WTF-Beta

Boston baked beans with Boston brown bread. Beans are scratch made; the bread came out of a can - as the good lord intended! [image: 1743268690099-b15e0cb3-e02d-4905-97c5-38f94310182c-image.jpeg]

I was going to try and take one for the team and watch the whole thing so the rest of you didn’t have to, but I just couldn’t make it to the end. I’m sorry that I failed y’all.

@Steve-Miller - Looks like a great show. Thanks for the pics. I haven't been in years, but the Chicago Botanic Garden also has an orchid show. I loved looking at the various types of plants. I used to grow some of the more common varieties of orchids and had reasonably good luck getting them to bloom. I was even the proud owner of a plant that Mrs. @kluurs gave me when I visited their home for a piano party. I've been winnowing down my house plants little by little. The orchids were the most demanding care-wise, so I ended up selling them on craigslist probably 10 years ago. I still have offshoots of a ficus that I gave Mr wtg when we first started dating in the late 1970s. And the offspring of a clivia that I bought at Home Depot in the 90s. I grew new plants from the seeds. Speaking of which, I need to divide and repot those clivia and find them new homes...

It's been suggested to me many times by smart well meaning people I have respected a lot I skip the news entirely. One lady told me after I told her it was causing me stress-- "Turn it off!" Well, the truth is I have only so much attention to give it anyway.

I think it is fun! I would love to attend a party there. No way would I want to live there. Oh, and that blue and white check area rug goes with nothing. I am wondering if the house, stripped of all the byzantine gilded garbage, actually has good bones. Impossible to tell from the photos. Obviously they have an insane amount of money to be able to irrigate a lawn like that. I suppose it is possible they are in a less desertified area of AZ, but still.

Yeah, Jack loved it! Gave him a chance to run around hard and he slept all the way home

Roast potatoes are truly the tastiest way to eat potatoes, even better than chips. Best when the potatoes are first chopped into smaller chunks... Mrs A can do them perfectly. I usually microwave and then mash spuds, using butter and pepper. I actually leave the skin in the mash for a bit of healthy roughage.

Looks kind of like snakes. But I'll bet it's good. Is there anything the air fryer can't do?

In the rice cooker pot in the rice cooker. It doesn’t get hot enough to sear but it’s perfect for sweating vegetables.

I'm exhausted just reading this. I don't have the bandwith. The prospect of everything he's talking about feels just catastrophic.

Oh wow, thanks for posting this, @Steve-Miller ! I only watched the first 6 minutes or so, I’ll have to come back and watch the rest later. But yeah, “too perfect” is never good. That’s why I was never truly satisfied with having a digital piano, in that “too perfect” experience, the total absence of truly organic sound, there’s no magic…

Can they please buy Montana too?

I have watched Wild Robot. Yeah, it's among the better animated feature films. Recommended.

@Jodi Which reminds me, how is your back doing these days? Sounds like you’re feeling better?

I have an explanation: Manuchurian Candidate 2025 - The President. Elon convinced Trump to get a Neuralink device and he's controlling him via a Starlink connection. The plan is working. As for the Koch Brothers: When some of the biggest donors to conservative causes made explicit their electoral opposition to a second Trump term way back in February of 2023, it came as something of a shock to the Republican orbit. After all, the powerful network organized under the auspices of billionaire industrialist Charles Koch had officially remained neutral in Trump’s 2016 and 2020 campaigns, a sign of how uncomfortable his allies were with a candidate whose positions were so far afoul from their own on so many issues. But by the time the network gathered at the start of 2023, their position on Trump was not really a point of discussion. The deadly Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021, was finally a step too far. The chief of the network’s main political arm, Americans For Prosperity, told her patrons that they were ready to back an alternative Republican who showed promise of winning. The group ultimately plowed more than $32 million into former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, and another $10 million in broader anti-Trump efforts before throwing in the towel. The hopes of reclaiming the party from this gatecrasher were dashed and they had to live with Trump as their standard bearer. https://time.com/7018266/trump-republicans-koch-network-2024/

The average person has no clue this is happening. Or what it could mean. We have tariffs that are certain to increase the price of food. We are losing/will lose agricultural workers either through deportation or because they won't go to work because they're afraid. And someone who wants to make a name for himself is ordering the release of water out of reservoirs so he can catch a soundbite. "See, I said I'd get water flowing to LA". Wonder what he'll say this summer if the farmers don't have water for crops. Can't wait to see who he blames for the results.