I update this blog three times a week, most weeks, not every goddamn day, so Neil Steinberg beat me to the punch, but the punch deserves to be delivered twice, a one-two, if you will.
Croaky and his boss, President Shit-for-brains, have blood on their hands. Specifically, that of David Rose, the responding officer for the attempted mass shooting at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Friday. He was killed by Patrick Joseph White, the shooter who toted five rifles to a CVS across the street from the building and opened fire. White was said to be increasingly obsessed with the idea the Covid vaccination had made him sick. Wherever could he have gotten that idea?
Our HHS secretary has called the Covid jab “the deadliest vaccine ever made,” citing reports to VAERS, the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System. Intended to be a democratic way for anyone to report sore arms, fevers, etc., it was most certainly set up for a simpler time, when people would be honest brokers of this information. A friend of mine, then a reporter for a prestigious magazine, was asked to poke around in it, see if there was a story, maybe.
He poked, and came away after a couple days with his conclusion: No. Why? Recall that the Covid vaccine was first given to those most vulnerable to the disease — the elderly and immune-suppressed. And so VAERS is full of accounts that run like this: My father had stage IV lung cancer, and received the vaccine. Three weeks later, he died. Or: My mother, 97 and bedridden in her nursing home, received the shot, and died after 10 days. Neither of these people had Covid when they died, so: Very suspicious!!!
And because VAERS is open to anyone — seriously, anyone can make a report — it is of course subject to manipulation by bad actors. And I’m sure it is. Anyway, it’s not a reliable source of information. Which Croaky should know.
One caveat that I should note: Something that’s always interested me is how mental illness cleaves to the culture of its time. People used to believe incubi and succubi came into their rooms at night and had sex with them. Today, it’s aliens who abduct victims to their ships to stick probes into their anuses. (Always the anus. Huh.) The man who killed four people in New York City a couple weeks ago was convinced he had CTE, or chronic traumatic encephalopathy, from being hit in the head as a football player. (He was in the building housing the NFL.) He was 27 years old (well below the age when CTE typically presents), played only high school (potentially dangerous, but hardly NFL-level dangerous) and had not been diagnosed with anything.
So both these men, White and the NYC shooter, had fixated on current events to explain whatever was jangling around in their heads, and it’s possible that White would have fired on the CDC in the absence of a led-from-the-top damning of the work they do. But I’d say those chances are slim.
How did Croaky react? With the usual thoughts-and-prayers statement, made on Instagram. Fuck him.
Finally, I leave you with this, which is so ironic I can’t stand it:
As a record number of people in the U.S. are sickened with measles, researchers are resurrecting the search for something long-deemed redundant: treatments for the viral disease.
After the measles vaccine was introduced in the 1960s, cases of the disease plummeted. By 2000, federal officials had declared measles eliminated from the U.S. This success led to little interest in the development of treatments. But now, as vaccination rates fall and infections rise, scientists are racing to develop drugs they say could prevent or treat the disease in vulnerable and unvaccinated people.
“In America, we don’t like being told what to do, but we like to have options for our medicine chest,” said Marc Elia, chairman of the board of Invivyd, a Massachusetts-based drugmaker that started working on a monoclonal antibody for measles this spring.
Yes, that’s correct: A drugmaker is looking for a treatment for measles (because “we like to have options for our medicine chest”) because increasing number of dumbass Americans are refusing a safe, long-established vaccine for measles. I can’t stand it.
OK, then! On that cheery note, go start your weeks! I’m off on a bike ride before it gets to…checking…89 degrees. Ugh.
Jeff Borden said on August 10, 2025 at 11:30 am
We’re committing suicide by stupidity.
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Deborah said on August 10, 2025 at 11:57 am
I was out of coffee this morning so I went to the grocery store to get some this morning. I spent $49.67 on 2 bags of coffee. The last time I went maybe 3 weeks ago it was $14 a pound which is high enough, and this morning it was $17 a pound. I’m going to stop getting that coffee, that’s just ridiculous. It’s the kind in those tall bulk cylinders that you bag yourself. It’s quite good, but not that good. It’s hazelnut flavored and it’s decaf. I can get coffee much, much cheaper at Trader Joes, not hazelnut, and not great. I think I’m going to mix the good stuff with the mediocre and try that, and when this expensive stuff is gone I’ll just get the the TJs stuff from now on. I mean there’s a limit. All for stupid tariffs. I don’t know how long Trump is going to get away with this. People notice.
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Pam H said on August 10, 2025 at 12:17 pm
We now live in an Idiocracy and soon we will be watering our crops with sports drinks. Or Mountain Dew. Have you noticed how all the vaccine averse folks are now using Supplements? Expensive and with no oversight whatsoever as to ingredients or manufacture. More idiotic behavior. Carolyn was right about her cousin, he is killing people and feels very righteous about his insanity.
@Deborah: Do you have a Dollar Tree in your neighborhood? Someone I know has been going there to buy coffee from Harry and David for $5 a bag (don’t know how many ounces in bag). He says it’s the cheapest coffee he can find and it tastes good. He buys the plain coffee, not the flavored. Just sayin’.
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Mark P said on August 10, 2025 at 12:45 pm
At least with some covid deaths, it was the stupid who paid the price. With measles, it’s usually the innocent children of the stupid who pay the price. Of course croaky knows that VAERS is not reliable. But it does support his conspiracy.
The difference between modern American and Idiocracy is that in Idiocracy, society naturally devolved. We have chosen the greedy and the stupid to lead us intentionally into the dystopia we are now living in.
And, speaking of price, I found some ground beef at Walmart the other day for nearly $9 a pound. They did have some that was somewhat cheaper.
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Suzanne said on August 10, 2025 at 1:08 pm
The anti-vax, anti-science rot is deep here in middle America. I did a cancer survivor program at the local YMCA last year. The leader of the group told us that she personally knew of several people who got the COVID vaccine and died from it (that was the day I walked out). We were also told about the healing power of foot baths and essential oils. Did you know that you can put drops of different kinds of essential oils on your spine and those oils will know which nerves to reach, all by themselves? And the foot baths will pull the toxins from your body! Which toxins, we were never told. During COVID, the amount of people I was in contact with that refused to mask was astounding, citing things like freedom, and the fact that a mask will cut off your oxygen supply to the point of death.
Even Jerome Adams, Trump’s first Surgeon General has made a statement that people will die due to RFK Jr’s idiocy.
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Deborah said on August 10, 2025 at 5:33 pm
I went to another grocery store today that I hate, it’s owned by Albertsons but called Market Street, it’s huge and the checkout lines are a mile long, but there are some things we have to get there because none of the other stores we frequent have those items, like Duke’s mayo (if you haven’t tried it, you should). I checked out the coffee there and it has gone up a lot too, 12 0z bags for $15 – $17, I haven’t gone back to Trader Joes yet, it will be interesting to see how much their’s costs now.
Also, the produce aisles had areas with blank shelves, so the disappeared farm workers are starting to have an impact, at least it seems that way from my shopping trip today.
We don’t eat that much meat so I can’t really tell how it has changed.
I bought eggs from the farmers market last time I needed some and they’re always pricy so I can’t go by that either.
This could get interesting.
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Sherri said on August 10, 2025 at 6:47 pm
Instead of being a normal billionaire and building his compound in Atherton or Los Altos Hills, Zuck has to take over a Palo Alto neighborhood, buying up houses on 1/3 acre lots and creating his compound that way. And not so his kids can attend Palo Alto schools; he has a small private school on his compound.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/10/us/mark-zuckerberg-palo-alto.html?unlocked_article_code=1.dE8.4ejX.ZiyyVcZcI-Zt&smid=url-share
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FDChief said on August 10, 2025 at 8:02 pm
The idiot fucker RFKJr always reminds me of a comment one of my Army pals used whenever someone would do or say something truly astoundingly stupid:
“Ah, (name of person). Can’t live with ’em. Can’t shoot ’em.”
But in all honesty, what would We the People lose if someone replaced Croaky’s brainworm with a juicy dose of hot lead? Beuhler..?
And the same goes for all these other MAGA skinsacks. Hegseth. Bondi. Patel. Vance. Trump. Think of the perfectly good oxygen these worthless hairbags are wasting!
Will no one rid me of these meddlesome MAGAts?
We’re hamstrung by our own conventions. In a sane polity all these scum would be lined up at the steps to the National Razor.
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Julie Robinson said on August 10, 2025 at 8:19 pm
Sherri, I read that story this afternoon and I’ll admit my jaw dropped. There was also a story a month or so back about a school Priscilla Chan was sponsoring and running. It seems that after the friend who was head of school died, Priscilla lost interest and abruptly closed it. The school was in a economically challenged area, and represented hope for the kids and their parents. Families were told after the good schools in the vicinity were full, when if they’d known earlier they would have had good choices available.
And a Zuckerberg reminder that Instagram will now share your real-time location unless you turn that feature off.
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Colleen said on August 10, 2025 at 9:24 pm
I was gonna make a pot roast last week. Until I saw the chuck roast was 27 dollars. At Aldi.
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Jeff Gill said on August 11, 2025 at 8:01 am
My 1978 high school class had some spectacular brain power in it. I like to think I’m fairly intelligent, and I just barely made it into the bottom of the top 5%. Ahead of me, but folks I knew from taking advanced level classes with them (they got the A’s & eked out my B-‘s) or in choir & drama club, were some unique individuals. Our valedictorian arrived relatively quickly at the CBO, and I check in with him by email from time to time, one end of the basketball statistician’s desk to the other. Our salutatorian died tragically young of cancer while in law school.
Of the rest of the twenty or so above me in the class ranks, I can see bits & pieces of the lives of many of them online, Facebook friends and such. The percentage of them who are strongly anti-vaccine is . . . startling, shocking to me, disturbing as I try to think what leads to this kind of outcome. Not all of them, but what appears to be a majority; a couple I stay in regular touch with who are more what we’d call science/reality-based share our befuddlement with each other. We learned mitosis & meiosis at the same lab benches, took physics & civics sitting next to them from the same teachers.
I will say in this unrandomized, unreliable sample it’s the engineers & technology folk who are the most certain & even aggressive about their confidence that mRNA is at best a profit-driven risk imposed on the American public and the world, at worse a conspiracy to mangle & mutate our DNA through their obscure realizations of how mRNA & spike proteins REALLY work, versus what “they” tell us.
One of them, a fellow I shared the stage with in musicals, stood next to in choir, was at multiple cast parties at his house (parents both PhDs), is regularly contacting me whenever I post on my feed an obituary of basically anyone who died younger than 80 asking if I knew if so-and-so “got the jab,” and messaging me links to studies and stories about the truth around spike proteins. My degree was in anthropology, and I have a highly skeptical view of my understanding of molecular biology based on, like him, knowing just enough to be dangerous (but my wife has a B.S. & M.S. from Purdue in biology & agronomy, so I can check with her). When I can, I scroll through his latest second-hand screed or well-intended question, and find the flaw or cherry-picked conclusion, and flash it back to him, generally to silence until his next offering. When my then 22 year old son was getting his first booster, he flooded my in-box with studies to try to convince me that even if I thought I should encourage this young man to get the vaccine, it was criminal stupidity to push or not to discourage actively his going back for this “untested, unsupported” medical intervention that was likely to enlarge his heart and possibly kill him, if not now, then sooner than might be otherwise.
I probably should have just blocked him then. But he’s a big part of my high school memories, and I know not just from then, but from his accomplishments since, he’s smart — I mean brilliant smart. So I’m morbidly fascinated to have this rolling window directly into the belly of the beast. He says he did not vote for Trump, though he defends him enough to make me wonder (he says he voted for the libertarian candidate, which would fit). But as recently as last week, when I noted a friend’s passing who was a lawyer & civil war historian, same age as me, who died after a two year struggle with Hodgkin’s disease while having dealt with diabetes his entire life, I got a message from my intelligent high school classmate asking if I knew whether Eric had “gotten the jab,” suggesting that many sudden onset cancers with rapid progression “may” have been triggered by the rogue components of mRNA vaccine.
It’s just so exhausting. But I don’t want to retreat into a safe space entirely. Quixotically, I want to see if there’s any way to change these brilliant but misled, misguided, misappropriated minds. Even as I know it’s not too dang likely.
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Jeff Borden said on August 11, 2025 at 9:54 am
I’m dreading the big meeting between tRump and his boyfriend, Putin, in Alaska this week. He’ll offer Ukraine on a silver platter.
BTW, the meeting is a propaganda bonanza for Putin. Not only is he landing on American soil –at a time when the war criminal faces arrest for crimes against humanity in most nation– but Russian nationalists have been clamoring for a return of Alaska to the Motherland. This is what happens when our leader is utterly ignorant of history and surrounded by sycophants.
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Mark P said on August 11, 2025 at 10:31 am
It would be interesting to see the distribution of engineers vs antivaxxers. It wouldn’t surprise me to see a strong correlation. I’m not sure why the engineer mindset would make belief in conspiracy theories more likely. I think the engineer tends to be a rule-follower who doesn’t think much about how and why those rules came to be, not a deep thinker. I think they also tend to feel superior to pretty much everybody, but especially those egg-head, do-nothing scientists. Engineers make and do things, scientists are off in cloud cuckoo land. So engineers follow the clearly-mark route, and if someone happens to put another clearly-marked route in front of them, they may just follow that route without any really critical thinking about it.
And that’s my pop-psychology for the day.
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Icarus said on August 11, 2025 at 10:40 am
Jeff Gill, not sure what to say about your engineering classmates who cannot differentiate between causation and correlation. They see a classmate die and also got “the jab” and their mind goes to their preconceived conclusion.
The good news is that they too will perish and hopefully before they can cast a vote in the mid-terms.
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nancy said on August 11, 2025 at 11:27 am
Kate had a school acquaintance whose father (an engineer) bought a boat some summers back. Never had one, or piloted one, before. For his first few outings, he took along a mutual friend, who said he was absolutely unteachable after the first, successful trip. The teacher would try to point out common-sense facts, like, say, that it’s unwise to cut too close to a spit of land, because often the water is shallower there. The new boat owner refused to listen, and his response was always, “I’m an engineer, I know what I’m doing.” The last I heard, he’d fouled three props and was on his fourth. Lost touch after that.
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Deborah said on August 11, 2025 at 11:48 am
I worked around a lot of engineers and I didn’t notice that they were particularly hard headed. They were mostly guys, only worked with one woman engineer. These were HVAC and structural engineers who worked on building design.
I thought the structural engineers were brilliant. They didn’t take risks though, and why would they? I remember many years ago when there was a bridge collapse in a shopping mall in Kansas City (I think it was in KC?), it had something to do with music/dancing vibrations. The structural engineers who did the work on that were in the same building of the architecture firm I worked for in St. Louis, they did a lot of work for us too. But of course that was the end of them forever.
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ROGirl said on August 11, 2025 at 11:49 am
I’ve worked with engineers for a long time and that story rings true. They mostly have a narrow frame of reference. The term “thinking outside the box” must have been invented for them.
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Suzanne said on August 11, 2025 at 12:14 pm
When we lived in a rural area, the guy down the road, an electrical engineer, had his own small airplane that he would fly from the small airstrip on his property. He would fly for business, or to take photos, etc. He frequently flew people to Kentucky to see the Ark thing. I would not fly with him, even though many did and said he was very diligent and exacting. Why wouldn’t I fly with him? Because he did not believe he could make a mistake. When the church we both belonged to had a building project, he argued with the architects and the structural engineer, sure that he knew more than they did. He would plow the snow from the church parking lot for free, but had to do it himself because other people didn’t do it right. He was also anti-vax and spread that plandemic video far and wide. He is one of the most arrogant people I have ever met.
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Jeff Gill said on August 11, 2025 at 12:19 pm
KC collapse was at a hotel/conference center in a Hyatt, and the issue was the design passing through two sets of structural engineers, with the final build being rods through a box beam which was two welded halves, supported by a nut. All the design worry was about the stress on the threadings, but they forgot to calculate the repetitive stress on the welds, and after a certain amount of use wear, a major loading caused a nut to tear through the bottom weld of the box beam, and then it was a cascade along the beam, of the nuts on the suspension rods popping through . . . and there was a second similarly built walkway below, which that one fell on, instantly doubling the load and repeating the failure cascade.
Why do I know this? I was a humanities major, but at Purdue, and the whole campus was discussing the design/build issues, at lunch, in the Union over Cokes, waiting in line at concerts, any place on campus all the way through ’81 & ’82. Over 100 killed, and twice as many seriously injured.
Legend said that after two firms of architectural engineers and the city code had passed on it, a welder on the site said “ain’t no way you’ll ever catch me walking across this, the weld will never hold like that.” You can’t fool a good welder.
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Deborah said on August 11, 2025 at 12:20 pm
I watched a clip of Trump talking about his takeover of policing in DC, I usually try to avoid hearing him speak, because it makes me sick, and I must say his speech has declined a lot. He sounded like he was about to fall asleep, he had a hard time reading charts that he had before him. It’s hard to describe how he sounded to me after avoiding hearing him for a while. Kind of a sleepy drone, almost a slur, low energy. And of course he was lying his ass off about crime numbers, surrounded by his sycophants. He’ll try anything so people will stop talking about Epstein.
I listened to a podcast yesterday called Shrinking Trump, two clinical psychologist were conversing about Trump’s cognitive decline. They described a confabulation that Trump recently made about his uncle, an MIT professor that had taught the unabomber and the whole story never happened. It was impossible to have happened. They said that confabulation is one of the tell tale sign that someone is devolving into dementia.
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Dexter Friend said on August 11, 2025 at 2:05 pm
Look at the big brains on Nallers! My cousin was valedictorian at Garrett HS in 1965, my brother was salutatorian at Waterloo HS, my aunt was the first woman engineering graduate at what was then known as Tri-State College in Angola in 1928, and Dad was too smart for second grade so they auto-promoted him to grade 3. At his funeral an old classmate told me how Dad was oh-so smart. Dad would rather read books than play sports.
Me? Helifino… school work found me day-dreaming and I barely finished in the top quarter, academically. All I cared about was basketball and baseball and I even played football one Fall, but we didn’t have a real team, just practicing for the new consolidated school, DeKalb High, which I missed by a year.
OK, two specials that knocked my socks off: the doc “Gimme Danger”, with Iggy Pop narrating his life story, just fantastic. And the new Marc Maron HBO special. He is a very intriguing comedian, to say the least.
Time for a carefree trip to Washington. Trump has federalized the policing of the streets.
WE ARE OFFICIALLY A POLICE STATE
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Suzanne said on August 11, 2025 at 3:20 pm
Deborah, I started listening to that Shrinking Trump podcast today. Very interesting and very sobering.
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Julie Robinson said on August 11, 2025 at 3:20 pm
Every engineer I’ve ever known has been 100% sure they are correct 100% of the time. Ugh.
This, from last night’s notes by Heather Cox Richardson: Bojan Pancevski and Yaroslav Trofimov reported in the Wall Street Journal that Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff, who is not a trained diplomat and does not speak Russian, appears to have misunderstood the terms Putin was offering for a ceasefire. After saying at first that Putin would withdraw his troops from parts of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson in exchange for complete control of Donetsk, Witkoff later clarified that the only offer Putin had made was for Ukraine to withdraw from Donetsk.
“This is deeply damaging incompetence,” former U.S. ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul posted on social media. “Witkoff should finally start taking a notetaker from the U.S. embassy for future meetings. That’s how professional diplomacy works.”
Argh. Dorothy, reading about the DC takeover made me wonder if your son is still in the Guard or on Reserve. I would hate to think he’d have to go “serve” this way.
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David C said on August 11, 2025 at 3:32 pm
I work with engineers every day. I mostly hate working with the old guys, which are the guys less than 20 years younger than I am, maybe thirty. They’re always right and don’t you dare question them. The young ones are great. They have a completely different mindset.
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jim said on August 11, 2025 at 4:36 pm
Agreeing with David C ar #24. I was getting ready earlier to post that imo the engineer-anti vax sentiment is more closely correlated with political party and age. I think here we know a bunch of old Republican engineers.
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Peter said on August 11, 2025 at 5:09 pm
Jeff, another reason for the collapse was that the design had a very low safety factor, because the understanding was that these were walkways connecting different areas of the hotel, and the day of the accident it was wall to wall people standing on those platforms.
How do I know that? At the time of the accident I was working for an architect and we were working on a project for Braniff at O’Hare and we were using the same engineer to do the same type of walkway from the old terminal 1 (pre United) to terminal 2A to connect Braniff’s gates.
The accident happened when the drawings went out to bid; the project really went downhill after that.
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Deborah said on August 11, 2025 at 6:55 pm
Peter, do you remember the name of the Structural Engineering firm that did the work on that Hyatt catastrophe. I’ve been trying to think of it most of the day. I remember the architecture firm I worked for (my husband too), sent out a memo from on high saying if anyone asked us if we were associated with that firm we were to immediately respond no. We weren’t officially associated with them but we used them a lot. After that they beefed up the structural engineers in our firm so we wouldn’t have to use outsiders.
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Sherri said on August 11, 2025 at 7:01 pm
Why in this day and age are there still months long delays in book publishing in different countries? There’s a new book about the partition of India that I want to read after listening to a podcast series on it, but it’s not being published in the US until next February! Of course, Waterstones in the UK is happy to sell me a UK copy online and ship it to me. I’ll have to pay international shipping and VAT and whatever the exchange rate is, so I wouldn’t bother if the book were being published, say, next month in the US. But I’m interested in the book now. By February I’ll be interested in something else.
The book is Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia, by Sam Dalrymple, and the podcast is Empire. That and The Rest Is History are two of my favorite podcasts these days.
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Deborah said on August 11, 2025 at 7:02 pm
Well, duh I just googled it, it was Gillum and associates. Jack D. Gillum was the main guy, he died in 2012 of complications from Alzheimers.
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nancy said on August 11, 2025 at 10:36 pm
The Hyatt collapse in KC was during a Friday night event called a tea dance. They did them all over the chain, kind of a yuppie TGIF mixer for downtown office workers. One of my editors was working for the KC Star, which won a Pulitzer for breaking news coverage, I believe. A whole elevated walkway collapsed. Crowded with people above and below.
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Suzanne said on August 11, 2025 at 10:57 pm
The Hyatt walkway collapse and Harry Chapin dying both happened during our honeymoon. Started married life off well.
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Peter said on August 12, 2025 at 12:56 am
Deborah, sorry I didn’t see you question until now – it was Gillum-Collaco Associates.
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susan said on August 12, 2025 at 1:41 am
Sherri, “The Rest is History” podcast is one of my favorites, too. Those two guys are the best story tellers, entertaining, factual, funny. They know their stuff, and know how to find it. They interact so perfectly, too. Did you listen to the four-part series on Hannibal? Holy moly. They really brought that to life. It was a tour de force, as Dominic often says of Tom’s work. Honestly, I don’t know how they have the time to do all the widely varied topics they present. Every week. More than once a week.
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Sherri said on August 12, 2025 at 2:54 pm
I did love the Hannibal series. Other favorites include the Murder of Franz Ferdinand, followed by the Road to the Great War, and the Titanic. Recent favorites from Empire include the current series on Partition and Victorian Narcos, about the Opium Wars.
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alex said on August 12, 2025 at 3:01 pm
The observations about engineers track pretty closely with my own. I’ve known a few who were Biblical creationists and authoritarian know-it-alls and it never ceases to amaze me how people so otherwise intelligent could be so skeptical of objective reality and so gullible for sucker bait.
I have one friend who has been radicalized by MAGA and I assumed, wrongly, that he’d be far too smart to be taken in. My impression is that it’s not a matter of intelligence so much as temperament. He’s a glum, angry sort of person who never got partnered and never stayed at any job for very long and evidently he has discovered that he enjoys owning the libs more than being one. Instead of navel-gazing with the rest of us, he discovered his inner asshole.
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Watson said on August 12, 2025 at 6:22 pm
Sherri, you can order a new copy of Shattered Lands for $27 from a bookseller in New Jersey though Alibris.com. Media mail shipping will probably be around $5; you can get $2 off with the coupon code PURSUE.
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David C said on August 12, 2025 at 7:03 pm
I know a creationist engineer too, Alex. He has a bumper sticker on his F-350 diesel dually, that’s probably never towed or toted anything, that says “Evolution is science fiction”.
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Sherri said on August 12, 2025 at 8:58 pm
Thanks, Watson, I didn’t think to check Alibris.
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Jeff Gill said on August 13, 2025 at 7:09 am
Yeah, well, quantum tunneling is science fiction, too. And is why that tiny thumb drive holds a terabyte of memory. Might as well call it magic.
Expecto patronum equals MC squared . . .
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Deborah said on August 13, 2025 at 12:32 pm
I’ve been trying to think of the places I’ve lived and the crime rates there, or more accurately at least my perception of it. I grew up in Miami, FL and my perception of it didn’t seem crime ridden, but when I went back to visit family in the late 70s and early 80s it had a very high murder rate that I often read about.
I went to college in Nebraska, in a small town and I never thought about crime.
Then we lived in Texas, Houston for a year and 6 or 7 years in Dallas. In Dallas our house got broken into twice.
Then I lived in St. Louis and the neighborhood we lived in the first 7 years was a high crime area near Forest Park. There were shootings in 3 houses that surrounded us, 1 murder (it was self defense, a woman was being beaten by her boyfriend when she shot him). Our house never got broken into the 7 years I lived there, but we had a high fence and a dog that was part German Shepherd and looked and sounded scary. It was in a gentrifying neighborhood, that is now completely gentrified. When I moved out of that house, LB and I lived in an area that was fairly close to where we lived but less crime ridden, but we still didn’t walk around much at night by ourselves.
When I lived with and married my husband, still in St. Louis for the next 10 years, we didn’t live in an area I worried about crime much at all. Still near Forest Park in the Central Westend.
When we moved to Chicago in 2003, I walked around by myself at night and didn’t think that unsafe at all. I walked home often late at night from where I worked in the loop area to our place in Streeterville. I realize there are high crime areas in Chicago but it all seems mostly to occur on the South side and the West side of the city. I never have any reason to go to those areas, except to drive through them on my way somewhere else. My rightwing sister thinks we live in a hellhole because she only hears about high crime in Chicago on Fox.
Since having a presence in Santa Fe, I don’t feel comfortable walking at night at all. I’m not sure why that is exactly, maybe my age, but LB feels that way too. Crime has increased here over the last couple of years. Albuquerque which is 60 miles away cracked down a lot on crime and has trigger happy cops, so a lot of the undesirables moved out, some came to Santa Fe. Also opioid use has increased in NM over time, so there are more desperate and unhoused people.
This is all based on my perception, not on reliable data. I’ve read that crime in Santa Fe has officially declined some but it doesn’t feel that way.
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Scout said on August 13, 2025 at 1:53 pm
alex @ 35 ftw… very colorful descriptions!
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tajalli said on August 13, 2025 at 6:23 pm
A bit of levity in these grim times with some snarky trolling by our very own Gavin N to twist someone’s panties.
https://www.thewrap.com/gavin-newsom-all-caps-trump-parody-x-post-truth-social/
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tajalli said on August 13, 2025 at 7:01 pm
In other news straight from the Xitter, a verified user Isaiah Martin @isaiahrmartin informs us that the Texas Republicans have set up a hotline for tips on the whereabouts of the Texas Democrats who are on the lam to avoid arrest for not voting the way they should.
He recommends that, for the sake of the public, to please be careful to refrain from flooding the toll-free number with info regarding Bigfoot, UFOs, or asking about why [you know who] is on “the list”. The person who shared this on FB enjoins all to especially refrain from reporting Mothman sightings. This is an important and serious hot line and needs to be kept available for its true purpose.
End of public service announcement.
The number is 1 866 786 5972
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Dexter Friend said on August 14, 2025 at 12:23 am
I had a good VA visit; No eye problems revealed. I’ll be getting some cool glasses in the mail in a few weeks.
Then during my medical visit I worked with the doctor to create a pain management plan. I am old with enough pain to get some help. I’ll be trying a new plan to see how it goes.
And…I found out why my appointment last month was cancelled. A patient came to the doctor’s office laden with a horrible case of bedbugs and the office was quarantined and later cleaned completely.
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Jeff Gill said on August 14, 2025 at 6:59 am
Dexter — down here in central Ohio, that’s an issue in any office with waiting rooms. We’ve had a serious problem for over a decade, they tell me, with a very robust population in our area. Spreading in apartments buildings and hotel rooms, sure, but also out of restaurants and doctor’s offices and county benefits seating areas. Lots of places have changed upholstery to make it harder to spread, and insect control businesses are as busy as they want to be. COVID slowed them, but by all accounts bed bugs have snapped back to where they were in 2019. Sorry to hear it’s gotten as bad up in the NW of the state.
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Jeff Borden said on August 14, 2025 at 9:44 am
Property crime has hit me a few times. In Columbus, OH., a tape deck was stolen from my car and my apartment was burglarized while I was at work. I’d bought a $700 stereo using my new credit card, which meant I made monthly payments on something I no longer had. My clock radio was my only source of music.
In Charlotte, NC, my car was stolen days before I planned to drive it to Chicago. (The newspaper I was joining, Crain’s Chicago Business, graciously reimbursed me for a flight, something unimaginable now.) Police found my beloved Honda behind an abandoned house, totally stripped of all removable parts. It had been used in a series of burglaries, too. The pricks who stole it even stubbed out their cigarettes on the dashboard.
In Chicago, our apartment in Lakeview was burglarized while we were at lunch. The thief stole my wife’s Apple computer, but he was a neatnik. He’d knocked over a lamp while disconnecting the computer, but was nice enough to put it back on the desk.
My wife was attacked by a telephone installer in Charlotte long before we married, which was quite harrowing, but she fought him off and he was arrested and convicted.
So, yeah, we’ve been victimized, but we’ve never let us stop us from enjoying our lives. Shit happens. I feel as safe in Chicago as I have anywhere I’ve lived, but I’m not an idiot. I don’t use earbuds on the street and I’m aware of what’s around me at all times. Many people get mugged or worse because they are distracted by their phones or their earbuds or whatever.
Now, to D.C. The big, strong men of MAGA apparently are absolutely terrified of the city. One idiot, a representative from Tennessee, Tim Burchett, has claimed he sleeps in his Capitol Hill office because he is too afraid to walks the streets. It’s since been revealed he sleeps in his office so he’s not late to early meetings. An Oklahoma senator, Markwayne Mullins, has said he doesn’t wear a seatbelt while driving in D.C. because he wants to be able to scramble when he’s targeted by carjackers. It’s pathetic, isn’t it?
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Deborah said on August 14, 2025 at 10:42 am
When I had a project in Minneapolis a year or so before I retired in 2012, my rightwing sister and her husband who lived in a small town about 30 miles west of the city drove in to have dinner with me. The entire time we were at the restaurant they were both scared to death that their car would be stolen. The area wasn’t dangerous at all and they were parked nearly right outside of the restaurant. You could almost see their car from where we were seated. They kept craning their necks to see if their car was OK and they left as fast as they could so it would still be light when they left in case they’d be mugged in the dark.
They would occasionally drive in to watch a baseball or football game and again they worried about their car or their safety walking to or from the stadiums. I can’t imagine living that afraid of normal places and things. Granted, I’ve felt uncomfortable from time to time here and there walking at night but only if I’m walking alone and it’s clearly an iffy area. And I never give it a thought that my car will be stolen.
I did have my car broken into in St. Louis in the 80s in the parking garage where I parked for work. It was an MG with a soft convertible top, the person was polite enough to get in to the locked car without ripping through the plastic window in the back and there was nothing in it to steal. Maybe they just didn’t have a sharp object at the time and knew there was an easy way to pry it open. It gave me pause after that when I worked late and had to walk through the garage, they did have a security guard who made regular rounds.
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