SpaceX has launched — and landed — an orbital rocket at Cape Canaveral. Whoohoo! ADDED: Better link. If you’ve got friends or family who don’t think there’s anything wrong with being on a government list, or who believe the gov’s pledges of privacy or promises that missions will never creep … have them read Carl-Bear’s latest over at TZP. Real world example, right there. If those friends are against the wide dissemination of “dangerous” information, Historian says, “Ask the Jews of Warsaw.” Kaiser Permanente opens its own medical school with a focus on teamwork. I can see some positives and…
Category: Arts and Aesthetics
All things creative. All things beautiful, profound, and moving.
We’re expecting five storms in rapid sequence over the next week. Some of them hard and windy. So should I go offline at any time, don’t worry. It’s not the ATF, FBI, CIA, or NSA. Just Ma Nature.
This will be a good test of how well my tape job did on fixing Old Blue’s leaks. So far so good after a week of normal wet conditions. Few drops of water in the trunk, but no lakes, rivers, or waterfalls in the passenger compartment.
Another table
The library held a mosaics class one morning last month. While everybody else worked on wooden planks the teacher provided, I decided to do another table. Specifically this one:
When it finally dawns on the social-justice pecksniffs just how many things in every culture are “appropriated” from some other culture, they’re gonna be in a world of hurt. Randall Munroe gives Time an interview as only the creator of xkcd could give it. (H/T jed in comments) “Who turned my blue state red?” Talk about blowback. That’s blowback. Odd couple: Black Lives Matter and Bloomberg. Half of me hopes he takes those officious overreacting officials for every dime — and thinks it’s too bad any judgment won’t come out of their own pockets. The other half of me is…
Been deadlining, but all caught up now.
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While I had my face buried in my latest BHM house-fixup article, the world outside was getting hammered with the kind of rain that makes even a seasoned Northwesterner wonder if there’s an umbrella (or perhaps a submarine) in the house.
Back to the “musings” shortly. In the meantime, I must beat back the tide of open tabs … “If bacon is so bad, I don’t want to live.” Leisl Schillinger is lying about that. She wants to live — and live boundlessly well. Wil Wheaton is right!. The growing trend to expect creative people to work for free, even for large, wealthy organizations, is insane and it’s destroying us. Okay, I know it’s a few days late, but these two really are the best Halloween costumes “We need more movies like Steve Jobs so long as they’re not like Steve…
The most important item in the house is now installed and plumbed and has hot water to fill it. Yum! The wainscoting behind it is beadboard from the old ceiling of the enclosed porch. The doorway you see on the left will eventually become a wall and the wainscotting will continue around three sides of the tub. (That’s Bathroom: Phase Two after the finances have recovered.) Scrounging and garage saling worked for everything else in the room, but I was determined to have a fabulous faucet, complete with shower attachment. So I found what I wanted online then searched for…
Can’t really speak to the merits of the lawsuit. But the notion that it’s it’s your own fault if you get murdered while in public housing is … novel, to say the least. This should hardly need saying. Flipping off a cop might not be the smartest thing someone could do, but it’s still free speech. Job of government: keep business people from succeeding. Now this is weirdly interesting: you cannot ride the backward-brain bicycle. Via A.G. in comments: What refugees carry in their bug-out bags. Concealed carrier stops a bank robber. A very sensible take on Ahmed and his…
Parishioners ensure that three counts of attempted murder didn’t become something much worse. Would love to know more details about how this guy hid out in plain sight. Man vandalizes own truck for money, blames Black Lives Matter. No comment. L.A. freelancers. In an … um, interesting tax situation. Ahhhh, free enterprise. In Pakistan, it seems, you can rent yourself a mob from people who specialize in this “valuable public service.” And this! Spy-agency contractor will pay $1 million for an iPhone hack. Some of us predicted this way back in the 90s: sensors in drugs that can report to…
This oughta keep you busy for a while. Major hat tip to faithful contributor MJR, who went on a link-hunting tear this week. Um … Yes, Wired, you can do something about Spotify’s weird new anti-privacy policy: don’t use Spotify. And y’know, Spotify’s “clarification” doesn’t help one little bit. It amounts to, “Oh, we’ll never, ever abuse all those bits of your life we’re requiring users to give up to us. Trust us …” Now this is funny. How North Korea is handling shooting range budget cuts. Over at TZP, Nicki and Y.B. write about a pair of killers and…
Panama was already better than many countries on guns. A smidge, anyhow. Now, in hopes of combating rising crime, they’re about to get better. Only a little better than the original smidge, but it’s something. Even the most worthless of petty bureaucrats now think they deserve to be treated and feted like Oriental pashas. Who are these people, anyhow? Once again, at least a few on the fringe are sending the message that they’ve had enough. (Tip o’ hat to jed) Yeah, now let’s see if the EPA and its employees get treated like a private corporation and its people…