And it will be another hot, moist week. Despite the t-storm possible zone forecast we didn’t get any rain at my house. Maybe someone did. I think we’ve had a mild year so far, but it’s gonna stay warm longer. We’ll see.
Didn’t do much yesterday. Watched some auctions close and even won a few things. Had a little excitement with youths and gunfire, mentioned in yesterday’s comments. Not much really besides reading and sleeping in, and yet, while I feel like it was lost time, part of me doesn’t really regret it enough to get worked up.
Today will be different though. I have more sorting to do to take another load of stuff to my new auctioneer. I have some more vehicle related stuff that I might get to, and I have to do some more work for my client. Haven’t heard back if my ‘clean all the connectors’ strategy worked or failed, and my partner hasn’t gotten back to me about the gear purchase. I need to follow up on both sides.
And who knows, I might get a small thing done around the house too, if I don’t get too distracted.
I’ve got some exploded can goods to clean up, and some stack maintenance to do.
Some of my auction stuff will even count as stacking…
So there is that.
nick
Monday. Good morning!
Nick, glad the “youths” didn’t harm you or yours. I hope your neighbour who ran towards the sounds was appropriately equipped.
For our Chicken lovers…
Have a good start to the week.
September 14. The peak of Summer is over. Winter is coming but is a ways off. I can’t wait for the Fall
… of government.
I see the signs in my neighborhood.
Gina For Governor!
For several years, the advertisement from Sybase just inside the front cover of PC Magazine was “LEARN POWERBUILDER NOW OR LOSE YOUR JOB”.
I think Java killed PowerBuilder. I never looked at PowerBuilder.
I use AI to write boilerplate code which would otherwise have to be transcribed from API documentation. For that, it is a useful tool and a logical next step from autocomplete in IDEs such as Xcode or Visual Studio.
The jury is still out where I work as to whether the AI can generate accurate code from a spec, with the developer only writing the markup and handing the chore of generating the logic to the AI.
Abbott’s newest desperation commercial running every commercial break on local Faux News is a promise to mandate a two-thirds ballot measure for every property tax increase.
I think the proverbial equine has run out the barndominium door on that one, but enough voters may not realize that some of the largest property tax increases in the state’s history have happened in the last five to six years.
As long as the Legislature keeps the plates spinning with “reform”, no one notices what their trim notices really say.
The Picasa GUI was an attempt to port iPhoto to Windows. Google bought out the developers and moved the interface online.
Apple could easily do iPhoto for Windows, but that program is a “killer app” on Mac OS X.
Amazon had a really excellent workflow for pictures with their Fire Phone. The interface was web based, but if you already accepted the privacy invasion of letting Amazon track your every movement on a trip through the phone, the tradeoff was worth the price.
220 million traveler records exposed in Vietnam-linked APIS leak
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/220-million-traveler-records-exposed-in-vietnam-linked-apis-leak/
IDScan confirms breach tied to 153 million stolen driver’s licenses
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/idscan-confirms-breach-tied-to-153-million-stolen-drivers-licenses/
are any of these data theft operations not Chinese?
Well that happened here in California a long time ago. State government is all dems heavy with Hispanic names. Now they are about to take the top job.
Saw a couple of Talifreako signs a few houses apart in a bougie part of town on Sat. Gina sign on the same lawn.
I don’t see many signs, so they catch my eye.
———–
Up and moving. Had a bit to eat. No coffee yet as I’m considering my morning tasks.
Only 78F so it must have cooled off at some point in the last couple of hours. I expect it will get warmer soon.
There is a bad smell in the kitchen and we can’t find the source. It’s sharp, smells a lot like death, is near the fridge and trash, but when you actually sniff those places they are not the source. It’s been a couple of days and the smell isn’t fading. I can find a dead rat with just a bit of sniffing, and this doesn’t quite smell like rat, so I’m mystified. I got my boroscope out and looked under the cabinets, under the fridge, the fridge drip trays, behind t he fridge, behind the cabinets, pretty much everywhere I can think of.
I’m at a loss for what to do next.
n
Funny how Ted Kennedy changes immigration law, then within a generation, we’ve gone from almost no hispanics, only a few puerto ricans, to 40%. And all it took was ignoring illegal immigration, and de-emphasizing westerners from Europe. When I was a kid, 20 minutes south of Chicago, we had ONE mexican restaurant and almost no one ate there. It was a little franchise fast food place called Pepe’s. Worse than Del Taco. And by the time I was in High School, we had a sit down place called Chi Chi’s. There were a couple of higher end places in Chicago, notably Guatalaharry’s, but that was it. They were mostly staffed by white kids.
Now you need to understand spanish just to shop.
n
Do you have a void under the kitchen floor, where something dead might be lying?
I would clear the u-bend(s) in the kitchen sink on principle – those can get pretty rank, and the source of the smell is surprisingly hard to localise.
What does the dog’s nose say?
One more – check on top of the fridge compressor…
And what other poor decisions have you made lately?
Where do you keep potatoes?
I recently bag from HEB go bad with a “death” smell really quickly.
Also, pull out the fridge out and check the drain pan to make sure that the gadget which reduces the dripping noise doesn’t have something funky growing on it.
This. We once had a smell problem, and it turned out that a mouse had gone and died I the little water tray.
How deep was the tray?
My wife says the same thing to me. I just fart again and move on.
I’ve looked all over the guts of the fridge. I once had a rat get caught in the fan and die, stopping the fridge from cooling. Rent house in LA. Landlord removed the rat and the fridge worked again. I was sure there was something dead in the drip tray, but nope.
Slab on grade house, so nothing under the floor. I’ve looked in the dead space under the cabinets.
Sink gets regular cleaning.
I’m checking the attic today, although I don’t really think it’s possible that it’s in the attic.
n
Worst case is the animal ate some poison and succumbed in the wall. Had that happen once. Found it because of small spot on the wall that was the animal decaying juices that soaked through the sheetrock. We had to cut out a chunk and replace the sheetrock.
Did that area of the house have any drywall work done ~15-20 years ago?
Just spent another three horrible hours at my bank for the software company. They are going to call me tomorrow if they need me again. And I cannot get my other signer on the business account until I get the Secretary of State updated. Which is a $150 fee per submission.
I occasionally have juices soak through my undies. It happens in your 70’s.
I had a bag of potatoes once with a spoiled tater. It was the time of year we don’t run heat or a/c. Just close the windows at night so it doesn’t get cold. So, the house was “well aired”.
The bag was on the bar. The counter on the half wall between the kitchen and living room. The stink usually appeared 20 feet away. Nah, it’s not the washing machine. Or anything in any cupboard.
Just one small tater in a 10# bag. Oozing pus. Sitting on the counter. Make your eyes water.
Oh yeah. Check the top of your fridge. One time the freezer section at the HEB had a come and go stench for a couple of weeks. Turned out someone tossed a three pound package of steaks on top of the freezers.
Crazy thing is there was a company that came by once a month to replace light bulbs. He was in that part of the store on his lift machine and saw the package of spoiled meat while changing a burned out florescent tube.
“Republican Reinforcements Arrive for Paxton in Senate Race”
https://texasscorecard.com/decisiontexas/republican-reinforcements-arrive-for-paxton-in-senate-race/
“Republican reinforcements are finally arriving for Attorney General Ken Paxton in his U.S. Senate race, months after the party’s biggest Senate-focused outside group backed his primary opponent.”
“The Senate Leadership Fund, a super PAC aligned with Senate Majority Leader John Thune, has purchased $32 million in television advertisements across Texas and is reportedly preparing to spend more than $50 million to support Paxton against Democrat James Talarico.”
“MAGA Inc., the super PAC aligned with President Donald Trump, recently announced $10 million in advertising supporting Paxton. America PAC, the political group backed by Elon Musk, is also supporting Paxton and has begun door-knocking operations to register and get out the vote.”
The more I see tweets by John Cornyn on X, the happier I am to be rid of him.
Subject to change if Talarico wins but really, John Cornyn is a backstabbing RINO of the first order, and I hope he ends up unemployed and friendless. FTG.
Game over, man, game over:
MA Takes Custody of Daughter of Couple Who Won’t Affirm Her Gender, Gets Restraining Order
A judge temporarily blocked the State from administering high-dose testosterone.
This is crazy. “Temporarily” blocked? They shouldn’t administer anything until the kid is 18. Kick it out the door.
“Fire Ants Are Vanishing Across Texas — Scientists Finally Found What’s Hunting Them”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SE9HVR2BD-w
So I need some harvester ants and some horny toads (aka Texas Horned Lizard).
I used to catch horny toads when I was a kid in Oklahoma and take it for a walk to the nearest red ant hole to watch it eat. It was fun.
Smartest muscle in your body is your a$$hole. It can separate gas, liquid and solid. Most of the time.
Smartest muscle in your body is your a$$hole. It can separate gas, liquid and solid. Most of the time.
Some days, just some of the time. Too many liquid farts these days.
I was hoping this heralded the return, lost with the ancient Greeks, of nude sports, but it was just her. Not a bad ad. It’s no worse than other ad campaigns that have showed up over the years, but she’s the perfect figure for outrage to show up.
Today’s activities was the rest of the cardboard leaving the basement, and cleaning the underlying floor to keep the mildew down, and removing a really annoying hump in the back yard. Some time before I bought this house, when it was someone’s rent house, a tenant built a small motocross track in the yard. Two trenches and three hill of varying height. Today I leveled the 2 foot hill and filled a fair amount of one trench. Pick and shovel work, no luxuries like a backhoe or skid steer, but it went quicker than I expected. I’m not sure if I should count it as aerobic or weight training.
In case anyone wants to critique the ad…
“Here’s Glitch McConnell Being Wheeled Into a Van, First Sighting in Over Three Months”
https://rumble.com/v7fielc-heres-glitch-mcconnell-being-wheeled-into-a-van-first-sighting-in-over-thre.html
He’s back!
In case anyone wants to critique the ad…
I saw her in “Anyone But You”. Unless she had a stand-in, her chest puppies are magnificent.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt26047818/
I dispute that
footballsoccerkickball is a sport.But if you got the pro kickballers together and filmed their synchronized crying it might at least be entertaining.
“Trump EPA Moves To Permanently Eliminate Greenhouse Gas Emissions Rules for Power Plants, Gutting Biden’s Signature Environmental Policies”
https://freebeacon.com/energy/trump-epa-moves-to-permanently-eliminate-greenhouse-gas-emissions-rules-for-power-plants-gutting-bidens-signature-environmental-policies/
“The agency is also axing Biden-era rules that would have forced coal-fired plants to shutter and gas-fired plants to complete costly environmental upgrades”
“Together, the moves represent a historic action that the EPA says is the largest power sector deregulatory action in U.S. history. According to the agency’s data, the move axing the Biden-era regulations will save Americans $310 billion. The other action—eliminating every remaining greenhouse gas-related power plant regulation—will save companies $370 million in direct compliance costs and is expected to lead to significant downstream savings in power bills both for businesses and households.”
Excellent! These laws were unconstitutional anyway.
‘’Women can do whatever they want to and be whatever they want to, as long as it’s not a woman we don’t like for some reason. ‘’
‘’I didn’t fight for the right to work so you could stay home and be a mommy”
—
Three years ago they’d have used the phrase “bodycon” to describe the ad. Short for body confident, they applied it initially to fatter women showing a lot of skin, then to thinner women in tight clothes, and they they just stopped.
They call it nude and naked, but bikinis show more. I know the shape of celebrities’ vulvas from too many bikini shots in the DM, and DM delights in the photos of women bent over, from the rear, so for anyone to complain that this ad shows too much, it’s coming from hate or an agenda.
I don’t recall why they hate Sweeney, but I know they do.
n
Well, that shows that SteveF did, in fact, view the ad to critique it. As did I.
I’m not a fan of making online betting easier, so I don’t like her employer for this. I used to be a libertarian, but I’ve seen the result of legalized casinos on my community back in Illinois.
I can’t deny the visuals are… stunning. Her voice, on the other hand, is not so good.
Fortunately, there’s a volume control.
Actually, I find a lot in common with Kathy Ireland and Brooke Burke. Nice to look at, but the voice was off-putting.
I spent a lot of time rewatching them just to make sure.
“Fire Ants Are Vanishing Across Texas” Harvester ants? Really? I was under the impression that fire ants killed all other ants.
I haven’t seen a horny toad in many many years. But I have, off hand, five harvester ant beds in sight of my house. I mow around them. Oh… plus one up the driveway.
Cool ants. They are big enough to tickle if one decides to crawl on your foot. They don’t bite often. I get hit once every other year. Hurts like crazy for a couple of hours but no marks or zit thing like from fie ants.
Fie ants vanishing is a good thing.
Yah know, I think Cornyn is a backstabber. Says one thing at election time and then mostly does the opposite. Sheesh. I think I’ve voted for him three times. Lesser of evils.
But! I don’t think he’s a crook. Last I saw the guy was worth about three million. I don’t know what kind of businesses he runs on the side. But yeah. 18 years at least in an elected office and he’s not super rich. So I think he is honest. I hope that’s the case and not that he’s too stupid to work the bribe system.
Ok. Compared to other politicks. To me, a million in the bank would be really awesome.
And then oh, AOC? I think she was elected with a net worth of $18,000 and is now worth 24 million. In what? Six years? She ain’t that pretty.
I watched the Sweeny ad. No idea what she’s trying to sell. But she is pretty. So make money for being pretty while you can. She sounded like a normal person, like, with a brain. Not like a Valley Girl.
As for her voice, the speakers in my monitor are really crap. Nothing sounds good.
“Costco nearly doubles cost of motor oil, limits purchases”
https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/6088997-costco-nearly-doubles-cost-of-motor-oil-limits-purchases/
“Costco’s Kirkland Signature full-synthetic motor oil 5-quart two pack now costs around $58, well above the approximately $30 it had been selling for just last year, and limiting customers to buying two boxes a week. It is also limiting purchases of Mobil 1’s full-synthetic motor oil 1-quart six pack, which sells for about $44, to five per membership.”
And here comes the first downhill on the oil products ride. The next one is gonna be a doozy.
Hat tip to:
https://thelibertydaily.com/
I think she’s hated because she did not get on the “body positivity” train, and the “you’re a woman if you think you are” train. Which reinforces Paul’s point that she seems to have a brain. Which is obvious if you consider she’s monetizing her best assets without jumping on the “girl empowerment” train either.
https://redstate.com/wardclark/2026/09/14/149-billion-high-price-of-prosecuting-illegals-before-deportation-n2206908
I can help. Just need to start interviewing illegals being deported. Develop information on all the assistance they got before crossing the border, the actual crossing, and after. What assistance they got in leading the undocumented life: who gave them money, advice, or in kind support, who they worked for, where they lived, where they banked, how they sent money home. Who sold them a vehicle without requiring a drivers license, or how they got a drivers license, and how they licensed a vehicle without insurance, or who sold them insurance.
You develop a profile of the people that are likely to provide actionable information, then concentrate on them. Probably focus on illegal entrants from 2020-2024.
Anyone providing information on crimes that can be criminally prosecuted gets their info fast tracked. They do not get deported, they are held for criminal prosecution without bail as proven flight risks. But the focus is not on them, it is the criminal prosecution of the enablers.
Parallel are the civil suits brought to recover damages by from any person or entity that enabled illegal entry by persons not meeting the requirements for legal immigration.
Say, for example, that information is developed that The Church of the Living Elvis Charities has been deeply involved in assisting the circumcision of our immigration laws. Subpoena their records of named individuals, then expand it to all individuals similarly assisted. Develop a RICO case. Go after the donors.
Rock on from there, baby.
The credits sequence is the only part of that flick I really like.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYVYlMC1Aqg
I know most of the words to that song. I’ve owned “Unwritten” on CD for 20 years.
Sweeney produced the most successful Shakespeare adaptation of all time, topping leftie icon Gwennyth Paltrow’s grossly overrated “Shakespeare In Love”.
Legalized online football betting in all 50 states will be a bad thing for the game long term at both the pro and college level.
Somebody dropped a dime on the Ohio State coach Saturday evening.
https://redstate.com/smoosieq/2026/09/14/scotus-blocks-trumps-new-usps-ballot-mail-rules-for-2026-midterms-n2206926
Ok. Here’s the backup plan:
No announcements, but the USPS does not deliver mail in ballots to addresses that are not residences, do not have addresses comporting with the USPS database, etc. No addresses of vacant lots, no addresses lacking apartment numbers, no business addresses.
The rational is iron-clad, and can be summed up in one sentence: The USPS will not deliver mail in ballots to any address where they would not deliver a U.S. Census form.
This will obviously not take care of all the problems, but it will put the brakes on a bunch.
https://legalinsurrection.com/2026/09/large-california-school-district-facing-disaster-after-enrollment-decline-of-more-than-a-thousand-students/
Decline of 1200 out of 50,000.
First, great news for those of you beotching about class size.
Second, it maybe might have something to do with the millions of illegals that have been deported.
Seems that an analysis of school enrollment decline would provide some intetesting data, including providing ICE with some tools to focus there enforcement efforts.
And it seems like property tax owners should tell the school district they need to cut their budget by 2%, and scale back their levys proportionately.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2026/09/a-defense-of-license-plate-readers/
Sure, they help solve some crimes, at the expense of fundamental freedom and arguably in violation of constitutional rights.
But let’s enlarge the scope of the debate and ask about the same technology being used by mobile cameras in police cars. How is that system different, if it is. Should we also be examining that use of LPR tech for the same reasons, or if it is different can it inform the reformation of Flock?
???
I suppose that cutting the effectiveness of the laws by going around them is sort of like circumcision.
(Yes, of course I know that you meant circumvention.)
It’s not just the car cams, many body cam manufacturers tout their ability to do facial recognition and LPR too.
———
The cop systems are supposedly just scanning for people and plates on alert lists, and not logging everything they see. You can believe that or not. The raw video is retained and archived, but IDK if it’s analyzed or indexed.
The trial of the incompetent “armorer” in the Baldwin shooting demonstrated the problem with body cams, and by extension, in-car cams, you are giving testimony that WILL be used in court without being charged or Mirandized. And video evidence is FAR MORE compelling to a jury than a typed transcript of a statement made with legal council present.
————
IF the Flock system is so great, let’s have every Flock employee’s routes published openly, starting with senior management all the way down to Juan in shipping. Make sure the photos of their vehicles showing any unique and easily identifiable features like spare tires, bike racks, bumper stickers, etc are also published.j
Let’s include every cop on their way to and from work, and throughout their daily routine, with photos of their vehicles.
They are our agents and employees after all, and we want to know if they are using official vehicles for personal use, or bunking off to sleep in a parking lot, or taking side jobs that leave them fatigued on the job and more likely to make a mistake that might hurt an innocent.
————
I bet we’d see an end to that if people could do freedom of information requests and learn the plate of every employee at every cop station, and then subpoena all the routes and logged event for every plate.
[yeah, real world they’d just make that information protected, like they did wireless phone conversations after the congress piggies got outed for whatever bad thing they were doing.]
n
Circumcision – some wordplay because of the Church reference? That’s what I assumed.
Some cheeky little monkeyshines…
n
My GF had undiagnosed PTSD from the probably-illegal hispanic who T-boned her and totaled her brand new car. She didn’t drive for months. I had to drive her to work every day, and pick her up.
The driver produced an insurance form, but it turns out to be expired. I later learned that this is what they do. They buy insurance, no questions asked, on a month-to-month basis, every year when the tags come due. They get their new tags, and quit making payments until the next year. So they pay 1/12th the insurance rates I have to.
State of Texas doesn’t verify legality of the applicant for the tags, either.
I don’t think there’s any law against selling insurance to aliens, and I don’t think we force the agents to verify legal immigration. It makes sense that people who are legally here should face the same regulations we do, and without checking…
Let’s also consider a world like in Stephenson’s Snow Crash where individual people can do the same as flock or the ALPRs. We’re already building toward that. There was an article recently that mentioned some Google glasses user caught video or a pic of someone that the article was about. Can’t remember the rest of the context.
What if there was an open source project to link doorbell or security cams, along with SDR dongles and raspi computers capturing the plate data and electronic signature of every cop car? Tracking the cop cars in real time? They already broadcast their position and status to the cop radios, why not collect and track that? An open source cop tracker like the open flight tracker, or open ship tracker?
It might be very interesting for sociologists to look at heat maps of where cops spend their time driving…
I’m a law and order supporter, but if they are going to surveil us, shouldn’t we surveil them back?
n
The price for getting rid of Cornyn may end up being the Senate seat as well as the Governor’s Mansion ending up in the hands of Dems.
The Senate race sits at the top of the ballot in Texas this year.
The Shot Girl had a wealthy architect daddy.
The mother is deliberately slumming it in that house in Florida for some reason. Maybe it is part of the schtick.
Extra small tiny little fire tonight. 86F and still, so I didn’t think I’d sit out for long.
Two helos, fast and low, or maybe the same one twice. It acted like a cop helo, racing to a spot, circling for a while, then following a road out of my view.
No wildlife. No gunshots.
Just before the cop helo, HPD unit came down my street slow, but left very fast in the direction the helo ended up going. Something in the other corner of the neighborhood maybe.
Anyway, time for my shower.
n
“Trump nominates Wesley Hunt to Saudi Arabia ambassador post”
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/6088993-trump-nominates-wesley-hunt-ambassador/
Interesting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wesley_Hunt
“New: Pentagon Admits On-Orbit Space Weapons for First Time”
https://redstate.com/wardclark/2026/09/14/new-pentagon-admits-on-orbit-space-weapons-for-first-time-n2206913
“In what can only be described as something of a surprising development, the Secretary of the Air Force, Troy Meink, announced on Monday that the United States has already fielded on-orbit space defense weapons.”
“Best guess as to the nature of the weapons described is that they are some form of electronic warfare devices, possibly jammers, with the slight chance of them being a directed-energy weapon, like a laser.”
I am shocked, shocked I tell you.
“Don’t Believe the Hype About James Talarico” by Kurt Schlichter
https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2026/09/14/dont-believe-the-hype-about-james-talarico-n2682879
“When Vice President JD Vance told the midterm convention audience that he had absolutely no desire to see James Talarico’s browser history, it got a good laugh. Talarico has that weird, smarmy creepiness thing going on, combined with casual blasphemy, a hatred of capitalism, and the sensibilities of a white-wine woman who works in HR and celebrates Kwanzaa. He’s a terrible fit for America, and an unimaginable fit for Texas.”
“But people are imagining it. They’re imagining it hard, especially people outside Texas. If you listen to the pollsters- and you should never listen to the pollsters- he’s either neck-and-neck with Ken Paxton or beating the TX AG handily. The smart set contends that Texas is about to tumble into the blue chasm at the hands of a guy who’s less Beto’s heir than Pete Buttigieg’s grinning Mini-Me. So, I decided, now that I’m back at my Texas house for the fall, to see for myself what’s really going on. Here’s what I found.”
“I was here in Texas during Betomania, and the big difference is that Betomania existed. He excited people. He was young and cute, and they were willing to overlook his communism and his furry dalliance to surf his sporty vibe. You saw Beto signs everywhere, and you could also feel that people were interested in the guy. In the end, he came pretty close to beating Sen. Ted Cruz (T-TX). But close only counts in horseshoes, hand grenades, and #MeToo allegations, which Talarico’s allies seem to have planted about him as part of a strategy of deception.”
“I drove about 1,000 miles through Texas on my trek from Los Angeles because Barkey and Bitey don’t fly, and the first Talarico sign I saw was in my left-leaning Houston neighborhood. Eight years ago, I would’ve seen a ton of Beto signs. They would’ve been everywhere. Is that proof of anything? After all, I didn’t see any Paxton signs either, but Paxton seems to have adopted a different strategy, one that doesn’t count on sending his party’s base into a frenzy of excitement. But Talarico desperately needs to generate a frenzy of excitement to win. So, where is it?”
I was here during Bozomania and it was real. Signs were everywhere. I have only seen two Talarfreako yard signs to date.
Dadgumit, Kurt Schlichter has a new book out and he is going for a hardback this time. I don’t do hardbacks, they are bulky and expensive. I’ve gotta wait. And it is a new series, not the Civil War 2.0 with Kelly Turnbull.
https://www.amazon.com/American-Warlord-Kurt-Schlichter/dp/B0H623TSB8?tag=ttgnet-20