There are two kinds of sellers at Eastern Market, most Saturdays: Growers and wholesalers. The first group grows their own produce, the second buys in bulk at the produce terminal, packages it separately and sells at a pretty good, better-than-grocery-store price. There’s no deception here, unless a customer is dumb enough to believe Michigan has a citrus crop.
Sometimes I stop at a particular wholesaler early, because he sells limes three for a dollar and we’re into lime cocktail season. This week I had to wait while the seller, clearly exasperated, searched his phone for CashApp, so a buyer could pay him $12. And call me boomer as much as you like, but this is ridiculous.
The guy I buy eggs from says this happens all the time and increases every year, because young people are abandoning cash. What’s more, older people like me seem to think it’s perfectly fine to pay for $7 worth of eggs with a $100 bill. Which is also ridiculous, unless you’re at a meat counter buying prime rib. I was reading a Facebook group for residents of my city, and there was an indignant business owner complaining that the city hadn’t enabled a parking app for its meters, and “no one carries change anymore, especially young people.” That may well be true; the manager of the waterpark I worked at two years ago noted it was taking longer every year to close out the registers in the snack bar, because younger people were simply bedeviled by quarters and dimes, and strained to count them.
I use an app to park in Detroit, because the kiosks that take cash are often inoperable, enforcement is robust, tickets are expensive and I’m nearly always staying at least an hour, which makes the transaction fee negligible. Plus, the cost to park is, for a major city, miniscule — a dollar an hour.
But in Grosse Pointe? To pop in and out of the dry cleaner? I keep an Altoids tin in my dashboard cubbyhole, filled with change. I put in a dime, get 12 minutes and leave with six still available for the next lucky parker. If I use the app, they’ll tack on a 40-cent transaction fee. The hell with that.
Add this to the list of Shit I Thought I’d Never See: That cash would become a problem.
So! The heat wave has arrived where I am. Two hours until noon, and it’s already 86. Yesterday it started cool enough that I could wear long pants, and by 1 p.m. it was oppressive. The next three days will be worse. But this is the climate we have chosen, so.
There is good bloggage, too:
Thanks to Nancy Friedman for posting, in the last thread, this Jon Carroll column, “13 Things You Should Know About My Mother,” published on M-Day 2005. (If you get a register-to-read pop-up, just reload a time or two.) Things I learned:
1 She was adopted into a wealthy family in Grosse Pointe, Mich. Her father was a politician.
2 She left Grosse Pointe to go to Vassar. When she graduated, she was supposed to return home and marry one of 200 eligible rich boys. Instead, she went to Hartford, Conn., and got a secretarial job in an insurance company.
…4 She met my father, who was poor, Irish and Roman Catholic. She married him. She was disinherited.
She never saw her father again. Well, that is a very Old Grosse Pointe thing to do to a daughter, if I do say so. Also:
8 When I was 8, she was waiting for a bus when an ash from a cigarette dropped on her pretty summer frock, and the frock erupted in flames. A passing motorist took her to the hospital. The scars on her legs took 25 years to heal.
This is the second woman I’ve heard of, suffering such a mishap. (The writer Eve Babitz was the other.) Jon’s mother’s would have happened in the 1950s, but Babitz’ was in 1997, when I like to think consumer-protection laws had largely shielded American skirt-wearers from clothing that could burst into flames. (I imagine the Trump administration is working hard to roll back these regulations, don’t you?) Maybe Babitz, famous hippie eccentric, was wearing a thrifted or imported-from-a-country-where-they-don’t-believe-in-that skirt. Whatever, a good summation on a mother’s life.
From national treasure Eli Saslow, a deep read on the spring 2025 measles outbreak in Texas. Saslow is able to get into anyone’s confidence, and portrays these…what’s the word? antivax idiots, yes. These antivax idiots come across sympathetically, but my heart was left as cold as stone. Here’s the local chiropractor, who does a lot of non-chiropractic health care in West Texas:
Most of what he remembered about measles came from an old “Brady Bunch” episode, where the children celebrated staying home from school and played board games. “If you have to get sick, sure can’t beat the measles,” one of the children said. …“I feel like I’ve been lied to,” Kiley told his wife as his fever rose to 104 degrees.
“Lied to” by a sitcom, check. More:
For more than a decade, Kiley and Carrollyn had debated whether to vaccinate their children. Each time, they decided against it. … In recent years, as many as 15 percent of families in West Texas school districts had applied for “conscientious exemptions” from the M.M.R. vaccine. What Carrollyn feared more than measles was the remote possibility that her children might experience an adverse reaction to the shots. Two of her younger siblings had been vaccinated and had then suffered from high fevers that led to febrile seizures — scary convulsions that lasted several minutes but didn’t cause permanent damage.
“My children won’t see this disease in their lifetimes,” she always concluded. “The vaccine would probably be fine, but why take an unnecessary risk?”
The takeaway from the story is, lots and lots and lots of people not only got measles, but not the Brady Bunch board-games variety. This was a severe outbreak, with high fevers, intestinal distress and more. All four of the chiropractor’s children had to be hospitalized. Bobby Kennedy should be horsewhipped.
Finally, if you have an HBO account, I highly recommend “Surviving Ohio State,” a documentary (a film, not a series, thank God) on the sexually abusive sports doctor there, Richard Strauss. It’s a familiar story, similar to the same narrative with Dr. Robert Anderson at U-M — rumors for years, student athletes complaining of fondling during exams, an actual penetrated-while-drugged rape, etc. — but no one did anything, not one thing, about it. No, wait, there was one coach who tried to get OSU to take action. A woman, of course, coach to both the men’s and women’s fencing teams. One of the villains of the piece is none other than U.S. Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio. It’s good.
The Iraq Iran bombing I don’t have the capacity to discuss right now. But you all feel free.
OK, then. On to confront the heat and figure out a plan for the day. I’ll probably work, because why the hell not.
FDChief said on June 22, 2025 at 11:11 am
Again, if all Tubby does is declare victory and be done? I don’t see anything hugely different than the sort of thing this country has been doing since the Fifties, and while it’s grossly unconstitutional that horse is long gone.
IF and only if he’s stupid enough to go any further, then…brrrr. That way madness lies.
But there’s no actual thinking with Trump, so there’s no way to tell until something happens.
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Mark P said on June 22, 2025 at 12:39 pm
Bobby Kennedy should be horse whipped, then tarred and feathered and ridden out of town on a rail, along with a warning that that will seem like a day at the park if he ever comes back to town. He lies so much. Plain, easily checked, outright lies. This country is a disgusting shithole.
Trump bombing Iran, aside from putting the lie to his promise not to get the country into a war, was a pitiful “me too!” Given what Israel has already done, it was completely unnecessary, like watching a bully beat up someone and then kicking the victim when they are lying unconscious on the street. Israel had already crippled Iran’s air defenses. Oh how brave we are!
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Suzanne said on June 22, 2025 at 1:30 pm
“But I absolutely know that Trump’s evangelical and Pentecostal supporters — the core of MAGA — are cheering.
This all does EXACTLY what Mike Huckabee said. Bombing Iran secures Trump’s status as God’s man, the one sent to fulfill the prophetic promises that lead to the return of Jesus.
While the rest of us are trying to discern signs of fascism, many American are discerning the “signs of the times.”
We think Hitler. They think Jesus. We think of the innocent suffering. They think of the final judgment. We pray for peace. They believe that the Prince of Peace is returning with a sword.”
https://open.substack.com/pub/dianabutlerbass/p/war-and-prophetic-ecstasy?r=91g9j&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email
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Mark P said on June 22, 2025 at 2:11 pm
End-timers are morons. Oops. I mean historically ignorant. All the end times bullshit is completely, entirely, totally and fully unbiblical. It’s not there. They are blindly and ignorantly following a 19th Century bullshit artist who came up with the idea from misreading the book of Revelations.
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JodiP said on June 22, 2025 at 2:55 pm
I am about to enjoy the Pride concert by the Twin Cities Gay Men’s chorus. My longest term friend is singing in it and it’s all Broadway Diva hits!
I came super early and then it was grabbed a seat in the waiting area. The very nice man stated it was for Kack, his partner, but I stayed and chatted for a few minutes. He just resigned from the chorus after forty three years of performing. Gay people are amazing.
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Jakash said on June 22, 2025 at 3:09 pm
“a dollar an hour.” Uh, say what? Holy moly! In Chicago, to park in the heart of downtown is $7.00 an hour. Some of the neighborhoods around downtown are $4.75 an hour. The cheapest spots in the least trendy neighborhoods are $2.50 an hour. The bonus, of course, being that the money goes to a private company and not the city itself.
Thanks for the thumbs-up for “Surviving Ohio State.” We saw that show up on HBO (er, Max?) (er, soon to once again be HBO Max?) but there weren’t enough reviews on Rotten Tomatoes for us to decide to go for it.
I believe it was Chekhov who proposed that, if a 30,000 lb. bunker buster bomb is introduced in 2015, a bunch of them will be used by an orange ignoramus “president” in 2025.
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Julie Robinson said on June 22, 2025 at 5:05 pm
Might as well fiddle while Rome burns…around here some small businesses have gone cash free after experiencing multiple break-ins. My own two kiddos rarely carry cash and are used to paying for purchases on their phones. Our credit union doesn’t accept loose coins, period, only rolled coins. At least they’ll give you the paper tubes.
At the other extreme, my hometown of Sycamore, Illinois still has penny parking meters, in a deliberate attempt to retain small town charm. What will they do when there’s no more pennies, I wonder.
And I remember visiting someone in the Foster/Kedzie area of Chicago where residential street parking required a pass. They prepaid for a stack of them and you had to run back out to slide it under the windshield wipers before the enforcement person came around. I tried to give them money to cover it, but they wouldn’t let me pay. It felt like a disincentive to having company.
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Brandon said on June 22, 2025 at 9:02 pm
If you grow them indoors, you could have your own citrus.
https://www.englishgardens.com/winter-citrus-care/
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Chris said on June 22, 2025 at 9:03 pm
I think Eve was wearing a vintage tutu. She was driving home from a party when ash from her cigar ignited the tutu. She never fully recovered.
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Jeff Gill said on June 23, 2025 at 7:03 am
MarkP is not a fan of John Nelson Darby, apparently.
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Suzanne said on June 23, 2025 at 8:06 am
Another sad story of a needless death from medical misinformation, this time promoted by the victim’s mother.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/crenzwyvpn1o
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ROGirl said on June 23, 2025 at 9:29 am
My advice: stay hydrated, keep out of the sun, and avoid the news.
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basset said on June 23, 2025 at 11:20 am
MarkP, say more about the “19th-century bullshit artist,” if you would… not familiar with that situation.
Meanwhile, I’m coming up on halfway through the thousand-page Heinlein biography. Still interested, still enjoying it.
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Jeff Borden said on June 23, 2025 at 11:59 am
There are numerous reports Iran moved people and materials from those sites prior to tRump’s raid. And, apparently, no radiation has been detected, which suggests the bunker busters didn’t work.
How much did we spend on this operation? We can’t afford Meals on Wheels or Head Start, but there’s always cash for war.
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Julie Robinson said on June 23, 2025 at 12:21 pm
And Presidential golf games.
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Mark P said on June 23, 2025 at 12:26 pm
Basset — Jeff Gill got it right. I was referring to John Nelson Darby, who played a big part in end times theology in the early 1800’s. As to the biblical interpretations that lead to end times theology, I like what Dan McClellan has to say about that and other aspects of religion. He is a biblical scholar who does a lot of videos on religion. The ones I like best are the ones where he takes on modern fundamentalist Christianity and Christian nationalism. He is a Mormon, but he keeps his personal religious beliefs out of what he says, as far as I can tell. Google ‘Dan McClellan end times’ and you’ll get a number of links to various videos he has done on the subject. Basically, he says that the book of Revelation is directed specifically to the environment of the early church and has nothing to do with predictions about any future, much less ours. I don’t want to influence anyone’s understanding of McClellan’s stuff, but I find it resonates with my own understanding of things.
I think I can pretty fairly sum up McClellan’s assessment of modern end-times theology: bullshit.
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alex said on June 23, 2025 at 1:32 pm
We’re back from Canada. We rented a minivan from Avis/Budget and it was filthy and the AC conked out during our trip. After we took delivery of the van last week, we noticed that the recesses in the floor were full of food debris, and when we tried to clean with a Shop Vac we only got a few loose jelly beans, Skittles and crushed potato chips. Everything else was saturated with spilled soda pop and stuck to the floor. The AC worked the first few days, then stopped blowing cold and we drove home for 10 hours in 90+ heat.
When I returned the vehicle this morning, I alerted the clerk that the AC hadn’t been working and that she should know this before renting it out again. No response. No apology or thanks or any attempt to make things right. You’d think the least she could do was promise an upgrade the next time around. Well there won’t be a next time, not with them. I wrote a scathing review on Yelp and mentioned that the last car we rented there had carpeting that had somehow come untucked and had stuffing falling out of it.
Otherwise we had a good time but it’s so good to be home again.
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Heather said on June 23, 2025 at 2:00 pm
Well, my AC decided to conk out in this heat. It turns on, but doesn’t get cooler than 84-85 degrees–and when I tried to turn it on last night after letting the cooler evening air in for a while, it actually made it hotter. The repair company can’t come out til Wednesday. I am hoping I don’t need a new one, not least because the compressor is on the roof of our building and a crane has to get the equipment up there. But it’s 25 years old, so that’s a possibility.
I keep reminding myself I got through a heat wave without AC in the 90s in Chicago that lasted five days AND the power was out for at least part of that…but I was in my 20s then and something like 800 older people died. Now I’m one of the older people and much more susceptible to overheating. My friend and I actually went camping in Wisconsin this past weekend and had to escape to a hotel in Madison on Saturday because we realized it was going to be dangerous for us to stick it out.
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David C said on June 23, 2025 at 2:44 pm
We rented a Jetta from Enterprise where the check engine light came on half way to Milwaukee. So we called them and they told us to keep driving it. Then in the middle of Chicago the low oil light came on. I called again and they said to add oil and they would reimburse me. From Oshkosh to Grand Rapids and back I added five quarts. When I brought it back and told them they shrugged like it was entirely normal.
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Sherri said on June 23, 2025 at 3:00 pm
Netanyahu didn’t attack Iran because they were close to a nuclear bomb. He attacked Iran because Hezbollah was neutered, Assad was gone, and Putin is busy in the Ukraine, so Iran is more vulnerable than they’ve been in years. Plus, Netanyahu needs to keep ratcheting up the fear to remain in power and out of jail.
He also understands how to manipulate Trump into joining his bombing spree: package up video so it looks like a triumph, and Trump will want in on the win. Reality will of course eventually sink in, but by then, he already has Trump talking about regime change. Of course, Trump will TACO, but that’s a tomorrow problem for Netanyahu, who needs to survive now.
Meanwhile, the Idiots In Charge serve the Toddler in Chief, so they just react to his whims, and there is no plan or strategy about what’s next. Why bother to think about how Iran might respond, when what you can do depends on what Trump sees on Fox News, not reality?
Of course, the whole thing is unconstitutional, but it’s not like Congress wants the responsibility. They just want to keep their offices without having to actually do anything that might threaten that status.
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Dexter Friend said on June 23, 2025 at 3:27 pm
I can’t turn off news, it’s just the way I have been since I can remember anything from Ike’s presidency. I had cable news on for 17 hours , back and forth, MSNBC and CNN. Several Democrats, most visibly AOC, want Trump impeached again, Tim Kaine and others say Iran was not developing a nuclear weapon at all, and I was astounded to hear the op utilized 125 aircraft. 7 were B2s carrying 30,000 pound bombs, necessitating many airtanker refuellings. And the B2s that actually headed to Iran left before the decoys that flew west…what subterfuge! I see the B2s flew right over my house. I’ll be damned.
Vance says we are not at war with Iran, just the nukes. The fucker should read the definition of war. One nation attacks another, it is war. How long did it take W43 to declare war when some Saudis destroyed the Twin Towers, hell, the Saudis and Osama were just declaring war on two tall buildings? Goddam, the shit we are lead to believe.
I take many old-age medicines and apparently one of them doesn’t react well to something I ate Saturday. Sunday I was in my recliner, I could only eat a little peanut butter on a cracker all day, but today I feel strong as an ox. I felt really sick Sunday. Maybe it was because I hate war. The evening Bush 41 bombed Iraq on January 17, 1991in response to the Kuwait problem, I was at work with my Walkman headset radio on. I had to stop work and settle myself as I had a panic attack, a flashback to when we were being shelled in Viet Nam 20 years prior. I instantly was back in panic mode. It was very eerie. That, thankfully, was a one-off panic attack. I was just really upset when the voters let this current maniac in the White House twice.
I live in a house , 125 years old, with a window AC, just a year old. It freezes me out so I have to sometimes raise the setting.
On The Dan Patrick Show on Friday, poll: would you rather live permanently in a -10F environment, or a 110F environment?
4 of 5 chose the cold. Me, well…I like it at 68F.
This is why I loved my year in Monterey, California. The Mediterranean climate. Yasss…
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Brandon said on June 23, 2025 at 4:36 pm
Reza Pahlavi urges regime change.
The last heir to the Iranian monarchy urged Western states on Monday to accept that the collapse of the current Iranian authorities is necessary to deliver lasting peace and regional stability.
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alex said on June 23, 2025 at 5:10 pm
Heather, I remember that summer of which you speak. A friend moved into my place when his flat on Roscoe lost power. I lived in a hi-rise on LSD and it eventually lost power. We had a candle party with all of the neighbors on my floor but couldn’t flush the toilets and soon had to vacate because of the intolerable smell. We packed bags, descended many flights of stairs and moved to a friend’s place in Andersonville; he was out of town on business but I had his keys and had been feeding his cat and watering his plants. We stayed there for the duration.
The following week, after the power came back, I shopped at the neighborhood Jewel and got sick from eating food that had obviously gone unrefrigerated and hadn’t been thrown out. It was a long time before I patronized that place again.
That was one horrid summer and I hope to never live through anything like that again.
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BigHank53 said on June 23, 2025 at 9:39 pm
There’s two other reasons for a business to go cashless that aren’t mentioned as often. One is that it’s very difficult for an employee with sticky fingers to help themselves to money that’s behind the Square credit card processing app. The other one is safety. When I was in my early twenties and living in a bucolic town in New Hampshire, the Texaco down the street was robbed and the high-school student working that evening was stabbed to death over less than $200.
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Deborah said on June 23, 2025 at 10:00 pm
So today my plans were to spend my day anywhere but in our unit. First I went to the coffee shop that was air conditioned near us. But while I was there I got a text that I was supposed to be part of a zoom call that started 20 minutes earlier. So I rushed home to get my laptop out and participate in the call. I spent the next 5 hours on that call upstairs in our unit in no doubt 90º+. I didn’t want to go anywhere public to take that zoom meeting because that’s horribly unfair to the people around you.
I was dying of the heat, dizzy and miserable while I was trying to get work done with another couple of team members on the call that lasted 5 hours. Miraculously we got a lot of work done.
It seems that the heat is cumulative, after 3 days of high heat it adds up and doesn’t cool off during the night. I’m now one of the oldsters who can’t regulate body heat well. My husband is 3 years older than me but can stand it better than me and he doesn’t get how unhealthy it is for people like me. And I’m the one who grew up in Miami, you’d think I’d have a better handle on it because of that.
After the call was done I sat doing nothing in our building lobby, finally in air conditioning.
I was so embarrassed about forgetting about the zoom meeting, but I’m in a brain fog because of the heat.
We went out to eat again, 3 nights in a row, I mean who wants to cook, then sit and eat in 90º+? The restaurant was so cold, I was freezing and then it felt good to walk out into the heat.
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Suzanne said on June 23, 2025 at 10:12 pm
Another important piece from Sarah Kendzior:
https://sarahkendzior.substack.com/p/i-spent-no-kings-day-in-a-cave
“No Kings” is a misnomer. Trump is not in charge. A birthday with a military parade gives the trappings of a king. But Trump is only the frontman for transnational organized crime. That’s all he ever was or will be.
Trump did not rise to this position alone. US officials have grown a second skin, one that seals their eyes and their deals and their documents. They entered the darkness of the mafia state and did so knowingly. Had they not, Trump could have never run in 2016 or in 2024. Party allegiance indicates whether a US official acts as an abuser (GOP) or an enabler (Democrat). But when they speak, it is often with one voice.”
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Jeff Gill said on June 24, 2025 at 7:24 am
Dexter, hate to tell you, but this 6 am the president of these united states is not happy with cable news, not at all. Which can only be interpreted as a) he stayed up all night watching it (dude, you have the three letter agencies for the actual news, right?) and b) he was waiting for the coverage to pivot into fawning praise for his peacemaking mad skilz, which it did not/has not yet.
And of course he’s puzzled, irritated, and lapsing into ever more public profanity over how other countries handle their affairs other than how he wants them following his script. Because at this point, anything that gets in the way of an inevitable Nobel Peace Prize nomination & award is apparently just f’ing kr4p.
My only current point of amusement is listening for just a slight edge of unease among Senate Republicans around pressing further into investigations of the Biden administration for cognitive decline and staff cover-ups. Because whatever else I might think about some of them, they’re mostly smart enough* to know what goes around, comes back to bite you. If you set a pattern to investigate Joe’s coherence & competence at even private late evening events, you set the table to do so for Donald’s post-Cabinet meeting musings.
*Ron Johnson excepted, of course.
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Deborah said on June 24, 2025 at 8:54 am
This is a hilarious interview with E. Jean Carol by Andy Borowitz, I subscribe to his substack so I don’t know if you have to be a paying subscriber to view it https://www.borowitzreport.com/p/trump-sells-his-747-to-pay-e-jean. I ordered her book, Not My Type, I need a good laugh these days. Oh and Dorothy, I ordered it from Avid of course.
This interview helped me a lot this morning, since it was sooooo hot into the night, I went to sleep about 10, woke up at 1:30 and was never able to get back to sleep, so I just worked on my design project, and got a lot done too.
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Dorothy said on June 24, 2025 at 10:06 am
Thanks Deborah! I read a review of E. Jean Carroll’s book that said if you can possibly listen to her reading her own book, you should do so. So I requested it from Libby. I think there are 600 or so people ahead of me. That’s okay. I’m not much for audio books as I can’t stand ear buds, and I play music when I’m buzzing along on my sewing machine(s). But I’ll make an exception for Ms. Carroll. I’ll listen to it while I’m hand quilting a piece I’m going to enter in QuiltCon this fall.
Is there a reason why your Chicago place is not air conditioned? I worry about you suffering in these temperatues! Do you have fans? I mean they’ll only circulate already hot air but at least it would be a breeze.
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Deborah said on June 24, 2025 at 12:05 pm
First, Dorothy you might try Shokz (spelling? and there are probably other brands) bone conduction listening, they dont go in your ears. I hate things in my ears, that’s why I’m having problems with my hearing aids. I got the shokz a year or so ago and they are great. THey cost about $75 but there is a more expensive version for better quality, I don’t know the difference because I haven’t tried them. I ordered mine from Amazon when I was still buying things from them.
Second, we don’t have air conditioning in our unit because my husband really doesn’t like it and the place we would have to put it by building regulations is not where we would want it to go. It’s a great big bulky thing, ugly as can be. Plus we’re usually never here in the summer so we’re stuck right now, hopefully not for many more days. We have project and family commitments to be here until July 8th. I knew that this could be a possibility because this is afterall the hot humid midwest. We used to live in St. Louis which is even worse in the summer but we didn’t have a place in NM yet to spend the summer. That was over 20 years ago and my problem with heat is something that is relatively new, like the last 5 years or so and gets worse every year.
I worry about my health in these conditions too, but for now I’m here for the duration.
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Sherri said on June 24, 2025 at 12:13 pm
Will Trump start calling for REGIME CHANGE in Norway so he can get a friendlier Nobel Committee? (The Nobel Committee is appointed by the Norwegian Parliament.) Maybe he’ll want to buy Norway, instead.
Giving Trump a Nobel Peace Prize would definitely be a first as tragedy, then as farce moment, with Trump the mirror house version of Henry Kissinger.
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Dexter Friend said on June 24, 2025 at 1:37 pm
Trump said on a live feed I saw around 6:10 AM today that Iran and Israel don’t know what the fuck they are doing, then punctuated it with “you understand that?”
Both CNN and MSNBC, the two he had just singled out as fake news, then repeated every fifteen minutes the video of Trump saying “fuck”. The correspondent on MSNBC said everyone around Trump is used to watching profane rants off-camera, this may be the first time he said “fuck” in front of international network feeds. Trump was maniacal, crazy this morning. He does want that peace prize.
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Icarus said on June 24, 2025 at 1:54 pm
on Eric Zorn’s The Picayune Sentinel I wrote the following:
A couple of thoughts about the bombing of Iranian nuclear facilities. 1) We phrase it that way to ignore that human beings are being killed.
2) What if Trump isn’t the one calling the shots? Sure, he’s sounding off on it, but what if someone in his administration is really doing the hard work?
We are about to get September 11th, 2.0.
After Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, the war hawks felt we had to redeem ourselves. So we did the Doolittle Raid. It was a waste of resources but it proved a point. Why do we not think another country would do the same thing?
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Icarus said on June 24, 2025 at 1:58 pm
Heather @18: I remember having a similar problem with my AC. The fix turned out to be a $22 Capacitor.
Google your AC model and see if that helps.
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David C said on June 24, 2025 at 2:35 pm
Like someone who thinks they hit the jackpot when they buy Rollex watch from a guy on the street, I’m sure he wouldn’t know the difference if someone gave him the Nobbel Piece Prize. Then maybe he wouldn’t start wars so he can pretend to end them.
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Deborah said on June 24, 2025 at 2:59 pm
Back before I retired I had conversations with the Nobel people in Norway, everyone spoke english thank goodness. For the World Food Prize project in Des Moines, We wanted to have a very over scaled Peace Prize cast in bronze. Long story, but Norman Borlaug who started the World Food Prize won the Peace Prize in the 70s for his amazing work that they think saved millions of lives during a horrific famine in Asia etc. There’s way more to this story but I’m leaving it out to get to the point that it was delightful working with the Nobel people, we had to get their permission to replicate the medal, even though it was way, way bigger than the actual thing. Like a thousand times bigger, ok I’m exaggerating. They had to approve everything, they were very gracious the whole time. The bronze cast piece turned out spectacularly. I can’t remember where the sculptor came from that we hired, he was amazing to work with too. THat project was so much fun for me, I could go on and on, but I’ll spare you.
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Deborah said on June 24, 2025 at 3:31 pm
Dorothy, I forgot to mention that we do have 2 fans, those tall vertical oscillating kind. I sit right in front of them at all times, they’re portable. They help but not much when it’s over 90º, just blow around hot air.
But today is sooooo much better, it’s cloudy so no sun beating down in our 2 walls of floor to ceiling windows, plus it’s only 82º now, much cooler now, tomorrow seems like it’s going to be even cooler but then it gets back up in the high 80s to low 90s later in the week. Yuck.
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Sherri said on June 24, 2025 at 4:58 pm
Not only is Stephen Miller a despicable little troll, he’s also corrupt: https://www.pogo.org/investigations/stephen-miller-conflicts-of-interest
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susan said on June 24, 2025 at 5:20 pm
David C@35 — Ha ha ha ha! Or the Noble Pizza Prize. Bet he doesn’t eat pizza, though. Still, it’s the recognition that matters to his tiny-dick psyche.
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Sherri said on June 24, 2025 at 11:54 pm
We should celebrate good news when it happens: Andrew Cuomo got trounced in the NYC mayoral primary.
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Jeff Gill said on June 25, 2025 at 6:48 am
“The hard-fought local fight mirrors the national Democratic divide: A young, inexperienced socialist running on a hopeful message with the backing of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez versus a 67-year-old, three-term former New York governor who worked in Bill Clinton’s Cabinet and got the ex-president’s endorsement in the race’s waning days.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/06/24/mamdani-leads-cuomo-nyc-mayor-race-00422363
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alex said on June 25, 2025 at 10:30 am
I’m surprised that so many people would be willing to forgive Cuomo for being the contemptible womanizing scumbag that he is. In the Trump era, it seems that nothing, no matter how bad, is a political liability anymore.
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Sherri said on June 25, 2025 at 1:19 pm
Yes, Clinton highlighted the 33 year old Mamdani’s inexperience in his endorsement of Cuomo.
Bill Clinton was 32 when he became governor of Arkansas.
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Dexter Friend said on June 25, 2025 at 2:05 pm
David C, a cringeworthy laugh your way; In 1977 I was in New York City at a political convention of fellow travelers. Back then, it was handy to have a little calculator for balancing the checkbook, and up on a little trailer some dudes were selling calculators for $5, a steal of a deal. Dozens were buying them, and so, I did. I went to a Duane Reade for batteries, and the staffers were both Japanese-descent men. They looked at my calculator to see what batteries it took, and both began to point and laugh at me when I told them where I bought it. The both sort of squealed with laughter, saying “You got fucked!”
The calculator was just a plastic shell, no works inside at all.
In 1977 I could run well. I ran back to the sellers, they were still raking in the fins, and started screaming to people that this was a sham. One dude quickly handed back my $5 and told me, “Man, get the fuck out of here, go on now!”
So I did. I did not, in the end, get fucked.
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Sherri said on June 25, 2025 at 2:26 pm
Look, I don’t know whether Mamdani will be good or effective as NYC mayor, but I do know what Andrew Cuomo is, and that’s an unrepentant sex pest who wasn’t very good or effective as governor of New York, except at promoting himself.
Fewer failsons without principles in power, please. When you try someone new, sure, you might end up disappointments like Sinema and Fetterman, but you also get AOC.
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Brandon said on June 25, 2025 at 2:35 pm
Do you remember the “Cuomosexual” phenomenon?
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Heather said on June 25, 2025 at 3:41 pm
AC update: Icarus, the capacitor did blow…but the compressor was also bad, so I have to get a new unit. Womp womp. The good news: they don’t need a crane to get it on the roof. The bad news: it’s still a ton of money. But that’s home ownership for ya. Guess I won’t be refinishing my floors, getting a new sofa, or painting my kitchen cabinets anytime soon.
I am dying at all of the crashouts on Bluesky after Mamdani’s victory in the primary. These people think he is a dues-paying member of Hamas.
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Sherri said on June 25, 2025 at 4:17 pm
My favorite of those, Heather, was Atlantic writer Thomas Chatterton Williams vowing to never shop at a government owned grocery store. One, TCW lives in Paris (though he is a visiting professor at Bard College, which is also not in NYC), and two, I guess he’s never lived in a state with state-run liquor stores!
I remember the State Stores in Pennsylvania where you had to tell the clerk at the counter what you wanted and they brought it out to you. It was a big deal when there was a State Store opened in Squirrel Hill where you could actually browse the liquor and wine and choose your own.
It was only recently that grocery stores here in Washington could sell liquor and wine, about the same time that marijuana was legalized.
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