Sat. Feb. 11, 2023 – Non-prepping hobby day

By on February 11th, 2023 in culture, decline and fall

Cool and damp, some chance of clear later.   Yesterday was nice but stayed on the chilly side.

Got some stuff done.   Spent some time on storage.

Not the most productive day, but one that did alright.

Today I’ll head to my meeting, spend some time with fellow enthusiasts, then do some more of the usual stuff.

Oh, in the middle there, I’ll help D2 get some cookies sold.    Help out your local GS troop, it’s cookie season…

So I’m off like a prom dress…  enjoy the day.

Stack something, even if it’s just memories.

n

68 Comments and discussion on "Sat. Feb. 11, 2023 – Non-prepping hobby day"

  1. SteveF says:

    I’m off like a prom dress

    That’s hate speech because of implied gender norms and slut shaming! To the camps with you!

    Of course, I found it amusing because I hadn’t heard that expression before, so to the camps with me, too!

  2. Nick Flandrey says:

    38F and 99%RH.   

    Got my stuff together, need to shower and get some coffee in me, then I’m off.

    n

    like a prom dress……

    ; – )

    — a little Lancers wine, or some Boone’s Farm Tickle Pink….

  3. Greg Norton says:

    Of course, I found it amusing because I hadn’t heard that expression before, so to the camps with me, too!

    I have a special wing in the camps reserved for me.

    I grew up in The South, and the extension of the rule down there is that the prom dress will be off more than once over the course of the evening if your teenage daughter – or son if he identifies as female — smoke cigarettes.

    And even 40 years ago, every high school graduating class had at least one. Ours was named Kevin; he became Lori.

  4. Greg Norton says:

    @Lynn – I took a call from Anaconda yesterday. The recruiter’s emails were way too woke for my comfort, but I figured I’d hear what they had to say.

    I don’t do “learning opportunities” anymore so I don’t think she was thrilled when she got my salary number. I received the “Thanks for your time, but” email within an hour.

    Lots of layoffs, but lots of places are hiring for the GPU accelerated computing future which AI processing demands will force. Your neighbor’s Bitcoin rig may be worth some money in salvage after all.

    Apple has a problem.

  5. Ray Thompson says:

    And even 40 years ago, every high school graduating class had at least one. Ours was named Kevin; he became Lori.

    I dated one while in high school. Her name was Jackie. Later converted to Jack. I don’t know if she/it/shim decided I was the best, there was no use looking further. Or if she/it/shim decided if I was all that there was, time to look elsewhere.

    When I came home on leave one time my mother set me up on a date with the daughter of her friend. Big mistake. Thankfully it was a drive-in. That ahem, girl, was as queer as a three-dollar bill. I was afraid to touch any of it.

  6. Greg Norton says:

    Apple is not buying Tesla. 

    The “Defender” machine is gone from the lobby of Bandley 3 – I’ve been there – but the legend is that Woz still has his badge.

    https://nypost.com/2023/02/10/elon-musk-wants-to-be-cult-leader-apple-founder-steve-wozniak/

    Wants to be? Tony is a cult leader.

  7. drwilliams says:

    Save me a spot in the camp, too. 

    Dibs on a porch rocker. 

  8. PaultheManc says:

    There are, in my opinion, some sensible people around in the world.  I see Lord Frost, in the UK, as one.  He has written an article in today’s London Times which I applaud.  (Sadly, no one seems to listen to him!)  The article was copied into this Tweet.

    https://twitter.com/MrSimonDudley/status/1624327674163339264

  9. Nick Flandrey says:

    Well, I had some sales and D2 sold a bunch of cookies, and we had a good meeting, so all in all, a good morning.

    Weather started sunny and clear but is turning to overcast… and it’s only 58F.

    n

  10. paul says:
    Whoddathunkit?

    Some guy named Powell mentioned that this might happen.  Who knew?

  11. SteveF says:

    Took daughter to the Y for a swimming qualification test before starting lifeguarding class. She passed, no problem. There were eight starting students, three teenage boys, four teenage girls, and one older woman whose certification had lapsed and she needed to start all over from the beginning to take the Water Safety Instructor class. One of the boys just couldn’t swim well enough and washed out. One boy tried too hard to show off before the babes and sprinted at the start of the 300m “endurance” part of the test … and burned out a quarter of the way in. Washed out. Good job, genius. He could have been one of two boys and four girls, assuming that was the reasoning – “reasoning” – behind the sprint, but no. I believe that each of those two boys has now wasted his parents’ $400 course fee.

    I signed her up for the class so she’d have the skills in case she ever needed them. The other kids apparently all wanted to work as lifeguards and now she’s thinking about it. -shrug- If she wants to, fine. She should get a regular job at some point, having to deal with bosses and timesheets and -ugh!- people, so that she can see for herself how horrible it is. Lifeguarding is as good as any.

  12. drwilliams says:

    If they forfeited the $400 course fee for not passing quals, that’s way too steep. 

  13. SteveF says:

    Ability to swim 300m, retrieve a weight from 9′ down and then swim the length of the pool, and tread water for 3 minutes was listed as a prerequisite for the class.

  14. drwilliams says:

    Yeah, and $400 for getting flushed is so Red Cross, but it doesn’t surprise me that the Y is running a profit center on it, too, Let me guess: They waive the fee for DEI?

    Too bad the Salvation Army doesn’t run swimming pools.

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  15. Greg Norton says:

    She should get a regular job at some point, having to deal with bosses and timesheets and -ugh!- people, so that she can see for herself how horrible it is. Lifeguarding is as good as any.

    My successor on the DC project at the tolling company, Roger, only had one job other than something professional his entire life. Lifeguard. Fancy Lad.

    It looks like Roger quit abruptly or was fired last Fall. With his family money it could go either way. I like to think he was canned. It is the romantic in me.

    Canned or quit ugly. He doesn’t have another job listed since then.

    Whoever has the project now has to clone my work for the Fred Ex — Fredericksburg Extension. No pressure; the road is only a year late.

  16. lpdbw says:

    My oldest son got his BSA lifeguard qual way back when he was a Scout.  About 1997.

    The instructor, a grizzled veteran of scouting (age 20) said: “I’m allowed to pass you if you can complete the half-mile swim by the end of the week, but I’ll just let you know right now that I don’t pass anyone who can’t do the full mile.”

    Another Scout dad warned me not to let the coaches at school know the boy could swim that well, or he’d be drafted to compete on the swim team.

  17. drwilliams says:

    “It’s alleged that Tyre had a relationship with one of the officers girlfriend [sic]. This was a revenge murder by 5 Black thugs. not a cop problem. not a race problem. not a fraternity problem,” notes “food activist” Devine Davidson. (She ascribes the problem to “patriarchal dominance” and “toxic masculinity” in the black community.)

    It will be interesting if this turns out to be the case. The Tyre Nichols beating has become the latest rallying cry for leftist authoritarians in their attempts to centralize federal control over your local police department. But if in fact the incident was a street-gang beatdown of a romantic rival — if it’s only tangentially related to law enforcement because the MPD somehow failed to screen out these thugs — the Tyre Nichols chapter of the “systemic police brutality and racism” narrative is going to collapse.

    https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/athena-thorne/2023/02/11/confirmed-memphis-cop-sent-pics-of-beaten-tyre-nichols-to-female-acquaintance-n1669791

    Gonna have to take another try at ‘splainin’ how this is “white” anything.

  18. paul says:

    If you watch TV over the air, the freeze last week broke KXAN’s transmitter.  But they moved 36.1 to 54.5.

    I didn’t want to re-scan because sometimes it gets strange.  Two of every 14 and 2 vanishes. PBS comes and goes.   It’s the weather.  Fog over Lake Travis matters.

  19. SteveF says:

    not a cop problem

    It absolutely is a cop problem. Why were thugs in a gang recruited onto the force? (Setting aside observations that most police forces are nothing but gangs with political support.) Why were the thugs-in-uniform not being supervised so that they could not go out and commit murders? Hell, why were gang members allowed to work together rather than being spread around?

  20. drwilliams says:

    Why were the thugs-in-uniform not being supervised so that they could not go out and commit murders?

    Not seein’ a white problem there, either. (Maybe in Fargo, but not Memphis)

    Qualifications, supervision–sound like anti-EDI rhetoric.

  21. paul says:

    The wife made me chicken crunch on Monday and I have been eating it all week.  Canned chicken, cream of mushroom soup, cashews, chinese noodles, and a few other things.

    Chinese noodles?  Do you mean chowmein noodles that often come in a container like the onions everyone has to have for green bean casserole?

    But, yeah.  The rest sounds good.  Toss in some water chestnuts, too.

  22. Lynn says:

    Lots of layoffs, but lots of places are hiring for the GPU accelerated computing future which AI processing demands will force. Your neighbor’s Bitcoin rig may be worth some money in salvage after all.

    He has an Etherium rig.  Are they the same ?

  23. Lynn says:

    https://nypost.com/2023/02/10/elon-musk-wants-to-be-cult-leader-apple-founder-steve-wozniak/

    Wants to be? Tony is a cult leader.

    I detect some … jealousy … on the part of Woz.

    Tony has a high volume website dedicated to him.  They report the good and the bad.

        https://www.teslarati.com/

  24. Lynn says:

    Wizard of Id: Bumper Stickers

       https://www.gocomics.com/wizardofid/2023/02/11

    Wow, I had no idea bumper stickers went back to the middle ages.

  25. Greg Norton says:

    Lots of layoffs, but lots of places are hiring for the GPU accelerated computing future which AI processing demands will force. Your neighbor’s Bitcoin rig may be worth some money in salvage after all.

    He has an Etherium rig.  Are they the same ?

    I believe the difference is in the hashing algorithm used and number of “coins” available, but the mining principle is the same.

  26. paul says:

    A few months ago I sliced up a steak.  Mixed a pack of Sunbird Kung Pao or Szechuan sauce.  They taste different but I can’t tell why.  Cooked the meat enough to start browning and then added a handful of raw peanuts.  Seemed like a good idea.  Once that seemed to be almost cooked, added a drained/rinsed can of sliced water chestnuts because that’s what I had.  

    The LaChoy can o’ stuff is good.  Not a fan of the popsicle sticks, I mean , bamboo. But a can of bean sprouts is too much.  Added a few tablespoons of garlic chile paste.  Then the Sunbird mix.

    Over rice.

    No leftovers.

    Chicken works, too.

  27. Greg Norton says:

    I detect some … jealousy … on the part of Woz.

    I doubt that, but I do believe Woz been disappointed with tech for about 30 years. It really did stop being fun once Windows 95 put a TCP stack into every PC and turned home computers into pr0n and shopping boxes.

    If you haven’t done so already, make the effort to watch the cringely.com Bob Cringely’s “Triumph of the Nerds”. YouTube has it now for free.

    You can safely skip “Nerds 2.01”.

    And yes, while you’re watching and wondering, I think Christine Comaford is another Gates squeeze like Ann Winblad and the late Pam Edstrom of “Wagg Ed” fame,, Microsoft’s PR during the antitrust BillG bad old days.

  28. Greg Norton says:

    Gonna have to take another try at ‘splainin’ how this is “white” anything.

    Benny Crump is the master. I believe that the “White Hispanic” label for George Zimmerman was his invention.

  29. paul says:

    Win95 did make networking easy.  Compared to WfW3.11.  But much of that was not having to dick with IRQs between sound and video and nic cards.

    I disagree with using TCP/IP on the local LAN. NetBEUI was good stuff and it simply worked. Not routable is a good feature.  A PC with no TCP/IP stack can’t be infected from the ‘Net.  Directly.  No Habla Internet isn’t a bad thing.

    I get it, sort of.  Have a router on your LAN doing DHCP and all that.  NetBEUI?  Just get a hub and everyone can share files and printers.  Just different levels of Plug and Play I suppose.

     Anyway.  I was not asked to vote.

    5
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  30. paul says:

    Firefox 109 seems to have a new feature.  Your ‘net connection is shirty(-r) and it just sort of gives up loading the page you want.

    Annoying.  Not as annoying as the screen that harped on “check your internet connection”.  

  31. drwilliams says:

    @paul

    Check your local market’s produce dept for sprouts.

  32. Nick Flandrey says:

    chowmein noodles that often come in a container like the onions everyone has to have for green bean casserole

    There are delicious cookies to be made with those noodles too.   We make them for Christmas.

    https://homecookingmemories.com/no-bake-chow-mein-noodle-cookies-recipe/

    is a fairly representative recipe.  And “no bake” doesn’t mean no cooking or work.

    n

  33. Greg Norton says:

    I disagree with using TCP/IP on the local LAN. NetBEUI was good stuff and it simply worked. Not routable is a good feature.  A PC with no TCP/IP stack can’t be infected from the ‘Net.  Directly.  No Habla Internet isn’t a bad thing.

    The TCP stack integration wasn’t nearly as much of a problem as the default Windows browser running as “root” starting in Windows 98 after BillG returned from one of his “reading weekends” with the famed epiphany about the Internet.

  34. Greg Norton says:

    Win95 did make networking easy.  Compared to WfW3.11.  But much of that was not having to dick with IRQs between sound and video and nic cards.

    Windows 95 was also a real 32 bit OS and did not ride on top of DOS.

    WfW 3.11 had preemptive multitasking Win32s, but it was a hack. Still, that platform was popular with C suites in Corporate America who wanted commodity PC hardware to be able to run TCP services back before Linux exploded beyond something Linus Torvalds coded sitting in his closet.

  35. paul says:
    The TCP stack integration wasn’t nearly as much of a problem as the default Windows browser running as “root” 

    But back then who knew about running as root?  Beyond some Linux total dork weirdos that could hardly speak English and know how to take a bath?

    Win95 was a good step up from Wfw3.11.  Slapping the IE4 “service pack” on Win95 was a big improvement.

    Win98 smoothed some edges, Win98Se polished everything.  WinMe pushed a bit toward XP.

    I have a CD with a beta of NT5.  Damn, that is sweet.  You have a solid NT3 with the 98Se shell.  XP was a step backwards.

  36. Nick Flandrey says:

    Ok astro nerds.

    Serious rabbit hole.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0bysBIj0FA

    Making a Monolithic Telescope Part 2: Machining Glass 

    –Really cool, and 9 months old so he’s made a good bit of progress beyond this vid.

    Very watchable despite the technical discussion, and it’s in his home shop.

    n

  37. paul says:

    Windows 95 was also a real 32 bit OS and did not ride on top of DOS.

    I disagree.  DOS did the booting thing.  You could still do things in autoexec.bat and config.sys. 

    NT5 aka XP got us off of DOS.

    Ya know, it’s been so long since I installed Win95 on bare hardware that I just don’t remember.  But I’m pretty sure you installed DOS 6 just to get the PC to boot enough to be able to see a CD drive.

    It’s been a while.  

    When I started at HEB the cash registers ran on WfW3.11 and NetBEUI.

    2
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  38. ITGuy1998 says:

    Win 95, 98, and Me all had Dos underpinnings. Win 11 is of the NT lineage – NT 3.1, 3.5, 4, 2000, XP, etc.

  39. Greg Norton says:

    But back then who knew about running as root?  Beyond some Linux total dork weirdos that could hardly speak English and know how to take a bath?
     

    I‘ve run Linux since Red Hat 0.9. I bathe regularly, however.

    Even at Death Star Labs, the concept of not running as root to build/debug software was a foreign concept when I started there in 2000.

    The browser was really dangerous to run that way, however. Everything was a hack, including SSL and JavaScript. 

  40. Lynn says:

    Over The Hedge: The Red Headed Screenpecker

       https://www.gocomics.com/overthehedge/2023/02/10

    Hey, I like Styx’s “Mr. Roboto” song !

  41. drwilliams says:

    I just watched part of a restoration of a 100+ year-old piece of furniture. I wasn’t really interested except to see if they tested for lead paint. Nope.

    If you’re doing such, get a test kit and learn the signs to tell you when to use it.

  42. Lynn says:

    “SpaceX Starship booster survives record-breaking 31-engine static fire”

        https://www.teslarati.com/spacex-starship-booster-survives-most-powerful-static-fire-in-history/

    “SpaceX’s Starship rocket has survived a record-breaking engine test – potentially the most powerful static fire in the history of rocketry.  According to CEO Elon Musk, Super Heavy Booster 7 (B7) ultimately ignited 31 of its 33 Raptor engines. One engine was manually disabled “just before” the static fire, while the other faulty engine automatically shut down while attempting to ignite. The other 31 Raptors, however, completed a “full duration” static fire that lasted about five seconds. Musk says that even with two engines disabled, those that remained were “still enough…to reach orbit” – an excellent result despite the static fire’s imperfections.”

    WOW !  If nothing else, watching that sucker take off would be amazing.

  43. Lynn says:

    Pearls Before Swine: Pig Has A New Job

       https://www.gocomics.com/pearlsbeforeswine/2023/02/11

    Heh !

  44. drwilliams says:

    School says 11 yr old’s drawing of pig with a bowtie is “obscene”

    A video, titled ”I can’t make this up,” has accumulated more than 800,000 views and features Sierra Carter, 37, of Jackson, explaining how officials at her fifth grade daughter’s school deemed her drawing of a pig wearing a bow tie “inappropriate.”.

    https://hotair.com/headlines/2023/02/11/school-says-11-yr-olds-drawing-of-pig-with-a-bowtie-is-obscene-n530016

    Maybe she could use Mr. Pastis as an expert witness?

    Perhaps get Friz Freleng to testify via Ouija Board?

    To quote from The Unexpurgated Bugs Bunny: ”What a bunch of f***ing maroons!”

  45. Ray Thompson says:

    I bathe regularly, however.

    Once a year is “regularly“. 🙂

  46. drwilliams says:

    I enjoy watching YouTube woodworking videos.

    If you do, then this one is worth a look, but you should not be drinking coffee or soda when you start. If you don’t recognize the schtick immediately, just turn it off.

    Guess Which Popular Creators Helped Build This Desk

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1nKruBs9kA

  47. Alan says:

    >> chowmein noodles that often come in a container like the onions everyone has to have for green bean casserole

    Back in the day in NYFC, at the local Chinese restaurant, when you sat down (usually in a booth) you got a bowl of wide (~¼”) fried noodles along with duck sauce and chinese mustard for dipping. Usually the bowl was empty before the appetizers were served. Haven’t seen them since we left the city. Yum!

  48. Alan says:

    >> https://hotair.com/headlines/2023/02/11/school-says-11-yr-olds-drawing-of-pig-with-a-bowtie-is-obscene-n530016

    1. Draw pig
    2. Bring it to school and have it go viral
    3. Declare it’s an NFT
      . . .

              Profit
     

  49. SteveF says:

    School says 11 yr old’s drawing of pig with a bowtie is “obscene”

    The young lady should branch into political cartooning and caricatures. Lampoon the idiot teacher, the idiot principal, the idiot administrators, …

    And a special cartoon for the boy who kicked off the whole kerfuffle by drawing him as a pig with no “boy parts”.

    Or what Alan says. There’s got to be someone who’d send her some money for it.

  50. Lynn says:

    Windows 95 was also a real 32 bit OS and did not ride on top of DOS.

    Sorry, Windows 95 was 16 bit with a 32 bit to 16 thunking layer.  Windows 95 was booted by a very rudimentary version of DOS 6 with most of the goodies stripped out of it.

    I was an alpha tester for Windows 92 / 93 / 95.  They would ship me diskettes weekly with CDroms later.  The Windows programmers were desperately trying to get more than 32K window handles so they tried every trick in the book and then some.  At the end, they shipped Windows 95 with 32K window handles.   I would dutifully load up the new Windows 9X candidate, try my software,  and then login to Compuserve and send the hidden message board a posting saying “my software no workie”.  I would get the canned reply, “we are investigating” but I knew they knew that the latest window handle multiplexing scheme had failed.

    Microsoft was really desperately trying to get Windows 9X to run for more than a day in the field.  Windows NT 3 was true 32 bit and required 4X more resources and only supported 10% of the devices that Windows 9X supported.  Windows 2000 was the first version of NT that was truly usable on anything other than a Dell or a Compaq PC, maybe Gateway too.  So they shipped Windows 95 anyway and people loved it despite having to reboot daily to hourly (software engineers like me).

  51. Nick Flandrey says:

    I did a launch conference or developer conference for MS in SanDiego way back in the day.   “Chicago” which became win95.   It was pretty interesting seeing whole hotel breakout rooms filled with PCs on tables, classroom style, and some of them even had miles of blue cat5 and server racks!

    The image that really stuck with me though was one of the MS support guys going from PC to PC with a floppy to remove a virus!   Straight from MS development, with virus pre-loaded!  And it was pretty much every machine there infected.

    n

  52. Greg Norton says:

    WOW !  If nothing else, watching that sucker take off would be amazing.

    Unfortunately, South Padre Island is a haul. First, go to Corpus Christi and then it is three hours south from there. That isn’t a spur of the moment trip.

    If you go, the campground at the south end of the island is about as close as I’d want to get to that launch site.

  53. Lynn says:

    WOW !  If nothing else, watching that sucker take off would be amazing.

    Unfortunately, South Padre Island is a haul. First, go to Corpus Christi and then it is three hours south from there. That isn’t a spur of the moment trip.

    If you go, the campground at the south end of the island is about as close as I’d want to get to that launch site.

    I think that ten miles away from the launch site might be far enough away.

  54. Lynn says:

    “The Conversation: Using Your Air Conditioner is a Form of Climate Denial”

       https://wattsupwiththat.com/2023/02/09/smh-using-your-air-conditioner-is-a-form-of-climate-denial/

    We must all suffer to bring the new utopia to fruition.

  55. Lynn says:

    “We Must Demand a Demonstration Project of a Mainly Renewables-Based Electrical Grid”

       https://wattsupwiththat.com/2023/02/09/we-must-demand-a-demonstration-project-of-a-mainly-renewables-based-electrical-grid/

    “Could anybody possibly be stupid enough to believe the line that wind and solar generators can provide reliable electricity to consumers that is cheaper than electricity generated by fossil fuels? It takes hardly any thought about the matter to realize that wind and solar don’t work when it is calm and dark, as it often is, and particularly so in the winter, when it is also generally cold. Thus a wind/solar electricity system needs full backup, or alternatively storage — things that add to and multiply costs. Surely, our political leaders and top energy gurus are fully aware of these things, and would not try to mislead the public about the cost of electricity from a predominantly wind/solar system.”

  56. drwilliams says:

    Renewables?

    What’s the fuel value of a human body frozen from lack of winter residential heat?

  57. drwilliams says:

    Democrats made it illegal for blacks to learn to read in the pre-Civil War South. Many risked their lives to learn to read despite that prohibition. 150 years later they have a new method and it is working much better, and in the North, too.

    https://hotair.com/john-s-2/2023/02/11/baltimores-failing-schools-should-be-the-biggest-scandal-in-the-country-n529989?cx_testId=1&cx_testVariant=cx_undefined&cx_artPos=2&cx_experienceId=EXIO3RTI8YOF#cxrecs_s

    One has to wonder if those same techniques could be used to prevent drug abuse?

    It’s really too bad that the U.S. doesn’t consider reading more important, and establish a cabinet-level agency to make sure that citizens are able to read. It would have to be the Dept of Reading, since “Education” evidently does not include reading.

    It must be more important to find other “rights” in the constitution.

  58. Ken Mitchell says:

    “Using Your Air Conditioner is a Form of Climate Denial”

    I am a proud and outspoken “climate denialist”.  The sea level hasn’t risen by more than an inch in the last 400 years, and it isn’t going to. It Barry Obama was being HONEST about imminent sea level rise, he wouldn’t have bought a house 11 feet above MSL on Martha’s Vineyard. And his Honolulu mansion is lower than that.

  59. drwilliams says:

    These Construction Errors Are so Bad They’re Almost Good

    https://www.dailybee.com/en/construction-good-almost?ly=native_one&abtv=540bb163-a3c6-4ac1-828d-80facee8a086

    or if you just need one short one before retiring:

    The Saturday Night Joke

    The Greeks Vs The Irish

    Over a double Latte, the Greek mentions “We built the Parthenon you may recall, along with the Temple of Apollo.”

    “Aye, and it was the Irish that discovered the Summer and Winter solstices.”

    “But it was the Greeks who gave birth to mathematics.”

    “Granted, but it was the Irish who built the first timepieces.”

    Knowing that he’s about to deliver the coup de grace, the son of Athens points out with a note of finality: “Keep in mind that it was the ancient Greeks who invented the notion of sex as a pleasurable activity!”

    “Aye! True enough, but it was the Irish who got women involved.”

    (h/t to AoSHQ)

  60. drwilliams says:

    “The Conversation: Using Your Air Conditioner is a Form of Climate Denial”

    Prohibit a/c in all government facilities to start–including any “loaf at work from home” arrangements. And write the rule so that transportation–ground and air–is a “facility”. 

  61. Nick Flandrey says:

    Watched the original Alien with Sigourny Weaver tonight with the kids.    They didn’t like the hidden robot guy, they thought he was “off” somehow and were not shocked when he turned out to be not human.

    The old “high tech” computer interfaces are pretty cool in a retro-future kind of way.  And man o man, Weaver was skinny.

    n

  62. Alan says:

    >> If you go, the campground at the south end of the island is about as close as I’d want to get to that launch site.

    >> I think that ten miles away from the launch site might be far enough away.

    The real question is, “How far away will Tony be?” I presume Gwynne will be closer, but in a heavily fortified bunker.

  63. Jenny says:

    @nick

    Alien was a very fine movie. A classic. 
     

    Busy day. Jewel Lake Ice fishing jamboree for an hour or so first thing. Food truck, hot drinks, fire barrels, many fishing poles and bait cups, and enthusiastic men with ice augers. Ice was probably a good 24” thick, maybe thicker. Lots of people. Several ice fishing tents.  Aunt and daughter and I had a great time. Then off to child’s music lesson, swung by an indoor farmers market for carrots. A brief stop at hardware store to replace my lost propane torch. Lunch. I left lunch cleanup to daughter and aunt. I took torch down to rabbits to see if it would do a more efficient job of cleaning my two empty cages. Yes. Much better than scraping or trying to wash with warm water. Three hours later my kindling cages were clean, rehung, and prepared for the does. Does settled. 
     

    Back to the house to find dinner just about on the table, courtesy of husband and family. Yay!

    Pretty tired tonight. It was a busy day. 

  64. Alan says:

    >> It’s really too bad that the U.S. doesn’t consider reading more important, and establish a cabinet-level agency to make sure that citizens are able to read. It would have to be the Dept of Reading, since “Education” evidently does not include reading.

    Yeah, and stick with Dept of Reading…I’m thinking no one in the current administration can spell “Education.”

  65. Alan says:

    And probably on page one  of Sunday’s NY Post with a catchy headline…

    https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-still-gives-no-details-about-alaska-ufo-new-object-seen-over-canada-2023-02-11/

    A U.S. F-22 fighter jet shot down an unidentified cylindrical object over Canada on Saturday, the second such instance in as many days, as North America appeared on edge following a week-long Chinese spying balloon saga that drew the global spotlight.

    Separately, the U.S. military also scrambled fighter jets in Montana to investigate a radar anomaly that triggered a brief federal closure of airspace.

    I guess Justin doesn’t have sufficient “toys” to play with the big boys.

  66. dcp says:

    First, go to Corpus Christi

    Why go by way of Corpus Christi?

    About a decade ago, I had a two-week TDY assignment in Brownsville TX.  Flew Southwest Airlines from Houston to Harlingen, picked up my rental car, drove an hour to Brownsville.  On my day off, I drove 40 minutes to South Padre Island.  Enjoyed the beach, but not the traffic getting there and back.

    Google tells me the direct route from Harlingen to South Padre Beach is about an hour’s drive.

    FlightAware tells me there are couple smaller air carriers that fly into Brownsville, so that’s an option, too.

  67. Rolf Grunsky says:

    Oh, we have the “toys” but the closest Canadian air base is in Cold Lake, Alberta. The U.S. bases were closer.

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