My car is now ten years old but it has multiple modern conveniences. This includes auto-temp control, heated seats, active headlights (which turn with the front wheels and change angles when going up or down hills to keep them level), and other goodies. While my wife loves the butt warmer, my fave by far is the backup camera. It is so useful to me. I recommend those for everybody and every car.
Foggyday’s Theme Music
Mood: newsfogged
The fog has been another move on us, taking it to eleven. Can barely see the houses on the other side of the street. What can be seen is smeared as the fog acts like petroleum jelly on a phone lens.
Ayep, this is Twosda, Jan. 7, 2024. 38 F outside with fog and rain, and going up to 46 F. Stagnant air warning in effect, rain expected. Man, t’is nothing when you look at the storm hitting a huge part of North America. Snow and ice are having their way with many U.S. states. Flights are being cancelled, snow is accumulating, traffic is a mess as snow plows and police cars get stuck in some places. A state of emergency has been called in parts of at least seven states. Good to have a president in President Joe Biden who knows how to react to these situations. At least for a little while longer. After 1/20, prepare for a blizzard of bullshit, regardless of what’s going on.
Don’t think ’bout going to Canada to escape it, neither, as blizzards were ruling up there as well.
Meanwhile, a friend in Alaska reports, “Another major melt combined with high winds and rain. In January. Which is normally our coldest month.” Their temp was 40 F although it felt like 24.
Saw a headline: “Meta ending its fact-checking program”. Like users weren’t aware that they checked out of fact-checking months ago. Then came more: “Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Tuesday said the social media company is ending its fact-checking program and replacing it with a community-driven system similar to that of Elon Musk’s X.” My brain went, hahahahahahahahahahaahahah. Then it added, hahahahahaha. Well, they’re fooling someone with that proclamation. I suspect those being fooled are either low-information individuals – LOIs – or right-wingers who declare up is down because that’s what PINO-elect Trump tells ’em.
I’m off Facebook for the most part. Check on friendlies around the world on it. Don’t share nor post. I only issue emojis for certain folks and their situations. I don’t use Instagram, or Threads. I’ve shifted to Blue Sky and Mastodon for texting and most of my social media thrills.
But to say that Meta is moving to something similar to X. Wow. X, where Elon Musk lies and threatens and then asks for everyone to be more positivie in their posts. Man, that’s downright capital P Pathetic.
Today’s music came from the car radio. It seems like every time I got in the car in the last week, this song was played. I’d drive to library and it would immediately come on. Return home twenty minutes later — a six minute drive at 25 per — and they play it again. It’s like, how many times will they play this in one day? Like they’re watching me and announcing, “Okay, he’s in the car, go, go, play, play “Too Sweet” now!
Yes, the song is “Too Sweet” by Hozier from just last year. After hearing it so often, I think The Neurons got hozierfied. Cuz now I’m walking around the house with the tune in the morning mental music stream (Trademark fogged in):
I think I’ll take my whiskey neat
My coffee black and my bed at 3
You’re too sweet for me
You’re too sweet for me
I take my whiskеy neat
My coffee black and my bed at 3
You’re too sweet for mе
You’re too sweet for me
h/t to Genius.com
Many people — especially those of an older gen. — will call this an earworm. I call it a brainworm. I believe this is one of those instances where I must share the song with others in order to release from my head.
Coffee and I had a kitchen counter summit. Terms were agreed for the day. Here’s the music. Into the fog I go. Cheers
Fogda’s Wandering Thoughts
Was in the library. Coldish day with air temp circulating at 42 F as rain and clouds said no to the sun.
A woman and child walked past. The adult seemed in her late thirties. Child, a girl, looked ten. I assume Mom and daughter but I don’t know. What struck was their dress. The adult wore boots, gloves, a knitted hat, and a puffy jacket. Kid wore crocs. Loose pants which looked like fleece jammies. A thin long-sleeved top.
Out they went into the weather together. I said something to my wife about the difference in their dress. She replied, “Yes, those young people just don’t seem to feel it, do they?”
No, they don’t.
Fogda’s Theme Music
Mood: brandnufogncoffee
We’ve slipped into foggy bottom or foggy bottom slipped over us. Fogda, Jan. 6, 2025. 40 degrees F, sunshine has taken some time away, apparently, giving us over to clouds and rain. 56 F is the projected high. An air stagnation advisory has been slapped on us.
Yesterday turned into fine, sunshiny day. Of course, we were slightly out of town for most of the afternoon, and in a slighter higher elevation, visiting our friends for a party. Good cast of characters, and the house is beautiful. The owner joked that it was a two-bedroom five two hundred square foot home with five fireplaces. Main house had a beautiful small living room and a large living room which used to be the original owner’s home movie theater. That was a natural for that original owner as he owned a chain of movie theaters. Finances crashed and he quit using the house during COVID. The owner related that everything had quit working and they needed to repair and replace multiple things when they bought the home. But they did the job and it showed. There’s also a .5 acre fishing pond, heated pool, a separate artist studio, two-bedroom guest house with a two-car garage, and an RV parking garage with space for three RVs, which cracks up the current owner. “Definitely something we don’t need,” he said. It’s about eight minutes out of Ashlandia. A hallway off the foyer has his and hers coat closets, along with a guest closet.
Papi continues losing fur at a startling rate. He’s not going bald or anything; fur keeps growing in to replace it. We don’t know what’s going on. His appetite is good, he’s as perky and conversant as ever, and he looks good. We keep thinking, must be the weather, but he’s never done this before. We eye him for signs of things going amiss. If it’s there, we’re missing it.
Today’s song was born out of texts swapped between Mom, me, and a sis in the Pittsburgh, PA, region. They had snow coming down, impeding traffic, limiting outdoor options. The Neurons took the opportunity to start “Snow (Hey Oh)” by Red Hot Chili Peppers in the morning mental music stream (Trademark blizzard). The 2005 song is about getting a fresh start. Hey, it’s kinda still a new year, new month, new day, and a new government administration in the U.S. Okay, I kind of choked on that last one. I’ve always enjoyed this hard rocker. Easy to follow and sing along. And hey, it’s also about surviving, so there we go.
Be chill and don’t thrill. Coffee and I ran into each in the kitchen and swapped some spit. Hey ho, listen to what I say yo, it’s a fresh new day. Here’s the music. Cheers
Grenday’s Wandering Political Thoughts
I read a note on Mastodon. Here it is:
I wondered about the veracity. Because anything on the net is suspect these days. So I searched on the G spot, “Did meta donate to biden’s inauguration fund”. As you can imagine, the results came back with pages informing me about how the Z guy and Meta donated bunches to Trump’s inauguration, and others’ reactions to that. Didn’t answer the question, of course. Search engines rarely do these days.
Tried Finecomb. Even worse results.
Bing came closer to the answer on page two of its results. FoxBusiness reported, “Biden inauguration bankrolled by corporate donors like Amazon, Google, Boeing”. Check out the story. Other than that headline and a qualifier that’s it’s not that unusual as a business practice for corporations to donate to inauguration funds, they didn’t cite any company’s actual donation.
Finally, I tried DuckDuckGo. Sadly, their results were about the same as Alphabet’s search engine.
What is funny in a sad and bitter way is that FoxBusiness barely covers the fact that corporations and oligarchs are pouring money into Trump’s inauguration fund after that headline grab about Biden’s inauguration fund, that I could find. That just doesn’t seem like news to them.
BTW, I did learn through FoxBusiness that Robinhood donated $2,000,000 to Trump’s inauguration fund. So while there’s a lot of shrieking about Meta & Z guy, the B guy and Amazon, and Google, others are rushing in with little fanfare.
Ann Telnaes sure had it right, didn’t she?
Grenday’s Theme Music
Mood: Coffeerockin
Good morning to you on this Grenday, January 5, 2025. It’s a foggy-cloudy-sunny-raining day out there. Eastern sunshine is narrowly prevailing, giving us a grey Sunday, or Grenday. Currently, we’re sitting at 42 F in our valley with a high of 51 F possible. All this is an improvement over yesterday. It saw us have a few minutes of sunshine. Hours of subsequent cold rain turned it into a gloomfest.
So today is better! Not better than places which are warm and sunshiny, but better than places smothered in ice and snow, wrecked with winds and burdened by freezing temperatures. Yes, definitely better than them.
A bright spot is that snow has accumulated in the mountains in southern Oregon. Our snowpack is at 164% of normal. That’s good news for the summer, as we depend on that slow melting ice to keep our cisterns, reservoirs, streams, and rivers filled during the long hot months when rain is rarely experienced. And it’s good to have the ground soaked again against another drought striking up. The wet ground and vegetation is a significant buffer against wildfires starting and spreading. So, it’s all good news, as long as it can be sustained for another month. That puts me at a point of grimacing agains the rain and mildly chilly temperatures with its gloom, and cheering for it for what it brings us.
Today’s song is an upbeat one. Last time — only time — that I shared it on here was when the lovely Quinn was diagnosed with lymphoma and living out his final month. Such a sweetheart, but that’s how life treats us all, regardless of how we live or our merits and debits. Unlike then, the cats are not to blame for the song’s morning mental music stream (Trademark spinning) residency. Jimmy Eat World came out with “The Middle” in 2001. Written when the band had been dropped by their first record company, it’s an upbeat rocker with some affirming lyrics.
Hey
Don’t write yourself off yet
It’s only in your head you feel left out or looked down on
Just try your best
Try everything you can
And don’t you worry what they tell themselves when you’re away
It just takes some time
Little girl, you’re in the middle of the ride
Everything, everything will be just fine
Everything, everything will be alright, alright
h/t to Songfacts.com
Today, the song emerged after I witnessed the clouds moving out, letting the sunshine wax bright.
Coffee and I have achieved cofftente. It’s kind of like detente but it’s not. Here’s the music. Hope an awesome day carries you through to tomorrow. Cheers
The Car & Contest Dream
I dreamed I had a very fancy sportscar. I knew it was quite unique, exotic, and expensive. It seemed dark in color but I never saw its color or make, and know little about its shape other than some brief glimpses. It appeared low and svelte with organic curves, along the lines of sports racers in the mid-sixties.
My wife and I were traveling in it. Along our way, we paused to submit an entry in a contest. Everyone was participating in it. My wife took care of that entry, going in and providing them some sample of clever engineering that we’d either found or created. Coming back to the car, she told me there was another opportunity to come back to give them an entry at three that afternoon. We agreed we would return and drove on.
We drove to our destination without incident. Then, with sunset chasing us, we headed back the other way. First we stopped to submit another entry. Since my wife did the first one, I volunteered to go in and take care of this one.
Inside this well-lit, austere place, it was chaos. I found a counter where a rotund white man with a thin mustache was supposed to be handling the entries. He looked like he was in over his head. I brought our device to him for registering and entry. The thing, whatever it was, was round, small, and lightweight, easily residing on my open palm. I gave it to him with the paperwork and watched to see what happened, wanting reassurances we were properly vetted. He did some things but seemed to lose focus halfway through. I made it a point to pester him to ensure our entry had been processed. Reassuring me, he showed me a pullback lid from a small metal can, the sort you’d find on a pet food offering. I was horrified and protested, but then decided, the hell with it, I had to go.
I returned to my car but didn’t see my wife. Picking it up, I carried it out of a crowd of people and around a corner, and set it down with a thump. Still looking for my wife and not finding her, I reasoned that she must have gone off and would be back in a moment. But she rapped on the car window from inside the car; she’d been sitting there the entire time and was indignant about the way I’d just picked up the car and carried it because it’d been unsettling for her.
That out of the way, we and five other couples began driving down a curving multilane highway into the gathering dusk. I could hear the people talking in their cars. Many were discussing my car and me. I gently accelerated, easily outdistancing them, though I knew they remained behind me and could still hear them talking.
By now, it was a moonless and starless black night. I reached a point where the road went up a vertical grade. The car handled it with no problem, but at the top was a ceiling. Reaching it, I stopped the car and left it. I was at the juncture between a white ceiling and white wall with a blue and black pattern. There was a crawlspace access. I knew from my journey there that I had to pick up the car and carry it through this crawlspace to the other side. I knew I’d done it before but I was a little more tired this time.
Nevertheless, I scaled the wall and entered the crawlspace. The other cars had arrived and were queued to follow me. Reaching back, I picked up the car with my wife inside it. As I began wedging myself and my vehicle through the narrow space, I thought, this is stupid, and stopped.
There must be a better way, I thought.
Dream end.
She Called It Right
Without intended irony, I read about Ann Telnaes’s resignation in the NY Times.
Ann Telnaes is an award-winning, highly-regarded political cartoonist. I’d long cut ties with the Washington Post as Jeff Bezos, the WaPo owner, revealed his colors and moved away from being a supporter of responsible, trustworthy journalism. (I keep ties with the NY Times mostly for the cultural information but they don’t inspire me with their journalism, either.)
The NYT story, by Benjamin Miller, said that Ann Telnaes resigned after her cartoon was rejected. She accurately portrayed Bezos and other billionaires genuflecting at a statue of PINO-elect Trump. Bezos, who would not let the newspaper endorse Kamala Harris, didn’t like cartoon, demonstrating once and for all, that man cannot handle the truth.
And Ann Telnaes called it right.
Saturday’s Wandering Political Thoughts
It begins to appear that democracy will not end with a bang nor a whimper, but a tweet. There are billions of individuals, mostly men, but peppered with women, who will cheer that. No, I take that back. They will not cheer because they will not know that democracy has ended. The trappings will continue long after the government has been re-shaped into some form of authoritarianism that endorses wealth and greed and treats the wealthy has a separate class, with a better set of rights and more lenient judicial tolerance.
Yes, much of it has already taken place. The groundwork is there. The billionaires are lining up to make it happen. And social media is the engine.
This gloomy view comes out of a new Dame magazine article. MPS brought it to my attention via their post, “It’s the Media”, as did Scottie’s Playground. I new some of the information Dame presented, but they delivered with deeper and harder facts.
The Dame article is “America’s Right-Wing Propaganda Problem Might Be Terminal“. The article’s great, overarching declaration is, Millions voted for Trump with a distorted understanding of who he is, what he supports, what his policies will actually accomplish, and how severely his second term will hurt them and those they love.
Yes, many of us were aware of the ignorant, undecided voters out there, wholly uncritical thinkers who were briefly engaged with the election, voted, declared themselves good citizens — I Voted — and helped create a disaster set of circumstances. But their ignorance was firmly aided by the right wing, funded by billionaires like the latest villian, Elon Musk, and gleefully supported by the GOP.
Listen, if the GOP tells you that they love America and support democracy, don’t buy it. They do not. Some Republican voters probably do love America and support democracy, but they’re being conned, and they don’t know it.
Worse, of course, is that this phenomena is not just rooted in the United States. It’s a plague, a virus, that’s spreading around the world, undermining democracy and freedom without any shots being fired. This — a right-wing media composed of angry, hateful males who pose as pseudo intellectual influencers to spread their bullshit — is why we’re seeing right-wing influence increasing. People are being told lies. Immersed in the media speaking to them, they’re unaware of the truth or reality.
I still believe Trump’s administration will implode and he will personally crash. He was a convenience to advance their cause. He will be tossed aside. I’m convinced that many Americans will never realize that happened. I remain certain that the economy will worsen under Trump, but again, right-wing influencers will tell them that its great, and they will believe it so.
And so, the United States of America will become a shell of what it was, an empty vessel that once offered the kind of hope for equality and justice which is theoretically possible, and the right-wing media will tell them that’s great again, no matter what their life is like.
And they will believe.
Satrda’s Wandering Thoughts
There’s a disturbance in the force. I mean, the Internet. It doesn’t appear Trump related. Doesn’t seem to be politically connected at all.
The short of it, many games won’t load on my laptop. I’m running Windows. Surfing on Opera, Chrome, Edge. None will load the games in normal or whatever ‘stealth’ offering the browser provides. Started yesterday afternoon. Research on the net about it is useless. Search engines focus on one aspect of the question posed. In this case, they’re all about giving me answers to games. Answers to questions I didn’t ask. Information which I don’t desire.
I’m not talking multi-role games. This is Connections and Wordle at the NYTimes. Sudoku at the Seattle Times and NY Times. Spelling Bee plays fine, as does several other games. Error messages say things like, “Yikes, you’re offline.” Yet I’m not offline.
Actually, I just tried a new, broader variation of the question on DuckDuckGo. ‘can’t play games online’. Answers remain useless but at least it’s focused on my issue. Must be your connection, they tell me. Your browser. Your firewall settings, or security. Nothing that touches the nub that the rest of the net works fine, and no settings were changed and all settings are per usual, and diagnostics show nothing. My wife’s Mac laptop doesn’t share the issue. And yes, the cache has been cleared, of course. Yes, I powered up and down. Yes, everything is updated. No, the sites are not reported as down. No issues are reported on them.
Overall, it’s a small thing. More first world blues. Just annoying to me, personally. I like playing my games and getting a little rush from completing them. The larger question is, is it my machine? Or is it the net? My bet is on the latter but it’ll take time for that to be revealed.
Guess I’ll just read a book instead. Halfway through ‘The Library at Mount Char’ per my wife’s recommendaton. It’s sucking me in. Gotta go out into the gloomy day and write soon anyway.
