I'm not one for big opinions on music, but I'm really happy that the gym changed the station from whatever it was that kept playing Meatloaf.
These Spotify workout stations that the gym plays have the weirdest AI mashups. The one that I still can't get over is Brandy layered over some modern 2020 pop beat.
I'm pretty sure my gym uses Sirius. We get the Soul Cycle channel now, which is about reïncarnation. Or that's what I'm assuming.
No, it's about that little patch of hair under your lower lip.
OP***: Haha, awesome. When we moved to town we rented a grotty house just down the hill, and we'd walk up there to swim through a little path in the woods. Now we own a house in Oakview and it's all much better, but I miss having the 300 Club so nearby.
It's better cardio than the Soul Train, but obviously not as convenient.
Is Club 300 near the sinkhole? Because the sinkhole is mostly what I remember.
There are so many sinkholes, but not near the famous one you're thinking of.
It is very close to the sinkhole that swallowed 3 houses across the street from my friend, in 2020.
It's good that there isn't a sinkhole monopoly.
I had no idea how many sinkholes there were until that happened, and my friend developed a working knowledge of Gainesville sinkholes, and now points out undeveloped lots all over the fucking place and is like, "Sinkhole there. Sinkhole there."
10: oh no. I am unhappy to have learned this today. THANKS.
Most of them are mature, and covered in trees and just kinda look innocuous!
I'm told that a mature sinkhole has a circular perimeter, which is kind of a satisfying phenomenon. The one across from her house is still kidney-bean shaped. But of course, these things happen on geologic scale. Probably.
My favorite thing is that when she had her roof re-done a few years earlier, she happened to add "sinkhole insurance" on a whim to her insurance plan.
My least favorite thing is that sinkholes are not considered Acts of God and therefore are not covered under ordinary home owner's insurance.
She can't sell her house until it's grown over with trees and feels normal again, but at least if it grows and eats her house, she's covered.
There is an extremely weird thing going on where the owners across the street are not able to abandon the land that they own, because no one wants the liability, and so neither the state nor the city will accept the land back. I don't know the current state of that legal battle.
3: since my local gym has been taken back in-house by the borough, and everyone there is now a local government civil servant, the playlist has suddenly become completely dominated by 1980s power ballads. I did not imagine socialism including quite as much Belinda Carlisle.
Oh, KM, another thing to look for: in the plats of neighborhoods, look for a place where they've designed the road to go around a nice patch of green space. Specifically, the two-way road splits into two one-way roads for maybe 200-500 yards. It's going around a sinkhole.
12.4: God takes houses up, like a tornado or hurricane. The devil sucks them down.
We have separate mine subsidence insurance, because coal mining is also ungodly. Just look at who the miners vote for.
https://bsky.app/profile/nedhartley.com/post/3lnhngiq4us26
Bananaman getting in on the act...
Why were you looking for as close to 8 years ago as possible? The comparison of the feeling of the first few months of the same guy?
Just the parallel of having to wait out a Trump administration, and check in with what it was like the first time.
I think I did this a month or so ago, too?
The two terms feel totally different to me. The first time I felt betrayed by country and I thought we were behaving in evil ways towards other people, but at the end of the day my life and those of people close to me weren't directly affected in any material ways. This time I'm over the feeling of betrayal, I already know what my countrypeople are capable of, but what the administration is doing is heavily heavily directly affecting my life and those of people I know in material ways.
Yeah. I know people who have been shoved out and we're budgeting with an assumption of there being about 40% chance of me being laid off in the next year.
Obviously I should start a factory, just in case. The perfect time to do that is when the tariff rates are switching more in a week than they have in the whole decade prior.
20/21: I'm not really trying to assert any specific similarities between the two terms. More just in terms of tally marks in a prison cell and willing time to pass, like it did eventually last time.
As long as I get unemployment, I don't mind much.
I had to listen to some of the most banal, insipid and stupefying "praise music" I've ever been subjected to this morning. The nauseating refrain was "Lord, you're mine" which was so poorly enunciated that it sounded like they were singing "Lord Jemai, Lord Jemai" There were som other lyrics, but that non sensual parody of a kirtan was 80% of it. Horrifying, and directly related to the focus on ludicrous, over the top adulation of the nincompoop in the white house. What an awful time we live in.
Well would you look at those leopards, eating James Comey's face.
Remind me to delete my texts before I go through customs. If I go through customs.
28: I need to figure out the minimum of stuff to delete. I do plan to have my phone in airplane mode oand turned off when I come back to the US.
I think my earliest concrete memory of a song is Julian Lennon's "Too Late for Goodbye." My sister was obsessed with it. She would lie in front of the radio, spinning the dial back and forth until she found a station that was playing it, and then jump up and call her friend to alert her. It would be another couple of years before we got a radio with a cassette recorder, so we could make our own mixes of songs taped off the radio, with bits of deejay chatter, station IDs and car ads stuck onto the edges. God, I'm really old.
30: You're just trying to make other people here feel really really old. I was almost done with college when that song came out!
The first song that I remember being a special favorite was "Puff the Magic Dragon".
My early memory is hating that song "Mammas Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys" because what if my mom wasn't going to let me become a cowboy, as was my dream at the time?
I just went back and re-listened to Too Late for Goodbyes, and I can only assume there was a tedious pondersome thinkpiece circa 1986, citing it in an argument about how repetitive pop music has become. It's catchy, though!
Sweet Jesus! I clicked-thru, and that guy's voice: My ears! My ears! I need to get to a hospital to get a transfusion, I've lost so much blood!
That shit is Auto-tuned-to-death!
How can anybody listen to that without losing their mind? If that's what passes for modern pop music, I'm glad to be an Old. Leave me with my PMJ, Pink Martini, Lady Gaga, and Robbie Williams ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MdYGQ7B0Vew )
The first time I remember learning about John Lennon was when someone had to explain the joke they made about the Beatles reunion.
33: There was a whole theme of repetition. The son looks and sounds a lot like his father!
35: I know you were raised in the wilderness of Nebraska but...you had heard of the Beatles, but didn't know the name of the band members? How old were you?
I'd heard of the Beatles, but I didn't know one of them was shot or know their names. But you didn't need to know their names to get the joke.
I tried to think of the first time I was aware of the individual members of the Beatles, and was led to look up the release date of George Harrison's cover of "Got My Mind Set on You." Did you know there were two music videos for the song, and that the first one featured Wesley from Buffy the Vampire Slayer? I only knew of the one where Harrison sings with a backup band of taxidermied animals.
I did know that, because of Nick Rocks.
We did not have MTV. We had Friday Night Videos and Nick Rocks, which was on every day after school.
I have a question. Why is there still no ambient conversation about realities of tariffs arriving in the lives of everyday people? Why aren't we feeling it and/or talking about it yet? Like, we're past when the effects of empty shipyards should have rippled out. Is it poor reporting? Or just not actually materializing?
It's not materializing. Someone on Bluesky who uses lots of graphs showed that over time, shipping from China isn't down that much. Everyone rushed ahead of the tariffs and then Trump backed down before that over stock was gone.
Inflation is going to get worse though. My barber now charges $29 for a haircut. But he's not imported.
Wow. So he fucking goosed the economy, like W. saying "go out and shop"? He is the most hapless lucky fucker.
The first song that I remember being a special favorite was "Puff the Magic Dragon".
I remember that being a favorite when I was a kid, and I remember playing it on a record player, but even then we knew Peter, Paul, and Mary were old. I am old enough to remember the record player being the primary way to play music, but also young enough that CD players and dual cassette players for dubbing became regular consumer items while I was still in elementary school (or maybe by junior high?).
46: That's odd - I thought we were about the same age (I'm 40), but when I was young I perceived records as mostly done and cassette tapes as the new thing; then by my early teens CDs had taken over. That may be because my dad kept a lot of cassettes around, though, not new releases so much as a music collection near-obsessively taped from radio broadcasts over the years. (And our kiddie songs were on tape.)
My kiddie music was on a record player. Us kids had our own. My parents had a hi-fi with a turntable and an eight-track deck.
There was a record player for the house, and I seem to remember at least once checking a kiddie-music LP out of the library, but definitely never any interest in or call for more than one record player.
The turntable had a thing where you could stack a bunch of records on it and it would drop the next one as one finished.
47: I'm older. I think within a month or two of heebie's age, IIRC.
I remember my sister (older by 2 years) and I recording ourselves on tape - singing and pretending to do a radio show - before I remember being able to record music from the radio or other tapes.
Apparently, other parts of Florida have problems more visually striking than sinkholes.
I probably knew the names of all the Beatles before I knew all the days of the week.
My parents were older and didn't listen to or mention the Beatles. Or any other rock and roll.
My dad always remembered Carrie Fisher as the little baby from her parents' divorce.
I just saw on Reddit: John Lennon died closer to Yesterday than today.
George Harrison died closer to today than Yesterday.
Joe Don Baker died closer to today than when Buford Pusser died. The latter being someone whose death was notable when I was a child.
57: My parents didn't listen to rock and roll if they got to choose the music. I was born in 1963, and I had 3 older siblings.
64: But I'm still the baby when my siblings and I get together. Unless their grandchildren are there too. I can't be the baby around actual babies.
Obviously the oldest siblings are the best.
Peep and I are both family babies who went to the same baby college.
65-66: I was born in 1968, the oldest child of two oldest children who had me at 22 so there's a huge gap from me and my brother to any of the same-generation cousins, who are really more like nieces and nephews.
I hadn't thought about this before: my mother was the oldest of 5, my father was the oldest of 3, and in both families the second kid didn't have any children of their own, widening that gap a little more.
64: You're really old.
Hah!
No sure what is the first song hat really struck me but it may well have been the "Ballad of Davy Crockett." Other candidates include "High Hopes", "Colonel Bogey March," or something by Alvin and the Chipmunks. A pretty alarming list actually.
We had a low slung console stereo that could do the stack of records things (but made for kind of a weird shuffle, half of several albums, followed by their other halves if you tuned the stack over.
Re: sinkholes. In formerly glaciated areas, you can get similarly small circular areas to be avoided where particularly large chunks of underground ice were slow to melt. They can form circular kettle lakes if they still have water in them, but they often are now just marshy areas or have unstable soils. But new ones do not generally just appear.
El puente es más alto en el medio del río. El medio, no en el lateral.
My little sister is the youngest daughter of a youngest daughter of a youngest daughter of an only daughter of a youngest daughter. That's as far as I was able to trace it. Babies as far as you can see.
34: I missed this yesterday, but FINALLY! Someone listened to it!
Don't think I noticed that no one guessed which song might be the birth of modern pop music.
74: I clicked on the link and listened to a bit of it too. For all I know it may be the birth of modern pop music.
I don't know much about modern pop music. Just that whoever broke up with Olivia Rodriguez ought to have done it with more tact.
I just clicked on the link again because I realized Pokey thinks this song is typical pop today?! It's reggae. It sounds nothing like today's pop (which you can hardly dance to without doing those weird joint popping moves).
Anyway this song is a guilty pleasure of mine and I just put it on my summer playlist.
I listened to a podcast on OutKast today and it made me feel all sad and nostalgic.
Romania gets it done! Happy Monday!
https://apnews.com/article/romania-election-presidential-europe-runoff-democracy-6408339a1a9d310bcc540c75b1d110f9
Australia, Canada, France, Romania... well, he was right. There is indeed so much winning that I am almost getting tired of winning.
While exploring AllMachines, I found fantastic mowers. The Walker Mowers are perfect for residential use. The Hustler Zero turn Mowers are highly recommended for large properties. I also looked at the Kubota Zero turn Mowers, offering excellent cutting power. The Cub Cadet ZT1 54 is a great pick for easy operation.
OT: I have just seen a clip from the TV series "The Handmaid's Tale" that features a stoning carried out by a mob entirely made up of women, and the person in charge literally tells the women that no one is to throw any stones until she blows her whistle. A powerful scene but somewhat derivative: the only difference from the original is that in the original the women are all wearing huge false ginger beards and the person in charge is played by John Cleese.
Walker Mowers are really nice, if you're into grass.
Or rather into grass that is all the same height.
Of interest to some:
https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/05/08/india-pakistan-rafale-strikes-us-russia-china/
The hay meadow was high on the hill behind the farm, overlooking the cornfield. [Miss Flitworth] watched him for a while.
It was the most interesting technique she had ever witnessed. She wouldn't even have thought that it was technically possible.
Eventually she said: "It's good. You've got the swing and everything."
THANK YOU, MISS FLITWORTH.
"But why one blade of grass at a time?"
Bill Door regarded the neat row of stalks for some while.
THERE IS ANOTHER WAY?
"You can do lots in one go, you know."
NO. NO. ONE BLADE AT A TIME. ONE TIME, ONE BLADE.
"You won't cut many that way," said Miss Flitworth.
EVERY LAST ONE, MISS FLITWORTH.
"Yes?"
TRUST ME ON THIS.
El puente es más alto en el medio del río. El medio, no en el lateral.
"By now you're dismasted. Dismasted, and with Brooklyn under your lee."
"Modern" pop is a pretty amorphous category. There's a decent argument to be made that pop music is still mostly variations on Buddy Holly and Chuck Berry.
Maybe what's more recognizable as distinctly era-specific is the sound production technology?
We have Moogs in a way they can't understand.
88 would have been better if you were 20 years older and had picked the pop icons from when you were 2-3 years old.
I finally clicked through and my first thought was that I've never heard it before. My second was that I don't miss autotune.
I once knew a guy who looked just like Buddy Holly, and who leaned into of with his choice of glasses and haircut. I told him I'd never get on a plane if he was on it.
No. He had a regular name. I can't remember it though.
Oh yeah, that's a great regular name.
Re: Friday WTFuckery, here are two actual things published on Friday:
1) An NYT Arts and Culture reporter felt it necessary to ask Ms. Rachel--who does social media songs and pieces for young children--whether she received money from Hamas after she was accused of antisemitism by a sketchy advocacy group who said: she had "posted nearly 50 times about the children of Gaza, most of which is filled with misinformation from Hamas, and only 5 times about Israeli children,". Good writeup of the fuckery in The Defector.
I guess it would be irresponsible not to speculate.
2) This little gem from Alex Thompson about the Biden-Hur interview (small portion of the audio maliciously released by WH right after credit downgrade).
This is how that part of the interview is recounted in the transcript: Biden says, "OK, yeah. In 2017, Beau had passed and -- this is personal -- the genesis of the book and the title Promise Me, Dad, was a -- I know you're all close with your sons and daughters, but Beau was like my right arm and Hunt was my left."
But here's what it sounded like in the quiet room where the dead air between Biden's pauses is emphasized by the tick-tock of the clock:
"Okay, yeah ... "
Tick.
"... Beau had passed and ..."
Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock. Tick.
"... this is personal ..."
Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock. Tick.
"... the genesis ... "
Tick.
"...of the book and the title Promise Me, Dad, was a ..."
Tick. Tock. Tick.
"... I know you're all close with your sons and daughters, but Beau was .."
Tick. Tock.
"...like my right arm and Hunt was my left."
I almost wish there was a Hell so that the people who talked that guy down a year ago could go spend eternity in it.
Whatever anyone wants to say about the guy, I've never heard any suggestion at all that he wasn't 100% capable of listening to the options presented to him, and picking a policy that would be in the best interest of the general public. Not that I agreed with every call, but I don't think any of them that I disagreed with were the result of senility.
Knocking him in favor of an obviously impaired chaos agent who has less than zero interest in helping anyone but himself? As noted, there ought to be a Hell for those folks.
I know, I know, they didn't want Trump, they just wanted Johnny Unbeatable.
Maybe Moby knew him when he was Declan Patrick Aloysius Macmanus.
I just can't for the life of me figure out what the revelations are about Biden. I know I spend more time than the average person with 80 year olds, but nothing I've heard about Biden's behavior is unusual for 80 year olds, so it's not surprising to hear that Biden acts within the typical range for 80 year olds. And his age hasn't been a secret. It's not like he spent six months in a memory care facility while skipping votes before someone figured out where he is or forged his birth certificate to make him seem younger.
To me the biggest misjudgment was considering himself so indispensable that he had to run again. But I'm pretty sure he thought that through with his full range of faculties.
Idly curious how many aged 75+ elected officials have more mental whateveresness* than Biden. Bernie Sanders, sure.
Also, what the fuck were the Democrats who allegedly care about health doing when they elected Connolly to the oversight committee?
*Or whatever the old folks are calling it these days.
99: The pathology of the NYT piece is interesting to me. By standard journalistic reasoning, they had to ask Ms. Rachel about whether she accepted money from Hamas because the accusation had been prominently made.
If you're going to write a story about Ms. Rachel and Palestinian children (which maybe you don't need to do), the standard approach is to report the accusation -- and if you do that, you have to ask her about it. It's all vile, and harks back to the old LBJ story about "we just want to make him deny it." But I think it's genuinely hard for the media to escape that sort of thing.
That said, there actually is a good way to write this sort of story: You start it out the same way Tracy did, then you detail the abuse that she is getting -- clearly labeling it as abuse.
It actually took eight paragraphs for the NYT story to go off the rails. It starts out with seven paragraphs of reasonable descriptions of Ms. Rachels' behavior, and then, in paragraph 8, says:
But Accurso's advocacy on behalf of Gazan children has led some supporters of Israel to accuse her of treating Palestinian children with more sympathy than Israeli ones, including those abducted in Hamas's attack of Oct. 7, 2023.
The Defector writeup highlights the NYT's assumption that sympathy for thousands of Palestinian children being killed and maimed must be equally balanced by the same amount of time being devoted to the small number of Israeli children kidnapped. And the paper's refusal to detail the history of the "antisemitism" organization making the accusation is really despicable.
One thing that I don't think Defector mentioned was the fact that Ms. Rachel was accused of "misinformation." Not only was she not given a chance to respond; the article didn't even offer an instance of anything that could qualify as misinformation.
That's shoddy work by any standard. Journalism -- even by the stupid rules of "objective" journalism -- doesn't have to suck. You can write a story -- you can even "cover the controversy -- and not have the result be idiotic.
George Washington, famously, did not help the British children.
||
My wife took the opening photograph. https://www.audubon.org/magazine/worlds-oldest-known-osprey-online-sensation-and-living-indicator-watershed-health Naturally, I'm sending this to everyone I know, everyone they know, everyone I've ever stood next to in line, etc.
|>
That's a great picture. Congratulations to her.
the pop icons from when you were 2-3 years old
All pop music is just variations on the Osmonds and Sonny and Cher.
I'm sure the scenery is lovely but it's really out of focus and she should have waited until that bird was out of the way. Rookie mistakes.
This was funny (though you may have to be logged in)
https://bsky.app/profile/grayathena.bsky.social/post/3lpktb7ttrc2u
https://edition.cnn.com/2025/05/14/europe/russia-wildfires-rage-siberia-region-intl-latam
Relevant to 113, I've been doing a bit of research into Soviet airborne formations.
Those of you who know me well will know that I think airborne operations are a complete waste of time, money, scarce airframes, and lives, and the only reason we keep doing them is the same reason we desperately tried to hang on to horse cavalry well into the 20th century - the GLAMOUR.
Airborne operations all start from someone giving the wrong, stupid answer to the question "hey, dude, you know what we could do? Get a load of underequipped soldiers, put them in large, slow-moving aircraft, fly them over the enemy within easy anti-aircraft gun range, and drop them miles away from any friendly forces, so they're surrounded by the enemy with no artillery and no resupply. Shall we do that?" (The wrong answer, for your reference, is "yes".)
At best, this leads to operational success because you then tell your ground troops - the ones with the tanks and the guns and the logistics, the ones who actually win wars - "guys, we need to advance right now. Ten thousand of your fellow soldiers have SOMEHOW ended up surrounded and outgunned behind enemy lines, let's not get into finger-pointing about whose fault that is right now, and we have two days to rescue them before they all get killed or captured". An airborne soldier is a highly trained, very fit, very aggressive soldier with an unparalleled record of ground combat success, but doctrinally he is, when properly used, a Damsel in Distress in a special maroon hat.
But the Soviets had two plausible use cases for airborne troops. The first was that you can fly them into an airport very quickly when one of your colonies looks like getting a bit freer than you'd like (1953, 1956, 1968, 1979, 2022). The second is that you drop them into areas of the front line where you don't have to worry about them being outgunned or surrounded or shot down on the way in, because you've just glassed the area with nuclear weapons. So the airborne didn't need terribly effective weapons, and indeed they didn't have terribly effective weapons, because everyone in that bit of West Germany would be dead. All they needed was lots of crappy little APCs that could keep the radiation out for just long enough for everyone to reach the Rhine before they died from the Bad Glow.
That's the Soviet outlook, you see - they don't need good kit because we expect them to die.
And before that, doctrinally, airborne forces were there not to do traditional airborne tasks like hold key locations such as bridges for the advance, but to drop deep in the rear and destroy high-value targets like fuel dumps. They weren't expecting to hold until relieved - they weren't expected to be relieved. Once they'd destroyed the target, the Soviets didn't care what happened to them. They were basically smart bombs with legs.
115 is all very true, OTOH knowing there's a regiment of airborne Hussars in the world makes me happy.
108: That is a great picture! And a good article, too.
116: I am going to VTSOOBC slightly (without naming names) and say that my heart was almost broken when I used the full title of the artillery unit normally called "7 Para" to another commenter IRL - the full title being "7 (Parachute) Regiment, Royal Horse Artillery" - and saw their face go from "sorry what? did I mishear?" to "surely that can't be right, no one would do that" to a brief hopeful moment of "but it's them. They might have tried it. It might be true!" And then I had to disappoint them.
(sorry, "7 Para RHA", not just "7 Para", calling them the latter is a great way to annoy real Paras, which despite 115 I am actually trying not to do)
"Green light - go! Right, out the door with you."
(reluctant equine noises)
"And who knows, the horse might grow wings."
We did have airlanding mules - they put them in gliders to insert them for the LRP columns in Burma. But not airdropped horses.
"We were on the verge of greatness. We were this close."
All I'm saying is that we'll know Poland is really serious about the Russian threat not when they reach 4.7% of GDP or more in military spending but when they bring back winged hussars.
123: https://www.twz.com/news-features/polands-future-f-35s-have-been-offically-named-husarz
124 The only way that news could be better is if it were an ekranoplan
Any aircraft is an ekranoplan if you have the guts to fly it over water at an altitude less than half its wingspan.
Some are born great. Some achieve greatness. Some have horses airdropped upon them.
The Natural History Museum's giant squid was airlifted from the Falkland Islands in the back of an Ilyushin-76, so in principle, Operation INK BLOT can be done!
("well, it's definitely going to be a surprise.")
The answer to 120 is surely that they should be mounted still in the aircraft and ridden down the ramp to exit at a full gallop. Of course we'll get our hair mussed, about half of them will end up with the horse landing on top of them and get effectively beheaded, and the effect on the aircraft's pitch trim will be terrifying, but you've got to admit that it's glamorous.
Sadly, the flight was not conducted at an altitude of less than 25m, or it would have gone down in history as Operation INKRANOBLOT.
You wage psychological warfare by constantly threatening nuclear attack on London. I wage psychological warfare by airdropping a defrosted thirty-foot giant squid on to the main runway at Engels-2.
We are not the same.
129: the alternative is to drop the horse *in a horse box*. The Germans experimented with a thingy called IIRC a Personenabwerfgerat (going off memory here so please forgive misspellings) which was a plywood coffin with a parachute attached. The idea was that it allowed you to drop parachutists from virtually any sort of aircraft. For normal airdrops you obviously need an aircraft with a fuselage big enough to accommodate people, and a hatch or door for them to jump out of. With the PAG you could just induce the person to get in the box and then hang the box on the aircraft wherever it fitted, like a nervous plywood torpedo, remembering of course to attach the static line to something sturdy. So you could use a light bomber or a fighter-bomber or whatever, really. Added advantage, no need to train the person inside in parachuting because they aren't actually required to do anything during the drop, just lie there questioning their life choices.
Clearly, you just need to scale it up a bit and you have a Pferdabwerfgerat. Or, for our export customers in Wakanda, the even larger Nashornabwerfgerat.
129 the real trick is to unhitch them from the 105's before galloping them off the ramp
132 I like to think bigger and go right for the Elefantabwerfgerat. Stupid Romans will never see it coming.
Essential background: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squid_(weapon)
The existence of something called the "Department of Miscellaneous Weapons Development" is delightful.
Phrases like this are how you know you're in for an interesting few years in the office:
DMWD was responsible for a number of devices of varying practicality and success, many of which were based on solid-fuel rocket propulsion
129: Picturing something similar to when the "who are those guys" posse stormed out of the boxcar in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Only, you know, from a plane.
Naturally, I'm sending this to everyone I know, everyone they know, everyone I've ever stood next to in line, etc.
That is a great photo!
Also, the sub-thread about airborne troops was just the right level of dark humor for what I needed today.
How did George Wendt die this week at age 76 when he was fifty in 1986?
I love that osprey photo!
I've seen osprey every time I've been to Mono Lake over the last few years. They put their nests way out on the tufa. I have some pictures of them but they're pretty tiny at that range. I also saw osprey at the Port of Oakland just last month, nesting on top of a light pole near the big container loading areas.
106: 99: The pathology of the NYT piece is interesting to me. By standard journalistic reasoning, they had to ask Ms. Rachel about whether she accepted money from Hamas because the accusation had been prominently made.
Maybe, but as you say why write it at all. Our if you need to, center it around the baseless accusation made by the advocacy group. Dig into that. Choices.
This is a version of "privileging the lie' that Jamison Foser goes on about (and I thin he may have originated the term). Privileging the accusation---Joe McCarthy would understand.