Once a legitimate blog. Now just a collection of memes 'n menz.
…and I was overcome with such emotion. I consider myself so very lucky to have called San Francisco home for nearly two decades. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times but despite all that it was time I wouldn’t trade for the world.
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Based on some recent encounters with health care professionals, I have to agree with wholeheartedly.
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I don’t like the idea of having to take my laundry outside to get it into the wash on the top plan. I’d have put a door directly from inside the house, closed off the one to the carport, and ditched that room’s “storage” designation. I also would’ve made it a double carport with storage on the outside edge that runs the length of the carport.
I understand the design philosophy behind the lower plan, but it seems that entry hallway is a tremendous waste of space.
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Yeah, at the time of its manufacture, this was Sony’s top-of-the-line high-end player, and even now it’s legendary and highly sought after by audiophiles and collectors—and even I would love to own one—but not at even a quarter of that asking price. Ho one in their right mind is going to pay that amount, even if it has the optional wood side panels and comes with the original box.
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Not a Plant, Not a Sheep. It’s a Photosynthesizing Slug!
But it’s dressed like a plant… and powers itself like one, too.
Meet the Leaf Sheep (Costasiella kuroshimae) — one of the smallest and strangest marvels of the sea.
Barely the size of a grain of rice, this creature has black ear-like tentacles, bead-black eyes, and a back covered in tiny green “leaves.”
Those aren’t leaves at all — they’re cerata, filled with stolen chloroplasts from the algae it eats.
Through a process called kleptoplasty, the Leaf Sheep turns sunlight into energy, making it one of the few animals on Earth to photosynthesize.
[h/t to Rick]
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In those internal autobiographies, we all tell ourselves that we’re one of the good ones, that our presence on this planet is yielding something beautiful, something that will leave this place better than when we arrived. In those stories, we are the heroes, the helpers, the saviors, or at the very least, we’re decent people just doing our best.
That self-reverential story has a way of bleeding over into the place we call home, the nation we claim as our own. There is a poisonous exceptionalism that most of us were born into; a curated mythology inherited by our parents, our politicians, our pastors that convinced us that as a collective, we were good or godly.
Some of us live our entire lives believing we’re better than we are, that our nation is better than it is, until we are faced with irrefutable evidence to the contrary. Suddenly, we realize that we might be the villains, the terrorists, the monsters, the accomplices.
We all grew up in this country learning of the horrors of the Holocaust, reading stories of Hitler’s unthinkable brutality against the Jewish people. We stared in disbelief at the images of walking corpses, emancipated from the concentration camps at the very precipice of death. We nearly vomited seeing jittery black and white newsreels of naked, indistinguishable human beings, stacked like cord wood. We read of an unrelenting barbarism against an entire group of human beings, whose only crime was existing in their skin.
And when faced with this sprawling inhumanity that defied our ability to hold it all, invariably we all thought about the German people, and we all asked ourselves, “What kind of human beings would allow this?”
We wondered what kind of morally broken people could stand by and watch generations of mothers, fathers, and children eradicated from existence, their communities razed to rubble, their cultures erased, their very humanity discarded.
From the safety of hindsight and the buffers of our own false stories, we’ve interrogated ordinary Germans from eighty years ago, lamenting their silence and inaction in the face of such horrors; condemning them as, at best, gutless cowards, and at worst, willing collaborators.
With stratospheric arrogance, we’ve told ourselves that we’d never have consented to such evil, that we’d have pushed back against it, that the abject terror unleashed on the Jewish people would never have happened on our watch.
And yet, there is Gaza.
Day after day, she testifies against us, documenting our indifference, recording our apathy, inventorying our inaction. She lifts our hands in front of us and shows us that her blood is all over them. She burns up the fictions of our goodness. She reminds us how easy it is for a nation to abandon its humanity, silence by silence, justification by justification, averted eye by averted eye.
Gaza is indicting the American people, and Iran and Lebanon are joining her. They are holding a mirror up to us as a nation, revealing exactly who we are— the truth about what we believe, about what we will abide, and what we will not stand for— and we should be ashamed and driven to our knees in repentance.
It would be damning enough to declare that many Americans now are as reprehensible as many Germans in the 1940s, but that wouldn’t be accurate; we are far worse.
We have access to America’s and Israel’s every vile deed in the palm of our hands. Donald Trump’s and Benjamin Netanyahu’s sociopathy floods our timelines. With the swipe of a finger, we can traverse thousands of miles and see the annihilation of a people in real-time. Unlike the German people in the shadow of Hitler, we cannot even attempt to plead ignorance. Through tiny screens that we are rarely more than inches from, we are 24-7 bystanders to the slaughter of children, to the bombing of hospitals, to the systematic extermination of the Palestinian people. We know exactly where the money is going, the politicians whose empires have been funded by terrorism, and the scale of the mass murders our tax dollars are funding.
And we are culpable for all that we allow or refuse to oppose.
One day, eighty years from now, generations of children all over the world will ask what kind of people would have allowed the genocide in Gaza to happen.
And it should break our hearts and boil our blood to know that unless we alter our course immediately and fiercely, we will be that kind.
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From thearchmagazine:
Behind a quiet wall in Scottsdale, a different kind of desert residence begins.
From the street, it feels protective and sculptural, board-formed concrete, corten steel, black metal, sand-toned plaster, and desert stone shaped into a low industrial silhouette. But inside, the house softens into stillness: warm oak, limewashed textures, black reflective water, filtered courtyard light, and Japandi interiors guided by Wabi-Sabi calm.
This is a private residence designed around contrast, raw exterior, silent interior; urban edge, desert retreat; architectural strength, human warmth. Every frame is built for atmosphere: the corten entry portal, the courtyard pool, the rooftop terrace at sunset, and the living spaces that open quietly toward the Sonoran landscape.
A modern home for slow mornings, cinematic evenings, and refined desert living.
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Back in April I picked up this beauty off eBay. The seller indicated it was “fully functional,” but like most vintage electronics on eBay the description was…shall we say, optimistic.
Immediately after unpacking and powering it up I noticed it had severe drawer problems. Yes, it worked, so I guess that would qualify as “functional,” but fully? It definitely struggled with opening and closing so I wouldn’t have decribed it that way. As I’m sure I’ve documented before, I’ve seen enough CD deck repairs on YouTube to immediately recognize a stretched drawer belt when I saw one. I put in an order for a replacement with West Coast Belts and not-so-patiently awaited its arrival.
Replacing the belt after I received it wasn’t all that difficult, even though the belt and pulleys were on the bottom of the CD mechanism itself. Thankfully the original belt hadn’t yet turned to black goo and was easy to swap. The belt I received wasn’t a 1:1 copy of the original; it seemed to have a bit smaller diameter and it was about half the thickness. Still, by this point I had it all torn apart and I wasn’t going to put everything back together without first giving the new belt a shot.
There was an improvement from the old sagging belt, but not much. Using a belt that’s too small is just as bad as using one that’s too big. I emailed the company and pointed out the size discrepancy. They said they’d send out a different one.
Another week passed and the new belt arrived. This one seemed to be the proper diameter, but the thickness was still thinner than the original. “Better than nothing,” I said as I swapped it out. The drawer did work more smoothly now, but it still felt off.
I did one more search on the internet and found a another belt supplier in Germany. They didn’t advertise a belt for my particular model, but rather one for the unit directly above mine. These two decks use the exact same hardware; it’s just this higher end unit just had a few more bells and whistles in its circuitry. So I ordered it.
While waiting for its arrival, I thought I’d try a tech tip gleaned from all those videos: boil the old belt in water for about 5 minutes to rejuvenate the rubber and shrink it back to its original size. I did that, and wouldn’t you know, after putting that one back in the machine, the drawer worked like buttah.
All was good until a few days ago when the drawer started lagging again when opening (or closing, I don’t honestly remember; it was annoying in any case). So much for my quick fix. The German belt had arrived a couple weeks earlier, but since everything was working I didn’t want to tear into the machine yet again, so I put the belt away for future use if my fix didn’t hold—and obviously it hadn’t.
At this point I really didn’t want to deal with this belt issue anymore, so I hauled out my “new” deck from a few years ago and put it in the system. What I’d forgotten about this new Yamaha is that something had changed in their implementation of the optical digital connection. Whereas the old Yamaha with the belt issues could dub optically to my MiniDisc deck and create tracks correctly, this new deck absolutely refused. The MiniDisc deck didn’t detect any track breaks so it recorded a CD as one continuous track that needed to be broken up afterwards. This was always a pain in the ass, so I decided to play around with belts again.
I mean, I had nothing much planned today and nothing else really to do, so I disconnected the player, opened it up and for some reason stupid reason instead of installing the new German belt, reinstalled the older, new, exchanged one. Everything seemed to work fine, so I buttoned everything up and put it back in my system.
It wasn’t five minutes before I realized things still weren’t right. Did I miss something when I was reassembling it? Did I over-tighten a screw somewhere?The drawer started shuddering (it’s the only way to describe it) when it opened. This hadn’t happened when it was installed before, but a shuddering tray is a definite sign of a belt being too tight.
Fuck me.
I pulled it out of the system, popped the cover, and removed the mechanism again. This time I installed the new German belt and it’s been working fine all afternoon. That belt is still a bit thinner than the original, but the diameter is spot on and the shuddering is gone.
So what did I learn? Like in many things in life, sometimes girth is more important than thickness.
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From Mock Paper Scissors:
Told ya he rushed it and the plane doesn’t have all the defense bells and whistles it is supposed to have, and now that we are in a shooting war with Iran (AGAIN!), he cannot fly this thing home, hence another older AF-1 is going to pick him up. So we get to pay for the fuel X2.
The Affordability Prznint.
Anyway, here’s the dopey liar try to gild the turd:
To honor our brave men and women of the Military, we are
sending the brand new, and truly spectacular, Air Force One to
Mildenhall Air Force Base, in the United Kingdom, to give them a
chance to tour the Aircraft – Everybody is so excited, and we
thought that they should be the first. For old time’s sake, we’ll be
taking the former Air Force One, from Turkey to Mildenhall, a
short trip that is totally worth doing in order to give our Great
Military Heroes a chance to appreciate our beautiful new addition
to the Air Force Fleet! President DONALD J. TRUMP
Yeah, I’m sure that they will be thrilled to tour this thing.
OK, Congress: time to make sure he knows that this bird is not his personal toy, and if he wants to keep it, he has to pay for this $400M bribe + upgrades himself, out of his own pocket. I defy the Republicans to try to make it some sort of tribute to the Grifter-in-Chief.
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Ray Lynch – Deep Breakfast (1986)
Sometime in 1987 or thereabouts, on one our many little tribe’s outings via ferry from SF to Sausalito (being newly-relocated desert rats we enjoyed any time on the water we could), I first heard this album. It was playing in one of the many New Age souvenir/crystal shops that dotted the main drag at the time and I was immediately enchanted. Fortunately I didn’t have to go far to get a copy, as they had an extensive in-store CD selection for sale.
Playing this always envokes the emotion of that afternoon if even the now sadly degraded memories of what actually expired outside that shop are fleeting.
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