Earlier this month I blogged about getting a lithium-ion jump starter for Old Blue after accidentally running the battery down. I was very happy to have that gadget even if the instructions were in inscrutible Engrish. Worked just fine, too. But in that blog I mentioned liking to have backups for my backups (“two is one and one is me stranded on the roadside on a dark and stormy night”). And whaddaya know, this handy-dandy gadget just showed up. This is NOT a jump starter: Nope, not a jump starter. It only looks like one — while also being quite…
Author: Claire
Today I have for you a collection of mostly useful or “lite” links. NO politics. Enjoy.
- Looking like spring here. But if you’re still in the merciless grip of winter, here’s an EZ windshield defroster. Just two ingredients. Whips up in seconds.*
- How to make sliding barn door for inside your house. I’ve been thinking of something like this, myself.
- How to use a large 3D printer to … print yourself a smaller 3D printer!
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Had to take a few days off from the ‘Net. Too many angry people, too many crazy people, too many “interesting” people. You know how you get those spates of them sometimes. Then you return and everyone’s peaceful and sane for a couple of months. I hope. I’m spending my break basking in reality. That is, not only mostly offline, but not in places that artificially pass for real. That is among other things, not in Washington, DC, where Jim Bovard took these very NSFW photos yesterday (and swears he didn’t deliberately go looking for the grossest signs). I played…
Trump’s officially been sworn in. The world hasn’t ended. Minorities aren’t being marched off to extermination camps. Women are not required to be either barefoot and pregnant or sexy and available. Putin hasn’t moved into the White House. And, poor CNN is disappointed in its embarrassingly obvious hopes that someone would murder Trump before the swearing in so that Obama could … appoint the next president or something like that.
David Gross writes: Your readers might be interested in knowing that Ammon Hennacy’s autobiography has just been released as a free (as in speech and as in beer) ebook. Hennacy was a Christian anarchist, and the most walk-the-talk radical I can think of. He did time during World War I for distributing anti-conscription propaganda, then spent 9 months in the hole for organizing a prison strike. He quit his job and started working day labor when income tax withholding was introduced so the government wouldn’t get a dime from him. And he operated Catholic Worker houses of hospitality — homeless…
The FBI. — yes, the freakin’ FBI. — has cameras on Seattle streets and a judge has just forbidden releasing information about them. Why should the FBI be doing street-level surveillance in U.S. cities (if they’re in Seattle, they’re everywhere else)? We can’t know and I haven’t found a single article that tells more than this one does. (H/T @EasyMac308 on Gab) Why aren’t Americans moving away from impoverished, jobless areas? Government, of course. Oh, there are SO many problems with technocracy — as the technocrats themselves are now learning the hard way (after they made millions of us learn…
I didn’t think he’d do it. But Obama just commuted Chelsea Manning’s sentence. Manning is set to go free on May 17. Here’s another link in case the one in the first paragraph gives you trouble, as it’s momentarily giving me.) This is a commutation, not a pardon. The sentence is cut short, but Manning remains a convicted criminal with all the loss of rights and other problems and stigmas that entails. But this is what she’d asked for, the best she’d hoped for. Hm. Now I wonder if Assange will agree to that extradition to the U.S.?
It was probably foreseeable that casting Joseph Fiennes, a white guy, as Michael Jackson, a black guy who desperately mimicked whiteness, would not set well with some people. Never mind that the TV episode was obviously pure silliness or that it played with a whole lot of other identities. No, a white guy playing a black guy, even if the black guy spent his life and fortune badly attempting to play a white guy, is verboten. After the standard indignation, the episode of the show was pulled before airing. Never mind more sensible people (here’s Tom Knapp) raising their hands…