Taomeow

No voila I'm afraid. The whole point of a solar powered charger is to have a way to charge my phone when the electrical grid is down. Whether it's winter in a solar-powered home in Finland, hot days of summer in CA when everybody runs air conditioning and the (overworked and inefficient) power supply gets knocked out, a hostile hacker attack on the grid, or a Carrington event (which managed to do damage even in 1859 and might end civilization as we know it should it happen again today), the hanging plant light that needs electric power to work won't work. Absent any such events, I just plug my phone in an outlet.

The hurricane/tropical storm is a couple hours away from us per latest predictions, but some fire hydrants in downtown decided to help it along ahead of schedule. Video: https://packaged-media.redd.it/k703vjwl1bjb1/pb/m2-res_1280p.mp4?m=DASHPlaylist.mpd&v=1&e=1692572400&s=6d053c7ae8deeab4e038fffffacb9f5afa090978#t=0

For some reason, off the top of my head I remembered a novel from the 1990s by Orson Scott Card titled Enchantment, a modern retelling of Sleeping Beauty that blends Slavic folklore, time travel, and fantasy. The protagonist, a Russian-American scholar, discovers and wakes up a princess who's been sleeping since the 9th century Kievan Rus' era. The princess, a smart and resourceful girl, begins adjusting to modernity, yet one thing she can't get used to is food. "Everything is flavored with something else," she complains. She winds up living for a while in modern America, then going there and back and spending some time here, some time there, and ultimately choosing the medieval time for her permanent destination. The scholar of course follows her. Nothing there is flavored with anything else -- it is what it is. One ingredient cottage cheese, one ingredient love, and so on... uncomplicated. And he chooses that.

Tens of thousands of acres of the Amazon rainforest have been demolished to build the road for the climate summit in Brazil. The most prominent and influential attendees will all arrive in private jets.

I have a solar charger for my phone. Which makes me a prepper. Wouldn't work in Finland. But I don't live in Finland. Which makes me sad but oddly reassured.

I've painted only sporadically so I haven't attracted them, but calligraphy gremlins definitely chomp on ink brushes and calligraphy pens. They like pricey Japanese ones.

This might work better than the medication prescribed to Milhouse of The Simpsons -- "Repressitol."

It's not the year of the Cat but it's the month of the Cat -- in the Vietnamese version of the Chinese taoist calendar they borrowed in time immemorial, they still have the Cat which the ancient China also had before it got replaced with the Rabbit. March 5 through April 3.

Interesting idea! The ducks would be fuming though if you told them. What I had in mind was something else though. I was thinking of three things two of which I will reveal here: 1. The ducks traveled all around the world -- in a huge group of like-minded individuals each of whom looks like a duck and quacks like a duck -- on ocean currents that made their routes pre-destined and inevitable. If they could think, perhaps each of them would come up with this idea that they're exercising their free will and choosing to join the group of like-minded peers and move in the same direction toward (or away from) the same coordinates. All freedom-loving ducks go toward ___ and away from ___! This is progress. This is equality. This is duckmocarcy. But in reality not a single individual one of them nor all of them as a group have any control of the ocean currents that carry them -- nor awareness of their existence. And yet those currents, the most powerful of them happening under the surface, are the sole determinant of where they are going. 2. And those same ducks carried by the currents which they have zero control over clearly demonstrate that any phenomena taking place on this planet that is mostly water follow the same patterns, be those patterns pollution or epidemics or mass formation psychoses or fake solutions to real problems. Everything ultimately goes everywhere. And in the universe that is mostly dao, our oceans are but a drop -- if that. Not a single duck can "save the planet," or save the whole group of ducks, or an individual duck, or itself without knowing the flow. And the only way to know the flow is to be the flow. So our separation from nature ("dao patterns itself on nature/on itself") is a guaranteed dead end. Welcome to rubber duckhood, humanity. Also sprach Taomeow.

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The funkiest and funniest folk band

China imported 12 million tons of coal from the US in 2024. The coal was delivered on huge oil-burning ships. China burned that coal to make energy to build solar panels. The solar panels were then exported to the US and delivered on huge oil-burning ships. In 1992, a cargo ship container tumbled into the Pacific, dumping 28,000 bath toys, mostly rubber ducks, that were headed from China to the U.S.. Currents took them, and news reports said some have eventually reached Maine and other shores on the Atlantic. In the following years, they showed up all over the world, Seattle to Alaska to Hawaii and back to China and to the Arctic. Pop quiz: how do you think the two stories are connected? Here they are in Chicago River

He was provoked. The cat wrote "Domovoy is stupid."

Mine is probably a domovoy.

How do you test for timelines? I know so many stories like this, on top of it occasionally happening to me. My sister-in-law, e.g., when living in an apartment, discovered one day that one of her earrings was missing. A diamond earring, expensive, a present for some anniversary. She turned the apartment upside down, then went over every step of the staircase outside the apartment, enlisted her husband and her daughter and her mother to look, they did it the next day too, just in case they missed a nook or a cranny, they used flashlights and what not, maybe not a microscope but other than that, literally everything in their power. And then she gave up. A week passed. She stepped out the door and there it was, that earring, in the middle of the top stair, shining brightly.

Brutalist style! I remember an even more streamlined set from my 7th grade... Around that time several of my classmates got into chess. Most played in their spare time, but the not-too-diligent me and my deskmate (we had shared desks for 2) started playing during classes. We were trying to be discreet of course, using mini sets and then smaller pocket sets as teachers kept confiscating them one after the other, two of his, two of mine. So finally we made a pencil drawing of the board on the plastic top of the desk and cut a bunch of little squares of paper on which we drew the pieces. Once caught again, the teacher would then make us wash the board off the desk and get rid of that "set" -- we did, only to replicate it by next class. I haven't played in a long time, but I do own a nice set for when civilization collapses... and even if I didn't, I could always revert to my 7th grade solution.

I found my lost Swiss Army knife. It was in a small inner pocket of a small German backpack I use when I go hiking. I checked that pocket at least a dozen times before, the knife wasn't there I swear, and now, out of the blue, it's there. People who experience weird comings and goings of small objects in this manner call it a glitch in the Matrix or the Mandela effect. I call it mindfuckery.

We have an idiom, "the hat is burning on the thief." Meaning, there's no evidence against him but for some reason he self-incriminates. Thanks for the heads-up.

You go backward in your memory, from the last thing you did that day back to the previous one back to the previous one, reconnecting everything in reverse, then go to sleep. Got it from a seminar. Very simple -- yet helps one combat fragmentation and realize how much of the day they were aware and conscious, and which parts their body or their mind disconnected from and sleepwalked through. Can be a fractal -- you can get a broad sketch of your day (I did this, and right before this, I did that, and that was preceded by such and such actions, etc.), or you can go into an infinite number of details. Ee.g. instead of "got undressed before going to bed" you remember "took off the left sock before the right sock" (can you remember?) or instead of "made boiled eggs" -- "cracked the boiled eggs on the left side of the counter, boiled the eggs for 6 minutes, turned the burner down, put the pot on the burner and turned it up," whatever.

I was thinking about that too. I'm no fan of excessive rules and regulations, prohibitions and restrictions, etc. -- nor of giving the mods extra work -- yet I've often wished we had stricter rules against stalking threads and/or users, against hijacking discussions via brigading, and against inquisition style interrogations thinly veiled as "just questions." (Gives me bad KGB flashbacks.) There's enough Savonarolas foaming at the mouth elsewhere and I don't think a forum that accepts that mode of communication in any section remains attractive -- except for those thriving on it. Maybe @stirling was right asserting that section is harmful (if I remember correctly -- if not, my apologies) -- even when ignoring it, one can't unknow that it exists and its qi affects all the rest. In any event, I'll figure it out for myself, and if others figure out a better solution, great.

I'm thinking about removing my access too. If I wanted a nonstop stream of regurgitated MSNBS etc. spam in my feed, human beings reduced to assorted dehumanizing labels, and events presented through the crooked lenses of the mighty lie machine, I could go straight to the source. In the current events section, I was hoping for something very different-- there are people with whom really meaningful and productive exchanges could happen if only... Ah well.

That's so cool. And so sad, because don't know about Australia, but in the Amazon rain forest the majority of plants found there haven't even been identified yet -- while they keep going extinct. Some of our pharmaceutical substances that were derived from those identified, in the meantime, have revolutionized modern medicine whenever they found an inroad there. Curare, without which modern general anesthesia doesn't happen and most major surgeries would be impossible. Quinine, which globally turned around malaria (synthetic versions, chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, are derived from it.) Pilocarpine, which is prescribed for all cases of glaucoma. To name a few. And god only knows now many were never touched out of hubris (old wives' tales, snake oil, woo woo medicine is the common way to refer to those miracles of healing nature and native expertise spanning millennia.) I used to gobble up books on ethnobotany. Sometimes they made me cry.

I'll tell you about the second biggest. It was Mo Pai, occasionally referred to as more pie, and it was not a pie I ever took a slice of but I remember it being baked and burned and banned and resurrected from the ashes again and again, like, forever. Still won't say anything about the biggest. Sorry, I just can't. 😿