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THIS!

From I Should Be Laughing:

_____ says that he wants his name on coronavirus relief checks going out to every American as part of the $2 trillion stimulus package intended to boost the economy even though a civil servant—the disbursing officer for the payment center—would normally sign federal checks.

Why?

Well, while signing the bill into law in the Oval Office last week—with only Republicans on hand, mind you—IMPOTUS was said to be in awe at the price tag attached to the legislation:

“I never signed anything with a T on it.”

Trump, who has faced criticism recently for his bumbling of the pandemic, and his view that it’ll be over soon, predicted a ‘rebound like we have never seen before’ by the end of the year.

The end of the year? But you said Easter! You said when the weather got warmer. You said it was no big deal.

I don’t want your name on a fucking check, I want your name at the bottom of a letter that says:

“I resign.”

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Weekend Update

We made our usual Sunday run to Target today. We’ve been getting four dinners a week from HelloFresh, but let’s face it, we still need lunch and incidentals.

The store was abysmal, although not as picked over as it seemed a week ago. Still no paper products, but that was expected. We’re still in good shape as far as toilet paper is concerned, and I was able to order paper towels off Amazon (even if they’re not arriving until week after next) so there’s that. We were able to get everything else on the list.

The one thing that stood out, however, was the fact that no one (except Ben and I) seemed to be observing the six-foot rule. Idiots, the lot of ’em.

We did some purging around the house yesterday, making a run to our meager storage unit in the process.  I wanted to find the bungee cords I knew were in a box as well as retrieve a tub of my dad’s architectural drafting paraphernalia that my sister had given me shortly after his passing. It had been my intent all these years to select a few of the pieces and make a shadow box to honor his legacy.

It took seven years, but after several hours’ work today, that intent finally became reality.


On another front, I finally got the door locks on Rabbit to automatically lock when driving away. This was a standard setting on Anderson, and I noticed it wasn’t happening with Rabbit, so I had to dig into the Owner’s Manual to find out where that setting was hiding. I also discovered this morning that our local FM NPR station (KJZZ) also transmits on two separate channels in HD. One’s for news only, and one’s for all-day jazz, and I can easily switch between the two. This makes me happy since there is a dearth of decent radio in Phoenix.

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Speaking of Night Skies…

Click to Embiggen

I still have no idea how people are creating the fantastic night sky photos you see online using only their iPhones. I’m lucky if I get 2-3 shots that are in focus, much less showing the galactic background.

(I know I need totally dark skies to see that galactic background, but even knowing that my pictures for the msot part are lousy.)

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Uranus is Leaking

From NASA Goddard:

Uranus is (very, very slowly) losing “weight.” Our 7th planet’s tiny mass loss was known only to Voyager 2 — until Goddard scientists Gina DiBraccio and Dan Gershman did a double-take on the satellite’s data, more than 30 years later.

Uranus’ twisted magnetic field allows tiny amounts of the planet’s atmosphere to leak out into space, potentially taking billions of years for significant loss to occur. This behavior has been observed at other planets, like Venus, Earth and Jupiter, but never at distant Uranus until now.

How much of an effect has this had on Uranus? The data from Voyager 2 is the one time Uranus has gotten on the scale, so to speak, so that’s a hard question to answer. But the remaining mystery is part of the draw. “It’s why I love planetary science,” DiBraccio said. “You’re always going somewhere you don’t really know.” Image: Voyager 2 took this image as it approached the planet Uranus on Jan. 14, 1986. The planet’s hazy bluish color is due to the methane in its atmosphere, which absorbs red wavelengths of light. 

Photo Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

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GPOY

I realized it’s been three weeks since Rabbit arrived and I hadn’t even taken a single gratuitous well-photoshopped selfie in the new ride!

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I Absolutely Believe He Would

The French of the late 1700s absolutely had the right idea of how to deal with a government that no longer had their interests at heart. I want nothing more than to see this bastard dragged from the White House and either strung up on a tree on its front lawn or to have his head forcibly removed from his body. But even more than that, I want to see him and his equally reprehensible spawn stripped of all their assets and thrown into 7×9 cells for the rest of their goddamned lives.

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Inside a Globular Cluster

Since I was a nerdy 12-year old just venturing into amateur astronomy (and having just read Isaac Asimov’s Nightfall—great short story, horrible movie) I’ve wondered what the night sky of a planet inside a globular cluster would look like. Glad to have found this picture, as it seems I wasn’t the only one who’d been wondering.

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Time Slows Down

Am I the only one who feels like the last two weeks—and this week in particular—have been the longest year in memory? I think I’ve finally figured out why, and it’s not just the stress.

Our daily routines, our “loops” or “narratives” in Westworld parlance, have been disrupted. We are so used to going through life primarily on autopilot, that these past couple weeks have forced us to adopt new routines. This causes our perception of the passage of time to slow since we now have to examine and process pretty much every. single. thing that we come across.

It will be interesting to see if our perception returns to “normal” the longer we’re all forced into these new routines.