Warmer, and wetter than yesterday, maybe. It was certainly warm and wet on Thursday. I saw 85F in the afternoon, in between rain showers. It’s been starting around 73F and warming pretty gradually til about 3pm. Pretty standard, for Fall. Likely that today is similar.
After cutting my hair, I did some small stuff around the house yesterday. Every time I got ready to do outdoor stuff, it rained again. Had to run some errands, and pick up the kid, which ate my afternoon. Got that done, did some meat shopping, and spent the rest of the afternoon cooking dinner and packing up the meat.
Today will be more of the same, trying to get some decor up, trying to get some auction stuff together, trying to do some domestic bliss. In other words, plugging away.
Yesterday I read this passage, and it struck me enough that I marked it for later…
“But my stars, boy, nobody can be alive and never have any trouble! Being alive is just meeting troubles every day and overcoming them. Just to stand up straight against the pull of gravity is a fight, isn’t it?” — Dr. Tresselt in Danny Dunn and the Fossil Cave.
Sums it up doesn’t it? And I’ve not seen anything as direct in modern young adult fiction… which might be part of the problem.
Stand up straight and fight.
nick
(and stack, which IS fighting.)
Congratulations. Find something to do. Volunteer, whatever. Don’t worry about doing something that brings in money. Having a sense of purpose, knowing which day of the week it is, is important.
Some pictures from a game last night. Yes, a Thursday. The state athletic association is having trouble getting enough officials so some games must be played on Thursday.
https://www.raymondthompsonphotography.com/Greenback
This game was significant in that it is the first time that Oliver Springs Academy (formerly High School) has beaten Greenback on Greenback’s home turf in school history. The two teams have played against each other for dozens of years.
Greenback at one time was almost invincible in their classification. A couple of state titles under their belts. Then there were some coaching problems. The really good players are now attending other schools, generally larger schools. The players want the exposure for collegiate prospects. Since Greenback High School is a city school, but there are several other schools in the county, the players can choose where they want to play within the county.
WhatsApp is huge with the Subcontinent crowd here. I was told that the initial appeal of the app was avoiding per-text charges which are common back home. Maybe the same used to be true in Europe. Now it is a privacy thing … as long as you don’t mind sharing your life details with Facecrack, who own the service.
I made the mistake of installing the app once on Android about eight years ago, early in my Masters program, before I realized that most of the Subcontinent demographic were not real students but paying the school to chase a visa. When I got tired of the 24/7 academic dishonesty drama, I tried to uninstall the app and had to wipe the phone to bare metal. Simply resetting to the factory configuration didn’t work.
That is how I got involved with LineageOS. Thank you Zuck.
@Nick – LineageOS now installs on recent Pixel hardware, including the 6A and 7A if you want a (mostly) spyware-free experience. That leaves a lot to be desired, but it is possible.
College players are now allowed to license their image and collect payment. The more prominent the school in the college football rankings the better.
This is why the transfer portal works. Ever since the TCU upset, everyone wants to play for Coach Prime and get in front of the national TV audience.
Texas State pulled off a similar upset at Baylor the same weekend thanks to the transfer portal, and that program used to just be a placeholder for the eventual NFL expansion team in San Marcos.
75F and light overcast. Sun peeking thru in places. Maybe I’ll get the decor out today after all.
n
So the map isn’t the territory, models are just fancy guesses, and climate scientists don’t actually know everything… Hmmm. It’s almost like ordinary people thought it was.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12678553/Aerial-footage-shows-devastation-Hurricane-Otis.html
Oh yeah, if you didn’t notice, CAT5 hurricane hit Acapulco.
n
It doesn’t look as bad as I expected. Facades & roofs, and windows, as expected from a Cat 5, but no building collapses, no dam failures, etc.
Yeah, that. There are plenty of apps that also provide end-to-end encryption that aren’t Meta. Signal, for example, or Threema. But for voice calls, um, this thing is a phone. It makes phone calls. If it’s not something sensitive, I don’t see the purpose of going through an app.
I guess some people live their lives in Facebook/Whatsapp, and think that is the whole internet…
For the wife and I it allows to call the former exchange students in Europe from the U.S. We can also do video calls.
Something about this guy always bothered me. I cringed and turned away or muted, or closed the window every time the guy came up. Dunno what, but there was something about him that skeeved me out.
https://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/us-v-vickers-larry-vickers-pleads-guilty-to-conspiracy-to-illegally-acquire-machine-guns/
From the end of the linked article it looks to me like he used a paperwork trick to get machine guns and got caught. You can argue about the legality of the restrictions, and the moral rectitude of non-compliance, but from a practical standpoint, lying to the Feds is never a good idea.
n
Unless you are Hunter Biden.
I honestly don’t see the crime here. He had a police department sign a letter that they wanted to see a particular gun model. He submitted a request to obtain said gun model. That’s how the system apparently works. The fact that the police chief was his buddy and the department “had seven police officers and no SWAT team” is irrelevant.
If lack of a SWAT team was a problem, then his permit to obtain the weapons should have been denied. It sounds to me like the people who screwed up here are the feds. They embarrassed themselves, so they are going to make him suffer. Typical…
Fixed it for you.
Frankly, “Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms” should be a convenience store, not an illegal federal police force, because the Constitution contains no authorization for a federal police force. ATF and the FBI should both be abolished.
That might be forgivable if the ATF would go after actual criminals, like narcotics smugglers and terrorists, but that might be dangerous. Much safer and convenient for them to go after paperwork criminals and sick people. ATF are cowards.
“So the map isn’t the territory, models are just fancy guesses, and climate scientists don’t actually know everything… “
Emmanuel and the rest of the global warming zealots are whores for the cause. As long as they worship at that altar they are not scientists and don’t deserve any more respect that a chicken entrail divining shaman.
Most people will not appreciate the irony: a model of a small fraction of the earths surface went wildly wrong in a few days, but they still claim perfection for the whole earth decades in the future.
He smells like an insider who went astray and had to be punished.
Tampa. Joint Base MacDill is home to a couple of freak show commands that need some scrutiny.
Actually, a *lot* of scrutiny.
When the Spanish ruled that part of the world, they knew when the Galleons had to set sail for Spain to beat the hurricanes in the Gulf and winter weather in the Atlantic.
If you hear weather geeks talk about intensity of storms hitting Mexico or the Gulf states being a record, always note how they use the term “in recorded history”. There are a whole lot of wrecked ships at the bottom of the Gulf which testify to what happened with weather in that part of the world before the US Army moved into Florida in the early 1800s and started keeping track.
End to end encryption is a Good Thing, but I wouldn’t trust any endpoint to be free from a back door. Call me paranoid, but sending anything over any complex system exposes it to snooping. Also, if we believe that quantum computing will become practical, then all encryption could be more quickly cracked. Imagine all that data currently sitting on trusted nodes. The Internet is forever. Once you lose control of something, it can never be recovered. To say anything else is risky.
Thanks, you made my point in another, better way.
Heh, first time I have laughed out loud today. Thanks!
Encryption got me thinking… I read Phil Zimmermann’s book on Pretty Good Privacy. He advocated that EVERY communication should be encrypted. To encrypt only sensitive stuff would draw attention to it. Quantum computing will still use enormous resources, and take finite amounts of time. If everything were encrypted, that would at least slow things down. Imagine a blind man looking for a needle in a haystack.
I hope you do. Many of us did, and love it. Think of it as a new beginning. I only know a few people who have failed retirement, my term for those who have gone back to work by choice.
(Repost as I originally put this with yesterday’s comments.)
>> I’m driving because my rescue dog would otherwise spend 10 days in a kennel.
@Bob, you mean your “service dog,” admissible anywhere, right?
If you’re into audiobooks, @nick may have some suggestions, depending on what genres you prefer.
Safe travels. thoughts are with you.
(Repost as I originally put this with yesterday’s comments.)
>> Certainly not in America, where The Outback Steakhouse, appropriating Australian culture, is still one of the biggest restaurant chains in the country.
Does Outback really represent Aussie (food) culture? Haven’t been ‘down under so don’t have a comparative basis. Most Americans (should) know that American Chinese food bears little resemblance to what you get in China.
>> And we won’t even begin to touch what is considered to be “Italian” cuisine in this country.
To see real Italian cuisine, check out Stanley Tucci’s CNN series (two seasons.)
>> I’ve gone a couple of times and Outback Steakhouse was a let down. All “Australian” and stuff and no emu and no ‘Roo.
Just steaks. Good steaks, for sure.
No disrespect but there’s a lot better steak out there to be had. I prefer porterhouse, rare, so my preference is always Peter Luger, Brooklyn, NYFC.
(Repost as I originally put this with yesterday’s comments.)
>> Had a bit of a panic this morning: I woke up to WhatsApp telling me I had a bunch of missed calls. The last time I had a pile of missed calls, someone was in the hospital.
Can I strangle the developers? When I actually looked at the list, all of the missed calls were old, from weeks ago. Why WhatsApp decided to notify me about them again, I have no idea.
That is the idea…now move along…
The whole family hit up Peter Luger’s when we were in Crooklyn on biz a while back. The cow carnage was impressive.
The Bloomin’ Onion is, in theory, a dish which originated from the Australian bar scene in the 1980s depending on which origin story you believe, but the founders felt that the general theme fit the casual environment they were trying to create, especially at a time when “Crocodile Dundee” was huge.
The more casual the model, the more alcohol gets ordered. Alcohol is key to the Outback Steakhouse chains’ business model.
A good Chinese restaurant will have the “real” food available via special order, but most Americans would find the flavors disgusting.
What I find interesting when we are out with the in-laws at a Chinese restaurant is that everyone waits for me to be Ugly American and order the dish I prefer then they all eat off of that. Only Number One Son cousin and my wife are hardcore about just eating the “real” food.
Bah. Multitasking while editing.
One of the bloggers on the Maggie’s Farm blog regularly vacations in Italy, and has lots to say about “real Italian” foods.
http://maggiesfarm.anotherdotcom.com
Most of the other stuff on that blog is pretty good, too.
Yeah I’ve seen those places in LA but sorry I’m not interested in lungs or pen!s, and lots of other weird organs. Now this comes from someone whose Italian grandmother made red sauce that included chicken hearts and gizzards. Pickled beef tongue too. There are a couple of Italian delis here that make it and it’s very either popular or hated.
Basques love it too. Bakersfield has some very successful Basques restaurants. Some people like to claim it’s not really Basque. No it’s boarding house food made by Basques with local ingredients and influence. Sort of like New York pizza of San Francisco chow mien. Sheep herders from the Pyrenees came here and spent the winters in boarding houses. Meals were one seating and you got lots of food at long communal tables for a low price. Lamb with lots of garlic on top, Basque beans. I just made up some Basque style cottage cheese today, so good along with the salad course and the pickled tongue before the main dish.
Oh well, now I’m hungry. Think I’ll go raid that cottage cheese.
The most exotic “real” Chinese food I’ve eaten is Bird’s Nest Soup. Otherwise, it is similar meats and noodles but the spice selection is weird.
Taiwanese like my in-laws are also really into MSG thanks to the Japanese running the island as a colony for 50 years prior to the end of WWII.
And, no, the “bird’s nest” is not a pasta concoction. It is a real bird’s nest harvested on a Pacific island which consists mostly of … well, you just don’t want to know where the gluten comes from.
Ken, that link to Maggie’s Farm is great. I think I have found a new read. I especially liked today’s intro. I have been to Italy and China, and a few other worldly places. I especially like the variety of Italian and Mediterranean cuisine, but parts of China are especially good if you appreciate their culture.
My paternal grandparents emigrated from Split, just across the Adriatic from Italy, which has heavy ancient Roman influence. I have not been across the Adriatic, but food from the Italian side is… not uniform. If you know where to go, it can be great and not terribly expensive. Venice is expensive, and the selection varies, but the interior, especially Tuscany, is great. I really like the people.
I also have some NYC influence in my life. Although I wouldn’t want to live there, for those rich enough there is great food done like nowhere else.
Since I am a California snob 😉 I think a lot can be found here. Authentic, well… But a lot of good. I also watched Stanley Tucci’s series, and he seemed to like LA as well as a lot of other places. And, for dkreck, Bakersfield is only 120 miles from me. Haven’t been there in a few years, but that isn’t a comment, just circumstances. Way back in the 1970s, we used to go to the mainstream Basque restaurants. Always liked their food. Later, my wife found out she is allergic to garlic, and that has put a damper on some of our choices. Still not allergic to vino!
Yeah we had a Chinese meal in LA where ta plate came with a whole fried chicken – gutted but the head attached then it was chopped several times across with a cleaver. Someone finally place an upside down cup over the head.
And my grandmother always started chicken by chopping the head off first. Sweet childhood memories – loved to watch it run around.
I can vouch for the Cuban food at Felix Continental on the Orange Circle being at least as good as what I could get in Tampa or Miami. My wife says that the Cafe con Leche is better than a lot of places we’ve been in Florida.
“Cuban” food in America is different, again, because of the wider availability of meat.
The Cuban sandwich is a Florida creation. And excactly where it was invented is the subject of much debate. Just remember – salami on a Cuban is a Tampa variation.
Imagine a blind man looking for a needle in a haystack.
– actually, if I had to do it, I’d spread out the haystack as thin as I had room for and then let the blind man roll around naked on the hay. Better chance of finding it without magnets or xrays or some such…
————–
WRT outback steakhouse- you can get better steaks, but you can’t get a good to pretty darn good steak for the money at any store you walk into in any medium sized town or freeway crossroads… We used to eat at Outback A LOT when I was touring. Never had a bad meal, never had bad service, usually enjoyed it, and the cost was very reasonable.
————-
I did a project for an oil company in Bakersfield and ate Basque food. It was really good. I was there a couple of weeks iirc, in the late 90s.
—————-
I had lots of ‘chinese’ food in china, shanghai in particular, and liked it all, although there was stuff I wouldn’t have seconds. Duck lungs battered, deepfried and dipped in sauce were so good we ordered more… Peking Duck wasn’t as good as I’d hoped. When I lived in Cali we’d go to chinese restaurants and order at random out of the back pages without any translation… sometimes we’d get a raised eyebrow, sometimes they’d ask if we were REALLY SURE but we never had anything we didn’t like or couldn’t eat.
————–
Poor people everywhere eat the same thing– entrails. Whether it’s menudo, or ram’s esophagus or fried pig anus, it’s all down to the preparation. Although the chinese in general take the whole thing to another level…
————
gotta get D2 from her school Halloween party in a few minutes. She is a pirate queen. She was a gypsy woman at school today. D1 is “too old” for dress up. That’s fine for now, I am dreading the “punk rocker/sexy nurse/french maid” times…
n
The Cuban sandwich
– and it doesn’t taste right if you use butter instead of margarine…
n
“Italian” food? There IS NO “Italian” food. Italy didn’t have a single culture or cuisine. Sicily isn’t Naples, neither is Roman, and northern Italy is a completely different set of flavors and cooking techniques.
Sort of like “Chinese food”. Cantonese is very different from Szechuan , and God help your tongue if you go into a Szechuan restaurant expecting Cantonese food.
@Alan
“No disrespect but there’s a lot better steak out there to be had. I prefer porterhouse, rare, so my preference is always Peter Luger, Brooklyn, NYFC.”
Luger’s has been top-notch for decades. Can’t go wrong there.
If you’re not in NYFC there are a lot of places that can do justice to a 32 ounce Porterhouse. Some, like Luger’s, have been in business for decades. When I was traveling a lot some years ago with a sales manager, we tried one year to hit all of the self-advertised “top ten” steakhouses in the U.S. I think we made eight. One was disappointing, the rest were solid.
One of the best steaks and meals that I had on the road was in Scottsdale at Morton’s. I’d been due to fly to Cali Friday night but got extended when a customer threw a hissy fit and needed hand-holding Saturday. After a long day I walked into Morton’s about 7 with a reservation for one,. The manager caught me on the way in and took pity. He personally kept an eye on me and not only made sure I had good service, he may have picked out my steak, which was a 30+ oz porterhouse done a perfect medium rare. It didn’t make up for the day, but it did recombobulate me.
There was a local place with three locations that had a double filet sandwich–two 6-oz cuts on separate buns–that went on and off the menu for a number of years. The price was always reasonable, but I’m sure it would be a $30 lunch today if they were still around.
“Yeah I’ve seen those places in LA but sorry I’m not interested in lungs or pen!s, and lots of other weird organs.”
I was having a good time as the only true blue-eyed pinkskin in a second-floor dimsum in Chinatown when one of my companions who was a true Mexican, not of Spanish ancestry, questioned my order of chicken feet. He was right–too much work.
@Nick
“We used to eat at Outback A LOT when I was touring. Never had a bad meal, never had bad service, usually enjoyed it, and the cost was very reasonable.”
Never having bad service can be pretty important.
We hit Outback in Orlando the night before a convention in the early days of “No rules, just right.” Walked in, laid the cigars on the counter, looked at the manager, raised an eyebrow and said “No rules, right?” He seated us in a closed section and told us he would aske for our help if someone complained. No one did.
“fried pig anus”
Worked with a guy who would say “I’m so hungry I could eat the a**hole from a road kill skunk.”
No lie, there was a whole big blue bin of frozen pig anus in the 99 Ranch store in San Diego. Right between the black chicken, and some bricks of frozen worms…
n
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/abrupt-change-coming-tucker-carlson-issues-dire-warning-america
– Hey Tucker is finally catching up with us.
n
I’m not a fan of the sandwich, but butter vs. margarine is the subject of much debate.
I like to get roast pork at Cuban restaurants, and in Tampa at La Teresita, the pork juices are best enjoyed soaked into the buttered pressed bread served with the meal.
Margarine, not butter, is the secret to make Giordano’s crust taste the way it does, however.
If the disappointment was Bern’s, the place has been slipping since the Laxer family got wrapped up in building the hotel and started skimping on the restaurant, eventually leading to a falling out with the chef Bern picked to run the kitchen after he passed.
I’m shopping books on eBay tonight.
They have a new “let the AI complete your listing”:
A real bookseller would poke out his eyes before putting this in lieu of a description.
The genius that added this feature should be in a bin of pig anuses, but they’d toss him out.
@drwilliams.
How about this generic listing text for a book?
Harvard Jew-Haters Finding Out the New #Rulez Suck
https://hotair.com/tree-hugging-sister/2023/10/27/harvard-jew-haters-finding-out-the-new-rulez-suck-n588165
cesspool
should be treated like Gaza
Cornell professor who found Hamas attack ‘exhilarating’ and ‘energizing’ now on leave of absence
https://nypost.com/2023/10/25/news/cornell-prof-who-found-hamas-attack-exhilarating-now-on-leave-of-absence/
Wonder if he’d feel triggered if someone described a lynching in those terms?
@RickH
Looks good.
Just use it “as is”
No reason to fill it out–that just takes time.
How about:
“This is the perfect book for when you are looking for the perfect book.”
There is one electron in the universe and he is darned tired of this corner of it.
An additional note about that book listing above – it was created by the “Bard” AI.
I find I am using Bard more often than google/bing/ducks search, at the moment for various coding questions. It takes some thought to get the ‘prompt right, and the answer is not always right the first time. But if you ’tell’ Bard that the answer doesn’t work, it will give you a corrected version of the code that usually works.
The key seems to be a good quality ‘prompt’. I could get the same answer with a google/bing/ducks search, but I’d have to go through several search results to find the proper answer.
@Rick H
I’m old enough–as are you–to remember when properly framed inquiries to an internet search engine could produce the desired results if the information were available.
Gates and Brin and the rest of the pasty-face billionaires do not have enough money and are working hard to make sure that AI works for them, not us.
“ANN COULTER: Staple a green card to their anti-semetic signs”
https://www.indianagazette.com/opinion/ann-coulter-staple-a-green-card-to-their-anti-semetic-signs/article_7acbfd20-0b84-58dc-b620-45116f801a3f.html
“In the past few weeks, Muslims and Arabs have poured into the streets in nearly every U.S. city to celebrate the slaughter of Israelis, while wearing scarves, keffiyehs and other clown outfits and waving the flags of Palestine, Egypt, Algeria, Iraq, Lebanon, Morocco, Yemen, Turkey, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nigeria, and on and on.”
Why are these people in my country ?
While he continues to beg for financial and other help from the Biden administration, Adams has recognized that, against a daily cost of $394 per migrant, a one-way plane ticket to anywhere has a huge return on investment. And we don’t use “anywhere” lightly — Politico reports some have been given tickets to places like Morocco and Colombia.
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/migrant-hot-potato-nyc-offers-illegals-plane-tickets-anywhere-big-apple
Every citizen of the United States should call their elected representatives and explain that they can either start getting the $394 a day that the illegal alien invaders get or things are going to get damned ugly fast.
Or maybe a caravan of 100,000 should head to NYFC and claim their “rights” to food and shelter.
“where is my plane ticket? I was promised a plane ticket. You are raciss!!!”
>> lyinglying talking to the Feds is never a good idea. talking to the Feds is never a good idea.
Ask Martha how that worked out for her.
Deceased son left a video will that he made on Saturday. Left everything to his long time girl friend. The cousin “Coroner” is working based on that. But Nevada law does only recognizes written wills.
We’ve asked the cousin for clarification, i.e., what is her authority to cremate the body. (When I was pricing cremations several crematories made it clear that they would nothing without a notarized authorization from the closest kin.)
There probably is a will he made in California some years ago. He told people he had a will on several occasions. Apparently nothing is settled yet.
His daughter only wants family related things … the girl friend had indicated she wasn’t letting anything go and she was keeping the cremation remains. Not fun…
>>Having a sense of purpose, knowing which day of the week it is, is important.
Nah, what’s important is that Alexa knows…
>>MIT atmospheric sciences professor and hurricane expert Kerry Emanuel said that ‘the models completely blew it.’
They’re called models for a reason…
>>Much safer and convenient for them to go after paperwork criminals and sick people. ATF are cowards.
One bad paper cut can sideline an agent for weeks!
>> Bah. Multitasking while editing
@Greg, get your priorities straight!
Looks like my first retirement week will involve some work after all 🙂 I provide Web and PC support to my wife’s indexing business & stuff apparently needs doing now that “you have more time”……quick ad….if anyone is writing a book that requires an index let me have your details. Interestingly book indexing is one thing that hasn’t yet been successfully automated as it requires you to index concepts as well as words.
Also the Brighton & Hove Arts Council ( https://www.bh-arts.org.uk ) (my wife is does thier newsletter and website) have decided that that now is a good time to upgrade their WordPress install and investigate ‘some really useful plugins’. I’m also going to check on the state of their server (Linux), I’m not convinced the hosting company is being timely about security updates
Ah well! it’ll keep the old brain cell ticking over.