Cool, then warm, then hot. Unless there is more rain. It rained all day yesterday and kept temps in the very low 80sF, until it stopped and the temp rose a bit. Then it cleared and the sun came out for a really pretty sunset. Forecast says we are still in the rain and storm zone though. I guess we’ll see.
Did mostly small things around the house yesterday. Didn’t get any big things done. I’m just not feeling it.
But today, well, today I’ll ROCK! Yeah, maybe not. We’ll see. Could be I get motivated.
I try but don’t always succeed.
Keep trying.
n
In haste. Good morning!
Be well.
Alex Stein’s … deathwish … ? … continues.
IIRC, two of the Clearwater City Council members are members of the “church”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGqjZQ1C1fU
To be fair, how many humans do you think would do the same thing? I’m fairly confident that the number is not zero.
I arrived in San Antonio in December of 1973. I think I first ate there sometime late 1974.
The salad bar was in an old MG car body. Each table setting was a different theme. I have eaten in about 3, maybe 4, of the settings. The one I remember was inside an old large commercial refrigerator with openings cut in the sides.
If there were four or more people at a setting it was possible to order the Roman Orgy, if the place had not run out. Really good meat pot roast with all the vegetables, potatoes and other trimmings. All brought to your setting by four people, holding the platter about shoulder height, chanting/singing about being a glutton, to get the attention of everyone in the place. Entertaining it was.
The San Francisco Steakhouse was modeled after early San Francisco with girls that were swinging on large trapezes hung from the ceiling. My memory of the steaks were that they were quite good. The place was over priced and I think that led to its demise.
When I worked for Burroughs in 1980 I would go to lunch with some of the maintenance technicians. Those people knew the good hole-in-the-wall places that had good food. Tequamalina (sp) was quite good and the guy taking orders remembered people and could get the same order. A couple of the technicians would just walk up, pay, and sit down, always ordering the same thing.
There was also Sister’s BBQ. Located in the backyard of somebody’s house. Three black ladies that sweated over the BBQ pit that had never been cleaned. The sweat dripping into the pit probably helped the flavor. I think the health department did not know about the place, or looked the other way. The BBQ was outstanding and not expensive.
And I always get Bill Miller BBQ when I am in San Antonio. I met Mr. Atoz for lunch at the one on Walzem road a few years ago. I like Bill Miller BBQ for some reason. The brisket is really good. I suspect that BBQ is a personal thing and I got used to Bill Miller when I lived in SA for 14 years. Well, actually in Universal City close to what was then Randolph AFB.
Bill Miller’s Laguna Madre is the big one at our house lately.
My wife has a crash pad in San Antonio so she can do a trial run in the VA clinic on the northern most freeway loop. She’s taken the kids to both Bill Miller’s restaurants in the last month. I went with her to the BBQ last weekend.
The Muslim Colonists have frozen her out of the Austin VA, and the choice is either work in San Antonio or walk away from the pension vesting in three years.
After WA State, I don’t put a sign in front of the house for at least a year. I’m the world’s b*tchiest doctor’s wife anymore.
Beyond the pension, I want to see real career growth at one of her jobs for the first time ever or I don’t see the point of calling a moving truck.
The last time we went to North Beach in the real San Francisco, the infamous Condor Club had been turned into a family friendly sports bar. Who knows what it is like now.
The first “Dirty Harry” film has a shot of the Condor Club in the background of one scene.
There was a space station return (dragon) this morning at 5am, but I forgot to get up, didn’t set my alarm. Too bad, good weather here, they are fun to watch.
Weirdly there’s almost no news about it, I guess there’s no astronauts – it’s just equipment and experimental stuff being returned.
Weirdly there’s almost no news about it, I guess there’s no astronauts
– maybe they’re trying to minimize discussion of the leak and need to de-orbit soon…
———-
Up. Moving. Coffee is brewing. And lest anyone think I’m a coffee snob, this past month there was a LOT of coffee in my auctions… some expired, some almost, some just in damaged packaging. Some just unknown brands. So I’m drinking whatever I got super cheap for the next few months. Right now it’s expired Levazza whole bean, espresso roast 5/10 for ‘intensity’. Last container full it was something about death, or black rifle coffee, or something but it was dark. Nothing to write about. I’ve got a couple of pounds of Starbux Verona, one beans, one ground, some black rifle, and now 2.5 # of “Maud’s Dark Roast” that I’m picking up today. $3 for 2.5#, I’ll take it.
I’m only paying ~$7/pound for Costco French roast or Columbian whole bean anyway, so stuff in the auction has to be cheap…
———–
75F, overcast, and drippy.
ummmmm, coffee….
n
Robinhood, the hipster stock gambling enabler, is laying off 10% of staff. They are saying they have too many layers of management. Some reddit user with no real world experience at all said
If the company isn’t lying, which could always be the case, it’s easy enough to see what happened. They grew fast. Hired any warm body. Lots of DEI and ‘non-traditional’ hiring. Now they have a moment to realize they hired too much deadwood and created too many layers to house and hide the deadwood. So they’re cleaning house.
Does anyone on reddit actually know what they are talking about? I haven’t found anyone when my google searches have ended up there.
n
Slightly less than Wikipedia. I use it the same way. Search using Brave search, look at the Wikipedia or Reddit articles that come up, and use that as a starting point for deeper, more trustworthy content.
Never, ever, for news interpretation, political, economics, social science, or philosophical items. Climate “science” is categorized as political. Or maybe religious.
For tech, each varies but I’ve found some good starting points and links. And I’ve found some stinkers, too.
Of course, a lot of what I research is antenna design, and that can devolve into the religious area pretty quickly. A search for “counterpoise” or “antenna ground” or “Should I ground my transceiver?” will get you into quicksand before you know it…
I suspect that anyone who has sufficient time on their hands to be hanging around Reddit is unlikely to have a lot of expertise, such that their time is not more valuable if applied to other activities. In other words, people whose opinions would be worth hearing are busy doing paying work.
Of course, my opinion is worth what you paid for it.
In other news, the rifle bipods from Limbsaver / Sims Vibration Laboratories are good gear and prices right. Recommended.
Currently drinking Puroast “low acid” coffee, I think someone here mentioned it?
Unfortunately my tummy has become picky again, and I can drink this without using a teaspoon of sugar to cut the burn. So I save taking in a few hundred calories each morning.
And the flavor is … OK … not like good fresh ground beans … but OK.
RobinHood is grift, run behind the scenes by the major players to move stock in their dark pools.
Their real customers are Fidelity, Schwab, Vanguard, et al.
Yeah, they make their money by frontrunning the trades iirc.
Remember kids, if the service is free, the product is you.
n
Phase 1 completed. I got the main area cut down from the 18 to 36 inches of growth. Even at the highest cut setting, it looks like crap, with all the pressed-down grass holding up the clippings. Tomorrow I start a second pass at a lower setting, and with luck, I can get around it once before the next heavy rain. After that, if I can get around at my normal setting on the third pass, it should look OK.
Sounds brutal.
Don’t hurt yourself!
I can’t run my mower until I fix it… so there’s that.
n
@Ray – regarding the sale of your 2013 Highlander to the dealer or Carmax…
…Have you looked into the on-line used car services, like Carvana and others? They seem easy to use, and will pick up your vehicle and give you a check. Have no idea how their offers compare to CarMax, but the process seems easy to use.
Trade-in values seem to be in the $6K-14K range, depending on condition, mileage, and region.
Yes, and they are all close. Trade-in for my area is about $7,400. I could only get $6K from Carmax and Carvana. The advantage of trade-in is the sales tax is reduced by the amount of the trade.
The hummingbirds usually show up April 1st. Give or take a day. This year was March 20th. Seemed early to me.
So far I have made 20 quarts of sugar water. I might have not marked down a few quarts. If they vanish mid-August I expect I’ll be making another 20 quarts of sugar water. And then maybe three more quarts through mid-October for the few strays passing through until late October.
They are fun to watch . They seem to know who fills the feeder. That is, they remember people. And…. besides, it gives me a chore to do that is seems worth more than vacuuming up tufts of dog hair and dog cookie crumbs.
Several years ago the neighbors were down here and we’re all drinking beer and yabbering. Snacking on a shrimp ring and chunks of cheese. We were all sitting on the back patio. Here comes a hummingbird. It buzzed around looking at us and got right in my face and started chirping. My face, no one else.
I guess it told me! There was sugar water in the feeder the next morning.
I’ve had a few land on my finger. They don’t weigh anything. Their feet feel just like having a cockatiel or parakeet or chicken chick using your finger as a perch. But mostly they just hover and look and chirp at me.
Yeah. Call me weird. I’m cool.
Everyone Should Be Free To Stay In or Get Out Of Social Security
https://townhall.com/columnists/starparker/2026/06/17/everyone-should-be-free-to-stay-in-or-get-out-of-social-security-n2677864
I used to have a Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet that showed the FICA limits by year and other useful info like inflation rate, mortage interest rate, T-bill returns, etc. Made it easy to play what-if. Someone must a spreadsheet that has all of that info and more.
So, yeah, it’s not only my money, it’s a fraction of my money being returned to me compared to what it could have been.
There may be another bailout or “fix” in the works. But in the meantime there is a change in the tax laws that should have been made long ago:
No income state or federal income taxes on S.S. Congress can make the change for federal income taxes, and include penalties on states that make it a net loss to tax S.S. The commie states want to keep the state income tax there are multiple ways to make them forfeit $2 for every $1 they tax.
Make Apple Pie Fried Again: McDonald’s Leans into Nostalgia for America’s 250th
More than a generation has been robbed of their fried heritage. Bring it back, keep it, and publish the current address or burial locations of every revolving FDA sob involved in that decision. And take all the leftover baked apple pies from Mickey D’s and deliver them in reefer “in lieu of” their pensions going forward. Bastards.
Except, most people would opt-out, then face retirement with nothing. No savings, no retirement fund, no retirement income. Then what happens to these people? They go on welfare and are paid out of a fund to which they never contributed. If a person opts out of SS withholding, then no welfare money in any shape or form.
Some of the problem has been from extending SS to illegal invaders. Welfare from a different pot of money. Another issue are those people who claim a back injury after working on the job for two months, having injured themselves lifting a bag of pretzels. Now drawing SSDI when in actual truth the people are just leeches.
I also don’t think that people, having reached the SS full retirement age, should be paying any income tax on the SS payments to the individual. SS payments to people at the full SS retirement age should not be counted as income. If a person draws SS early, that is counted as income until the full retirement age is reached. SSDI should be counted as income the same as unemployment payments.
If the states want to tax SS income, let the state do it. If people don’t like it move to another state or throw the bums out that are in office that allowed the taxation. The FEDs should get their noses out of the state’s business.
And burnt tongues and roasted taste buds. Yes, bring it back and teach the younger generation to eat the pie with one hand and a cold drink in the other hand.
I’m tired of messing with my cell phone. I have service most of the time. I seem to always get the bad radio when I place a call… they miss every third syllable. I’m tired of watching the battery charge level. A dead battery is a useless phone.
Yeah. I’m tired of playing with it. Just freaking work.
I’ve tried turning on wi-fi calling. Doesn’t work. I suppose it’s like trying to set up Google Pay. Maybe I’m just too stupid to see the secret OK button.
I’ve looked at Ooma. Seems like a good deal. I can port my cell number. But what if I want to go somewhere and receive phone calls? Like, I want to keep the “mobile” part of having a cell phone.
Call Forwarding to the rescue! *72 followed by the 10 digit phone number. *73 to turn it off.
And when I need to call the bank or credit card, where their caller ID knows who I am, I’ll just turn my phone on and use it.
Seems like a plan. A perfect plan? I don’t know. Worth a try. Ooma gives you a 30 day trail.
How about putting Ronald McDonald back in the stores?
And not just his name on the donation box for the Ronald McDonald Communal Living Forced Labor Camp.
I mean the Ronald McDonald House.
And bring back the McDLT of whatever it was called. With the hot stuff on one side of the container and the cold stuff on the other side.
Use coated cardboard if styrofoam is so so evil.
The Whopper has a box again.
Cardboard, but it is still better than a paper wrapper.
Even commie Illinois with its outrageous state income taxes doesn’t tax pensions or SS.
Yet.
Big brother is getting more powerful capabilities…several news articles about this:
Be careful out there….
Lawn care is like a slow day at work, with overhead heat lamps. Less weight to lift and carry but more walking.
“SS income” is largely an oxymoron.
Until the value of all the contributions has been returned to the worker that was forced to participate in the program, there is no income.
The minimal baseline for that value could be calculated based on inflation using a more robust measure that the rigged CPI, but a more realistic measure would use the regular T-bill auction results, since that is the method by which the federal government would have to pay for the deficit spending if the law did not allow the trust fund to be “loaned”.
Even the latter method understates the cost to the worker, as those funds could have been invested to better effect in mutual funds.
SS insulates people from their own choices and assumes that people will act stupidly and that .gov knows best. Neither is a given.
Having paid in, I want mine back, but I never planned to get any. From high school on I assumed I’d get nothing.
Unemployment insurance is paid half by the worker, half by the company and is another bad deal as you would bring home more and KEEP more if you got the money instead. More meddling in people’s personal affairs.
Should there be some sort of .gov run plan, independent of employers? Maybe. But participation shouldn’t be mandatory.
People make poor choices all the time. Some are cushioned by .gov action, most are not.
n
Sibling was in town so we had indian food for dinner. Yum. W’s plane has landed, so she’s headed home. D1 is headed out of town, staying with her friend so they can get their very early flight. D2 has appointment in the morning, then headed to a friend’s house prior to attending a concert and sleeping over. Dad taxi in between my three pickups. Then I’ve got and extra kid Friday and a different one Sat. night.
And I need to get to the BOL soon to mow, but maybe not on Father’s day… where’s my simple life?
n
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/nyxqYrPHiT8
redesign the top so it has a bit of a bump, and it becomes a portable crucifix suitable for sharing the glory of Christ with those requesting enlightenment
For the record, I just polished a CD that was heavily scratched and not readable with my CD ripping software. It was trying, 70minutes on one track, but couldn’t read it.
Quick wet sand with 3600 sanding pad, then quick wet sand with a magic eraser, then a polish with a “fast gloss” automotive paint compound (“removes 1600 grit swirl marks”) and the disc is reading as fast as an undamaged disc. I used my hands and a kleenex for all the steps and the final polish.
That worked better and took about the same time as using the DiskDr polishing tool.
n
“The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047” by Lionel Shriver
https://www.amazon.com/MANDIBLES-FAMILY-2029-47_PB-171-POCHE/dp/000756077X?tag=ttgnet-20/
A standalone, no prequel, no sequel, book about a financial apocalypse in the USA starting in 2029. I reread the well printed and well bound 400 page trade paperback published by Harper Perennial in 2017 that I bought from Amazon in 2021. BTW, this book is labeled as dystopian fiction by Amazon and others. I doubt that there will be any future prequels or sequels for the book as the author does not seem to go that way.
The book covers four generations of a family in the near future. The family consists of about twenty people of whom I mostly did not like due to their overall craziness and attitudes about life. If there was anyone who came close, it was Florence Mandible who even as a single mother managed to buy a house in East Flatbush, NYC on a low income salary. But even she makes a lot of bad decisions that lead to a tough life. And I mostly liked Enola Mandible who was a successful author living in Europe but evacuated back to the USA due to supposed discrimination in Paris. Plus I liked Jarred Mandible who managed to get his patriarch grandfather to give him the money to buy a small farm in upper state New York.
The conditions leading up to the beginning of the financial apocalypse in the USA in 2029 had their roots in Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, basically the Great Society federal and state programs. And in the continual wars and police actions started or participating in by the USA from WWI onward. One might exempt WWII from that list as WWII was supposedly actually good for the economics of the country but I have not researched that accepted fact for truthfulness.
In 2029, the rest of the world changes from using the USA Dollar as the world reserve currency to the new Bancor, a basket of world currencies. The USA Treasury Bills, of which there are $40 trillion outstanding, immediately double their interest rates in the next sale. The USA President and Congress pass legislation that holding Bancors is illegal for any USA citizen. Under further financial pressure, the USA repudiates the entire $40 trillion debt and starts seizing all the gold across the country from both citizens and businesses. Even gold wedding rings are seized as China has demanded that their tbills be redeemed immediately with non USA Dollars.
The patriarch of the Mandible family is a 97 year man with a fortune inherited from his grandparents who owned a steel mill. The patriarch has his fortune invested in gold stocks, stocks of gold bullion in central repositories, tbills, and the stock market. With the crash of the stock market, seizure of gold, and repudiation of all tbills, he is wiped out and he and his Alzheimer afflicted second wife move in with his son and his wife. And then the entire family ends up moving in with Florence in her tiny three bedroom house. But that quickly goes away also as the remaining family members are soon homeless and living in a park.
The author freely acknowledges that in choosing paths for the family and the nation, she always chose the bad results path. She thinks that her book takes an optimistic view of the coming financial apocalypse which I find amazing.
One thing that just blew me away. By 2042, the government required all workers to have a chip embedded at the base of their skull that reported all income and expenditures instantly. The chip reported all data to the government computers using satellites which was immediately taxed using government based checking accounts. No private banks allowed.
Starlink anyone ?
My rating: 5 out of 5 stars
Amazon rating: 4.2 out of 5 stars (4,704 ratings)
Lynn
He’s working on brain implant chips too.
n
W arrived home safely.
Had a tiny little fire by the water feature. One cat, no frogs, no gunfire.
Only 77F but sitting for a couple of hours reading the heat kind of soaks into me and I definitely feel it when I go back inside.
Time for a shower and bed.
n
no mention of the continued deterioration of Portland and surrounds, and the millionaire tax…
n