Supposed to be another fantastic day today. Yesterday cleared up and warmed up, turning into another picture perfect weather day. Forecast for today is the same.
I did some auction things in the morning, and then did my pickups in the afternoon. I took surface streets because the Loop was backed up, but got caught in a 20 minute delay anyway as the Trail Riders crossed my path. Some of the riders are riding more than 100 miles, some more than 200. It’s always fun to see them on horseback and riding in wagons. There are people along the routes to cheer them on, and the riders wave and have a good time with the kids and adults that come out.
Since the Trail Riders have arrived, that means the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo is underway. Great weather for it this year. It’s a big deal and I’ve written about it a couple of times before. Fun for the whole family.
Today I’ve got one kid duty and the lists to fill my day. Oh what will I do to fill my time? Uh, dood, I’m sure I’ll find something.
Lots of work to be done. But also lots of fun to be had. These are the Good ol days. Make sure you live them.
Get busy stacking!
nick
Good morning all!
Sad but true. The problem, of course, is that war destroys instead of creates. If we could only put all that effort into bettering civilization. Unfortunately, peace and wealth created the Lefties and the Woke, whose good intentions have paved the road we are currently on.
I have a directory of work-related stuff labelled “old”. Inside that directory is another named “very old”. I had a look at the way I used to teach back in the 1990s and…cringe. I have actually improved over the past few decades.
Delete it all? Somehow old things are sentimental even if they are totally useless.
Saturday. Good morning!
Things to do at the BOL today, but not much élan for doing them. The last weeks of silly workload have me feeling more like lying on the couch and listening to music.
I have some new-to-me CDs that I want to hear on the good speakers. One of them is The Many Faces of God. Michael Buchanan seems, unfortunately, to have dropped off the face of the earth.
I suppose if I start by getting up and doing something, I might get into the swing of it… perhaps I will bribe myself with a trip to the bakery and a croissant. At least it will get me up and moving.
USA and Israel have attacked Iran.
The beginning of the end for the Mullahs?
I wonder what the plan is. You cannot bomb a country into regime change. Are they coordinating with people inside the country? Who? How?
How often has a US attack resulted an improved government in the Middle East. Iraq? Libya? Afghanistan? The record is not exactly promising…
Hideki Tojo might have something to say about that.
I noticed the Wegovy commercials have disappeared from air. I don’t know if that is due to a new RFK Jr. regulation or the lawsuits.
My wife and I have an ongoing debate about the Wegovy commercials. I doubt that the actress featured prominently in all three ads is losing weight due to the drug. She’s way too buff if you look closely.
I’d be surprised if they’re not. The western powers have surely been activating whatever assets and allies they have inside Iran over the past weeks and months.
I would expect that a lot of Starlink minis and satellite telephones have been arriving there recently too, including though friends of the Pahlavi heir.
For anyone who hasn’t read them already, I would recommend Lawdog’s recent pieces on Iran:
https://open.substack.com/pub/thelawdogfiles/p/so-iran-aca
https://thelawdogfiles.substack.com/p/so-iran-part-2
https://thelawdogfiles.substack.com/p/so-iran-part-3
https://thelawdogfiles.substack.com/p/its-hypocrisy
Worth a read: The Graveyard of Destructive Ideas.
Good article! I always wonder why the sheeple fall for this shite. Or is it really the Dumbocrats alone trying to stay in power by cheating. Bias the Census with millions of crimmigrants, vote lockstep against anything Redumblican, etc. No wonder the FUSA can’t get anywhere. VDH mentions everything that hold the FUSA back. There will never be a PLT Utopia.
Wake up, sheeple!
With the rise in the cost of RAM, some pencil pusher at Chrysler decided to raise the price of the RAM pickup to coincide.
@denis, if you can change the DNS setting on the TV, try 1.1.1.1 or another adblocking service that works at the DNS level. This is my problem with ATT fiber, and using their equipment. They do not allow use of other DNS services and the TV only has auto, no fixed IP. On the computers, I set whatever DNS I want and fixed IPs.
I haven’t worked on my networking changes to fix that yet, although I have all the stuff.
———–
So now I know that the pill might limit the peak, but it’s still gonna be there. I’m surprised that it only got to 150, that has to be the med working.
Pill ??? Did I miss something ?
– NOT one of the fat pills. Something the doc gave me to slow absorption of the carbs and sugar. “acarb- ” something that I can’t remember. Take with food and it’s supposed to moderate the big sugar swing. I’m still experimenting as it’s only the second time I’ve tried it. And I haven’t tried it on the same meal to see a direct comparison.
——–
62F and bright overcast. D1 is crashed out after being up late. Didn’t go to Aggieland “come spend your money with us for college” day. D2 has a school thing and needs to be at school at 11am, probably back late. My low back is screaming at me today and I don’t know why.
Coffee in the cup. Maybe eggs and bacon, or maybe waffle and a pill to keep ‘experimenting’…
n
A carb keeps sugar from being direct injected? I guess that makes sense.
I have read that Iranian sources inside the regime provided DETAILED information about a high-level meeting of most of Iran’s highest generals with Supreme Leader Ali Khameni. Israel, reportedly, attacked a specific room within their HQ at the precise time of the meeting and NOBODY has come out.
The war that started in 1979 may finally be coming to a close.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPIdRJlzERo
Followup from DM
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-15600161/Woman-baked-death-Walmart-oven-Halifax-Canada.html
No evidence of foul play.
No safety violations.
One of the reasons I put up with their biases is the DM always follows up.
———-
and HEY, parts of the middle east are fighting! Again, still, forever…
Let’s just hope their sleepers here don’t activate.
n
Thanks, Nick!
I had intended to put a PiHole on the network, but heard (here?) that doesn’t kill YT ads.
I will give your suggestion a try. I hope our cheapo Turkish TV from Aldi has a capability to set DNS manually. The ads during the concerto last night were the last straw…
We have a drive-in beer place near the BOL. Very civilised, as it limits unnecessary lifting and carrying of heavy crates of beer bottles and empties. I checked the website before loading the car full of empties and driving to the shop.
The website says they close at 5pm, the sign on the door says 2pm. Grr. Bought beer at the supermarket instead. Nastygram sent…
Coffee.
Breakfast burritos.
Coffee.
Coffee.
Suicide, then? Odd way to want to go…
Not looking at the DM website, which is poisoned with ads, cookies, trackers and popups.
The old peanut farmer will be welcoming a bunch of new psychopaths’ and butchers in Hell tonight.
Lawdog chimes in on Iran.
Well, at least she did not go off half-baked.
Not looking at the DM website, which is poisoned with ads, cookies, trackers and popups. \
– which is what the adblocker is for. I even managed to get rid of a whole column by manually selecting it. If only I could figure out how to block all the “M+” paywalled articles.
n
Is there a good reason that you are not availing yourself of ad-blocker software? It’s probably not necessary to go so far as blocking all javascript and external resources, but simpler measures will stop most of the annoyance. Using a browser window in private mode will let the cookies and trackers in but will make them pointless.
Ah, the future of reporting… note the ‘trainee reporter’ appellation on the contributors…
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-15601293/moment-Iranian-missiles-skies-Dubai-westerners.html
In my opinion, any “influencer” who participates in the white washing of the arab states is complicit and a fair target.
Plus, what fuxing idiots.
If a missile landed “metres away” he’d be jelly. Firecrackers “metres away” are dangerous to hearing and eyes. Missiles?? Yeah.
and “5x the speed of sound”? Yeah.
– not anymore! and not ever if you were not western and white.
–and yet the other guy was ‘metres’ from a missile…
n
The old peanut farmer was granted a pass because he spared the world Ted Kennedy ’80.
Go watch the recent “Chappaquiddick” if you can find a source. Tubi used to have it, but they pulled the stream.
I do have AdBlock Plus on the desktop Mint boxes, but I am on Chrome browser on my Android phone just at the moment.
Any suggestions for a suitable adblocker? Perhaps pointless if I am using Chrome, I know…
Ugh. A nephew gave W1 and me some fancy coffee for Christmas. W1 brewed some up for breakfast/brunch. I am not a huge coffee drinker these days, and usually consume decaf when I partake. This stuff was not decaf, but it certainly was very aromatic and tasty.
Alas, it turns out the gift was espresso coffee, but W1 neglected to read the packaging, and brewed it as if it were filter. We consumed it by the mug-full. She is a regular coffee drinker, and even she has a caffeine buzz from it. I feel nauseous and headachy, as if I were hungover from a skinfull of beer. At least if it were beer, I could sleep it off. This stuff will probably keep me awake all night.
uBlock Origin Lite works well for YouTube with Chrome here. “Remove Paywalls” extension is working presently for DailyMail in Chrome, too.
Ole’ demented Tucker:
Tucker Carlson torches Trump’s ‘disgusting and evil’ attack on Iran as MAGA base fractures
This guy went off his rocker. It’s hard to believe he thinks Iran is some innocent Mooslim country.
And, no, the MAGA base is not fractured. Carlson, quoting the Bible, doesn’t mean shit.
I was wondering if Tucker had some vulnerable relatives, like H. Ross did.
n
Pointless if you are using Android.
Tucker Carlson has been purchased by Qatar (pronunced “Gutter”) and has become pretty anti-Semitic. I never did watch his show, but he’s gone pretty far into the swamp.
I have a pi-hole. When I use my phone on wi-fi the ads are blocked.
I have a powered four port USB thing. It uses one port on the PC. Each port on the extender (?) has a power switch. Clear as mud? If I’m going to wear out a USB port, let’s do so on the $30 gizmo and not on the PC.
I turned on the port for the UPS yesterday. A little box half covered by FF blinked on the screen and Mint put an icon next to the clock. It knows the brand and model of the UPS. Says it’s fully charged. I can adjust settings in case the power goes out. The only thing missing, that the UPS’ software did on Windows, is tell me the load or how long the battery will last. I’ll live with the defects. Pretty cool that it automagically did it.
I also turned on the DVD drive. The PC chirped. Drive works for reading. Don’t know about burning yet.
Today I have no sound. Tried a MP3, tried a video. No sound. Celluloid shows the first picture of a video but that’s all. I installed VLC. Video plays, no sound.
I rebooted. I get a line of tiny text when the machine boots. It doesn’t stay long enough to read.
So I Ducked and tried a couple of the suggestions. I “already have the latest package”.
Well, crud. And Buddy the Beagle is pestering me for a walk. Better pestered than cleaning up a puddle.
I got to thinking. Other than messing with T-Bird and FF and Text Editor, I didn’t do anything. Character Map shouldn’t have any effect on audio/video.
I came back inside. Tried a video. Tried a MP3. No sound. Hey, wait…. Turned the DVD drive one and the PC chirped. Now I have video and audio. Even with the DVD turned off.
Crazy.
Hmm. I was able to set DNS on the TV to 001.001.001.001, but am still getting ads on YT. I wonder if my ISP is just ignoring requests sent to 1.1.1.1?
This is going to take some investigating, I think.
When I am feeling less queasy after too much coffee, methinks…
Paul, does your PiHole prevent ads on YouTube?
@denis there are other versions (dns ad blockers) that offer differing levels of blocking, some do nanny stuff too. Another might work for you.
That’s assuming your provider isn’t somehow redirecting those DNS requests, and that the TV actually is using 1.1.1.1 —-
Sorry, google points out that 1.1.1.1 is cloudflare and doesn’t block the ads. I was misremembering because they do have service that blocks malware and adult that I was looking to use on the kids.
google adblock dns servers and you’ll get a list to try.
n
I’m not sure. I don’t watch TV other than DVD or Blu ray or LaserDisc movies. On the PC, yea, I get a few ads before the video I want to see starts. Not always. Seems to be random.
I download the videos I want to watch. Nothing huge, just clips maybe 5 minutes long. Go to You Tube, copy the URL, open https://saveig.in/savefrom/ and save the file. It’s a habit from too many years of erratic ISP performance.
I could figure what to add to the pi’s block list but the ads usually have a Skip button.
Relatives or employees?
The Perot family paid for my father-in-law’s heart transplant and, when he went into rejection, convened daily conferences of the best related specialists in the world on a daily basis to find a solution to the problem.
Relatives or employees?
– doesn’t really matter, leverage is leverage.
Or they could be poisoning him like Jordan Peterson, physically or mentally.
n
Ancient religions live on…
https://ace.mu.nu/cat%20tworship.jpg
process the change of address:
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei
James Earl Carter Hotel
Hell City, Hades 7734-7734
Watching youtube on my amazon stick the ads are often unskippable and more than a minute long, or they make you skip three with one unskippable.
A lot of the content I watch isn’t monetizable so no ad in front (tobacco related stuff, cigars/pipe smoking).
Some was ad free by the creator’s design but youtube changed their policy and started inserting ads anyway, like study or sleeping music collections.
Youtube doesn’t want to play you three hours, or six hours when you are not paying attention, or even awake.
n
In between outdoor stuff I’m ripping dvds again, and had good success with makemkv on the ones that handbrake wouldn’t do, like the John Wick movies or today, 3:10 to yuma. The new drive makes a difference too as many that wouldn’t rip before, ripped without issue on the new drive. You can wear out a DVD drive…
I wonder who took the photo and sent it to us?
n
I meant Perot’s motivation back in the 70s.
I thought “On Wings of Eagles” was about getting employees out.
Nailing an email marketer to the roadway should be a misdemeanor as long as tire-friendly pavement-flush nails are used and the appropriate warning signs are posted 50-yards in each direction:
WARNING!
E-mail marketer nailed to roadway!
Run over in forward direction only!
No Backing!
Cell phone spammers, including text, are to be nailed to roundabouts only, with no limitation on repeat rounds.
Antenora, 9th Circle, Hell
In Dante’s Inferno, the 9th circle is for treachery, with the region Antenora being for traitors to country.
I made a large purchase from Big River just now, and I hope I did it right to get credit for this site.
I used the daynotes search tool for Amazon.com, found a link to a book in one of Lynn’s posts, clicked the link. That got me to the amazon.com page for the book, which I didn’t want, but had the ttgnet tag. Then I searched for my product and bought it.
SteveF displays disturbing indications of a classical education.
Did the Jesuits get to you, poor Steve?
Saturday bedtime. W1 and I went outside to observe the planetary parade, but we were a bit hampered by having missed the best window, (shortly after sunset), and by passing high cloud.
There were certainly some bright, non-twinkling objects visible, so I suppose those were the naked-eye planets. We had binoculars, but without knowing where to look, those are not much use.
Unfortunately, the first I heard of the alignment today was when W1 said she wanted to go outdoors, so I had no opportunity to look up a description or star map.
Ah well, it was nice to be out in the fresh, cold air, and the BOL has about as little light pollution as it is possible to get in densely populated western Europe.
Goodnight!
There is an Amazon affiliate deal for this site? Why did nobody say so before!
After getting sound and video working, I had the idea to go find that set of 20 movies I bought from the Microsoft store a while back. The movies that won’t play in VLC, just the MS program. Wouldn’t even play on Moa. I saw the folder the other day. Don’t remember where. I was busy sorting out T-Bird. The files had the “preview icon” for lack of a better term, so Mint knows what the files are. I’ll trip across it some day.
I dug into My Documents. Yeah…. lots of windows programs. A couple of iso files for Win11. One 6.x GB and the other 4.x GB. Gone.
I deleted a lot of stuff. Maybe 50 GB worth. I still have copies on other drives but they are useless on Mint. If I’m looking at the right right place with the right tool, I’m using 256GB on this 1 TB drive. Down from 325GB/
More stuff will be deleted.
I have a crazy idea. Remember that sausage ball recipe I posted? Jimmy Dean, shredded cheese, Bisquick, mixed and baked? It’s a Betty Crocker thing.
How about using canned corned beef hash? Instead of sausage? Baked on a cake rake in the oven so the grease drains. It ought to be good. If not to me, the dogs will love it.
Watching the PLTs and Dumbos simp for the Ayatollah is interesting. That is not going to help them during the midterms. They don’t give a shit for the Ayatollah.
tRump, tho.
Is there a setting to have a program “open here” and not tiling from the upper left corner of the screen every time I open it? There has to be. Windows manages to do so.
Dragging stuff to the middle of the screen is getting old. Grump grump grump.
I spotted a folder called Public. So I did the Share stuff. Installed Samba. Need to re-boot…. I don’t expect to connect to Moa. But I probably need Samba to print.
The window thing…. T-bird is sketchy. But it stays on it’s side of the screen. FF is ok. Tho clicking the comments link on blogger site opens a window way on the other side of the screen.
But T-Bird. Open a message, drag it to where I can read it. Close message, open next and I have to drag it again to the center of the screen.
“SteveF displays disturbing indications of a classical education.”
As in Inferno by Niven and Pournelle?
No, I’m just awesome.
My public school education was, shall we say, lacking. There’s a reason I dropped out of high school.
You mentioned that some time ago, Paul. I expressed doubts about whether they’d stay together once the fat in the hash melted and stopped holding them together. I suspect that you made them before and they didn’t turn out well but you ate them anyway and that made the dogs angry so they tripped you and then hit you in the head with a hammer and made you forget having made them.
“I have a crazy idea. Remember that sausage ball recipe I posted? Jimmy Dean, shredded cheese, Bisquick, mixed and baked? It’s a Betty Crocker thing.
How about using canned corned beef hash? Instead of sausage? Baked on a cake rake in the oven so the grease drains. It ought to be good. If not to me, the dogs will love it.”
Check your grocery to see if they have corned beef hash in the same chub packaging as JD. I like it better and it seems to have a bit less fat.
I read that but also read the original. (Semi-original. English translation. Not surprisingly, I don’t read Tuscan.)
Currently reading The Aeneid, Dryden’s translation.
If you want something to keep you busy for a couple years, grab either The Harvard Classics or The Great Books of the Western World and start reading. There’s also the Penguin Classics collections but I’m not so fond of those because a lot of the works are excerpted or edited and I’d rather get the entire original (in English translation, generally).
I’m in Burnet. The HEB seems to have problems stocking half and half.
I’ve not made sausage balls substituting corned beef hash. Yet.
Might be a big mess on a cookie sheet. But all the parts are tasty so even if my idea fails, ok.
Did you install the multimedia codecs?
When you find the files, try playing in VLC under Mint. You might have better luck.
If the files still won’t play with VLC, the last resort would be poking at them with ffmpeg from the command line using the -i option.
ffmpeg -i [filename]
To install ffmpeg, run
apt-get install ffmpeg
I use the Brave browser on Android – don’t notice a problem with ads.
I only knew about the affiliate stuff because of a previous discussion around the WordPress plugin that adds the tag, automatically, whenever you post a link to Big River.
=============
Classical educations come in many forms. American and European universities pre-WWII, when it was mostly white, mostly men, and universally Liberal Arts, in the truest sense of the word, is one form. Back when a Liberal Arts degree meant you studied classical literature, math, chemistry, and physics.
Compulsive reading of anything and everything put in front of you, from cereal boxes to Plato and Aristotle is another.
Somewhat related, Donald Knuth, in The Art of Computer Programming, had chapter heading quotes. The one I remember best was in (I think) a chapter about data structures.
There was a time we expected our experts to actually know stuff, beyond their fields.
I had a small cache of books from my college days that got ruined in flood in my basement. All 3 volumes of Knuth, the Dragon book, my Thomas calculus book. And several others, mostly math.
FWIW the MakeMKV files are more than 6x bigger than the files Handbrake makes. And while MakeMKV doesn’t know which file is the movie, and which are shorts/previews/special features, it includes all of the files it can read in the output and it’s easy to rename the biggest one to the movie title. It also embeds the CC or subtitles, which VLC can display. Handbrake doesn’t seem to get that right no matter what settings I try.
——
Spent the beautiful afternoon cutting the back yard weeds and grass with the string trimmer. Then used the blower attachment to move a ton of leaves onto the grass from the patio and the areas that should be mulch. I’ll mow all that mess tomorrow if it’s nice out.
Sat and watched the sun go down, not much of a sunset though. Just some pale orange. Had a tiny little fire and relaxed. It got chilly with no nuclear fire. I think today’s high must have been mid 70s F in the shade but it was hot in the sun. I was sweaty.
W was inspired to go and buy some flowers and plants. D2 is still at her school thing, and D1 is babysitting. I’ll have to find something to make for dinner for me and W. Maybe just a steak.
——
Some other people are now worried about iranian sleeper cells activating. They are a bit late to the party, but then not everyone pays attention.
——
WRT a classical education, it’s never too late. The great books collections are $5-15 per volume depending on quality of the printing, but can also be found at goodwill and estate sales. I have most of the Five Foot Bookshelf, and the Harvard Classics collection. I’m always looking for more. You can d/l the whole thing online somewhere for kindle.
I’ve always got my eye out for “collected works” volumes too. It’s one book, $2 at goodwill, but has all the Shakespeare, all the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, all the Poe, etc. Great way to build the library.
——
@denis, the amazon affilitate link gets appended to any amazon link posted here, and applies to anything you buy in that shopping session after you use it to get to amazon. You can find anything, link it here, and then follow the link in a new tab to activate it for your session if no one has posted a link yet that day. The money goes to Barbara. I don’t think it’s much normally, but it can’t hurt, especially if you are buying something expensive or filling your cart for the month.
This headlight is great for close work, like plumbing under a cabinet.
n
“Cuba Becomes the First Country To Reach Net Zero. Shouldn’t We Be Celebrating?”
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2026/02/25/cuba-becomes-the-first-country-to-reach-net-zero-shouldnt-we-be-celebrating/
“There it was on the front page of Saturday’s New York Times: with a small assist from the United States, the island nation of Cuba has almost entirely ended the use of fossil fuels. Finally, we have the first country in the world to achieve the climate movement’s Holy Grail and nirvana — Net Zero! Or at least a very close approximation. This should be cause for a huge celebration.”
“You would think that the Times, which has been demanding the elimination of fossil fuels for at least a couple of decades, would be leading the celebrations. But weirdly, now that Cuba has finally shown the way, the Times chooses to put a completely different spin on the achievement. The headline and subheadline are (print edition): “U.S. Choking Oil Deliveries To Cuba Ports; Military Action Brings a Nation to Its Knees.””
“The piece reports that the Trump administration is helping Cuba to achieve Net Zero by preventing oil tankers from landing there. Somehow in this piece, that is spun as a bad thing. It has brought Cuba “to its knees.””
Looks like Net Zero sucks to me.
MakeMKV doesn’t transcode the audio or video. The MKV file contains the streams exactly as they came off of the disc. This has upsides but a big downside for a quality BluRay.
HandBrake is designed to recompress the video for portable devices.
Creating a DVD still requires an MPEG2 video codec, however, and, ideally, an AC3 codec for audio, both of which require license fees. ffmpeg has the codec support, but the codecs are not legal to distribute in the US as part of a Linux distribution.
Red Hat flavors of Linux, including Fedora, have codecs available for easy instal through RPM Fusion. Ubuntu has a separate repository which must be activated in apt.
Texas Tech (16) beat Iowa State (4) this afternoon.
They beat then #1-ranked Arizona a couple weeks ago, then promptly lost to unranked Arizona State.
Definitely dangerous, but inconsistent, and still missing their star player for the year. Be interesting to see if they can keep up when the tournament starts.
“Memes We Waited 42 Years For”
https://accordingtohoyt.com/2026/03/01/memes-we-waited-42-years-for/
“First, a request to President Trump:”
“Sir, may I humbly request you stop doing awesome stuff on Saturday. This humble meme gatherer would like her afternoons off. Thank you for your attention to this matter — SAH.”
“To the people belly aching about war with Iran: BITCHES, I watched our country be humiliated by the taking of hostages. My 12 th grade class song was “And I Ran, I ran so far away” and no, it wasn’t talking about aerobics. We’ve watched Iran finance destruction against the US and Israel and taunt our presidents. We watched them arguably interfere with our elections for decades.
Yeah, we bombed the evil oppressive regime of Iran. Don’t like it? Go cry SOMEWHERE ELSE. Your crocodile tears give me a rash.”
My personal favorite:
https://accordingtohoyt.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/hcrydlubeau_cja.jpg
LOVE the carbonite.
n
Past time for bed though.
n