One semi pleasant side effect of the No Alcohol restriction I’ve been on since before the surgery (I should write some posts about the surgery I reckon) is I don’t go out to eat at my favorite places very much because they are where I do most of my drinking (margaritas usually). So this is saving me money by mostly eating from my own kitchen. Plus I have a fully stocked bar downstairs I can visit when the restriction is lifted. Restaurant and bar drinks are hella expensive.
I dine out half for food better than I can make myself, and half for company, which is why I always sit at the bar. I can chat with people at the bar. Table for one just reminds me how single I am. I won’t do table for one anymore. Staying home all the time reminds me of it too, but at least I have part-time work for now.
This is something else I like about train travel. I get to chat with my fellow passengers in the dining car and the lounge car. A certain someone once told me how good I was at getting a standoffish table talking to each other, but that’s because some situations have their own built-in ice breakers. Hi! Where y’all from? Where you headed? This your first train ride? I’ve had some amazing conversations on the train.
My problem with cancelling my Disney+ subscription is I did that months ago when I found out my Disneyland annual pass had been allowed to expire and they never told me that was going to happen.
The theme parks are apparently run as separate entities under the corporate umbrella, and Disney World spares no effort to let me know when my annual Disney World pass is getting close to expiring. I get email notices, letters (big poster card letters) in the mail reminding me that it’s time to renew. Disneyland could not have cared less and when I found out I was heartbroken because it was such a lucky break that I got it at all. Disney hands out chances just to buy an annual pass now like they’re indulgences from the gods above. So in my anger I cancelled Disney+ even though I really Really wanted to watch the next installment of its Percy Jackson series.
But I have many, Many more issues now with Disney and the parks, not the least of which is I just don’t feel safe going down to Florida anymore.
“We’ll end up having pockets of outbreaks of different types of infectious diseases,” Florida’s former surgeon general, Scott Rivkees, told the BBC. “Individuals who are older, immunocompromised adults and children who may have cancer, for example, are going to be afraid to go out into public.”
If Florida goes ahead, it would be one of the first states to officially do away with childhood vaccination mandates, which have long been a fixture in parents’ back-to-school plans. In April, Idaho’s governor signed a law loosening vaccine requirements.
These moves come as Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr, a vaccine sceptic, undertakes remaking US vaccine policy, and the nation’s public health agency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), is in turmoil.
So, dig it. DeSantis’ Florida removes vaccine mandates for school children and Walt Disney World is full of children and their parents. Pixie dust, magic and disease.
I got talked back into DVC and now I have points in Saratoga Springs (gives me walking access to Disney Springs) but I can rent my points out and get some of that money back. The parks have changed so much since I started going in 2006 it’s not the fun it used to be. The Writer’s Stop is a tap bar now, because I suppose you can make more money selling beer to adults than books to kids. Star Wars has overrun half of Hollywood Studio, The Great Movie Ride is gone, MuppetVision 3D is gone, the riverboat and Tom Sawyer Island are gone, the bar seats are back at the Tune-In Lounge but you still can’t order food. And tickets are worthless if you don’t also make a Park Reservation. Don’t get me started about park reservations!
And…a certain someone is gone. For all I know he’s back in Germany because a green card just doesn’t cut it here now.
I just don’t feel like going anymore. It isn’t fun anymore. It isn’t magic anymore.
I reckon I’ll probably let that annual pass expire too. It’s a shame because I really liked going, and even with all the complaints I just listed I could still enjoy going because Disney World is so big and I can have a great time just wandering around the parks and trails between the resorts. I do a lot of pleasure walking. But it’s in DeSantis’ Florida and I don’t feel safe going there anymore.
Not With A Bang Or A Whimper, But With The Sound Of Kissing Ass
Jim Wright today on what happened to Jimmy Kimmel…
Here in Florida, when the governor went after Disney for free speech, Democrats, liberals, the left, and people across the country stood up for the corporation and loudly pushed back against fascism.
Yesterday, @Disney sold all those people out and instead threw their Mickey Mouse hat in with the fascist government.
Disney is the Senator John Fetterman of companies.”
I am one of those people Disney sold out. I’m a gay man and a Disneyphile, and I felt directly attacked by DeSantis and the Florida republicans then. And they’re still doing it to us…
Disney stood up for us, after a fashion, and the Pride merchandise kept coming as did the acknowledgement of Pride month and the fact of our being part of the Disney family.
But this year’s Pride was carefully muted at Disney World…I was there, I saw it. You had to dig to find the references and the merchandise, and there were only one or two new items on display. If you know anything about how Disney markets itself and leaves no money on the table, it was striking. And sad. Very sad.
So you could almost see this coming. I appreciate how difficult a MAGA ruling government can make things for a company that just wants to keep doing business with the America that was. But that America is on its deathbed and if they can’t bring themselves to take the hits, stand up, and fight back, it is gone forever.
You are a media company for chrissake. You have a platform, a bully pulpit. Use it.
Today, like every day since Trump was re-elected, I grieve for my country. I’ve none to spare for Mr. Kirk, but I am sorry for what his family, and especially his kids are going though now. They did not deserve this. They deserved to have a father raise them, nurture and care for them, love them from childhood into their adulthood. I am sorry for their loss.
One could wish Mr. Kirk had spent more of his time on loving and raising his own kids, and not demonizing other people’s kids.
People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned.
-James Baldwin
But also, this…
He who fights with monsters, should see to it that he does not become a monster himself. And if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes into you also.
-Friedrich Nietzsche
I have two thistle feeders I’ve been putting out since last winter, after I discovered the woodpeckers love the new feed mix of niger seed and ground up sunflower kernels. The American goldfinches have been hitting them all summer long too, which is a new thing. Previously they’ve stayed away once the trees got their spring leaves, and I would take them down. But if the woodpeckers and the American goldfinches keep coming I reckon I’ll keep putting them out. The woodpeckers (downy) brought a chick to the feeders back in spring.
The feeders are two different sizes: tall and short. And here’s the strange/funny thing…I have to hang them correctly or the birds won’t come. Tall feeder on the left, short one on the right. If I reverse them it’s like the birds don’t see them anymore. I’ve no idea…
Yesterday morning I was in a hurry and somewhat frazzled and when I refilled the feeders I hung them backwards. I realized my mistake a few hours later, but decided to dig in my heels and see if the birds would ignore the offence. But no. All afternoon the feeders remained vacant.
So I went back out and put them in the correct order. Not two minutes later the feeders were busy again.
Falls Road and Roland Avenue are closed off today from Northern Parkway to Howard Street for the 2025 Maryland Cycling Classic. Looks like The Avenue is caught between them so only foot traffic is getting in this afternoon. Supposedly the roads open back up after 6PM today. Papi’s announced they were closing shop today but I see that post has been taken down so maybe there was just some confusion as to the timing. I can see where a lot of restaurants would be royally PO’d if they couldn’t open on an end of summer Saturday evening.
I’m fine here in Medfield. Although it’s looking like a disgustingly humid day, the more I have to zig-zag around the obstacles on my morning walk the more exercise I get.
I tested negative for COVID-19 a few days ago and my vitals all look good, so I reckon I’m done with it and my upcoming ablation procedure is going to happen on schedule. It’s just amazing, really. Only a few years ago this thing was killing people by the tens of thousands, and now two vaccines and four booster shots later and what I got was less painful than your usual case of the flu. I had a fever for just one day, and my blood oxygen level never went below 95.
Don’t ever get me started on Mr. Wormbrain Secretary of Health and Human Services and his insane ideas about vaccines. And especially childhood vaccines. In 1961 I and a bunch of my elementary school classmates got the first Sabin polio vaccines delivered via a sugar cube. The Salk vaccine had been approved for use in 1955. Those vaccines were considered miracles. Here’s why…
Look at it. This is where you are going when you throw science out the window. Without science all we have are myths, lies, and superstition. And…Darwin, eventually. That prize DeSantis lunatic Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo who got up in front of reporters the other day to announce that making childhood vaccines mandatory for school attendance was like slavery…I got your slavery right there you drooling moron.
Do Not Install Our Solar Garden Lights In Your Garden
The sad truth is most of those lovely solar outdoor garden ornaments aren’t actually made for the outdoors…
I just brought in one of these from the front yard to figure out why it wasn’t lighting up anymore, as it was getting plenty of sunlight where it was. Turned out half of it was full of rain water, and the wires inside connecting all the little LEDs corroded and broke.
I can try fixing it but why bother, it’s obviously not meant to be kept outside anywhere it rains. It seals pretty tightly but notice how the top where the solar panel is sits just slightly in from the rim of the glass bottom. Water is always going to seep slowly into that glass unless you seal it so tightly you can’t get it off to take out the battery…something I do to all my garden lights at the end of every season, and replace it with a new one at the beginning of the next.
This is just one small detour in a tale I’ll probably go into later, about how this year’s flower and garden lights display went badly wrong. A combination of the high heat, my return to work subtracting time from housework, and my aging body not having the energy needed to do everything I wanted to do this year.
Last Monday night in bed I felt a sore throat coming on. With me that’s usually the first sign I’m about to get a flu. The next day I was supposed to have a meeting with some of my co-workers but luckily I scheduled it as a web conference so I didn’t have to be in the office. Two-thirds of the way into it I had to bail out due to a rising fever.
I figured it was a flu all right. But it felt a bit odd for a flu. So just in case I used the second and last of a two pack COVID-19 home test kit I had to make sure it wasn’t You Know What after all. I’d used the first one in that box some months ago after going down to Disney World to make sure I was safe to go back to work. You can be infected and infectious for days, some say over a week, before your own symptoms show. That test came back negative.
This one…
I wasn’t terribly worried, as I’ve had a total of six vaccinations against it, starting with the two part Pfizer vaccine and four boosters spread out over the years. What bothers me mostly about this is I am a heart patient now, and I have an ablation procedure scheduled for just after my birthday. I’ve put a message up on the hospital patient portal to the surgeon asking if he would want to postpone it now and reschedule.
I was weak as a kitten, and running a fever, so I didn’t dare go outside, but I needed groceries. This brought me to use DoorDash for the first time. It’s a shopper/delivery service that will go to your local grocery store and buy things for you from a list you provide, and bring them to your door. Those of you reading this who are not single have no idea how massively this helps those of us with no close by family or significant other to bring food to us when we’re too sick to go get it ourselves. Running out of stuff in the fridge especially, since all that is perishable and you can’t keep a large supply of it on hand (I have a chest freezer for things that can withstand freezing), and also suddenly discovering that my flu meds are all out of date and now I’m too sick to go get more, was one of my big problems with getting sick and I’m all by myself. Now I don’t have to worry about that.
I keep telling myself I need to schedule a bi-yearly reminder to check all the expiration dates in my medicine cabinet and first aid kits.
Also…yes, I know…Amazon. I needed a new mouth thermometer because the one I had failed to restart when I put a new battery into it and I procrastinated about getting a new one. Things you don’t think about until you’re sick. Amazon got me a good one the same day and it was very helpful.
How bad was it/is it now? I did a little searching and found this list of common COVID-19 symptoms…per Google AI…
Fever or chills: Check. But as of my writing this it’s gone. Body temp is 98.6 on the nose. Cough: Check. Not a very bad one though and it is going away. Shortness of breath or difficulty breathing: No Sore throat: Yes, but only Tuesday Congestion or runny nose: Yes New loss of taste or smell: Oh Definitely Yes! Wednesday-Thursday it was all mucked up. Better now Fatigue: Also definitely yes, but also getting better. Muscle or body aches: Sort-of, but not very. Headache: No. Nausea or vomiting: No. Diarrhea: This would be oversharing.
So all in all I think I’m okay. Had this happened before the vaccines I’d probably be dead by now. But I’ll need to wear a mask any time I want to go outside until I know I’m clean. I’ve ordered some more COVID-19 test kits and KN95 masks. I’ll use one test kit every week until it comes back negative. Then I can dispense with the masks.
I did an overnight stay in Rockville, to go see my classmate Bill Wirths do his Reverend Billy Wirtz act at Hank Dietle’s on the Pike. He does an amazing Blues/Boogie-woogie piano act with the history of Blues and his own story in it mixed in. I don’t know which is more fun…his music or his stories.
His act is a lot of fun and he travels around the country so if he’s in your neighborhood you should catch it.
So I went down to Rockville, and since I figured I’d be sticking around for a while to explore my old neighborhood, I rented a room at a hotel next to the Twinbrook Metro station. I’ll go into my explorations in another post…things have changed So much that what little hasn’t changed just makes your heart ache. Or mine anyway. But I just want to note one Very happy change I saw next to the hotel.
You may recall this post from June 2021, where I shared the news that a certain despicable cool young people only nightspot was going under the wrecking ball. Some weeks later I ventured down to hopefully watch and get some shots of the pile of rubble it had become, only to see that it looked like it would be spared after all. The entire rest of the site had been leveled, but not that one building. I was unhappy about that, but so it goes.
So the morning after the Reverend’s performance I woke up early and decided to wander around. First thing I did was walk over to the site of what was once upon a time Fritzbee’s (later Fuddruckers) and see if the building still stood.
The massive new project they planned for the site turns out to be a art-deco-ish high rise apartment building with shopping and a Wegman’s at street level…
That’s almost all of the land that was once occupied by the old Radio Shack, some strip shopping (I used to get my art supplies at the Visual Systems store there) and a big parking lot. Some years ago they blocked off Fishers Lane where it connected to the Pike and made it all one big block. This new apartment building is sitting right over where Fisher’s lane used to be. Before I went to bed at the hotel next to it, I grabbed some night snacks at the Wegman’s and thought how nice it would be to live in a beautiful art deco apartment where I had a Wegman’s I could just take the elevator to, The Matchbox bar and grill right across the street, and an easy walk to the Metro and from there to the DC Gayborhood. But I am not going back to renting if I can help it.
And rent for a basic apartment in it is several times the mortgage on my Baltimore rowhouse, which is in a neighborhood where I can walk to everything I might need. I count my blessings.
So I took a wander to explore my old neighborhood, but first see what had happened to Fritzbee’s. It was all the way in the back of that block, almost to the train tracks. Last time I saw the old building it was close by to the new Metro parking garage and fenced off for construction.
It was Gone!
Even better…the site was now a dog park!
I had wanted the site to be sewn with salt. But covered in dog piss and shit is even better! Or to give my post from 2021 a slight rewrite…
Turn the uncool away as a matter of policy, to cultivate the shallow beautiful people, and eventually they’ll flit away to the Next Big Thing and what’s left are all the customers you might have had if you hadn’t pissed them off. And now it’ll be pissed and shit on until Rockville decides to put something else there.
Dr James Dobson, a prominent and influential evangelical leader who advised four US presidents, has died aged 89.
Dobson was a fixture in conservative US politics for decades and most recently served on Donald Trump’s advisory board for evangelical affairs.
The ministry he founded, Focus on the Family, is one of the largest in the world, with a presence in nearly 100 countries.
As we get ready to behold the commercial news media’s whitewash of this man’s life, lets pause and review the atrocities. Because this man leaves in his wake some deeply festering wounds on our nation, and especially on some of its children.
James Dobson is dead. Finally. This awful homophobe made the world a significantly worse place by his living in it. His brand of hate was tremendously influential in the modern Republican Party. Future Americans should look at Dobson with contempt and disgust, much like the racist scum of our collective past and of the Trump administration today.
…
From the very beginning of his public career, Dobson was horrible. He came to public light in 1970 with his child raising manual, Dare to Discipline. This book made him the anti-Benjamin Spock. It was openly pro-corporal punishment. He claimed to oppose child abuse, but his guidelines on this was much more vague than it was on beating the crying kids…
…In a follow-up book The Strong-Willed Child, which also advocated beating the hell out of the brats, Dobson stated about how long the beating should go on, “Yes, I believe there should be a limit. As long as the tears represent a genuine release of emotion, they should be permitted to fall. But crying quickly changes from inner sobbing to an expression of protest … Real crying usually lasts two minutes or less but may continue for five. After that point, the child is merely complaining, and the change can be recognized in the tone and intensity of his voice. I would require him to stop the protest crying, usually by offering him a little more of whatever caused the original tears.” Ah yes, keep hitting the child until their will gives up. What can go wrong?
And it wasn’t just kids that he urged hitting. It was also the family dog…
They say the abused child is greatly at risk of growing up to be an abuser. You wonder how many masked ICE thugs you see gleefully terrorizing immigrant families, separating children from parents without any hint of compassion, how many MAGA bullies and thugs on the streets and in the halls of power, were raised according to Dobson’s methods…
“There were men waiting for them in civilian clothing. The [ICE agents] detained the family for many hours, and it was a terrifying time for the two children and their mother,” said Elora Mukherjee, director of the Immigrant Rights Clinic at Columbia Law School.
“They were crying in fear. One of the agents at one point lifted up his shirt, which displayed the gun that he was carrying,” Mukherjee said. “The 6-year-old boy was terrified to see the gun. He urinated on himself and wet all his clothing. No one offered him a change of clothing for many hours.”
Dobson would approve of all of it. There’s the man. He believed himself to be God’s own right hand, and gods don’t feel shame.
[Update…] And so it begins…
Dr. James Dobson, a politically influential child psychologist who started a radio show counseling Christians died Thursday.
-ABC Action News
Democratic state Rep. Nicole Collier from Fort Worth returned to the Texas Capitol on Monday but says she remains locked inside the Capitol because she wouldn’t sign a permission slip to be under escort by the Texas Department of Public Safety.
The escorts for all House Democrats who left the state last month — preventing a vote on a GOP-led redistricting effort — are meant as a guarantee that they will return to the House by 10 a.m. Wednesday for the next special session.
She wouldn’t sign. So what? So fucking what? Seems like the rest of them did. Which means they have police “escorts” tagging along with them everywhere so they can’t leave the state again. Which means even if Collier, who wouldn’t sign, leaves the state, They’ll Still Have A Quorum!
At this point it’s just the sort of cheapshit petty harassment that republicans do, and their gutter crawling voter base just loves. If this really was a mature, principled party, they’d just shrug and let her make her statement and go on about their business (of helping Trump rig the midterms). But they are the party of the perpetually aggrieved and frightened of the world they live in. The Grand Old Poltroons. And that’s not just a democrat, it’s a black woman sassing them back. Of course she has to stay locked in. They’d sell her back into slavery if they could.
I hadn’t read any of Fred Clark’s posts in a while, I suppose for some reason I can’t get his blog to work in Feedly. So just now on a lark I checked in.
I also appreciate his telling how it feels to move into a new place in the center of town and you can walk to “a supermarket within walking distance, and a half-dozen coffee shops, four pizza places, and more restaurants and bars than I’d manage to visit over the next 15 years of living there.” Yes, urban life is Wonderful. Especially if you’re a walker. And especially so when it seems you are welcomed to it with a street fair right outside your front door.
I really need to figure out how to get his posts to show up in Feedly.
[Update…] This time I tried I got the link to Slacktivist added to My Websites easily. I have no idea what the problem was before.
In The Future Everyone Will Have 15 Minutes Of Reality…
Meanwhile, in the land of Fox News, Plantation Owner Christianity, RFK Jr and Donald Trump, a man uses AI machines trained on other people’s music, to create a band that doesn’t exist, generate thousands of mock music tracks from that mock band, put them on a streaming service that pays real bands next to nothing for their music, and then builds an army of bots to stream his mock band’s mock music and get millions in royalties from all his mock listeners.
FBI Acting Assistant Director Christie M. Curtis said: “Michael Smith allegedly produced hundreds of thousands of songs with artificial intelligence and utilized automatic features to repeatedly stream the music to generate unlawful royalties to the tune of $10 million.
SMITH created thousands of accounts on the Streaming Platforms (the “Bot Accounts”) that he could use to stream songs. He then used software to cause the Bot Accounts to continuously stream songs that he owned. At a certain point in the charged time period, SMITH estimated that he could use the Bot Accounts to generate approximately 661,440 streams per day, yielding annual royalties of $1,207,128.
SMITH spread his automated streams across thousands of songs to avoid anomalous streaming as to any single song. SMITH was aware that if, for example, a single song was streamed one billion times, it would raise suspicions at the Streaming Platforms and the music distribution companies that those streams were the result of streaming manipulation. A billion fake streams spread across tens of thousands of songs, however, would be more difficult to detect, because each song would only be streamed a much smaller number of times. As a result, SMITH repeatedly identified the need for more songs as crucial for facilitating the fraud scheme. For example, on or about December 26, 2018, SMITH emailed two co conspirators that, “We need to get a TON of songs fast to make this work around the anti-fraud policies these guys are all using now.”
If only they’d paid his royalties in mock money, say three dollar bills or one of Trump’s bitcoin things, it would have been the perfect mock crime.
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