Complicated answer.
No kidding!
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Pope Leo votes by mail -
Happy Halloween!wtg said:
Guess I'll be donating a lot of candy to the township come Monday.
Maybe not.
Suddenly, as if from nowhere, they're all coming out....
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Happy Halloween!It's Saturday. It's Halloween. Weather is OK, cloudy and cool but not unpleasant. We're an hour into trick or treat hours (3 to 7), and we just had our first six kids. A coven of witches and Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz. No Toto.
Is there a Halloween Scrooge or Grinch? I'm almost thinking that next year I just won't bother at all.
Guess I'll be donating a lot of candy to the township come Monday. They collect it and send it to troops overseas in care packages.
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The Venezuelan oil dealI'd love to hear Renauda's take on this.
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Whole home backup powerWe have had a manual transfer switch, same setup you described, since 2000. Works great. It is a very cost effective way to get some kind of backup in case of an extended outage. But as @bernard points out, it is kind of a pain to haul a generator around to hook it up.
Standby generators are running close to $15K these days and our town has created pretty stringent setback requirements like the ones you describe that are making it near-impossible to get one installed.
These Base Power batteries are just another way to get a bit of backup so the essentials like refrigerators and sump pumps can keep on doing their thing. And a furnace in winter and well pumps if you're not on city water. Not so good for running the high-demand stuff like A/C or electric heat.
They have their own automated transfer switch, so the backup kicks in seamlessly. If you want to extend the coverage more, you can get a portable generator to use to charge things up if an outage goes on for long enough to deplete the battery.
And with the incentives (reduced electricity rates and referral bonuses), it's stupid cheap. If you can refer one person, you've covered $250 of the $295 installation cost.
Of course it's always possible that there is something in the setup at an individual house that could require additional work by an electrician so that Base can do their install. Like any home improvement project, the homeowner has to decide whether the costs outweigh the benefits.
I don't think everyone has a need for one of these, but if you do, it's worth looking into.
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Remember these?100 Unhinged Things Trump Did That You Probably Forgot
"Flood the zone with shit."
That's how Steve Bannon once described Donald Trump's attention-overload strategy. It's designed to overwhelm your senses, so the latest outrage erases your ability to remember the avalanche of outrages past. The "shit" part matters as well — because the goal is to make politics seem so dirty and indecent that no sane person would ever get involved in the political arena. This cedes the civic ground to hyper-partisan sociopaths.
That's exactly why combating the memory hole is essential as voters head to the polls. The 2026 midterm elections are the only structural opportunity to put guardrails on this runaway train of a president who seems hell bent on destroying our democratic norms, dividing the American people, and alienating our allies while emboldening our enemies. The result is a tsunami of sleaze: unprecedented corruption, rising costs, and governmental chaos.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/100-unhinged-things-trump-did-130000828.html
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Drone photo awards -
Drone photo awardsMy fave of the ones in this NPR piece. Rugs in Turkey:
https://www.npr.org/2026/10/31/g-s1-150698/drone-photo-award-winners
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100th anniversary of Houdini's deathThis Halloween marks the 100th anniversary of the death of the legendary magician Harry Houdini.
He earned his reputation by freeing himself from traps that seemed impossible for a mere mortal to survive.But Houdini couldn't escape the ultimate fate waiting for him in Detroit on Oct. 31, 1926, and his spirit still haunts the Motor City.
https://www.npr.org/2026/10/31/nx-s1-6008110/100-years-harry-houdinis-death-haunts-detroit
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Whole home backup powerDuh. Walkout basement. Didn’t occur to me.