WTF-Beta

We need to see more of glamorous Melania. Have you seen her recently? Mind you, there's a funny new bump on the Whitehouse lawn

Idioms and tongue twisters can be fun to include. And things like listening and differentiating: Ice cream. I scream. Green House. Greenhouse. But pronunciation and basic grammar learnt from the course book will be the meat of your lessons.

Happy birthday!!

The Hur interview. https://www.axios.com/2025/05/16/biden-hur-tape-special-counsel-audio

@wtg Lovely Thank you

Oh for the days when we loved such simple amusements! When I lived in San Francisco decades ago I visited the home of a guy who had several restored player pianos. It was so satisfying just to sit there and be entertained, as if by magic!

I love them in pots on the deck. So easy to step out and clip what I need.

I'm confused. We've had "densified wood" for over 40 years now.

If you only do what you've always done, you will get what you've always gotten. I've long thought American foreign policy there was misguided.

@Bernard said in School bus drives off the road: Am I being ageist, or shouldn't there be an age limit for school bus drivers? I don't think you're being ageist. Aren't there stats about the age beyond which reflexes are slowed enough to be concerning? What age do most states require drivers to do actually driving tests, 70? Should that be the cut off for commercial drivers maybe? Or am I missing something?

It sure is @mark bait!!

I still prefer a knife (santoku), to cut slices depending on the arrangement of the toppings.

You mean like eventually or our King is but yours isn't

I think the butterfly pea tincture is the only one I've had. There's a Vietnamese restaurant a couple of blocks from our house that serves very good food, but isn't particularly pretentious, so the apparent sophistication (and by this I mean that I'm not particularly sophisticated in such things and may be wrong) of their seasonal cocktails surprises me. Anyway, that's where I had the butterfly pea cocktail. It's actually the only coctail I've had there that was mildly disappointing, but it wasn't the butterfly pea ingredient that I didn't enjoy. I just found the drink to be a little weak and astringent, like maybe it had too much soda water. We took some out-of-town guests there last night and I had a cocktail that was so good that my friend ordered one for herself. It had cognac, Grand Marnier, blood orange liquer, orange juice, ginger marmalade, lemon juice, and orange bitters. My friend had just told me earlier in the day that she wanted to try a variation on a margarita that she'd heard about, where the traditional margarita is shaken with orange marmalade, so maybe marmalade is becoming popular as a cocktail ingredient? Maybe it's been popular for years. It's certainly less exotic that the ingredients in the article. As I said, I'm not particularly sophisticated in this area. In any case, the drink was really tasty!

Made me think about maintenance of the aircraft after Trump leaves office, should the aircraft be accepted. It seems the Trump Organization already has an aviation fleet that includes.a Boeing 757: https://www.trump.com/lifestyle/aviation It will be expensive, but the Trump Organization should already have some capacity to maintain an aircraft, even if it's outsourced.

Pope Bob has a nice ring to it. Although he spent many formative years in Peru, so maybe it should've been Pope Beto I.