Yesterday for Memorial Day I woke up at 0530 and made a brisket. Unfortunately, making and eating that for dinner was a bit of a pyrrhic victory since in the process I figured out where the “gray water” smell in my kitchen is coming from.
I’m going to need a sawzall…
¡Enlaces!
Most of the news from Mexico today is La Cope del Mundo related… First up El Presidenté Mujer will totally host the Iranian team. I’m just curious what happens if they get to the knockout rounds and have to play a US hosted game?
Mexico though is still working on their national team roster. I will predict out of 120 million Mexicans, Guillermo is still the best goalkeeper for the job.
US conducts a military drill over Caracas. Long live the empire.
If you’re afraid ICE is coming for you, why would you go to a World Cup game?
A $4 Trillion Federal Budget, and we’re talking about surveillance blimps? …Assholes, I want a surveillance blimp. *kicks pebble*
In all fairness, I’m constantly lying about the Cuban government, according to the Cuban government.
Cool. Maybe Millei will slap some sense into his commie frock.
Appropriate for the day after a 3 day weekend.
My knees and elbows are still sore from re-connecting my toilet flange to the main drain line on Sunday, so you have my sympathy. It separated during the foundation lift I just had done. Lacking a sawzall, I used a hand saw. The space was probably too tight to fit a power tool anyway.
I hate plumbing jobs.
Not too tough before the sheet rock covers up everything.
I plumbed my whole house but I was a 2.6Score. Obama taught me to use the phone and a pen nowadays.
Well, China paved the way during the PPP administration, so why not?
Sorry about the plumbing issues. Dihydrogen monoxide is such a pernicious erosive medium…
Oh good, well at least we have a clear goal in mind. How hard could it be to stabilize Venezuela?
It’s much bigger than Guam, which has a high propensity to tip over.
Excellent music choice! Also the soundtrack for too much of my life over the last 5-10 years lol
Semi-related, propofol is an excellent anesthetic, but boy does it mess with your head if you have 2 propofol sedations a month apart. Sigh. I don’t love it quite as much now.
It’s actually a pretty shitty anesthetic, but it does a really good job of making you forget what happened.
“…[propofol] does a really good job of making you forget what happened.”
*keenly furrows brow, scribbles ensue*
Med fentanyl was kinda magical. Just completely out for maybe 15min and then good to go. No drowsiness. *snap*
+ Milk of Amnesia
Bobarian: interesting, thanks
Evan: that’s what I love about propofol. Instantly awake
Cuba could clearly start sending over more Tony Montaña’s, making Rubio look more uncool.
I don’t think I have ever seen that Ramones video before.
Following up on the ded-thred . . . . people who buys cars but don’t drive them.
I have 119,000 miles on my 2006 Nissan 350Z.
So, a pretty low per-year average, but still 119K is a lot of miles driven.
I expect to hit 200K before someone decides I’m not fit to drive.
…. glances over at his 506k ’03 Monte…. “a lot”?
Well. I am an engineer with a desk job.
There’s the weekday commute and weekend activities. And my current driving is split over three different vehicles.
The goal is never buy a new vehicle the rest of my life. I can do that if I get another 80K to 100K miles out of each vehicle that I own.
The wife’s Exploder hit the 200k mark last month.
I’ve put about 21k on my Elantra since I bought it in 2013. It’s presently at ~93.5k. If I maintain my present habits as a WFH social recluse and the thing keeps running for another 50k it’ll last me until the first year I’m eligible to collect social security.
Yeah, that’s low. I just hit 140k on my 2018 Taco. Those 100-mile round trips to the range (or the parent’s house) most weekends are adding up.)
On the plus side, 2018 was a pretty good model year for Toyota. I’ll probably see 250k easy if I keep up with the maintenance.
I’m getting twitchy about my GTI being at 63k.
LOL.
I’ve never kept a new car that long before.
That it? I’m at the point of scheduling routine maintenance for 120k miles, and don’t regard that as having high mileage.
118K on my 2004 F150 and I only have one drivable vehicle. I’ve been every place I wanted to go.
8 year old car. 31k miles. I live in a 15 minute suburb.
2009 Subaru Forester, under 100k miles
Totally understandable after how many completely innocent Haitians with proper immigration paperwork have been rounded up like so many head of cattle and sent on trains to the nearest concentration camp.
Not for nothing, but step 1 of setting yourself up as a sympathetic victim of hypothetical future malicious immigration enforcement might be to stop identifying yourself with the shit hole you fled from. If “your country’s national anthem” is different from the national anthem of the country in which you presently reside, maybe return there with all of that overwhelming pride you feel and be the change you wish to see in the world.
PPP promised them eternal amnesty. Drat that nasty Orange Man for trying to enforce laws again!
I suspect truck driving in Haiti is not quite as lucrative as it is in Ohio.
Nor as safe. In Haiti hitchhikers pick up you.
Noticed that too.
And yet the US still actually “assimilates” far more successfully than, say, Europe. We don’t have no-go zones or Sharia law (yet). We do have the two-tier justice system that will get us there sooner rather than later.
My sympathy level is about the same as that for anyone complaining how long it’s been since their team won a championship.
Haiti’s first football World Cup appearance since 1974 is a source of immense pride. However, Emile, a Haitian living in Ohio, is afraid to attend a match because of United States President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown.
Haiti open their account at the 2026 edition of football’s showpiece international event against Scotland on June 14 at Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts.
Gee, “Doing the jobs Americans won’t do” must pay pretty well if he can afford to attend World Cup matches.
Emile, a truck driver in his 40s
Oh, nevermind. He’s just undercutting an American truck driver’s wage by working illegally, while creating a hazard on the roadways for other motorists.
Oh child, that’s just what we’ve spent up to March for FY 2026. FY 2025’s budget was $7.1T, against $5.3T in revenue.
We need to hijack one of those surveillance blimps, park it over DC and just have it constantly loop the current deficit clock and the Witcher “…. fuck” clip in perpetuity.
It might as well say “Eleventy-seven gajillion.” The numbers are so large they become abstract and decontextualized from reality for 99% of people.
But they’re perfectly happy to concern-troll for an anti-American news outlet spreading FUD.
Someone should start posting on X that some people are posing as news reporters to get contact information to turn into ICE.
If “your country’s national anthem” is different from the national anthem of the country in which you presently reside, maybe return there with all of that overwhelming pride you feel and be the change you wish to see in the world.
Whoa, whoa, whoa. Let’s not go crazy.
What a peculiar combination of job functions.
Commas matter!
“Let’s eat, Grandma!”
The Oxford comma is a hill on which it is worth dying. Punctuation and capitalization is the difference between “I helped my friend jack of a horse” and “I helped my friend, Jack, off a horse.”
Look, depending on the horse, that output commands a high market price for creating new horses.
I use Oxford commas if I have 4+ of something, if the subjects are long or require more words, or if it helps the overall look of the sentence for clarity. It’s nothing to froth over. Those that do just like frothing.
Regarding that getting wordier than I anticipated, I’ll use semi-colons if I think it separates things more cleanly. (But I didn’t, just now.) Not for ‘professional’ writing, but starting with conjunctions sometimes just helps the sound.
I rather like sounds.
“I helped, my friend Jack off, a horse”
//Christopher Walken
Two spaces after a period and Oxford commas forever!
Obligatory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_i1xk07o4g
Foreign affairs? Oh, to be young again.
What a peculiar combination of job functions.
Is he Jewish?
Surveillance blimp?
Deploy one or three over Romania. That way we can spy on Pie.
He’ll never let us know what’s at stake.
He’s already easy to find, he has a cold so just listen for his coffin.
Pie wouldn’t bat an eye.
The drill, which the Venezuelan government said it had authorized as an evacuation drill for possible medical emergencies or disasters, included two MV-22B Osprey aircraft that landed near the U.S. embassy and vessels that entered Venezuelan waters in the Caribbean Sea.
Tin foil hat time: What’s the real purpose of the drill?
Sabre rattling at Cuba.
Okay, Audio Glibs. I’ve got a wiring question.
For funsies, I bought a pair of shitty “solder it yourself” amplifier kits. My intention was to wire them in series, sending the output from one to the input of the other (almost certainly produinc a godawful drop in sound quality, but this isn’t a serious project). The hurdle I’ve run into is that the input is a three-pin header for a 3.5mm plug. The output is a pair of two-pin speaker wire headers. How would I wire those four pins to feed the three pins on the next module and get something resembling an audio signal?
The 3.5 mm jack is just going to be L/R/Gnd TRS stereo, so the L pin from the speaker wire you’d solder the 3.5 mm pin 1 (T), the R pin from the speaker wire you’d solder to the 3.5 mm pin 2 (R), and you’d solder the two grounds to pin 3 (S).
Is it safe to assume that with the board labelled “In1” “In2” and “Blk” that the black wire is still ground?
Uhm… best I could do is “probably.” I’ve interconnected a whole lot of amps, but haven’t built one from scratch.
If you get it wrong the sound will be inverted.
😱
Noise Cancelling Stereo.
Some amps are balanced and combining the negative speaker output will release magic smoke.
Also audio input amps have a front end stage that you will completely overwhelm.
If you omit the gain stage it may work. However, I only dabble so I know just theory and not construction.
🤔 Would diodes help?
Good point.
No.
Do you have a schematic? See if the grounds are tied or separate from each channel.
There are schematics late in the instructions of the two kits.
https://resources.kitronik.co.uk/pdf/2143_high_power_amp_essentials_2_0.pdf
https://resources.kitronik.co.uk/pdf/2185-deluxe-stereo-amplifier-essential-information.pdf
the one that stacks it all on one chip is using this guy: file:///C:/Users/elderwyrm/Downloads/en.CD00001048.pdf
Edit fairy kindly replace the link with the real one – https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/stmicroelectronics/TDA7297/715883
Common ground, but they are a “chip” amp. The front end is built into the chip.
What will happen is you won’t get any louder the chip will simply output maximum wattage and full distortion.
It’s not like cascading transistors.
Aww… 😥
On the bright side, they’re cheap.
Relevant Bart Simpson and a megaphone:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oCyXsHC-lQ4
The world is ending
If the Texas barbecue industry had an alarm, it would be the spreadsheet that Russell Roegels uses to track the price of brisket. On a recent morning, sitting at a quiet table in his suburban restaurant, he pointed to the number at the top of the column: $5.56. That’s the price he pays for a pound of the most important item on any barbecue menu in Texas.
Over the past year, that number has risen 28 percent, a reflection of the spiking meat prices that have dented the pocketbooks of average grocery store customers nationwide. Inside the kitchens of Texas’s more than 3,000 barbecue purveyors, whose very existence depends on a plentiful and affordable supply of quality beef, the effect has been close to cataclysmal.
Roegels, 53, grew up working at a barbecue joint and has run his own since 2001, serving some of Houston’s elite and their friends, including former president George H.W. Bush, NFL veteran Gary Kubiak and former Astros pitcher Andy Pettitte. He used to be able to offset the high wholesale cost by selling other meats and side dishes. But this year he realized that wasn’t enough. So Roegels made the risky decision to raise the price he charges customers for brisket by $2, to $35 a pound — a 6 percent increase — and hoped his clientele wouldn’t defect.
Yeah, those price conscious consumers paying $35 a pound for brisket will probably walk out en masse 🙄️ With only a 629% markup, I’m surprised the poor bastard can keep the lights on. Probably hasn’t cut himself a pay check in years.
I’d think you’d want to price the brisket as low as you can, and run the margins up on the sides.
Appropriate for the day after a 3 day weekend.
Very much so. Everything seems off today, work is getting on my nerves, and Mrs. TOK and my youngest are on each others’ last nerves. Thankfully tomorrow night I ship out for 4 days of hockey.
As I looked up o’er the streets of Laredo
As I looked up near Laredo one day
I spied a young blimpie, wrapped all in white plastic
Wrapped in white plastic, as cold as the clay
“Oh, beat the drum slowly and play the fife lowly
Sing the Death March as you carry me along
Take me to the valley, there lay the sod o’er me
I’m lighter than air and know I’ve done wrong”
One foot in the grave
Trump’s eating habits have been a recurring point of discussion among members of his administration. On “The Katie Miller Podcast” in January, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said the president is in “incredible” health but criticized his diet, saying it consists of “really bad food,” frequently including McDonald’s, candy and Diet Coke. “I don’t know how he’s alive, but he is,” Kennedy said. At an awards gala earlier this month, White House chief of staff Susie Wiles said Trump eats McDonald’s “every single day.”
Trump has continued to downplay his advanced age, even as he is set to become an octogenarian in less than three weeks.
“I’m not a senior,” Trump insisted at a White House event on May 4. “I’m far younger. I feel like — I feel the same as I felt 50 years ago.”
The palpable hope for bad news is rather unseemly.
They learned to be thorough after Biden. Thought never occurred prior.
How many annual physicals do they give this guy every year? Feels like he gets one a month.
This is how you know Trump is a bullshit artist.
I didn’t believe him before, I’d want a second opinion from Melania.
Iran’s World Cup team is based in Tijuana, so no trouble slipping across the border for games (all three of the group games are in the U.S.).
Blistering
Unpredictable and extreme weather is becoming more frequent as Earth warms. Experts say unprecedented and deadly weather extremes that sometimes strike at abnormal times and in unusual places are putting more people in danger.
“We know beyond a shadow of a doubt that heat wave events such as this have been made more likely and more severe due to climate change arising from our emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases,” said Peter Thorne, director of the ICARUS Climate Research Centre, at Maynooth University, in Ireland. “But, nevertheless, many of the records being set, particularly in the U.K. and France, are mind-bogglingly crazy.”
Literally baking.
Source: my ass. They don’t even bother trying to p-hack a facially plausible study to push to the press anymore.
The previous 7-8 months we were complaining about the cold.
On the average temps haven’t changed much.
No, it is not. Stop lying.
The unseasonable heat extended to Spain, where weather service spokesperson Rubén del Campo said: “We find ourselves with temperatures we normally see in the middle of the summer now in the month of May.”
He said Seville hit 100 degrees over the weekend, while large parts of the Iberian Peninsula saw temperatures 5 to 10 degrees Celsius higher than normal.
And in Rome, temperatures were expected to reach 89 on Tuesday.
Temperatures which are not exactly unheard of, just a little early.
The end is nigh.
It’s 89 today in Podunkville, that’s late July-early August temps. A nice surprise. I learned the AC is working fine.
It was 82 degrees in TX, and for some reason that was a number in Bright Red on Wunderground weather, like it was somehow hot, or bad. It should be in the same color as all the other fonts or even green as this is totally normal.
This will be followed by years of “normal” weather which will somehow go unremarked in the scare-media.
So, as many of you know, Florida was one of the states to re-draw its Congressional district map post-Calais.
As expected, Marc Ellis and the usual suspects filed a lawsuit immediately.
Today was the
smackdownruling.(Here’s a link to the actual ruling for the curious ones).
What a difference following procedure makes.
Unpredictable and extreme Firsting is becoming more frequent as Earth spins. Because Firsting doesn’t conform to your laws of entropy.
According to our model…
Over the last few weeks, the United States right loudly claimed victory in a battle that few people on earth knew was happening. National Review’s editorial board gloated, “Science Has Spoken Against Climate Alarmism.” Several papers owned by Rupert Murdoch ran similarly hyperventilating headlines that scientists had reversed “doomsday predictions” and “quietly scrapped the apocalyptic forecasts that have terrified policymakers and the public.” Donald Trump wrote on social media that the United Nations’ “TOP Climate change committee,” the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, “admitted that its own projections (RCP8.5) were WRONG WRONG WRONG!”
That isn’t what happened. And it’s hard to overstate the gulf between the scale of the right’s triumphalism and the size of the thing they are ostensibly talking about. The alleged victory in question is in reality an academic paper published last month by a team of earth system modeling experts convened by the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project, or CMIP, an initiative of the U.N.’s World Climate Research Program. The paper describes several new forward-looking climate scenarios created to help researchers understand how and why the earth warms, and what might happen as it does. Such scenarios have been a mainstay of climate science since the 1980s, and are updated frequently to account for new research and observations. “These scenarios are not prediction machines,” said Detlef van Vuuren of the University of Utrecht, a veteran of emissions scenario development and the lead author on the CMIP paper. “They are simply ways to explore possible futures.” As the present changes, so too do researchers’ models of possible futures.
They actually admitted one particular scenario was vanishingly unlikely, but that’s no reason to give up on the incessant scaremongering.
Keep fear alive.
“You silly wingnuts have been taking us seriously this whole time lol dummies”
Top-shelf gaslighting, that is.
Related.
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/the-panic-industrys-new-target-ee794c4d?st=xnvY2V&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
@Rhywun, if you’re still around, check out Luster by Maria Somerville if you haven’t. Dreampop/shoegaze verging on post-rock in places.
🫡 okey dokey
“These scenarios are not prediction machines,” said Detlef van Vuuren of the University of Utrecht, a veteran of emissions scenario development and the lead author on the CMIP paper. “They are simply ways to explore possible futures.”
But that doesn’t mean we can’t use these calamitous “possible futures” to impose draconian “mitigation” scams in the here and now.
“We’re now in a very different position than RCP8.5 would have taken us, which is good,” van Vuuren said. “That doesn’t mean that RCP8.5 was wrong.” Continually updating scenarios to account for new data and understandings, he says, “is just the regular way we do our climate research.”
According to my model, my model is correct.
It wasn’t wrong, it was just a different answer than reality.
Not even wrong