WTF-Beta

Who is the author?
Lots of info there on the obvious grifting...

The carillon at the University of Chicago has regular summer concerts. Inside the church there is a video showing the player up in the tower. People bring chairs, snacks and drinks during nice weather to sit outside.

The dynasty of Cons

Our parents love Aldi - We have a TJ's a block away so we never deal with the parking lot. There is an Aldi moving into the neighborhood maybe 1/4 mile away? Maybe we will give it a try. Also, we have Whole Foods, Jewel, Mariano's, and other more locally-owned grocers all within a mile? Costco a couple of miles away. Lots of choices living in the South Loop neighborhood of Chicago!

Do you have access to wifi? That's a handy way to use a second phone without a cellular plan. I have an older iPhone that I use as a dedicated piano tuning device. Most of the time disconnected to the rest of the world, but I can turn on wifi when I want to update an app or connect to the interwebs. I can use my primary phone as a hotspot if I need access "out in the field" without wifi.

Sugar, Peanuts, Palm Oil, Peanut Flour, Cocoa, Hazelnuts, Lecithin as Emulsifier, Salt, Vanillin: An Artificial Flavor.

This came across Facebook

What Your Cat Understands About Donald Trump That Most Democrats Don't
Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez for THE PUGILIST
Apr 19, 2026
This morning I received another comment on a recent post — the post in which I had compared Donald Trump to Vito Genovese — insisting the parallel was invalid. The reason given: Trump is an idiot. Too stupid to actually run anything.
I’ve been getting variations of this comment for years, always from people on the left, always offered as though it settles something. It doesn’t. It reveals, instead, a failure of perception that I believe is one of the most costly analytical mistakes Trump’s opponents continue to make.
When Democrats dismiss Donald Trump as too stupid to be effective, they lose. They’ve been losing that bet for a decade, and they will keep losing it for the same reason a person might call a shark stupid for not doing algebra. The shark isn’t trying to do algebra. That’s not what it’s for.
There are different kinds of intelligence in the world. A cat cannot discuss philosophy, but it can do lots of things we can’t. It can jump six times its own height from standing, catch a hummingbird in flight, and twist itself mid-fall to land on its feet. You can’t do that. I can’t do that. We do not call ourselves stupid for lacking gifts that simply fall outside another creature’s metric. We should extend the same analytical honesty to Donald Trump — not to admire him, but to see him clearly, which is something his opponents have catastrophically failed to do.
Trump is, by most conventional measures, a deeply limited man. His reading is reportedly poor. His attention span is narrow. His grasp of history, policy, science, and law is weak at best. At the kind of intelligence most of us value — the capacity for empathy, for genuine human connection, for moral reasoning — he is, by the evidence of his entire life, essentially deficient. But none of that intelligence is required to run the Mafia. Or, as it turns out, the government.
What Trump possesses instead is something rarer and more dangerous than most of his critics have been willing to name: he may be the greatest con artist and mob operator the world has ever produced — quite simply the most effective sociopath to ever walk this earth. Consider the scale of what he has accomplished. He convinced tens of millions of working-class Americans that a Manhattan real estate heir who spent decades extracting wealth from contractors, students, investors, and tenants is their champion against elites. That is a con of staggering audacity — and it has not merely survived exposure, it has fed on it. Every indictment became a fundraising event. Every scandal became evidence of persecution. He somehow engineered a fraud immune to the mechanism that ends all frauds. Is that stupidity? I’d say it’s a form of operational genius. Repugnant, yes. Not something most people would want to do or be proud of. But a kind of genius nonetheless.
The organizational structure around Trump is not merely like organized crime — it is structurally identical to it: loyalty oaths, omertà culture, intermediaries for dirty work, pardons dangled as currency, defectors punished, soldiers rewarded. No Mafia don in history ran that kind of operation at the scale of a nation-state, with a major political party as his instrument. The Gambinos controlled parts of New York. The Cartels each have their little patch of Mexico or Colombia. But Trump? He controls half of America’s political reality, and all of its government at the moment. He captured the judiciary and the house. And he did it by being a con man. The comparison to Genovese is not hyperbole. It is taxonomy.
His critics might object that Hitler, too, was this kind of operator — and they would be right, which is precisely the point. Hitler was also mostly a moron, but with one special, horrible gift. Hollywood has done us a grave disservice with its brooding, thoughtful Nazi officers, staring meaningfully into the middle distance. Screenwriters projected their own fantasy of what powerful evil looks like onto men who were, in most respects, idiots and buffoons — gifted only in the precise ways that mattered for what they were trying to do. Only Charlie Chaplin, working from the music hall tradition, understood that buffoonery and menace are not opposites. His portrait of the dictator in The Great Dictator is psychologically truer than almost anything that followed. Hannah Arendt reached for the same truth at Nuremberg, finding not a monster in the dock but a mediocre bureaucrat — the banality of evil, she called it, to the outrage of people who needed evil to be smarter and more interesting than it is.
Trump is not more interesting than he appears. He is exactly as venal, as shallow, as reflexive as his critics say. But he is, within his own operational domain, essentially unrivaled at being evil. His cunning is largely instinctual rather than strategic, for he, like all other serial killers, lacks a conscience entirely — he wins by smell more than by plan, which is why his operation is chaotic even when it’s effective — but the results speak for themselves. Decades of survival. A second term. A country reorganized around his appetites.
We do not need to think the rattlesnake is “smart” to respect what it can do. We do not need to grant Trump the kind of intelligence we value to acknowledge the kind he has, that most of us, mercifully, lack. Calling him stupid is not accurate, because it is a failure of perception — and it is one his most sanctimonious opponents keep paying for.

Diagnosis is often the real skill... Especially when the fix is easy!

I read Dan Brown's "Secrets of Secrets" recently. This story reminded me of some of the tech used...

Mason & Hamlin?

I sing in a couple of choirs. I've noticed more singers and musicians using tablets instead of printed music, so I decided to give it a try. Keeping all of the music from both choirs plus some books and all the the other benefits seemed like a good deal.

It was a bit of a learning curve - I used "mobile sheets" on an android tablet for one of the most affordable ways to "go digital". Got through one concert last month. I still miss seeing two pages open in front of me. Yes, I could look in landscape mode, but then everything is soooo tiny!

To get to the point, my other choir has an upcoming concert. (https://hinsdalechorale.org/) After warm-ups last night, I opened the tablet to get a message that the SD card was corrupted and all of my music was lost! Luckily, the choir manager had an emergency folder, but all of my markings on the music are gone.

Ugh. I had gotten pop-ups to back up the library, but I wasn't sure how to do that.. now I do! Downloaded the PDFs again and only use an SD for the backup now. Luckily I know the music well and can get along without much of the markings on the music. So much of my early markings are notations of where to find my next pitch during a rest - I don't need those anymore. I do highlight my line - that's one of the benefits along with the backlight in darker places to help me see the music.

Lesson learned. Back up digital information!

Wait, is that Epstein he's healing??

In this endless push to create more cost-effective efficiency, (replace human workers) I wonder in the future vision for society HOW people are expected to survive and be parts of society? I know in the science-fiction world, it was often written that people wouldn't NEED to work anymore yet still had an active part and the means to follow their dreams. I'm not seeing much of that being discussed for our future..

Had a family member that had one of those bathtubs with a door installed. Sounded like a good idea except she complained that she sat naked waiting for it to fill and also to drain all the way before the door could be used. Maybe with a heater in the room it might be more comfortable?

Another chapter in the book of life - blessings to you both!

Out to eat and it was on the screen

$4.35 for regular at our local Costco, but I see $4.09 at the suburban ones.

We live pretty close to the area in downtown Chicago where many of the rallys take place. We didn't go this year. Traffic was slow getting out of the neighborhood to attend a family birthday gathering. Thinking about the event I was reminded about something I read by John Pavlovitz recently on how they are most important for those protesting, not so much about making any change to the minds on the other side.

"We’ve already had two massively successful No Kings Day events, and as cathartic and encouraging as they were, things here are far worse than they were then.

The Constitutional crises are piling up.
We’re immersed in unnecessary and unwinnable wars halfway across the world.
This Administration’s disregard for legality and morality is escalating.
The complete Epstein files are still concealed, the monsters within them still evading their reckoning.
ICE is still ravaging our communities with impunity and with taxpayer funding.
And our traitorous, cognitively-decimated, sociopathic Predator-In-Chief has become more unstable, more violent, and more unhinged than before.
We’re a hair’s breadth from full-on fascism.

The last No Kings Day protests didn’t stave off the chaos that is now here, and it won’t prevent what this regime has planned, unless we all do more than show up on Saturday.

Rallies and protests are powerful, important things.

They are a necessary visual reminder that we’re not alone.
They help provide a sense of agency in dark days, to help our minds right-size the threats that seem so towering and so beyond our reach.
They give us a chance to stand with a chosen community and be a tangible response to the things that burden us.
They connect us with people we live, work, and study alongside and give us the chance to forge partnerships and build coalitions."

snip

"We need to remember that transformative activism is found in sustained movements, not in soothing moments, and we need to find our place in the messy and local battles throughout this nation until we actually strike fear into the oppressors and oligarchs, and upend the new order they are constructing where we are truly powerless."

https://johnpavlovitz.substack.com/p/no-kings-day-is-coming-but-does-it

Thanks for keeping things working!

The Active brand. Pretty sure we had the Dirty labs one before but never paused the washer to give the enzymes longer to work. I do use the Dirty labs dishwasher powder and that's been working well.