Animals
And when does a timber rattlesnake pose a threat to a person's life? Any time a person sees or hears a timber rattlesnake, it poses a threat to a person's life.
http://wjhl.com/2016/07/14/wildlife-officials-rattlesnake-death-warranted-after-scott-county-va-utility-worker-almost-bitten/
Books
+Neil Gaiman recommends Jenny Lawson's new, crazy coloring book. I can see why; it's certifiably crazy (Lawson claims she locks herself up to draw it) and intricate enough for many, many hours of coloring fun. "Adult" in the sense that the images are too complex and weird for toddlers, not in the sense of likely to embarrass adults in front of kids...unless you're the sort of pompous adult who claims to have outgrown doing anything kids like to do, like coloring.
http://thebloggess.com/2016/07/14/i-have-a-big-announcement-to-make-and-im-not-sure-how-to-say-it-but-its-all-your-fault-sort-of/
He was on Twitter, btw, to promote his book via this interview. Serious fans may be able to watch:
https://www.waterstones.com/blog/waterstones-exclusive-video-neil-gaiman-and-chris-riddell?
Tom DeWeese has written a novel. (Not an Amazon link. I get no commission.)
Now I need an Amazon book link...see below. This one's a comedy classic.
Economy
The funny thing is...Earlier this month, the news broke that my county was planning to raise property taxes to balance the budget. Naturally, as North America's Queen of Frugal, I could think of several alternative ways to balance the budget, one of which I was willing and able to do myself. So I was invited to address the county board meeting...but the board members did not want to discuss any immediate plans for cutting expenses before tax bills went out. They wanted to "think about it" for another year, or maybe decade. Our federal government are the same way, Gentle Readers. The donkeys balk, the elephants stand around chewing their cud. And so it will always go, until we go beyond the scope of previously proposed balanced budget rules and amend our national, state, and local constitutions to the effect that, if proposed expenses exceed income, government may allow volunteers to engage in fundraising to save their favorite programs, but government may not raise taxes.
https://www.conservativereview.com/commentary/2016/07/5-takeaway-from-obamas-parting-present-eye-popping-debt
If you want to read this one the way I do, I want you to visualize the last person who mentioned depending on a disability pension to me: Sixty years old, short sensible white hair, sensible clothes, Northern accent. Straight healthy back. Walks without limp. Reads; stack of library books not selected from the Large Print Collection. Carries own books. Drives own car. Crochets; can see to match colors. Speaks in normal tones, neither loud like the profoundly deaf nor muted like the hard-of-hearing. Could easily pass for fifty. I mean, for all I know she may have early-stage multiple sclerosis or some such thing, but I have no idea what her disability might be, after seeing her and talking to her and car-pooling with her, several times. I mean, if I had the money I'd hire her as a driver today. That's the Face of Supplemental Security Disability Pensions today. Not that it takes less than a year, still, for an ordinary working person to convince the federal government that the arm or leg s/he has lost doesn't seem to be growing back...if anything, the difficulty of getting a disability pension may explain why someone who obviously could do a job is clinging to that pension.
http://dailysignal.com/2016/06/28/social-security-programs-face-depletion-in-near-future/?
Family
Ways to be a healthy parent rather than a helicopter parent. (Use judiciously.)
http://www.parenting.com/parenting-advice/tips-tricks/6-radical-parenting-ideas-to-consider-your-kids
Fun
Dan Lewis discusses the history of tug-of-war. (In junior high school we had a rougher version called a rope fight, which is what it was; winners dragged losers around the field, and to keep the game going people from the winning side would then be transferred to the losing side. Considering the amount of cross-gender body contact that went on, I remember rope fights as something of an "adult content" game, not what I'd consider suitable for junior high school.)
http://nowiknow.us1.list-manage.com/track/click?
Funny
Now this is just plain ridiculous. Someone advertising a job that really might have been suitable for me, if I'd had access to Skype on the right day, has got me onto a job search mailing list that clearly is not edited by humans at all. This is a legitimate job all right...but what thought of matching a car-free writer in Virginia with an ad for a rural route mail carrier in Arkansas? Well, I laughed...and maybe some reader has a car and is in Arkansas. (Searcy, to be exact.)
http://www.indeed.com/cmp/United-States-Postal-Service?
Health
John McDougall is sticking his neck out with this one, but it's true: some people with Type 2 diabetes can be considered "cured" in ten days. Adayahi has done this. (Diabetes may eventually recur, though, if for some reason you have to give up the exercise component. Adayahi stays on the good side of the diabetic borderline when working but has to take insulin when ill.) And, as always, if you take a McDougall vacation to test one of these claims, doctors will be standing by.
http://us4.campaign-archive2.com/?u=5e58f59d97611f910916b6276&id=7bd1947bab&e=4d57a9fdfb
More good news, if true:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jul/14/zika-epidemic-has-peaked-and-will-run-its-course-within-18-months-say-experts?CMP=twt_gu
Local
Regular readers may be asking, "Why the cafe? Time offline, in a store building, writing about items in the store, we can understand...but why is the Queen of Frugal using an Internet Cafe in a town that has a public computer center?" Yes, some of you may have guessed: the cesspit erupted.
http://priscillaking.blogspot.ca/2014/09/nefarious-librarian-in-scott-county.html
The Nefarious Librarian hasn't accused me of stealing books; instead she wangled permission to post a set of rules that included subjective terms, and then accuse me (and some other people, by ones) of breaking her rules. That means she gets to confront us in the more supportive atmosphere of a regional library board meeting, rather than having to accuse us of crimes, go to court, and go directly to the mental institution where she should have been all along. And what's a Lee County reject doing, making rules for Scott County taxpayers, anyway?
So you might say I'm campaigning for librarian. Actually, I'm campaigning for the idea, which has already been proposed by members of the county board, of defunding the library. Our public library is indeed tied into a big, clunky regional system with clunky, inflexible policies; those policies have indeed been used to inflict the coveted position of head librarian in Gate City on a Lee County reject who was expected to consider it a punishment. That reject is close enough to my age that I knew a long time ago that, unless she dies, I'll never be offered the one and only nine-to-five job I have ever imagined I really wanted. I've coped; I've worked in public libraries enough to know by now that I prefer private ones. So, for all these years, I've been watching the reject, a.k.a. Nefarious Librarian, a.k.a. Double-Wide (because her bottom half is twice as wide as her top half, which is massive), systematically destroying my town's library. Yet I've not been pushing to get her out. I'm not a pushy person; I've been trying to earn my living without looking at or speaking to the Nefarious Librarian. She has been pushing to keep me, and at least half a dozen other serious adult library patrons, from doing any serious work in the library. For at least five years. And it seems the only way to stop Scott County's money being spent to prevent what Scott County taxpayers intended it to accomplish, namely to have a library and/or computer center for serious adults, is to shut down the public library as it currently exists. Then we can have a bookstore, which is what this web site was intended to support from the day one.
Big Stone Gap has a bookstore (one of my working role models) located within walking distance between the public library and the college library, and that bookstore is making a profit. I would have thought Gate City had room for at least one library and a bookstore. Maybe not. What's certain is that we don't have room for Double-Wide.
Politics (Election 2016)
Where could Candidate Trump possibly find a nominee who might be considered life insurance? Hmm. If my name were Pence, I might make a career of sitting on every possible fence, since I almost do that anyway and doggerel about it would be publicity. My impression is, however, that that's not what the voters want in the White House. (One reason for doing it. I don't want to be President.) Which may be Pence's crucial life insurance appeal.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/04/29/why-endorsing-ted-cruz-wasnt-an-easy-call-for-mike-pence/?tid=sm_tw
Weird
Or do I just mean tacky? This one is just plain tacky. After a murder is no time to blather about whether the victim might have been a racist, or anything else with which you disagree, of which you disapprove, or which you don't like. Shame, Jesse Benn. Brave people criticize those in power, cowards criticize those on their way down, and people who are just plain mean bash the dead.
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2016/07/14/huffpo-blogger-claims-slain-dallas-cop-may-have-been-white-supremacist-offers-this-as-evidence/
No, I've not joined the boycott of the Huffington Post because that'zine featured an article claiming that Jesus might have foreseen Muhammad as a true prophet. (Who or what is a prophet? How much good and how much harm did Muhammad do? How do we know? Is Koranic scholarship sounder or more solid than Biblical scholarship? How do we know? Can any of these questions be answered based on facts, or must all of them be answered based on faith? I say faith, and HP has the right to feature whatever statements of whatever faith they may choose.) Some readers may, however...
http://www.florida-family.org/take_action_desktop.php?message=312
No comments:
Post a Comment