Posted by Jordan Liles

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/video-bathtub-viking-ice/

The video allegedly showed a protester wearing a viking helmet and costume while riding in a bathtub on wheels to escape numerous ICE agents.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/video-bathtub-viking-ice/

I got M's two shirts done in the colors he requested.  ( Read more... )

Cow are the latest animals observed using tools, reopening the debate about animal intelligence

Researchers report the first documented case of tool use in cattle, based on a Swiss Brown cow named Veronika who doesn’t just grab an object and rub it against herself.

She chooses the “right” part of a tool for the job, changes her technique depending on where she’s scratching, and repeats those choices in a way that looks consistent and intentional.

( Read more... )

Today is sunny and cold. 

I fed the birds.  I've seen a flock of sparrows.

I put out water for the birds.

EDIT 1/20/26 -- I did a bit of work around the patio.

EDIT 1/20/26 -- I did a bit of work around the patio.

I've seen at least one starling.




.
 

Here's an interesting observation:

Hey ding-dongs, let’s have a chit-chat about Ablaut reduplication.

If you have three words, the order usually goes 'I-A-O.'
-tic-tac-toe

If there are only two words, ‘I’ is the first and the second is either ‘A’ or ‘O.’
-click-clack
-King-Kong


I can think of a few exceptions, like "bone-dry," and more rhymes like "helter-skelter." Some like "merry-go-round" seem to follow a similar high to low pattern.

Challenge #10: Big Mood (Board)

CHOOSE SOMETHING YOU LOVE AND CREATE A MINI MOOD COLLECTION OF THREE (or more) ITEMS THAT EVOKE YOUR FEELINGS ABOUT IT. You don’t have to limit yourself to visual media, or collect the items into a special format like a square (though you can if you’d like).

So yesterday while doing some editing on Fanlore and I found out what a colorbar was and I thought they were kind of neat. So for today's Snowflake Challenge I'm twenty years too late for a trend and made a colorbar for Holmes/Watson:



And yes I do realize one pic is of Basil/Dawson, but they are the mouse equivalent for Holmes/Watson, and I love them.

1. Uncustables do not suck. I had a honey and peanut butter one yesterday and enjoyed it thoroughly. Tasty, easy, and just the right amount to polish off between here and the pool. A very good option!

2. You know how when people die and you go through their stuff and find random bits of change? Well, I'm not dead yet, but I just went into the fabulous storage area to find paper clips and discovered $98.76 in change and a spare mail key!! On the down side, sorry, bro. On the up side, my storage area shelves are now my happy place.

3. Daniel - the very best of our maintenance guys - just came in to check my dishwasher door situation. He thinks he might have to replace the door. He did not take it off but took pix and went to find a part. He left his cart outside my door so I'm thinking this will happen soon.

After seeing Christmas Carol Goes Wrong on stage, I bought the official script; I thought it would be a nice way to remind myself of my evening at the theatre. And it is! But it's also interesting to see how many things had been changed or added by the time I saw it in performance.

Flicking through, here are some of the more interesting differences I've noticed between the script version and the actual performance I saw on the fourteenth of January!


( Some differences between the script and the actual staged version of Christmas Carol Goes Wrong. )


Finally, a delightful little exchange from the script that I don't remember being in the show itself:

Sandra: Listen, we all know the Cornley Gazette's official policy has been not to review our shows since our immersive production of Dracula.
Robert: The small print on the ticket clearly said I would enter his house and bite him.

Our space opera Exordium began life as a mini-series screenplay over four decades ago, morphed into a mass-market paperback, returned as a hastily corrected e-book series, and now is relaunching for the last time after Dave and I, now retired, were able to go over it more slowly. It always needed a more thorough going-over. But also, over the years, so much has changed!

From Exordium’s beginning we’ve struggled with the skiamorphs (shadow shapes—like wood grain on plastic) that are left not only when you move between media, but when your forty-year-old vision of a technology’s cultural impact collides with present-day reality.

The world of Exordium was always a future world replete with echoes of a distant, earthly past that let us shove in all the things we loved in books, art, film, and TV and use them to create the kind of science fiction/space opera we liked.

We were a couple of twenty-somethings in 1977 when Star Wars came out. Younger readers probably can’t imagine the impact of that film on a generation accustomed to SF movies that were either glorified monster fights or preachy future-shock stories filled with plastic furniture and tight jumpsuits that would take an hour to get out of if you had to pee.

On our way out of the 2:30 a.m. showing, we looked at each other and said, “We can do that, but . . . tech that makes sense!”

“More than one active woman!”

“FTL battles that make strategic sense in four-space!”

“More than one active woman!”

Together: “Pie fights! Fart jokes! Ancient civilizations! Cool clothes and machines!”

Thus was born Exordium. At the time Sherwood worked as a flunky in Hollywood, so the first version was a six hour miniseries. On the strength of it we got a good Hollywood agent, and there was a bid war shaping up between NBC and the then-new HBO when . . . boom! The mega-strike of 1980. When that was over, the studios were so depleted that min-series projects were put on hold—for the most part a euphemism for “killed.”

So we decided to turn it into books—and that meant breaking the chains of “can’t do that on TV,” developing the sketchy cultures, and completely rethinking the necessarily limited space battles, which had been confined to bridge scenes with rudimentary 1980s style FX. Dave dived into military history to figure out more about how the ships and tech he’d come up with would fight. Sherwood delved into cultural history to develop the social and political maneuvering we wanted.

Dave also got into high-tech PR and started thinking harder about how the technologies of the future would change humanity. Our world acquired an interstellar ship-switched data network. Our characters acquired “boswells.” Today we call them smartphones, which don’t yet have neural induction for subvocalized privacy. Boswells were (and are) great plot devices, with an intricate etiquette of usage.

But we totally missed social media. That wasn’t a problem, of course, when we sold the series to Tor in 1990, where, despite an awesome editor and nice covers, it mostly vanished into the black hole of the mass market crash. But now we’re bringing them back. Thirty years into the future we didn’t see, which features a publishing industry that didn’t see it either.

The challenge with retrofitting SF is: what do you do with science fiction that purports to take place in the future, but contains elements that look, well, quaint? You either grit your teeth and reissue the book as a period piece, or you rewrite it. And if you choose the latter, what’s inside the can may be more Elder God than annelid.

A lot of what was daring in our original (in our future, everyone is brown, with white being the largely unwanted exception; gay relationships are a part of everyday life, as well as polyamory, etc) is now commonly found, which is great. But other aspects were tougher. In Exordium, we had to wrestle again with the original screenplay, much of which still shadowed the story, especially in the first book. The language that would pass Programs & Practices in 1980 required made-up cusswords; the default for soldiers and action characters was male; by the nineties Dave had developed the idea of the boswells but in Exordium, everyone seemed to be running to computer stations for communication.

We kept the cuss words. Many readers don’t like neologisms, especially for profanity, but the Exordium idiolect had become too much a part of the worldbuilding: for example, the word “fuck” is a great expletive, but it also carries centuries of negative baggage. In our world, sex had completely shed the guilt, especially for women, so we jettisoned slang and idiom that still evoked that old misogynism.

Everything else needed a serious revamp, including the complex battle scenes, which had to be purged of the last traces of non-relativistic widescreen physics. (It helped that some very competent military gamers had developed an Exordium tactical board game based on the paperbacks.)

Rewriting wasn’t all work. One of the joys of revisiting a world in this way is discovering the zings, connections, and hidden history you missed the first time around. Rewriting becomes like looking into a Mandelbrot kaleidoscope.

We kept the fun elements: A playboy prince with unexpected depths, a gang of space pirates and their ass-kicking female captain, ancient weapons from a war lost by the long-vanished masters of the galaxy, coruscating beams of lambent light, intricate space battles where light speed delay is both trap and tool, twisted aristocratic politics more deadly than a battlefield, a bizarre race of sophonts that venerates the Three Stooges, a male chastity device mistaken for the key to ultimate power…

And yes, a high tech pie fight.

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Last year I played a game a month, and actually accomplished it! This year...I did not. I had plans but everything was overthrown in the first part of the year. These are the games I played in 2025:

1. Vintage Story
2. Jupiter Hell
3. Forgive Me Father
4. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (review pending)

I was originally playing Horizon's Gate and then Vintage Story hit me like a truck and consumed all of my time. I spent the first six months or so of the year playing that, then played some Cataclysm and other games for a bit before picking up Jupiter Hell, played Witch Spring R but didn't beat it--I'm playing in Japanese so it's taking quite a while--and near the end of the year I bought Clair Obscur on sale and played it right through the end of the year. No review yet because I'm cleaning up all the post-game stuff, but soon.

Not as many games as last year, but boy did I enjoy all that time with Vintage Story.

New Year's meme time.

( Read more... )

Happy New Year to everyone!

Violet has had a resurgence of interest in knitting and it seems she practiced enough in my absence to now have a good grasp of the mechanics of the knit stitch. She has had to start a new project, because the one she started some time ago accidentally went through the wash and ended up extremely felted. It was a rather fuzzy yarn and hard to knit with, so I was happy to start her off with some smoother yarn that she had chosen for herself at Michael's (I think) and hadn't used yet. So far the little practice piece she is working on has no holes and no extra stitches and is looking good.

There has been a lot of activity in the basement over the last few days. My son in law decided to move his piano away from the part of the basement where I sleep, but his chosen spot (and really the only other place in the house as it's currently set up where there is room for a piano) was just a tiny bit too narrow for the piano. He worked out that if he took the quarter round molding off the parts of the wall on each side of the space the piano would just fit, so he did that this morning but then discovered that the one convenient power point is behind a large shoe rack that's right beside the piano, and there isn't enough clearance to insert a power cable (making the power point very not-convenient). There are at least three double power points in the part of the basement where I sleep, but only the one at the other end where the piano now is, because it's set up as a storage area. There is, however, a power point halfway along the hallway between the two areas, so I'm thinking my son in law will have to run a long extension cord from there to the piano.

While he was thinking about the piano placement, he and my daughter also decided that maybe they could reposition the corner couch that's near my bed, and put it over where the piano used to be. Unfortunately they didn't ask my opinion first (I was upstairs doing something else while this was going on) and when I saw the new layout I didn't really like it, so they ended up moving the couch back.

When I signed up for Wegovy at NovoCare I was asked to pick a date - I picked the first available date - Wednesday, the 21st - tomorrow. I thought I was picking a delivery date. I'm guessing now, I was picking a date for the fun of it. Reddit research now shows that NovoCare will send my prescription to Centerwell who will text me to set up an account (which will likely get fucked up because I used to have Humana and they used Centerwell so I have a non-working account there). Then Centerwell, will send me the goods.

I was looking forward to Wednesday. Now I'm hoping I get the shit in my lifetime. Sigh.

Oh well. This is one sure way of avoiding nasty side effects.

I can just now see the work of loud landscapers of yesterday and they did a fabulous job! Everything looks so tidy. Soon they will be planting the flowers they put in every year. 'They' are the resident volunteers.

Today is housecleaning day, Tomorrow is Food & Beverage meeting day, Thursday is volleyball?, Friday is Closet Day.

Yesterday I was looking up shit on the internet. Every search was investigated by AI and it was driving me nuts. I just wanted the URL of this one company. I did not want its history! I just wanted to know this one thing, I did not want a Ted Talk! Then... I remembered. A while back I was so proud of myself when I engineered my default search tool to be AI! ha. That was a short love affair. I switched it to Google and calm came over the waters. Now I get AI only when I want it. Thankyou, me

Jim Across The Hall has now taken to throwing his garbage into the plastic milk carton that is specifically for glass wine bottles (we do way more trash separation here than is necessary but that's another rant). He's been having trash issues for a while. Bonny went in a couple of weeks ago and showed him what not to do. It did not stick. I do not want to be scraping tomato slices off the floor and the first time Joan slips on one, it ain't going to be pretty.

So I sent an email to the person who manages the carers who come see to him twice a day. She got right back to me and said she would let the carers know to make sure he's not taking out his own trash. She got back to me so fast, that it made me think she was glad to have more evidence that he cannot live in the independent living community any more. His career told me yesterday that he now goes to bed at 4 right after the second carer leaves for the day. I am grateful every day that at least he gets dressed before he comes out.

The door at the end of my hall goes right into Assisted Living which goes right into the Nursing and Memory Care wings. It's also a short cut down to the main lobby/dining rooms/etc. They put a note on that door yesterday that they had a confirmed case of RSV and precautions now required. Happily, I do not have to go through that door but, sometimes, Jim takes that route. I hope his carers steer him clear of it.

Well, I'll be damned. Reddit was wrong! Or, more accurately, my mileage varied. I just got a text from NovoCare with a FedEx tracking number! No delivery date but it's FedEx Overnight Service. So... looks like my Wegovy will be here tomorrow.

Posted by Nur Ibrahim

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/mar-a-lago-dog-masks-party/

The American Humane Society’s Hero Dog Awards Gala took place on Jan. 9, 2026, with Trump in attendance.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/mar-a-lago-dog-masks-party/

ysabetwordsmith suggested I share this short list of resources for printing stickers and other relevant accessories.