Character flags from Mario Golf Super Rush via

I enjoy iconography like this

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A somewhat funny exchange, but I'm struck by the typo of the original poster "By Fiance" which proably shoulda been "My Fiance"

That M<=>B swap is one I make all the time (I think it has to do with my neurological processing of phonemes and how M and Bs are kind of similar from a mouth positioning point of view) so it's somehow soothing to catch it out in the wild.

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It's too bad that "Trump Derangement System" means what it does, because honestly Trump's hysteria about getting things named after himself is pretty f'in deranged.

"The Trump administration asked Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., for the Washington region's Dulles International Airport and New York's Penn Station to be named after President Donald Trump in exchange for releasing the federal funds required to build a long-delayed tunnel between New York and New Jersey, multiple sources told NBC News."

via I know it's just we've gotten spoiled by low key winters, but I was thinking of the Vernor Vinge novel "A Deepness in the Sky", [minor spoilers] where the spider like aliens live on a planet around a start that is basically "off" for 215 years of a 250 year cycle, and the entire civilization goes into a deep freeze - it's so cold that the atmosphere condenses:

"What do you expect to see with a natural view? Most of what is sticking up is mountaintops. And farther down is covered by meters of oxy-nitrogen snow." A full terrestrial atmosphere froze down to about ten meters of airsnow--if it was evenly distributed. Many of the most likely city sites--harbors, river joins--were under dozens of meters of the cold stuff.

Parts of the book were so evocatively written that the imagery has stuck with me - aliens figuring out ways to un-hibernate early, and tromp around in ways akin to humans moon landing and exploration.

But then again, I guess you don't have to look so far for vast blocks of cold stuff - 20,000 years ago lots of North America, including the nothern United States, was under a mile or two of ice. That's scary and mindblowing.


Some family bequeathed brain swelling, Measles related encephalitis on one of their kids. His dad reports, "He's pretty much as if he was paralyzed,"

"We're not blaming God for this," said [his] 35-year-old [mother] Kristina. "Yes, it hurts, of course, it hurts. But God has chosen Ethan for a reason. God is doing something, and we're gonna glorify his name regardless.

"And we wouldn't change it any other way," the mom continued. "If I knew this could be the outcome, I still wouldn't have given my son the vaccine."

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Do you remember that old church trope/joke, about how a guy is on his roof, escaping a flood, and two or three boats go by offering to rescue him, and the guy declines to go with them, saying "god will provide"? And the guy drowns, and up at the pearly gates, the guy asks "what happened?" and God says "what do you want from me, i sent three boats?"

Modern science provides blessings that some are too foolish or misled to accept. And it's not just the kids of the deluded parents who suffer, but the whole wider community. Kind of fun piece on some interesting roller coasters - especially interesting to read about Kennywood's "Racer", a "mobius strip" kind of design where the cars switch sides (I guess technically one ride is like half nearly an identical path) One book I liked a lot as a kid was 1982's Kid's Whole Future Catalog (the title a play on the "Whole Earth Catalog") with all kinds of interesting and inspiring visions for what might have been coming down the pike.

Another book that caught my eye but I didn't have my act enough together together to note it on the obvious day was "Arthur C. Clarke's July 20, 2019: Life in the 21st Century", another future-looking book (written around 1986).

Somehow it feels like we've lost that techno-optimism. Like not a lot of confidence that the world of 2060 is gonna be that great. (And some of he cyberpunk corporate dystopias from the later 80s seem the most likely.)