Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

This blog will pay for itself.

Battle won, war still ongoing.

My years-long effort to drive family and friends away has really paid off this year.

Technically true, but collectively nonsense

I can’t take this shit today. I just can’t.

We are builders in a constant struggle with destroyers. let’s win this.

When do we start airlifting the women and children out of Texas?

We still have time to mess this up!

Militantly superior in their own minds…

They fucked up the fucking up of the fuckup!

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

And we’re all out of bubblegum.

Everybody saw this coming.

Make the republican party small enough to drown in a bathtub.

But frankly mr. cole, I’ll be happier when you get back to telling us to go fuck ourselves.

Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.

Teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.

An almost top 10,000 blog!

Black Jesus loves a paper trail.

Sitting here in limbo waiting for the dice to roll

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

A thin legal pretext to veneer over their personal religious and political desires

Fuck these fucking interesting times.

Whoever he was, that guy was nuts.

Sunday Evening Open Thread: Crossing the Streams

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NOT GONNA BE A PROBLEM FOR AARON RODGERS…

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Medium Cool with BGinCHI – Discovering Japan

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In case you’re new to Medium Cool, BGinCHI is here once a week to offer a thread on culture, mainly film & books, with some TV thrown in.  We’re here at 7 pm on Sunday nights.

While I would love to do an entire Medium Cool on the music of Graham Parker (my childhood & adolescent musical crush), I’m just using this to frame our discussion this week on Japanese art and culture. I’ve been watching a lot of Japanese film lately (Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, especially) and my son is getting old enough to be into anime and manga.

I’m curious what kinds of Japanese culture you’re interested in. I have a decent familiarity with literature and film, but wondering also about other areas.

I’m not sure I’ve seen a Japanese TV series besides “Giri/Haji” (and it has English actors in it). How about other art forms?

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Betsy – Watercolor Landscapes and House Portraits!

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Our featured artist today is Betsy!  Let’s give her a warm welcome.

If you would like your talent featured in the Artists in Our Midst series, send me an email message.  Don’t be shy!  This is the final Artists post in the queue, so please get in touch if you would like to be featured.

Betsy

I paint landscapes in watercolor.

I have a couple of favorite subjects.

One is the sense of a  particular ecosystem or plant community. I want to be able to remember the sound of the insects buzzing in the beach dunes, or make you imagine the coolth of the air sifting down a shaded hillside in a northern forest.

My other main interest is structures in their setting — a town or rural village.  I’m especially interested in the spaces between buildings.  

I’ve also painted a few house portraits for friends and clients.  Right now I’d like to do more work on commission, since I just left a “real” job due to coronavirus concerns.

I hope you enjoy these paintings!

Update from Betsy:

I am is available to take commissions for art.  I specialize in house portraits, but if you would like a different subject, let me know and I may be able to do something a little different for you.  I would love to do some art for you!

Previously I have mostly done commissions for friends and neighbors, so bear with me as I start to scale up — this feels like a good moment for it.

My email for commissions is BetsyMakesArtForYou at the google email place.

On The Road - Betsy - Watercolor landscapes and house portraits 9
Adirondack Mountains

Mixed hardwood-conifer forest and pond edge

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Sunday Morning Open Thread: Little Fuzzies

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Too tired for news, so you get H. Beam Piper spinoffs.

At last, the cartoon convention of a dog following a sausage on a string come to life!…


The Guardian‘s story about Millie the rescue jack russell / whippet cross, and her scary adventure. Includes a short video, too.

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Sunday Morning Garden Chat: Resolutions?

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No pics this week, because I can’t post what I haven’t gotten…

… Just a short while ago, we were doing all manner of fall gardening and yard care. At the end of the season, gardening can seem more like a chore than an enjoyable hobby. We harvest vegetables, fret about mowing the lawn, deal with leaves, clean perennial beds and have to plant garlic before the frost.

Now, however, the memory slate has been cleaned. Somehow we’ve forgotten all the hard work last year’s gardens entailed. Refreshed, we find ourselves spending an afternoon browsing the internet looking for this year’s seeds or thumbing through an actual, hard-copy, seed catalog planning this year’s gardens…

Here are a handful of 2022 resolutions that acknowledge some new approaches to our hobby:

* For one thing, this is the year for gardeners to fully recognize our role in dealing with global warming. Those two-cycle, gasoline engines used in our yards, for example, are no longer environmentally acceptable and need to be phased out of home gardening. This season, accelerate replacement of your old mowers, blowers and weed eaters with manual, battery or corded versions. Even just skipping a session, mowing just once a month, will make a huge difference.

* Next, gardeners are well known for sharing. Make some of your plantings for the greater good. For example, we gardeners have the ability to help increase pollinator, butterfly and bird populations, which have been in serious decline. All it takes is planting a few things that support them. There are enough of us that, combined, such efforts will make a huge difference.

And with over 85 million of us gardening, planting a row of food to donate to the hungry will have an impact on millions of people without food security…

Probably because we have yet to get enough snow to hide last year’s failures, this year’s new seed catalogs have not inspired me to the usual dreams of excess. I still need to finish redoing the raised beds in the front yard, as the pitiful rootpouches of waiting iris and hemerocallis transplants attest. And that’s not gonna leave me (or the Spousal Unit) energy or attention for more than a minimum half-dozen or so ‘essential’ heirloom tomato plants. So y’all get to mock me if I break down and set the credit cards on fire over the next six weeks…

What’s going on in your (planning / memories / indoor) gardens, this week?

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COVID-19 Coronavirus Updates: Saturday / Sunday, Jan. 22-23

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Since people are asking:

… Research suggests that the original version of the coronavirus and early variants had an incubation period of about five days, on average. The Delta variant seems to move faster, with an average incubation period of about four days. Omicron is swifter still, with an incubation period of roughly three days, according to a recent C.D.C. study.

The amount of virus that builds up in someone’s body is known as viral load. In general, people are thought to be most infectious when their viral loads are high.

In a recent study of the Alpha and Delta variants, researchers found that people tended to reach their peak viral loads about three days after infection and clear the virus about six days after that, on average.

Whether Omicron follows the same pattern remains to be seen. In one preliminary study, researchers found that Omicron infections were about a day shorter than Delta infections and resulted in slightly lower peak viral loads, on average. But the difference might be due to higher rates of pre-existing immunity — as a result of vaccination or prior infection — among the people who were infected with Omicron. Another research team found that among vaccinated people with breakthrough infections, Omicron and Delta produced similar levels of infectious virus…

Earlier in the pandemic, people were advised to use a rapid test five to seven days after a potential exposure to the virus. Given Omicron’s shorter incubation period, many experts now recommend taking a rapid test two to four days after a potential exposure. (They also recommend taking at least two rapid tests, about a day apart, in order to increase the odds of detecting an infection.)

People who are testing to reduce the risk of transmitting the virus to others, for example at an upcoming gathering, should test as close as possible to the event itself, experts said…

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