Florida does it again. Michelangelo’s David is declared pornographic. You teach it, you lose your job.

Floridians might be the stupidest people in the world. Amurrica, we’re #1!

Today is the anniversary of my Mom’s death, 41 years ago. She was 46. She was very ill for her final 5-6 years, so she only had about 20 “normal” adult years. It’s hard to believe she’s been gone that long.

In spite of what her gravestone says, her full name was Helen Susan Bates Nichols. Not sure how or why someone omitted that from the stone – I wasn’t focused on those details at the time. In fact, I went a little crazy at the time, making a string of bad decisions. I recovered after a few years, but my life’s path had been altered significantly. Sure would like to have those years to do over, but it doesn’t work that way.

That’s a hard first thought to follow, but I’ll try. I have a terrible Apple Photos problem – the application is behaving weirdly. Some photos can’t be seen – I only get a grey-ish placeholder. And others are being duplicated, en masse. I already had a duplication problem affecting 1000s of photos in the 2003-2004 era, and now the duplication is spreading. I think it’s all related to iCloud sync, but…I haven’t figured it our yet, and I’m worried about the integrity of 20 years of digital photos. 34,000 photos, though some of them are dupes. Normally I can find an answer to something like this online, but so far…nope. This all started when I transferred my desert photos from camera to laptop a week or two ago. I hate it when shit that used to work reliably suddenly just stops. It’s got to be a software update somewhere in the system, but hell if I know what triggered this.

NPR has run a lot of pieces lately on how unsustainable our western way of life is. The “American Dream” – a single family house, a couple of kids, a few cars, vacations on cruise ships, etc. – is singled out as being particularly wasteful. I’m no apologist for our western way of life, but after unpacking a few Amazon orders today, wow! I’ve got enough plastic wrapping left to fill a dumpster. I’ll single out our overuse of plastics in the modern world as one of our worst, least sustainable habits. Time to find a new packing material and stop buying bottled water.

This note from Business Insider just makes me ill. To think that rubes from all over America continue to throw money at the world’s most dangerous grifter…ugh.

Former President Donald Trump raised $1.5 million in the three days after he claimed on Truth Social that he’d be arrested Tuesday, per multiple media outlets.

Trump’s 2024 campaign confirmed the sum to Fox News, the outlet reported Wednesday. The money was said to be raised from grassroots donations.

The Washington Post, citing an anonymous source familiar with the matter, reported the same amount raised in that time frame.
The resulting average of $500,000 a day is almost double the daily average from the weeks before and after he announced his bid for the White House in November.

The Trump campaign brought in $11.8 million in the six weeks before the announcement, averaging out at $280,000 a day. And in the six weeks after Trump announced his run, his campaign raised $9.5 million, or $226,000 a day.

$226K per day (!!), every day, and more when he asks for it. Essentially no restrictions on how he uses the money. No wonder he’s running again. People are just plain dumb.