Does the company that bought Osprey still honor the warranty?

Keen Newports have the finger loops on tongue and heel. I think Blundstone boots do, too? I’m sure someone with Blundstones can confirm or refute that.

Those loops are so handy, I agree.

Bicycle. No gas expenses, no tabs, no loan, free parking. I understand how it works and can mostly fix it myself for very little money. I can take quiet side streets and arrive in a much better mood, plus my fat lazy ass gets some exercise.

Coffee makes me incredibly hungry (any caffeine does). This would backfire on me soooooo bad.

I have to wonder if an extra cup of any liquid per day would help avoid weight gain. You hear so much about people misinterpreting thirst as hunger - they eat instead of drinking.

I’m finding the opposite. Books that I loved when younger are even better as I re-read them now. Ursula le Guin, Terry Pratchett (their YA and their adult books) have so much more nuance and subtlety than I was aware of when I just read them for the adventure and story. There are some profound bits of wisdom and wry observation tucked in those books.

Billy Connolly

A “final solution”, as it were.

This is cool. I always wondered why I can instantly grasp 1 through 4, but 5 and up become abstract. Thank you for posting this!

At least, not yet…

“The universe danced towards life. Life was a remarkably common commodity. Anything sufficiently complicated seemed to get cut in for some, in the same way that anything massive enough got a generous helping of gravity. The universe had a definite tendency towards awareness. This suggested a certain subtle cruelty woven into the very fabric of space-time.”

• Terry Pratchett, Soul Music

Despite claims by school officials that the adaptation had not been approved, KFDM notes that the book “was on a reading list sent to parents at the start of the school year,” so the district’s suggestion that the teacher “went rogue” seems…not true at all in the, y’know, actual sense of the word. A source close to the teacher told KFDM that the school’s principal had approved a syllabus that included the book. “There is an active investigation,” Mike Canizales, a spokesperson for the Hamshire-Fannett ISD, told the outlet.

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/09/texas-school-fires-teacher-over-anne-frank-graphic-novel

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/fathead

In common North American usage “fat head” and “big head” imply hubris or pride, as well.

Dusting cloths: tear old cotton flannel sheets into squares. You can do this to sheets in your own rag-bag, or buy sheets at the charity shop. Old towels work well, too. They can be washed and re-used for quite a while. Old cotton knits work fine, if you don’t mind waving your dingy old tightie-whities and sweat stained tees around.

Anything soft and slightly fuzzy, and if the cloth alone doesn’t do the trick all you have to do is get it damp with plain water.

Hmmmmm… processed slurry of animal cells grown in a chemical bath vs tasty plate of beans and rice from the neighborhood taco truck.

Which is more affordable?

Which has less environmental impact?

(Something about lab-grown meat gets up my nose, and I can’t quite articulate why.)

I don’t understand how it is more ethical to create an embryo from a stem cell than to create one from a sperm and egg. Both are viable, neither is a person. How are they different?

(Keeping the stem cell version in vitro past the the age when it would need to implant isn’t really a solution/distinction because we can do the same thing with a sperm-and-egg version.)

I hope you are doing better now.

70,000 people without toilets… eeek.

And petting wildlife. Or trying to take selfies with wildlife. Or feeding wildlife.

No, no, and no.

Even a cute lil’ chipmunk is a no-no. Bison, moose, and their sweet huggable calves are serious no-nos.

It seems a little over-the-top to be angry at physicists from 30-40 years ago for being wrong.

Scientists aren’t priests, and science isn’t a religion. Expecting scientists to always be right, always be humble, and everything they add to “science” to be sacred and correct and immutable is a little silly.

This is how science works. It’s messy. It goes in delicious looking directions that turn out to be dead ends. Humans create ideas (with all the hubris and errors of being human) that other humans test (with all the hubris and errors of being human.)

I was struck by how angered she was by physicists thinking they were right and saying “we’re doing something real”. They were doing something real: they were exploring and testing an idea. Without that work, the idea could never have been proved wrong.

(My personal “string theory” is that string/cordage is humanity’s greatest invention, and my user name is a joke.)