Hijack This Thread

[tek]

Not to mention the way it jerks the steering wheel around when it decides I'm drifting out of my lane

There might be a setting in some non-obvious menu to set how hard the lane-assist 'nudges' you.
My new-ish Jeep has settings for things I didn't even know existed.

[qbawl]

Not to mention the way it jerks the steering wheel around when it decides I'm drifting out of my lane

There might be a setting in some non-obvious menu to set how hard the lane-assist 'nudges' you.
My new-ish Jeep has settings for things I didn't even know existed.

Yes I think there is also pretty sure it can be turned off but as much as I like to bitch I'm 77 years old blind in one eye (the other one ain't so hot either) and more medical crap than you can shake a stick at so it is actually a good thing I suppose.

[bill_g]

The weather here has been confusing. Days of warm sunshine followed by freezing rain and snow teased with moments of clear blue sky. My lawn really needs a haircut, but my new Toro does not have a pontoon option.

[bill_g]

While winding my way through Mrs belongings, I came across her dentures. She's kept every set. Now I need to dispose of them, and straight to trashcan may be the best way. Someone had suggested I donate them to a dental school. Great idea. OHSU has one of the best dental colleges in the country. They said no.

So, I googled what-to-do-with-false-teeth-after-a-death, and came across this article on Cake. I am certain they are being sincere in helping while weaving some dark humor into their ideas. My favorite so far is putting them in the Halloween candy bowl to scare people. At least it's cleaner than decapitated Barbies in a pan of pork-n-beans. YMMV

[Flatpoint High]

The rest of the story
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/p ... 234979503/

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[raison de arizona]

There are some really amazing pictures in this thread, worth a click.

Photographs taken in the right place at the right time, intentionally or by chance - a thread

[Dr. Ken]

This is very on brand

[Flatpoint High]

BatBoySuperTuesday.jpg.webp (34.29 KiB) Viewed 572 times

[Reddog]

Found this:
Red panda discovered in luggage during Bangkok airport bust

https://abcnews.go.com/International/re ... =107877312

[qbawl]

Found this:
Red panda discovered in luggage during Bangkok airport bust

https://abcnews.go.com/International/re ... =107877312

Well, hopefully he will fiercely log in and update us on his foreign adventures.

[p0rtia]

[RTH10260]

Missouri: home to child marriage, corporal punishment and sick ‘child welfare’ ideas
Missouri lawmakers – great defenders of children! – want to force teachers to register as sex offenders if they use a trans child’s preferred pronouns

Arwa Mahdawi
Thu 7 Mar 2024 12.13 CET

Did you know that child marriage is still legal in much of the US? About 300,000 children and teenagers were legally married in the US between 2000 and 2018, according to the advocacy group Unchained at Last. At least 60,000 of those marriages “occurred at an age or with a spousal age difference that should have been considered a sex crime”.

Did you know that, until quite recently, Missouri was a “destination wedding spot” for children who wanted to tie the knot? The state has tightened its child marriage laws now – and is seeking to ban the practice – but not all lawmakers are happy about the changes. Missouri state senator Mike Moon said last year that he knows kids who have been married at age 12 (to another minor) and they’re “thriving”!

Did you know that many school districts in Missouri still authorize corporal punishment? If a kid acts up in class, a teacher can spank them. Don’t worry though, they’re not allowed to do anything horrible like punch them in the face. According to one school district, the only punishment allowed is “swatting the buttocks with a paddle”.

Did you know that Human Rights Watch gave Missouri an “F” grade last year for its compliance with international child rights standards?

I mention all these fun Missouri facts because I think they’re important to bear in mind as we look at the latest dystopian news coming out of the state. Which is this: state representative Jamie Gragg is so concerned about the welfare of kids in his district that he has come up with a novel new way to “protect” them. How? By introducing a new bill which would force teachers to register as sex offenders if they use a transgender child’s preferred pronouns or otherwise help them in their “social transition”.

The bill states that any teacher or school counsellor who provide support or “other resources to a child regarding social transition” could be found guilty of a class E felony and placed in the same sex offender registration category as someone possessing child sexual abuse images. They would not be able to work at a school again or be within 500ft of one.



https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... x-offender

[RTH10260]

The state took these children away – then used their parents’ low IQ scores to keep them apart
In the US, IQ scores are often a key factor in gauging parenting ability. Critics say the assessments are misguided and unfair – and the results can be devastating

by Britta Lokting
Wed 6 Mar 2024 16.00 CET

Amethyst Gibson brought her son home from St Charles hospital in Bend, Oregon, five days shy of Christmas.

It was 2022 and Gibson, who goes by Abbi, was renting a room from Tina Berlin-Dungan, who owned a one-story house in a nearby town and charged her $400 a month. The two women had equipped the home with everything the baby, Dean, would need: a Pack ’n Play crib and changing station, clothes, bottles, a baby bath, baby gate, and ointments for rashes.

The next night, Berlin-Dungan and her friend Dena Singleton were hanging out on the couch with the baby while Gibson briefly stepped outside to meet her then boyfriend, Singleton’s adopted son. “And we hear pound, pound, pound on the door,” said Singleton. Through the entryway window, Berlin-Dungan saw a caseworker from the Oregon department of human services (DHS) accompanied by several police officers.

“Very quickly, we knew what they were there for,” said Berlin-Dungan.

She opened the door and the caseworker presented a court order to remove Dean from his mother.



https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/202 ... are-oregon

[AndyinPA]

Very sad.

[Volkonski]

Hundreds of guillemots, exhausted by storms, dead on French beaches

https://theprint.in/world/hundreds-of-g ... s/1992664/

Hundreds of guillemot seabirds have been found dead on French Atlantic beaches, exhausted by unusually heavy winter storms that prevent them from feeding, environmentalists said.

Over 500 common guillemots – seabirds related to penguins and puffins – have been found dead along the French Atlantic coast since the year began, French League for Birds (LPO) has estimated.

Antoine Prevel, a volunteer for the nonprofit Sea Shepherd France, said guillemot beachings happen regularly in winter, but not to the scale of the past weeks.

Scientists say it is likely the birds died from exhaustion due to difficult conditions at sea.

[Uninformed]

“Media tycoon Rupert Murdoch gets engaged to Elena Zhukova”:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-68508087

“Media tycoon Robert Murdoch has become engaged to his girlfriend, his team has confirmed.
The 92-year-old has reportedly been dating retired Russian molecular biologist Elena Zhukova, 67 for several months.
The marriage, which is expected to take place at his Moraga vineyard and estate in California this year, will be Mr Murdoch's fifth, but sixth engagement.”

[pipistrelle]

She reminds me of someone.

[MN-Skeptic]

Long, fascinating article. I highly recommend reading it. The brilliant person is revealed to be a 20-year old college student in the UK.

The Mystery Social Media Account Schooling Congress on How to Do Its Job

Earlier this year, Matt Glassman — a congressional scholar at Georgetown who has spent most of his adult life studying the Hill — wanted to know the answer to an obscure procedural question. “When was the last time a ruling of the chair was overturned on appeal in the House?” he asked on X, tagging an anonymous user named @ringwiss.

Less than a minute later, the mysterious account responded with an answer — 1938 — and a decades-old edition of the Congressional Record to prove it.

That kind of speedy response time and wide-ranging legislative knowledge is what has made @ringwiss a go-to resource for staffers, lobbyists and reporters across Washington looking for answers on congressional procedures, especially in a year when lawmakers have been stretching procedures to novel ends and increasingly bucking leadership — creating a need for deeper understanding of oft-forgotten rules.

His tweets have gained renown around the Capitol for their nuanced discussions of arcane congressional rules and history, and for his comfort with correcting longtime lawmakers and Washington journalists alike. His following is only around 4,000, but it’s a well-connected bunch, including congressional chiefs of staff, committee staff directors and other leading insiders.

“He’s just a complete parliamentary obsessive and savant, really like no one I’ve ever met, even people in the parliamentarian’s office,” Glassman told POLITICO Magazine.

[Sam the Centipede]

That's a fun article, MN-Skeptic, thanks!

That level of dedication and knowledge accumulation by a 20 year old suggests that Surdy cannot be neurotypical, as I think few of us neurotypicals maintain that sharpness and constancy of focus regardless of motivation. Boredom or distractions divert us down other by-ways, into other fields.

But we benefit greatly from the efforts of these outliers, those whose obsessive work carries everyone forward. Their contributions are valuable and should be appreciated, as Surdy's clearly are.

Bravo to him!

[Flatpoint High]

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[RTH10260]

Can't they just drive down main road and fill the potholes ?

[keith]

We've got an app here called "Snap, Send, Solve".

You take a photo of a problem amd send to the app and its routed to who needs to fix it, whether Roads, Parks, Water, Electricity, whoever.

I send in a problem in NOVEMBER regarding a bus size (not an exaggeration) hole in a main street near us which had been there since July. It is covered up by huge steel sheets which over time have shifted and bent endangering tires.

It is still not fixed, though some work was done a couple of weeks ago. We drove by at 9:00 at night and half the road was blocked off, a bunch of heavy equipment was parked around, and you could see workers standing in the hole with their heads just above street level. When I said bus size I wasnt kidding.

Today it looks exactly like it did when I reported it in the first place.

Maybe if I reported it to Kenosha they would fix it for us?

[bill_g]

Several years ago a sinkhole formed in the road adjacent to our shop. The road is also the primary approach to a local post office across the street from us. So, it gets a lot of traffic, and not all drivers are expecting a Gaping Maw From Hell in the middle of the road. It grew unexpectedly fast from a dent in the pavement, to exposed aggregate, to a car eating interdimensional portal in the course of a day meaning something was actively undermining the road.

The City actually responded that day with a crew who could tell it was beyond their ability to immediately resolve. They surrounded the hole with cones, folding reflective placards, signage, and yellow tape. And that's the way it stayed for the following week. The washout continued, and the hole enlarged. I never did see or hear water, but I did wonder where all that earth, stone, and pavement went - what void existed deep below us that could accept all this and more? We increased the cone and placard perimeter as needed though it seemed to do nothing to deter the overnight drunks from crashing into it almost daily.

By the time a contractor showed up with a crew, those reflective placards and cones had seen a lot of action, and were quite ready to be replaced. They did a big excavation that revealed the broken old water pipe. They made quick work of the repair, and put steel plates over the hole for the evening. They finished the following day with backfill and fresh asphalt. Their mop up was a bit incomplete though. Several shovels and rakes were left behind along with all the brutalized cones, placards, and signage the city crew had set up.

I didn't let grass grow under any of that. The tools came indoors. We stacked the city property inside our locked compound next to our dumpster but visible through the fence where they sat for a month before we disposed of most of it. We kept the best cones, folding placards, and tools. They've been useful several times since.

[AndyinPA]

https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/28/us/bus-s ... index.html

00:43 - Source: HLN
CNN —

Morning commuters in Pittsburgh got an eyeful Monday when a bus fell backward into a gaping sinkhole, leaving the front half hanging several feet above the road.

The Port Authority bus was stopped at a red light when a rectangular hole in the street opened up beneath it, swallowing the back half of the bus, Port Authority of Allegheny County officials said.

Only the driver and one passenger were on board when the bus fell in. Both were safely able to exit, and the lone passenger was being treated for minor injuries, the Port Authority reported.

You can buy Christmas ornaments of the bus (and other souvenirs). This was just a few years ago.

[RTH10260]

The blue dragons season is upon us, but researchers remind beachgoers to think twice before touching them

Priscilla Thompson
Sat, March 9, 2024 at 4:40 PM GMT+1·3 min read

CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas — Spring breakers flocking to Texas beaches this month could stumble upon a sight many have never seen — a bright blue and silver sea slug known as the blue dragon.

While the tiny, 1-inch creatures may look like fun, researchers warn that touching them could result in a painful sting.

“There’s all kinds of stories of people accidentally stepping on these blue dragons or picking them up and squeezing them and getting stung. And yeah, it doesn’t end well,” said Jace Tunnell, a marine biologist at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi.

Blue dragons, known scientifically as Glaucus atlanticus, sail on the surface of the ocean feeding on toxins from the Portuguese man-of-war and other jellyfish-like organisms. As southeast winds increase during the spring, the slugs blow ashore with the potential to release those dangerous toxins upon unsuspecting beachgoers.

“It would be 3 to 5 times what a man-of-war sting would be,” said Tunnell, who spotted one of the first blue dragons of the season on North Padre Island last month. The pain can last for up to three hours.

“You will know immediately if you are stung by a blue dragon,” Tunnell said. “It will be intense pain. It will feel like somebody has needles that they’re scraping across your skin.”

Blue dragons live in the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans, but their habitat is expanding, according to American Oceans, an advocacy group that aims to educate the public about marine species. “Such examples are on the east and south coasts of South Africa, in European waters, near Mozambique, and off Australia’s east coast,” the group writes.


https://www.yahoo.com/news/blue-dragons ... 00343.html
(original: NBC News)