Drive-By
Things are starting to get out of hand here in northern California.
Oh! We're having a heatwave, a tropical heatwave
The temperature's rising, it isn't surprising,
She certainly can can-can
She started a heatwave by letting her seat wave,
In such a way that the customers say
That she certainly can can-can
Gee, gee! Her anatomy makes the mercury rise to 93!
Having a heatwave, a tropical heatwave, the way that she moves,
That thermometer proves that she certainly can...
(What's your name honey? Pablo).Certainly can..
(Chico, Miguelito, Pablo, Chico, Miguelito)...oh, can-can.
I don't know about anybody else but my life has come down to one concept: FLEE! FLEE TO THE OCEAN!
[Of course, the above bitching brings to mind this observation from all the way back in 2005:]
Never Happy
When I lived in Manhattan, I never needed to know when winter officially arrived. I could count on one particular coworker to announce it. The official date changed every year, but he never failed to signify it by dropping by my office first thing in the morning, a Starbucks commuting coffee mug in his hand, and saying, "Boy, oh, boy, do you believe how cold it is? Damn!"
Having just peeled off watch cap, ear muffs, scarf, gloves, and a ten pound top coat, I could -- while watching the sleet moving horizontally across the windows -- say with some conviction, "Yes, as a matter of fact, I do believe how cold it is."
With this exchange, the first of a daily ritual that would be repeated between us for months without variation, I knew that winter had been declared open.
In New York City, there are really only two seasons -- "Winter" and "Street Repair." Winter was cold and inconvenient. "Street Repair" was hot and inconvenient. My coworker wasn't happy with either. Yet he never failed to announce the beginning of "Road Work." The official date changed every year, but he never failed to signify it by dropping by my office first thing in the morning, his Starbucks commuting coffee mug in his hand, and saying, "Boy, oh, boy, do you believe how hot it is? Damn!"
He was a living, breathing, mind-numbing example of why the number two fantasy of people who work in offices is the ruthless slaughter of one or more of their coworkers. (The number one fantasy? I don't have to tell you. You know. And you should be ashamed of yourself.)
When I moved to southern California, this was one little daily irritation I was happy to leave behind along with "Winter" and "Road Work." Instead, I got only one season, "Traffic," but since you have to go to "Traffic" in order to be in that was okay. I no longer needed to kill my coworker, so that was a win.
In the hills above Laguna, however, I discovered another two seasons -- "No birds" and "Birds." That's otherwise known as "Not Spring" and "Spring." When the birds leave sometime around the Christmas holidays, you don't really notice it. At least I didn't until I passed a neighbor, a Starbucks commuting coffee mug in his hand, on his daily constitutional and he said, "Boy, oh, boy, do you believe how quiet it is? Damn! Sure wish the birds would come back."
He walked on but I stopped and turned slowly to look at him. Brief memories of fantasized mayhem washed over my mind until I shook my head and thought, "No. Can't be. Just your imagination," and went on my way.
But, of course, what couldn't be, was. Over the course of the next few months, I'd pass this neighbor on our overlapping walks and he'd invariably say, just to be neighborly, "Boy, oh, boy, do you believe how quiet it is? Damn! Sure wish the birds would come back."
In time, of course, the birds, as birds will, did come back. I noticed it one day when, just at dawn, a bird woke me with a Bachesque series of trills and calls. A day or so later, when passing my neighbor on the hill, he said, "Boy, oh, boy, did you hear that bird this morning? Terrific!"
But nature is not decorative no matter how much we might wish it would be. Where you have one bird, you get two. When you have two, you get ten. And ten is just the prelude to a hundred or even more, as Alfred Hitchcock knew.
About a month after the first return of the birds, I was awakened by a cacophony of bird calls hooting and screeching at the first crack of light. I shrugged it off and went outside to get the paper from the drive way. My bird-loving neighbor lives diagonally across the intersection. I picked up the paper to go inside when I heard the sliding door to his deck open. I looked across and saw him in his underwear stagger sleepily out into the rising and falling cloud of colorful bird calls, wipe the sleep from his sad eyes, and shout out into the pristine morning, "Shut... UP!"
Even in paradise it seems that some people are never really happy. Must be the traffic.
| The Moral Meaning of ‘The Sopranos,’ Ten Years Later - Acculturated It is impossible for a person to compartmentalize evil acts and separate them from the rest of his or her life. In the case of a gangland boss like Tony Soprano, it is impossible to maintain a real family and a Mafia family without having the latter corrupt and threaten the former. |
| No way out Globalism has made it possible to fund disorder from the profits of order. Qatar, for example has recently been accused of being the Switzerland of Terrorism. Yet it receives a vast income not only from the sale ofnatural gas but from holdings in the West. The BBC remarks that "Qatar owns more land in London than the Queen." |
| Marxism: A Cross Between Mean Girls & Lord of the Flies | Declination Deep down in their bones, they are afraid of us. Because that is the instant reset button. They immediately lose the second it comes to that. With Marxists, it is perpetual high school politics. View them through this lens, and a lot starts to make sense. Their tactics, their methods… it’s all straight out of school. Moral high ground, in their world, is straight-up popularity, and nothing more. You wonder why mountains of bodies surround every major Marxist regime? Imagine if you gave a bunch of catty valley girl teenagers absolute power over life and death. What would happen? How many would die? |
| Basic Economy Flights Exist To Make You Pay More For Air Travel – Consumerist American Airlines found that in test markets for the Basic Economy fare, it was able to raise the prices for regular economy fares. Customers were willing to pay more for a regular economy seat if there were something worse available. Like Basic Economy. |
Denver Decriminalizes Public Defecation To Protect Illegal Aliens This new law, or lack thereof, has the ACLU seal of approval so you know it’s bullshit:Denver Colorado is about to smell worse than piss-soaked shit-stained San Francisco. The city voted to essentially decriminalize public urination and defecation and the reason is as liberal as it gets. The city is now becoming a giant toilet to help protect illegal aliens from deportation. Denver is not only a sanctuary city for criminal immigrant scumbags but also now a sanctuary for human waste. |
| Cancer Isn’t a Logic Problem Cancer cells are not simply a disorder or breakdown in a mechanism, but an organism going on a full-tilt offensive, using multiple, often shifting strategies to produce and use molecular fuel, win resources, and evade the immune system. If so, then the rules of the game may change—these insights suggest that the war on cancer may be endless. Still, we can get better at treating it as an evolving entity within the context on its ecology, through the idea of “living drugs,” such as engineering the body’s own immune cells to sense and mobilize an attack on cancer. |
| It Turns Out That Paving a Road with Unwashed Clams Is Not a Good Idea | Oddity Central - Collecting Oddities A few days ago, David Rose unloaded several truckloads of unwashed clam shells onto the access road to his property, as a cheaper alternative to gravel. As soon as they saw what was going on, Rose’s neighbors told him to use washed shells instead, as the ones he was unloading still had visible clam meat on them that would start to rot. He apparently declined and carried on with his original plan. After three rainy days, the sun came out over Tiverton, and with it came maggots, flies and a stench that neighbors describe as unbearable. |
| The Worst Ever First Day on the Job | Literary HubIn the preunion days, lunch would always be at a bar. On particularly tough jobs, John Callahan himself was known to show up late in the day with a case of beer for the crew. On road trips, it was the job of the guy in the shotgun seat to prepare a thermos of cocktails for the driver. At the end of a move, the shipper always offered us beer. Often our work would take us into New York City, which required a 7 am start. At 7:20 we’d get off I-95 in Pelham and stop at Arthur’s Bar and drink a couple or three screwdrivers before heading into Manhattan. As far as I could tell, the moving business floated on an ocean of alcohol. |
| CABINET // Journeys of Lactic Abstraction Milk is a substance prone to mimesis and abstraction, a duality echoed in the ebullient packaging that places it before us as an industrial staple. For pats of butter or rich creamy milks, there are countless hand-drawn bucolic scenes, realistically formed, that essentialize the gift of nature, of the mother, Mother Nature. Equally, milk is prone to abstraction through technical processing into powdered formulas or constituent parts. This abstraction is reflected in the aseptic geometries of plastic cartons, milk sticks, and Tetra Pak pyramids. |
| [Miscellany] | Bee-Brained, by Vauhini Vara | Harper's MagazineFor the past decade, Indian Americans have dominated the Scripps National Spelling Bee — among last year’s top ten were seven Indian spellers — and all the recent champions competed at the N.S.F. bee first. Nihar told me that his experience there established his training regimen. Also, he said, “If I hadn’t done N.S.F., I would have felt very scared spelling in front of a lot of people.” |
| Impossible City: New Orleans The last bars have closed, at four or five, and all that’s left is the sour smell of oysters, vomit, and stale beer. Every so often, in the cool drift from an open door, there comes a sweet trace of dark liquors, breathed out from shadowed wood. Cigarette smokers splash disinfectant across the sidewalk and hose it into the gutter. Shops put out their garbage, a simmering potpourri. These smells are always there, but you notice them more in the early hours of the day, when the distractions are few, when the neon has been switched off and the bands have gone home, when almost everyone is somewhere else. |
| BBC - Future - Why printers add secret tracking dots At that point, experts began taking a closer look at the document, now publicly available on the web. They discovered something else of interest: yellow dots in a roughly rectangular pattern repeated throughout the page. They were barely visible to the naked eye, but formed a coded design. After some quick analysis, they seemed to reveal the exact date and time that the pages in question were printed: 06:20 on 9 May, 2017 – at least, this is likely to be the time on the printer’s internal clock at that moment. The dots also encode a serial number for the printer. |
| What it Takes to Cook Some of Literature's Most Famous Meals | Arts & Culture | Smithsonian Dinah Friedhas created and photographed 50 famous meals from literature. From Holden Caulfield's cheese sandwich and maltto Oliver Twist's gruel, Fried has compiled a collection of images that fascinates food, photography and literature lovers alike in her newbook,Fictitious Dishes. "Eating and reading just go hand in hand," said Fried, "we use the same words, to have a voracious appetite for food or for books." |
Carlisle: The Cursing Stone:The cursing stone, which stands in a subway linking Carlisle castle and the Tullie house museum, is inscribed with a curse first invoked by the Archbishop of Glasgow in 1525 against cross border families, known as the "reivers", who lived by stealing cattle, rape and pillage. The stone, designed by artist Gordon Young, consists of a 14-tonne lump of granite carved with the 1,069-word 16th Century curse.
That curse is as follows:
I curse their head and all the hairs of their head; I curse their face, their brain, their mouth, their nose, their tongue, their teeth, their forehead, their shoulders, their breast, their heart, their stomach, their back, their womb, their arms, their legs, their hands, their feet, and every part of their body, from the top of their head to the soles of their feet, before and behind, within and without.
I curse them going and I curse them riding; I curse them standing and I curse them sitting; I curse them eating and I curse them drinking; I curse them rising, and I curse them lying; I curse them at home, I curse them away from home; I curse them within the house, I curse them outside of the house; I curse their wives, their children, and their servants who participate in their deeds; their crops, their cattle, their wool, their sheep, their horses, their swine, their geese, their hens, and all their livestock; their halls, their chambers, their kitchens, their stanchions, their barns, their cowsheds, their barnyards, their cabbage patches, their plows, their harrows, and the goods and houses that are necessary for their sustenance and welfare.
There's more. Much, much, much more. But you get the general idea and.... Well... if you insist.
Continued...These efforts take money, of course, just as the efforts to build up alternative media require funding. That’s where the dissidents are making the most progress. WeSearchr is still trying to find its footing, but it has worked well as a proof of concept for fund raising outside the orthodoxy. The new site Counter.Fund is a very creative idea that could turn out to be a viable alternative to the establishment crowdfunding sites. By being explicitly ideological and open about its business model, it makes supporting it feel important.
Mass movements of any type have certain thresholds they must pass in order to become credible threats to the prevailing orthodoxy. If you’re building a religion, you better be provocative and you have to live off the land, so to speak. If you are building a political party, it is about working the election laws and getting your message out to a broader audience. Put another way, you have to demonstrate tactical savvy and the ability to finance your war against your opponents. Otherwise, people are reluctant to join.
Whatever your preferred term is for the brewing rebellion among the Dirt People, they have weathered the first punch from the Cloud People. The dismissive name calling that was a feature of Progressive commentary, has given way to attacks on the people on the front lines of the fight. The next step is to start going on offense using the rules against the establishment. That means coordination and that means money. There are some good signs so far, but the Dirt People are still a long way from being a credible threat.
Remember, support your local Dirt Person.
If you can just get your mind together
Then come on across to me
We'll hold hands, and then we'll watch the sunrise
From the bottom of the sea
[Chorus]
But first, are you experienced?
Have you ever been experienced?
Well, I have
Speaking only for myself, but starting around the time this song was released in 1967 I was "experienced" about 60-65 times over the following four years. My old friends say this single fact explains so much about me. I demur.
Fisherman Call is a free service. All you have to do is register online and provide your name, phone number and the time you would like to be called by the fisherman. You can even select a specific fisherman from several profiles listed online. You can see a picture of each one of the available fishermen, check out their work schedule and even listen to a recording of their voice to see if it’s the first thing you want to hear in the morning. Then, all you have to do is go to sleep.
Boy: Hello…
Fisherman: Morning! How are you feeling this fine day?
Boy: Good, thanks. Are you on a boat right now?
Fisherman: Yeah, I woke up at three and came out to sea.
Boy: Th… three?!?!
Fisherman: We caught a huge fish this morning, I’ll send you a picture.
Boy: Thank you!
Last week some wag remarked that the best thing about Trump's First Hundred Days is that they weren't Hillary's First Hundred Days. This clip will make you a believer.
An aerial view of the new Apple headquarters on April 28, 2017 in Cupertino, California.
Apple's new 175-acre 'spaceship' campus dubbed "Apple Park" is nearing completion and is set to begin moving in Apple employees. The new headquarters, designed by Lord Norman Foster and costing roughly $5 billion, will house 13,000 employees in over 2.8 million square feet of office space and will have nearly 80 acres of parking to accommodate 11,000 cars.
Pretty much everybody that will work inside this monument to hubris will hate, absolutely hate, everything the Pentagon stands for. And they will depend, every moment of every day, on the power of the Pentagon to keep their lives, their fortunes, and their non-existent honor.
To The Right / Candice Drouet from Really Dim on Vimeo.
On the Left, the people keep a comin' but the train's done gone. Everybody's moving "to the right."
The Shining / The Darjeeling Limited / Holy Motors / Inherent Vice / Jackie Brown / Juno / Drive Ex Machina / Delicatessen / American Psycho / 2046 / Rebel Without A Cause / Little Miss Sunshine / 1984 / The Neon Demon / The Big Lebowski / Collateral / Donnie Darko / Bronson / Catch Me If You Can / Marie-Antoinette / It Follows / Lost River / Trainspotting / Still Alice / Cape Fever / Amelie Poulain / The Grand Budapest Hotel / Blue Is The Warmest Color / Nightcall / Only God Forgives / On the road / Boogie Nights / One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest / Saint-Laurent / Reservoir Dogs / Wild Tales / O’ Brother, Where art Thou ? / Fight Club / Black Mass / Twelve Years A Slave / Memento / Hail, Caesar ! / Upstream Color / La La Land
Indeed, unless the billboards fall
I'll never see a tree at all.
- - Ogden Nash
Along Gene Autry Trail, viewers will encounter a series of billboards featuring photographs of the very mountains towards which they are heading.
Each photograph is unique to its position along this route and at a certain point as one approaches each billboard, perfect alignment with the horizon will occur thus reconnecting the space that the rectangle of the billboard has interrupted. In the language of billboard advertising this kind of reading is referred to as a Burma-Shave after the shaving cream company of the same name who used sequential placement to create messaging that could be read only from a moving vehicle. Jennifer Bolande -- Desert x 2017
Premise: we’re going to roll tires down a ski jump.
Because you've got to do something to recoup the bribes that got the Olympics to Nagano in the first place:
"The Nagano Olympic bid committee spent approximately $14 million to entertain the 62 International Olympic Committee members and many of their companions. The precise figures are unknown since Nagano, after the IOC asked that the entertainment expenditures not be made public, destroyed the financial records."
The tires taking part in the competition come from a kei car (Japanese minicars), sedan, sports car, dump truck, Formula One car and bulldozer.
Each tire is sent down a steep slope covered in AstroTurf. For added science, they are shoved off by a man in a white lab coat and gloves. After launching off a ramp, the tires land on a marked section of the track before rolling into a crash barrier.
Which one do you think will take home the coveted prize of...Ski Jumping Champion Tire?
Here are the competitors:
Place your bets.
Wait for it.
Nellia Ehrentraut, 64, and husband Dietmar, 70, are drawing accolades online after a YouTube video showed them energetically dancing to Johan Blohm & The Refreshments. The video was filmed at an event called the Boogie Woogie Veterans Tournament in Landshut, Germany. The couple, who married in 1070, said they have been dancing together for more than 30 years, and have won numerous awards for dancing in styles from the 1930s, 40s, and 50s. "We still have a lot of fun," the couple told ABC News.
That's the news of the day and the week and we are out of here for a beautiful Friday afternoon. Hope you have one too. Come back when you can. We'll be here all week month year decade.
What a shame it would beif the world should happen to incinerate Earth's foremost producer of lichen and human fertilizer!
[HT: Western Rifle Shooters Association]
Ahhhhhhh..... now that's satisfying!
As opposed to THIS! This ATROCITY! from a few days back.
This site is a free photo material site of a nurse who responded to the demand of 1% maniac customers. Even those who were not satisfied with the material site so far are satisfied lineup! Please use it if you can use it. -- Scima nurse
Today is National Puppy Day - The Atlantic
Hey, every day is National Puppy Day!
Courtesy of the ever-popular BSBFB The Borderline Sociopathic Blog For Boys -or- I Wish This Guy Spoke English, So I Knew What Was Going On. But Hey; Cool Fire Tornado, Brah
Oh yeah, it's easy to tie your yoyo string in knots
. The real challenge is to get it untangled without dropping the beat! The European Yoyo Championship was held over the weekend in Bratislava, Slovakia. American Evan Nagao took first place in the open finals division, and deservedly so. Evan Nagao Takes European Yoyo Championship - NeatoramaContinued...
Realistic Anatomical Paintings Reveal The Structures That Lie Beneath Our Skin
— Old Holborn✘ (@Holbornlolz) March 7, 2017
10 Of The Most Adorable Animal “Mlems” Ever Still, the prize for the longest tongue in relation to the body size goes to the chameleon. This tiny fellow can stretch its tongue up to 1.5 times to its body length when trying to reach the sweet nectar of flowers.
Monsanto House of the Future: When Our Future Was Made of Plastics Built in Disneyland in 1957 as a joint project between Disneyland, Monsanto, and MIT, the House of the Future was constructed of 16 identical plastic shells that were fabricated off-site and then shipped to the building site for assembly. The home was meant to display technological marvels, such as the microwave oven and speaker phone, but mainly showed the many ways that plastics could be incorporated into home-building of the future. Materials included: Acrylon, melamine, rayon, vinyl (flooring), and even plywood. Each of the four wings was capable of supporting 13 tons.
Calvin Coolidge: Address at the Celebration of the 150th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, Philadelphia, Pa. It is the product of the spiritual insight of the people. We live in an age of science and of abounding accumulation of material things. These did not create our Declaration. Our Declaration created them. The things of the spirit come first. Unless we cling to that, all our material prosperity, overwhelming though it may appear, will turn to a barren scepter in our grasp. If we are to maintain the great heritage which has been bequeathed to us, we must be like-minded as the fathers who created it. We must not sink into a pagan materialism. We must cultivate the reverence which they had for the things that are holy. We must follow the spiritual and moral leadership which they showed. We must keep replenished, that they may glow with a more compelling flame, the altar fires before which they worshiped.
Dynamic Duo “What entranced me was the pride with which the twins showed off their matching outfits.” After reading about the pair in a story on Retro Renovation, Kevin Howard located them in an online yearbook from Denison. He discovered that Maurine Elizabeth Everett and her sister Noreene Dodd died within four months of each other around 2004, at ages 88 and 89, respectively. He also learned that their mother was a seamstress, which explained all the matching outfits.
Before Smartphones And Computers Kids Had Real Fun
Assault Trombone:
This is the oldest known photograph of a human in America
The story behind the first selfie in the world Since daguerreotype needed a lot of light, Robert had to work outdoors. The famous first selfie was taken in October 1893, outside the lamp and chandelier store which was owned by his family. For the photo, Robert used a box fitted with a lens from an opera glass. Since thedaguerreotype needed 3-15 minutes to be taken, the young photographer had enough time to uncover the lens, run into the shot, stay there as long as necessary or more, and then replace the lens cap. In the self-portrait, Robert's image appears off center, showing a man with tousled hair and his arms crossed, looking at the camera with uncertainty.
No one saw an almost unimaginably huge and powerful wave crest at 600 feet and sweep down the inlet.
Sunshine Yogurt’s Roadmap to Global Market Domination – Eleven New Yogurts
"I'm not a singer. I'm a shouter." -- Grace Slick
Slick wrote White Rabbit at home in Marin County a year earlier, on an upright piano with missing keys, at the end of an acid trip during which she listened to Miles Davis’s Sketches Of Spain for 24 hours straight. Then she presented it to her then bandmates, San Francisco raga-folk avatars the Great Society. "They'd read us all these stories where you'd take some kind of chemical and have a great adventure. Alice in Wonderland is blatant; she gets literally high, too big for the room, while the caterpillar sits on a psychedelic mushroom smoking opium. In the Wizard of Oz, they land in a field of opium poppies, wake up and see this Emerald City. Peter Pan? Sprinkle some white dust-cocaine-on your head and you can fly."
And now... complete with lyrics and her backing band...
Continued..."If you find yourself driving down a highway in Japan, you might pass what looks like an actual Transformer. No, you're not crazy. These tricked-out transports belong to a niche DIY semi truck culture called dekotora, in which long-haul drivers add custom graphics, lights and swag to their vehicles on a level that goes way beyond a couple decals. With some dekotora customizations costing up to $100,000, many of these dedicated DIY designers see their vehicles as spiritual extensions of their identity."
How to Prepare for Spring, 1528
"Of prymtyme, and what it is. The prymtyme is hote & moyst temperatly as the ayre. This season the blode moeueth and spredeth to all the membres of the body, and the body is parfyte in temperate complexyon. In this season chekyns, kyddes, and poched egges ought to be eaten, with letuses & gotes mylke in these thre monethes. Prymetyme begynneth whan the sonne entreth the sygne of Aryes and lasteth .xcii. dayes, an houre and a halfe fro the .x. day of Marche to the .x. day of June. In this season is the best letyng of blode of ony tyme. And than is good to trauayle and to be laxatyfe. And to be bathed. And to eate suche thynges as wyll purge the bely." -- Secretum secretorum, tr. Robert Copland / Are you ready for primetime? Nothing makes for a festive spring like lettuce, bloodletting, and laxatives.
"Backward, turn backward, O Time, in your flight,
Make me a child again just for tonight! "
.... and all by myself in the room in the museum where this hot wheels extravaganza is installed!
Via Never Yet Melted ｻ If Millennials Were Lumberjacks
So, of course, cue Monty Python!
I cut down trees, I wear high heels
Suspendies and a bra.
I wish I'd been a girlie, just like my dear pappa.
He cuts down trees, he wears high heels?
Suspendies...and a bra?
...He's a lumberjack and he's OK
He sleeps all night and he works all day.
Kellyanne's World via Never Yet Melted
7 Major Experiments That Still Haven’t Found What They’re Looking For Super-Kamiokande—and its planned upgrade, Hyper-Kamiokande—located a kilometer under a mountain in the Kamioka laboratory in central Japan, have been charged with looking for (among other things) the tell-tale signatures of such extremely rare proton decays in gargantuan tanks of super pure water.
TSA rolls out new, 'more intimate' airport pat-downs For those who were hoping to have a closer relationship with their TSA prober.
Oh, put a sock in it! Moral Outrage Is Self-Serving, Say Psychologists
Intricate Fruit & Vegetable Carvings by Japanese Artist Gaku
Dr. Patrick Moore was right: @Greenpeace IS full of sh*t "Greenpeace Claims Immunity from Lawsuits Because Its Claims Are ‘Hyperbole’"
The science of “hangry”—why some people get grumpy when they’re hungry
Why pay less? Luxury Iceberg Water at $100 a Pop “It’s extremely pure right off the bat. It has no pollutants or contaminants whatsoever naturally. So, we don’t have to do anything to touch the chemistry of the water,” he adds. “It also has an incredibly light taste, that is why we call our tag line, 'the taste of snow and air.'”
American Shale Ready to Take On Petrostates
At last,Case closed on the Rosenbergs - latimes Julius and ethel Rosenberg were executed 55 years ago, on June 19, 1953. But last week, they were back in the headlines when Morton Sobell, the co-defendant in their famous espionage trial, finally admitted that he and his friend, Julius, had both been Soviet agents.
Burn Voyage: Schoolchildren give goldfish Freddy and Bubbles Viking funeral Both fish were pushed out to Valhalla in longships that they made out of cereal boxes and egg cartons in small group
The Eternal Question:Do Zebras Have Stripes On Their Skin?
"Playing dress up and pretend is not genius, ladies and gentlemen."
Inside Trump's Secret Dinner: A Side of the President You Don't Ever See Inside the restaurant, I was seated at a table which I had booked hours earlier, directly next to where Trump would be dining. I made the booking based on a tip from a trusted source.
8:45 PM: Trump is served his entree. According to a waiter, who wished to remain anonymous:“The President ordered a well-done steak. An aged New York strip. He ate it with catsup as he always does. The sides and appetizers on the table were shared. Three jumbo shrimp cocktails were delivered before the meal. At one point, the President looked at his watch and remarked ”They are filming 'Saturday Night Live' right now. Can't wait to see what they are gonna do to me this week.“ It was hard to serve him because he is so funny and relaxed, it makes you laugh.”
Trump talks jovially with his guests for the next two hours. His iconic hand motions fill the space as dinner is served....
10:14 PM: Trump and his party get up to leave. The president is stopped momentarily for selfies and handshakes. Discretely, Trump can be seen handing cash to one of the latino busboys for his table. The president handed the young man a $100 bill.
So you've foolishly agreed to meet an online contact in meat space. And yet you know that online made meetings can be appointments to rob you[ Sacramento police warn of social networking robbery trend ]. What to do?
Never fear. Sensing's got you covered with his own training:Sense of Events: A Soviet spy on how to meet a dating-site match in person
Thanks to my training at the Army's counter-terrorism school and former Soviet spy Victor Suvorov's explanation of "fieldcraft," the steps that espionage agents take to avoid capture while spying on and in hostile countries, here are the rules for meeting anyone whom you have not met in person before:1. Try to get a photo sent to you beforehand. The sticky wicket is providing one back. In a word, no. But if you are meeting someone from a dating site, this can be difficult. Judgment call to ask. But it is also likely that the other person's social media, perhaps even the dating site itself, will have one. But be prepared for it to be, um, inaccurate or out of date.
2. Do insist on being fully told how you will recognize the other person - what s/he is wearing, color of hair, does s/he wear eyeglasses, height, weight (yeah, good luck with that, guys), etc. Then when you go to meet, wear something else. If robbers are using these sites to lure you there, you do not want to show up looking like you.
3. Arrive very early. Suvorov wrote that he always arrived a few hours before the set time, found a spot away from the meeting place and keenly observed who came and went, especially those who came and didn't went. Of course, he was stealing military secrets so you don't need to arrive hours, plural, early, but one hour. And then watch. I am guessing that thugs will get there 15-20 minutes beforehand, so be alert, as Suvorov was, for men who arrive and seem to have no purpose being there. In other words, they look like they are waiting.... Read even more tips at Sense of Events
From the ever-popular - - Never Yet Melted
Did Donald Trump beat up your hopes, crush your dreams. and kick them to the curb? Well, snowflake, it's time for you to feel better by moving, not to Canada, but to an alternate universe.It is a universe ruled by.... President Hillary Rodham Clinton!
Ace says: "Thanks to Soothsayer, the best TV intro ever, and yes, it beats Manimal, UFO, and even The Six Million Dollar Man."
And I believe him.
I’ve got Mick Jagger’s lost memoir
One of my favourite anecdotes is of Mick returning unannounced to Dartford to see his parents after two years of chaotic world tours, debauchery, mayhem, riots and goodness only knows what else. ‘Oh Michael,’ says his horrified mother on opening the door. ‘Your hair….’
The Hidden History of the Laundry Chute - The Atlantic
A laundry chute is a mythic domestic space. It’s an unwatched door to nowhere, the open throat of an old home. Its reputation has as much to do with convenience as with the early recognition that a house is not solid through and through. The laundry chute is a place where stains and embarrassing odors go to be erased, and dropping linen down the chute is a mnemonic for forgetting those embarrassments, for making such accidents invisible.
Remembering Nüshu, the 19th-Century Chinese Script Only Women Could Write | Atlas Obscura
Does gentle reader enjoy being smeared? Well, I should speak only for myself. I don’t like it. Perhaps I am projecting when I guess that most members of the new administration, Stateside, don’t enjoy it either. Verily, I’ll go out on a limb, and say no normal person delights in becoming the target of vicious attack, and yet our Lord said: “Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake.”
In the past three weeks, Trump has: staffed the White House, sent a dozen Cabinet nominees to the Senate, browbeat Boeing into cutting its price on a government contract, harangued American CEOs into keeping their plants in the United States, imposed a terrorist travel ban, met with foreign leaders and nominated a Supreme Court justice, among many other things (And still our hero finds time to torment the media with his tweets!) What have congressional Republicans been doing? Scrapbooking?
Time and again, we give away a right because we think it’ll adversely affect only those we see as adversaries. But it always comes back on you. When you give power to politicians you like in order to punish Americans you don’t, it’s guaranteed that that power will one day be used against you by politicians you don’t like, who see you as the bad guy.
"Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world.
Where none suffered. Where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. Some believed that we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that as a species, human beings define their reality through misery and suffering. Smith Interrogates Morpheus Transcript
The Genetics of the American Nations
While the original colonial ancestry of the country has been overrun by subsequent migrants, the founding stock remain as a genetic undercurrent – a common genetic thread – within each American nation. This is especially true in the nations of the American South, where the colonial settlers received less subsequent migration and the original stock remains strong.
Happy 150th Birthday, Laura Ingalls Wilder
The changes that they saw in their lifetimes are nothing short of astonishing. Almanzo lived from 1857 and died in 1946; his birth predated the Civil War and his death happened after the dropping of the atomic bomb. Laura lived from 1867 to 1957; she was born during Reconstruction and died in the same year that Sputnik I was launched. She lived to see the introduction of electricity, the telephone, penicillin, movies, television, air travel, space travel, and two World Wars. She was born in an era of twig brooms and eating hard tack on the trail, and died in the age of vacuum cleaners and counter-top blenders.
In a large forested enclosure of the Wolong Reserve, panda keepers Ma Li and Liu Xiaoqiang listen for radio signals from a collared panda training to be released to the wild.
Tracking can tell them how the cub is faring in the rougher terrain up the mountain. As conservation icons go, nothing quite beats the giant panda. Instantly recognizable worldwide and adored by billions, the giant panda is a virtual brand whose resemblance to anything wild is as tenuous as it is rare. Like many endangered species, giant pandas have declined as a growing human population has seized wild lands for human uses. The Chinese have spent the past quarter of a century perfecting breeding methods, building a captive population and protecting habitat. The giant panda was recently taken off the world endangered species list—a minor miracle, due to the unique efforts of Chinese zoologists and conservationists. -- Winners of the 2017 World Press Photo Contest
Fortunate that the drooling moron mayor of Davis now sleeps with the squashed toads.
[HT: Armchair Sinner: "Gawd, I forgot about Julie Partansky: a proponent of leaving potholes unpaved, lest we should lose their historic value (I'm not joking); one of the architects of the Dark Skies campaign, which dimmed and shaded streetlamps to better view the stars, much to the delight of drunken college students, graffiti "artists," rapists and muggers (finally, we folks in the Downtown Davis Business Association -DDBA- been able to make some headway against this crime issue); and, last but not least, Ms. Partansky was a vocal opponent of mosquito abatement, particularly with respect to West Nile Virus spraying.RIP, Julie, 'cause now that you're gone, we sure are.
Oh yeahhh, we can't forget this little gem either (sorry about the Jon Stewart/Stephen Colbert link, but it's funny and from way back in 1999, when he wasn't so insufferable.):"]
In Tuesday's Woodpile Report. Ol' Remus offers up a fine study of the recent regrettable events in that bastion of Free Speech, Berkeley, California:
Having achieved their stated goal—shutting down the event—the mob then surged into the city of Berkeley and went Full Ferguson, again without serious inconvenience by law enforcement.It appears there was another, unstated goal. Those who committed acts of violence and property destruction were promptly called "outsiders" on the basis of no public evidence whatever. Such speedy certainty suggests insider knowledge, perhaps prior knowledge.Actual "outsiders" in student mobs, meaning "no affiliation to the campus", are rare. They ask us to imagine a sudden and sizable influx of random opportunists where there was no evident gain. "Outsiders" are more often the most inside of insiders, on call for criminal thug work . On call by who? Perhaps by those who can offer credible assurance of noninterference by law enforcement....
Oathkeepers has infiltrated organizations like The Berkeley Against Trump Coalition and has this to say about the "outsiders" they deploy:
The anarchists are by far the most dangerous of these groups. They are organized like militias. They actively train and practice their operations. They have discipline and zero tolerance for weakness. They have a number of former military personnel providing expertise to enhance security, logistics and martial arts capabilities. The majority are physical fit, military age males. They are primarily white with few minority members. Their leadership tends to be either former military, a proven leader from the occupy movement or a highly educated alpha-male.
The rest is right next to the top at last Tuesday's Woodpile Report.
The Eagle born to those who pledged their lives and sacred honor
was smiled upon by God and freed from chains and iron collar.
He is held aloft on unity and by History revered,
for preserving peace through strength his wings now reach across two hundred years
but for each of those, and one year more, God has smiled upon The Corps,
from the Barbary Coast to the Eastern Sand, by sword, by gun, or by bare hand.
So it's been, and shall be weighed: though many are born, few are "made".
Faithful Always, they shall remain...dogs to loose when war is waged.
I am a Marine on the beach, I’m a killin’ machine, with a need to bleed you when the light goes green
best believe, I’m in a zone to be, from my Yin to my Yang to my Yang Tze
Put a grin on my chin when you come to me, ‘cuz I’ll win, I’m one-of-a-kind and I’ll bring death
to the place you’re about to be: another river of blood runnin’ under my feet
Forged in a fire lit long ago, stand next to me, you’ll never stand alone,
I’m last to leave, but the first to go, Hard Corps is the only way I know.
I feed on the fear of the devil inside of the enemy faces in my sight.
Aim with the hand, shoot with the mind, kill with a heart like arctic ice...
I am a Devil-Dog I’m marching on, I am a warrior and this is my song
I bask in the glow of the rising war, lay waste to the ground of an enemy shore,
wade through the blood spilled on the floor, and if another one stands I’ll kill some more
bullet in the breach and a fire in me like a cigarette thrown to gasoline,
if death don’t bring you fear then death ain’t brought by no Marine.
Come to the nightmare, come to me, deep down in the dark where the devil be
in the maw with the jaws and the razor teeth, where the brimstone burns and the angel weeps
call to the gods if I cross your path and my silhouette hangs like a body bag
hope is a moment now long past, the shadow of death is the one I cast.
I am a Devil-Dog I’m marching on, I am a warrior and this is my song
Hell has no demon I won’t overcome, I am a warrior and this is my song
Now, I live lean and I mean to inflict the grief, and the least of me is still out of your reach,
the killing machine’s gonna do the deed, until the river runs dry and my last breath leaves.
Chin in the air with a head held high, I’ll stand in the path of the enemy line,
feel no fear, know my pride: for God and Country I’ll end your life
I am a Devil-Dog I’m marching on, I am a warrior and this is my song
Hell has no demon I won’t overcome, I am a warrior and this is my song
I made the devil himself turn and run, I am a warrior and this is my song
Into the fire I will keep marchin’ on, OORAH, Marine Corps, get some!
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - Red Right Hand
“People have completely forgotten that in 1972 we had over nineteen hundred domestic bombings in the United States.” — Max Noel, FBI (ret.)
Take a little walk to the edge of town
And go across the tracks
Where the viaduct looms
Like a bird of doom
As it shifts and cracks
Where secrets lie in the border fires
In the humming wires
Hey man, you know
You're ain't coming back
Past the square, past the bridge
Past the mills, past the stacks
On a gathering storm comes
A tall handsome man
In a dusty black coat with
A red right hand
He'll wrap you in his arms,
Tell you that you've been a good boy
He'll rekindle all those dreams
It took you a lifetime to destroy
He'll reach deep into the hole
Heal your shrinking soul
Hey, buddy, you know you'll never turn it back.
He's a god, he's a man
He's a ghost, he's a guru
They're whispering his name
Through this disappearing land
But hidden in his coat
Is a red right hand
You ain't have no money?
He'll get you some
You ain't have no car?
He'll get you one
You ain't have no self-respect
You feel like an insect
Well don't you worry buddy
'Cause here he comes
Through the ghettos and the barrio
And the Bowery and the slum
A shadow is cast wherever he stands
Stacks of green paper in his
Red right hand
You'll see him in your nightmares
You'll see him in your dreams
He'll appear out of nowhere but
He ain't what he seems
You'll see him in your head
On the TV screen
Hey buddy, I'm telling
You to turn it off
He's a ghost, he's a god
He's a man, he's a guru
You're one microscopic cog
In his catastrophic plan
Designed and directed by
His red right hand
With this millions more can break the record of the most views of "THE BEST INAUGURATION EVER!"
We love that you are looking for a #pussyhat and want to get one to you as smoothly as possible.
A group of boojie women gathered at Knitty City in New York lay down their plastic brain-substitute devices long enough to make their pink Pussyhats in preparation for protests, in Washington and New York, for women’s rights following the election of Donald Trump - - 18 January 2017
Short form: Thousands of dickheads are to hit the streets in "protest" by jamming their empty skulls into their hand-made slack and scratchy pussies.
HOW TO GET A HAT IN THE DC AREA [Emphasis Added]Days before the March
We love that you are looking for a #pussyhat and want to get one to you as smoothly as possible. So, here’s the plan. We are going to have few pickup sites in DC in the days leading up to the March. We will be announcing them on Facebook and Twitter. Please be patient.
Our first distribution scheduled will be at Busboys and Poets at their 5th and K St. Location at 2 pm Wednesday, January 18. We will be there until the hats run out. We will see how that goes and then announce more times as soon as possible.Day of the March
We are giving out hats at the March. We love that you are a marcher who is already part of Pussyhat Project with your enthusiasm, passion, and commitment to women's rights. We have a spot confirmed and almost ready to announce. Follow us on Twitter: @pussyhatproject for any last minute changes.
Are you still a little concerned about hat distribution? We are doing our best! Hat makers are pouring their hearts into making hats for you and we are all so grateful for your participation. Please sign up on Twitter @pussyhatproject for logistics in DC (yes, we are mentioning it again). We have to be nimble and may have to make some last minute location changes. If so, we want you to know ASAP.
AFTER THE MARCH:
1. We hope you continue to wear your pussyhat loudly and proudly everywhere and anywhere for years to come. Be prepared to don your pussyhat for future marches and protests.
2. If you do not want your pussyhat after the march, please give it to a feminist who will wear it loudly and proudly. We know that there are many who are still in search of pussyhats.
3. The Michigan State University Museum is collecting stories, selfies, pussyhats, and other items related to Michigan women’s participation in the Women’s March in Washington, DC, and in Lansing, Michigan. Please consider donating your stuff and the stuff of your memories to the MSU Museum to document this historic event. Before you send anything, please contact Shirley Wajda, Curator of History, 517.432.4582 or (better) wajdashi@msu.edu. (It is possible that other collections will also be asking for artifacts related to the Women's March and Pussyhat Project)
4. Bring your pussyhat back to your hometown and give it to someone who needs it to keep warm. We have had many participants suggest women's shelters and cancer wards. Become more involved with the organization you are supporting.Thank you for being part of Pussyhat Project! We are deeply grateful.
Mesmerizing. Made by the Shire of Moora here's how they lay this road in the outback of Western Australia.
Finishing touches were recently accomplished on the $443,000 upgrade to Airstrip Road. Funded through Roads to Recovery Funding Program. A great job by our road works crew and Trevor Longman with the Shires drone for the footage. A total of 4.9kms were completed over a two day period.I love work like this. I could watch it for hours.
It is block of ice containing a drowned fox who broke through the thin ice of the Danube river cold. Fridingen, southern Germany, Friday, Jan. 13, 2017
With the untimely death of my car last month, I have been forced to shop for a new (used) car. For me shopping for a car is the closest thing I've had to a near-death experience since my real-death experience five years ago.
Buying a car is a skill that I do not have, in a realm I know nothing about, and which requires more money than I can easily spend, in order to get a car that will not collapse, crawl to the side of the road, wheeze, steam, gurgle, gasp, and die.
In short, I have become very weary about everything in the car-buying process. Still, I must persevere and make this all an extended Zen moment.
And in the course of looking about with my Zen"I have to get a car"Mind I stumbled over this ad from Volvo. It didn't sell me on the over-rated and over-priced Volvo, but I think it will amuse you just the same.
The true believers keep a comin'
But the train done gone.
Via Never Yet Melted's Climate Change History
How to shovel snow the easiest & safest way! Aching back NO MORENo bending your back. No aching back. No chiropractor.
This is how I shovel, when I need to.
No special shovels, no money to waste on half baked contraptions.
All you need is a piece of rope, or chain, or anything flexible that you attach to the lowest point of your snow shovel, or other type of shovel, or pitchfork.
Stand with your back straight and arms straight down. Load the shovel. Lift by curling your arm that is holding the rope while the other arm shoots the snow, or the sand etc., away. When shoveling upwards on steps, just shorten up your rope grip..... something you cannot do with the bent shovels.You can also shovel going downwards on steps, just lengthen your rope grip. At all times KEEP YOUR BACK STRAIGHT UP AND DOWN.
This is how I save my back, save money, and my shoveling is actually fun.
Get your motor runnin'
Head out on the highway
Lookin' for adventure
And whatever comes our way
Yeah Darlin' go make it happen
Take the world in a love embrace
Fire all of your guns at once
And explode into space
I like smoke and lightning
Heavy metal thunder
Racin' with the wind
And the feelin' that I'm under
Yeah Darlin' go make it happen
Take the world in a love embrace
Fire all of your guns at once
And explode into space
Like a true nature's child
We were born, born to be wild
We can climb so high
I never want to die
Born to be wild
Born to be wild
Or, as I used to say before I died, "I just wanna flash before I crash." Then, after I came back from the dead, my motto became....
Continued...
Standing at around five feet tall, the impressive architecture was shaped with a Dremel tool. In addition to its gothic silhouette, it includes inlaid candy glass windows with intricate, hand-painted details throughout. What’s even more remarkable is the gingerbread’s structural integrity. “There’s no supports of any kind,” McConnell explains, “and everything (aside from the lights) is edible.” It took her a full month of 10 to 15 hours per day to finish..... McConnell documented the edible masterpiece in progress. Artist Sculpts Massive 5-Foot-Tall Gingerbread Castle
The Approach, 2nd Place, Action.
An EF2 tornado bears down on a home in Wray, Colorado, on May 7, 2016. As soon as we were safe, as the tornado roared off into the distance through a field before roping out, we scrambled up the hill to check on the residents. Thankfully, everyone was all right, and we were grateful for that. As I was checking in with a young woman coming out of the basement, we became very aware of a strong new circulation right above our heads. We needed to run for cover and did so before saying a proper goodbye. # © Tori O'Shea / 2016 National Geographic Nature Photographer of the Year
Winners of the 2016 National Geographic Nature Photographer of the Year Contest - The Atlantic
Two more if you...
Continued...File under: "In America, if it's worth doing, it's worth overdoing."
Then again, if the pistol fails you there's always the fully automatic shotgun....
Continued..."When the moon is in the seventh house...."
Up to November 8 it was a very stressful year. Now it's time to go and get your opossums de-stressed.
"We acknowledge that the placing of the incendiary devices under the truck was a bad idea from start to finish."
Black Friday Zombie shoppers lined up by the hundreds at Best Buy, Target, Walmart, and other Box Box retailers. Have a look at these parasitic consumers who can't wait to buy more flatscreen televisions, tablets, and toasters, while they go deeper into credit card debt. Media analyst Mark Dice has the story
Just when I think I can take things more seriously, they pull me back in.
Scha·den·freu·de noun pleasure derived by someone from another person's misfortune.
Breathe deep the gathering gloom,
Watch lights fade from every room.
Bedsitter people look back and lament,
Another day's useless energy spent.
Out of some subway scuttle, cell or loft
A bedlamite speeds to thy parapets,
Tilting there momently, shrill shirt ballooning,
A jest falls from the speechless caravan.
- - - Hart Crane,To Brooklyn Bridge
[A Photographer captures suicide as couple jump off 40 meter high bridge ]
Yea, verily it is said....
Inspired by the Cubs, Trump voters begin to come out to vote. Their theme?
California Historical Society Collection, 1860-1960
"I'll get Bill and Anthony fixed at a group rate."
HT:Meanwhile, In The Bunker… | Western Rifle Shooters Association
Once Only
almost at the equator
almost at the equinox
exactly at midnight
from a ship
the full
moon
in the center of the sky.
--- Gary Snyder, 1958
I don't remember who first played "The Landscape Game" with me. It would have been many, many years ago. I also don't remember what my answers were to the game's ten questions, but I wish I had written them down. Played once the game is played forever. Once the first answers are lost, they are lost forever.
You can only play The Landscape Game once in your life. Once you know the questions and the interpretations any chance of replying honestly and openly is gone. It is one of those things that, if you know the "solution," makes any further revelation impossible. "The Landscape Game" is true once and once only.
So no peeking by any means. There's no "win" in the game and the only player you can cheat is yourself.
Next Monday you will see why....
For the questions.... AND ANSWERS. WARNING. ANSWERS AT THE END OF THE JUMP.
Continued...
Paradise, California: Neal Road between the Skyway and 99.
[Photo by MEH: October 1, 2016]
When you want to stay Zen but also feel your metal.
Harry Roy & His Orchestra "My Girl's Pussy" (1931)
(Me-e-e-e-o-o-o-ow)
There's one pet I like to pet
And every evening we get set
I stroke it every chance I get
It's my girl's pussy
Seldom plays and never purrs
And I love the thoughts it stirs
But I don't mind because it's hers
My girl's pussy
Often it goes out at night
Returns at break of dawn
No matter what the weather's like
It's always nice and warm
It's never dirty, always clean
In giving thrills, never mean
But it's the best I've ever seen
Is my girl's pussy...
And then there's the current occupant of the White House.....
President Obama says, "Gotta have them ribs and pussy too!"
Flatulating "Famous Faces" fulsomely fucked. Courtesy of The Brilliant Basket of Deplorables
"I'm fine. Really, I'm fine. Thank you for asking. I'm fine. I am better than 100 percent."
Why take a walk on the Champs Elysees when you can take a walk on the wild side? Too bad about Paris. It had nice ideals.
Continued...
Up on "The Ridge", as natives refer to Paradise, California area, you don't keep a weather eye on the horizon, you keep a fire eye. This morning this was the news from my town. Cal Fire issues new round of evacuation orders, road closures as Saddle Fire burns 600 acres
The Saddle Fire, that burned throughout the night near Paradise and forced the closure of most of Pentz road and many of its cross streets, has a new round of evacuation orders in place this morning. Pentz Road remains closed from Malibu Drive to Mesilla Valley Road and all roads that connect to Pentz. Concow Road has been closed from Highway 70, which includes Jordan Hill Road, Granite Ridge Road and Deadwood Road. Pinkston Canyon Road and all roads that connect to Pinkston Canyon Road was the newest closure that was issued overnight. Nelson Bar Road also remains on the list of mandatorily evacuated areas. Evacuation warnings remains in effect this morning for Pentz Road from Malibu Drive to Canyon View Drive
This is five miles and an entire township away from my place, but you learn quickly in this town to stay informed about the position and the pace of any fire. Driving up the Skyway into Paradise I have noted at least 5 fresh spot fires by the side of the Skyway in the past week. Once I came by as Cal Fire crews were mopping up a small one. Further up the Skyway I also pass the now madrone and manzanita covered scars and burned stumps of the much more frightening 2008 Paradise fire:
74 Paradise homes destroyed by Humboldt Fire Furious winds and unusually dry conditions had fueled a fire that raced up ridgelines and surrounded the southern end of Paradise, giving this town just east of Chico its greatest threat in modern times. The flames engulfed two of the three escape routes out of Paradise - and the third was threatened as well. Firefighters ordered the evacuation of more than a third of the 26,000 residents, including a large number of retirees. With only one two-lane route out of town, it took more than two hours for residents to drive 10 miles. Some panicked. The one fatality involved an elderly woman who tried to flee even though her neighborhood wasn't being evacuated. She died of a heart attack. "The greatest fear is fire on the ridge," said Shauna Robbins, 37, who grew up in Paradise. "There's no way out. You're trapped. If the fires jump, you're in a mess."
It's a town of lava cliffs, deep ravines, and tendrils of mesas covered in dry grass and pitch pine at this season of the year. The views afforded also mean that there are, as noted above, not a lot of ways out of the town. Unlike 2008 when there were three roads out, the Skyway, which once ended at Sterling City, has been extended north east for miles to Lake Almanor, so now there are 4 escape routes. As I once did when I lived in Laguna Beach where the houses have a tendency to slide off the sides of the cliffs, I keep a "Go-Bag" in the trunk of my car. I don't think I'll need it today, but I'm keeping my fire eye on the horizon.
After all, the key part of the term "wildfire" is "wild."
Continued...
Found in the always on the mark WrathOfGnon
The more things change, the more they stay insane.
16th-century Dutch engraving depicting a fantastical animal with the heads of various other animals sprouting from its body: an allegory for the difficulty of ruling over a diverse nation. In the background, watching on, can be seen a small mob or leaders, both secular and religious. This work by Antwerp-based artist Pieter van der Borcht the Elder, with its image of a confused and troubled body politic, can perhaps be seen as particularly salient in regards the US presidential elections. | The Public Domain Review
Fiber Fix, The Manly Man's Tape, asks 'What happens when you flip a car with a roll cage held together by duct tape?'
The Iconic Stevie Nicks in 1976: Big hair, big hips, big pipes, hot lips, and (alas) the brain of a singer. But when she turned it on she could blow up the entire building and leave everyone charred and cheering in the rubble.....
Continued...
Beach Volleyball Venue, Beijing, 2008 Summer Olympics
Main Swimming Pool, Athens, 2004 Summer Olympics
Olympic Sports Complex, Sarajevo, 1984 Winter Olympics
Recently, the average cost of hosting the Olympics exceeded $5 Billion with Rio coming in at =/-$11.6 billion. Pricey, but what's money when it comes to a really fabulous venue for synchronized swimming? Images from Imgur
It wasn't always just Corinthian sports followed by urban decay, From 1912 to 1948, the Olympics awarded medals to sculptors, architects, writers and musicians, too.
“William Butler Yeats’ brother Jack won a silver medal in the 1924 Olympics... in painting,” the commenter wrote. And sure enough, a look at Olympics results history shows that Jack B. Yeats placed second in the 1924 painting event for his work “The Liffey Swim.”
Well I'm about to get UPSET
From watchin' my TV
Been checkin' out the news
Until my eyeballs fail to see
I mean they say that every day
Is just another rotten mess
And when it's gonna change, my friends
Is anybody's guess
So I'm watchin' and I'm waitin'
Hopin' for the best
Even think I'll go to prayin'
Every time I hear 'em sayin'
That there's no way to delay
That trouble comin' every day
No way to delay
That trouble comin' every day
- - - The Mothers Of Invention - Trouble Every Day
Standing instructions to Hillary Handlers
The First Photograph:
Taken in 1826, "View from the Window at Le Gras" is the world's first photograph
View from the Window at Le Gras is a heliographic image and the oldest surviving camera photograph. It was created by Nicéphore Niépce in 1826 or 1827 at Saint-Loup-de-Varennes, France, and shows parts of the buildings and surrounding countryside of his estate, Le Gras, as seen from a high window.
Niépce captured the scene with a camera obscura focused onto a 16.2 cm × 20.2 cm (6.4 in × 8.0 in) pewter plate thinly coated with Bitumen of Judea, a naturally occurring asphalt. The bitumen hardened in the brightly lit areas, but in the dimly lit areas it remained soluble and could be washed away with a mixture of oil of lavender and white petroleum.A very long exposure in the camera was required. Sunlight strikes the buildings on opposite sides, suggesting an exposure that lasted about eight hours, which has become the traditional estimate. A researcher who studied Niépce’s notes and recreated his processes found that the exposure must have continued for several days.
Nearly 200 years and trillions of photos later, at the nano-instant it was taken, this was The Last Photograph:
‘The key is in the window, the key is in the sunlight at the window"
I don't think Alan would take it amiss if you used this form letter for your own enjoyment. I do.
Hello,Someone has signed up for your service using my email address. (And, interestingly, using this name.) Please delete my email address from your database.
The email I got welcoming me to your service came from a no-reply address, so I had to go to your website and dig around until I found a contact form. I see that you require me to give you my name as well as my email address, so you're demanding that I tell you things about myself I’d rather you not know because you aren't smart enough, or don't care enough, to include one simple step in your sign-up process: Confirm that this is your email address.
This neglect is both discourteous and stupid. It’s discourteous because it effectively allows anyone who wants to spam someone else to use your service as a quick-and-easy tool for doing so. It’s stupid because then anyone so victimized will tag anything that comes from you as spam, which will eventually lead to your whole company being identified as a spammer. You’ll all be sitting around in the office saying, between chugs of Soylent, “We keep ending up in Gmail's spam filters, what’s up with that? Those idiots.”
So, again, please delete my email address from your database. And please stop being a rude dumbass, like all the other rude dumbasses to whom I have to send this message, more frequently than most people would believe.
Most sincerely yours,
My kind of town: Where the still have a good old-fashioned 4th!
8:05 a.m. A concerned Bigfork resident reported that the neighbor has created some sort of “firework bomb” with several propane tanks. Apparently, he plans to set it off tonight.
8:22 a.m. Someone saw two elderly women drag a bear off of Highway 2 East.
9:42 a.m. A local man reported that his missing iPad notified him that it had made its way to Florida.
9:52 a.m. A Kalispell resident complained that the neighbor man has refused to clean up his firework mess.
1:57 p.m. Spastic boys in a Jeep Wrangler were seen chucking fireworks out the window as they drove down River Road.
2:43 p.m. The owner of a local ranch reported that four foreign men checked in to a room with only two queen beds. He thought this was weird.
2:46 p.m. A Kalispell man reported that the maintenance manager threatened to end his life over excessive water usage.
2:52 p.m. Someone reported that a man wearing fuzzy pajama bottoms was standing between ShopKo and Super 1, looking very “lost.”
7:02 p.m. A report was made about a local “bugler” who was shooting fireworks at “tubers” floating the river near Bigfork. He was told to knock it off.
7:15 p.m. Kids were seen tossing fireworks into the woods along Mountain Meadow Road.
8:48 p.m. A Kalispell resident reported that the fireworks in their neighborhood seem louder than the fireworks in other neighborhoods.
9:42 p.m. Reportedly, a drunken man shot a firework “out of his butt” in the direction of children who were sitting on a dock in Lakeside.
Firework Frenzy - Flathead Beacon
Made, like Porsche, in der Black Forest mit der elves.
For an inside look in great detail: Explore Der Wunderland courtesy of Google Maps. Mouse down and look around.
During the following hours, the idea of realizing a long forgotten childhood dream became vivid more and more. On the very same day, he called his twin brother Gerrit and surprised him with the following words: „We are going to build the largest model railway in the world“.Gerrit, who is more rational and sceptical by nature, doubted Frederik’s state of mind, and didn’t take the idea too seriously. However, six phone calls later, each with Frederik in the line enthusiastically presenting new ideas about this topic, Gerrit realized that his brother was serious, indeed. So, he started to consider the project from an economical and technical point of view.
He came to the conclusion that the project is technically demanding, the economic aspect very risky, and from an entrepreneurial point of view it is plain crazy – but possible, nonetheless.
Thanks to intensive research, the Wunderland team succeeded in receiving information and documents and have recreated Area 51 in the America section. The model of AREA 51 consists of three different floors, developed from carefully crafted plexiglass and sandpaper, which form a realistic simulation of the cold, barren concrete walls of this secret research facility.For the equipment a lot of unusual materials were used, for example:
- Star gate: Medical X-ray image viewer lamp
- Floors in the control center: Rechargeable battery inner casing
- Walls in the control center: Lamellas of a camping gas heater
- Rotor: Toothed circular saw and cable armoring
- Alien spider: Casting of a genuine spider in silver
- Control desks: Fiber optic cabling with LED lights
- Monitor: Converted MP3 PlayerThe Area 51 has two servo motors (star gate, UFO), an engine (rotor), and approximately 300 LEDs installed. 30 guards protect the area, in which can be found 50 researchers and technicans, along with 20 aliens and 2 robots.
"Remind him of anybody?"
— James Melville (@JamesMelville) July 20, 2016
Remind us of anybody?
Yes. Thatcher is back. Chilling similarity in posture and tone.#PMQspic.twitter.com/Y1Xa408ygZ
The Faroe Islands have some of the most beautiful roads in the world.
It is impossible to describe what it feels like driving through the green valleys and up the mountains, or alongside the ocean, surrounded by steep drops and tall cliffs. It’s an experience like no other. But there is a problem. Unlike almost all other parts of Europe, we don’t exist on Google Street View. The Faroe Islands may be rugged and remote but this collection of 18 islands in the North Atlantic also provide some of the world’s most magical landscapes and it is time that this hidden Nordic nation is revealed to the world. Taking matters into my own hands, I decided to create my own version of Street View – Sheep View 360.
I gently placed a 360˚ camera, powered by a solar panel, on the back of a sheep that would take photographs as the animal freely grazed the open hillsides of the Faroe Islands. Photos are then transmitted back to my mobile phone so that I can upload them to Google Street View myself, finally putting the Faroes on the map in a very unique way! But now I need your help. My sheep are great for capturing the tracks and trails of the Faroe Islands, but in order to cover the big sweeping Faroese roads and the whole of the breath-taking landscapes, we need Google to come and map them." -- Durita Dahl Andreassen[Note: The pointers at the upper left will spin the POV around as in Google Street View.]
Taking the top spot by a long mile is Teton, Wyoming – the county home to the affluent Jackson Hole ski area, and 40.4% of the famous Yellowstone National Park. The Top 1% that live near Old Faithful are particularly well-off, making an average of $28.2 million each year! - - Full Article Here
Elsewhere....
This recent addition to the spam folder pretty much closes the circle of strife:
ATTENTION SCAMMED VICTIMYOUR REF CODE NUMBER: 06654, FOR YOUR $1,500,000.00 USD ONLY
This is to bring to your notice that I am a delegate from the US AMBASSADOR TO UNITED NATION to The IMF (International Monetary Fund) Regional Payment Office to pay 721 scam victims $1,500,000.00 USD (One Million Five Hundred Thousand Dollars only) each. You are listed and approved for this payment as one of the scammed victims to be paid this amount,respond to this mail and contact MR JOHN BROGAN in Abuja Nigeria as soon as possible for the immediate payments of your $1,500,000.00 USD*(ONE MILLION FIVE HUNDRED THOUSAND DOLLARS) compensations funds.
You are to send your INFORMATION TO THE REPRESENTATIVE:
[1] Full Names:...... ..
[2] Contact address:....
[3] Direct Telephone:...
[4] Country:............
[5] Occupation:.........TO THE REPRESENTATIVE
MR JOHN BROGAN
Email: johnbrogan295@yahoo.com
Phone: 2348754356576Regards
Mrs Susan Rice
"It must be the summer of 1949 and she's taking my brother and I back home to her family in Fargo for the first time. I would be almost four and he'd be two and a half. The war's been over for some time and everyone is now back home and settled in. My father's family lost a son, but -- except for some wounds -- everyone else came out all right.
"We're living in Los Angeles and her home is Fargo, North Dakota, half a continent away. So we do what you did then. We took the train. Starting in Los Angeles we went north to San Francisco where we boarded the newest form of luxury land transportation available that year, the California Zephyr.
"Out from the bay and up over the Sierras and down across the wastes until we wove our way up the spine of the Rockies and down again to the vast land sea that stretched out east in a swath of corn and wheat that I remember more than the pitched curves and plunging cliffs of the mountains.
On the Zephyr you sat in a plush chair among others in a long transparent dome at the top of the car and it seemed all Earth from horizon to the zenith flowed past you.
"There was the smell of bread and cooking in the Pullman cars that I can still capture in my mind, and the lulling rhythm of the wheels over the rails that I can still hear singing me down into sleep.
"At some point we changed trains to go north into the Fargo Station and, as we pulled into Fargo in mid-morning, my mother's family met us with their usual humble dignity -- they brought a full brass band that worked its way down through the John Philip Sousa set list with severe dedication. They also brought me more family members than there were people living on our entire block in Los Angeles. There may also have been a couple of Barbershop Quartets to serenade us during the band breaks, but I'm not sure about that. My Mother at 100 @ AMERICAN DIGEST
"Train travel once played a large and vital part of America’s passenger transportation network, but today it’s taken a back seat– all the way in the back. Rail transportation in the nation now consists primarily of freight shipments, while passenger service plays a seriously limited role compared to train travel in many other countries. By the late 1950s, America’s railroad flagship passenger services were unable to compete with airlines, and it all pretty much went downhill from there. Which is frankly, pretty sad because when they were at their best, American railways really knew just how important the glamour and elegance of travel was to the passenger experience. Streamliners were designed to reduce air resistance, offering multi-day high-speed across journeys across the country in train cars resembling luxury hotels and private clubs. Life aboard them really did seem to reach a “high peak of enjoyment” as the brochure says…." Streamliner Trains that Oozed the Elegance of Old World Travel
The observation car of the California Zephyr today.
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