After the recent Bruce Springsteen dust-up with 47, Borneo doesn't have to worry about becoming a US province. Ain't no way Trump now wants to hear the Boss sing "Borneo the USA"! 😬
Although if Springsteen wants to get on his good side, just change tramps to Trumps, when he sings "Born to run".
There is a Kinky Friedman song - Wild Man from Borneo. I revisited the lyrics to see if there was a relevant meaning. But I couldn't honestly decipher much of the meaning, if there is one. :-)
Thanks. I hope you are in a good place regarding your mother's passing. You have been on my mind but figuring out the proper words at this distance has eluded me.
I've been thinking of buying a t-shirt that reads "When does this old enough to know better kick in?" 🤔 Katie smiled when I showed it to her, with just a gentle 🙄
Pityriasis rosea can happen after a round of antibiotics, and I believe once did for me. Standard treatment is reassuring words that there's almost always nothing seriously wrong with sprouting itchy giraffe spots for a few weeks. Treating the symptoms is optional, if they get too annoying.
It's possible these rashes sometimes have a viral cause. That is, I suspect the proximate cause is "immune system gets annoyed at something and stages a skin protest" with any number of remote causes.
Um... VOA and RadioFreeEurope / RadioLiberty are different entities operating with different relationships to the government, VOA being the "official" broadcaster of the U.S. government, and RFE/RL being funded by the government but operating with much more editorial and programming freedom. But VOA is indeed still in business...
A brief Copilot summary, which would have been accurate for *both* organizations pre-Trump. I'm sure if Trump and the Project 2025 Troglodytes want to cut funding for RFE / RL they can and will, but they can't *legally* directly intrude in its day-to-day ops the way they can at VOA unless they want to end up with even more 3rd string DOJ attorneys arguing bullsh*t cases in court...
< Voice of America (VOA) and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) are both U.S.-funded international broadcasters, but they serve different purposes and have distinct histories.
VOA, established in 1942, is the official international broadcaster of the U.S. government. It provides news and information in multiple languages, aiming to present a balanced view of global events while promoting American values and perspectives.
RFE/RL, founded in 1949, was originally created to counter Soviet propaganda during the Cold War. Unlike VOA, it operates with more editorial independence and focuses on regions with restricted press freedoms, such as Eastern Europe, Russia, and parts of Asia.
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) is a private, nonprofit organization funded by the U.S. Congress through a grant from the United States Agency for Global Media (USAGM), an independent federal agency overseeing U.S. international broadcasting.
RFE/RL operates with editorial independence and focuses on providing uncensored news in regions where press freedom is restricted. Its headquarters is in Prague, Czech Republic, and it has multiple bureaus worldwide. >
Good. I depended on that a lot when I lived overseas. I spent a couple of hours every day putzing with a shortwave trying to hold a signal. I felt like I could trust them.
49 and cloudy at the lake. I’m here with my daughter/grandson until Thursday. Had a lovely weekend here with the daughters and their families. Our son never likes to come here, I think it’s too much socializing for him. 18 mo old Adeline had the most fun splashing in the 56 degree water!
That’s my town! I just watched a bit of it, but at the very beginning the photographer is on the Bearskin trail, which I walk/bike on a few times a week. I know that trail like the back of my hand. About 1:51 she’s walking over a trestle and you get a quick glimpse of a house on the left. We used to own that cabin, too funny.
Cool! It seems like a very nice place. North Carolina doesn't have the same kind of lake environments. Except for a handful in the mountains, our lakes are either reservoirs with hydroelectric dams or very shallow lakes in the coastal plain.
It’s gotten quite commercialized over the past 18 years we’ve been up here but during the week, it’s still pretty serene. I only saw one other boat on the lake as I was kayaking this morning. It was lovely. I’m not too happy with the advent of the UTV. I don’t understand the allure, you come to the north to escape the loud.
Good morning. Cloudy and 59 here, with highs in the 60s and rain later.
The mothership is covering Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” which passed the House and now goes to the Senate. The FP is headlining the spat between Trump and Harvard.
The Economist had a theme this week of the Trump admin having an adverse effect on American innovation through its multi-pronged attacks on higher ed in general and federal science funding, among other disruptive actions.
I think it's way too soon to say, in any detail, how "American innovation" will be affected by the current turmoil. (Europeans basically have no innovation at all, so The Economist can go fish.) That said, turmoil itself, uncertainty and disruption, tend to increase institutional conservatism and reduce everyone's efforts to come up with something new.
Vlad and the birthday bro went out for Italian ice this afternoon. They said it was good. I was hoping they'd decide to go to Dairy Queen, because they could have gotten onion rings for me.
I don't know about in the areas of science and research, but Trump's brand of American innovation seems to be doing quite well so far... finding new and ever more creative and efficient ways to corrupt the Executive branch while allowing the Legislative branch to demonstrate its clear usefulness as a check on the Executive, all while the meter maids in the Judicial branch, particularly those at SCOTUS, hand it a parking ticket every now and then.
Hopefully Ron Johnson can pound some sense in the heads of additional Senators and Trump. The BBB is not economically feasible. He appeared in an emergency All-In pod to discuss.
I haven't listened to the podcast with Johnson yet. Did you think it worth it? I've skipped many All-In lately. In years past, their banter on tech and science was worthy. Now - I don't want to hear them talk with such certitude about issues they are not qualified to cover. Economics and Ukraine in particular. Too many super successful tech people mistakenly think they know more than they do. Worse, lately their collective cover and defense for Trump - well most of them are just lying to protect their access to power. I think Friedberg is the one still worth listening to. His signature theme is "more energy production is the most important thing we can do" and goes a long way to mitigating our fiscal issues and national security risks. And China is way, way ahead of us in energy production plans.
I would say yes it’s worth listening to. They don’t wax poetic much, they just ask Johnson questions and he talks most of the time. I am really disappointed in David Sacks. He’s gone off the deep end.
Sacks is awful. Everything about him. His position on Ukraine, his promotion of crypto. His arguments with Larry Summers on economics and trade policy. He will conform to whatever Trump wants him to be.
I'm interested in the Harvard thing. I know Trump is going about it wrong, the hammer vs scalpel thing. I know important research is at risk. I'm also willing to bet not all research is so sacrosanct. Like most domains that raise money, public or not, it does become something of a perpetual machine. The institution develops programs to raise funds. These programs are managed by people whose job depends on raising funds. That depends on having somewhere to place the funds. Inevitably some will be useful and some not, but the machine has to be fed. I don't have any idea how to sort out the good.
Completely anecdotally, a very good friend of mine, and his wife, were researchers at UT Austin. One seemed to study cocaine in rats for about 30 years. I think we know cocaine is not good. The other some kind of social science - i.e. do humans function better with this or that training. I love them both but have seen them spend what seems like the bulk of their time writing grants - for studies we maybe could survive without. Embarrassingly there is a longer story about my friend, caught using NIH money for home repairs.
The FP has an article by Tyler Cowen that ponders the problems with the Trump approach and possibly better ways to go about it. It seems right that promoting positive initiatives is better than trying to tear things down.
Some research is good directly, some is good indirectly, and a majority is not good.
Colin Wright ("SwipeWright") has a substack where he talks on various issues. lately he has gotten into bad research. Most of it comes from the liberal arts, and is just performative essays. A good example was "petrosexuals", which reads like someone tossed a thousand academic buzzwords into a blender.
Interestingly, he studied the social life of bugs. That's an example of indirect research. We don't study bug social life because we hope they become our influencers someday, but because that may translate into insights in our own lives.
The problem in funded research is that it is very politically driven, both form the side funding it and from the recipient side. It is incestuous, in that leaders of an ideology push for the idea to be funded, then push to select who will select the recipients.
There's another issue. Publications drive hiring, tenure, and promotion decisions so the more you publish, the better. I edit a minor journal that has gotten over 417 submissions this calendar year already. We publish 84 papers a year. We're on track for 950ish submissions, so less than a 10% acceptance rate.
I have a paper under review at a good journal. I initially explored it for a lesser known journal doing a special issue on a topic. The problem was my results countered what they wanted to be found. I didn't submit because it would be a waste of time. The good news was wrestling with that decision I observed a "natural experiment" (one that occurs by chance, and is not set up by the researcher). We saw something occur similar to what we were studying, but it differed on an explanatory variable. A natural experiment might be two communities dealing with a problem; one tries "A" attempt, another does not. Do their outcomes differ? If you can show "A" mattered, then yes.
I'm grateful you didn't skewer me, it would be easy to take a swipe at the admittedly broad brush, but as you say - it's a can of worms. There are lot of things at play with this issue. On the one hand, the arrogance of the elite institutions ("how dare you question what we are doing with your money!") makes it easy to fuel populist anger. On the other hand, it's reasonable to believe that funding needed for the important stuff will inevitably mean some waste on things of little value. The issue with publications and their ideological capture is a big problem.
It could be that the most practical answer is that NIH and the institutions are overdue for much higher level of scrutiny. But the Trump admin approach is, as it does with everything, taking action that will harm everyone without addressing the the fundamental issue.
BTW - the end to the story about my friend using NIH funds for personal use is that UT Austin didn't want the stink either, and as far as I know just made him pay back the funds, fired him, and dropped the issue.
The story has been in academia for over a year. The people who caught her are research nerds (I mean that respectfully), who saw the result tables didn't cohere together. The author faked data. Everyone is confident that happened. Except for her.
Many journals now want you to deposit the source data as a condition of publication. The idea is if there are replication questions they want to see the source data.
The irony is her research was in ethics. We talked about the case at our major conference last year, as she cancelled a talk.
People who alter a results table have to be careful because nerds can backsolve the table and spot it. I had someone submit an article where they had a binary variable (1 or 0). Okay, but in looking at the covariance table it appeared there were values in excess of 10 in the results table. We rejected it.
Typically, the place to fake it is in data collection, to "lose" some problematic data results before they appear in a table. For example, suppose you do an event study, where in the first stage you study the stock price changes. A person could sort the results, and drop those at one end or the other, to shift the overall results. It is much tougher to spot that, because you'd need to collect the source data yourself to know something had been dropped.
BTW, it's why I like collecting my own data: I get nervous trusting a doctoral student I've never met.
Yes. Whatever is/was in the version that arrived in the Senate, it’s going to be an entirely different beast afterwards, and then another entirely new beast if/when it goes through whatever the conference committee is called nowadays.
Looking at the Malaysian Luxe Lodge video that included rafting, my first thought was, do they warn the tourists about the leeches?
I burned them off with cigarettes. But that was a half century ago and nobody really smokes anymore. (Although in that part of the world, the clove cigarettes were popular with the locals.)
I was looking at that turbid water and thinking about leeches, too. My oldest daughter went rafting in Borneo when her ship was there. She also mentioned crocodiles.
And some really impressive monitor lizards swimming across. Since both were mostly submerged in muddy water, it was nearly impossible to tell which was which.
I recall being in a motorized dugout on a river up near Samarinda and the local driver didn't bother to try to figure out the difference. He aimed the boat at them trying to kill them and cackled wildly when he hit one. Kinda like rural southerners with copperheads in the backyard, they weren't particularly enamored with that part of their local fauna.
After the recent Bruce Springsteen dust-up with 47, Borneo doesn't have to worry about becoming a US province. Ain't no way Trump now wants to hear the Boss sing "Borneo the USA"! 😬
Although if Springsteen wants to get on his good side, just change tramps to Trumps, when he sings "Born to run".
There is a Kinky Friedman song - Wild Man from Borneo. I revisited the lyrics to see if there was a relevant meaning. But I couldn't honestly decipher much of the meaning, if there is one. :-)
It's *Kinky Friedman*. 'Nuff said. 🤔🤨🙄
Hmmm, should I ask for a Trump EO to ban bad puns? Otherwise, I'll show you to the 🚪
Oy, Jay! I hope you're just warming up your wit ...
Ha! I'm sure he's probably thinkin' - in the words of the Boss himself - "Oh-oh-oh, I'm on fire".
Good morning! 58 F, gloomy and wet but I am home. My suitcase is empty and put away for the first time since December.
Now I need to sort out all the stuff I brought home (I did take the estate sale opportunity to get rid of some stuff here.)
Congratulations on wrapping up this phase.
Thanks. I hope you are in a good place regarding your mother's passing. You have been on my mind but figuring out the proper words at this distance has eluded me.
Thank you, and the same to you in return!
"Resigned," I would say, with occasional erratic emotions that are not really about her death but about the whole course of my/her life.
Thanks. Yes. We were always close, but I have discovered a lot I wish she'd bothered to tell me.
My MIL had a trivet on the wall in her kitchen that said "Ve are too soon old und too late schmart." Yes.
I've been thinking of buying a t-shirt that reads "When does this old enough to know better kick in?" 🤔 Katie smiled when I showed it to her, with just a gentle 🙄
But creativity! "Knowing" and "better" are moving targets for the analytic and creative mind! I'm not surprised the eye roll was gentle.
Very concise. "You're lucky if life knocks some sense into you before you're too old to appreciate it."
I like that!
Huh, a naked-headed skin disease.
I had Pityriasis once, but it wasn’t gymnocephala, fortunately.
What antibiotics worked for you?
Worked as in caused it? I forget.
Pityriasis rosea can happen after a round of antibiotics, and I believe once did for me. Standard treatment is reassuring words that there's almost always nothing seriously wrong with sprouting itchy giraffe spots for a few weeks. Treating the symptoms is optional, if they get too annoying.
It's possible these rashes sometimes have a viral cause. That is, I suspect the proximate cause is "immune system gets annoyed at something and stages a skin protest" with any number of remote causes.
So I stumbled across this in my morning readings.
NZZ.CH: After escaping the chaos of the Soviet Union, many Russian-Germans are now voting for the far right:
https://www.nzz.ch/english/despite-success-russian-germans-shift-toward-far-right-ld.1886183?mktcid=smsh&mktcval=E-mail
It seems Putin's propaganda efforts are reaching beyond Tucker's Suckers and well into Europe's heartland.
Interesting report. Hard to dispute that letting in Russian media (by definition “state media”) invites heavy-duty propaganda into your society…
America used to counter some of that nonsense with VOA. Did it actually die? I've lost the plot on that story.
Looks like it’s operational.
https://www.rferl.org/LatestNews
Um... VOA and RadioFreeEurope / RadioLiberty are different entities operating with different relationships to the government, VOA being the "official" broadcaster of the U.S. government, and RFE/RL being funded by the government but operating with much more editorial and programming freedom. But VOA is indeed still in business...
https://www.voanews.com/
https://projects.voanews.com/global2/
It seems The Donald and his crew decided it might be a useful tool after all...
https://apnews.com/article/voa-oan-media-voice-of-america-89649b6a62df9a40c5b3af682770d6b9
So…rfe/rl ftw!
Yep...
A brief Copilot summary, which would have been accurate for *both* organizations pre-Trump. I'm sure if Trump and the Project 2025 Troglodytes want to cut funding for RFE / RL they can and will, but they can't *legally* directly intrude in its day-to-day ops the way they can at VOA unless they want to end up with even more 3rd string DOJ attorneys arguing bullsh*t cases in court...
< Voice of America (VOA) and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) are both U.S.-funded international broadcasters, but they serve different purposes and have distinct histories.
VOA, established in 1942, is the official international broadcaster of the U.S. government. It provides news and information in multiple languages, aiming to present a balanced view of global events while promoting American values and perspectives.
RFE/RL, founded in 1949, was originally created to counter Soviet propaganda during the Cold War. Unlike VOA, it operates with more editorial independence and focuses on regions with restricted press freedoms, such as Eastern Europe, Russia, and parts of Asia.
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) is a private, nonprofit organization funded by the U.S. Congress through a grant from the United States Agency for Global Media (USAGM), an independent federal agency overseeing U.S. international broadcasting.
RFE/RL operates with editorial independence and focuses on providing uncensored news in regions where press freedom is restricted. Its headquarters is in Prague, Czech Republic, and it has multiple bureaus worldwide. >
Thanks. I bookmarked that for my news source list.
Good. I depended on that a lot when I lived overseas. I spent a couple of hours every day putzing with a shortwave trying to hold a signal. I felt like I could trust them.
49 and cloudy at the lake. I’m here with my daughter/grandson until Thursday. Had a lovely weekend here with the daughters and their families. Our son never likes to come here, I think it’s too much socializing for him. 18 mo old Adeline had the most fun splashing in the 56 degree water!
Which lake is it again?
Minocqua.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A13XFNA6Lr0
That’s my town! I just watched a bit of it, but at the very beginning the photographer is on the Bearskin trail, which I walk/bike on a few times a week. I know that trail like the back of my hand. About 1:51 she’s walking over a trestle and you get a quick glimpse of a house on the left. We used to own that cabin, too funny.
Cool! It seems like a very nice place. North Carolina doesn't have the same kind of lake environments. Except for a handful in the mountains, our lakes are either reservoirs with hydroelectric dams or very shallow lakes in the coastal plain.
It’s gotten quite commercialized over the past 18 years we’ve been up here but during the week, it’s still pretty serene. I only saw one other boat on the lake as I was kayaking this morning. It was lovely. I’m not too happy with the advent of the UTV. I don’t understand the allure, you come to the north to escape the loud.
Superior?
There are thousands of lakes in northern WI before you get to Superior. Most people have homes on those lakes rather than fierce, frigid Superior.
Thought I remembered you being on a trip to Superior, either the lake or the town some time ago.
My daughter lives in Duluth on Superior, maybe it’s they?
That’s what it was.
Good morning. Cloudy and 59 here, with highs in the 60s and rain later.
The mothership is covering Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” which passed the House and now goes to the Senate. The FP is headlining the spat between Trump and Harvard.
The Economist had a theme this week of the Trump admin having an adverse effect on American innovation through its multi-pronged attacks on higher ed in general and federal science funding, among other disruptive actions.
I think it's way too soon to say, in any detail, how "American innovation" will be affected by the current turmoil. (Europeans basically have no innovation at all, so The Economist can go fish.) That said, turmoil itself, uncertainty and disruption, tend to increase institutional conservatism and reduce everyone's efforts to come up with something new.
tbf the Italians did introduce a new flavor in gelato in 2023: I'll check in July to see if they have any new Gelato innovations or not....
Vlad and the birthday bro went out for Italian ice this afternoon. They said it was good. I was hoping they'd decide to go to Dairy Queen, because they could have gotten onion rings for me.
I hesitate to say there is no innovation in Europe. But their culture and governments are not innovation-friendly.
Yes, that's more accurate.
I don't know about in the areas of science and research, but Trump's brand of American innovation seems to be doing quite well so far... finding new and ever more creative and efficient ways to corrupt the Executive branch while allowing the Legislative branch to demonstrate its clear usefulness as a check on the Executive, all while the meter maids in the Judicial branch, particularly those at SCOTUS, hand it a parking ticket every now and then.
When you make it impossible for people to plan and coordinate, you’re doing pure harm by way of disruption.
In other "wow, who knew?" news, the square of the hypotenuse equals the sum of the squares of the other two sides.
Hopefully Ron Johnson can pound some sense in the heads of additional Senators and Trump. The BBB is not economically feasible. He appeared in an emergency All-In pod to discuss.
I haven't listened to the podcast with Johnson yet. Did you think it worth it? I've skipped many All-In lately. In years past, their banter on tech and science was worthy. Now - I don't want to hear them talk with such certitude about issues they are not qualified to cover. Economics and Ukraine in particular. Too many super successful tech people mistakenly think they know more than they do. Worse, lately their collective cover and defense for Trump - well most of them are just lying to protect their access to power. I think Friedberg is the one still worth listening to. His signature theme is "more energy production is the most important thing we can do" and goes a long way to mitigating our fiscal issues and national security risks. And China is way, way ahead of us in energy production plans.
I would say yes it’s worth listening to. They don’t wax poetic much, they just ask Johnson questions and he talks most of the time. I am really disappointed in David Sacks. He’s gone off the deep end.
Sacks is awful. Everything about him. His position on Ukraine, his promotion of crypto. His arguments with Larry Summers on economics and trade policy. He will conform to whatever Trump wants him to be.
I've lost interest in the Trump/Harvard thing and the "Big Beautiful Bill".
I'm interested in the Harvard thing. I know Trump is going about it wrong, the hammer vs scalpel thing. I know important research is at risk. I'm also willing to bet not all research is so sacrosanct. Like most domains that raise money, public or not, it does become something of a perpetual machine. The institution develops programs to raise funds. These programs are managed by people whose job depends on raising funds. That depends on having somewhere to place the funds. Inevitably some will be useful and some not, but the machine has to be fed. I don't have any idea how to sort out the good.
Completely anecdotally, a very good friend of mine, and his wife, were researchers at UT Austin. One seemed to study cocaine in rats for about 30 years. I think we know cocaine is not good. The other some kind of social science - i.e. do humans function better with this or that training. I love them both but have seen them spend what seems like the bulk of their time writing grants - for studies we maybe could survive without. Embarrassingly there is a longer story about my friend, caught using NIH money for home repairs.
The FP has an article by Tyler Cowen that ponders the problems with the Trump approach and possibly better ways to go about it. It seems right that promoting positive initiatives is better than trying to tear things down.
https://www.thefp.com/p/tyler-cowen-harvard-trump
I should have prefaced the above comments on research, that Jay Janney very likely could and should expose how know-nothing that is.
Whew! Talk about opening a can of worms!
Some research is good directly, some is good indirectly, and a majority is not good.
Colin Wright ("SwipeWright") has a substack where he talks on various issues. lately he has gotten into bad research. Most of it comes from the liberal arts, and is just performative essays. A good example was "petrosexuals", which reads like someone tossed a thousand academic buzzwords into a blender.
Interestingly, he studied the social life of bugs. That's an example of indirect research. We don't study bug social life because we hope they become our influencers someday, but because that may translate into insights in our own lives.
The problem in funded research is that it is very politically driven, both form the side funding it and from the recipient side. It is incestuous, in that leaders of an ideology push for the idea to be funded, then push to select who will select the recipients.
There's another issue. Publications drive hiring, tenure, and promotion decisions so the more you publish, the better. I edit a minor journal that has gotten over 417 submissions this calendar year already. We publish 84 papers a year. We're on track for 950ish submissions, so less than a 10% acceptance rate.
I have a paper under review at a good journal. I initially explored it for a lesser known journal doing a special issue on a topic. The problem was my results countered what they wanted to be found. I didn't submit because it would be a waste of time. The good news was wrestling with that decision I observed a "natural experiment" (one that occurs by chance, and is not set up by the researcher). We saw something occur similar to what we were studying, but it differed on an explanatory variable. A natural experiment might be two communities dealing with a problem; one tries "A" attempt, another does not. Do their outcomes differ? If you can show "A" mattered, then yes.
I'm grateful you didn't skewer me, it would be easy to take a swipe at the admittedly broad brush, but as you say - it's a can of worms. There are lot of things at play with this issue. On the one hand, the arrogance of the elite institutions ("how dare you question what we are doing with your money!") makes it easy to fuel populist anger. On the other hand, it's reasonable to believe that funding needed for the important stuff will inevitably mean some waste on things of little value. The issue with publications and their ideological capture is a big problem.
It could be that the most practical answer is that NIH and the institutions are overdue for much higher level of scrutiny. But the Trump admin approach is, as it does with everything, taking action that will harm everyone without addressing the the fundamental issue.
BTW - the end to the story about my friend using NIH funds for personal use is that UT Austin didn't want the stink either, and as far as I know just made him pay back the funds, fired him, and dropped the issue.
https://nypost.com/2025/05/27/us-news/harvard-professor-of-honesty-stripped-of-tenure-fired-for-manipulating-data-in-studies/
A story today. Thoughts, Prof. Jay?
The story has been in academia for over a year. The people who caught her are research nerds (I mean that respectfully), who saw the result tables didn't cohere together. The author faked data. Everyone is confident that happened. Except for her.
Many journals now want you to deposit the source data as a condition of publication. The idea is if there are replication questions they want to see the source data.
The irony is her research was in ethics. We talked about the case at our major conference last year, as she cancelled a talk.
People who alter a results table have to be careful because nerds can backsolve the table and spot it. I had someone submit an article where they had a binary variable (1 or 0). Okay, but in looking at the covariance table it appeared there were values in excess of 10 in the results table. We rejected it.
Typically, the place to fake it is in data collection, to "lose" some problematic data results before they appear in a table. For example, suppose you do an event study, where in the first stage you study the stock price changes. A person could sort the results, and drop those at one end or the other, to shift the overall results. It is much tougher to spot that, because you'd need to collect the source data yourself to know something had been dropped.
BTW, it's why I like collecting my own data: I get nervous trusting a doctoral student I've never met.
I think the reason I've lost interest is that I agree with parts of a variety of points of view, and also, Trump is just an overwhelming bore.
Trump seems to be the short-fingered vulgarian he was described as.
Inadequately endowed in so many ways and extremely boorish and vulgar.
Although given how many want to assassinate him, "Boer" might also be applicable.
I've settled on that word too. If I had to choose only one word for Trump, it would be unbearably "boorish".
Yes, "boor" is even better, but they go together. I don't think I've ever found a boor interesting.
But then there's the third of the three homophones.
Yes. Whatever is/was in the version that arrived in the Senate, it’s going to be an entirely different beast afterwards, and then another entirely new beast if/when it goes through whatever the conference committee is called nowadays.
Right?!?
My immediate thought on TMD's main piece was: What's the point in me actually reading this?
Again, it's not what they say. It's what they do.
Pretty bird.
Looking at the Malaysian Luxe Lodge video that included rafting, my first thought was, do they warn the tourists about the leeches?
I burned them off with cigarettes. But that was a half century ago and nobody really smokes anymore. (Although in that part of the world, the clove cigarettes were popular with the locals.)
I was looking at that turbid water and thinking about leeches, too. My oldest daughter went rafting in Borneo when her ship was there. She also mentioned crocodiles.
And some really impressive monitor lizards swimming across. Since both were mostly submerged in muddy water, it was nearly impossible to tell which was which.
I recall being in a motorized dugout on a river up near Samarinda and the local driver didn't bother to try to figure out the difference. He aimed the boat at them trying to kill them and cackled wildly when he hit one. Kinda like rural southerners with copperheads in the backyard, they weren't particularly enamored with that part of their local fauna.
It's often easier to be friends with animals from a very considerable distance!
I forgot to mention that it's Son F's 16th birthday. Life's a blur.
Good morning, friends! It's Tuesday here, and it's raining. Nothing is on the calendar, which makes me nervous.
I am home, my suitcase is unpacked and put away for the first time since December. I feel ya.
Morning. All rain here today, too, after a rainy gloomy day all day yesterday. It makes me drowsy.
When the feeling you’ve forgotten something important is too strong, first check to see if you’re wearing pants, I always say.