alex51324

[alex51324]

You’re not depressed. You just need $250,000 in your bank account.

[alex51324]

Mine would be

horse.

If I were super wealthy my #1 "selfish" purchase (something I'd do that wasn't for benefiting society or other people) would be endless takeout. I'd order food brought to my house every day if I could afford it. Fuck it, if I were wealthy enough I'd employ a personal chef to just come by twice per week and make me a few days' worth of healthy meals. That would be so amazing.

[alex51324]

Oh, man, this reminded me how much I miss cough syrup with codeine. They used to give it out fairly readily--if you told the doctor you were coughing so badly you weren't getting much sleep, boom--codeine.

When I had covid last month, the guy at the urgent care sent in a cough syrup prescription for me, but it was some other awful stuff. Huge disappointment.

[alex51324]

[alex51324]

Oh man--I already have most of the included books, but that is a fantastic deal.

oh hey humble bundle finally had a bundle that felt worth getting an affiliate link for

$18 for 14 martha wells novels/novellas/short stories (including murderbot) in drm-free epub readable on any device you want, with a portion of your purchase going to support world central kitchen. you can also adjust your donation to increase the amount that goes to charity, the default kind of sucks.

you can copy/paste this plaintext link if your adblocker breaks the other one: https://humblebundleinc.sjv.io/1935ox

[alex51324]

Little Adventure!

There was a full-day adventure I was vaguely thinking I might do if I got up & moving early enough, which did not occur--I'm going to try more seriously to make it happen next week--but luckily I had a smaller one on tap!

Middle Creek Wildlife Management Area!

First, Sophie and I hiked out to Willow Point, which is the spot where people go to watch the Snow Geese in the early spring:

There weren't any particularly special bird visitors today, but it's still a nice walk!

That little speck of land out there in the middle has cormorants on it.

There are some egrets & herons out there. You can't see them because I cannot take photographs through binoculars, but they were there.

We made the acquaitance of this floral friend, who is called Hollow Joe-Pye Weed. He is as tall as me, and his blossom is as big as my head. There were tons of him along the walk to the Point. Butterflies and bees like him!

Then we drove over to the little nature center/museum thing, and I had a little look around--I always seem to get there shortly before they close, so I am seeing it in sections, but today I watched a video of one of the workers banding some ducks, and learned about how to tell male mallards from female when they are in their adolescent plumage. Next time we go to the Dairy Queen by the creek I will test this knowledge. (They have vending machines with corn, so there is an abundance of ducks.)

We had a little snack, and then Sophie had a nap while I got Willow out for some Lake Exploration!

Boats are only allowed on one section of the lake, so that the birds can have privacy, so it was a short explore, but nice! The white posts that are near the top of the water in the picture are the boundary of the boat zone.

We went along the shore to the left, then the whole way out to the posts, then along to the posts the whole way to the right of the picture, and back along that shore. Over on the right side you can get fairly close to some stumps where birds like to perch, and I was wishing I had brought my binoculars so I could see them. Later, when I was back on land, I discovered that I did, in fact, have my binoculars in my pocket. I will have to go again sometime.

There is a blue heron in this picture, but I will be very impressed if anyone can find him.

Then I stopped at the Pennsylvania Dutch grocery store, and got both chicken pot pie and chicken pie. (I was going to just get the pie, but they didn't have any left at the deli, so I got the pot pie, and then in the freezer section they did have chicken pie. But by then I had already gotten used to the idea of pot pie, so I got both. I will bake the chicken pie on Monday, because tomorrow I have to make my eggplant parmesan.

[alex51324]

Sorry, i don't normally post much america stuff, but Why are universities selling cheese? And the Good Shit, too? Are the university students making the cheese? Is there a cheese course there? Is this exclusive to wisconsin university or do other universities do that too?

So a lot of US universities--and especially a lot of the ones called StateName University, or University of StateName--are what is called Land Grant Universities.

The land for the university (or at least its original campus) was granted to the state by the federal government, in the 1800's, for the express and stated purpose of getting the state, and therefore the country as a whole, up to speed in the applied sciences.

Chief among these--and often singled out by name in the new university's founding documents--was agricultural science. (My own alma mater, as one of these, was known affectionately as "the farmer's high school," well into the 1900's.) In addition to undergraduate degrees in ag sci, these institutions usually had research programs dedicated to developing farming methods and crop & livestock strains suited to the state's conditions.

Naturally, in dairy-producing states, the land-grant universities had dairy science programs. Over time, these expanded to include everything from herd management up to and including processing milk into products for sale. Today, usually the final processing end of things is handled by a separate Food Science department, but it grew from this common project of bettering American farms and American farmers through science.

So a lot of these schools still have a sort of boutique line of test-farm-to-table goods, that come from the demonstration herds in the ag sci department (which students getting an ag science degree work with as part of their lab time) and then go to the test kitchens in the food science department to be turned into products that are then sold to help fund the relevant programs of study.

My undergrad school does cheese as well, but it's the ice cream that's really famous. And yes, there is an ice cream course.

my sister hath sent me. Canned Cheese.

[alex51324]

I gave out their blueberry creamed honey as my Standard Christmas Gift For Adults last year, and it was a huge hit.

(I did the honey, one of their little candles, and an ornament that I made, all wrapped in a flour-sack dishtowel, to make it a little more substantial of a gift, but the honey was the main thing.)

I am intrigued by the lotion bars; might have to try those.

i need to make a shoutout post for the ioway tribe's bee farm products right now

esp this:

THE LOTION BAR.

why do i love it so much? bc it repels mosquitos WAY BETTER THAN BUG SPRAY. Not only does it make ur skin smell like honey, it forms a waxy seal that buggy chompers cant bite through.

it also soothes bug bites, rashes, and itchy skin.

my partner has the Yummy Blood that mosquitos find irresistable. we tried so many repellents, the wristbands, the candles... nothing seemed to keep them away. out of curiosity and desperation, we tried this lotion bar and the results have been life-changing for us. it is EXCEPTIONAL.

if u or someone u know is bug bait, i cannot recommend this tribe's beeswax bar enough. please support native businesses, ditch the bug spray. this stuff works, and smells, way way way better than anything else.

Not to mention they have REALLY GOOD HONEY.

[alex51324]

"If he is the victim of a random street crime, I'm going to call in the National Guard and start murdering homeless people."

[alex51324]

those guys can scurry

[alex51324]

Since some people in the notes seem confused: This is not saying that nobody should be vocal in their opposition to the regime.

Rather, think about which way you can be more effective in your particular circumstances, which include--among other things--your vulnerability to reprisals, and what you are personally in a position to potentially obstruct/slow walk/dumb-insolence your way out of.

So anyways with the rapid rise of fascism I feel it’s a good time to point out that it’s perfectly legal to follow unjust orders slowly, badly, or inefficiently

[alex51324]

Per the article (and Google translate), her name is Emma Emmeline, and she's two years old!

Her humans went looking for her when she wasn't with the other horses, and the fire department dug her out. Once she was out, she had a drink and a little snack, and was able to walk the short distance home.

She was seen by a vet that evening and then again the next day; she has some scrapes and bruises, but seems like she'll be OK.

i know this isn't the reguar theme of this blog but i need to share it somewhere because today someone called my local fire department because they found

a horse

[alex51324]

Some sort of Pinocchio situation, maybe?

(Source: Mississippi state fair butter horse.)

This is a MUSTANG

[alex51324]

Okay, I guess it kind of makes sense that horses that have been feral & free-roaming for many generations would lean toward preserving genes for efficient metabolism.

And then turn into enormous butterballs once they have access to domestic-horse-style groceries.

Also:

(source)

(It's a process pic of a state fair butter sculpture.)

(Yes the actual butter horse ended up more toned.)

This is a MUSTANG

[alex51324]

Knowing just a *little* bit about survey design, it looks to me like what they're trying to do is get answers that they can spin as "people don't care whether it's the government or a tax preparation company, as long as it's free."

TBH, if it was genuinely free, I probably wouldn't care, but my experience with "free" products offered by tax preparation companies is that they try to trick you into using a paid feature and then you either have to pay up or delete the whole return and start over.

Also, when you get to the question about how "free" tax preparation from the IRS might actually cost the government $10-$20 per taxpayer for initial setup, please do bear in mind that it was already set up and available to everyone last year. (And to people in certain states the year before that, through a pilot program.)

And then Trump torpedoed it because he felt like it, so if they have to pay those setup costs again, maybe they can, IDK, take it out of his "covering the White House in ridiculous gold-painted tat" budget.

tl;dr: take the survey, but it does not have a "nuance in tags" option, so watch out for traps.

The IRS is thinking about eliminating its free tax filing services in order to funnel money to commercial tax filing services save tax payers lots of money! But they are being required by Congress to see how Americans feel about that idea, so they have an anonymous survey up. So let them know what you think (and maybe call your senator and representatives too!)

[alex51324]

See, the trouble here is that he's set the bar too high for himself. If I'd never seen one of his videos before, I'd be in awe, but now? As soon as it became evident that it was going to be a boat, I was waiting to see it float.

(Spoiler: it does not.)

Honey wake up, the chocolate guy just dropped a new video !

[alex51324]

gosh, that sure was a choice that they made.

they could never slip an mpreg'd kier past me. my brain is finely attuned to such things

[image description: a screen cap from Severance episode 2.10 shows a glowing fireplace in one of Lumon's birthing suites. On either side of the hearth stands a statue, seemingly made of painted and glazed ceramic or similar. The statue further away from the camera, slightly out of focus, is of a woman, clearly far along in a pregnancy. She wears an old fashioned gown and hat and rests her hands on her baby bump. The statue in focus, closer to the camera, is of a bearded man who looks similar to other images of Kier Eagan. He wears similarly old fashioned clothes--a jacket, waistcoat, and tie. His waistcoat is pulled tightly over his chest and stomach, showing some of his dress shirt between buttons. His stomach is visibly rounded, very much like a baby bump, with his hands resting one atop it and one below in a position very reminiscent of a pregnant person holding their stomach. end image description.]