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No pooping, no peeing.

Leftovers & links
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South Park has always loved Casa Bonita, a giant and wacky (and real) Mexican restaurant in Lakewood, Colorado. Now Trey Parker and Matt Stone are buying it.  

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Gotta love a good quote, but also, gotta get it right. Even if a thousand sites on the ‘net say Einstein said it, that doesn’t mean Einstein said it, and guess what? It wasn’t Einstein who said it.

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Stymie was an interesting zine, written by Roger Ebert when he was 18 years old. Purportedly a sci-fi zine, it’s actually about everything. I enjoyed Ebert’s story about Ben the sewer worker, and his view of the upcoming 1960 Presidential election, and honest to Gort, I even liked Ebert’s poetry.

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I’m from Seattle, so I still follow the news from there, and it’s cool that they’ve prioritized light rail, and they’re expanding their system. Three new stations for the northbound train will open on Saturday. I’ll choose public transit over cars anywhere it’s feasible, so this is good news.

There’s always a but for me, I guess. But — no pooping.

When I lived in San Francisco, every BART or Muni station had restrooms. Usually they were hellacious, and sometimes they were locked for cleaning, but if you had to poop or pee there was a good chance of pooping or peeing at any train station. 

See, if you’re driving somewhere, you can pull over anyplace there’s fast food, and plop a poop or a pee. If you’re in a subway or riding high above street level, that’s a trickier proposition — you might not know what’s there and what's open, in whatever neighborhood you're passing under or over. And whether successful or failed in your quest for a restroom, it’ll be a much longer interruption. Common sense: Restrooms are needed, at subway and el-train stations.

Seattle's light rail is a cool ride, but there's no pooping. No peeing. No public restrooms were built in any of the stations, as Seattle built its light rail. 

That's a great way to cut costs, I suppose, but some people poop and pee, and sometimes a poop or pee is needed unexpectedly. Having no restrooms at the station makes driving seem like a better idea. Light rail is an elegant solution to traffic jams. Light rail without restrooms is savagery.

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It takes six months to train a new hire where I work, and we’re all being outsourced three months from tomorrow. Through the grapevine, not through any announcement, I’ve learned that our replacements’ training is now underway, at least to some extent. They’re not being trained by us, and I’ll add “thankfully.”

So who’s training them? Well, I’ve only heard about training for one tiny subsection of what we do, but for that small task, our replacements are being trained by a woman who was in our workgroup, five years ago. She now works in a different department, and she’s a perfectly smart and capable lady, but to me it seems like an unwise choice.

Could you train someone, today, to do a job you used to do, five years ago? 

That's just a sliver of the work we do, though. No word on who’s training the replacements on things beyond that one task — the work we spend 95% of our time doing. If it’s the same lady, there’ll be surprises ahead, because what we do and how we do it has changed greatly in the past five years.

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Songs sung by Barbie and Ken in 1961. It’s surprising how listenable some of these songs are. A few of them sound every bit as good or better than the pre-rock pop music of that era.

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This is a well thought-through look at how mainstream journalists habitually demonize the homeless. When it happens so very often, perhaps it’s not a coincidence.

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“Perhaps the greatest irony of the “the vaccination implants 5G in you so the government can track you everywhere” conspiracy is that people *already,* *voluntarily* carry an always on, constantly connected tracking device with them at all times. They take them into their bedrooms and their toilets. Indeed they pay lots of money for the privilege of carrying the latest and greatest tracking device with them.

“Maybe if government started charging iPhone money for the vaccine the anti-vaxxers would line up for them like it was Black Friday.”

Lane Crothers

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YouTube says it’s finally going to ban anti-vaxxers — all anti-vaxxers, not just Coronavirus anti-vaxxers. Some will say we should be concerned about this. Well, I am concerned, but only that YouTube has waited too long, won’t go far enough, and this shouldn’t be any corporation’s choice, anyway. 

When someone is spreading dangerous untruths and gets a wide audience, that ought to be illegal, and YouTube should’ve already been prosecuted for allowing it.

Not many years ago, I would've argued ferociously against what I just said, but I've seen the power of social media.

If we who have brains don't do something to rein in the fools and swindlers, if giant corporations continue allowing anyone to say anything, that'll be the death of democracy.

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Put away the handcuffs, people. God doesn’t want you being kinky or having any fun with the Mrs, or the Mr, or anyone else. 

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My least favorite way to wake up would be a fire. My second least favorite way to wake up would be a burglar prowling around. But my third least favorite way to wake up is the way I just woke up, by dreaming someone’s knocking at the door at 2:00 in the morning, when really, no-one’s knocking at the door.

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I watched some cop shows when I was a kid. Adam-12 and Dragnet come to mind, but I’m pretty sure Columbo was the only cop show I ever really liked. It debuted fifty years ago, with “Murder by the Book,” an episode directed by Steven Spielberg when he was still a zygote.

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Here's a 4-minute documentary on pinball, automats, grocery machines, and other marvels of 1960s high tech vending machines. It cuts off just as it’s getting more interesting, though.

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Remarkable trees.

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 Mystery links  — Like life itself, there’s no knowing where you’re going: 

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     —②—
          —③—

Sincere tip 'o the hat to:

• Becky Jo
• Dave S.
BoingBoing
Captain Hampockets
Mark Maynard
Messy Nessy Chick
Ran Prieur
• and One of the Butt Sisters but definitely not the other.

🧁 ☕ 🍩
You’re always invited
to add anything below,
about anything at all.
🍩 ☕ 🧁 

9/30/2021

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2 comments:

  1. So this is new...

    https://www.sciencenews.org/article/footprints-ghost-tracks-prehistoric-humans-americas

    Humans may have been on North America longer than originally believed.

    I can share this with you because you are nerdy about science like me.

    ReplyDelete

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