This is one for the books.
This evening I called a number. As soon as anyone picked up, she started talking about the "Medical Alert" system. Apparently I had been approved for a free Medical Alert button. So they passed me from operator to operator in order to get this thing. All used the same exact words as well. Nothing suspicious about that.
What's strange is that I had the wrong number. But it was a wrong number that I found on Google, so it was kind of official. Anyway, no sale was made.
Last night I figured I'd watch a movie on YouTube. A thriller, seemed like it could be interesting, and I've enjoyed a couple of things I'd seen Chabrol direct before. Only problem was the dialogue was in French, which I don't really speak or understand.
Well, it turned out to be possible to get subtitles, if you messed around with the settings. Of course what you get is a literal, word-for-word translation. Which, as you might guess, is completely impossible to comprehend.
Couldn't watch the movie after that, but I think I might try it later on with a movie I'm more familiar with.
After I got home from work today I walked a few blocks to get a cup of coffee and maybe a pastry. It had been raining off and on all day. I noticed when I had been outside for a bit that it was now snowing. As of this moment it is...raining, nothing else mixed in.
This has been happening all winter, which is now ⅔ over. Anytime it starts snowing either the temperature rises enough to melt it or precipitation stops or a mixture thereof. We haven't had a covering of snow on the ground in the whole season.
I'm not going to come down on whether this phenomenon is good, bad, or indifferent. But it is one of the reasons why you can't give a kid a sled for Christmas now. Maybe there are sled rentals for very fluffy winter days now. I could see making some scratch with that.
A look at some possibilities for the future:
Kamala Harris: Chosen as running mate because Biden promised John Lewis to pick an Af-Am woman and she was a US Senator. Was only a Senator because she'd been the better funded Democrat and Republicans are locked out of statewide office in California. Has not covered herself in glory as VP.
Pete Buttigieg: Appropriately enough, an illustration of the Peter Principle in action. Former mayor of a fourth-tier city. Now Transportation Secretary as the transportation infrastructure is on fire. Oblivious or worse.
Gavin Newsom: Has succeeded in making California a state to flee from. Would make a good Dragnet villain.
Bernie Sanders: We've seen how this movie ends. Twice.
Elizabeth Warren: 2020 was her year to shine. Oh well.
Amy Klobuchar: Did about as well as Warren in 2020 while somehow getting better press. Impossible to imagine her running without approval from higher-ups, which she will not get.
So it looks like Joseph Robinette Biden will be the nominee again, despite the fact that a stiff breeze could knock him over. Whether the GOP is capable of producing a stiff breeze is another question.
The above image is a photo taken by Vivian Maier, and shows her eye for charming detail. From the styles on display most of her pictures appear to have been taken in the 1950s and 60s, although she lived until 2009 and some are probably later (than the 60s, not her death in 2009. Although that would make a great story.) The fact that her photography wasn't really discovered during her lifetime is interesting. What creative things do people around us get up to that we never even guess about?
Dogs are used to holding the size card over cats. Which is good for them as cats, overall, are more battle-ready. As you can see above, faced with a cat their own size or larger, dogs will freak out. There's no aggression from the other party, but it's just wrong.
As it happens, most servals don't really thrive in domestic settings. So the issue doesn't arise that often.
I used to think that maybe English was a Celtic language. Or at least wonder. After all, it's right there on a pair of islands where most of the surviving Celtic languages come from. But no, linguists insisted it was a Germanic language with a lot of French and Latin borrowings. And it's true that English doesn't have a lot of confirmed Celtic cognates. One of the few common English words traced to Welsh is "penguin", which originally referred to far north seabirds like puffins and auks.
But Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English, an intriguing and accessible book by John H. McWhorter, questions this conclusion. Or at the very least complicates it.
German, Dutch, Swedish, and the gang are, by and large, variations on what happened to Proto-Germanic as it morphed along over three thousand years. They are ordinary rolls of the dice. English, however, is kinky. It has a predilection for dressing up as Welsh on lonely nights.
Its resemblances to Celtic languages like Welsh and Cornish include both the way it uses "do" to construct verbal phrases and the way that gerund verbs are used in sentences. In these English is unlike any other Germanic language. Or nearly any other language at all, with the exception of the Celtic ones.
To be sure there could be more debate. McWhorter does, however, point out that only a couple hundred thousand from the Anglo-Saxon tribes invaded Britain. Not enough to kill everyone and replace their language full-on, even assuming that's what they wanted to do.
After doing some grocery shopping in Rumford in the late afternoon I figured for a change of pace I'd take the bus north to Pawtucket and then take a bus south from there to get home. So as I had done a number of times before I waited for the 78 and rode it until I got to downtown Pawtucket, the Slater Mill area. What I hadn't realized was that that stop wasn't in service for the bus I needed anymore. They've instead rerouted most buses to the new Pawtucket-Central Falls Transit Center, the new train stop. New as in it just opened three weeks ago. Eventually while I was waiting downtown I saw a sign, but I wouldn't say the change was really well publicized.
I think I'll be staying away from downtown Pawtucket for a while, at least for that time of night. The city has its ups and downs, and now it seems to be entering one of its anomic phases.
As for waiting at the new transit center it's not bad, although due to the previous misunderstanding I was there later than I would have liked. It's well lit, which is a plus. The train station doesn't look like it has anyone working in it, though. Maybe janitors.
(Heavy sigh) All I can say is, brace yourself.
In a way it's grimly hilarious, although the fact that it involves real people emphasizes the "grim" part. A classroom full of mostly white kids drive their black teacher out of a job for not tap-dancing fast enough. Because antiracism. Gotta keep mouthing the words.
But there's a lesson here. If you're in education you need to identify students with the potential to be like Keisha from this article. Deal with them however you need to, but deal with them. Because if you leave your authority up for grabs, the worst possible people will grab it.
Some say that your mental and/or emotional state can affect your physical health and wellbeing. Those some are almost certainly right.
The past couple of days I've been having some very noticeable lower back pain. It occurred to me that maybe there was something psychosomatic, that stress might be a factor. And today I resolved something that had been stressing me. My back feels something-something percent better. So it looks like there is a connection.
When I Googled this guy I found out he'd been doing magic since 1972 and had even opened for Perry Como. That's some history. No idea why I've never heard of him before. He's great. Check out his multiplying card trick. The self-effacing southern accent helps sell it too.
There's a grim viral video going around. Kids on a school bus. A teenage boy is repeatedly punching a much younger girl, about 8. She's reclined, helpless, and he beats her without mercy. Someone obviously got it on video, but that's all that was done.
A common working definition of strength is the ability to hurt others. It's not the only definition, not the correct one, but it's one that many adhere to. The strong prove that they're strong by hurting the weak. There's no guarantee children won't fall into it.
If education has a purpose, it's to get kids to reject this thinking and excel in other ways. And of course adults need to be ready to intervene in cases like this. Failures all around.
In my ambling review of earlier-21st-century TV shows that I missed when they were on cable, I've recently gotten to Leverage. It's not quite up to the level of Monk but didn't annoy me into turning it off after a few minutes like I did with Psych. In fact it's a solidly entertaining show. Just very silly.
The premise is that an insurance investigator (Timothy Hutton) gets drafted into mastermind a heist when he's down on his luck. It turns out to be a double-cross, but he recruits the crew he works with into acting as Robin Hoods, stealing to help those who need help.
Hutton started his acting career by playing a bereaved teenager in Ordinary People and won an Oscar for it. He brings as much Real Actor mystique to the role as he can, which largely entails his character being hung over or flat-out drunk in every scene. There's a certain mismatch in trying to play a real, conflicted person in a show whose character dynamics are mostly taken from Marvel and DC, the Buffyverse, and your lab partner's D&D campaign.
So like I said, silly. But that doesn't mean it can't be fun. Beth Riesgraf is consistently a joy to watch as Parker, a break-in artist with dodgy social skills.
