Recent Posts

You'll see a lot of junk right now because the holidays...... too many data, mis-reading

Thank you for not padlock - gracias (Grace)

And I'm sure you had fun with writing (concise and humour) - "British Mods" and a chuckle "Modal Mud Mode Mod"

www.theguardian.com/film/2022/sep/29/sigourney-weaver-kevin-kline-interview-the-good-house

It was interesting but it wasn't the Oscar. It was two hours of fun. There was a little bit about family, addictions, ageism, violence/death, etc

ie: The Ice Storm, Life as a Home, Sophie's Choice, Big Chill, Grand Canyon

November 19, 2022
Vol. 11, No. 1859

_____________________________________________


November Surprise: In a surprise announcement, Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed a special prosecutor to handle the potentially criminal cases against Donald Trump for the January 6thinsurrection and the secret documents he held at Mar-a-Lago.
Garland said he made the appointment to insulate the Justice Department from accusations of political motivation in the investigations.
A furious Trump said he "won’t partake in it" and called it "the worst politicization of justice in our country,"
"I have been going through this for six years — for six years I have been going through this,” Trump said, “and I am not going to go through it anymore."
Supporting Trump, the intellectually limited George Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene tweeted, “IMPEACH MERRICK GARLAND!”
Jack Smith, the former head of the Justice Department’s public integrity section, and a career prosecutor with 30 years’ experience will head the investigations. Smith has served as chief prosecutor in The Hague prosecuting war crimes.
“I intend to conduct the assigned investigations, and any prosecutions that may result from them, independently and in the best traditions of the Department of Justice,” Smith said in a statement.
Smith would not be completely independent. If he decides to seek indictments, the attorney general would still have to sign off on it.

Drop of Blood: Former Theranos executive Elizabeth Holmes was sentenced to 11 years and three months in prison for defrauding investors in her blood testing company.
The 38-year-old Holmes had raised $945 million for Theranos with the promise that she had a revolutionary testing technology that could run 1,000 tests to diagnose multiple health conditions with a single drop of blood. The technology didn’t exist and the company’s collapse became a huge scandal in the investment world.
Her defense argued that it was merely the failure of a technology startup like any other. Holmes was told to report to prison in April. She is married and pregnant with her second child.

The Long Count: Democrat Adam Frisch has conceded in his effort to unseat the firebrand Colorado Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert. That gives the Republicans 219 seats in the House, just one more than the minimum for a controlling majority.
The race had not yet been called when Frisch gave up and qualified for an automatic recount. Boebert was leading by just 554 votes.
“The likelihood of this recount changing more than a handful of votes is very small — very, very small,” Mr. Frisch said in a video posted on Facebook. “It’d be disingenuous and unethical for us or any other group — any other group — to continue to raise false hope.”

Tweet That: While as many as 1,200 Twitter employees took a buyout yesterday, the company’s new owner Elon Musk sent out pleas to be informed about how the social media platform works.
“Anyone who actually writes software, please report to the 10th floor at 2 p.m. today,” he wrote in the first of three emails. Thirty minutes later he said he wanted to learn about Twitter’s “tech stack,” a term used to describe the programming mechanics. Then he asked some people to fly to San Francisco to meet in person.
Twitter teeters on the edge of existence after Musk charged in, fired half the employees, drove out more, then offered a buyout to those who didn’t want to stay. As one example, the “core services” team, which handles computing architecture, has been reduced from 100 people to four.
Users are leaving the platform as well, predicting its collapse.
Musk actually tweeted, “What should Twitter do next?” Maybe leave someone to close the doors after everyone is gone.

Stormy Weather: Snow has been falling in the Buffalo, NY area at the rate of three inches an hour during an early winter storm that could last through the weekend. There are reports of accumulation of five feet of snow, but we always question that. Somebody is measuring in a snow drift. Nevertheless, a crippling amount of snow has fallen.

The Obit Page: Robert Clary, the diminutive French-born actor and singer best known for his part in the 1960s sitcom “Hogan’s Heroes” about Allied prisoners of war in the fictional “Stalag 13,” has died at age 96. He was the last surviving member of the cast.
The show poked fun at how the prisoners made their captors look like fools and ran sabotage operations inside Germany. Few people in the American audience knew that Clary had real and horrific experience in a camp during the war.
Clary was Jewish and when he was 16, his parents and their 14 children were rounded up and sent to Auschwitz. His parents were gassed the first day and he recalled many years later that his mother’s last words to him were, “Behave. Do what they tell you to do.”
Clary survived entertaining the Germans with song and dance, spending 31 months in extermination camps. He was the only member of his family who lived to the end of the war.
In the US, Clary married Natalie Cantor, daughter of the famed singer and dancer Eddie Cantor.
Created only 20 years after the war, “Hogan’s Heroes” was popular, but also criticized for being in bad taste, drawing laughs about war. Clary later said in his memoir, “‘Hogan’s Heroes’ was about prisoners of war in a stalag. It was not about genocide. It was not Jews going to the gas chambers.”

The Spin Rack: Hundreds of people protesting strict Muslim rule in Iran have been blinded by rubber bullets and pellets fired by the police and security officers. The NY Times reports that security officials patrol the hospitals and sometimes the wounded are denied treatment. --- Naomi Biden, the President’s oldest grandchild, is getting married at the White House today. The ceremony will be followed by a black tie evening reception. Naomi is the daughter of Biden’s troubled son, Hunter.

Below the Fold: A federal judge in Florida partially blocked a law hailed by Gov. Ron DeSantis that limits discussion of racism and privilege in schools and workplace training.
US District Judge Mark Walker in Tallahassee stopped the Republican-backed bill from taking effect in the state's public universities, calling it “positively dystopian.”
"The State of Florida's decision to choose which viewpoints are worthy of illumination and which must remain in the shadows has implications for us all," Walker wrote. "But the First Amendment does not permit the State of Florida to muzzle its university professors, impose its own orthodoxy of viewpoints, and cast us all into the dark."
-30-
Subscribe and Comment

My Winter classical music


www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRxofEmo3HA
(oops ) Vivaldi's Spring

L'Inverno (Winter)
Opus 8, No. 4, in F minor

I. Allegro non molto--
Frozen and trembling in the icy snow,
In the severe blast of the horrible wind,
As we run, we constantly stamp our feet,
And our teeth chatter in the cold.
II. Largo--
To spend happy and quiet days near the fire,
While, outside, the rain soaks hundreds.
III. Allegro--
We walk on the ice with slow steps,
And tread carefully, for fear of falling.
Symphony, If we go quickly, we slip and fall to the ground.
Again we run on the ice,
Until it cracks and opens.
We hear, from closed doors,
Sirocco, Boreas, and all the winds in battle.
This is winter, but it brings joy.

I didn't write this....... and I read a smidge

"Trump Part III: In a speech loaded with superlatives about himself, political fictions, denial of climate change and more, Donald Trump last night announced his third run for the presidency saying, “America’s comeback starts right now.”
It was a return of the Trump show in which credit for all good things go to him and blame for the bad goes to others. He took no responsibility for the party failure in the midterm elections.
Dismissing climate change, he said ocean levels are predicted to rise 1/8th of an inch in 300 years rather than the scientifically predicted one foot in 30 years. He said China was involved in the 2020 US elections. He said Russia would not have invaded Ukraine if he was still president.
Trump declared, “I’ve gone decades, decades without a war, the first president to do it for that long a period.” He was president for four years.
Conservative politicians and commentators immediately expressed worry about a Trump return.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who held his office by 19 percentage points a week ago, and is a front runner to oppose Trump, was blunt about the underperformance of his party across the country and the prospect of Trump running for president again. “I would just tell people to go check out the scoreboard from last Tuesday night,” he said.
In remarks to supporters the morning after her projected victory, Arizona’s governor-elect Katie Hobbs said Arizona voters chose “solving our problems over conspiracy theories” and “sanity over chaos. ”
Of course, she was referring to Kari Lake, one of the last holdouts of Trumpism from the Tuesday election who, 36 hours later, has not conceded defeat. Lake campaigned in part on claims that the 2020 presidential election was rigged in favor of Joe Biden and she has suggested that if she loses it could only be because of election fraud.
If she finally gives up, it’s a big nail in the coffin of Trumpism."

I go to a lot of podcasts - listen and play PIANO (solo/duo classical and solo/duo jazz) Chopin, Satie, Vivaldi, Bach, Beethoven, Withers, Jarrett, Oscar O, Dana Cunningham etc, etc

Double strong mint gummed the koan ~ by the grasshopper

Congratulations for the veterans
And conscientious objectors
Happy birthday with my second ex-wife