From last night's concert, here's Dead and Company playing a very tasty rendition of Wharf Rat with Billy Strings adding some much needed fire to the mix.

https://youtu.be/8sNOFxdKB1U?si=VHAh46p9AfRfh1lB

#music #DeadandCompany #GratefulDead

Here's a good article from Charlie Angus.

Reading it made me think of a line from a Bruce Cockburn song. "The trouble with normal is it always gets worse."

I've been thinking about that a lot as I see the US slide rapidly into fascism. I've caught myself thinking, "No, they wouldn't do THAT.". But they do, and then something even more horrible and destructive.

Today we lost NPR and PBS. Let that one sink in. What's next?

https://charlieangus.substack.com/p/the-second-tower-principle

#NPR #PBS #politics #fascism

Here's my short review of The Lion King musical which I saw in Toronto last night.

https://coredump3.blogspot.com/2025/08/review-lion-king.html

#TheLionKing #Disney #musicals

This is damning.

https://deanblundell.substack.com/p/video-trump-admits-epstein-trafficked?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=4163578&post_id=169657254&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ocv1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

This week's Featured Links post links to (mostly politics-free) articles about using Microsoft Word with Notebook LLM, how the right embraced the art of Thomas Kinkade, the death of the projection booth, and more.

https://coredump3.blogspot.com/2025/07/featured-links-july-29-2025.html

#AI, #Art, #eReaders, #Food, #Gaming, #MicrosoftWord, #Movies #TV, #Music, #Society, #Technology

New hat just dropped.

And to the next ASSHOLE to asks me why I don’t mention Hamas….

You lost the ability to use Oct 6 as a justification when your kill ratio soared past 30 to 1

wanna give a huge shout-out to Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky for gifting us some absolutely stunning colour photographs from Russia in the 1910s.

YEAH YOU READ THAT RIGHT. he took three photographs of each subject, through coloured filters, and then projected the images again through the filters and superimposed them.

and thus, we have colour photography of early 20th century Russia. and it's beautiful.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Prokudin-Gorsky

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Prokudin-Gorsky#Colour_Photos

#History #Photography

Two Canada versus the US stories to look at this week. A Canadian fisherman detained by the US Coast Guard IN CANADIAN WATERS and the success of the Canadian boycott of US goods.

And then there's the Blue Jays!

https://coredump3.blogspot.com/2025/07/the-usa-versus-canada-9.html

#politics #CanadaStrong #ElbowsUp

A good article on Trump's war on science. The graphs don't lie.

https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/nih-the-quiet-engine-of-science-is

#science #WarOnScience

This week's Featured Links post has links to articles about a 5-day walk across Toronto, a deep dive into inequality by Paul Krugman, an interview with Terry Gilliam on the 40th anniversary of BRAZIL, and more.

https://coredump3.blogspot.com/2025/07/featured-links-july-22-2025.html

#Books, #Finance, #Funny, #Language, #Medical, #Movies #TV, #Politics, #SFF, #Society, #Software, #Typography

Do not stay at a Hyatt hotel. They're running fake "smoking detectors" specifically as a revenue-generating scheme and arbitrarily fining guests $500.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1945959030851035223.html

Today's post is a collection of links that support my increasingly strong feeling that the human race (or at least our technological civilization) is doomed. As you might expect the articles focus on the Trump administrations war on science and climate change and its effects.

https://coredump3.blogspot.com/2025/07/were-toast-61.html

#ClimateChange, #Environment, #Medical, #Politics, #Religion, #Science, #Society, #Technology

This week's Featured Links post links to articles about the day that Grok tried to be human, Cory Doctorow on rubber-hose cryptoanalysis, how the Ukrainian infantry is adapting to drone warfare, and more.

https://coredump3.blogspot.com/2025/07/featured-links-july-15-2025.html

#AI, #ClimateChange, #Disinformation, #Environment, #Military, #Security, #Society, #Technology

I was going to do yet another blog post with articles pointing out examples of misinformation and disinformation (there's just SO much of it right now), but instead I wanted to highlight some sites and tools that you can use to detect disinformation.

https://coredump3.blogspot.com/2025/07/detecting-and-fighting-disinformation.html

#medical #politics #disinformation #misinformation

Today's Featured Links post has links to articles about North America's most isolated road, The Anti-Autocracy Handbook: A Scholars' Guide to Navigating Democratic Backsliding: a new resource, why pasta tastes better in restaurants, and more.

https://coredump3.blogspot.com/2025/07/featured-links-july-7-2025.html

#Art, #ClimateChange, #Environment, #Food, #History, #Military, #Places, #Politics, #Science, #Technology

@ai6yr @michael_w_busch

I know the area well and have been through the floods of 1987, 2002, 2006 & had lots of friends impacted by 2015.

A friend of mine has a place near the headwaters of the south fork of the Guadalupe, 5-6 miles above Camp Mystic. It's been in the family since it was part of Mexico. It has the original schoolhouse for the area on it, from 1836. I've spent probably more than a year cumulative there and lived in the area more than a decade. They remember the floods.

The family had a girls camp there in the 1970s-80s. The cabin footings are 6 feet above the 1936 high water line. The cabins are an additional 6 feet above that, sitting on 2x2 foot concrete piers poured directly onto limestone bedrock. In 1997ish I helped the owners anchor the floor joists and hurricane strap the walls and roofs.
At least one of those cabins is gone.
As is the dam which was built in the 1910s -- more than 2 foot thick concrete with down river buttressing extending > 10 feet.

I'm pretty sure the main building at Camp Mystic was the original from 1926. I've seen pictures of cabins *uphill* from the main building with walls missing.

*****************
Crider's Dance Hall and Rodeo* was 100% feet dry in 1987. I had lunch there when we were doing SAR.

[EDIT: A friend pointed out that we weren't at Criders in 1987. He can't remember where we went, but is sure it wasn't there. Therefore I don't know if Crider's flooded in 1987.]
******************************
The main bar is well above most of the property. The pool tables were flipped by the force of the water. Today they were going to celebrate 100 years in business.

The Hunt Store -- easily 30 feet above the first flood plain (which is 10 feet above nominal) -- is wrecked and the owner is asking not to be contacted.

This isn't a problem of not remembering. This storm several sigmas past the worst seen in written history. All the river gauges I've seen so far go off scale at 20-25 feet, and stay off line for hours.

First pass guess by looking at the damage done, the crest on the south fork was 40+ feet.

The local officials didn't assess the risk appropriately and didn't have an appropriate notification plan. And to some extent I blame them for the loss of life.

There are also long-standing issues of lack of infrastructure:
There aren't gauges that far up the river -- where the floods start.
There's nothing like a flood warning siren system.
In the 1990s we had a telephone tree, where the upstream land owners would call us, and we'd call places further down, letting them know that they needed to pull stuff up from the river. Apparently that died at some point.

I haven't been back in that area in a while, mainly because I don't fit in politically any more, but even so I mourn.

*Yes, Dance Hall and Rodeo is a thing; and was a helluva good time too.

@chris - Canada needs to open the market to EV low-speed vehicles (LSV) and small EVs as used in many European cities, as well as stop placating the US and remove the tariffs to the Chinese EV market, like on BYD.
Canada does *not* have a EV manufacturing base to protect - and only if there is significant competition and take up here in Canada will there ever be one. Nor should we be the gatekeeper for the US, who have shown to do us no favours.

Trump has lost it. From his Florida concentration camp press appearance.

McNichol: Who is, is there a specific timeframe you'd expect the detainees to spend here? Days, weeks, months.

Trump: “In Florida? Here at Alligator, I'm spend, I'm gonna spend a lot, look at, this is my home state. Uh, I love it. I love your government. I love all the people around. These are all friends of mine. They know him very well.

https://deanblundell.substack.com/p/video-the-president-who-cant-answer

#politics #dementia

I didn't know this. I don't use macros in my documents (any I use get loaded from an attached template) but this could easily affect a lot of technical writers.

https://office-watch.com/2025/why-cant-autosave-work-with-a-macro-in-a-word-or-office-document/