Really thought you were going to say leitmotif.

Oh, nice! Thanks!

I seriously admire this level of commitment to the bit.

oops! Sorry. It’s a recent (well, compared to the original) parody/homage/whatever of the poem:

• This is just to say
• I have eaten
• the rich
• that were at
• the golf club
• and which
• you were probably
• saving
• for class war
• Forgive me
• they were delicious
• so white
• and so old

It was posted on Twitter by “your friend Helen” (@hels) many years back. I assume they were the author but I really don’t know.

https://i.imgur.com/g9zpxpc.jpeg

Looks like a Stefan to me, though I can’t put my finger on why.

For me, Birkenstocks slip a little bit no matter what. If I don’t wear socks, the rubbing eventually makes me bleed (usually just under the ankle). If I wear socks, that doesn’t happen.

I’m not sure why that happens to me and not to most people. Maybe my skin is too dry? But yeah. When I wore Birkenstocks, it was with socks. These days I just don’t wear sandals.

So, for anyone else who became curious after this exchange:

I tried to look up how many there actually are. It’s hard to give a single number, since there are many different ways to count them, but vaguely speaking it’s in the range of dozens to a few hundred. GPS specifically has had 83 satellites built, of which 31 are currently operational, but most of the others still exist, they’re just parked in a higher orbit for retirement. There’s also GLONASS, BeiDou, Galileo, QZSS, and IRNSS/Navic. QZSS and IRNSS don’t have as many satellites, and the rest are kinda roughly similar in number (e.g. GLONASS has had 146 built and 24 currently operational).

So yeah. Nowhere near hundreds of thousands. Even Starlink, which now comprises more than half of the total satellites of any kind in orbit, has only about 10,000.

I live 3300 km away from Texas. That’s almost half again as far as Kyiv is from Paris. It’s not trivial to just pop down there for a march some weekend.

A derecho, flooding, and tornadoes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Gary_power_outage

I actually think they are saving a copy. They need to be able to redo the training if they come up with a better architecture.

I would have transcribed it as “Demnn Fennìrós.” But yeah. Sloppity slop.

chambermaid, maybe?

Sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice.

Yeah, he definitely seems untethered enough that any kind of threat seems risky to entirely dismiss. I don’t think he’s gonna do anything with the actual military against Canada, though. That’s expensive, and his puppeteers don’t see a big profit in it. He’s kind of already acting as an occupying force within the US, and his hold on power here is tenuous; and war with Canada, who can actually hurt Americans on their home soil, would be even more unpopular than his various overseas entanglements.

I didn’t take apart a phone to get it, but I managed to buy a rotary dial mechanism from a surplus store near where I grew up when I was a teen (maybe thirty years ago?). I think I’ve still got it in a drawer. It’s honestly a very clever design, and the sound is kind of weirdly soothing.

This is my read on it too. He has no idea whether we want bond yields high or low or what. He actually feels a little bit attacked by the question because he doesn’t understand it. At first he tries to deflect it, because if the question will just go away, he doesn’t have to care about it anymore. But then there’s a follow-up. This is a challenge that isn’t immediately going away. That makes him angry. He still doesn’t know what’s going on, but now he has to care about that. So he’s gonna make a vague threat about being in control of the military. That should do the trick. That makes the reporters’ eyes get wide every time, and he can just walk away at that point and be guaranteed to get a lot of press attention. It’s a win-win.

You have to understand that he doesn’t see these interviews as means of communication. He sees them as power struggles. Any communication that occurs is entirely incidental.

They don’t. They’re financing it via debt in an increasingly unstable and circular manner.

Frogger.