Fixed it for you, National Weather Service. #IndigenousPeoplesDay

Racist pedophile slave traders don't get days named after them.

This year I'm all about celebrating Columbus Day, in honor of an incompetent, delusional, racist, narcissistic pedophile who thought everything should be named after him but wound up going to prison.
#ColumbusDay

CNN reports that "James Talarico has been absent from the campaign trail over the past 12 days... prompting Republicans to open a new line of attack on the Democratic nominee."

Talarico's campaign attributes his absence to having the flu. I do not know whether he actually has the flu, or instead has covid and doesn't want to admit it because of the politicization of covid. An eye-popping 1 in 19 Texans currently have covid!

Anyway, it's conceivable that Talarico could lose his Senate race because of his absence from the campaign trail and the perception that he is weak or hiding.

Most of us aren't as important as Talarico, but we each do things that matter. Please, please take steps towards not becoming sick like Talarico! If you can talk to someone on the phone instead of meeting them in person, do that. If you must meet in person, and the weather is nice, meet outside, or meet inside with the windows wide open. If you meet inside, use a Corsi-Rosenthal box to remove viruses from the air. If you live in a country like the United States that has updated covid and flu shots available, get them ASAP! (If concerned about side effects from covid vaccines, get Nuvaxovid instead of one of the mRNA vaccines.) Above all, if you are able to wear a well-fitted N95 mask, do that.

If, despite your best efforts, you come down with an airborne virus, do everyone around you the favor of telling them about it. There's no better motivation to take precautions against viruses than learning that someone nearby has come down with a virus. Especially in the case of covid, which many people incorrectly believe has disappeared, it is a wake-up call to learn that "Someone in my office / trivia league / book club has tested positive for covid".

Boosts welcome.

Sources:

https://pmc19.com/

https://lite.cnn.com/2026/10/08/politics/james-talarico-campaign-trail-paxton-texas

#Talarico #JamesTalarico #Covid #Flu #Influenza #CovidIsNotOver

My cat keeps a pretty accurate solar clock of important daily events (food time, walk time, etc), and we've reached the time of year when his estimates are rapidly changing in the day with the sun. I'm pretty sure I could cross plot it with solar declination and it would be closely related. He's asking for breakfast later and dinner/evening walk time earlier. Right now he's about 50 mins ahead of schedule nagging me for dinner, and that is around how much later sunset is than a month ago. Would be interesting to know what his lag is exactly and if it's consistent, or varies based on how fast the sun is changing.

RE: https://mstdn.science/@jeneralist/117389076256314549

This is eye-opening:

"Pennsylvania does not usually insist that only a licensed clinician may act while someone is dying.

"Any bystander may do chest compressions. Any bystander may take a defibrillator off a wall in a shopping center and use it on a stranger. Any bystander may perform abdominal thrusts on a choking person. Public buildings hang bleeding-control kits beside the defibrillators, and we teach ordinary people to pack a wound and apply a tourniquet. Trained school staff carry epinephrine.

"And in 2014, this commonwealth decided that any member of the public should be able to reverse an opioid overdose with naloxone...

"In the minutes before professional help arrives, a trained ordinary person acting beats nobody acting.

"There is no such law for a woman bleeding after childbirth. She can hemorrhage to death"

#WomensHealth #CommonSense

#Pennsylvania allows lay midwives (as distinct from nurse midwives). A new bill in the legislature would specifically prevent these midwives from administering any medication -- including misoprostol, which can be used to treat hemorrhage that could otherwise kill someone before they could make it to the hospital.

When 23 counties in the state don't have hospitals with L&D, don't ban helpers -- train them instead.

🎁 https://share.inquirer.com/l8JgQy

#midwife
#PeripartumMortality

This Sunday
===========

### Sunday, October 4, 2026, at 10:30am

### Animal Blessing

Worship Leaders: Pastor Kirk, Sheri, Alex & Janique

This Sunday we honor the interconnected web and bless the animal companions who enrich our lives. Bring your animal companions along, or invite them to the screen if you're online. If your companion can't join us, or is no longer with us, bring a photo to hold or share. For those who wish, we'll have time for introductions and appreciations.

To help everyone feel at ease, we ask that animals in the sanctuary stay close to their humans and be leashed or otherwise restrained as appropriate. To support those with allergies or other sensitivities, we will hold an animal-free section in the front few rows on the musicians' side of the sanctuary, and joining online is a welcome option too. As always, please care for yourselves and one another by choosing the place and the way of joining that serves you best.

Davies Unitarian Universalist Congregation
7400 Temple Hill Rd.
Camp Springs, MD 20748
Directions
(301) 449-4308

Onsite & Online (https://daviesuu.org/zoom/worship)

#unitarianUniversalist
#spirituality
#animals

@mathew @dan @mcc parrots can learn how to video call their friends on a phone and choose to do so when given the choice!! https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/scientists-taught-pet-parrots-to-video-call-each-other-and-the-birds-loved-it-180982041/

Listening to an audiobook in German in which two characters discuss Star Wars. The German narrator repeatedly pronounces it "Darth Wader" and now I can't stop picturing Vader in his full Vader costume, his imperial cape tied around his waist and his pants tucked into hip waders, standing in a river and casting his fly-fishing rod while happily humming the Imperial March under his breath.

It's 90 degrees today. DC is definitely in the middle of the Fake Summer season, one of 10 seasons we have here in DC:

Winter
Fake spring
More Winter
Spring
Summer
Fake Fall
More Summer
Fall
Fake Summer
More fall.

#washingtondc

New Washington DC law bans landlords from imposing dog breed restrictions https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/oct/01/washington-dc-landlords-dog-breed-restrictions #WashingtonDc #Animals #Dogs #UsNews #UsPolitics

PSA: If you aren't using your fallopian tubes any more, you might want to take them out -- it reduces your risk of ovarian cancer A LOT.

https://globalnews.ca/news/12067462/surgery-to-remove-fallopian-tubes-reduce-cancer-risk/

Washington has finally solved the problem of boring monuments: the planned 250-foot triumphal arch near Arlington Memorial Bridge will now double as a military complex with rooftop snipers, drone bays and sniper-ammo storage. Nothing says neoclassical heritage quite like a rifle scope glinting off your cherry-blossom selfie - welcome to the Arc de Snipers. https://sarcasticrobot.com/the-arc-de-snipers-washingtons-newest-weaponized-tourist-trap/ #Trump #WashingtonDC #DroneSwarm

This is Maeve. She may be the sweetest, most good natured, most trusting dog I have ever met. She was abandoned in DC last week, and since I’m not able to adopt a dog now, I had to turn her over to the Brandywine Animal Shelter. I want to make sure this absolute delight of a dog finds a good home.

My #bikebus is on the front page of the #Chicago Sun-Times today!
https://chicago.suntimes.com/education/2026/09/23/bike-bus-waters-elementary

#BikeTooter #kidicalmass

I try to love my enemies and wish them the best, but sometimes I just can't. At the moment, 1 in 91 Americans have active covid infections, and I'm being mistreated by some jerks who think that wearing masks to stop the spread of viruses is silly. I tell myself to think charitably towards them, but in truth, I'm hoping that they will each become sick with covid and then develop sequelae that leave them suffering for months. They deserve it.

Please, folks, support people who mask, and think about wearing a well-fitted mask yourself. And if you're able to get an updated covid vaccine, do that, too. In the US, most insurers are paying for the new vaccine that was just approved a few weeks ago. If you're concerned about side effects, ask your pharmacist about Nuvaxovid, which has minimal side effects in most people.

#covid #MaskUp

Here's a great article for people who care about either animal welfare or the environment. It's about The Transfarmation Project, an initiative of the charitable organization Mercy for Animals. The project "provides open-source blueprints for converting industrial pig, poultry and dairy barns" into facilities that grow mushrooms or plants. Crucially, the project finds ways "to repurpose the infrastructure that the farmers already have" so their investment won't be wasted.

https://text.npr.org/nx-s1-5944503

The article discusses the advantages for a family of farmers that made the transition, including the transformation of their manure pit into a freshwater pond. Their pigs had produced "roughly a million gallons of liquid manure" each year. Manure pits release methane and contribute to climate change. Now, the freshwater pond that replaced the manure pit has "become a haven for frogs, ducks and other wildlife".

I linked to the text-only version of the article. To see pictures, click on "Go To Full Site" at the top of the page.

#Transfarmation #CAFO #AnimalWelfare #vegetarian #vegan #MercyForAnimals #mushrooms #environment #agriculture #GoodNews #OpenSource

An advertisement for Nuvaxovid just aired on TV!! I'm thrilled that awareness of Nuvaxovid will no longer be limited to the hardcore fans who advocated for it the last few years.

I want to continue feeling joy over the advertisement's existence for a few moments longer. Therefore, if anyone dislikes either the wording or the graphics of the advertisement, I ask that you kindly keep that dislike to yourself for now. Let's just celebrate the fact that Nuvaxovid survived FDA delays and RFK's nuttiness, and has gone mainstream enough to be advertised on TV.

#Nuvaxovid #Novavax #Sanofi #CovidVaccine

One link below but I just now realized why there are table of contents at the beginning of some blog posts. Sighted folk don’t have a way to jump to the first heading level 2 or 3 on the page, nor do they have the capability of bringing up a list of headings on the page and then jumping to a chosen heading the way we do. Gods, how do you all use such a limited form of navigation? I would think scrolling would get tiresome after a while.

If I sit here and think of all the ways that screen reader users can navigate easier around a web page than a sighted person, because the screen reader user can access more symantic things, it makes me actually want browsers that borrow how screen readers are able to extract and use symantic information. Like I think it would be cool to give you all the capability of jumping to a particular heading on the page, table heads, or the capability of extracting a list of links in the browser, things we have. The mouse just clicks and scrolls. How do you all handle such limited forms of navigation?

I found this for Firefox I’m sure others exist https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/headingsmap/

#WebDev

My apartment building is moldy. Instead of actually dealing with the mold, the manager has added more and more Glade plug-ins to mask the smell. I hate Glade plug-ins as much as the average Mastodon user hates data centers, Facebook, and Trump. I want to be a billionaire, just so I can afford to live somewhere without Glade plug-ins.