Seeking address labels that support a charity

Many years ago I used return address labels from the National Wildlife Federation and other nature- and medicine-based charities.  Then I started printing my own labels using the Avery system of buying blank sticky labels and printing them at home with my name and address.  The last time I tried that, the process was hellishly frustrating, ending with the paper jamming in my printer and the sticky labels tangled in the gears.  I vowed in the future to buy directly from charities again.

But where?  A quick search this morning wasn't productive.  And my understanding of most label-printing services (like the Walmart pictured above) is that my $$ goes to Walmart or the check-printing company and not to the charity.  My "support" for the charity thus becomes having their name or logo microprinted on the label.  

I wonder if any readers are purchasing return address labels from charities.

Majestic irony indeed

For background reading on the meeting of King Charles with Trump.

"86" explained

This morning while doomscrolling I saw a headline indicating that the Department of Justice would be indicting former FBI Director James Comey "because he shared a photo of some seashells."  They are alleging that the "86 47" in the photo is indicative of inciting violence against the president.

Any idiot could look up 86 in Wikipedia:

Eighty-six or 86 is American English slang, generally meaning to "get rid of" someone or something.

In the hospitality industry, it is used to indicate that an item is no longer available, traditionally from a food or drinks establishment, or referring to a person or people who are not welcome on the premises. Its etymology is unknown, but the term seems to have been coined in the 1920s or 1930s.

There are multiple theories re the etymology, which you can read at the link.  Think of the countless hours expended by highly-paid attorneys on both sides, much of which comes at the expense of the public, and for no practical purpose.  I'm so tired of this shit.

A curious landscape feature in Italy

Explanation at the geography subreddit.

Iran's enriched uranium

Embedded above is a screencap from an impressive New York Times article explaining how Iran accumulated 11 tons of nuclear material.  

The graph depicts uranium at various "grades" from low-level (grayish) to enriched (darker) and weapons grade (blackish).

"As the stockpile kept growing, the Obama administration began talks to curb it.  In 2015, Iran and six nations led by the United States reached an accord that limited the purity of its enriched uranium to 3.67 percent and the size of its stockpile until 2030... Iran lacked a single bomb’s worth of uranium in 2018, when Mr. Trump withdrew the United States from the pact and reimposed a series of tough economic sanctions."

Continue reading at the link for more information.  

The art of the deal...

"Demand destruction" looms

I don't know if this term will work its way from the business/economic community to the general press, but it is a useful term.  Here's the Wiki:

In economics, demand destruction refers to a permanent or sustained decline in the demand for a certain good in response to persistent high prices or limited supply. Because of persistent high prices, consumers may decide that it is not worth purchasing as much of that good, or seek out alternatives as substitutes.

I've heard that phrase expressed in interviews on the Bloomberg channel and on Al Jazeera, but today I encountered the phrase in a Facebook post by Mohamed El-Erian:

I will reiterate my previously-expressed belief that the U.S. equity markets are trading at unsustainably high levels based on irrational expectations of a quick resolution to the current Gulf conflict (based on part on Trump's totally irrational claims of such), combined with positive economic news from the small sector of AI-related companies that are overweighted in equity indexes.  The American consumer is hurting and is cutting back on spending; the fact that inflation is stable or rising indicates that companies are passing on their costs to consumers, not that consumers are buying more (as El-Erian notes).  IMHO this is a good time to cash in on paper gains in stocks or to write covered calls when such are available.

Addendum:  Here is a 6-month graph of an index representing the 500 largest companies in the U.S., with the onset of the war indicated by the red arrow:

The Dow Jones Industrial Average has a similar shape.  The S&P has overshot the war onset number because this is its composition:

The U.S. "economy" is increasingly being viewed as one based on information technology, and while artificial intelligence may hold enormous potential for increasing profitability of corporations through increaed efficiecy (and lower payrolls...), the underlying "boots on the ground" economy of agriculture and industry is suffering.  Even if the war ends tomorrow morning, oil prices are going to remain high for a prolonged period.

Just my opinion.  Do not make your investment decisions based on the rantings of an old English major with job skills in the biosciences.  Consult your investment advisors and read widely.

Addendum:  An Australian writing the I Fucking Love Australia substack puts the situation more bluntly:

Oxford Economics has it modelled. Oil at $150 plus for four months, global inflation back at 7.7 per cent close to the 2022 peak, world GDP growth slowing to 1.4 per cent for the year. Australian recession sharpest since the early nineties. None of this is fringe analysis. This is the orthodox economic forecasting houses now openly publishing recession scenarios with a straight face.

And the equity markets are still being held up by the AI fever dream. A handful of US tech billionaires playing a hyper-financialised game of chicken on multi-trillion dollar valuations underwritten by an artificial intelligence investment bubble that still has not delivered the productivity gains it promised, and is openly built on the premise of replacing every working person on the planet. When the energy shock fully filters through into demand destruction, into corporate earnings, into job losses across logistics, transport, agriculture and manufacturing, the unwind will not be gentle. Your super fund’s overweight position in Nasdaq tech is going to find out the same way it did in 2008.

The convergence is the real fucking story. Energy shock plus inflation shock plus AI bubble plus a US president actively breaking the global trade system with tariffs plus a global central banking response that has run out of room. We are looking at conditions that could make 2008 look like a kindergarten scuffle. It is not impossible to talk seriously now about Great Depression two point oh. The brokers laughing that off three months ago are now on speed dial to their compliance departments.

"Fake news you can trust"

That seems to be the motto of the Babylon Bee, where I found this item.

LIHOP and MIHOP return from obscurity

Raise your hand if you are old enough to remember the heyday of these terms:

LIHOP ("Let it happen on purpose") – suggests that key individuals within the government had at least some foreknowledge of the attacks and deliberately ignored it or actively weakened United States' defenses to ensure the hijacked flights were not intercepted. Similar allegations were made about Pearl Harbor.

MIHOP ("Make/Made it happen on purpose") – that key individuals within the government planned the attacks and collaborated with, or framed, al-Qaeda in carrying them out. There is a range of opinions about how this might have been achieved. 

Those were the leading contenders in the conspiracy theories surrounding the events of 9/11.  Now the terms return in discussions of the White House Correspondents' Dinner shooting.  I've heard various suggestions that the event was staged, and have read strong denials.  Today I found this on Facebook:

If it's true that the police had been notified and that the shooter was on a watch list, then his being able to check into a D.C. hotel begins looking suspicious.

The tornado in The Wizard of Oz (1939)

The depiction of the tornado in the 1939 film was intense and remarkably well-executed, even by modern standards.  I found a relevant Instagram post (which I don't know how to embed) that describes the basic technology used.  

The tornado isalso discussed at some length in an article at the Oz Museum.  English majors and other wordsmiths will appreciate this aspect:

“Cyclone” is the word L. Frank Baum chose to describe the Kansas storm in his story, although he clearly meant “tornado.” Shortly after THE WIZARD OF OZ book first appeared in 1900, Professor Willis L. Moore, then Chief of the United States Weather Bureau, wrote Baum’s publishers to urge them to correct the inaccurate usage. He received a response from Frank K. Reilly of The George M. Hill Company, offering that the change would be made in the next edition.  This, however, was never done, and any who purchase a copy of THE WIZARD OF OZ reprinting Baum’s original language will find that “cyclone” remains, again and again – as colloquial and as factually incorrect as ever. (MGM got around the issue in the movie by having Bert Lahr exclaim, in idiomatic fright, “It’s a twister! It’s a twister!” Later on, however, the screenwriters were loyal to Baum, and Judy Garland’s Dorothy explains to Toto, “We must be up inside the cyclone!”)

The article goes on to discuss the various static artistic depictions of the tornado in different publications of The Wizard of Oz, including this one -

- in which the tornado is still present in Munchkinland.  The Oz Museum article is nicely illustrated, but for explication of the movie technique, see the Instagram account.

Manes

This image of Icelandic horses at play in Germany was one of the Photos of the Week at The Atlantic.  It got me wondering whether horses' manes provided evolutionary advantages that might have led to selection pressures affecting their size.  I'm not a "horse person," so there is a fuckton of stuff I didn't know, nicely summarized at the relevant Wikipedia page. 

"Radiator thing on a basement pipe"

A curiosity posted in the whatisthisthing subreddit by someone who saw it while visiting an open house.  Informed discussion thread at the link indicates that this is in fact a "radiator thing" (properly termed "hydronic heater") in a "fin tube" style, and similar in intended function to a baseboard heater.

I agree with this comment that it looks like an amateur hack:

That's not going to do much to heat the space because a slant fin radiator is meant to move air by convection. The normal installation is down low near the floor, not up high. Also usually below a window. They work by heating the cool air that's coming off the window and falling down on them.

And I find it curious that traversing the same room is what appears to be a hot water pipe wrapped to prevent heat escaping into the basement.

Re the shooting incident yesterday...

"Meghan McCain bleated out, “I don’t want to hear one more fucking criticism of Trump’s new ballroom at the White House,” which — briefly — seemed likely to be the most vacuous comment of the evening. Even by Meghan’s increasingly wooly standards, using the shooting at the DC Hilton as a pretext for building the $400 million ballroom seemed like a non-sequitur.

But it was quickly followed by what I am sure was a completely spontaneous and not at all coordinated flood of almost identical comments from the MAGA toady gallery, which didn’t feel the need to change the wording or the message.

One does not have to be a member of the august punditocracy to note that MAGA reacted this way because MAGA was told to react this way..."

Text and image excerpted from the Charles Sykes substack To the Contrary.  I'll append Trump's own tweet at 05:46 this morning about his "Militarily Top Secret Ballroom" -

- which has been demanded by every President for the last 150 years.  For fox ache.

Fake invitation phishing scam

The invitation was addressed from a high school classmate and sent to me personally and not to a group.  Note that it requires not just a reply, but the downloading and installation of a program in order to validate the invite.

A dangerous scam, which was recently featured in a NYT article about fake invitations:

Phishing scams involve “two distinct paths,” Ms. Tobac added. In one, the recipient is served a link that turns out to be dead, or so it seems. A click activates malware that runs silently as it gleans passwords and other bits of personal information. In all likelihood, this is what happened when Mr. Lantigua clicked on the ersatz invitation link.

Another scam offers a working link. Potential victims who click on it are asked to provide a password. Those who take that next step are a boon to hackers.

“They have complete control of your email and, in turn, your entire digital life,” Ms. Tobac said. “They can reset your password for your dog’s Instagram account. They can take over your bank account. Change your health insurance.”

Me at age 4 months

Photo taken in the front yard of our post-wartime (1946) government housing in Arlington, Virginia.  The address was 3422 A South Utah, which I see on Google maps is still a housing complex (our unit was under the red dot).

I'm held by my mom, who had to retire from her career as an American Airlines stewardess when she became pregnant with me.  Dad was a Navy lieutenant stationed stateside.  Mom's sister Ona, on the right, was in the WAVES.   

Posted to share with family and as a relief from doomscrolling.

Washington D.C. turning blue - updated

I found this on Facebook, but also found confirmation at Northern Virginia magazine.   

The color is "American flag blue. That’s the color of the industrial-grade pool topping that is going to applied to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool as part of renovations on the century-old monument."  

Here's another photo of the resurfacing, submitted by a frequent reader of TYWKIWDBI

Here's how the reflecting pool used to look:

In any case, the discussion thread at the source immediately focused on how this foreshadows the "blue wave" coming in the mid-terms.

Addendum:  An anonymous reader offers the following information, which may greatly change the interpretation of this event:

Umm.. this part of the approved restoration of the reflecting pool, kicked off in 2010 [Obama administration] and again in 2023. The reflecting pool was built on marshland that had been drained and supplemented with dredged material from the Potomac River. Constructed without an underlying support structure, the pool sat directly on this soft ground. And filled with over 6 million gallons of water it, it started sinking into the ground and leaking. In the 1980s' they poured concrete into the pool to try to stablize the pool. But by 1986 it was losing 500,000 gallons of water per week. Between 2010-2012 they did major repairs, but the repairs havent held.

A plan was proposed in 2023 to tear out the reflecting pool and totally replace it for $301 M. However, an alternative plan to coat the bottom of the pool with a standard industrial pool coating to seal it was devised. That is estimated to come out to $2-8 M total, and save up to $1 M in annual costs to repair and refill the reflecting pool. And that's where the blue color comes from -- standard pool bottom sealant color, and picked to reflect the sky since its a reflecting pool.

https://www.history.com/articles/lincoln-memorial-reflecting-pool-restoration-sinking

https://nypost.com/2026/04/25/us-news/crews-roll-out-blue-coating-on-lincoln-memorial-reflecting-pool/

https://www.doi.gov/sites/default/files/fy2023-nps-greenbook.pdf

My first hospital bill

When I was two years old I fell ill while my family was visiting relatives in the small town of Ada, MN (west of Leech Lake and Itasca, near the ND border). I was hospitalized for four days. Above is the complete hospital bill (I've photoshopped out my mom's name, but the rest is undoctored). How things have changed, not just re pricing, but in terms of the complexity of billing.....

Reposted from 2007, because the more I think about this, the staggering change is in the complexity of billing.  

Addendum:  I may have posted this one before as well.  It's from 13 years later (1961) for orthopedic surgery at the Mayo Clinic to correct some of my polio deformities:

Surgeons fees $375.  Three xrays $54.  Seven blood tests $29.  Grand total $648.  Balance due after Blue Cross Blue Shield insurance: $75.   How things have changed...

Patches in plywood - Dutchmen or biscuits?

Image edited for size, color, brightness, and contrast from a garish photo at the whatisgthisthing subreddit.  The discussion thread is reasonably focused and includes an explanation of termionology:

"They’re called Dutchmen, they’re shaped like footballs to cover long knots or splits.... That’s not a Dutchman. Dutchmen are also called bow ties because that’s what they are shaped like.  This is a biscuit.... No. It’s a Dutchman. A Dutchman can be any shape and is used to hide blemishes. A bow tie is a Dutchman key and is used either for decoration or to stop cracking. This may be the same shape as a biscuit but it’s not a biscuit because of how it’s used. Biscuits are for joining wood... Can confirm, I work maintenance at a fulfillment center and if a conveyor belt suffers damage one of the options is to cut out the damaged section across its entire width and then lace in a length of new belt to fill the gap.  We commonly do 8 ft Dutchmans to allow the entirely of the patch to be inside the pulleys of the main drive and still have both lacing visible and accessible, should the lacing fail then the Dutchman isn't all wadded up in the drive..."

And as to why one would cut knots our of plywood: 

"Knots in wood are much more dense than the stringy, normal wood. When they make plywood, they layer thin strips (plys) of wood together and glue them to one another like a wood-and-glue sandwich. The problem arises when there is a dense, brittle knot on either of the two exposed plys on the plywood sheet. Shaving a slice of a dense knot gives you a super brittle portion that often ends up crumbling out in crumbs.

Think of it like having a sheet of paper with a small section of equally as thin glass embedded into the paper. You can bend the paper portion, cut the paper portion easily with scissors, but the little glass portion has different properties. It's more dense, but you can't bend it or stress it or else it will shatter."

Hat tips to the commenters.  More at the link.  I know this is TMI, but I'm desperately trying to keep my mind off that clusterfuck of the U.S./Israel/Iran war ruining the world economy.

Addendum:  As I continued on this topic, I found an entire Wikipedia page on Dutchmen.  Evidently the term is used regarding replacement/repair material in a wide array of otherwise unrelated professions: woodworking, masonry, shipbuilding, railroading, theater, boilermaking.  The etymology and connection to the Netherlands remains unexplained in what I've read (maybe it's an allusion to putting a finger in a leaking dike).

A longwatch about cybersecurity

A link to this video was sent to me this morning by a reader in response to my post yesterday about an online extortion attempt.  I've only watched part of it so far, but I think it's worth reposting, especially in light of recent information regarding Anthropic and its Mythos AI model.

Over-the-top online extortion

Here's the text of an email I found today in my spam folder:

Call was lost, as usual.

Ok. I don't have much time, so let's get straight to the point.

I want to make you an offer that you can refuse, but only once.

Here's what I have:

Your complete personal information: full name, date of birth, home address.

Your social security number and driver's license details.

All your email account login credentials, including this account.

Other login details and your private messages.

A multitude of files found on your devices.

Access to your bank accounts.

The details of your credit cards: number, expiry date, and cvv.

I have compiled this entire package into a single folder. I can and intend to do two things with it. It is up to you to decide which one:

I will send this entire package to darknet markets, where other criminals will buy it.

It is unknown how they will use this information. They may purchase something illegal in your name, or they may not, but you will definitely not like it.

Or you can buy it from me for a small fee of 600 usd.

Changing the entire package of documents and data is very expensive, very time-consuming, and unsafe.

I already know that you have just read this text. Do not try to ignore this.

I only accept payment in bitcoins at the exchange rate at the time of transfer.

Transfer money here: [redacted for posting]

After payment, I will delete the folder containing your data, and you can continue living as before or, if you don't trust me, take your time changing all your data. It's more profitable for me if you pay me. It's easier and better for everyone.

This is a unique offer. Take advantage of it. I will wait for 1 day.

The "from" address was one of my own email addresses.

The south celestial pole

This was the Astronomy Photo of the Day, showing a time-lapse image of the sky as seen in the Southern Hemisphere, looking toward the south celestial pole.  Discussion at the link.

Very interesting

Copied from Facebook.  I hope I or a reader can find reliable documentation online.

Just realized it gives new meaning to the old phrase "you can't step into the same river twice" previously meaning the river changes.  But now it also means "the you changes..."

1987 cartoon. And the "Strait of Schrödinger."

Credit Chris Clarke for finding this old Gary Larsen premonitory cartoon and posting it on Facebook.

Addendum:  I can't resist adding this "dad joke" I also found on Facebook.

I'll see myself out...

A Brief History of Kinetic Sculpture Racing

Found by reader smittypap, who posted the link in a comment at my previous post about art cars.

Another example of people having fun.  No war posts today.

Removing a facade from an old building

There is informed discussion scattered through the comments at the oddlysatisfying subreddit post.  Huge windows used to be assets re light and maybe heat during an earlier era of industry, but became maintenance liabilities in more modern times.

I agree with the top-rated comment at the source: it's like removing a carpet and finding a hardwood floor.

Some elevators have "Yes" and "No" buttons

I probably should travel more, because I've never seen an elevator panel like this.  The rationale is explained in a lucid and fairly concise comment thread at the whatisit subreddit.

The Roman emperor Commodus

Interesting.  You learn something every day.

An "art car" parade (Houston, 2025)

The video is almost two hours long - a thorough documentation of the parade, apparently without any commentary, best approached for casual viewing by clicking along the scrubber bar at the bottom.  Here are a couple screencaps:

I found the video after reading about the phenomenon in The New York Times:

This was not just a car. It was an art car — a vehicle transformed into a kinetic sculpture, built from imagination and, often, from what others had thrown away.

“I can’t drive past trash without pulling over,” said Mr. Polidore, 50, a longtime elementary school art teacher who writes art curricula for the district. “When I’m stuck in that hellacious Houston traffic, I’m scanning the side of the road for any parts of cars that have gotten thrown off in wrecks and I’m grabbing them.”...

The rules remain minimal. “Whether it’s been painted, welded, sculpted, dropped, chopped, beaded, smashed, crashed, lit or lifted, art cars come in all shapes, sizes and forms,” read this year’s brochure. “The only rule is that it must roll!” And across the city, in garages, driveways and schoolyards, artists have been working for months to ensure that theirs will.

But what might make Houston’s art car parade so special is the fact that many of the artists are children... Over 50 of the cars that roll on Saturday will have been made in Houston classrooms, a striking fact at a time when arts funding in schools continues to shrink...

In Houston, where driving is nearly unavoidable, the art car offers a kind of inversion, a reminder that even the most ordinary object can be remade into something strange, expressive and communal.

Or, as Ms. Soto put it: “Art cars are chaos. Good chaos.”

TL:DR - People having fun.  Something this world needs more of.

Addendum:  If this topic interests you, I encourage you to browse some of the art-car-related posts at Just A Car Guy, including this video of the Houston art car parade.

Good news for home distillers of alcohol

As reported this week in The Guardian:

A US appeals court on Friday declared a nearly 158-year-old federal ban on home distilling to be unconstitutional, calling it an unnecessary and improper means for Congress to exercise its power to tax.

The fifth US circuit court of appeals in New Orleans ruled in favor of the non-profit Hobby Distillers Association and four of its 1,300 members.

They argued that people should be free to distill spirits at home, whether as a hobby or for personal consumption including, in one instance, to create an apple-pie-vodka recipe.

The ban was part of a law passed during the US’s post-civil war Reconstruction era in July 1868, in part to thwart liquor tax evasion, and subjected violators to up to five years in prison and a $10,000 fine...

More information at the link.  Image cropped for size from the original, credit Diana Vyshniakova/Alamy.

Autonomous weapons are not just science fiction

Autonomous weapons (aka "killer robots") were the basis for the Terminator movies and uncounted spinoffs and copycats.  But the concept is achievable, and the potential consequences are unthinkable:

"A very, very small quadcopter, one inch in diameter can carry a one- or two-gram shaped charge. You can order them from a drone manufacturer in China. You can program the code to say: “Here are thousands of photographs of the kinds of things I want to target.” A one-gram shaped charge can punch a hole in nine millimeters of steel, so presumably you can also punch a hole in someone’s head. You can fit about three million of those in a semi-tractor-trailer. You can drive up I-95 with three trucks and have 10 million weapons attacking New York City. They don’t have to be very effective, only 5 or 10% of them have to find the target.

There will be manufacturers producing millions of these weapons that people will be able to buy just like you can buy guns now, except millions of guns don’t matter unless you have a million soldiers. You need only three guys to write the program and launch them. So you can just imagine that in many parts of the world humans will be hunted. They will be cowering underground in shelters and devising techniques so that they don’t get detected. This is the ever-present cloud of lethal autonomous weapons.

They could be here in two to three years."

              — Stuart Russell, professor of computer science and engineering at the University of California Berkeley

That's the intro to a frankly unsettling article.

...lethal autonomous weapons systems (LAWS): weapons that have the ability to independently select and engage targets... humans out of the loop — where the human releases the machine to perform a task and that’s it — no supervision, no recall, no stop function.

One of the very real problems with attempting to preemptively ban LAWS is that they kind of already exist. Many countries have defensive systems with autonomous modes that can select and attack targets without human intervention — they recognize incoming fire and act to neutralize it... Meanwhile, offensive systems already exist, too: Take Israel’s Harpy and second-generation Harop, which enter an area, hunt for enemy radar, and kamikaze into it, regardless of where they are set up. The Harpy is fully autonomous...

Among the lauded new technologies is swarms — weapons moving in large formations with one controller somewhere far away on the ground clicking computer keys. Think hundreds of small drones moving as one, like a lethal flock of birds...

I worry it will breed way more terrorist activities. You can call them insurgents, you can call them terrorists, I don’t care, when you realize that you can’t ever fight the state mano-a-mano anymore, if people are pissed off, they’ll find a way to vent that frustration, and they will probably take it out on people who are defenseless. 

Much more in the link.

Reposted to provide addenda:  The source link at Buzzfeed for this old (2017) post has undergone partial linkrot, but I'm going to repost the text as an introduction to this old (2018) video about "slaughterbots" -

It presents seven minutes of gradually increasing horror and is very similar in content to "Hated in the Nation" - my favorite episode of Black Mirror -

 

Posting both because this morning one of my cousins forwarded to me a substack presentation by "Blood in the Machine" entitled "Why the AI backlash has turned violent," which addresses recent physical assaults on various persons associated with AI and public anger against datacenters, including this comment:

"In the short time since I wrote that post, such pointed AI refusal has continued apace. Maine looks set to become the first US state to ban data center development outright. Form letters for refusing AI at work are circulating widely. Public polling of AI sentiment is in the gutter; it’s never been popular, and it’s especially unpopular now. A widely discussed NBC poll found that just 26% of Americans had positive feelings about AI; around half had negative feelings. Gen Z in particular loathes AI: For respondents aged 18-34, AI’s net favorability rating was minus 44."

I have some other offerings to present re AI, but will defer until later and just leave this post up for now.

America needs another New Deal

An excerpt from Heather Cox Richardson's April 13 "Letters from an American" -

Just as there is a blueprint for destroying democracy, there is also one for rebuilding it. “Let us now and here highly resolve to resume the country’s interrupted march along the path of real progress, of real justice, of real equality for all of our citizens, great and small,” New York governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt said to the delegates at the Democratic National Convention in 1932 as American democracy struggled to resist fascism.

“Out of every crisis, every tribulation, every disaster, mankind rises with some share of greater knowledge, of higher decency, of purer purpose,” FDR said. “Today we shall have come through a period of loose thinking, descending morals, an era of selfishness, among individual men and women and among Nations…. Let us be frank in acknowledgment of the truth that many amongst us have made obeisance to Mammon, that the profits of speculation, the easy road without toil, have lured us from the old barricades. To return to higher standards we must abandon the false prophets and seek new leaders of our own choosing.”

“I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people,” FDR concluded. “Let us all here assembled constitute ourselves prophets of a new order of competence and of courage. This is more than a political campaign; it is a call to arms. Give me your help, not to win votes alone, but to win in this crusade to restore America to its own people.”

(boldface added), More at the link.

The world's oldest gorilla

Details from Deutsche Welle:

At 69 years old, Lady Fatou on Monday became not only the Berlin Zoo's longest-residing tenant but also maintained her title as the oldest gorilla in the world.

Born somewhere in West Africa in 1957, she arrived in Europe at the port of Marseilles in 1959 amongst the luggage of a French sailor. According to the Berlin Zoo, the sailor found himself unable to pay his bill at a tavern and gave Fatou to the landlady as payment. From there, she soon ended up in the German capital.

Fatou is a western lowland gorilla. In the wild they usually don't live past their 40s, and even in captivity 50 is considered advanced old age.

In 1974 she gave birth to Dufte, the first gorilla born at the Berlin Zoo. Although her daughter passed away in 2001, Fatou's granddaugther M'penzi still keeps her company in Berlin. She has at least three great-great-great grandchildren as of 2026.

I had no idea they could live that long.  You learn something every day.

Breaking news

Screencap this afternoon from the France 24 site.  Putin's ally Orban loses despite Trump's support:

“My Administration stands ready to use the full Economic Might of the United States to strengthen Hungary’s Economy, as we have done for our Great Allies in the past, if Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and the Hungarian People ever need it,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social ahead of Sunday’s vote.

“We are excited to invest in the future Prosperity that will be generated by Orbán’s continued Leadership!” said Trump, who has endorsed Orbán multiple times during the campaign.

The U.S. has always influenced foreign elections - but usually not so overtly.  Or so ineffectually.

And "Magyar" is such a wonderful patronym for a Hungarian leader.  Apparently it is a common surname as well as the ethnonym for the people.

Daddy, what is a "late night rage tweet"?

Here you go, sweetheart.  Read this and weep.  This is a spontaneous public rant by a person who is supposed to represent the dignity of the United States to the rest of the world.  This is what happens when a man becomes mentally unstable and discovers that after a lifetime of having people do whatever he wants them to do, his "base" of loyal supporters begin to desert him.

Some of the backstory triggering this rage is expressed in the I Fucking Love Australia substack: 

"The story is this: Trump’s own people are ratting him out faster than a Boa constrictor with an eating disorder. Staff leaking. Pentagon leaking. State Department leaking. Every single person in that building with access to a phone and a journalist’s number is apparently queuing up to unload everything they know about the most powerful man on earth, and what they know is not flattering.

This is not a leak. This is Niagara Falls wearing a suit.

Carville’s referencing a New York Times story that reads like a guided tour through the West Wing’s collective contempt for the man running it. These aren’t anonymous sources with a grudge. These are the people who sit in meetings with him. The people who hand him his briefing notes and watch him ignore them. The people who stand there with a straight face while he explains how he could’ve been a general if he hadn’t had that thing with his foot.

Those people. Talking. Constantly.

That is not the behaviour of people who fear their boss.

That is the behaviour of people who have already quietly packed their desk drawers and are just waiting for the right moment to walk...

And then there’s the book.

Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan. June. Carville calls them the pizza man. Because they’re going to deliver.

Every leaked conversation. Every panicked staffer confession. Every moment where the people closest to the most powerful man on earth looked at each other across a conference table and thought Jesus Christ we are so completely fucked. All of it. Bound. Published. On shelves in June.

The structural collapse of the whole operation is what Carville is pointing at underneath all the profanity. MAGA loyalty looks airtight until it doesn’t. Then it goes like a tradie’s knees on a cold morning. Fast and all at once. He’s watching the Indiana state Senate Republican primary as an early indicator. Republican voters. In Trump’s own party. Peeling away...

Carville’s flat prediction: Trump will not be president a year from now. Too weak. Too exposed. Too hated by the people closest to him. And when Democrats get back in January they go straight for the corruption and they claw every dodgy dollar back...

But here’s what we do know.

The leaks are real. Vance sharpening his knife is real. The book is real. The polling is real. The fact that the most feared political operator in living memory is now being openly mocked by his own Pentagon is very, very real..."

(boldface added)  More at the link.

American negotiators arrive in Pakistan for peace talks

I can't imagine anyone had serious hopes that peace could be negotiated during the recent summit in Pakistan, when the U.S. positions include "complete surrender" and the Iranians insist on control of Hormuz plus compensation for damages from the bombing campaign.  American media reported hopfully that "talks were underway" while in fact both sides were using the pause to reload their weaponry.

The AI image and the text below come from an April 11 Substack entitled "I Fucking Love Australia."

The Surrender Summit: Trump Sends His Son-in-Law to Lose a War

JD Vance flew to Pakistan to negotiate with a civilisation that’s been doing geopolitics 

since before white people invented trousers.

"Vance brought his wife.

Not a deputy secretary. Not a general. Not even a halfway competent mid-level State Department lifer who at least knows what the Strait of Hormuz is on a map. He brought Usha. His wife. To a war negotiation. The most consequential diplomatic moment since the end of the Cold War and JD thought, yeah, I’ll make a long weekend of it, bring the missus, see Pakistan...

And then there’s Jared Kushner. Jared fucking Kushner. A man whose entire qualification for any of this is that he married into the right family, which, by the way, is also his business model, his foreign policy experience, and apparently now his military strategy. Jared has the energy of a guy who’s never been told no in his life because everyone around him was either paid not to or too scared to. He walked into the Middle East peace process last time and achieved absolutely nothing except making himself several hundred million dollars richer. So naturally Donald called him again...

And somewhere in a Mar-a-Lago dining room, the aluminium siding salesman with the IQ of a concussed house brick is posting about tankers on Truth Social, absolutely convinced he’s winning, because no one in his orbit is allowed to tell him otherwise, and the two blokes he sent to Pakistan to save his legacy couldn’t find the Strait of Hormuz with both hands and a geopolitical GPS..."

More at the link. 

"Relapsing into individuality"

I came across an interesting quote from one of my favorite authors:

“As life goes on it becomes tiring to keep up the character you invented for yourself, and so you relapse into individuality and become more like yourself everyday.”

The citation comes from her 1976 autobiography.  It reflects an astute perception by a woman whose literary craftsmanship focused on the deceptions of her fictional characters.  I particularly like the three words I've placed in the title of this post, and I have no doubt that I am more "myself" now than I was during the earlier phases of my social and professional life.

Via the Indian Times Entertainment.  Embedded image via Goalcast, where there are additional quotes and aphorisms.

Reinstituting U.S. military draft registration

A very interesting headline in The Hill this morning.  Details re the implementation at the link.

I came of age during the 1960s, when the Vietnam War was at its peak, and I can assure younger readers that a wartime draft was a very big deal back then.  I have read in unreliable sources (Facebook) that with the onset of the Gulf War, soldiers have been implementing misdemeanors (smoking weed on base etc) in order to be dismissed from active duty.  And it's possible that the onset of active conflict and some combat-related deaths has diminished the applications for military service.

But then I saw this in the article at the link:

"In addition, immigrants who don’t register may lose their U.S. citizenship."

Is this automatic registration being implemented as a strategic way to justify the mandatory deportation of legal immigrants?

Worldwide toilet paper consumption

I'm not particularly surprised that the U.S. leads the world in this metric, but the numbers are unexpected.  Per capita usage of 141 rolls per year would mean 2-3 rolls every week.  How many squares are people using???

Zweeeeëg explained

If I'm going to blog words tonight (in order to avoid you-know-what/you-know-who), we might as well look at this wonderful word meaning "dizygotic."  This discussion thread at the etymology subReddit has a lot of interesting and relevant content, including how in Danish one word can mean either dizygotic or double-edged.  Followed by a allusion to the two very different meanings of "unionized" (union-ized vs un-ionized) and the two meanings of logistics (vs. logistic).

Words are always fun.

Word for the day: deranged

It's a word most people recognize and vaguely understand, but I was curious about the etymology.

From French déranger, from Old French desrengier (“throw into disorder”), from des- + rengier (“to put into line”), from reng (“line, row”), from a Germanic source. See rank (noun).

Coming from the French is what left it out of my wheelhouse.  But it makes sense - disrupting a rank, creating disorder.

The Google Ngram viewer for usage in books shows several generations of quietude followed by a rise in recent decades.  I suspect once the 2025-26 data is entered that there will be an upward spike.  If there is an equivalent tool for monitoring usage in blogs and social media, I should think the numbers will have gone parabolic this year.

The synonyms are pretty familiar -

- and the idioms are perhaps more fun to peruse: