WTF-Beta

Robert Mueller.

My last car, the one that was totalled late last summer, was a 2014 Hyundai Accent. I liked it a lot. It was old enough to not have ridiculous and annoying features.

My current car is a Hyundai Elentra and I like it a lot as well. For a '25 model, it's not terribly laden with intrusive software. I love the auto headlight dimming feature, but I hate that in the middle of a sunny day, if I drive into the shade of a few trees for a few seconds, it beeps and flashes "You're headlights are off". I haven't figured out how to turn that off yet. Another bad feature is that the only interface to the stereo is Bluetooth. Period.

What CHAS said. There is no low that's too low for the republicans.

Considering where CBS is now, good riddance.

@Daniel Political shenanigans and bad decisions.

The USPS was giving $12 billion in annual discounts to private mailers for pre-sorting. Sounds like a good business plan. /s

Even though the USPS does not get tax money to run its operations, thanks to G.W. Bush, money that USPS collected for future health and pensions for its workers has been used to reduce the federal deficit.

If the USPS dies, it's because politicians--totally lacking in vision and pride for this country, and totally beholden to private interests--wanted it to die.

I guess I'm getting old, I've never heard of them. But I just discovered that if you Google 'BTS' they hijack the screen and redirect you to a video even though you clicked on the wikipedia link. Not nice.

That's cool. I rarely translate F to C but often translate C to F with a few simple mental math steps. (C * 10) - .1(C *10) + 32 (ie, ten times C, minus 10% of that, plus 32). Although approximate, it comes very close.

Even a white supremacist, Christian nationalist, misogynistic, bigoted, antisemitic turd like Nick Fuentes.

“MAGA was always a farce. It didn’t exist. It was vaporware. It’s true. Sadly and horribly, it was always bound up with the cult of personality of Trump. And for a lot of people, this is the last step they need to take. It is him. He is the problem.

“And this is when you need to realize it’s not his advisers. It’s not his personnel. It’s not the bad advice or whatever. It’s him. He’s the problem. The buck stops with him. He’s the president. He’s the movement. And if there ever were principles or promises, he’s betrayed all of them. And that is what is left.

“All these people that are still trusting the plan, Republicans, MAGA supporters, this is what is left. Trump, Mark Levin, Laura Loomer, Randy Fine, and your war with Iran. That’s what you got. And I know a lot of people are not happy about that and that’s why they’re coping.

“And they’re saying, ‘Well, you know, there’s actually a five-dimensional plan.’ Or, you know, ‘We need to convince Trump otherwise. There’s people working on the inside.’ People are saying all these things.

“He needs to go. Like, I really believe that he needs to be impeached under the Democrats. And I don’t even want him to be removed from office because I don’t want Vance to become president either. I want Vance to burn down with all of it. But it just needs to be shut down. This guy is totally insane.” – Nick Fuentes, on today’s podcast.

This was in the East Village on Ave B before it became as I'm sure it has by now become more gentrified.

Alphabet City. I lived on 3rd between B and C for about a year. Rough place back then. We were broken into... not that it mattered all that much because we had slim pickings in those days. A small black-and-white tv was all they could take. It was unnerving, though, because I was asleep in the apartment during the break-in. Around 10:30 am (I worked into the late evenings) someone opened the door to my bedroom and closed it. I thought it was strange that my roommate would do that, but also he was usually gone to NYU by then. So when I got out of bed I phoned him and he said he was not in the apartment at that time. When I went out to the living room, I saw the window wide open, the tv gone, and the front door wide open.

Haven't used earplugs since I left NYC.

Unbelievable. It's a hell of a time to be saying 'maybe we shouldn't be there'. What a crackpot, untethered administration.

Trump draws backlash for comment on Iran war: ‘Maybe we shouldn’t even be there’

“Really, I’m demanding that these countries come in and protect their own territory – because it is their territory,” he said.

“They should come and they should help us protect it. You could make the case that maybe we shouldn’t even be there at all, because we don’t need it. We have a lot of oil. We’re the number one producer anywhere in the world times two.”

SOB starts an ill-advised, unnecessary, illegal war, replete with war crimes, (Did you hear Hegseth this weekend? Total war crime mind set.) and expect the nations that he's screwed to bail him out?

He's in a pickle now and I suspect he knows it. Dangerous times.

OMG! They are so cool! I love the large octave one. How nice!

@wtg

If something as simple as a T-shirt requires all those resources, Kismai wants to make it last.

I can't help thinking he might actually be shortening the life of the shirt with his intensive washing methods.

I know that when scouring sheep's fleece, enzymes are not good. They will deteriorate the fibers. I use Dawn Ultra (the one that doesn't contain enzymes) and it does a fantastic job.

As for laundry, I use Mrs. Meyers, preferably Lavender scented, which does contain enzymes. But I'm not a wear-it-once-must-be-laundered person. Even more so now that I don't have a job.

On Trump... "No one stands up to him"

That's the entirety of the situation in a nutshell.

This guy hand crafts organs. I think his channel is so fascinating (and a tiny bit helpful because I'm rebuilding the bellows for my Melodion and then need to rebuild the bellows for the reed organ). Watching his videos makes me want to take a wood working class. In this video, he shows the full build of a portative organ. He goes into detail in other videos.

He also plays...

Oh geeze, sorry to hear it. No experience here, except we once had a woman at work who sometimes had seizures. I was not there both times. Best wishes for the best outcome.

Another seat flipped to blue this week.

Democrats deliver stunning flip in New Hampshire special election

@wtg Best wishes for Mr. WTG that he recovers quickly and his health stabilizes. Best wishes for Mrs. WTG too.

I don't know if I can describe what I'm thinking, but I'll try anyway.

What if you made a box with a hinged pedal in it, and weighted, to rest on the floor to the left of the piano's pedals. The pedal would need to be long enough to create sufficient movement to move the real pedal. Attach a very strong type of thin cord to the pedal so that when you push down on the pedal the cord is pulled down. This next bit is where you may have reservations: You'd have to screw two eyelets into the bottom of the keyboard--one of each side of the piano's pedal unit. The cord from the boxed pedal would run up to the eyelet on the left, across the underside of the keyboard, through the eyelet on the right, and down to the real pedal where it would be attached to the back of the pedal. When you pressed the boxed pedal, the cord--traveling up, across, and down to the real pedal would lift the back of it as if you were pressing your foot on the front of it.

Maybe it's an unrealistic design. It depends on strong cordage and the willingness to screw eyelets into the piano's underside. And, I don't know if you'd be able to get enough power from it to actually lift the back of the real pedal.

Maybe this makes sense, maybe not. I hope so.

I bought this knife decades ago at a street fair in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. I don't know who made it or where it's from, but the cost was somewhere between $20 and $40... I can't recall exactly, but it wasn't more than $40.

It is a fantastic kitchen knife. I will reach for it, over the Wusthof chef's knife, 99% of the time. The blade is thin, sharpens really well and keeps it's edge. One tiny improvement would be a redesign of the handle, but it's the blade that makes this knife so good for me.

All my knives hang from a magnetic rail. I use a Chef's Choice 300 electric sharpener. Sharp is important.