An email from The Google regarding a merchant replying to a review that I left two years ago (pre-ChatGPT): Here’s the full text of the reply: Thank you for taking the time to leave us a 5-star review for Calaveras Cantina in Jupiter. We are delighted to hear that you enjoye … | Continue reading
How did Joe Biden sound today? I didn’t watch the State of the Union address, but I have skimmed the transcript. I think it is fair to say that Joe Biden is the most transformative president in U.S. history because a country is defined by its residents and Joe Biden has done more … | Continue reading
A well-done Audible recorded book and, probably, a good book in print/Kindle form: Cook County ICU. A few things that I learned from it… The modern insurance/Medicare/Medicaid system requires that hospitals seeking to get revenue give each patient a concrete diagnosis prior to … | Continue reading
Episode #571 of how being a homeowner makes a person stupid and boring… Our area of Florida is plagued with moderately hard tap water that is packed with dissolved solids. There are professional window washing services that charge about $700 to come over with a hose-fed flow-thr … | Continue reading
Today is Super Tuesday, an important milepost in what is shaping up to be a fight among two guys in Memory Care (and one gal for whom Americans don’t seem to share my own enthusiasm (and even I have been put off by Nikki Haley’s seeming lack of coherent philosophy)). A bit of no … | Continue reading
From a Bloomingdale’s department store, February 19. 2024 (entering Year 5 of coronapanic): Temporarily out of service. We’re sorry, this water fountain is not in use, due to enhanced safety measures in place to protect our customers and colleagues! (Who will protect the … | Continue reading
When a World War I-style trench warfare stalemate develops, the real victims are those who never go anywhere near the trenches and who, in fact, are able to go to mostly peaceful Germany and marry the German taxpayer. Women & girls in Ukraine have been disproportionately impact … | Continue reading
I enjoyed the special effects in the Dune 2021 movie, but the plot seemed overly serious and challenging to follow. For the strike-delayed second part, I’m hoping that Godzilla will join the mix. Who agrees with me that Godzilla v. a sandworm would spice things up? (Side note: I … | Continue reading
We had a few seconds of power loss the other day. Everything in the house, including a Windows machine using NTFS, came back to life without any issues. A Synology DS720+, however, became a useless brick, claiming to have suffered unrecoverable file system damage while the underl … | Continue reading
Some photos from a recent Florida Panthers v. Washington Capitals NHL game: (My neighbor loves hockey and has season tickets. Bizarrely, the Florida-based team is one of the best in the NHL. They lost the Stanley Cup last year to the cold weather experts in the Las Vegas … | Continue reading
The JetBlue management team, based in enriched-by-diversity New York City: The JetBlue home page: | Continue reading
The Twitterverse reported that Gemini was refusing to create images of whites, but happy to create images of Blacks: I tested this theory after some frantic code rehab had been done to reduce the obviousness of the bias, but before the ability to show humans had been pulled alto … | Continue reading
“Migrant suspect in Laken Riley murder accused of ‘seriously disfiguring’ nursing student as affidavit reveals grim details in case” (New York Post): The Venezuelan migrant charged with murdering Laken Riley allegedly beat her so brutally with an unidentified object that he dis … | Continue reading
Willis Haviland Carrier at work in 1902, according to Gemini: | Continue reading
I went to Costco to set up my mom’s new life as a Floridian. As part of the sales process, Costco customers are informed that some of the profits from the towels for sale flow into the pockets of people who identify as “women”. The “Women Owned” logo certifying that this is where … | Continue reading
Fritz Haber, the historical figure who did more than anyone else to enable human population to expand to 8 billion: Note the baldness. What does Gemini think that life in a German lab looked like circa 1909 when the Haber process was being developed? How about the 1,600 Naz … | Continue reading
Apparently, a mostly peaceful conflict between two groups within Eritrea has entitled people from both sides of the conflict to claim asylum in Europe and the U.S. This has resulted in the mostly peaceful conflict continuing in The Hague and in, for example, North Carolina. “Char … | Continue reading
History according to Google’s Gemini: ChatGPT 4, in response to the same prompt: ChatGPT, in response to “Create a mural of five aircraft designers working together in 1905”: Back to Gemini, this time regarding elderly surgeons: I give the system credit for using one … | Continue reading
A pizza shop in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida: Note the solution to the inflation problem that the government tells us is entirely in our minds: tape over all of the prices and tell the customer what it’s going to cost only after he/she/ze/they orders. | Continue reading
Other than gender studies graduates who are about to have all of their student loans transferred onto the backs of the working class, divorced women are the most reliable Democrat voters in the U.S. What’s the latest harvest of material from Democrat-controlled media on the mirac … | Continue reading
For folks from the Northeast and California who are afraid to move to Florida because of a perceived lack of righteousness, the local Palm Beach County library branch’s displays for Black History Month… First, in the kids’ area: It turns out that identifying as “female … | Continue reading
From the creative geniuses at Stern, a James Bond Premium machine, NIB: A harmless diversion? Only if you think that cancer, birth defects, and “reproductive harm” are harmless! The warning to Californians about what might happen to them if they are brave enough to unbox this … | Continue reading
The Biden administration recently extended the “Temporary Protected Status” (i.e., “permanent”) for migrants from El Salvador. Starting in 2001 (State Department), Salvadorans have had an automatic right to stay in the U.S. because El Salvador is too dangerous for human habitatio … | Continue reading
“Ukraine says it has sunk another warship, disabling a third of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet” (CNN): Ukraine claims it has now disabled a third of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet after its military intelligence said it sank another Russian warship in a sea drone attack off the coast of Cr … | Continue reading
“Egypt is building a new walled buffer zone more than 2 miles wide on Gaza border, satellite images show” (CNN): Egypt is building a massive miles-wide buffer zone and wall along its border with southern Gaza, new satellite images show, as fears grow over Israel’s planned groun … | Continue reading
A Ukrainian friend shared “Russia has recruited as many as 15,000 Nepalis to fight its war. Many returned traumatized. Some never came back” (CNN): He is one of as many as 15,000 Nepali men to have joined the Russian military, multiple sources have told CNN, after the Russian g … | Continue reading
Happy Valentine’s Day! If we intersect love and romance with the regular content of this blog… we get “Rachel Dolezal Is An OnlyFans Model & Teaching At A School After Pretending To Be Black To Run NAACP Chapter” (Outkick): Former disgraced NAACP leader Rachel Dolezal, who pret … | Continue reading
The mostly corruption-free folks at FIFA say that seven World Cup 2026 matches will be played in Miami (source): How will this work given that the World Cup is set for JULY? All the games will be at night? They’ll accept a 70 percent player attribution rate due to heat stroke? … | Continue reading
“Biden administration to restore $235m in US aid to Palestinians” (BBC, 2021): US President Joe Biden’s administration plans to provide $235m (£171m) of aid to Palestinians, restoring part of the assistance cut by Donald Trump. “UNRWA loses funding after charges that some emp … | Continue reading
Today is the Super Bowl. On one side we have junk vaccine profiteer Travis Kelce, paid a reported $20 million to promote Pfizer COVID-19 vaccines (recently shown to have zero effect on death rate among those who’ve previous made it through a SARS-CoV-2 infection; see “Effectivene … | Continue reading
We got a free Apple Fitness+ subscription with our nearly $40,000/year family health insurance policy (the cheapest that we could find for a small LLC that covers Cleveland Clinic, Mayo, and U. Miami; see Shopping for health insurance on healthcare.gov). We can celebrate Black H … | Continue reading
The New York Times has a story on how the coronapanic shutdowns set American K-12 students back (which is the same as killing them, by COVID standards, since people with less education tend to live shorter lives and any shortening of a life can be considered a “COVID death”). Of … | Continue reading
January 30, 2024 memo from my mom’s retirement community “wellness coordinator”: I am sorry to report that we are seeing an increase in the number of Covid cases here at [the home for elderly Democrats in Bethesda, Maryland]. Over the last 3 days we have 11 new cases.I ask that … | Continue reading
For those of us whose hands and brains are accustomed to the Microsoft Sculpt ergonomic keyboard, which was discontinued in 2023, it looks as though there is hope. Microsoft has apparently made a deal with Incase, an established computer accessory company, to revive the Microsoft … | Continue reading
January 28, 2024, front page of the New York Times: And the link to the full story if you feel that you need to know more. An window into what’s on the minds of progressives! (But how is it consistent with their love for the Islamic Resistance Movement (“Hamas”) and Palestini … | Continue reading
An Ordinary Man: The Surprising Life and Historic Presidency of Gerald R. Ford covers a few mostly forgotten foreign policy challenges that Gerald Ford faced. The Fall of Saigon in April 1975 was depressing, but people didn’t blame Ford for it. One that lifted his reputation wa … | Continue reading
We have two Bertazzoni-brand wall ovens. One is a microwave that purportedly also works as a thermal oven, but is wildly inaccurate for temperature. The other is a big convection oven that is even worse for temperature control (if you set 350 you might get 310 or 400). I’m tryin … | Continue reading
An Ordinary Man: The Surprising Life and Historic Presidency of Gerald R. Ford reminds us of the 1976 panic regarding a respiratory virus: a strain of influenza called “swine flu”. This was the genesis of the modern muscular CDC. Congress appropriated $500 billion in pre-Carter/p … | Continue reading
Today is the day, supposedly, for Apple to begin delivering its $3500-4150 version of the $500 Meta Quest 3. Have any of you ordered one? Tried one? Figured out what could be done with a device that becomes a 1 lb. stone around your head after two hours of battery are exhausted? … | Continue reading
A tweet from Vivek: Here’s an idea to bridge the divide on abortion: codify sexual responsibility for men into the law. If a woman carries a child to term, she can automatically make the man fully $$ responsible both for herself and for the child, if confirmed by paternity test … | Continue reading
A tweet from Barbara Lee, California Democrat who is running for U.S. Senate: 52 years ago, Shirley Chisholm announced her campaign for president—becoming the first person of color & Democratic woman to run for the office. At the time, as a Black single mom on welfare, I didn’ … | Continue reading
Back in October 2022, we ordered a $13,249 Sub-Zero refrigerator to replace a 42-inch-wide KitchenAid from 2003. The KitchenAid was a $500 landlord special wrapped in $3,000 (pre-Biden dollars) of cabinetry. It looked beautiful with panels that match our cabinets. Unfortunately, … | Continue reading
“[Lockdown and forced vaccination mayor of Boston Michelle] Wu acknowledges ‘pain’ of state plan to use Roxbury rec. center as overflow shelter site” (Boston.com): Boston Mayor Michelle Wu responded to Gov. Maura Healey’s potential plan to use the Melnea A. Cass Recreational Co … | Continue reading
An Ordinary Man: The Surprising Life and Historic Presidency of Gerald R. Ford describes a vigorous debate about whether approximately 50,000 Vietnamese refugees should be admitted to the U.S. This was a non-representative group containing the professional and managerial elite of … | Continue reading
I recently listened to an “Audible Original” production of David Copperfield. My reivew: If you love the ideas of two young English gentlemen getting naked together, massaging each other, and taking a shared bath, this is the novel for you. I downloaded the text from Project Gu … | Continue reading
“Somerville City Council calls for ceasefire in Gaza” (Boston Herald): The Somerville City Council is requesting President Biden to call for a ceasefire in Gaza but stopped short of endorsing a measure calling for the dismantling of Hamas and the administration of Israeli Prime … | Continue reading
I’m listening to what is supposedly one of the best books of 2023: An Ordinary Man: The Surprising Life and Historic Presidency of Gerald R. Ford. It’s a good reminder of a lot of history 1940-1980. The book devotes a fair amount of space to Ford’s career-ending decision to pard … | Continue reading
“Trump slammed with $83M verdict for repeatedly defaming advice columnist E. Jean Carroll” (New York Post): The jury verdict was broken down into $65 million meant to punish Trump, $11 million to help Carroll rebuild her reputation and another $7.3 million to compensate her for h … | Continue reading