I’ve known about some of Google’s special operators for years, but librarian Hana Lee Goldin goes through all of the ones she knows about that supercharge search results beyond the usual five paid results and AI Overview at the top of the page. Bookmarked!
The number 21 is burned into my brain for some reason. I don’t understand why. For as long as I can remember, my neocortex has insisted that my wedding anniversary is on May 21, NOT May 22, the correct date. Thus, I went out last night to find proper flowers for my bride, and after some dead ends I found tulips in a lovely shade of coral and surrounded them with alstroemeria. I had to do this on the bench in the basement quietly so as not to alert Jen; I still have a long way to go in my career as a flower arranger, but I think the overall effect comes across OK.
In any case, Happy Early Anniversary, blondie.
The temperature has been bouncing up and down for the last couple of months, but now that everything is green again we’re well into yard sale season. It’s been pretty slim pickings around here for the last five years or so. I think that a lot of the older families cleaned out and moved on when Finn was a toddler, which spoiled me for variety—walking through the sales with her in the backpack I was always able to drag home good toys, clothes, tools, and other excellent finds. I don’t recall being able to find much of anything last year, and the opening sales this year were just as meager: lots of glassware and kids’ clothes but not much else.
I wrote about my Boy Scouts finds a few weeks ago, and yesterday I hit a community yard sale a little north of here. Within a couple of minutes I scored a free(!) steel wheelbarrow from a couple who’d just sold their house and were looking to get rid of stuff. I’ve repaired our plastic wheelbarrow twice now and it’s on its last legs, so I can make one good solid unit out of two easily. Up the street I found a brand new portable Manfrotto tripod, which will replace my larger travel tripods, and a set of stainless steel restaurant steam pans. Those are great for car fluids of different kinds. As usual there were a lot of clothes and glassware, but I was happy with the stuff I found, and Hazel snoozed patiently in the passenger seat while I walked around.
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My tomatoes are going nuts in the greenhouse, which is a pleasant surprise. All I did was mix some new soil in with the old stuff left over from a couple of years ago, add Tomato-Tone, and drop the plants in. Each one is growing fast, they’ve all started flowering, and three of the four have set fruit as a result of my hand-pollinating. It’s all I can do to keep myself from buying more plants to put out there, but after reading that tomato prices are supposed to spike upward, I’m second-guessing my hesitance.
Meanwhile, the peach tree I bought Jen last fall is covered in fruit, which is a great sign. We planted it on the top of the hill at the west side of the backyard and surrounded it in deer fence over the winter. It came back bigger and greener, and our nightly visitors haven’t been able to nibble on it, which means it’s going to grow big and strong, and my girl will have fresh peaches to make her happy.
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Later in the day I dusted off my black suit and got myself churched up for a trip into DC with the family: my sister-in-law’s PhD hooding ceremony was scheduled for the same day as the Pimlico horse race and a Nationals/Orioles game along with about twenty other graduation events, so traffic was heavy. We got there just in time for the start of the event, and met up with the family at a Fogo de Chau to eat lots of delicious meat until we were all stuffed.
I realize I’ve been doing a poor job of updating this feed with EV swap updates, so here’s a whole pile of them to lower your productivity to a crawl on an overcast Thursday! The newest is at the bottom, which covers Brian and I modifying the battery tray and the spline collar to mount the EV powerpack to the transmission, then doing some welding to mount the three sections together.
I stopped in to Hopkins today for my 18-month checkup, which is the second-to-last one I need to do before they declare me completely clear. Everything is looking good so far; my overall numbers are down most likely because I gave blood about three weeks ago (I did the Power-Red donation, which is geared towards NICU and cancer patients) and that brought my numbers down. Jen was able to come with me this time, and we stopped at Trinacria for our traditional celebratory lunch.
Back in the day, Dad was given a red nylon windbreaker from Ciba-Geigy in his early sales career. It was a very mid- 60’s design: a square band collar work jacket with two pockets. It had design elements that I came to love when I found it in the closet behind his other stuff: a black and white vertical racing stripe on the right breast with a Ciba-Geigy patch on the left. I think that early nylon must have shrunk over time, because it was marked as a medium but was definitely a small, and it fit me perfectly. When I found it, there was no way it would ever have fit on Dad, so I asked him for it. I had it for several years after college and took very good care of it. One night I wore it to a party, and it got pinched when I wasn’t looking. Heartbroken, I’ve looked for a replacement ever since.
Facebook is definitely reading my mind, because this amazing vintage Gulf jacket showed up in my feed yesterday for the eye-watering price of $175, size small. If I was stupidly rich, I’d have already bought it, but I’m not that much of a slave to fashion. I’m sorely tempted, though.
Reading multiple stories about how AI demand has made hard drive, GPU and RAM prices all skyrocket, I decided to pull the trigger and upgrade my laptop to something that will handle video editing better than the one I’ve currently got. This is an M2 Macbook Air that I bought three years ago, and I made the mistake of only speccing 8GB of RAM. It’s been a solid machine, but it has a few quirks I dislike (mainly software-related) and it just chugs when I’m working with heavy video files. I specced out a new M5 Air with 16GB of RAM last week, and with a trade in on my current machine I should save about 1/3 of the total cost. However, the order is currently stuck in processing—what was supposed to be in stock locally is now estimated to be here between May 15-19.
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Interestingly, when I look at the stats for IK here, my daily numbers have jumped up to about four times where they used to be a year ago, and when I compare that with the Scout journal, those numbers have dropped. My guess (and I need to do a lot more digging in my server logs) is that I’m getting hit by the AI bots, who are scraping the site for content. I would have expected that the Scout journal would be hit just as much, but apparently not.
I’ve had the drumbeat and bassline of Angel by Massive Attack stuck in my head for the last three days. I was fortunate enough to see them live in 2019 during the Mezzanine 30th Anniversary tour, and this was more powerful in person than the recorded version, if that’s possible. Being able to see Horace Andy and Liz Fraser sing their tracks live was incredible.
Here’s the first release from Inferno, the upcoming BoC album. On first listen, I really like it. The beat is a lot more central to this track than any previous work they’ve done; I was always a huge fan of the Big Beat electronica genre, and I would love to see them lead the charge into a new era of solid groove. I tried to preorder the album last week but it timed out on me, so I’ll try again today.
This beautiful fellow is a Piliated Woodpecker, which is apparently rare compared to the other types in this area. He sat at the base of what used to be our cherry tree and cleaned it out on Saturday morning, giving me enough time to put the long lens on and snap a couple of pictures when he looked up. He’s bigger than he looks—I’d say about the size of a crow.
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The tomatoes in the greenhouse are going gangbusters. I’d say they’ve grown about 5 times their size since I bought them, and they’re all putting out flowers, which I’ve been dutifully trying to fertilize every day. I sure do hope we get some good fruit on each one. I have to repair a bunch of holes in the plastic this coming weekend, because the replacement cover I bought seven years ago did not last as long as the stuff I installed in 2005.
The internet can be a wonderful thing sometimes.
This clip is from a 1982 French cop movie called Le Marginal, starring Jean-Paul Belmondo. The featured car is claimed to be an original 1966 Shelby GT500, heavily modified, and driven in the movie by the star himself. The hero car was saved, restored, and sold in 2023. I like a lot about this car, except for the rear taillights.
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…countless researchers have shown that many of the most meaningful forms of real-world creativity and invention depend less on solving well-defined problems than on figuring out what the problem is in the first place.
In 1964 a study on creativity was done where researchers watched how 31 artists approached a still life, and split their approaches into two different types: problem-solving and problem-finding. The former spent their time working on the outcome, while the latter spent their time finding and formulating a visual problem. The researchers then went back five years after graduation to see where the students took their careers:
The artists who used a problem-finding style while in school were far more successful five years after graduation. Of the 11 students who were the least problem-finding in approach, eight had dropped out of art altogether.
This tracks with my personal experience in art school: those of us who embraced MICA’s freshman-year philosophy of learning how to think instead of learning how to make art seem to be more successful in our careers.
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This is an excerpt of a longer video starring a guy named Yung Lean, who is some kind of Swedish rap star. The song is forgettable but the choreography is amazing; leave the sound off if it gets annoying.
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This is a clip of a quartet busking in Asheville, NC, featuring a woman known as Abby the Spoon Lady, who does an incredible job of adding color and style to the percussion. There are many other clips of her available on YouTube, but I like the bluegrass featured here—even though the sound kind of sucks.
Every day I get emails from various Democratic organizations, asking for money. They all say the same thing, in about ten different iterations: Can you believe this, We must stop this, There’s no time to lose, We need help, Our funding is running out, etc. All with the same urgency and desperation. I know why they’re written this way; I’ve been adjacent to and involved with advertising long enough to understand what gets the eyeballs and what gets thrown in the Junk folder.
But that’s not what I’m looking for. The fascists in power had a plan when they went into this administration; it was called Project 2025. it outlined clearly all of their policy goals, their strategy, and the christian white nationalist oligarchy they wanted to reshape our democracy into. It was shared broadly with the general public before the election, and we blindly elected its authors into power. And they’ve been running the playbook ever since then, using Executive orders, DOGE, a corrupt Supreme Court, and ICE/Border Patrol recruits to break down our society.
No, I can’t believe this. Yes, we need to stop them. There surely isn’t any time to lose. Yes, we need help. But I’m not giving the Democrats any money until they come up with a fucking plan. What’s the plan? How do we fight back against the dismantling of our democracy? What are they going to do to regain control, but more importantly, what are they going to do once they’re in control? How are they going to rebuild without dissolving into a bunch of squabbling special interests? Where is our Project 2029?
What’s the fucking plan?