.amazon.com/Vertx-Everyday-Tactical-Concealed-Outdoor/dp/B0DLNLHTCP?tag=ttgnet-20/
Interesting.
The gub guy in Gubs and Bammo magazine drew his gub in 2.5 seconds from this fanny pack. Me, I would probably take 10 seconds. Still interesting because it don’t print and I can probably get my seven round revolver in there.
https://www.gunsandammo.com/editorial/vertx-everyday-2-fanny-pack/522418
Oops, gub gal, not gub guy.
“Shock Video: Minnesota Somali Man Threatens to Shoot Ice Agents”
https://www.infowars.com/posts/shock-video-minnesota-somali-man-threatens-to-shoot-ice-agents/
Yup, that is a fairly low IQ. Deport his ass before he has children.
Hat tip to:
https://thelibertydaily.com/
“A Richardson, Texas Resident Explodes on Mayor Amir Muhammad Omar”
https://rumble.com/v72u3r8-a-richardson-texas-resident-explodes-on-mayor-amir-muhammad-omar.html?mref=8g74p&mrefc=2
I almost bought a house in Richardson back in 1985. Why do these cities elect muslim mayors and city councilcritters ?
“Is Justice Jackson’s judicial buffoonery giving black women a bad name?”
https://revolver.news/2025/12/is-justice-jacksons-judicial-buffoonery-giving-black-women-a-bad-name/
“Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson has made a pretty strange name for herself on the Supreme Court, and it’s not because she’s carefully sticking to the Constitution. Over and over, she sounds less like a judge calling balls and strikes and more like an activist trying to steer outcomes she personally approves of or has been told to push. She feels a lot like a DEI activist judge, used more for her willingness to play the game and control than actually because she’s a fair judge.”
Yes.
We (wife and I) had our interview on the dog scam. It will be on the local news Monday. I may post a link to the story so’s all you’ns can see the story.
The 43″ TCL tv that I use as a monitor rebooted last night as well. I wonder if it is phoning home to rebooted Windows servers somewhere?
How did you know it rebooted ?
Crankshaft: Pizza Box Santa
https://www.gocomics.com/crankshaft/2025/12/10
Uh, that is very strange.
Culturally, Justice Jackson is about as “black” as I am. Possibly less.
Jackson grew up wealthy in Miami. Her father was lead attorney for the school system and her uncle a Miami police chief.
We’ve been over the white husband here. IIRC, he’s sixth gen Harvard legacy, money so old that it farts dust.
Rather than it just be sleeping this morning I had to hit the power switch and watch it go through the whole boot sequence with the logo and various intro stuff.
Technically it’s a smart TV with Google built-in, but I just use it as an HDMI external monitor for the Mac and PC.
“Notable Deaths in 2025”
https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/notable-deaths-in-2025/
Charlie Kirk is not there. I find that disappointing and blatant prejudice.
SecWar for the win! No more “dudes in dresses”:
Pete Hegseth Posted a Cartoon That Best Sums Up Why the Dems Are SO Triggered (Move Over, Franklin!)
The cartoon sums up my feelings on trannies in the military.
SecWar for the win! No more “dudes in dresses”:
Pete Hegseth Posted a Cartoon That Best Sums Up Why the Dems Are SO Triggered (Move Over, Franklin!)
The cartoon sums up my feelings on trannies in the military.
I voted for that !
“Dozens of teenagers loot 7-Eleven in brazen flash-mob robbery — and post video on social media”
https://www.theblaze.com/news/7-eleven-looting-video-mob
Matt Bracken predicted this.
https://steelcutter.substack.com/p/when-the-music-stops-how-americas
The flash mobs will get more common. Eventually the stores will start putting the shotgun squads back in them.
It is a lot more common than you imagine, especially among the Spec Ops types.
The VA doesn’t pay for confirmation surgery … yet.
Rather than it just be sleeping this morning I had to hit the power switch and watch it go through the whole boot sequence with the logo and various intro stuff.
Technically it’s a smart TV with Google built-in, but I just use it as an HDMI external monitor for the Mac and PC.
Huh. I think all TVs are running some variant of Linux nowadays. I wonder if the various Linux variants update very often ?
You could have lost power last night too. There seems to be a lot of that going around now.
If they aren’t using webOS, my guess is that the TV manufacturers build up from the base Linux kernel with Yocto rather than a canned distribution with update infrastructure like Fedora or Ubuntu.
webOS was Palm’s next gen OS for the Pre prior to HP’s disastrous buyout of the company. LG owns the OS now, but Qualcomm holds the patents.
I meant to comment on this earlier, but I’ve been busy this week. Elon isn’t the only Tres Commas club member wanting to build sex robots.
Oh Christmas tree. Oh Christmas tree…
https://www.kxan.com/sports-general/horns-report/texas-longhorns-left-out-of-college-football-playoff/
The Cheez-Itz Citrus Bowl at Camping World Stadium.
Culturally, Justice Jackson is about as “black” as I am. Possibly less.
– she’s got the ignorance and the gimme down pat, like she was born to it. Remember, we tried to focus the blame for black misbehavior on culture, but then the Dems come along with ‘even one drop’…
n
Many years ago I had a black coworker who had a very privileged childhood – grew up in NYC, both parents were professionals, went to a selective public school, went to a good college with parents paying for most of it, never any problems with police except that “they looked at him”. One day he was whining about the difficulty of growing up as a black man in America. I scoffed and said that I grew up blacker than he did: repeatedly broken home, poverty, didn’t always have food, hassled by the stupid pigs*, the works. Hoo-doggies did the privileged little boy get pissed about that.
* The police in my hometown were so corrupt that the FBI and state police came in to clean them up one day. More than half of the force was allowed to resign in lieu of charges being filed, which is another form of corruption.
Jackson sits in the “Roe” chair, and all of the writing burden for the liberals now falls on Hermione Granger Kagan, which may be more devastating long term than a Conservative majority.
Just noticed the sad news from Brian Bilbrey (one of the original “Daynotes Gang”) about the passing of his wife Marcia on 15 Oct 2025: https://www.orbdesigns.com/15-october-2025-a-very-sad-day
Condolences to Brian and family.
Might work with ground meat and textured vegetable protein, but not with “southern cooking”.
n
“Scientists confirm vast underground MEGASTRUCTURES beneath Egypt’s Giza Pyramids”
https://www.naturalnews.com/2025-12-10-scientists-confirm-vast-megastructures-beneath-giza-pyramids.html
“Researchers using advanced radar technology claim to have discovered a massive, previously unknown network of eight spiraling shafts and two enormous chambers extending over 3,500 feet beneath the Khafre pyramid, structures they describe as dwarfing the visible pyramids.”
I wonder if the lost Ark of the Covenant is down there.
Biscuits can’t be automated.
Taco Julie is learning the same lesson Darden management did trying to solve the same problem at Red Lobster.
Minnesota University Accused of Harboring Illegal Alien Predator
https://redstate.com/wardclark/2025/12/10/minnesota-university-accused-of-harboring-illegal-alien-predator-n2196993
Next time use a medium-level of force, arrest the administrator and the campus security officers, and immediately suspend all grants to the college and students pending a review. Hit them with a hammer, then hit the red paste with a sledgehammer.
LOL3
Elizabeth Warren Rants About Trump’s Action on (Checks Notes) Pennies
Pennies. tRump, tho. Our Congress sucks dead bunnies.
The Pocahontas story would be perfect if pennies were still indian heads.
South end of Indian going north.
“Minnesota: ‘Nearly Every’ Somali Household with Children Is on Welfare”
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2025/12/10/data-81-percent-somali-households-in-minnesota-are-on-welfare/
“More than 8-in-10 households headed by Somali refugees in the state of Minnesota are on one or more forms of American taxpayer-funded welfare, new data published by the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) reveals.”
So much for having to be a citizen to get SNAP, WIC, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, SS Disability, etc, etc, etc.
Apparently one anchor baby opens the aid spigot.
n
Chilly but not too bad out, 54F. With the Mr Heater going, I had a nice tiny little fire and read for a while. Two black cats slunk by but no other wildlife. One weird aircraft, looked like a car size quad copter and sounded strange. It’s dark though so I didn’t get a good look, but the lights were not helo shaped.
Think I’ll shower to warm up and get to bed.
n
Esoterica-
I updated the basic wordpress install that runs this site, and 8 of the plug in helper apps. Everything seems to be working fine, except that wordpress editor no longer displays check marks when I select check boxes for config stuff or to add tags to posts.
The tags are applied, but no check marks show next to them in the list.
Oh well, maybe they’ll fix it in the next update. It’s a pretty subtle thing, but it was working for a half dozen updates, why break it now????
Programmers. Bah.
n
Sez the googles (WordPress support site)
Assume you are using Firefox? Although cached JS in other browsers may also cause the issue.
Oh well, maybe they’ll fix it in the next update. It’s a pretty subtle thing, but it was working for a half dozen updates, why break it now????
Programmers. Bah.
Guilty.
Russian drone.
Thursday. Dark. Porridge eaten. Time to get on the road. Have a good day!
Check the area for stray fiber optic cables. They may look like spider webs.
Aldi and Lidl are the super-discount stores of Europe. Nothing wrong with shopping there, of course, but hardly “high end”.
Vaguely related:
Spent yesterday evening helping rearrange the shelving in our town’s local store. Every mountain village has (or, sometimes, had) a little store – this is viewed as just as important as keeping your local primary school. Lose those, and the town starts to die. These stores almost always lose money, and get subsidized by the town. My wife is on an (unpaid) mission to fix that – she sees no reason why the store can’t at least break even.
Our store is run as a cooperative, but the people on the board have treated it more as a mommy-club, and haven’t actually done much for years. Personnel turnover has been a bitch, with lots of knowledge lost. The store has no idea of what sells, what it’s margins are, or even sometimes who the suppliers are. They throw away a huge amount of expired product.
Anyway, it’s great to see my wife with her teeth in a project. Probably take a year or so to see any real results…
I followed the suggestion of writing directly to the local embassy. Had a reply within hours! They forwarded my mail to the “Federal Benefits Unit”. Hmmm…I hope they have a better address than I found, because that’s the office where the autoreply says that they will read your mail in 60 days or so.
At this point, I am going to wait a week and see if anything happens…
One thing I like about Switzerland: There is generally no withholding. Come tax day, you have to cough up the full amount of tax you owe for the year. Tends to make people think about things…
Of course, in the lefty cantons (cough, Basel, cough), politicians want to put a withholding system into place. Gee, I wonder why?
Perhaps one of these? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beta_Technologies_Alia#/media/File:BETA_Technologies_A250_eVTOL_Prototype_Aircraft.jpg