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Guingamp and the Countryside

Guingamp and the Countryside

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Days Like This Are Why I Love to Travel

Days Like This Are Why I Love to Travel

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Musique Bretonne

I’m a sucker for electronic gadgets. Earlier this year I bought a handheld digital recorder for dictation. I bought it along on the trip to Brittany and had it with me yesterday at the Fete des Islandais. I was going to post these clips on Facebook, but it won’t let you post or link to audio clips. Boo hiss boo bad Meta bad. SSS Blog to the rescue! Here is some music from yesterday, hope you…

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Footnotes for Facebook

Footnotes for Facebook -- The humble footnote could save our democracy

In high school I took an advanced writing class, which required me to write a research paper of at least 10 double-spaced typewritten pages on a subject of my choosing (provided the instructor approved it). My paper was about the impact of nuclear power plants on aquatic life.

The instructor required every factual statement in the paper to have a footnote identifying its source. Not only was…

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What if Trump Shot Someone on Fifth Avenue?

What if Trump Shot Someone on Fifth Avenue? (Answer: It wouldn't matter one iota to his base.)

I went off on a friend (by now, probably an ex-friend) on Facebook about her unreasonable, unbreakable support for Trump. I had made the argument that Trump’s actions and inaction increased deaths from Covid-19. In particular, I argued (see if there’s a flaw here, I don’t think so):

The more widespread the Covid-19 virus becomes, the more people will catch it.

The more people that catch…

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The Trump Convention's Biggest Lie

The Trump Convention’s Biggest Lie

Of all the falsehoods, half-truths, prevarications, distortions, misstatements, deceptions, … oh heck, let’s just call it what it is … of all the lies you’re going to hear during the Trump convention, this will be the biggest and most-repeated: that Trump took a poor Obama economy and turned it into a great Trump economy.

Fact: On job creation, Obama beats Trump — Obama created 1.5 million…

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Suzie was starting to go stir crazy from being in the house in Kensington so long, as was I to a lesser extent, so we decided to go on a 4-day getaway. We were wanting to go someplace new, someplace not too far of a drive away, someplace warmer (it had been coolish in Kensington for about a week). We settled on Amador County, and found a very nice, cozy, extremely well-provisioned Airbnb near…

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How Can Trumpers Defend Sheer Incompetence?

How Can Trumpers Defend Sheer Incompetence?

The graph below is Exhibit 1 for how far the United States has sunk under the (mis)management of the Trump ‘Administration’. It shows the seven-day rolling average of new coronavirus cases in the United States (population 328.2 million) and the 27 countries comprising the European Union (population 446 million).

This is what failure looks like. This is what incompetence looks like. This is what…

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Desecrating the Flag for Trump

Desecrating the Flag for Trump

Title 4, Section 8 of the United States Code — federal law — is titled "Respect for the Flag." Trump and his supporters make a big deal out of respect for what Trump calls "our GREAT AMERICAN FLAG" (no need to yell, lay off the Caps Lock button for God’s sake).

Surely Trump supporters — who excoriate athletes who kneel during the national anthem to protest racism — wouldn’t do anything contrary…

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Loving Caring People

Laugh-my-ass-off quote from Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale today in Politico:

Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale played down concerns of a confrontation [at Trump’s upcoming Tulsa rally]. “I’ve been here since day one, and I found all Trump supporters to be really caring, loving people that care about this country,” he told Fox News.

As to protesters who might come to Tulsa, Parscale…

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Yesterday I had to vacate the house for three hours for cleaning, so I decided to drive to San Francisco to take pictures and play tourist.

First stop, Treasure Island, which I thought would be a good place to take shots of the SF Skyline. For those who don’t know, Treasure Islandis an artificial island built on the north side of Yerba Buena Island, which is located in the middle of the San…

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I Made a Photo Page with Gridsome, GraphQL, and the Flickr API

I Made a Photo Page with Gridsome, GraphQL, and the Flickr API

N.B.: You may also view this page on the new blog site.

My adventures in front-end web development continue.

I’m a WebDev rookie, and am progressing in the absolute wrong way, starting at the top with Gridsome and Vue, before having a good grasp of any of the three sisters (HTML, CSS, JavaScript) they’re built on. But I’m more motivated when I can directly see the results of what I’m…

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Enough Already It just keeps coming. With the boys back at home, the amount of laundry has more than doubled.

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These Strange Times We are in our fifth week of living under the stay-at-home order issued in the Bay Area on March 16.

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It's a Wrap!

It’s a Wrap!

In the end, I just could’t vote for Bloomberg

Super Tuesday’s here. Suzie and I are going to vote this morning at the Kensington Community Center. After the (somewhat embarrassing I’ll admit) post yesterday, watching and reading news coverage and posts from people I respect, an email from Pete, and a good night’s sleep, I realized I just can’t vote for Bloomberg. He’d make a perfectly adequate…

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How to Vote Post-Pete

How to Vote Post-Pete

With my preferred candidate making a pragmatic, mature, take-one-for-the party decision to drop out of the race, Suzie and I have less than two days to decide who we’ll vote for in the California primary. It’s a tough nut to crack; we need a flow chart to follow all the possible permutations.

I’m a moderate, pragmatic, center-left guy. I think Trump and his ilk are reprehensible and dangerous.…

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Search is Making Us Narrower

Search is Making Us Narrower

I am a techno-person. I love computers. I code as a hobby. I’m a far cry from being a Luddite.

But there are many ways that digital technology is making us less than we used to be. Many have been widely discussed. But not this one. Search is making us narrower, less well-rounded, and less wise.

“Search” encompasses lots of things, and some aspects of it are unobjectionable. The ability to…