“Always jingle all the way… nobody likes a half-assed jingler.”It’s Friday! And it’s the first Friday in December. Yay!
I am repeating a tradition I’ve followed for many years: all the rest of the Fridays this year are vacation days for me. Since I get more paid time off then my husband, this is a good way to burn some of that without creating too much weirdness. My plan this weekend is to finish Christmas shopping. We’ll see how far I get…
Welcome to my Friday Five: Only the top five (IMHO) stories of the week and five videos (plus notable obituaries and a recap of my posts).
New HIV Cases Hit All-Time Low in New York City. Let me just say as a man who was an out adult in the ’90s and remembers years when so many people I knew were dying from complications of AIDS that some weeks I had to decide which memorial service I wouldn’t go to so I could attend others, this headline brought tears to my eyes.
Yeah…It’s the fourth Friday of November. Yesterday we had a nice, quiet Thanksgiving with just the two of us here (while keeping in touch with a number of distant friends through the day).
My hubby found a 10-pound turkey, which is a good size for a small group and still lets us have lots of leftovers. I used a recipe from The Science of Good Cooking as a guide. Short version: put turkey breast side down, drape bacon over the back, bake at 325º until meat thermometer reads 165 in the thigh; pull out and turn oven to 425º, remove stuffing and bacon, flip turkey over, drizzle with olive oil, put thermometer in breast, return to oven and cook until temp is 185. It came out delicious. We also had green bean casserole, mashed sweet potatoes (as I continue my quest to replicate my Great-grandma S.J.’s heavy cream and molassis laden delicacy), giblet gravy, sweet potato pie, cranberry sauce, and a sinful collection of olives, pickles, pickled veggies, nuts…
It was a nice, laid back holiday. And I suspect all my conservative relatives heaved a big sigh of relief when Mom told them we weren’t coming. But enough about that.
Welcome to my Friday Five: Only the top five (IMHO) stories of the week and five videos (plus notable obituaries and a recap of my posts).
“Strangle facists with the chains they would have you wear.”It’s the third Friday of November. That means it’s NaNoWriMo time and I’m frantically writing every day.
Welcome to my Friday Five: Only the top five (IMHO) stories of the week and five videos (plus notable obituaries and a recap of my posts).
Graphic depiction from Rachel @maddow that shows exactly what the Persisterhood did in Virginia (click to embiggen)It’s the second Friday of November. That means it’s NaNoWriMo time and I’m frantically writing every day.
As I explained a couple of weeks ago, my long-running weekly round up of all the links I thought worth sharing has been retired, replaced by this, my Friday Five. Only the top five (IMHO) stories of the week and five videos and a recap of my posts.
Hating Comic Sans Is Ableist. I understand what the author is trying to say: a lot of dyslexic people find Comic Sans’ irregularities helpful for reading. But the fant is ugly and poorly designed. I reserve the right to dislike poorly designed things, sorry. And everyone else is allowed to disagree. Doesn’t make any of us any -ist…
It’s the first Friday of November. That means it’s NaNoWriMo time and I’m frantically writing every day.
As I mentioned last week, my long-running weekly round up of all the links I thought worth sharing has been retired, replaced by this, my Friday Five. Only the top five (IMHO) stories of the week and five videos and a recap of my posts.
(click to embiggen)It’s the fourth Friday of October. It’s also the final Friday of October. Which means that NaNoWriMo is right around the corner, and we’re careening ever more quickly toward the Yuletide Season.
Two weeks ago I posted “Friday Links (is anyone reading edition)” which contained far fewer links than my typical Friday Links post. I explained why I was feeling that the number of people reading the posts didn’t seem to justify the number of hours I spend most weeks assembling the post. Last week there was no Friday Links… and not one person sent a message asking after them. So, clearly there isn’t a gigantic audience that I simply wasn’t aware of for my weekly round-up.
As I said in that post, I read news all the time, so bookmarking stories that might be interesting to share isn’t the part that takes a lot of effort. And I like having routines, so having a task to work on a particular kind of post on a particular evening each week is something I can enjoy doing. So, I’m going to try a slight modification. Welcome to the inaugural Friday Five post. It will consist of only the five stories out of everything I bookmarked this week that I feel must be shared. Here we go:
Drug Companies Make Eyedrops Too Big — And You Pay for the Waste. It’s not just eye-drops–but wasted prescription eyedrops add up to $3.4 BILLION dollars in wasted health care money a year in the U.S.–this and drug packaging issues (such as the doses of chemotherapy) add up to a whole lot more billions wasted.
Farewells:
I will continue to share links to obituaries of people I think ought to be remembered, and they won’t count against the Five.
“Otter get out of here, put my party pants on and my sparkly shoes, it’s Friday baby!”The second Friday in October already. Where is the year going?
This week we have what is probably one of the shortest collections of Friday Links I’ve ever done (unless you count the few times I’ve missed the day). One reason is that I’ve been very busy and a little bit under the weather this week. So I just didn’t collection many. But another reason is that I’ve been thinking about how much time I spend on various activities and considering making some changes. There was a time, not that long ago, where the weekly round up of links was one of my most clicked on posts every week. And that’s just on my personal blog. I can’t get stats from the places where I cross-post the full text, so always assumed the actual numbers were higher. But now Friday Links is one of the least click posts on the blog, consistently.
This isn’t just about click. I’ve always rationalized the weekly round up based on the fact that every day I spend some time reading news and such on the net, and collecting the links of the stories I think worth sharing isn’t a big effort. However, assembling the post takes several hours every Thursday. Even those time when I try to limit how much time I spend, it always takes longer because I’ll reach the time limit and think, “But there was that one story about…” and go looking for the link. Sort of, “Just one more, oh, and that one! And we can’t forget this one!”
It took much less than an hour to assemble this one, and I still spent more time arguing with myself about whether I should go looking for more links so it wouldn’t be so short.
Anyway, here are the links I gathered this week, sorted into categories as accurately as I could.
So, yesterday was Friday, the day that usually this post should go up. It’s already October! Where is the year going?
I didn’t get this post finished Thursday night primarily because I am sometimes very absent-minded. It’s not that I forgot, though. When I got home from work I started cooking dinner, and that involved roasted a couple of pork loin chops in marinara sauce, while the veggies cooked in the microwave. Once everything was done I called my hubby in to eat, and got out a couple of plate because I wanted to smother each pork loin in cheese, so I was going to plate them up. And even though just three minutes earlier I had used oven mitts to pull the pan from the oven, I roached over with my bare hand and firmly took hold of the handle of the lid of the pan…
So, once we had doused my hand in cold water, we determined it wasn’t serious enough burn to require medical attention, but the only way I got through dinner was I spend most of the time clutch my cold drink with the burnt hand, and only letting go when I need both hands to cut the meat. One of the blisters is right on the joint of the index finger, and any attempt I made to type, use the mouse, or touchpad that night was just not fun. So, I tried for a while, but eventually spend the evening reading. Things were better by morning, but I had to work, so, here we are, a day late!
Anyway, here are the links I gathered this week, sorted into categories as accurately as I could.
No Worries, Washington Post, I Fixed Your Headline For You!.
“People who choose to end their lives as a tool of mass violence do not get to have a public eulogy in which they are memorialized fondly for whatever the fuck they did before they decided to aim indiscriminately into the crowd.”
On the face of it: Misunderstanding the point of Face ID.
“Apple created Touch ID and Face ID not as the best ways to secure your iPhone but as better ways than you were probably using. These are conveniences, not foolproof security systems. When Apple shipped Touch ID, it knew that most people weren’t using a 128-character alphanumeric passcode, they were using 4-digit numeric passcodes (if anything). Why? Because they wanted to unlock their phones quickly. MY SANDWICH MUST BE INSTAGRAMMED AS FAST AS IS HUMANLY POSSIBLE. 4-digit numeric passcodes are terrible security. They are easy to guess, hack or simply jack by watching someone type it in. Fingerprints and faces are not perfect, but they are considerably better for most security situations.”
This Week in Racists, White Nationalists, and other deplorables:
We Snuck into Seattle’s Super Secret White Nationalist Convention.
“Despite usually agreeing with everything the Nazis did and believing the Holocaust is just “anti-white propaganda,” they always claim a technical reason for why they aren’t “National Socialists.” None of these reasons would ever make sense to anybody outside the community and “I’m not a Nazi, but” is one of the most common white nationalist recruitment tricks to have people hear them out.”
Kim Davis protested at work, refusing to do her job as county clerk and denied her fellow citizens their right to marry. And she was a conservative here. But let some football players protest the murders of unarmed people of color by police (who are never held to account) and that’s unconscionable!It’s the fifth Friday in September. We are fast running out of the superior month that his the home of superior babies.
This has been a really weird week in part for reasons I can’t go into here. But the weather turned hotter than I like for a few days, and that seems to send plants into another frenzy of pollenating, so we both had nasty sinus symptoms. On the other hand, I’ve been getting a lot of writing done.
Anyway, here are the links I gathered this week, sorted into categories as accurately as I could.
FBI: Violent crime up in Seattle and Washington in 2016, but murders specifically down.
“While violent crime increased in Seattle and Washington state last year compared to 2015, the city and state both saw double-digit decreases in the number of murders and non-negligent manslaughters committed during the same time period… criminologists warned the new numbers may not indicate the start of a long-term trend because violent crime remains well below rates seen in the 1980s and early 1990s. And even compared to a decade ago, violent crime in 2016 is 18 percent lower than it was in 2007, and the murder rate is 6 percent lower than it was then…”
A very interesting letter from another team owner back in the days when Donald was a sports team owner. (Click to embiggen)Why the Overrepresentation of Black Americans in Professional Sports Is Not a Good Thing.
“…anyone who has taught in a US high-school system knows that this balance is strictly imposed on black males. Intellectuality is not just discouraged but not even recognized. When you reinforce this attitude by underfunding education, the remaining opportunities for black success are not found in the classroom but in the gym.”
How Hugh Hefner’s Incredibly Complicated Legacy Got Cast as Female Sexual Liberation.
“He published features that supported abortion rights years before Roe v. Wade, and his Playboy Foundation made gifts to rape crisis centers, abortion support services, and the ACLU’s Women’s Rights Project. Hefner also fought for First Amendment protections—a predictable cause for the publisher of a nudie magazine—ran some brilliant interviews, and gave money to civil-rights causes… At the same time, Hef’s magazine explicitly trashed women who stepped outside his feminine ideal.”
Click to embiggenIt’s the fourth Friday in September. The last Friday that I will be my current age. September, that blesséd month, which brings us extraordinary babies.
I’m not sure whether we haven’t quite recovered from last week’s illnesses, or if all the rain has made plants go extra crazy with the pollen and just making my hay fever worse, but we have both been a bit out of it all week.
Anyway, here are the links I gathered this week, sorted into categories as accurately as I could.
Font Folly 