We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
Painting is a copy of a now-lost Leonardo painting
Leda and the Swan
A sudden blow: the great wings beating still Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill, He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.
How can those terrified vague fingers push The feathered glory from her loosening thighs? And how can body, laid in that white rush, But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?
A shudder in the loins engenders there The broken wall, the burning roof and tower And Agamemnon dead.
Being so caught up, So mastered by the brute blood of the air, Did she put on his knowledge with his power Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?
Hello everybody. If the news seems pretty grim these days, don't worry too much about it. The government will fix everything. They're peculiarly suited to coming up with the answers to today's problems. After all, the surgeon who leaves a sponge, retractors, and his watch inside a patient knows where to look when they open the poor sod back up. Been there, done that.
In many cases, the buyer isn’t aware of Zelle, but they do a little googling to read up on it. They discover it’s a digital payments service that’s backed by their bank, which makes them feel more comfortable. Zelle is also found in some banks’ mobile applications themselves, which adds to that sense of trust. The buyer, now feeling that Zelle is a legit service, then transfers the money, assuming their bank will step in to help if anything goes wrong. After all, they’re sending money directly to another bank account – so surely the seller knows they could be tracked down and caught if they attempt fraud?! Unfortunately, that’s not proving to be the case.
Doesn't anyone take responsibility for their own actions anymore? That was a rhetorical question.
[W]hen defendants caused the embedded Tweets to appear on their websites, their actions violated plaintiff’s exclusive display right; the fact that the image was hosted on a server owned and operated by an unrelated third party (Twitter) does not shield them from this result.
The Internet is a woman riding the subway wearing a bustier and a thong while complaining that everyone is looking at her.
“Facebook informs us insufficiently about gathering information about us, the kind of data it collects, what it does with that data and how long it stores it,” the court said. “It also does not gain our consent to collect and store all this information.” Facebook has also been ordered to delete all data it had gathered illegally on Belgian citizens, including people who were not users of the social network.
A smart politician would tweak stalking laws in the US to include covertly tracking people across the Internet without their express written consent, with a one-button opt-opt that erases every bit of your data at any time from any web service. I don't know any smart politicians, and don't expect to meet one anytime soon.
Driverless cars are widely believed to be the silver bullet that will make ride-hailing profitable by eliminating the main cost: wages paid to human drivers. In the fourth quarter of 2017, Uber paid about $8 billion to drivers in earnings and bonuses, or about 72% of its gross revenue for the quarter. Uber lost $4.5 billion last year on $37 billion in gross revenue.
I hate to break it to you poindexters, but the Uber driver's only real job is to supply the car you ride in. Oh, and to clean the puke out of the back seat every third passenger. Getting rid of the driver is a sideways move.
College career centers around the country stress to their students the importance of gaining internship experience to apply the knowledge gained in the classroom in a real-world setting, develop and enhance professional skills, and forge relationships with industry professionals, believing that internship experiences will lead to better career outcomes. However, while research findings by NACE indicate a positive correlation between paid internships and job offers received before graduation, unpaid internships were found to have little or no impact on this measure of short-term success.
When I was young I learned about the Triangle Trade in history class. Sugar, tobacco, and cotton to England, textiles and rum to Africa, and unpaid interns to the Americas. I could have sworn they outlawed that sort of thing.
Surrounding the building, located in Cupertino, California, are 45-foot tall curved panels of safety glass. Inside are work spaces, dubbed “pods,” also made with a lot of glass. Apple staff are often glued to the iPhones they helped popularize. That’s resulted in repeated cases of distracted employees walking into the panes, according to people familiar with the incidents. Some staff started to stick Post-It notes on the glass doors to mark their presence. However, the notes were removed because they detracted from the building’s design, the people said. They asked not to be identified discussing anything related to Apple.
When I was young the kids who walked into walls a lot had their own classes, which were held outdoors quite often. They had their own bus, too. Now they have their own office building, which is nice.
A few of these search engines, including DuckDuckGo and StartPage began as normal search engines with no privacy enhancements. However, after they realized the massive risk associated with storing so much data, they decided to take a different approach.
I use Femgoplaces.com. It's a pretty cool search engine, you probably haven't heard of it. You type in your search terms, and they dispatch a girl to drive to a part of town she's not familiar with. When she gets there, she rolls down the window and asks the first person shes sees for the information she wants.
The first will use hydrogen to clean up existing diesel engines, increasing their fuel efficiency by a third and eliminating over half their air pollution, with an average nine-month payback, the company says. That’s a potentially enormous market with plenty of existing demand, which HyTech hopes will capitalize its second product, a retrofit that will transform any internal combustion vehicle into a zero-emissions vehicle (ZEV) by enabling it to run on pure hydrogen. That will primarily be targeted at large fleets. And that will tee up the third product — the one Johnson’s had his eye on from the beginning, the one that could revolutionize and decentralize the energy system — a stationary energy-storage product meant to compete with, and eventually outcompete, big batteries like Tesla’s Powerwall.
Yes, but will they shoot a tractor trailer into space? That's the true measure of technical innovation nowadays.
“Utah’s economic and political success is a model for our nation,” Romney said in a written announcement distributed Friday morning. “I am ready to fight for this great state and advocate for solutions that improve the lives of Utahns.” In his announcement, and in a video, Romney touted his leadership of the 2002 Olympic Games in Salt Lake City, his tenure as Massachusetts governor, his degree from Brigham Young University and his 24 grandchildren.
If I recall correctly, Romney really cornered the Mormon vote in Massachusetts. Well, he drove his wife to the polls. Same thing. Say, are there any Mormons in Utah?
A New Zealand company is on the cusp of granting its employees the ultimate in work-life balance: four days work for five days pay. Perpetual Guardian, a trustee company, has become the first major business in the country to embark on a creating a workplace “fit for purpose for the 21st century”. New Zealanders work an average of 1,752 hours a year, making them close to average compared with their OECD peers.
When I read the headline, I assumed all the employees joined a New York City longshoreman's union, and one of their brothers was a union delegate.
“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”
From Frank Herbert's Dune, The Litany Against Fear
One more shooting. One more chance for the Progressives to screech and whine about gun control. I'm really tired of this cycle. Progressives complain about the cycle, too, because they want action, and they want it now. In 3 weeks they'll be bored again, or outraged about something new such as the fact that Trump doesn't have a dog and doesn't seem to care for them. Progressive try to make it seem like those of us who actually support freedom and the Constitution are uncaring, because we don't do something other than the one thing they deride - "Thoughts and Prayers". I've noticed some are taking a new tack. Not necessarily better. Like every other event, they trot out the same emotions, same flawed statistics, bizarre comparisons to nations without cultures remotely similar to ours, and then one or two tricks. Progressives are not old dogs. They are young dogs and haven't learned that new tricks aren't necessarily smarter or better.
I wrote about mass shootings, and school shootings in particular, slightly over 5 years ago. Have my views changed since then, and the presumed thousands of mass shootings that Progressives point out? No. Not in the least. Does the fact this involved children change my views? Nope. Am I cold and heartless? No. I'm just rational. Gun control won't stop this. People who want to kill will kill and they will use whatever method they can. The Progressive argument is "with guns, you can kill MORE" and that's just not proven to be true. It's an assumption based on incomplete data sets. What is the real issue that needs to be discussed after a shooting and the outrage is building?
I'm sorry, I was being pretending to be pleasant. As you know, I'm no good at it. Let's start over: Keerist, what drivel. But it's unexceptional drivel. No need to comment on how trite and meaningless the message is. Let's look at the spelling. I guarantee it was written, and shared quite a bit on social media, by college graduates. "You body"? Really? However, I'd like to point out that the word isn't misspelled. It's not a typo, either. The person who wrote it, and apparently a lot of people who read it, are blind to the fact that it's the wrong word. They have a condition I hereby christen Facebook Aphasia. They no longer have the mental ability to tell one word from another. It's not that they don't have the innate intellectual horsepower to learn the difference between you and your and you're. After all, they probably learned Klingon for their cosplay wedding ceremony. They're broken, not dumb.
I think, technically, I'm talking about semantic anomia, but I'm just a blowhard on the Internet, so Facebook Aphasia is good enough for me.
Semantic anomia is a disorder in which the meaning of words becomes lost. In patients with semantic anomia, a naming deficit is accompanied by a recognition deficit. Thus, unlike patients with word selection anomia, patients with semantic anomia are unable to select the correct object from a group of objects, even when provided with the name of the target object.
Of course proper doctor-type persons know you generally need brain damage from a shovel to the parietal or a tumor that makes tempura of your temporal lobe to give you a proper dose of semantic anomia. I hereby posit that a contemporary public school education followed by a trip to the academy is on par with a severe blow to the head. People have become brain damaged by a refusal to enforce abstract standards of right and wrong for grammar, or anything else for that matter. Through a continual process of calling anyone who notices you're in error a Nazi, and exposure to a continuous stream of word salad on electronic devices, there are entire generations who are literally unable to tell one word from another. They've been taught from the cradle to simply take a stab at all things grammatical. They've been conditioned to rely on hunches, and they're blissfully ignorant of where the knee-jerk reactions they call hunches are spawned.
So, welcome to the Facebook Aphasia world, where every voice is passive, every sentence starts with an adverb, and to, too, two is just the sound a Sesame Street train makes. There's no use whining about it, when wining about it works better. And dismember, never leaf anyone who touches your sole more than you body.
This means that the first time a user goes to a restricted website, they will be invited to amend the filter settings, or turn it off altogether. However, only the account holder will have the ability to do this - not necessarily a hurdle for families, but potentially a problem in shared houses of adult occupants.
The horror! Pornography will not be immediately displayed by default on your computer screen? What do I need one for, then? And remember, never leave anyone who touches your soul more than his own winkie with safe search turned off
The White House plans to stop funding the station after 2024, ending direct federal support of the orbiting laboratory. But it does not intend to abandon the orbiting laboratory altogether and is working on a transition plan that could turn the station over to the private sector, according to an internal NASA document obtained by The Washington Post.
Remember kids, Tesla's taxpayer-subsidized piece of automotive space junk is brilliant, and Donald Trump is a doodyhead for wondering if a space station could be useful to anyone. It's just a hunch you have, but you hunches is always wright.
Typically, small mammals like mice reproduce fast and die young. The oldest mouse-eared bat ever captured of the Myotis genus was 41 years old, and they regularly live past 20 or 30. While they don't live as long as the average human does, these flying creatures live extremely long considering their size—nearly 10 times longer than an animal of that size would be predicted to live.
I hereby support research that may, one day, after millions in grants, allow humans to live to be 41, too. I sleep by hanging upside down in the closet already, so I've got a head start.
We chose to highlight this study for two reasons. First, it helps illustrate a pattern that we believe is widely under-appreciated in the policy community: Most programs—even many that are thoughtfully designed and well implemented—are found not to produce the hoped-for effects when rigorously evaluated in well-conducted RCTs. (Randomized Control Trials)
I bet conditional cash transfers break the poverty cycle from the moment the recipients get the dough until the moment their boyfriends make it to the strip joint.
Using police accident reports for Tippecanoe County, Indiana, and exploiting the introduction of the augmented reality game Pokémon GO as a natural experiment, we document a disproportionate increase in crashes and associated vehicular damage, injuries, and fatalities in the vicinity of locations where users can play the game while driving. We estimate the incremental county-wide cost of users playing Pokémon GO while driving to be in the range of $5.2 to $25.5 million over the 148 days following the introduction of the game. Extrapolating these estimates to nation-wide levels yields a total ranging from $2.0 to $7.3 billion.
Hmm. Maybe brain damage from Pokemon-induced car crashes is the reason no one can spell "definitely" anymore.
Reflektive encourages customers to use more regular feedback to keep employees improving their efforts more regularly. New areas the company plans to look at include learning, compliance and training. While plenty of startups are tackling those issues on their own, such as Pluralsight in corporate training, Behera says his goal is to create a command center for a manager to see how their employees are performing and adding skills, making companies like Pluralsight more of a potential partner.
I dunno. Screaming, "No raises for anyone, NOW GET BACK TO WORK," always works great for me. I find this saves the employees the embarrassment of hearing how worthless and lazy they are during formal reviews. See, I worry about other people's feelings too much. It's a curse, really.
The poetry world is abuzz this week in the wake of a controversial essay published in PN Review by British poet Rebecca Watts, denigrating a new generation of ‘amateur’ poets. She takes aim at ‘a cohort of young female poets who are currently being lauded by the poetic establishment for their “honesty” and “accessibility” – buzzwords for the open denigration of intellectual engagement and rejection of craft that characterises their work.’
In the room the women come and go, talking of Michelangelo the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle.
Assemblyman Ed Chau (D-Monterey Park) says an increasing number of websites and apps are collecting personal information and content from young users that can be used to market brands and products. But the consent agreements that make these practices possible are often buried in general terms and conditions for use of service, and companies often allow minors to sign up with no more than a promise that they have asked their parents for permission.
By definition, a parent who wants their minor child to get a Facebook page is unfit, so wangling clear consent from them shouldn't be too difficult.
Thankfully, I am not the only investor demanding Facebook keep users safe. On Monday, two major investors in Apple sent an open letter criticizing the company for not doing enough to protect children from the negative aspects of smartphones and social media. This is a potential game changer. The players are combining two corporate governance strategies in ways that may be harder to resist than traditional strategies.
I thought Mark Zuckerberg's mentor's name was spelled "Beelzebub."
The data initially was gathered by Bongo International, a company that helped North American retailers and brands sell online to consumers in other countries, the researchers said. FedEx acquired Bongo International in 2014 and eventually changed its name to FedEx Cross-Border International. FedEx shut down the service last April. The discovery of the customer IDs and other personal information suggests that not only was the information never properly secured to begin with, but FedEx officials failed to purge the data once the service was discontinued.
Yes, I'll be glad to give a screenshot of my driver's license to "Bongo International." Sounds as buttoned-down as the Bank of England.
Everyone have a great Friday. I hope today's links touched your soul more than you body!
For powerlifting and related high-resistance exercises, we tend to alternate between higher (10) rep days and lower (5-6) rep days. Obviously, the number of reps reflects the max weights that we can do at those reps. 10 reps means you can't do 11 with good form.
Of course, over time you keep upping the weights.
Our format is to do a light warm-up with the specific exercise, then only four-five working sets. And that's it for my weekly deadlifts, for example. A younger person could do more each week (like twice), but there is a time consideration too.
The endurance of teeth has to do with genetics, diet, hygiene, and injuries. Due to bad luck, I have ended up with a fine (expensive) bridge which is anchored in (expensive) implants. After all, nobody wants to look like they come from England.
The question du jour is this: What do you do about dental hygiene?
- Once daily or twice? Or, God forbid, after every meal? - Toothpaste, salt, or nothing? (I have read that toothpaste is a useless product of genius marketing) - Regular brush, electric rotary brush, or water pic? (My people recommend the latter, along with an office deep cleaning every 3-4 months. Takes 1/2 hour. I feel sorry for those gals, disgusting but very useful job.
Eloquent. Extraordinary. Timeless. Paradigm-shifting. Classic. Six decades after it first appeared, Leonard Read’s “I, Pencil” evokes such adjectives of praise. Rightfully so, for this little essay opens eyes and minds among people of all ages. Many first-time readers never see the world quite the same again.
Try searching on the Internet for information about Thor. Good luck if you're not interested in comic book movies. The Internet is a million miles wide and 1/16" deep, and it's turtles all the way down. References to Thor, the actual Norse god of thunder, are an afterthought. The actual Thor, not the wisecracking Australian guy, seems like he was pretty important back in the day. When a day of the week is named after you, you matter.
I'm always fascinated to see who matters on the Internet, because I wandered the Earth before it existed. The Internet likes all kinds of people who seemed half a joke in their heyday to me. I think it's a totally ingrained fetish for pointless contrariness. It's a Howard Zinn world, and whatever you trot out, there must be a cranky alternative we can decide to like instead. That's why the Internet loves Tesla, a weird, mostly useless crank, and hates Edison. The daily Google Doodles are always nobodies that somebody has decided to exalt in place of people who accomplished a lot. I prefer the real deals. I have no interest in a movie about comic book Thor. The original article was interesting enough.
Speaking of original articles, How about Jack Kilby? Who's that you say? Oh, he's not Internet-famous enough to get welfare queens like Elon Musk to name their subsidized cars after him. He just more or less invented the integrated circuit by himself in 1958:
It was in a relatively deserted laboratory at TI's brand new Semiconductor Building where Jack Kilby first hit on the idea of the integrated circuit. In July 1958, when most employees left for the traditional two-week vacation period, Kilby -- as a new employee with no vacation -- stayed to man the shop. What caused Kilby to think along the lines that eventually resulted in the integrated circuit? Like many inventors, he set out to solve a problem. In this case, the problem was called "the tyranny of numbers."
Almost all of the truly useful things in the world are invented by invented by guys like Kilby, not Tony Stark wannabes. They bring lunch to work in a paper bag, wear short sleeve shirts and clip-on ties with their J. C. Penney suits, and have ink stains on their shirt pockets. The Internet's not interested in them. Then again, the Internet isn't all that useful, so it's foolish to think a Facebook world would be interested in a real god, when a comic book god is available.
The Gallivans initially found humor in their odd situation. But after months of deliveries—which turned from fun to creepy—they just want to be left alone.When Kelly and Mike contacted Amazon about the perplexing parcels, the online retailer told them everything had been paid for via gift card; the sender (or senders) remain anonymous. Presumably ruling out family or friends who might be playing some kind of sick joke on the Acton pair, experts suspect the Gallivans are the victims of a scam.
The Gallivans don't sound like Internet people. The Free Sh*t Army wouldn't have asked for the packages to be stopped.
Prices were already rising in Hungary after the war because production capacity fell due to the destruction. With no tax base to rely upon, the Hungarian government decided to stimulate the economy by printing money. It loaned money to banks at low rates who then loaned the money to companies. The government hired workers directly, they provided loans to consumers, and they gave money to people. The government literally flooded the country with money to get the economy going again.
It's interesting that post-WWII Hungary didn't bother to collect taxes, because the money was devaluing so fast. They just printed some more and spent it. Stop me when I say something that sounds unfamiliar.
Google was guilty. The European Commissioner for Competition, Margrethe Vestager, made that brutally clear. “Google abused its market dominance,” Vestager declared as she announced her judgement in Brussels on June 27, 2017. She handed Google a £2.1 billion fine – the largest antitrust penalty ever handed to a single company, and gave it 90 days to change its ways.
I'm a grown man, more or less. Like I said, I don't have heroes, or go to comic book movies looking for them. But Adam and Shivaun will do in a pinch if you put a gun to my head. Slaying dragons that desolate the landscape and sleep on mountains of gold still cuts some ice with me.
So play to each platform’s strengths. Recruiters don’t want you to treat LinkedIn like Twitter and share your every thought. But don’t treat Twitter like LinkedIn, either! While you’ll want to avoid tweeting anything offensive or crude, Lopez encourages job seekers to be themselves. If you’re showing more attitude on the one social network, just make sure you’re making up the difference in aptitude on the other.
The Soviet Union used to announce they were lightening up every once in a while. Perestroika, tovarish! After a few months of letting you vent your spleen at the party meetings, they'd say, "Never mind," and anyone who opened their yap would be mining gold in Siberia with their bare hands for twenty years. Giving a recruiter access to your social media accounts is about the same idea.
Emerging evidence suggests that living near major roads might adversely affect cognition. However, little is known about its relationship with the incidence of dementia, Parkinson's disease, and multiple sclerosis. We aimed to investigate the association between residential proximity to major roadways and the incidence of these three neurological diseases in Ontario, Canada.
I'm so old I remember when "scientists" warned us that living near power lines would give us cancer, but major roads giving us dementia is almost as good. Of course since next-to-no-one lives far away from power lines or major roads, your study can be bent, folded, or mutilated to suit any agenda.
Cybersecurity experts call it “cryptojacking” — hijacking computers to produce digital currency, like Bitcoin, Litecoin and Monero that have been in the news. Infected networks or computers perform double duty, conducting normal functions (perhaps a bit more slowly) while also obeying remote commands to do calculations that generate digital currency for the criminals, or wrongdoers, who may be company insiders.
Yeah, but at least your computer is finally doing something productive. I say leave it.
On Monday, Amazon reportedly began a series of rare layoffs at its headquarters in Seattle, cutting several hundred corporate employees. But this week, something quite different is happening at the company’s warehouses and customer-service centers across the country: Amazon will politely ask its “associates”—full-time and part-time hourly employees—if they’d prefer to quit. And if they do, Amazon will pay them as much as $5,000 for walking out the door.
For $2,500 I'll promise to never work there in the first place.
When it comes to pricing, Chipotle tried to woo customers back after
its setback over food safety with low prices and promotions, but this
did not translate into a longer-term benefit. The restaurant chain needs
to try something better and permanent which it might under the new
leadership.There are speculations that additions to the menu could include breakfast options and alcohol.
Breakfast options and alcohol? That's a redundancy at my house.
This was Dark Valentine, a special event held February 9 and 10 to transform Cupid’s favorite holiday into a far more sinister and gruesome occasion. Hollywood discovered some time ago that there’s no reason to restrict horror movie releases to October, and haunters are learning the very same lesson. “There’s an audience for blood and guts all year round,” says Larry Kirchner, owner of The Darkness, celebrating its 25th year of terrifying the good people of St. Louis. The Darkness offered up Yuletide scares last December and hosted a “Scream Break” in March, but My Bloody Valentine’s is the Missouri haunt’s first foray into seasonal romance.
I think there are still four or five days on the Millennial's calendar that aren't Halloween, but I wouldn't bet on it.
Currently, SNAP benefits are delivered in the form of cash added to an electronic benefit-transfer (E.B.T.) card, and they’re spendable at almost any store that sells food. The Department of Agriculture wants to dock about half of that money and replace it with an “America’s Harvest box,” consisting of “100 percent U.S.-grown and produced food.” Not freshly harvested fruits and vegetables or meat, mind you, but processed “American” food in cans, tins, and jars.
What's for dinner tonight, mom? Cling peaches in heavy syrup, creamed corn, and cranberry sauce with indentations from the can. You know, same as last night.
The universality and popularity of general fitness programs is partly because they have nothing to do with physical talent.
Your genetics do determine many of your physical capabilities at advanced levels, but rarely at ordinary levels. Short people can be fine basketball players, for example - but not at a college level. Long-limbed people can do good bench presses and deadlifts, although not as readily as compact people. Everybody can run, swim, and do bench presses. Most people are physically effective but not blessed with special talents. That is why general fitness is popular - anybody can engage in it.
Besides your physique/physical structure, genes determine your ratio of fast-twitch to slow-twitch muscle fibers, your neuromuscular connections, your brain-neuromuscular responses, eye-hand coordination, your aggressiveness and energy, lung volume, etc.
Not to mention non-genetic factors like drive, training, and practice.
The point I wish to make is that, as with musical talent or intellectual horsepower, everybody has a level at which they can best perform, and few people ever reach those levels. In fitness, your only competitor needs to be yourself from last month.
Of course, we all have varying degrees of competitiveness, but that should never be any obstacle. Not one of our readers will play in the NFL, the NBA, or in the US Open. Or, for that matter, perform in the NYC Ballet.
My advice, to be able to engage in the fullness of life, is to get out and move hard every day with weights, calisthenics, cardio, etc - and to do a lousy job of it if need be because there are no grades. Giving it your all is all that is required.
Here we go - planning a Maggie's Farm Urban Hike is a great Valentine's Day conversation for your spouse, significant other, or someone you'd like to impress. It's time for the first glimpse of the 4th Annual Urban Hike Itinerary. As we ate pizza last year outside of Chelsea Market, there was a general consensus that we needed to see the sights a girl can see from Brooklyn Heights. As you know, there's nothing in Brooklyn aside from a bridge, some heights, and possibly Patty Duke's identical twin cousin. And for those of you into bad 1970's B movies, The Warriors. Fuhgeddaboudit. Leave the gun, take the cannoli (Clemenza's house is in Gravesend, Brooklyn, but Paulie was probably killed in NJ since we see the back of the Statue of Liberty).
We're only about 60 days away. Halfway through February, then March, and right now we're pegging some weekend post 4/13 (so we're thinking 4/14, 4/21, or 4/28). Sundays are a possibility, but much more difficult. Saturdays are always better, so we're planning on those 3 weekends for now.
As usual, all are invited and welcome. I expect this may be our most well-attended hike yet. Last year I was surprised to learn one couple was from my hometown (hope we see you again), while yet another travels quite a distance from the MidWest just to share a few hours with us. They've attended the last two, and I hope we see them again, as well (my wife and I speak about your wandering ways often). A number of people in my office heard about last year's hike and asked me to inform them about this upcoming one.
Last year we were all dazzled by the 'secret lair' of the Manhattan Contrarian (my wife is still gushing). I suspect we'll be equally dazzled by some new sights this year. So feel free to add comments, observations, or suggestions. Even if you're not plannning on joining us (please join!), but you have suggestions, we'll welcome them if they fit into the time span/distance. We encourage additions, we encourage any additional commentary during the walk which you find useful (last year we even managed to glom on to a professional tour at one location). This is all about knowledge sharing.
The current plan is to start in Manhattan, possibly at a Dunkin' Donuts on Fulton, by Gold, about 3 blocks from the Brooklyn Bridge. We'll walk over the bridge, then head north to Dumbo, east to Vinegar Hill, the Navy Yard, and Admiral's Row. We'll then double back to the Heights where we'll take a look at Roebling's apartment (I think I've got the right address - 110 Columbia Heights at Orange and Pineapple), a brownstone that isn't a brownstone, the Atlantic Avenue tunnel, the original Abraham & Straus (a New York thing, A&S was an iconic store), the Wyckoff Street Mosaic, Gowanus Ballroom, the Gowanus Canal, the Red Hook Warehouse and the Red Hook Grain Terminal. Some other places of note where there may be stops include 299 Sands St (King's County Distillery - but it's early in the hike so maybe not), 141 Lawrence (Circa Brewing), Cacao Prieto (chocolates!), Prospect Park (a bit of a stretch, but we'll see), 195 Centre St (Other Half Brewing), 40 Van Dyke (Sixpoint Brewing), and 218 Conover (Widow Jane's Distillery - great bourbon). Once we're in Red Hook, we can take a water taxi back to Manhattan, which I've heard tell is good fun.
So that's a preliminary plan. I think it came out to about 11 miles. That's a good stretch of the legs, but we're open to changes and ideas.
Hello everybody. Roger de Hauteville here, King of Sicily. Bird Dog has asked me to sit in for him while he's away at a retreat. It's not exactly summer camp. He's in a 12-step program for toxic masculinity. He's been leaving puddles of masculinity on the floor here and there, and his minders have decided it's got to stop. So you're stuck with me again. I was available because I'm on a forced hiatus from my job, too. Damn HR harpy got me in hot water with the shareholders. She secretly recorded a marketing meeting I called. Total entrapment, in my estimation. I'll let you be the judge:
HR Harpy: Roger, I think we should stop testing our products on animals.
Roger de H: I don't.
HR Harpy: It's cruel.
Roger de H: Hey lady, it's not like I invented the practice. Cosmetics companies have been doing it for years.
HR Harpy: Yeah, but we make hammers.
See? This is why American industry is falling behind the rest of the world. No respect for old fashioned quality control.
A Denny's wedding ceremony typically costs $199, and includes extra frills like use of the photo booth, a Wedding Pancake Puppies Cake, two wedding t-shirts, and a coupon for two Grand Slams on your next visit to Denny's.
Many said they were left confused and reeling and weren’t even aware that Snapchat was planning an overhaul, they simply woke up one day to find the app looked completely different. Hundreds if not thousands of teens lost their streaks, some of which had been maintained for hundreds of days, because they were confused at how to send snaps using the new interface.
For the sane reader who's avoided Snapchat's charms, a "Streak" is an endless stream of pointless, ephemeral messages sent between two instant message accounts. They give you a little gold star if you keep it going for 3+ days. Pavlov was born too soon, I guess.
Let’s start with 1000 archers with a light bow in their hands, drawing from thirty to fifty pounds. A recent post on American Indian archery established that a champion archer could get eight arrows off before one hit the ground. Even if we reduce this to a more conservative five, a thousand archers could get 5000 arrows in the air over fifteen seconds.
Remember, if you want to test this theory, don't test it on animals if the HR lady is looking.
On a credit card, this contingency isn’t such a big deal. It’s applied against your credit line. The car rental agency just verifies that you could charge up to the amount that’s required. It doesn’t charge the whole amount at once. With a debit card, they freeze the total amount they need to cover any potential charges. That means your money will be held in your debit card account until the transaction is complete.
I didn't think this was possible. Apparently, you can rent a car with cash, too. The smart traveler always relies on carjacking only as a last resort.
After debating whether or not they felt comfortable stepping foot in a paranoid Communist state with a record of human rights abuses, Will and Sam decided that being the first foreigners to hit the slopes after they were opened to non-Koreans was too good an opportunity to pass up.
They wouldn't have debated an invitation to golf with Donald Trump.
1753 saw the arrival of Lord Chancellor Hardwicke’s Marriage Act. This was seen to be a way of banning clandestine marriages once and for all. Parental consent was required for any person wishing to marry below the age of consent, i.e. 21. The marriage had to be conducted in church during the day by a clergyman, banns had to be read or a license issued. Falsification or errors made could result in the marriage being nullified.
Now all you have to do to nullify your marriage is let your Snapchat Streak lapse.
Then, in October of that year, following Russia's space launch of Sputnik I, the American scientific community came under considerable pressure to achieve a major technological accomplishment of its own. At the University of California's Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, scientists responded by recommending to the AEC that earth excavation offered the "highest probability of early beneficial success" in the Plowshare Program. Actively supporting the proposal, Dr. Edward Teller, 'father of the hydrogen bomb' and director of the Radiation Laboratory, suggested that the AEC detonate a 2.4 megaton atomic device on the northwest coast of Alaska in the region of Cape Thompson. Such an explosion would create a deep water hole to be used as a harbor for the eventual shipment of coal, oil, and other non-renewable resources thought to exist along this part of the coast.
Mr. President, we must not allow a radioactive harbor gap!
The company was formed in 2002 for creating crowd scenes for the Hollywood movie Sea Biscuit. Their inflatable crowd have since appeared in over 80 feature films including many memorable ones like The King’s Speech, Frost/Nixon, American Gangster, Spiderman 3 and many more. These plastic men and women were featured in many TV shows and commercials as well.
Do they have styrofoam classical columns for rent, too? Those things work great. You can pay for them with untraceable foreign credit card payments, too.
US scientists have discovered a new family of antibiotics in soil samples.The natural compounds could be used to combat hard-to-treat infections, the team at Rockefeller University hopes. Tests show the compounds, called malacidins, annihilate several bacterial diseases that have become resistant to most existing antibiotics, including the superbug MRSA.
Further down the page there's a similar headline: New Macrobiotic family discovered in Whole Foods.
The discovery of a burial containing 8,000-year-old battered human skulls, including two that still have pointed wooden stakes through them, has left archaeologists baffled, according to a new study from Sweden. It's hard to make heads or tails of the finding: During the Stone Age, the grave would have sat at the bottom of a small lake, meaning that the skulls would have been placed underwater. Moreover, of the remains of at least 11 adults placed on top of the grave, only one had a jawbone, the researchers said.
It's probably part of an ancient tradition that continues to this day. You make a pilgrimage to the shrine that holds the triptych with the sacred runes of plenty scrawled all over it. There are fantastic, indecipherable signs everywhere. You beg the totem for succor, and then while you're fumbling for a sacrificial offering, a disembodied, sonorous, god-like voice booms: Do you want fries with that?
"Amazon is thinking of offering a checking account. For a fee of $5-10 a month, the service will include cell phone damage protection, ID theft protection, roadside assistance, travel insurance and product discounts." Forty-six percent of “Old Millennials” (ages 31-38) and 37 percent of “Young Millennials” (ages 22-30) say they would open that account... When the same responders were asked about a free checking account from Amazon, without the bundled services, interest in opening the account is lower.
That's nothing. Over 70 percent of Gen X-ers said they'd be willing to have their heads pounded onto a stake in a Swedish lakebottom for six months of free Netflix.
One of the most glaring perversities of the modern labor market is credential inflation. While the education workers need to do a job is quite stable, the education they need to get a job has skyrocketed since the 1940s. Sure, the average job is more intellectually demanding than it once was, but researchers find that only explains 20% of the workforce's rising education. What explains the remaining 80%? Employers' expectations have risen across the board. Waiter, bartender, cashier, security guard: These are now common jobs for those with bachelor's degrees...
What is higher ed for? It's used for all sorts of things, including credentialing, career training, adulthood-avoidance, beer-drinking, mating, social and networking opportunities, life-enrichment, a foundation for lifetime learning, etc. etc. From a purely career standpoint, there is no doubt that the first job somebody gets after higher ed can be the most important in career trajectory regardless of the school, major, or grades. Changing trajectory can be done, but it is more difficult if the first rung of the ladder is low.
How often do you feel "bursting with physical energy"? It's a wonderful feeling. We see it in kids all the time. They have to run, have to move, have to dance, have to climb, can't sit still. It's hard to know what it's about, though.
Feeling as energetic as a 7 year-old, with that need for physical activity, is rare in those over 30. A sedentary lifestyle (roughly defined as less than 6-8 hours of exertion/week - not including walking unless elderly) is a mental habit rather than a measure of any sort of true physical "energy." Energy, however, accrues to the energetic even though we will never be 7 again.
I make distinctions between these biological and psychological things:
1. The drive, need, and desire for challenging physical activity that derives from high fitness (Get Up and Go is a result of fitness + attitude), 2. The ability to recruit the mental energy to complete hard things in a dutiful way or with external demand, but without the need or drive to do them (70/30% mental/physiological), 3. The state of one's capacity for muscular and cardiac function (100% physiological) 4. "Low energy," aka "laziness", ie lethargic life habits (90% mental, but the physiological obviously deteriorates rapidly with disuse).
OK, so subjective "energy" is not mainly related to actual physical "energy". Same word, different things. #3 is of most interest to me even though it has nothing to do with how much Get Up and Go you feel when you wake up in the morning. I have a strong bias in favor of those with that Go Go attitude regardless of age or physical conditioning.
Unhinged Conspiracy Theorists: Leftwing Professor Lawrence Tribe Floats Theory that a Carter Page Associate Was Murdered in an Engineered Plane Crash, Then Deletes His Noxious Tweet
For powerlifting and related high-resistance exercises, we tend to alternate between higher (10) rep days and lower (5-6) rep days. Obviously, the number of reps reflects the max weights that we can do at those reps. 10 reps means you can't do 11 with good form. 
The universality and popularity of general fitness programs is partly because they have nothing to do with physical talent. 
Why 