Month: November 2018
I intended to include this in last night’s post, but it didn’t quite fit. You won’t be surprised to learn that Mssrs. Harris, McHenry & Baker, homebuilders of 1925 disapproved of renting. Sorry, renters but aside from the full page of sentimental and financial arguments they print in the back of their plan book, they go so far as to sniff at you for not exercising your full rights of citizenship. Still, they had a point. To wit: Click to embiggenate if you can’t see the figures, but they’re showing what a household’s “rent-paying habit” (yes, that’s what they call…
I don’t indulge in the boxes of freebies the thrift store puts out; they’re usually loaded with junk. But Friday morning, a huge number of the freebies were … art books! Oldish art books, but in good shape; once obviously some painter’s cherished possession. I grabbed seven or eight, and along with them the book on the right, 101 Classic Homes of the Twenties, with floor plans and photographs. 101 Classic Homes is one of those marvelous books Dover does, where they find some quirky, usually artsy, material in the public domain and reprint it. In this case, it’s a…
Yesterday’s news item about the 69-year-old man who “identifies” as 20-some years younger and demands a legal date-of-birth change has sparked some creative (albeit sneaky and slightly felonious) thinking. Sure, the guy’s claim is Onion-worthy. But the most ridiculous self-identity claims are being taken seriously enough now for claimants to extort money out of victims — with the assistance of so-called human-rights tribunals (must read; that news out of Canada is as absurd as it is scary). It may soon be that the only way to compete in a world gone mad is to “identify” as something totally self serving…
Note: This first got published without its ending, a fact I caught 10 minutes later. My apologies to anybody who saw it in its naked state. —– I mentioned the other day that life at the moment is pleasantly dull. That’s still the case. After an extraordinary October, we’ve begun an extraordinary November. Cold, foggy mornings, but blue skies all afternoon. Perfect weather for winter preps and completing fall projects. Yesterday I hauled out my little Honda inverter-generator to give it its seasonal checkup and run under load. I’ve never had to use it in an emergency, but it will…
He’s 69, but says doctors have told him he has the body of a 45-year-old. So. Naturally. These days: Dutch “positivity guru” demands a legal age change because he “identifies” as younger. And being younger would help him get more responses on Tinder (among other things). He’s actually awaiting a court ruling. If it’s a joke, it’s one he’s taking pretty far. If it’s an act of culture jamming, it’s sublime. If it’s the Netherlands’ version of The Onion, I’ve been had. Others are inspired by his example. 🙂 Here’s the original news story (in Dutch). (H/T Shel)
What Joel (and Leslie Fish) wrote was sadly moving, and we can know that willfully naive souls will repeat the same fatal mistakes, world without end, amen. But thank G-d, some in the American Jewish community are awakening and taking up arms in defense of themselves and their faith. Sigh. Dutch police decrypt hundreds of thousands of messages from IronChat, a supposedly rock-solid, end-to-end encrypted messaging app praised by Edward Snowden. Six questions about the sloppy and insecure CIA communications that got 70 U.S. spies killed. Meanwhile, as Sharyl Attkisson notes, the Central Lack-of-Intelligence Agency deepens its spying on everybody…
It turned out to be a fairly normal election, after all. A dead Republican brothel owner was elected to the Nevada state assembly. And a live writer of porn romance novels is refusing to concede the Georgia governor’s race. Minnesota elected a domestic abuser and Farrakhan supporter as its chief law enforcer. And Arizona is still trying to decide between a seeming all-American paragon and a complete lying moonbat in its Senate race. Decisions, decisions … For me, personally, and for the good people of Washington state, the biggest heartbreak was the urban-driven slaughter of gun rights in the lopsided…