Tea for one ?

I've been surprised at how little the official Consumer Price Index has risen since the onset of the tariffs.  Part of this may be the result of companies eating some of the costs, but a more subtle effect is "shrinkflation" - a process that has been going on for decades as companies downside the size of products while holding the sticker price unchanged.  Anyone who pays attention to their budget and shopping is aware of the process; hat this is accelerating is evidenced in this article in Reuters:

Toy makers that serve retail giants like Walmart, Target and Amazon are reducing the number of accessories in toy kitchen sets, removing batteries from electronic playsets, simplifying doll makeup and reducing packaging, as a 30% blanket tariff currently imposed on Chinese imports puts a damper on their bottom lines...

Educational toy maker Popular Playthings - whose China-made animal sets, trucks, and magnetic food sets can be bought on Amazon - is delaying and paring down a magnetic cake set it had planned to launch in June, CEO Jason Cheung said in an interview. The company is reducing the power of the magnet, using cheaper packaging, and removing one of two serving plates that were to come with the set -- all while upping the price from $29.99 to $34.99.

"Originally it would come with two plates so two kids can have cake at the same time,” Cheung said. Now, "one (child) will serve, while the other can eat."

Time to cue Led Zeppelin "Tea For One."

Colorful "rocks" found in a Georgia yard

From the discussion thread at the whatsthisrock subreddit:

OP, that looks like cement-solidified-and-stabilized industrial waste, possibly from dye, glaze, or pigment manufacturing.

Going back to the 1950s, manufacturers have mixed their hazardous wastes with concrete to solidify and bind it to prevent it from migrating off-site or into waterways, and to allow it to be disposed of as solid waste. I can clearly see a thin layer of plain cement on the bottom and top of those pieces. Industrial dyes and pigments back in the 20th century contained manufacturing by-products like dioxins and toxic heavy metals used as colorants.

Please err on the side of safety and dispose of whatever you collected. It could be very old and full of bad stuff. If the in situ concrete is breaking up, perhaps call the county environmental agency to let them know.

The ongoing genocide in Gaza, updated

Excerpts from the CBC's As It Happens transcript from several days ago, featuring an interview with Ajith Sunghay, who is the Head of the UN Human Rights Office in the Occupied Palestinian Territory:

NK: You know, when we talk about these hundreds and hundreds of people being killed around aid distribution sites, what are Palestinians in Gaza telling you? What are your staff members there telling you about the kinds of choices people are having to make right now?

AS: It's very difficult. I mean, to be honest with you, we are lost for words to describe how things are in Gaza. Two-point-two million people are suffering, and not necessarily all dying, but in different ways. In that background -- against that background -- we see, and I have to say, you know, before the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation stepped in to distribute food, there were 400 places -- 400 centres -- where the UN and its partners were distributing food. That is for 2.2 million people. That's been reduced to about four centres. And now, three centres in the last few days. We're talking about 700,000 people squeezed into each centre trying to get food. It is chaotic, and people are being shot. And this has happened over the last six weeks. We see 700-plus people who have been shot and killed while trying to get food. They are not a threat to the Israeli Defense Force. So, why are they being shot? This is a crowd control issue. So, you can imagine, after six weeks, when people have been shot and killed every day trying to get food, they still go. And that is because their choices are just to either starve and die, or go to these places, struggle, step on each other, fight for this meagre resource, and get shot. And that's a very, very difficult choice to make. And they say we know the risk, but we will take that risk. We'd rather die one way or the other. So, it's that desperate.

A column at The Guardian collected some of the more outrageous statements by Israeli politicans in the past couple years:

“All of Gaza’s infrastructures must be destroyed to its foundation and their electricity cut off immediately. The war is not against Hamas but against the state of Gaza,” said May Golan, minister for social equality and the advancement of the status of women of Israel on 7 October 2023.

“Flatten everything [in Gaza] just like it is today in Auschwitz,” David Azoulay, council leader for the northern Israeli town of Metula, said in an interview with an Israeli radio station, December 2023.

“Now we all have one common goal – erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the Earth” Nissim Vaturi, deputy speaker of the Israeli parliament, wrote on X 7 October 2023. Vaturi also wrote: “The war will never end if we don’t expel everyone.” (2 November 2023) and “To wipe out Gaza. Nothing else will satisfy us … Don’t leave a single child there, expel all the remaining ones in the end, so they have no chance of recovery.” (9 October 2023)

“The Gaza Strip should be flattened, and for all of them there is but one sentence, and that is death,” Yitzhak Kroizer, a member of national security minister Itamar Ben Gvir’s far-right Otzma Yehudit party, said in a radio interview. This did not get much international coverage but was cited in the letter sent to the attorney general at the end of 2023 accusing the country’s judicial authorities of ignoring incitement to genocide.

“The children in Gaza have brought this upon themselves,” said Meirav Ben-Ari from Yair Lapid’s opposition party Yesh Atid in response to a Palestinian lawmaker bemoaning the loss of civilian life on 16 October 2023.

“There should be 2 goals for this victory: 1. There is no more Muslim land in the Land of Israel ... After we make it the land of IL, Gaza should be left as a monument, like Sodom …” said Likud member of the Knesset Amit Halevi on 16 October 2023.

“They [the children] are our enemies,” said Simcha Rothman, a member of the Knesset for the National Religious party, part of prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition. Rothman was responding to a question from a Channel 4 (UK) interviewer asking “the children are your enemies?”

Addendum from email received from World Central Kitchen July 20: 

World Central Kitchen teams in Gaza have again run out of ingredients to cook warm meals. We served 80,000 meals yesterday, emptying the last of our replenished stocks while aid trucks remain stuck at the border. 

Our brave teams are still baking bread and delivering water each day—essential lifelines for Gazan families. 

Our Field Kitchens are prepped and ready to resume cooking the moment new supplies arrive. Every second counts. Families in Gaza rely on these hot meals.

WCK’s commitment remains steadfast. We are on the ground, working alongside local chefs and partners, ready to ramp up operations the moment food can safely reach our kitchen.

And this from The Guardian yesterday:

At least 32 people were killed and more than 100 injured on Saturday morning when Israeli troops opened fire on crowds of Palestinians seeking food from two aid distribution hubs in southern Gaza, according to witnesses and hospital officials.

People on the scene described it as “a massacre”, and claimed Israel Defense Forces fired “indiscriminately” at the groups of Palestinians – reported to be mostly young men – who were making their way towards the hubs run by the US- and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF).

Most of the deaths, which a civil defence agency spokesperson, Mahmud Bassal, attributed to “Israeli gunfire”, occurred in the Teina area, about two miles from a GHF aid distribution centre east of Khan Younis.

Medical sources told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that many of the wounded are in a serious condition, while witnesses at the scene said many of the dead and injured were children and teenagers.

The Nasser hospital in Khan Younis received 25 bodies, as well as dozens of wounded people, while nine others were killed near a centre north-west of Rafah, the civil defence agency said.

Dr Atef al-Hout, director of Nasser hospital, described the situation as “an unprecedented number of casualties in a very short time”, warning that the actual death toll could be higher.

“We’re unable to provide adequate medical treatment as we lack equipment, medicine and personnel,” he told Haaretz. 

July 23:

Tel Aviv, Israel: Israelis protest the food shortages in the Gaza Strip by marching with sacks of flour towards the defence ministry headquarters in Tel Aviv.  Photograph: Jack Guez/AFP/Getty Images, via The Guardian.

The future of clean energy

Selections from a gallery of photos at The Atlantic showing the enormous scale of solar energy projects in China, which currently has 74% of all clean energy projects under construction worldwide.  Mountains, deserts, lakes, and industrial sites like the cattle feedlots are being covered with solar panels.  

Meanwhile the Trump administration is "Reinvigorating America’s Beautiful Clean Coal Industry."

Visually-appealing puréed meals

At the Reddit source there is a relevant discussion thread, including comments by people who have undergone facial reconstruction surgery and other ailments requiring pureed food.

"The Motorcycle Diaries"

I came of age in the 1960s, when Che Guevara was intermittently in the news, and an iconic image of him was frequently featured in underground culture.  At the time I never learned much about him other than that he was a revolutionary who was assassinated by the CIA, so it was a pleasure to discover this 2004 movie recently.  

The Motorcycle Diaries is a biopic adaptation of a book covering a formative period in Che Guevara's youth, when he left medical school to travel with a friend through much of South America.  The script is free of leftist dogma and revolutionary principles; it's basically a road trip/coming of age movie illustrating how Che came to be familiar with and sympathetic with the indigenous peoples of America, and realized that the borders between countries are artificial constructs.  

Four xrays of hands on the fourth of July

All of these xrays were taken at one level 1 trauma center.  The comment thread at the radiology subreddit is largely anecdotal and uninteresting, but one comment was salient - lots of people wake up the morning of the 4th of July not realizing that this will be their last day with two good hands.

WWII prisoners-of-war in Minnesota - updated

I watched this program on Minnesota public television while on a recent vacation back to my home area, and was delighted to find that is is available on YouTube.  It is an outstanding and uplifting program, and will be of interest to those outside Minnesota (I think a map in the video shows other POW camps scattered around the U.S.).

Somehow while growing up in the 50s and 60s I never learned that there were German prisoners-of-war living here and working on farms during the war.  It was win-win for American farmers and for the prisoners.  This video is well worth watching IMHO.

Addendum:  A tip of the blogging cap to reader Doyle Stevick, who found a 2025 book on this very subject:  The Fifteen: Murder, Retribution, and the Forgotten Story of Nazi POWs in America, by William Geroux.

"Today, traces of those camps—which once dotted the landscape from Maine to California—have all but vanished. Forgotten, too, is the grisly series of killings that took place within them: Nazi power games playing out in the heart of the United States.

Protected by the Geneva Convention, German POWs were well-fed and housed. Many worked on American farms, and a few would even go on to marry farmers’ daughters. Ardent Nazis in the camps, however, took a dim view of fellow Germans who befriended their captors.

Soon, the killings began. In camp after camp, Nazis attacked fellow Germans they deemed disloyal. Fifteen were sentenced to death by secret U.S. military tribunals for acts of murder. In response, German authorities condemned fifteen American POWs to the same fate, and, in the waning days of the war, Germany proposed an audacious trade: fifteen German lives for fifteen American lives." 

A "heat burst" is a rare weather phenomenon

"A rare weather phenomena known as a heat burst occurred in a remote area of northwest Minnesota before sunrise Thursday. 

At an automated weather station near the town of Fertile, Minn., the temperature rapidly rose from about 72 degrees at 3 a.m. to 93 degrees at 3:40 a.m. At the same time, the dewpoint went from the upper 60s to the low 40s — a staggering drop before normalizing back into the 60s."

Just 10 miles south, at the weather station in Waukon, Minn., the heat burst didn't occur. While it was 93 in Fertile, the temp stayed in the low 70s in Waukon.  

This from Wikipedia: 

In meteorology, a heat burst is a rare atmospheric phenomenon characterized by a sudden, localized increase in air temperature near the Earth's surface. Heat bursts typically occur during night-time and are associated with decaying thunderstorms. They are also characterized by extremely dry air and are sometimes associated with very strong, even damaging, winds.

Although the phenomenon is not fully understood, the event is thought to occur when rain evaporates (virga) into a parcel of cold, dry air high in the atmosphere, making the air denser than its surroundings. The parcel descends rapidly, warming due to compression, overshoots its equilibrium level, and reaches the surface, similar to a downburst.

It would be scary to be outdoors while this is happening.  You learn something every day.

The Milky Way - horizontal and vertical orientations

Both images were entries at NASA's Astronomy Photo of the Day (November 5, 2024 and July 2, 2025).  Relevant discussion at each link.

Not The Onion

I have no words.  Just waiting to see who else climbs out of the clown car.

The image is a nonclickable screencap.  Details at The Daily Mail, which seems oddly appropriate.

The cartoon equivalent of a "dad joke"

"The muumuu /ˈmuːmuː/ or muʻumuʻu (Hawaiian pronunciation: [ˈmuʔuˈmuʔu]) is a loose dress of Hawaiian origin. It is related to the Mother Hubbard dress, introduced by Christian missionaries in Polynesia to "civilize" those whom they considered half-naked savages. Within the category of fashion known as aloha wear, the muumuu, like the aloha shirt, are often brilliantly colored with floral patterns of Polynesian motifs. In Hawaiʻi, muumuus are no longer as widely worn as an aloha shirt, but continue to be a popular dress for social gatherings, church, and festivals such as the Merrie Monarch hula competition.

The word muʻumuʻu means "cut off" in Hawaiian. The dress, which was originally used as an undergarment or chemise for the holokū, lacked a yoke and may have featured short sleeves or no sleeves at all. The muumuu was made of lightweight solid white cotton fabric and, in addition to being an undergarment, served Hawaiian women as a housedress, nightgown, and swimsuit. Holokū was the original name for the Mother Hubbard dress introduced by Protestant missionaries to Hawaii in the 1820s. In contrast to the muumuu, the holokū featured long sleeves and a floor-length unfitted dress falling from a high-necked yoke which was worn by the aliʻi as well as the common people. By the 1870s, the holokū of the aliʻi took on a more fitted waist and often a train seven or eight yards in length for the evening, and included ruffles, flounces and trimmings, while the modest loose-fitting train-less holokū continued to be widely worn by women of all classes as their daily dress. In time, upon the introduction of printed fabrics to Hawai'i, the muumuu, essentially a shortened and more comfortable version of the holokū, gained popularity for everyday wear."

An articulated T. rex foot

We all know T. rex were big, but wow...  The foot is up for bids at Sotheby's "Geek Week" auction.  Lots of amazing items there, priced for the megamillionaires.

Image from a "Photos of the Day" gallery at The Guardian.

A fascinating video about Roman aqueducts

Lots and lots of information I didn't know, most of it quite interesting.  Sadly, the speaker employs an execrable narrative style of pauses and emphasis that has to be tolerated to extract the info.

Reposted from 2022 to add a much higher quality video which uses animation to explain some of the engineering challenges facing the Roman architects.

The engineering of roman aqueducts explained.
byu/cosmic_voyager01 inDamnthatsinteresting

Nonuplets thriving

"On 4 May 2021, nine children were born to Halima Cisse (Mali) in the Ain Borja clinic in Casablanca, Morocco. This is the first known incidence of nonpulets surviving birth.  The record previously belonged to eight babies born in 2009 to Nadya Suleman (USA) aka "Octomom".

Nonuplets are extremely rare, and until the arrival of the Cisse children, no cases had been recorded of nine babies from a single birth surviving for more than a few hours."

The children are now 4 years old.  Updated info at Neatorama.

There are a lot of good people in the world

From a Facebook post by the Longville Campground Residents.

Update on the Facebook post: "7/8/25 Update: We have found 3 possible foster homes for this liittle chick!  He’s on his way to meet the first family. If the family does not accept him, it’s on to number 2.  Thank you to all who shared the call for help, and the people who messaged they might have a match."

Frostbite of the vocal cords

Symptoms of painful swallowing and hoarseness, resulting from the recreational use of inhaled nitrous oxide.  Details at The New England Journal of Medicine.

Addendum:  a tip of the blogging cap to an anonymous reader who provided a link to Inside the Nitrous Mafia, an East Coast Hippie-Crack Ring (in The Village Voice).  It's a longread, but well worth perusing.

"Hypocorism" explained

I encountered the word in a crossword puzzle clue.  As an almost-eighty-year-old English major, I still learn something every day...

Hypocorism: A term of endearment, often a diminutive; a pet name; a nickname.  Rarely used for "baby talk", such as bow-wow for dog and choo-choo for train. 

"Hypocorism joined the English language in the mid-19th century and was once briefly a buzzword among linguists, who used it rather broadly to mean "adult baby talk"—that is, the altered speech adults use when supposedly imitating babies. Once the baby talk issue faded, hypocorism settled back into being just a fancy word for a pet name. Pet names can be diminutives like "Johnny" for "John," endearing terms such as "honey-bunch," or, yes, names from baby talk, like "Nana" for "Grandma."

Etymology from Greek terms for "a small degree" + "caress".

A golden retriever lay in state at the Minnesota capital

I trust every reader here is politically aware enough to know that a political assassination occurred last month in Minnesota when State Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband were shot to death at their home.  Many of you may have missed the detail that when the gunman entered the Hortman's home he also shot their golden retriever, Gilbert.

This was not a hunting dog.  Melissa Hortman was training this dog for Helping Paws, a nonprofit that provides service dogs to people with disabilities, including veterans and first responders with PTSD.  Gilbert did not graduate from the program, so the Hortmans decided to keep him as a house dog.  There are no living witnesses to the assassination, so it is not known whether the dog came to the front door out of curiosity or to protect his humans, but it doesn't matter.  Governor Walz decided to include Gilbert in the memorial at the state capital.

There is no record of any other nonhuman ever lying in state, and Melissa Hortman, a former state House speaker still leading the chamber’s Democrats, is the first woman. The state previously granted the honor to 19 men, including a vice president, a U.S. secretary of state, U.S. senators, governors and a Civil War veteran, according to the Minnesota Legislative Reference Library.

If any readers consider a dog lying in state to be trivial, please read my post five years ago entitled Remembering Sugar Rae.  And if you still don't understand, please find a different blog to follow.

"Past Lives"

The storyline is very simple.  Lifelong childhood friends in Seoul, Korea are forced apart by circumstances when the girl's family emigrates to Canada.  About 12 years later they re-connect via the internet, but he is stuck in Korea, and she has career commitments in Canada and the U.S.  So, in a decision reminiscent of the memory-erasure in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, they agree to stop corresponding and Zooming online and pay attention to their real lives.  Another 12 years pass, and he is invited to meet her and her husband in New York City.  They meet, talk, and ponder.

I thoroughly enjoyed this movie.  The three actors are excellent, and the dialogue with its hesitations and pauses is utterly realistic - which I value highly in movies that are dialogue-driven.  Regarding the overall tone of the movie, one of the reviews I read used the term "pitch-perfect", which is exactly correct.  This movie is not overly sentimental or overly analytical - and it's not a "rom com" because there is no comedy.  It is a serious contemplation of destinies, alternative possibilites, and stark choices that echo Frost's "The Road Not Taken."

As I looked through various reviews for salient commentary, the best I found was this comment, oddly enough in the YouTube trailer comment thread:

The quick cut at the end showing them as kids was sublime. Gave me chills. There they are once again the two kids standing together but also apart on their divergent paths. The memory now in nighttime mirroring their present was beautiful visual poetry. A realization that their feelings for each other can only exist in a time and space both real and imaginary."

Past Lives has won multiple awards internationally and was nominated for Best Picture and Best Screeplay at the last Academy Awards.  I borrowed the DVD in our library, but the movie should be available streaming and it's available on Netlix.

We should be celebrating the 2nd of July

This Fourth of July, Americans will celebrate the adoption of the Declaration of Independence with picnics, parades and, of course, fireworks. It's a tradition that's been in place for more than 200 years — and for more than 200 years, it's been kind of wrong.

"It is the right day to celebrate the Declaration of Independence," author and historian Ray Raphael tells NPR's Guy Raz. "It is not the right day to celebrate the signing of the declaration or the right day to celebrate independence. The vote for independence was on July 2 — two days before — and the first signing of the declaration ... was not until August 2 — a month later."..

In his book Founding Myths: Stories That Hide Our Patriotic Past, Raphael explores the truth behind the stories of the making of our nation — like how America ended up lighting fireworks on the 4th and not the 2nd.

Raphael says that even the writers of the declaration expected July 2 to be the day that went down in history.

"Adams wrote a letter to his wife, Abigail, on the 3rd of July, the day after they voted for independence, saying the 2nd of July will always be remembered and will be celebrated with parades and illuminations and patriotic speeches," Raphael says. "He described the Fourth of July to the tee, but he called it the 2nd."

America ended up with the 4th because that's the day the Declaration of Independence was sent out to the states to be read. The document was dated July 4, so that's the day they celebrated.

Image from Old Hollywood.

Reposted from 2014 because this is still a "thing you wouldn't know."

Addendum:  I found this info in the National Archives:

The Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. It was engrossed on parchment and on August 2, 1776, delegates began signing it.

Although the section of the Lee Resolution dealing with independence was not adopted until July 2, Congress appointed on June 10 a committee of five to draft a statement of independence for the colonies. The committee included Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Robert R. Livingston, and Roger Sherman, with the actual writing delegated to Jefferson.

Jefferson drafted the statement between June 11 and 28, submitted drafts to Adams and Franklin who made some changes, and then presented the draft to the Congress following the July 2nd adoption of the independence section of the Lee Resolution. The congressional revision process took all of July 3rd and most of July 4th. Finally, in the afternoon of July 4th, the Declaration was adopted.

Perhaps my previous source was inaccurate?  I presume Adams was celebrating the addition of the Lee Resolution, which allowed completion of the declaration.

The "changing room" illusion