Saturday, August 31, 2019

Meat juice extractor, antique gadget test, beef tea

Recipes for the infirm.

Of yore.



This video gets a strong reaction on YouTube. (A lot of it is irrelevant, such as vegetarians chiming in to identify themselves as viewers, and you can get the blouse at Target.)


Mirror selfie, Seth Everman

Jabuticaba tree

It grows fruit on its trunk.

But you can't have any. The fruit lasts only a few days. Transportation is impossible. Although it's made into products and those can be transported.

The tree grows in Brazil.

And it's not the only tree that grows fruit on its trunk. Cacao grows pods on its trunk that contain the large seeds that are fermented and dried into cocoa and made into chocolate.

Duckduckgo images [jabuticaba flowers], [jabuticaba], [jabuticaba fruit]






Meet Alexandria Cortez's challenger

He thinks Trump is a genius. (About social media)

Dog chases seals off dock

Getty Museum, Egyptian mummification

During the Roman period following the Ptolemaic dynasty.



Ladybug follows a drawn line




Fluid string art

Friday, August 30, 2019

Hell needs a new PA Announcer




Forcas
: Will you be interviewing any new announcers my dread Lord.
Lucifer: Yeah we might as well. I just got back from the fucking doctor. My arch fell again. Can you believe that shit? Anyway who do we have in the last bus?
Forcas: Well we have several people that will be coming in. A bunch of Puerto Ricans who moved to Florida will be in next week. That child molester who killed himself. A couple of run of the mill gang bangers from Chi town. But there is one in particular that I think you might want to see. She starred in a famous sitcom!
 Lucifer: Holy shit. That cunt Betty White is finally here! I thought our deal was that she could live to 130. Cool beans.
Forcas: No not the lesser demon Betty White. She still has far too much evil to do on Earth.
Lucifer: Then who is it? Mackenzie Phillips? The one that banged her father? Sweet. I love a dirty girl.
Forcas: No not her either. It’s Rhoda!

Dreams

"Archie we are ready to go out. Are you going to come out to got to dinner?"
"I don't think so Edith. I fell asleep in my chair and I had the strangest dreams."
"What kind of dreams Daddy?"
"Well little girl you got really fat and were always hanging out with really skinny coloreds with flies on their eyes."
"That's weird."
"Did you dream about me Arch?"
"Yeah I did Meathead. You also got fat lost all your hair and kept attacking the President and trying to get him impeached."
"Well Nixon should be impeached."
"It wasn't President Nixon it was some orange guy with blond hair."
"How about me Archie? Did you dream about me/"
"No I didn't Edith. So stifle. You have one season left after you get raped."
"WHAT!!!!!"
"I don't know it was a dream. Usually I dream that I am a Sheriff down South. I don't get it. It must be indigestion. I don't want to go out. Make me something before you go. I am staying home.'

Marilyn's Diary

I had a hard time after the family broke up when Aunt Lily and Uncle Herman got divorced. Uncle Herman moved to NYC to join a band with his friends the Indian, the Construction Worker and Cop. Grandpa moved to NYC too and got a job as the bouncer at the Stonewall Inn. Which was strange because he was kind of old but he had a strange way about him that sucked people in. So to speak.

Now Aunt Lily continued to live at 1313 Mockingbird Lane. Even after Eddie moved away to run for Senator in Massachusetts. She kept having wild sex parties with all of her weird Hollywood friends. Even the trouble that her friends Squeaky and Patricia and Leslie Van Houten got into didn't phase her. I just knew I had to move out before she dragged me down.

WKRLEM: What do wasps do, anyway?





It's obvious.



Ant Man.

What do wasps do, anyway?

What purpose do wasps serve?

A few are flying around the whole garden but they're not interested in flowers. If they go into a flower then it's purely by accident. They go leaf to leaf to leaf. What are they doing?

* Wasps are predatory insects that spend a lot of time hunting smaller insects to feed to their larvae. The wasp prey is chewed into smaller bits and taken back to the nest and fed to the young wasps larvae that turn the exoskeletons of prey insects into a sugary solution which they feed back to the adult wasps.

Although difficult to determine the exact number of insects that are killed by a wasp colony through a summer, it's been suggested that a single wasp nest will catch approximately five metric tons of insects in one year.

R-i-i-i-g-h-t. In your wasp-dreams.

I don't like this answer. Let's look somewhere else.

What Good are Wasps?

The site has a good video that I don't see on YouTube.
* wasps deliver yeast to wine grapes
* wasps eat other insects
* yellow jackets are dead bug cleanup crew

* Hornets and paper wasps prey on other insects.
* Paper wasps carry caterpillars and leaf beetle larvae back to their nests to feed their young.
* Hornets give their nests all kinds of live insects.

But sometimes the cost of wasps far outweighs the benefits. New Zealand is given as example for an invasive species of wasps killing their honey bees.

Conclusion: wasps do some good but you should probably kill them.

Come to think of it, there is a very low insect population out there.

Do beans need bees to pollinate?

Duckduckgo [how do beans pollinate]

Garden Simply.

"Daddy, is this going to be the birds and the bees?"

     "No, Son. This is going to be about a subject we don't talk about."

Beans f themselves.

And so far as evolution goes, that's not very advanced.
Beans are self-pollinating and rarely pollinated by insects. Bean flowers release pollen the night before the flowers open. The next day, as the flowers open, the anthers brush against the stigma and pollination occurs.
W-h-a-a-a-t?

I can't even visualize that.

Let's see, the pollen is released inside the flower bud before the flower opens. Then when it opens the anthers rub against the mess inside. Do I have that right? Could you draw me a picture?


Oh. Apparently the thing in the middle grows past the thing surrounding it. The picture is showing when they both stay short then it works. 

So now I know what's going on inside there and I can stop worrying about not having any bees around here. 

Troller in Chief

At first I was like: Why is he even saying anything?
And then I was like: Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha

Best president ever.

If you click over to the Twitter thread -- but why would anyone sensible do that? -- you'll see a thousand liberal heads exploding all at once. Fantastic firework display. Suddenly concerned about state secrets. As you know, the photograph was already published widely. And you can do as well with Google Earth.

Mark Steyn cracks up Tucker Carlson

Skip to 2:50 to miss Carlson's setup that includes a lot of Biden footage, to Steyn who regales Carlson with an imaginary Biden-style story in slightly exaggerated form.




He lied to the President, lied about lying to the President, leaked government information to cover up his lying, and lied to the public about his lying.

Comey tried to set up the President soon after he took office and failed, and covered up the attempt.

What a great sentence. Written by William Jacobson at Legal Insurrection.
Comey is revealed to be a completely manipulative bureaucratic infighter who maneuvered the government into a two-year Executive Branch paralysis in the form of the Mueller investigation, while falsely proclaiming himself the only holy player in the saga. His defense when unmasked in the IG Report is to crow that he wasn’t indicted.
A bit more at the link. As usual the comments there are erudite, incisive and ass toot.  

Deep State is morally superior and has insights that the rest of us don't have

Tell us more about this morality and these insights, Zen Buddhism and the correct pronunciation of Nietzsche and such.



Representative Doug Collins with Bret Baer

Basically, Comey's a butt hole. 



Turns out Jim Comey is a weasel after all

One of the best articles I've see so far on the IG's report on Comey is from an international site funded partially by Russia, rt.com/about-us.

In just a few paragraphs Nebojsa Malic, a Serbian-American journalist based in Washington, recapitulates Comey's whole effort.

"We are not weasels" is what Comey told Congress in 2016 and that forms the backbone of the article. He said that during a congressional hearing defending the FBI's probe of Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State running official business on a private email server in which Clinton was treated with kid gloves, ending with Comey holding a press conference exonerating her in violation of FBI and Justice Department protocol.

Then Clinton blamed Comey for losing the presidential election to Trump. Until Trump fired Comey and all was forgiven as Comey became the martyr of Democrat resistance. Here is where Comey leaked his memos of meeting with Trump to the press with the idea of getting a special counsel appointed.

Since then Comey has become a celebrity virtue-signaler publishing a book about a Higher Loyalty and urging his readers to vote Democrat.

At the heart of the IG report is Comey's handling of the seven memos about his meeting with Trump. He claimed those notes were personal records. The IG concluded that claim has ...
... no support in the law and is wholly incompatible with the plain language of the statutes, regulations, and policies. 
It was wrong for Comey to ...
1) Take them home
2) Keep them from the FBI
3) Leak them to the press.

But that hasn't stopped Comey from claiming the report exonerates him because he didn't leak any classified information and he isn't going to jail.

Comey's tweets are provided in the article and pretty much everywhere you read about this. Twitter.com/comey

DOJ chose not to charge Comey over the memos, reportedly because they don't want to look "petty and vindictive" to go after Comey on a technicality even though Mueller and his team threw the book at anyone even remotely connected to Trump, ruining dozens of lives but failing to find anything on Russian collusion.

Another OIG report about the FBI and DOJ spying on Trump's campaign is still pending. Along with a criminal probe. So it might be a bit premature to claim Comey is in the clear.

By the OIG report it is clear that the FBI director abused his power in pursuit of personal objectives. Not just by leaking memos to get a friend appointed special counsel to go after Trump but by the contents of the memos themselves. Comey's own words betray him.
I explained that he could count on me to always tell him the truth. I said I don't do sneaky things, I don't leak, I don't do weasel moves.
Yet Comey just three weeks earlier, in the first memo, talking about the meeting he arranged with DIA Director John Brennan and DNI James Clapper to brief the president-elect on the Steele dossier.
I then executed the session exactly as I had planned.
Within days the briefing made it to CNN who reported on the dossier and BuzzFeed actually published it. It's not been officially established how that information got out though Trump was furious and asked Comey about it.
Comey said that, among other things, he remembered telling Trump that the source of the information was not a government document, and it's not classified. 
The description matches perfectly Comey's own memos.

Comey repeatedly vouched for Andrew McCabe as honest and professional. McCabe was later fired after the OIG found that he leaked to the press, then lied under oath about it. Comey also vouched for the professionalism of the FBI including presumably senior agent Peter Strzok and attorney Lisa Page whose text messages reveal their loathing of Trump and his supporters.

The OIG report says Comey's actions set a dangerous example for current and former FBI employees.

Nebojsa Malic concludes, why then is he not being punished for it? Trump came into office with a promise to drain the swamp in Washington D.C. Instead, he meekly submitted to a two-year probe that fond nothing and limited himself to angry tweets as people who supported him were sacrificed. And that kind of restraint hasn't prevented his critics from calling him a tyrannical, dictatorial Nazi. While Americans who voted for him got the message that their president is powerless to stop or punish this kind of behavior and that there are two sets of laws in the United States, one for the powerful and another for the deplorables.

Bramhall, NYT Daily News

Thursday, August 29, 2019

Five things that make Dorian a dangerous hurricane

USA Today.

Let's guess what the five things are. I bet they're regular hurricane things.

1) High winds topple trees and cause other injuries
2) High water levels flood roads and lower areas. Roads flood.
3) Electrical wires get knocked down. People experience loss of electricity
4) Rush on groceries cause shortages.

Um. I need one more.

5) People underestimate the danger and hang in instead of relocating. People die of exposure and being battered and drowned.

That's all I got.

Back to the article.

The first few paragraphs are the usual stuff as if the reader is new to planet Earth and is hearing about tropical storms for the first time .
Along much of Florida’s east coast, as the storm approached, shoppers rushed to stock up on food and emergency supplies at supermarkets and hardware stores and picked the shelves clean of bottled water. Lines formed at service stations as motorists topped off their tanks and filled gasoline cans.
Oh. This is happening in Florida. Oh. people buy groceries, water, and fuel.

I wouldn't do that. Because my truck's gas tank is already full and I have no intention of going anywhere, and because I just went shopping. My pantry is full and so is the freezer and refrigerator. I have an excellent water filter and tons of bottles and jars.

About that. It's been a month since I've been shopping. That means I haven't been using the juicer. It just sat there this whole time. What a waste. I really need to fill the 4 bins in the refrigerator with things I can juice.

So I made a point to stop at Whole Foods after the hospital. And I was reminded again how gorgeous and how gracious the people are there. Workers and customers alike. Without exception, everyone I engaged was responsive. It's actually a lot of fun. I learned that I get genuine sourdough bread, not the fake-o sourdough bread at the regular grocery. I got a lot of fresh vegetables and lot of fresh fruit, quite a lot of fresh fish, meat, and deli. I've been enjoying the heck out of it.

Apparently I went a bit overboard. The cost was over $200.00. I knew it would be a lot but I didn't know it would be that much. Still, it's all great stuff and it's all things that I cannot get at the regular stores.

I did not get milk and I did not get eggs. So I would make a rush to the grocery for those. I can get those by walking across the street.

Back to the article.

1) It's forecast to strengthen to category 4. A lot more words at the article and this threatening photograph. You can see Cuba and the outline of Florida.


I'm always tempted to photoshop a wire whisk into the picture. But this is a serious blog.

2) It could hit anywhere along the east coast of Florida -- or even Georgia or the Carolinas.

Or even Virginia or Maryland or Delaware or New Jersey or New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island or Massachusetts, New Hampshire or Maine. It's all a wild guess but historic probabilities project it on Florida.

3) There's a risk of life-threatening storm surge.

Right. It wouldn't be much of a storm with that.

4) It could make a second landfall.

5) South Florida is already sodden from an extremely wet August.

Florida is wetlands afterall.


Marilyn's Diary


I loved living in Southern California even though I was not native to the sunny vales of the Golden State. You see I was born in the old country and was brought here as a child after the terrible accident where my parents were killed that involved the villagers with torches and pitch forks. My Aunt Lily and Grandpa came and rescued me and brought me to their home. I am eternally grateful because that is where I met my wonderful Uncle Herman.

I had to hide the fact that Uncle Herman had become my monster lover. I didn't want to hurt my Aunt Lilly who had been so kind to me. So periodically I would date other people to throw her off the scent. Now I couldn't do that with Eddie because he was a werewolf and they can smell out anything but he only liked to smell piss. Specifically female piss so if I left a pair of my piss stained panties around he would be busy wacking off for days. Still and all I had to bring in a parade of losers just to keep up appearances.

I dated Moondoggie which had the added benefit of pissing off that little whore Gidget. She got so mad she went off to become a nun. Then I went out with Tod Stiles who was pretty cool. He was always off with his friend traveling on Route Sixty Six. I tried to interest him in Route Sixty Nine but he never wanted to ago there so I guess he was a homo. I heard he became a cop. There were several other losers but the one I most remember was a hillbilly from Carolina with a woodie named Sixty Grit.

WKRLEM: Why can't I vote for a ........Surfer Girl



Somehow I ended up with an infection on my legs and a lesion that requires antibotics that stop me from going in the sun. So I miss the last week of summer in the sun and can't go to the beach!

Bummer man!

Dear Tulsi




Dear Tulsi,

I am sorry to hear that you have been dropped from the next debate. I have been dropped too! Can you believe it? The DNC obviously has a problem with strong women! I don't understand it. I have consulted my chakra and my spirit guides and they tell me it is a a conspiracy of old white men. And Indians. You know Bernie and Warren have gotten together to keep us out of the race.

What I would like to do is get together with you outside of the hall the night of the debate. We can attract a bunch of free media and be much more entertaining. I figure I can read some tarot cards and talk about my crystals. You can wear a bikini and teach people about surfing and stuff. It's a win win for us. A fundraising bonanza if I say so myself.

So if you are interested just contact me. You can email me or phone. Or just contact me astraly on the spirit plane. I will know it is you.

Call me.

Namaste,
Marrianne.

ISIS warrior exploded by the drone he was operating

When the drone's battery ran low and returned to him.

This happened last year. The ISIS guy was targeting allied forces after the Battle for Mosul in northern Iraq. The Battle for Mosul ended in 2017 but British troops are still training Iraqis there.

He had customized a civilian drone with explosives but failed to fully charge the drone. Civilian drones are programmed to return when their power is low to prevent owners from losing them. For some reason, with a weak signal, the explosive ignited overhead and the operator was killed.

Although enemy drones are a very real threat, ISIS calls them its Air Force, this incident still gave the British and the Iraqis a good laugh.
... a common, simple and effective tactic is to push a hand grenade — with pin pulled — in a steel tube attached to the aircraft. 
Once over the target the drone is remotely dipped so the grenade slides out of the tube, releasing the trigger mechanism. 
Some grenades are adapted with fins attached to help them fly more accurately.
More deets and photos at the Sun.

Wednesday, August 28, 2019

The lady's in a hurry

This is a story lifted from Kitchen Notebook. Lucy is an expatriate American woman who is living in Lyon with her French husband and their son. She writes floridly like a woman for women and she uses a lot of French words.

This story is titled The Lamb Chops.


The pickings were slim at the market. Shopping is more like a farmer's market, not an American  supermarket. The vendors like to take a break after summer harvest and before autumn harvest so there is virtually nothing to buy.
I was going to be teaching a class where we just cook together through to lunch time, based on what I find. I dropped my son off at school and only had 45 minutes before class. I had to be quick. I walked the length of the market and reached the end. Nothing. Nothing looked fabulous this morning. 
She had noticed before a surge of early autumn vegetables and had been looking forward to using those ingredients, particularly beets and watercress. That was her plan but when she went through the market all those things were gone.
My egg people being gone was a serious problem. These are the only people who consistently give me fabulous eggs. I am talking about eggs laid yesterday, the ones that plump up into perfect ovals when poached. I had to start asking people about their eggs, and got shaky answers each and every time. "Tuesday" said one, looking off over my shoulder just long enough for me to know, without a doubt, he was telling a story. I finally settled on some eggs, wasting precious minutes. 
She needed tarragon but a previous shopper took the whole lot. None left.
She rolled her eyes and so did I. This continued all the way back down and I realized I had done the whole market I still didn't have a starter. 
Time was wasted and now she must change her whole plan.
I decided to shift my poached egg dish to a starter and go with a meat dish. Côtelettes d'agneau en aïado, which is aromatic herb marinated lamb chops I like to do with three sauces, a fabulous garlic sauce similar to an aioli but cooked, a buttery plumped reduction sauce from lamb stock, and a sweet onion and predominantly chervil based green sauce using Claire's secret olive oil. I got closer to the meat stand where the idea for the chops came from but saw he was one of those circular saw butchers that wear lab coats, the ones that use power saws, producing cuts addled with ugly to deal with bone schrapnel. That would not do. 
Not do! Clinging to her idea of lamb chops she will leave the outdoor market and make her way to a familiar butcher nearby. Thank God for the regular guys.
"Bonjour madame, do you have any lamb chops?"
"Yes, we do. Honey, the lady wants lamb chops."
"How many?"
"Eight." I was thinking that would be fine. Eight lamb chops.
"Coming right up!" he called. I had 20 minutes at that point to finish this transaction and get down to the kitchen, open up, and print out recipes. I heard him bumping around downstairs. I looked at my watch and smiled at the butcher's wife.
She told the wife that she's teaching class in twenty minutes and they both laughed.

Then silence.

"The lady's in a hurry!"

The butcher came up with a lamb on his shoulder and started to carve into the lamb. He removed the cuts that he needed to get to the chops.
"The lady's in a hurry, the lady's in a hurry" he sang, removing a shoulder, the heart, trimming and slicing with what looked to be a small razor sharp paring knife. He brought down a hack saw and pulled no more than two strokes to get through one bone, cut out the strip of ribs, and trimmed the end with a cleaver. His tools hung from the gorgeous hooks that looked like miniature metal bulls horns lined up in neat rows above him.
She recalls her previous butcher used those same hooks to hang meat when he broke down the animal. But this butcher uses them for his tools. He showed her a sample and asked if that's what she wants. She told him she prefers the smaller chops. "Can you give me the cute little ones that look like a miniature côte de boeuf?"
He went back in and came out with a gorgeous trimmed lamb chop. I asked for some nice and thick and some nice and thin. I like it when I can stand the thick ones up on their end and the thin ones kind of lean along the side. Perfect. 
She noted the price was not that much higher than what she pays the producer. Apparently she transported to her workshop as they do in science fiction because the next sentence picks up in front of her rentrée.
The whole class was gathered in pairs along the street, waiting for me, although class would not start for another 5 minutes. I ushered them all in and we all had a cup of coffee while I printed the recipes. It came out that one of the students who had registered at the last minute was celiac, so instead of an autumn tarte, we went with some vanilla bean enriched îles flottantes for dessert. We had a delightful morning. The eggs were probably at least 4 days old, but I will take that up with him tomorrow.
Eggs four days old! OMG. They didn't puff up like they should.

Those îles flottantes things are a glass or bowl of creme Anglaise with an island of floating meringue.

Duckduckgo images [iles flottantes]

1983, Cpt. Ziv Nedivi, Israeli Air Force

When kids meet their sports heroes

It's mostly soccer.

Pepé Le Pew is Odor-able



Other Pepé Le Pew videos are better, but this one the comments to it are more interesting than the video.

I did not know the skunk is a slam on how Frenchmen smell. I never put that together.

French people say in comments that in France the cartoon is an Italian lover, not French. And that Pepé is not a particularly French name.

They say, now that they realize in America Pepé is French, they're offended. 

One woman said the video depicts how she force-loves her own cat.

And that made me recall, "Hey, I did that too with my dogs." But they absolutely loved it. 

I read somewhere that parents do not give their children three minutes of personal one-on-one attention each day. That made me sad. I looked back and realized how much personal attention both parents gave me. And that made me think that I can do much better with my dogs. 

I resolved to give them ten minutes of personal attention each day. Reliably. Forever.

I chose a spot to do this each day. Sitting in that spot meant, now I lavish you with Pepé Le Pew love.

At the edge of the wall where the carpeted dining room steps down to the sun room made from a porch with a blister of glass that ran the length. When I sat there where the two room connected that meant It's just me and the dog. Nothing else exists. For at least ten minutes each day.

I put her on my lap and give her a full body massage while talking to her softly. 

I'd set her to the side and touch every inch of her body. 

I'd trace the features of her face and her ears. 

The dog quickly learned that is the dog's power spot. That is where I lavish attention. I talk to the dog and pet her. I lavish her, and pet her all over. I talk like Pepé Le Pew and say the things that he says in the cartoons and both females in their times f'k'n loved it. 

They soaked up the attention like a sponge. 

They assumed the position of Pepé Le Pew love.

Wherever they were in the yard, whatever they were doing, no matter the time of day, no matter everything else going on, the dogs literally flew to me, they dug their claws into the carpet for maximum traction and they cannonballed through the air and expected me to catch them and spread them out and rub them all over and whisper sweet nothings in their ear. I'd tell them how wonderful they are, how beautiful they are, how I cannot take my eyes off them, how lucky we are to be together, and now we make beautiful music together. I  was a total nutter with with dog and they could never get too much of it. 

It turned out that was their all-time most favorite thing.

It really was their power spot. For them it made the whole world fine. They loved nothing better than to be lavished with personal attention and spoken to softly in a cartoon voice.  If you saw it, you'd think, good Lord that man is a freak! And it was a bit freaky. But it was fun and it worked. 

Emmy: Chick-Fil-A vs Popeye's

Looking for KFC, I discovered a Chick-Fil-A on Broadway south of Elati at Dartmouth in Englewood. That's 3085 South Broadway, so, 40 blocks south.

And the nearest Popeye's on Colfax gets poor reviews on Yelp. 2122 E. Colfax at York. That's a few blocks north and twenty-one blocks east. The photographs look terrible. Other Popeye's nearby get slightly better ratings. But not much.

But I don't want a sandwich. I want a pile of fried chicken with extra that I can re-heat in the oven. And coleslaw.



It appears Popeye's wins. 

I knew the comments would be contentious. I did find a KFC that day, but they're being pushed out. And I did like the chicken and biscuits and the coleslaw. The help was outstanding. 

Judgment day for professor who wants to kill all Christians

A professor of English at an Iowa community college wrote:
It's not pretty, and I'm not proud but seeing what evangelical Christians are doing to this country and its people fills me rage and a desire to exact revenge.
Boasting of being part of antifa he responded to President Trump describing them as "radical left wack jobs who go around hitting people over the heads with baseball bats."

The professor wrote:
"Yeah, I know who I'd clock with a bat."
Now he's resigned, but after the college decided to remove him from the classroom.

They don't say this but they probably offered him another job that he refused. Because the college's statement doesn't make sense otherwise.

The college president said,
The decision has nothing to do with the substance of his views or his right to express them.
Get the gymnastic duplicity required to fire a guy for speaking dangerously for aligning with a domestic terrorist group, and for making your college look like a bunch of nutters.
Rather, our decision is based solely on our commitment to fostering a safe learning environment for our students, faculty and staff.
Rather-rather, you fired him for what he said. Just admit it. Had he not spoken so outrageously he'd still be employed. You fired him for what he said. Say it!

The article continues with some dope libertarian who supports the professor.

Story at WND who has no comments but does have a list of other articles you might find interesting. For example:

* Urban crows get high cholesterol from human food.
* Rabbi hammered with a boulder in hate crime
* Google engineer steals self-driving-care trade secrets
* When MLK said "I have a dream," wha did he mean?

Seriously? MLK tells you exactly what the means.

* University mandates castrated pronouns.

Leave the college.



* Man paddle boards from San Fran to Hawaii
* NYT: We're victims of right-wing conspiracy
* 15 ex-spooks who work at CNN and MSNBC now
* New solution for intolerable bat poop at church

Man, that site has lots of good stuff.

Family charged with assault and hate crime after discovering a teen in a bedroom closet

Weird story.

This story is primarily racial.

A fifteen-year-old Latina girl invited a seventeen-year-old black boy into their home while her parents were out.

Her parents returned. Her mother, her step-dad and her biological father. So, odd group right there.

The three parents discovered the teen boy hiding in their daughter's closet. They tied him up and pelted him with racial slurs. Then untied him and the boy fled. The parents did not call the police.

I didn't catch how the police were called and I'm unwilling to reread the story.

The children tell the story differently. They say the teen did not punch the mother. And they say there were no racial slurs.

I don't really care. The teen has his story, apparently he knew the parents would object and that's why he was hiding, the girl is guilty as the boy for setting this up, she has her own story, the parents have their own story, and the other kids have their story.

This is a clash of subcultures within my own culture. Subcultures in which I have little knowledge.

I do know the comments to this story on SFGate are 100% obnoxious. People do go on positioning themselves as racial experts and everyone else as racists.

Bret Baier performs Rapper's Delight at Rascal Flatts concert

No. Shut up. I don't want to watch him on Fox and I certainly don't want to watch him do the board up his butt white guy's rap.
Turns out, he can bust a pretty good rap.
No, he doesn't. Stop it. I said shut up.
[He] was attending a Rascal Flatts concert over the weekend in Bristow, Virginia, when he was called on stage for an impromptu performance. 
And while Rascal Flatts is a country music group, Baier opted to sing a cover of The Sugarhill Gang’s 1979 big hip-hop hit, “Rapper’s Delight.” 
And he wasn’t half bad.
And he isn't half good either. I said, shut up.
As for performing with the The Sugarhill Gang, Ashley Moir, a booker for “Special Report,” shared a video in December of Baier doing just that at a Christmas party. 
She tweeted: “My boss is cooler than your boss. Ladies and gentlemen, @BretBaier and The Sugarhill Gang!”
No, he is not. He is wearing a red jacket with green Christmas Trees. He's a nerd attention whore dope in all ways and he keeps showing it.  I said, shut up and you are not shutting up.

Video and a lot more annoying stupid as H-E-double shit tweets and videos at bizpacreview, if you care to rip out your eyeballs and jab an ice pick into your ears.

Apparently he's been doing this one stupid song for a decade. It's a thing with him.

And if there is anything to drive you off Fox this would be it.

Tuesday, August 27, 2019

Can a nuclear bomb stop a hurricane?

No, it cannot.

From Tampa Bay Times. 

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says the question comes up so often that they wrote an explanation about it.

Why won't it work?

Guess.

Come on, be a sport, guess.

Guess, I said.

Guess!

An atom bomb doesn't produce enough energy. It would simply create a radioactive storm.

So that's that. Subject closed.

But, but, but, but, butbutbutbutbut.

If you attempted to offset a hurricane's energy, most of the effort would go to reducing its cloud fields and little would change its wind speed.

The idea is a gross underestimation of how powerful the storms are to anything that can be thrown at tin

Then what about four bombs?

What about lasers?

What about more lasers?

What about zapping them in the beginning with a multitude of coordinated lasers to totally mess up the patterns with heat? Huh?

The article goes on to list previous proposals. So it's not just you thinking this.

The whole list of ideas were shot down by scientists who got busy with calculations.


Oleta Adams, Don't Let The Sun Go Down On Me

The discussion elsewhere was about Elton John defending some British prince and his whacked American wife about flying around all over the place. Commenters regard Sir John as court jester.

Another commenter said that all Elton John / Bernie Taupin songs that he's heard covered by other people are better than the original by Elton John.

Face it, his songs are great but he's not that great of a singer. His hits really are better sung by others. Elton John has fantastic piano skill but that's it. He doesn't write his own songs, and he doesn't sing them the best. He uses gimmick eyeglasses, fur and feathers and sparkles for stage presence. Other singers have presence by their voice.

The Two Rooms album shows this. Every song on it is better than the original.

Oleta Adams blows me away. She sings this song as a gospel. I really like her take on this song.



I think I saw her one time in a basement lounge in New York. 

Friends and I were taken out to dinner before Oleta was famous and a woman very much like this was singing her heart out down there. The whole time I was thinking, "Oh man, she is awesome!" 

Joe Biden is not nuts

So he tells us.

The video is edited so that Biden never makes his point and that's fine with me because I don't care to hear it.




G7 Biarritz

It's over now. Trump and Melania are back home.

I don't even know where to start with this. We have several videos of bilateral meetings between Trump and various G7 members and others but they're all formal and stilted and give no real sense to the discussions behind them.

We have the transcripts of those and they show mostly a vicious and insane American media and Trump's somewhat confused indirect and evasive responses, only seldom straightforward and clearly expressed. The journalist ask about everything except what is relevant to the discussions at hand.

We are assured that behind all this crap is genuine human interaction.

We have the official descriptions of the purpose of the meetings that bear zero resemblance to the actual global issues we expect the leaders to discuss, gender fairness and climate change. Bite me.

We get fluff and goo, politesse, banalities, bromides and bafflegab, anything but actual discussion. They're hardly worth watching or reading.

What we see is a polecat host that ambushes Trump immediately, clearly the main participant who towers over everyone else, to draw off Trump's gravitas to his own parasitic advantage. We see the host's wild gesticulations and hear the graceful liquid phonemes of his own fluid language chopped harshly as hash. He is quite impossible to listen to. While Trump answers different questions entirely from the ones that are asked, and in parts broken to bits that must be reassembled, giving the impression of a disordered and self-interrupting mind.

We see the host invite an Iranian guest unexpectedly to throw Trump off his game. The host complicit with terrorist supporting regime. To drive his silly-ass European point. Even while using the United States to confine his own ISIS members. And confined by a manner they deeply criticized.

Then at the end the polecat host uses Trump again in a very long bilateral to draw off Trump's genuine yellow vest bonafides and wear it to cover his own extreme leftism, to stiffen his own failing position, gesticulating wildly and chopping his language. The video is painful to watch.

Macron is failing at home.
Merkel is failing at home.
Trudeau is failing at home.
Giuseppe Conte has already quit due to immigration backlash.

And they each use Trump whom they don't like and with whom they disagree about everything to buttress their own positions. Socialist who each need America's economy to succeed, but need to do that unfairly while chiding the American president for not accepting their parasitical demands as an honor.

By reading the transcripts I suppose it is Merkel who comes closest to honest discussion.

The others are crap.

Macron's first polecat ambush. Not worth the trouble of reading. Or watching.

The arrogant Donald Tusk. Not worth the trouble of reading unless you're interested in knowing what insufferable international arrogance looks like. Not a G7 member, just another asshole to give Europe the additional weight needed to match Trump's natural gravitas. Total fail. Total slime.

Trump and Boris Johnson working breakfast.

Trump and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. Corn, corn, corny-corn corn. Well, we'll see, won't we. Corndog sushi just doesn't have that ring to it. Then again, they don't have space to grow wheat given all the arable (water)-land is used to grow rice. Far less to grow corn.

Then again, don't you think they get tired of rice all the time? Rice Crispies, rice pudding, sembei, fried rice, boiled rice, risotto, steamed rice, sake, rice beer, rice miso, arancini, pesto rice, rice balls, salad rice, queso rice, curried rice, black rice, wild rice, brown rice, saffron rice, paella, rice pilaf, dirty rice, coconut rice, lemongrass rice. Rice day in and day out. Rice coming out of their ears, rice everyday, pooping rice out of their butts.

Sure, polenta and pork corn-tonkatsu would be great once in awhile.

Trump and Justin (sparkly pink socks) Trudeau. Why is this guy even here?

Trump and Boris Johnson discuss big trade deal. No transcript. If only they can work out a genuine trade deal with zero tariffs and zero non-tariff barriers both ways with tremendous pressure on both sides for specific protections. Then they will have the model for the rest of Europe to fall into. Then they will have the model for China to copy. As they do. Copy everything. Having no real collective imagination about anything beyond communism which is pure collectivism.

President Trump and President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. Egypt is not a G7 member. This meeting it to antagonize Iran.

President Trump and Prime Minister Narendra Modi. India is not a G7 member. This meeting is to antagonize China.

President Trump and President Macron. This is a long video and nobody likes watching it. It's horrible. The host is drawing off the naturally occurring very real power of Trump, an accomplished person who is doing this job for free and at great expense to himself because he honestly believes his nation needs his peculiar trade expertise. Trump is a very big man in life apart from the presidency and Macron is a little man with a mama complex and Napoleon complex combined with no real life achievement outside of politics, and it shows when the two stand together and the small one is gesticulating wildly, chopping his liquid language to chunks, literally sucking the other one's ... neck, or whatever, drawing off energy as a vampire polecat. It's gross. It's ugly. It's very hard to watch and to hear. Ew, I hate this video to pieces.

Trump's own Twitter feed is far more interesting than any of this. Twitter is where Trump talks to us. He brags. He jokes. He slaps people around. He highlights things other people say about him. He toots his own horn.

In many ways Trump is similar to my own dad who mouthed off about everything. Everything. He was very hurtful sometimes. Very crude. Somewhat abusive in language. Extremely blunt. He f'k'd me up so badly sometimes I'd be put in a goth mood for weeks at a time. The advantage of that is we always knew precisely what he had on his mind.

Except for the times when we didn't.

It was well after they happened that I learned of the times that he followed me and watched over me without me knowing.

I learned that he followed me in his car to a dealership and watched from a distance behind plants as I negotiated the deal.

He followed me in his car all the way from his house in the foothills to my apartment in Denver to make sure I got home safely when I was ill.

I learned later he disposed of flower arrangement sent to my hospital room because it was in a black vase, and he associated black with death, and my situation was critical. He didn't want me to see the black vase.

What an asshole!

But he was trying to protect me.

That is what Trump is like to me. People at large give him no credit for the things that he does for us, the sacrifices he makes for us, they misconstrue purposefully, as children do toward their own fathers.

By reading Trump's Twitter account, I hear my own father. It has all the infuriating elements. All the same humor. The same hardness. The same tenderness. All the same genuine love.


Monday, August 26, 2019

I am Jensen, your bestest friend now

Water and sound experiment

Explain this to me.

Please.

How to Cook Everything

The Basics, by Mark Bittman.
4.5 Stars on Amazon.

I'm going to hospital in an hour and I'll take this book with me to give to any one of the nurses. I'll ask them if they know anyone who could use a good book similar to Betty Crocker. Except better.

I have Bittman's original How to Cook Everything but that one doesn't have any photos. It's very well written. Each recipe is brief, actually terse. Then variations are given for nearly everything. It's great for imparting the understanding that you can basically clean out your refrigerator by some variation of one of your favorite things.

I've never actually used it. I'll give away that one as well.

This book is for beginners. I read it in three minutes like zip, zip, zippity do dah, zip, zippity, zap.

Immediately the scrambled eggs don't tell you how to make them like a sauce. The omelet is done poorly. The frittata is so plain and basic it's ridiculous. Nothing about quiche. Nothing about all the marvelous things that can be done with eggs. Nothing about the properties of eggs that make them so important in cooking.

The fish section doesn't say how to prepare sushi or sashimi or Hawaiian poke. There is nothing in it that describes an Asian approach.

The rice section shows the difference between short grain rice and long grain rise but fails to mention anything about the millions of categories of each. It doesn't suggest how to get the best short grain rice nor how that can be used for risotto. Nor why. Although, it does show how to make risotto. It shows what it should look like -- the degree of creaminess and how to get that.

The soup bases are extremely basic. It instructs to use commercial chicken broth for making soup base from Turkey pan drippings. There is no mention of using the carcass, far less breaking the bones and roasting them for more flavor. Nothing about using a pressure pot to speed up the process. The true glory of bone broth with its wonderful gelatinous aspic is missing.

(A friend of mine was throwing that away because he didn't know what it is. He thought it was like fat.)

The bread section helpfully has the NYT no-knead overnight bread, but it doesn't tell how to make sourdough. Nothing about sourdough culture. Nothing about how to make it more sour. There is nothing about Pullman loaves. Nothing about wet dough and cloches for wide open crumb.

Nothing about aging pizza dough.

Distressingly, the pasta section assumes all commercial pasta. There is absolutely nothing about how to make your own pasta, the various types. How to cut it. Various ways to make it. Nothing about machines or how to roll it. Nothing about egg pasta. Nor Asian noodles. Nothing about changing the pH.  Nothing about various flours, nothing about Durum wheat.

Each section I'm thinking, more is left out of this book than is put in it. I could write a more thorough book. Wait. I have written a more thorough book, far more thorough,  over ten years in blog-form showing all the experiments, successes and failures. The photographs in this book would be extremely helpful for someone who's just starting. But I already have 100X more photographs about everything. Everything.

Somebody else needs to own this book. Nothing against the book. It's a very good book.  It's just not for me. It's for a beginner. A teenager perhaps.

Why are those press room cameras so loud?

Gawl! They're totally re dick a liss.

Quara.


For you see ...

First, most press conferences are held in a very live room that has been designed acoustically for maximum sound projection so that public speakers can be heard by everyone present.

The US Capitol's main open area allows visitors to whisper against the wall and have the sound travel around the circumference of the whole room. 

The discussions about types of microphones and their placements and their purpose are irrelevant.

Secondly, the single lens reflex cameras used by nearly all photographers presently have mirrors on  mechanical devices inside the camera that are used for the photographer to look through the viewfinder to look directly through the lens, that's what makes them so valuable, you see exactly what the image sensor sees, and the mirror must be moved out of the way before the shutter snaps open. Then back closed. Then the mirror returned to position. The shutters are usually like two thin window blinds that move downward in sequence with a space between them. They are moved back up when the shot is completed. So this is a lot of mechanics happening inside the camera. 

Mechanics inside an electronic device. 

New cameras designed without the mirror and its mechanism are a lot more quiet. 

In the past, the most noise used to be the electric motor that advanced the film. 

And it used to be the flash going off. 

Sometimes present day flashes recharge. It sounds like ssspoofssss. 

We photographer types abjure shooting with flash. Abjure; it's a w-o-o-o-r-d. Because on-camera flash is so flat. It's like POOF a giant light in your face. The frontal shadows are erased, and the shadows that are cast are sharp and harsh with the front features flooded out. Working with flash takes a lot of finesse with flashes set up around the subject and calibrated just so to make light pour around the subject and fill in the shadows behind the subject and balanced precisely. It's an art. And in pressroom situations there is no time for art. And the house lighting is generally fairly good and the camera's ability to operate at low light is outstanding. Even with various types of light, yellow to blue.  

The following high speed images of shutters will show that the Canon camera's mirror mechanism is quite floppy. It vibrates all over the place. The mirror vibrates when put in both up and down positions, while the Nikon is tight. The sound is cut off but before it is, you can hear that the Canon is louder than the Nikon.

Maybe something is wrong with this particular Canon. Maybe that's why it's been opened.

Most other high speed recordings of these camera shutters omit the mirror moving out of the way, and that's the mechanism that makes the most noise. The choice of videos is limited.

More at Quara but it's not very good.

Incidentally, many modern small cameras have a button for you to select the type sound for your camera to make. They allow the user to imitate an SLR camera sound. They actually put the noise in there for you. When ordinarily they'd be completely silent. It's like a preferred feedback thing. So you're not going, "Is this thing even on?" Is that weird, or what? 

Sunday, August 25, 2019

Jon Bon Jovi sings Elton John's and Bernie Taupin's Levon

A lot better than Elton John does. From the album Two Rooms.

I love on the Album insert Bon Jovi writes, "Did you ever hear a song and think, oh man, I wish I had written that? That's what Levon is to me."

Working breakfast: President Trump and Prime Minister Johnson

Okay, who is doing the work? The breakfast or the principal participants?

The service people who made the breakfast and presented it and cleaned up the mess.

The breakfast didn't do anything except get eaten.

The principal participants were all just blabbity-blab blab blab.

Except it's all blabbery with severe consequence.

* They talk about dinner the night before in which they covered three subjects.
* Trump: they won't have an anchor around their ankle for trade.
* Johnson: wants cabotage for British freight ships from New York to Boston.

Goodie gumdrops a new word: cabotage: transportation of people and goods between ports within the same country.

* Trump: I was stymied. Now we're not.
* Johnson: we don't sell lamb or beef or pork pies in the US.
* Trump: we had a discussion about Putin
* Trump: allies have not pressured me to end trade war with China. Has 2nd thoughts about everything.
* Trump: I could declare national emergency on China.
* Trump: I'm not concerned about market reaction to tariffs.
* Johnson: We're in favor of dialing it down a bit.
* Johnson: There is unanimity that the NHS is off the table.
* Trump: We've close to a trade deal with Japan.



Bonus: Trade deal with Japan.

Bali kite festival 2018



Kite festivals all over the place, including the U.S., and through the years. 

Youtube [kite festival].  Really super cool ones. This video shown above is a minor example.

I like the music: Worse by Jincheng Zhang.

Mostly in Asia.

Boy, you sure miss out of a lot of fun when you're not obsessed. 

I don't understand why hang gliding wasn't invented much earlier when the essential elements existed; silk, bamboo, and obsession. 

What held eveyone back? 

Civilization? Society? Was everyone working too hard just to exist for them to spend time messing around for hours on end pursuing happiness? Life must have been hard. No wonder everyone died so young, they were all, "Get me outta here." 

Come on! 

Then one thing happened. One thing in the United States. One single kite experiment using Rogallo wing to bring down a space capsule instead of a parachute, an idea rejected, and then boom, people are flying suspended from kites all over the whole globe, and flying around like birds do. When all along the essential elements existed. 

Now all these new kinds of kites all over the place, flying bags essentially, made from new materials. Better fabric. better dyes, better string. 

How do you get such a kite? 

YouTube [kites].

AD www.prokitesusa.com/  10% off summer sale. Over 1,000+ Quality Nylon Kites Hand Chosen By Our Kite Experts. All Ages & Skill



High Line Kites. Berkeley. Now, where are you going find finer nutters than Berkley? Huh?


Casual skill



Nikon mirrorless cameras

Sony and Canon already had mirrorless cameras. Now Nikon is catching up.

As you know SLR, single lens reflex means the camera uses a mirror so that the photographer can look through the lens for their shot. When the photographer pushes the button the view goes blank as the mirror gets out of the way for the light to hit the sensor.

There must be space inside the camera for this mirror and prisms and mechanisms to move in and out.

The mirrorless cameras obviously get rid of the mirror. They're a little bit more compact.

The unfortunate thing about them is they take their own lenses.

You can still use the old SLR lenses for full sensor frame or for 3/4 sensor frame that most people have, by using an adaptor piece.

What a bummer!

These are Nikon Z series.

Everyone says "zed" instead of "zee" like we're all British now. Blah.

They get on my nerves.

My last good nerve going twang twang twang like a one-string banjo.

Zed.

Z6 is 24.5 megapixels for $1,800.00 body only.

Z7 is 46 megapixels for $3,000.00 body only

Prices vary. You can do much better buying used. People get these things, don't use them and offer them with very low usage at tremendous discounts.

Both are full frame. That means the sensors are large as 35mm film cameras, the standard of photography for ages.

We've been putting up with these 3/4 size sensors because they're so excellent and hardly anyone cares and we optimize the heck out of them anyway to make the photographs useable on the internet.

While theoretically you can shoot in raw and print a billboard from them. They are ridiculously overpromising for everyday use. Only professionals bother with the full frame cameras.

And only a wierd-o needs more than 24 million pixels. Honestly the 46 million megabit shooting fills up storage cards quickly and slows down processing tremendously. It takes longer for computers to handle them. And their contribution is not noticeable in everyday use. Who among us is printing billboards? With significant detail.

Just look at the photographs of Trump. These are all taken by professional photographers using incredibly expensive equipment in cameras and lenses and ALL of their photos look like crap. Look at [Trump] in images. That's what top of the line equipment gets you when you optimize the H-E-Double mike booms out of them.

So anything over 24 megapixels is just being silly. And stupid. And slow.

Come on!  

24 mp is more than enough for anything anyone might do. The Z6 can take a lot more photos per second than the more expensive Z7 can. For whomever might need to take a bunch of photos per second. I've never needed that. I don't shoot sports and such.

I've reached an unhealthy conclusion.

We photographer types are a weird lot.

Honestly, the photographers who upload videos are all weird. They speak with insane accents. They speak like user manuals, all technical crap that only experts understand, and when you do understand them it's all crap. A guy films his review of Nikon Z6, presumably with a Z6, but in black and white. They all talk about stuff that nobody cares about, things that have nothing to do with the camera. They're all out of their f'k'n minds. They're impossible to watch.

I can't tell you how discouraging this awareness is.

It makes me so sad.

Every group I've ever involved myself turns out to be a collection of crackpots; dog training, dog showing, obedience, confirmation, artists, gardeners, hang gliders, boy scouts, civil air patrol, pop-up constructors, and photographers. You name the group and you simultaneously name the crackpot.

:-(

This is the one person I saw talking about Nikon mirrorless who is the least like that.

Maybe there are others better than this. But I haven't seen them. I gave up on about twenty people. All men as it turns out. Come on, Women, what's your problem, aren't you weird enough?

E.U. President Donald Tusk said he will not cooperate with no-deal Brexit

Why should he? In a no-deal Brexit there is nothing there to deal with.

Sundance at Conservative Treehouse hears this differently. He's smarter than I am and he (they) hear Tusk saying the EU will work to block Britain's exit and will not accept terms. They hear hubris and arrogance.

Do you?

I always hear hubris and arrogance all the time in ordinary citizens, in comments made all over the place, European and British, so I'm a terrible judge.

Of course Tusk sounds arrogant to me. Every inflection sounds arrogant, far more so the message.

Brexit is leaving. That makes EU poorer. It makes EU less, not more, the legs that Tusk stands on while making this announcement, like Macron made his points out of the blue, show weakness, not strength. A strong statement delivered from weakness is lame. It's not just arrogance, it's lame arrogance.

This is what happens when everyone gets a participation trophy. And when economies are advanced by out-of-whack unfair policies, they honestly don't know how to play in fairness when they grew up with unfairness on their side. They've never known genuine fairness. All they know is how to do business unfairly. Because we've allowed it for so long.

Can you see Johnson messing his hair in the car before getting out? He has that tossed and tumbled boyish carefree look that's so impossible to achieve. It takes hours in front of a mirror.



Johnson will form an alliance with Trump against the EU.

They will create a bilateral trade deal with genuine reciprocity, a word that I spelled right the first time, one that works with only trade between the US and Britain. 

With EU unable to influence agreements between UK and European companies, then European countries will get tariff-free access to US market by working out of Britain, or shipping through Britain. 

While the US will ship to European countries tariff free through Britain. 

Eventually all EU corporations who want trade with North America will start operations in the UK. Or end the Marshall plan finally and fully by dropping its one-way tariffs. 

What we are seeing is the world being forced into genuine free trade. 

What we are seeing is growth pains. 

Saturday, August 24, 2019

Bilateral between President Emmanuel Macron and President Donald Trump

Macron ambushed Trump with an unplanned (for Trump) meeting at Trump's hotel, set up in advance for Macron's domestic audience.

Macron isn't doing very well domestically so he feels he must propound French values, as he reads them, but do that in broken English and it doesn't work.

Trump tolerated the meeting while looking aside as if saying without words, "I'm having a hard time being diplomatic with this little dick."

We see that as the two are sitting there.

It was a power move by Macron that Trump didn't mess up for him, nevertheless Macron looks very small by doing it.

Seems that way to me.

Maybe to various French audiences Macron looks fairly big. I don't know.

* French accent *

We will discuss Libya, Syria, Ukraine, North Korea and Iran ...

Trump looks away.

... A lot of these crises we need a strong coordination and partners at the table. And especially on Iran we have to fix the situation ...

Trump looks away from the table. (Is that a f'k'n raccoon I just saw. Walking by. With a parasol? And a mixed cocktail? Oh. Macron.)

... and we had a lot of trouble and we have to work very hard because I see we share the same objective.

First being sure that Iran doesn't get access to nuclear weapons. And second ...

Trump looks away from the table.

...  stability of the region.

We will discuss about the economic global situation, how to decrease tensions and fix the situation in terms of trade because I think if we manage to fix the situation seven of us, we fix a grea part of the world and this is very important part of our discussion as well, and obviously how to find new ways to relaunch our economic (situation).

When I look at Europe especially we need some new tools to relaunch our economy. We decided ... probably decide to have new tax cuts, which is on of the ways to relaunch. We have strong coordination with (something).

And third obviously we will discuss a lot of things at the G7; gender equality, digital and how to manage this new world with common initiative together. And, obviously climate and bio (something) and a lot of these hot topics. And with this (agenda) ...

Trump looks away from the table. (Is that a lemur wearing a tutu? Dancing and waving a conductors baton?)

... we know the impact we can have on climate on the various agenda.

Trump looks away from the table (Is that a poodle wearing boots I just saw. With a parakeet on its back? Reading a little book?)

But our cooperation (something) our investors will (something). And I think, during the sessions, we will actually see in order to have some solutions to these problems and implementation of this (new set of solutions) and all these climate protections for the global agenda.


Adidas in Russia


It's the three stripes. * Russian voice * Loving it.





There are a lot of photos of them squatting like this when there is no chair. It's like making your legs into a chair.

If I tried this, I'd tip over. If it worked then my legs would lock into that and I wouldn't be able to get up. It's a lose/lose situation with me.

China and Christmas

* kddomingue says:
I think our President is spot on in regards to China. Too many people who are screaming about how the tariffs will affect Christmas are regrettably shortsighted. The unequal trade has got to stop. A little pain now for great gains in the long run.

   ** yadent says:
Ya, how can one really celebrate Christmas without commerce interactions...

      *** wendy forward says:
Gotta have that cheap shiny Chinese crap, it’s not Christmas without it.

         **** Sofa King says:
“Mommy, Mommy, what’s kwismas about???”

“Cheap Chinese crap, my dear…”