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If you can’t afford a six million dollar banana to complete your art collection,  maybe you can still snap up a seventy dollar diamond potato!

(oh, those Cards Against Humanity peeps are the apple (or potato) of my eye!)

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Sonic installing fiber on the pole near my house on November 27th, 2024 :-)

I’m thrilled to say Sonic internet just scheduled me for an upgrade to their fiber! I’ve had Sonic through AT&T’s fiber at 50 megabit for 5 years and it’s been great. But the upgrade will give me 10 GIGAbit, and it’ll cost LESS per month!

I had gigabit fiber in Berkeley, and yeah, the internet felt that much closer! Also, in my experience, cable internet was “usually” fast but sometimes had high latency, but Sonic fiber (and even the Sonic DSL I had in San Francisco years ago) was always very “snappy”!

I’m on Potrero near Richmond and they scheduled me for December 4th. I’ve had Sonic for (OMG) 19 years through various homes in the bay area and I’ve never heard a person that didn’t speak very highly them. If you want to sign up, now’s the time. You could use my referral code and get a free month if you like: http://sonic.com/referral/89863eh7h

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!)