Who else is wondering how embarrassing it will be when the Syrian rebels open Tulsi Gabbard’s file and start uploading it to the internet? Who else is hoping that when the United Healthcare CEO’s killer is arrested, he has a really good story to tell about why he did it? Yes, we don’t condone violence, but events like this are one reason I always enjoyed my career in journalism; you really never know what’s going to happen on a particular day, and things never unfold the way you expect them to, which is sometimes terrible and sometimes not, but almost always interesting.
Here’s the latest on the UHC CEO shooter, which suggests this guy planned this pretty well. Taking a bus in and out of the city was genius; interstate bus depots are packed with people, but no one looks very closely at anyone. It’s assumed you’re poor and inconsequential. A guy in a hooded jacket wearing a mask wouldn’t warrant a second glance from anyone.
I once had to pick up Kate and her roommate from an overseas trip at the Detroit Greyhound station. It was very early, before 6 a.m. as I recall, and I was parked outside in the pickup lane wishing I’d made coffee before I left. I watched a very old Jewish man — black hat, sidelocks, the works — walk in slowly, choose a seat in the waiting area, put on his tefillin and start davening. No one appeared to be giving him a second look. That’s a place you want to make your escape from after a premeditated murder.
But more will be revealed, because it always is.
I’ve noticed for a while that lots of new crime fiction is set in the past, because video technology makes it far harder to get away with murder these days; I guess this guy thought it through.
Enough, though — how was everyone’s weekend? I went to visit my old editor, who was recently laid up with a torn quadriceps tendon, an injury he suffered to the other leg just a few years ago. He’s at the sitting-in-a-recliner-in-a-leg-brace stage of recovery, so it was the right time to bring over some brownies and a flagon of green juice for healing purposes. The juice is my version of the First Watch kale tonic. Alan thinks it tastes like grass, but I find it quite the pick-me-up. The Vitamix is shaping up to be the best gift we gave ourselves this year, although I just made a carrot juice that turned out kinda meh. I’ll still drink it, but I won’t make it again. Yesterday we finally put the tree up and today it’s just been cleaning, chores and blogging. And finding clips of Trump’s Meet the Press interview online — jeez, what misery we’re in for.
Also, thinking of our next trip. Focus is closing in on Scotland and parts of the U.K.
Monday is on our doorstep. Let’s get through it.
Mark P said on December 8, 2024 at 4:26 pm
I tore my quad tendons and had to have surgery to repair them. It was especially fun because I had just the previous week had my rotator cuff repaired.
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Carol said on December 8, 2024 at 4:35 pm
Wigtown, Scotland’s book town. Especially during its book festival in autumn.
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David C said on December 8, 2024 at 4:49 pm
If I was going to Scotland it would be to see the locations of my favorite movie ever “Local Hero”.
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alex said on December 8, 2024 at 5:14 pm
Several years ago I think I tore a glute when I did the splits falling backwards. My entire left leg and ass were black and blue and for a time it was so swollen up that it looked like I had a third buttock. I didn’t get it worked up because the out-of-pocket costs at the time would have been too much and I had an asshole boss who was accusing me of faking medical excuses to work from home during the pandemic.
Yesterday I went to an art fair where a couple of friends were selling their creations, then came home to discover that my laptop was going kablooie. Today I took it to the Geek Squad and they informed me that I have a crack in the screen, though I have no idea how that happened. They also suggested, informally, that I take it to a third-party vendor for repairs because it will be cheaper and faster than if they ship it off to Apple.
At present I’m making a beef barley vegetable soup and having my dad and brother over for dinner. I added a can of crushed tomatoes and it became way too tangy so now I’m trying to tone it down with some sugar and some baking powder. It’s better but I don’t think this’ll go down as a keeper recipe. It’s a reminder that just because a recipe appears on the internet doesn’t mean it’s any good.
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Jeff Borden said on December 8, 2024 at 5:44 pm
A couple of friends have visited Scotland for tours of the distilleries. We’re considering Scotland and/or Ireland, but we’re not going anywhere while our beloved but elderly dog, Cosmo, is still around. My buddy from Toronto just did the distillery thing with his two adult sons. The weather in all his photos looked pretty abysmal, but that’s what Scotch is for, right?
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Julie Robinson said on December 8, 2024 at 6:35 pm
72° and sunny today, so no complaints.
Did anyone else notice that the UHC head, a “good family man”, was actually separated from his wife? I think the story said they had been living apart in recent years. He bought a house but was rarely there, with his sons visiting a “couple of times a year”. I’ve a feeling a whole lot more will be coming out. Not, I should add, that he should have been killed.
Tendons, I’m learning, are tricksy things. Mine seems to be responding to the air cast, and I’m no longer in pain 24/7. Maybe I’ll avoid surgery after all. Dear daughter bought me some CBD gummies, but they didn’t help me sleep and gave me a headache.
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basset said on December 8, 2024 at 8:56 pm
Duxford, the UK’s equivalent to the Air Force Museum…
Thirsk, home of “All Creatures Great & Small,” and the Yorkshire Dales…
and you have to cross Abbey Road.
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Julie Robinson said on December 8, 2024 at 9:56 pm
We might have been there at the wrong time, but I was quite concerned we’d be run over. Still, it’s fun to have the picture.
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Sherri said on December 8, 2024 at 9:58 pm
Tendons are tricksy things, but I’ve learned that they can be strengthened (and should be, if you’re strengthening your muscles.) My sports medicine doctor tells me that focusing on the eccentric phase of the lift strengthens your tendons.
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Jeff Gill said on December 9, 2024 at 8:02 am
Well, that got me searching: “the eccentric phase is the portion following the isometric phase, in which the muscle is lengthened under load to return to its starting position. Eccentric training focuses on this last portion of the movement, making it more challenging by slowing down the cadence, or speed, of the eccentric phase.”
https://www.healthline.com/health/fitness/eccentric-training
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David C said on December 9, 2024 at 9:36 am
I didn’t think eccentric training was training while wearing a smoking jacket and cravat, but I was hoping. Another hope dashed. Damn, that’s been happening a lot lately.
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Julie Robinson said on December 9, 2024 at 9:38 am
Will have to discuss this with my trainer, but the tendon in question runs on the outside of my ankle and leg. Until the boot comes off, I’m only allowed upper body activity while seated.
Unrelated, has anyone made a photo book through Mixbook? Am being inundated with ads.
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SusanG said on December 9, 2024 at 10:41 am
My first thought was the killer had a grandparent who died because UHC denied cancer treatment. Now I’m thinking, this looks like a video game. Images suggest GenZ IT nerd and gamer. New theory: he worked for a firm that created the AI product that allows UHC to more efficiently screw patients. Vigilante justice, probably has help from other nerds/gamers.
I made the mistake of going on Reddit and oh my! Nobody wants this guy caught, and if he is, they believe no jury will convict. Also, the wife is in on it. Tik-Tok amateur sleuths are refusing to help police. Bet they’re all over and holding the info close to the vest.
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tajalli said on December 9, 2024 at 1:02 pm
Julie, I wouldn’t use a site that advertises heavily. Wikipedia has a good spreadsheet of reliable sites.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_image-sharing_websites
A friend uses Zenfolio to share photos and make slideshows.
https://rauzon.zenfolio.com/p859914566/slideshow#h6855164d
PhotoBooth has a slideshow feature, if you’re into the Apple universe. And either Acrobat or PowerPoint might have good album-making features.
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Deborah said on December 9, 2024 at 1:53 pm
I’ve been in NM for a couple of days, nice sunny weather, much warmer than normal of course because that’s the way it is now and will continue to be more and more. While that sounds great, it’s really not, as we all know (or at least most of us) lots of damage to nature is coming especially with the Trump admin winding up. Lots of work to do on the yard but first I’m getting some things done for the holidays.
I had to buy a new dryer on Saturday after just arriving and we’re having a new storm door installed, nothing like home ownership. Since we bought the condo unit in Santa Fe we’ve had to replace the hot water heater, the toilet (only one bathroom here), new stove, had work done on the wiring, painted most of the interior, fire place repaired, the outside of the entire building was re-stuccoed (which we all had to chip in for), ditto for a new landing on the building stair upper landing etc etc etc. Expecting the fridge to conk out next.
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Deborah said on December 9, 2024 at 1:58 pm
Luigi Mangione or something like that, not sure of the spelling. Sounds like something delicious.
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Dexter Friend said on December 9, 2024 at 2:32 pm
I just alerted my Facebook friends and Facebook threatened to ban me if I left it up, so I deleted it. It’s the fucking NEWS, fer crissakes!
Luigi, yes…eating at an Altoona McDonald’s, had an XRay of screws into bone, maybe it wasn’t covered , so he went off. Still in possession of his zip gun or whatever it will be called, not a veterinarian’s gun.
Whatever the age of the person who ID’d Luigi, I want this person to collect the $60,000 and not let the now-present NYPD screw him/her out of the reward.
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Dorothy said on December 9, 2024 at 4:01 pm
Scotland was much more beautiful than Ireland, in my humble opinion. We did a couple of distillery tours there too. At the last one I mentioned we were there to celebrate our 40th wedding anniversary, and one of the tour guides slipped away, and came back a few minutes later with a little gift for us. Two little whiskey tumblers that do not stand flat on a table. They’re slightly rounded on the bottom and weren’t we just absolutely delighted to be given such a nice gift!
I’m glad it was a McDonald’s employee who recognized the guy and called 5-0. He or she should get the reward money. Maybe they can find a better job than McDonald’s now – or maybe not have to work at all for awhile! Use it for school or something. Anyway I’m glad they caught him. Who knows if he had anyone else on his list?
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David C said on December 9, 2024 at 5:49 pm
It looks like Luigi Mangione is a libertarian, dudebro, maybe incel, with mental health problems. He used a ghost gun which will prompt Congress to do absolutely nothing about them. Didn’t like “woke”. He’s prime age for when schizophrenia manifests. I suspect when they interview his family, they’ll talk about how worried they were about him but didn’t think he’d do something like this. In other words, just a typical American story about someone who never should have been able to get a gun, but did. A more successful John Hinckley for our time.
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Julie Robinson said on December 9, 2024 at 5:51 pm
Amazing that it took so long. Just heard another story of UHC refusing to pay for surgery after a burst appendix, calling the surgery discretionary. Two years later it’s gone to collections and she’s getting dunning calls.
Tajalli, I just want a printed photo book. I haven’t been happy with any of the companies I’ve tried so far, so looking for others’ experiences.
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alex said on December 9, 2024 at 6:44 pm
Tonight making butter chicken in the slow cooker and it smells divine.
Today I posted a comment defending trans rights on a news web site and even though it got a lot of likes, I can’t believe the TERF blowback I received. Engaging with these folks is a fool’s errand and I’ll know better next time.
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Sherri said on December 9, 2024 at 7:35 pm
Alex, the TERFs just baffle me. I understand the right wingers hating trans people, but the ostensibly left wingers who absolutely lose their minds over trans people are a conundrum. There was a guy who was on the ACLU-WA board when I joined the board, who eventually revealed himself to be a TERF. Which, okay, fine, you don’t have to be in lockstep with every position of the organization, but what you can’t do is attack staff members on social media about it. This guy was not only trying to provoke arguments with Chase Strangio, a national staffer who is transgender, he was making personal attacks on Chase on social media.
We asked him to resign, he refused, saying we didn’t have a social media policy. My reaction is we didn’t need to have a social media policy to require that you not personally attack staff members, but we took it to a vote of the board, where we needed a 3/4 majority to remove him. He was given time to defend himself, which he spent telling us the women on the board that we should be opposed to transgender rights and if we weren’t, we weren’t really feminists.
As Chase Strangio was becoming the first transgender person to argue a case before SCOTUS this week, I checked again on our former board member’s social media, and he’s still almost single-mindedly focused on attacking transgender people (or anyone who isn’t clearly XX or XY, for that matter), still attacking Chase (deadnaming him, using the wrong pronouns, etc), and calls the ACLU the TCLU now.
Since this guy identifies religiously as a neoPagan (seriously), I know he’s not doing this because he thinks the Bible says so, but I don’t know why he’s so fixated on this issue.
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alex said on December 9, 2024 at 9:09 pm
Sherri, I can conceive of no explanation other than plain and simple bigotry, and from the responses I got today these people seem to be preoccupied with concern about others viewing them as bigots and it makes them apoplectic. Of course, they were also trying to steer me toward reading some agitprop that to a sensible person would remove any doubt about their motivations.
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Icarus said on December 10, 2024 at 8:43 am
I feel like we tried harder to find the Lindberg kidnapper than Luigi Mangione.
**typo in name field sent this comment to moderation
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nancy said on December 10, 2024 at 11:01 am
I was standing naked in a group shower this morning, apres-swim, thinking about how I’d feel, sharing it with a trans woman. (OK, no I wasn’t. We were discussing how smokin’ hot Luigi Mangione is. But I’ve thought about it before.) Bathrooms are simply a non-issue for me and, I suspect, many others — women don’t walk around naked in bathrooms. We enter, choose a stall, do our business, come out, wash hands, leave. Locker rooms might be a different issue, not for me but for many inclined-to-be-sympathetic women. I’ve noticed that some women, no matter what, will choose the curtained shower stalls over the big room, and I figure they have their reasons, and it’s none of my business. Maybe they’re trans. I honestly have no idea.
I do think we need to have a civil — civil — discussion about trans women in at least some sports. I cannot erase the image of Lea Thomas, who transitioned at 20 after having benefited from all the hormones a male adolescence could bestow upon her, standing way taller than her opponents, with her giant T-square shoulders and long arms, on the starting blocks, and call that fair. I understand that there are some AFAB women who can beat her, and that elite AFAB swimmers benefit from a similar build, but it just bugs me. I am not a TERF, either.
I also hate the term “pregnant people.” That’s the extent of my TERF leanings.
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Deborah said on December 10, 2024 at 12:22 pm
I agree about the term “pregnant people”, it doesn’t seem necessary but what do I know. I suppose there are trans men who get pregnant but my thinking is that it’s probably a microscopic percentage of the population. I get the “they, them” that’s a larger percentage but still a small number.
I’m one of those people who showers and changes in a curtained stall, I’ve never been comfortable openly naked in even all female spaces.
Off topic: has anyone seen the movie The Order yet? I watched the trailer and Jude Law performs an uncanny channeling of Gene Hackman even his looks, it makes me want to see the movie just for that. The actual plot is based on a true story and seems extremely violent but Jude Law’s acting as Gene Hackman would have done it is amazing. Law readily admits he was channeling Hackman.
Gene Hackman is one of my favorite actors, he’s in his 90s and lives in Santa Fe, we saw him buying paints once at the art supply store we go to, this was probably 12 or so years ago. My husband had the guts to tell him we loved his work and Hackman was very gracious.
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Dexter Friend said on December 10, 2024 at 1:01 pm
I don’t think Luigi is an incel at all. He’s a panty-dropping hard six-pack stud. Check out his pic with his lady on a beach in todays NY Post. Now, a waste of talent. Lonely heart ladies will be packing the mail bags to the prison.
Not an endomorph at all.
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Mark P said on December 10, 2024 at 1:12 pm
I used to be extremely body shy, but I guess reaching the age where nobody wants to look changed things. I remember a friend who was in the Army responding to men who say they wouldn’t want to shower with a gay man: if you were in the Army, you showered with a gay man. Is showering with a trans person all that much different?
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Julie Robinson said on December 10, 2024 at 2:45 pm
If you’re uncomfortable with the idea of a trans person in a locker room, how do you think they feel?
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nancy said on December 10, 2024 at 3:39 pm
I’m sure they feel just as uncomfortable. Which is one reason I don’t worry about it very much.
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Sherri said on December 10, 2024 at 4:12 pm
Elite athletes are outliers already. Lia Thomas is 6’1”. Katie Ledecky is 6’0”. There’s not a lot of evidence that going through male puberty conveys a lasting advantage, despite what the anti-trans folks would have you believe. I’ve read a number of studies, but none are definitive; most are small samples and poorly constructed.
The conversation also needs to consider the scale of the issue; the largest estimate has transgender individuals at about 1% of the population. Not all of them are interested in competing in sports. Allowing them to compete is not the death of women’s athletics.
I have yet to be in a locker room that didn’t provide some private areas for showering and changing, and know women who always used those private areas, for a variety of reasons. A Mormon friend, for example, didn’t want to deal with questions about her Mormon undergarments. Muslim women don’t typically dress and undress in common areas.
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Deborah said on December 10, 2024 at 4:16 pm
I used to go to the Y a few blocks away everyday at lunch time when I exercised, when I was working in St. Louis. I had a friend who said she was so concerned about changing in a locker room with lesbians. All I could think of was well you do it every time you’re in a women’s locker room so get over it. But still I didn’t feel comfortable about showering in the group showers, but it had way more to do with my feelings about my own body than what anyone else thought.
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alex said on December 10, 2024 at 5:59 pm
When you’re getting naked in front of other people you have no idea who is turned on by what. Or who is repulsed by what, for that matter. People can be hetero, homo, bi or trans. All this pearl-clutching by the TERFs and their bedfellows on the right is ridiculous, especially since the only people getting turned on in public shithouses are probably coprophiliacs. The idea that people would go trans just to satisfy prurient interests in a place like that says more about them than it does about trans people.
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Deborah said on December 10, 2024 at 6:32 pm
Kimberly Guilfoyle ambassador to Greece. Give me a break.
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susan said on December 10, 2024 at 6:44 pm
Well, they can serve her lips on a platter of fish stew and no one would notice.
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susan said on December 10, 2024 at 6:52 pm
Deborah, have you seen the Top 10 Private Houses of 2024? Now with more brutalist concrete! Oppressive white walls! Non-human scale! Surprise lighting! Confusing lines!
Yeesh. Who determines the top 10 houses???
The “Nest House” in Hòa Khánh Nam, Vietnam I think is the most civilized, approachable, and in neighborly harmony of all of those other weird, architecturally swell domiciles.
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Deborah said on December 10, 2024 at 7:34 pm
Susan, I had not seen that, thanks for the link. Of all of them the only one I found kind of interesting was the first one shown, the Japanese one with the screens between, at least from the outside. Once they showed interior pictures it was pretty grim. The worst one to me was another Japanese house, the windowless concrete block, dismal. And the Vietnam nest house with the jumble of electric wires hanging on the pole right outside looked terrifying. I don’t know what jury picks those but I’m sure there’s a lot of jockeying going on to be included in the choices. None of them looked very appealing to me personally, a lot of hype and in a few years they will exist in “evaluative oblivion” which is a phrase my husband uses to describe the work that starts out in all of the architecture magazines and then slowly slides into nothing special when the next “big thing” hits, and then it repeats.
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David C said on December 10, 2024 at 8:22 pm
It was always a big thing with Limbaugh and Huckabee that they could walk into a women’s locker room saying they identified as a woman. I don’t think the ruse would work. Limbaugh would walk in with one hand down his pants and the other holding a stogie. Huckabee would walk in with one hand down his pants and thumping a bible with the other. That they think that way tells more about them than it does trans women.
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