You knew it was coming, right?
This past week sucked. Hopefully this one’s better. Let’s take a look.
Nope. It’s going to suck.
The problem isn’t just that MERCURY RETROGRADE is going on, it’s that MERCURY RETROGRADE is between us and the sun ais is going to stay there all frigging week. Goddamn orbital mechanics. Which is a shame, because there’s a normally positive interaction between Mars and Venus going on until Tuesday. I say normally positive, because the literal meaning is “completion” which in traditional astrology, is positive (much like order and stability are. Astrologers were trained to pander to the rich and powerful). However in this circumstance, it more likely means “completely sucks.”
In honor of Leo, have some Leo (all German songs can be made metal):
Leo: Knight of Cups reversed – Trickery, artifice, subtlety, swindling, duplicity, fraud.
Virgo: 8 of Swords – Bad news, violent chagrin, crisis, censure, power in trammels, conflict, calumny; also sickness.
Libra: 10 of Coins – Gain, riches; family matters, archives, extraction, the abode of a family.
Scorpio: Knight of Swords – Skill, bravery, capacity, defense, address, enmity, wrath, war, destruction, opposition, resistance, ruin.
Sagittarius: 10 of Swords – Pain, affliction, tears, sadness, desolation. It is not especially a card of violent death.
Capricorn: Knight of Wands reversed – Rupture, division, interruption, discord.
Aquarius: 10 of Cups reversed – Repose of the false heart, indignation, violence.
Pisces: 6 of Coins – Presents, gifts, gratification, attention, vigilance “now is the time.”
Aries: 6 of Swords reversed – Declaration, confession, publicity, losing your weapons.
Taurus: The Devil reversed – Evil, fatality, weakness, pettiness, blindness.
Gemini: 2 of Cups – Love, passion, friendship, affinity, union, concord, sympathy.
Cancer: Ace of Cups – House of the true heart, joy, content, abode, nourishment, abundance, fertility; Holy Table, felicity.
Trickery, artifice, subtlety, swindling, duplicity, fraud.
Sounds sufficiently shitty.
Sure does. I need to be extra careful during business meetings this week.
Virgo: 8 of Swords – Bad news, violent chagrin, crisis, censure, power in trammels, conflict, calumny; also sickness.
I’m going back to bed, for a week
Max’s low salt tolerance is shameful.
Also, can we get Hormel to offer spam without the added potato starch?
Dunno, but I’m about to try one of the various homemade SPAM recipes. I started doing this whole “healthy” thing and gave it up, but I still crave some fried SPAM and eggs now and then. Or a fried SPAM-wich.
Grilled Spam and Cheese?
Damn it. I mis-read and thought Libra was me for a moment, thinking “hey thats not so bad”
Virgo: 8 of Swords – Bad news, violent chagrin, crisis, censure, power in trammels, conflict, calumny; also sickness.
Mahalo for the picture of Hawaii’s favorite breakfast “sandwich”, the Spam musubi. A rectangle of rice, with a slice of Spam (probably fried with soy sauce), with a seaweed wrap holding it together.
Spam is a serious product out here with a dozen or more varieties of Spam in every grocery store. In the bigger stores the Spam section will be on every shelf top to bottom and stretch 30 feet.
Starwise I did notice Orion has returned low in the sky before dawn meaning we are drawing nearer to various fall hunts.
I just got a two pack of Spam in the mail.
It’s okay, I was expecting it.
“Surprise Spam” does sound like a fine practical joke.
Amazon sells Spam and does gift shipments to other peoples’ addresses.
R.J.:
The anti-frat frat I “joined” had the annual cook out, which included grilled spam in sauce, which was generally made of whatever liquids the president could scrounge out of his kitchen.
“Kraken Rum, Kahlua, and Ketchup sauce”
UCS:
That would be one of the less objectionable ones.
Spam became a staple in Hawaii as a result of of WW2.
Also became a staple at the senior Chez Fourscores. We always took some to fish camp, ate it for breakfast on the flyout morning.
I have a can somewhere that I have been saving to reminisce some day but mostly
I don’t like Spam!!!
😧
You don’t like Spam?
What’s wrong with you?
Well, there’s spam, egg, sausage, and spam: that’s not got much spam in it.
I loooove it… I’m having spam spam spam spam spam spam baked beans spam spam spam & spam!
Gemini: 2 of Cups – Love, passion, friendship, affinity, union, concord, sympathy.
Love *and* passion?
Something really bad is bound to happen the following week. 🙁
Sagittarius: 10 of Swords – Pain, affliction, tears, sadness, desolation. It is not especially a card of violent death.
Now I’m just a shadow
of the boy I used to be
I need to be extra careful during business meetings this week.
Look around the table. If you don’t know who the sucker is, it’s probably you.
Aquarius: 10 of Cups reversed – Repose of the false heart, indignation, violence.
There will be blood if no dentist can fix the wife’s tooth, which shattered last week.
random astronomy facts and fiction
Mesklin – Wikipedia
***
The idea came from an object that was at the time believed to exist in the 61 Cygni system, and which might represent an extrasolar planet.
***
61 Cygni – Wikipedia
***
61 Cygni /ˈsɪɡni/ is a binary star system in the constellation Cygnus, consisting of a pair of K-type dwarf stars that orbit each other in a period of about 659 years. Of apparent magnitude 5.20 and 6.05, respectively, they can be seen with binoculars in city skies or with the naked eye in rural areas without light pollution.
…
Over the course of the twentieth century, several different astronomers reported evidence of a massive planet orbiting one of the two stars, but recent high-precision radial velocity observations have shown that all such claims were unfounded.[15] No planets have been confirmed in this stellar system to date.
***
***
Prot says he is from the binary star system of Agape and Satori. These are certainly poetic appellations by the writers; “Agape” is the Greco-Christian term for transcendent unconditional love (often translated as charity), whereas “satori” is a Japanese Buddhist term for enlightenment, or self-understanding. Of the few hundred or so stars with proper given titles (as opposed to a star-catalog number), none have those names.
***
Ooh, spooky…
alien natural history museum
https://xenobiologymuseum.com/the-galactic-menagerie/
Those say more about us than extraterrestrial life.
That said, consider parallel evolution: different species filling same or similar niches will evolve very similar body types and behavior. Likely extraterrestrial life from earth-like planets will be familiar in an uncanny valley like way. Uncanny valley is an evolutionary adaptation that is there for a very good reason. We should heed it. Contact with extraterrestrial life except under the most careful circumstances will be extremely hazardous for both them and us.
Considering the variety of life on earth, I don’t expect too many surprises if we ever go out there or they come here.
These Blue Oyster mushrooms can sing, but not Don’t Fear the Reaper, surprisingly.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-nIBA0V_No
And this fun guy puts on a great show:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPJ10eXc9bY
Maybe that killer cordyceps fungus from The Last of Us can be defeated with music like in Mars Attacks.
Bubba Watson came in 2nd in LIV UK tournament today. He hit his driver off the fairway twice for eagles. Both were crazy accurate at that distance.
https://dapi.livgolf.com/v2/content/en-us/videos/watch-bubba-watson-two-eagles-driver-off-deck-rd-3-liv-golf-uk-by-jcb-2025
lucky astronomer gets video of asteroid hitting the moon
https://www.space.com/meteorite-impacts-moon-february-2023-video
Haven’t checked on Robby Soave lately. I sure hope he’s being sarcastic.
https://x.com/robbysoave/status/1949211557075808344
Some scoundrel should spam his feed with how to change a tire videos.
I think he is saying the left’s attempt at smearing her (accusing her of being a fascist) is going to backfire on them.
Looking around all I can find are accusations of her using her boobs to attract attention thus downplaying the seriousness of domestic violence. A woman using her boobs, that is completely unprecedented.
It seems silly but knowing the left she is stealing their thunder somehow…
relevant:
https://www.reddit.com/r/HitchHikersGuide/comments/jr3943/eccentrica_gallumbits/
***
Known as “The Triple-Breasted Whore of Eroticon Six”, Eccentrica Gallumbits, the author of The Big Bang Theory – A Personal View, is mentioned in all six of the novels. She is first mentioned in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy when Arthur looks up Earth for the first time in the guide. The entry for Earth follows that for Eccentrica Gallumbits. She is heard about again during a newscast that Zaphod Beeblebrox tunes into shortly after stealing the spaceship Heart of Gold. The newsreader quotes Eccentrica describing Zaphod as “The best bang since the Big One.” It was also reported in Fit the Ninth of the radio series that Zaphod had delivered a presidential address from her bedroom on at least one occasion. Commentary on Zaphod in the novel And Another Thing… intimates that one reason for his acquiring a third arm is the ability to fondle all of Eccentrica’s breasts at the same time.
***
Sarcastic about it not being fascist?
Another overrated Boomer icon dies
***
Lehrer was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1955 and served until 1957, working at the National Security Agency (NSA). Lehrer once stated that he invented the Jello shot during this time, as a means of circumventing the base’s ban on alcoholic beverages.[18] Despite holding a master’s degree in an era when American conscripts often lacked high school diplomas, Lehrer served as an enlisted soldier, achieving the rank of specialist third class, which he described as being a “corporal without portfolio”.[19] These experiences became fodder for songs, such as “The Wild West is Where I Want to Be” and “It Makes a Fellow Proud to Be a Soldier”.[20] In 2020 Lehrer publicly revealed that he had been assigned to the NSA; since the mere fact of the NSA’s existence was classified at the time, Lehrer found himself in the position of implicitly using nuclear weapons work as a cover story for something more sensitive.[21]
***
There used to be an NSA satirical choir kind of like The Capitol Steps. Their hit parody song was I Am the Very Model of a Modern Language Analyst.
RIP. Although I’d say he was more popular with GenX than baby boomers.
video game lets you journey across universe at ludicrous speed
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpp5LEenDQk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAWL8ejf2nM
This guy is able to play with slide of a P320 and get it to discharge consistently without a full trigger pull.
I’ve never seen a handgun with play like that in the slide. What kind of piece of shit did the Army buy?
https://youtu.be/jOMQOtOQoPk
Leo: Knight of Cups reversed – Trickery, artifice, subtlety, swindling, duplicity, fraud.
But the 2nd is my birthday! No fair
6 of Swords reversed – Declaration, confession, publicity, losing your weapons.
I can’t have a boating accident, I don’t even own a boat!
Uh, watch out. That is an old plot device! You hear a prediction that you dismiss as not possible. Intrigue ensues and you suddenly find yourself in the exact set of circumstances you never saw coming.
Someone towing a boat gets into an accident and the boat goes flying into JI’s armory. Randos loot the scene!
How big is your car?
Haven’t checked on Robby Soave lately. I sure hope he’s being sarcastic.
It seems pretty clear to me. Are people pissing and moaning because she’s advertising jeans?
Envy is the primary motive for most of human behavior.
“You know- a DEAL deal. Maybe the guy’s a Republican.”
“It’s a very powerful deal, it’s a very big deal, it’s the biggest of all the deals,” Trump said alongside von der Leyen.
“It’s a good deal, it’s a huge deal, with tough negotiations,” von der Leyen said after the meeting.
Let’s all celebrate.
Well, I WAS gonna take the nice car to Cleveland. But it seems there’s thunderstorms all along my route NE.
Tracker Testarossa- allons-y!
That reminds me, I need to check weather on my route for next week
You have a nice car, implying that you also have a not so nice car.
Look at Mr Deep Pockets. Probably has insurance on both of them as well.
Is it nice enough so we can fly away?
this is some really wiggy stuff:
https://vmonaco.com/papers/Factoring%20Integers%20With%20a%20Brain-Inspired%20Computer.pdf
The Russians have a supercomputer with many floating-point unit coprocessors, which is innovative, but the above would be a real game changer. It’s also way more practical than quantum computing, in my amateur opinion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NDMC_Supercomputer
Libra: 10 of Coins – Gain, riches; family matters, archives, extraction, the abode of a family.
Are you saying the Epstein files are somehow hidden in my abode and I’m going to gain massive riches if I manage to extract them?