The coldest winter I ever spent
Archive for 2024
We are RVing to Morro Dunes RV Park and Pinnacles National Park over Thanksgiving! I’m excited that this will be our first real “mini-vacation” in Gallahop, our RV! We went to Yellowstone on a 2 week maxi-vacation over the summer that was terrific!
Abigail and I made 5 pounds of Latkes for Multicultural Night at her elementary school! They were gone in 60 seconds! Yay!
Biscuits and Gravy can be amazing. Ask me how!
Abigail is in a 4H Bee Keeping project and loving it! She harvested honey a month ago and (in the photo) they did some hive maintenance 2 weeks ago… checking for mites and moving the frames around for the winter. We ALSO went to a friend of Megan’s house to harvest honey from their bees a few weeks ago! Wee!
Abigail’s class won the Slime The Principal prize for raising the most money for the Jog-a-thon! Mr. Ranch came through in spades with his slimee performance! Ms. Milani gets in the last slime!
On this Ruby Bridges Walk To School Day, my daughter’s school had a march! I’m proud! I wish I had recorded the entire presentation, it was excellent!
The first time I marched for civil rights was in my 20’s. It was Important! I was glad to have found a group that could lead a civil rights project effectively. Activities like this prime kids to be able to lead actions. That is IMPORTANT.
Today’s earworm: Firework/ball!
You know how everyone knows there are certain parts of the world where people live longer because of all the yogurt they eat (like Soviet Georgia) or what kind of diet they eat or whatever. They are called Blue Zones. Well, maybe not.
This is just a preprint article (meaning it hasn’t been peer reviewed yet), but it looks like all of those blue zones were just a combination of shoddy record keeping and pension fraud.
For a slightly deeper dive, read this Arstechnica snippet
…Newman found a staggering number of errors in the data for every blue zone. For instance, in 1997, there were 30,000 Italians claiming a pension while turning out to be dead. In Costa Rica, 42 percent of citizens over the age of 99 were found to have “misstated” their age in the 2000 census, shrinking the blue zone in that region after error correction so much that the estimated life expectancy plummeted to the bottom of the pack. And in 2010, more than 230,000 Japanese centenarians turned out to be missing, imaginary, dead, or the result of clerical errors, amounting to an error rate of 82 percent. “If equivalent rates of fake data were discovered in any other field… a major scandal would ensue,” Newman wrote. “In demography, however, such revelations seem to barely mention citation.”
(and thanks to Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me and the IgNobel Prize for unearthing this!)
I don’t think Trump meant what he said about what he’d have the National Guard and military do to Americans.
Oh wait, yes I do.
Transcript:
Kyle Clark: I missed something during last week’s Donald Trump rally in Aurora. Was standing there, heard it, just wasn’t sure if I heard what I thought I heard. So we did not play it back to you here. It seemed that Trump was talking in Aurora about using the U.S. military against Americans that he says hate this country. Listen to what he said.Donald Trump: We have the greatest military in the world, but you have to know how to use them. You have to know how to use them. But I protect you against outside enemies. But, you know, I always say we have the outside enemy. So you can say China, you can say Russia, you can say Kim Jong Un, you can say, but that’s not it’s going to be fun, if you have a smart president. No problem. It’s the enemy from within. All the scum that we have to deal with that hate our country. That’s a bigger enemy than China and Russia.
Kyle Clark: All right, the military thing and the enemy within, like the comments are kind of next to each other, but it’s not super clear. Well, over the weekend on Fox, Trump just came out and said what he seemed to be saying in Aurora, that he has a desire to use the U.S. military against American citizens.
Donald Trump: I think the bigger problem is the enemy from within, not even the people that have come in and destroying our country, by the way, totally destroying our country, the towns, the villages, they’re being inundated. But I don’t think they’re the problem in terms of Election day. I think the bigger problem are the people from within. We have some very bad people. We have some sick people, radical left lunatics. And I think they’re the. And it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard or if really necessary by the military.
Kyle Clark: The Harris campaign responded to that, saying that it should, quote, alarm every American who cares about their freedom and security.
I just signed up for my first 5K road race, running alongside my daughter as a Girls on the Run Running Buddy!
The race is November 2nd in San Leandro!
