jack

Seems like it was just yesterday I was pointing out that I need to get control over those things that annoy me and not let them annoy me. FAIL. Volleyball. Martha's husband, Richard, pointed out last week that when the right mix of people are playing, it is such fun. And when there is a spoiler in the bunch, it is just not. Fun. We have a spoiler. And it's not even the asshole. Or the woman who shreds my hand with her long nails. So... yeah... we have multiple people who work hard to ensure it is not as fun as it could be. And this morning I let it work on me. My bad. But...

Old people.

I think maybe I need a change of scenery. Even if brief. So I will go out and do my Amazon return. Maybe at lunch. Or maybe when the house cleaner comes this afternoon.

Oh remember the soy sauce situation? Well, I bought another bottle, filled up my little soy sauce jar and went to put the rest in the cabinet where it belongs. But it was a tight squeeze because... there was a nearly full bottle of soy sauce already there!! WTF?

So, now, whenever I get on my high horse about being sharper than all these old people around here, I hope someone just says to me "soy sauce." Myrna would have. God, I miss her.

Ok, I think I'll go out now. Before my leg gets too tired from the day as it is want to do lately. And, I think I'm going to go to Fred Meyer. It's always such a chore because it is so huge but they have different stuff and I want different stuff and need a change of grocery scenery.

So off I go.

davidgillon

Me, Last night: It's bloody freezing in here!

Me, this morning: It's not bad, but still colder than it should be. Maybe I should check the central heating?

Central Heating: Look at all my pretty blinkenlights!

Me: It's probably the water pressure, I'll need to top up the system, but I need to warm up first

So I go put the fan heater on in the living room until the room is nice and toasty and I warm up

Warmed up, check the pressure: 0 Bar.

So I turn the awkward little knob underneath that lets water into the system (not the nice big handle next to it that doesn't) and fill the system to 2 Bar. Turn the system on, blinkenlights keep flashing

Me: I'll give it quarter of an hour to sort itself out

Quarter of an hour passes

Central Heating: Pretty blinkenlights!!

Me, still cold: Hmm, that big red blinkenlight says 'reset', it couldn't be? Yes, it's also a button.

Me, after pressing the reset light/button and an obvious restart: I'll give it quarter of an hour to sort itself out

Another quarter of an hour passes

Central Heating: Pretty, pretty blinkenlights!!

Me, still still cold: Bugger, must be something -- oh, you idiot!!!

Walk into still toasty living room, pick thermostat up and carry it into kitchen

Central Heating: Oh, wow, it's cold in here, hang on a minute and I'll get that sorted

*headdesk*

Current Mood: Warmer

blarg_feed

Posted by mhoye

https://exple.tive.org/blarg/2025/11/11/historical-reasons-2/

https://exple.tive.org/blarg/?p=6761

In 2011 after Dennis Ritchie died, I wondered if we should start retiring usernames on unix systems as an honorific, in the same way sports teams will retire the numbers of great players. I’d proposed a patch to useradd.c at the time that was rejected; understandable, I suppose, but I ran the modified version on my own machine for a while, to no effect and for no reasons but my own. Those few lines of code might have run a dozen times, inspecting the names of service accounts that they’d never object to, but I knew they were there.

I frequently wonder what building a deeper cultural history into the functioning of the common codebase would look like, and what a shared heritage might mean and maybe gain over time. How history might invisibly accrete, not in load-bearing bugs or temporary-permanence, but in the touchstones of the human history.

You can’t wear 99 in the NHL now, or 6 in the NBA. Maybe you shouldn’t be able to log in as dmr for the same reasons.

https://exple.tive.org/blarg/2025/11/11/historical-reasons-2/

https://exple.tive.org/blarg/?p=6761

guardianworldnews_feed

Posted by Andrew Sparrow

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/live/2025/nov/11/bbc-crisis-labour-conservatives-donald-trump-lawsuit-politics-live-updates

Culture secretary also condemns MPs who dismiss BBC as ‘institutionally biased’ in swipe at Badenoch and Farage

Here is a round-up of what various lawyers and commentators have been saying about Donald Trump’s legal case against the BBC.

Joshua Rozenberg, the legal commentator and a former BBC journalist, has said in a post on his A Lawyer Writes Substack that the corporation should settle. He explains:

Given what Brito is claiming, the lawyer is unlikely to be impressed with the BBC’s assertion that “the purpose of editing the clip was to convey the message of the speech made by President Trump so that Panorama’s audience could better understand how it had been received by President Trump’s supporters and what was happening on the ground at that time”.

So the BBC would be well advised to draft a retraction and apology in terms that the president’s lawyer finds acceptable. Brito is also calling for this to be broadcast as prominently as the original programme. And the corporation will have to pay compensation.

George Peretz KC, chair of the Society of Labour Lawyers, says on Bluesky, commenting on Rozenberg’s blog, that the BBC might be better off with a more robust approach.

So at the moment, despite @joshuarozenberg.bsky.social’s piece, I wonder whether a better BBC response would be the Arkell v Pressdram one. proftomcrick.com/2014/04/29/a...

(At least to the extent he’s seeking more than a formal apology limited to the obvious mistake and a very modest offer of compensation.)

There is, after all, the risk of a dangerous precedent here. The BBC will often offend foreign leaders – some worse than Trump. Sometimes it will make factual mistakes in reporting on them. Yield to Trump now, and who next?

Mark Stephens, a media lawyer, told BBC Breakfast that a court case could reflect badly on Trump. He said:

Every damning quote that he’s ever uttered is going to be played back to him and picked over – not great PR.

Trump risks turning what’s currently a PR skirmish with the BBC very much on the back foot into a global headline that the court finds Trump’s words were incendiary …

George Freeman, executive director of the Media Law Resource Center in New York and a former lawyer for the New York Times, told the BBC that Trump “has a long record of unsuccessful libel suits – and an even longer record of letters like the one you received that don’t end up as lawsuits at all”.

Christopher Steele, the former MI6 officer who is trying to recover costs from Trump after the president sued him unsuccessfully in the UK, says Trump’s latest threat is preposterous.

Donald Trump’s threat to sue the BBC in London is preposterous. He remains in breach of English High Court orders in a case he brought and lost against Orbis 18 months ago. So any further abuse of the UK courts by him for such legal tourism and intimidation should be prohibited.

Robert Peston, ITV’s political editor, says the BBC has been told Trump does not have a case.

The legal advice to the BBC I am told is that President Trump was not meaningfully damaged by Panorama’s manipulation of his 6 January speech, and that therefore there is no legal necessity to pay him compensation. The BBC board is therefore likely to resist and fight his demand to be “appropriately compensated” out of court, and will risk him carrying through on his threat to seek $1bn in damages by going to court.

These times are difficult for the BBC but we will get through it. We will get through it and we will thrive. This narrative will not just be given by our enemies. It’s our narrative. We own things.

I see the free press under pressure. I see the weaponisation. I think we have to fight for our journalism.

We have made some mistakes that have cost us but we need to fight for that.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/live/2025/nov/11/bbc-crisis-labour-conservatives-donald-trump-lawsuit-politics-live-updates

guardianworldnews_feed

Posted by Damien Gayle (now), and Ajit Niranjan (earlier)

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/live/2025/nov/11/cop30-live-negotiations-begin-after-agenda-agreed

Christiana Figueres tells summit that decarbonisation of global economy is inevitable despite disruptive Trump presidency

In the run-up to Cop30, the Guardian published a series of articles looking at the ten biggest polluters of greenhouse gas, and their plans to clean up. Here’s a piece my colleague Jonathan Watts wrote in September about China, which according to an analysis published today has plateaued its emissions.

Chinese power took on an old-fashioned hue in the past week with a huge military parade, a gathering of former allies Russia and North Korea, and President Xi Jinping’s defiant vow not to be intimidated by bullies.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/live/2025/nov/11/cop30-live-negotiations-begin-after-agenda-agreed

guardianworldnews_feed

Posted by Rupert Jones

https://www.theguardian.com/money/2025/nov/11/uk-to-reconsider-decision-to-deny-waspi-women-pension-payouts

Millions born in 50s lost out because of government failings over changes to state retirement age, campaigners say

Millions of “Waspi women” have been given fresh hope that they might receive compensation after the UK government announced it would revisit a decision to deny them payouts.

As many as 3.6 million women born in the 1950s are said to have lost out because of government failings in the way changes to the state pension age were made, prompting the Women Against State Pension Inequality (Waspi) campaign to launch in 2015.

https://www.theguardian.com/money/2025/nov/11/uk-to-reconsider-decision-to-deny-waspi-women-pension-payouts

guardianworldnews_feed

Posted by Nadeem Badshah

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/nov/11/nhs-trust-fined-after-woman-killed-herself-hepworth-death-trap-ward

Alice Figueiredo, 22, died in 2015 after 18 similar attempts to self-harm on the Hepworth ward at Goodmayes hospital

A woman whose daughter killed herself on a “death trap” mental health ward in London has called for urgent change after an NHS trust was fined more than half a million pounds.

Alice Figueiredo, 22, took her own life at Goodmayes hospital, Redbridge, after 18 similar attempts.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/nov/11/nhs-trust-fined-after-woman-killed-herself-hepworth-death-trap-ward

guardianworldnews_feed

Posted by Ben Jennings

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/picture/2025/nov/11/ben-jennings-on-cop30-cartoon

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/picture/2025/nov/11/ben-jennings-on-cop30-cartoon

guardianworldnews_feed

Posted by Lisa Allardice

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/nov/11/its-notoriously-hard-to-write-about-sex-david-szalay-flesh-booker-prize-winner

The novel’s protagonist is violent, libidinous and so inarticulate he says ‘OK’ some 500 times. So how did the author turn his story into a tragic masterpiece?

When we meet the morning after the announcement of this year’s Booker prize, David Szalay, the winner, seems an extremely genial and gentle author to have created one of the most morally ambiguous characters in recent contemporary fiction. His sixth novel, Flesh, about the rise and fall of a Hungarian immigrant to the UK, is unlike anything you have read before.

Szalay (pronounced “Sol-oy”) is often described as “Hungarian-British”, but that has offended Canadians this morning, he says. His mother was Canadian and he was born in that country, where his Hungarian father had moved a few years earlier. “I’m arguably more Canadian than Hungarian.” Now 51, he grew up in England, graduated from Oxford University, and lived in Hungary for 15 years. To make things more confusing, he is over from Vienna, where he now lives with his wife and young son Jonathan.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/nov/11/its-notoriously-hard-to-write-about-sex-david-szalay-flesh-booker-prize-winner

guardianworldnews_feed

Posted by Aisha Down

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/nov/11/fraudster-who-hid-in-london-is-jailed-over-bitcoin-scam

Zhimin Qian cheated 128,000 victims in China through a Ponzi scheme before going on the run for six years

The trail had been cold for five years – ever since Zhimin Qian narrowly escaped the police days after they raided her six-bedroom house in London. Then, in February 2024, detectives noticed a long-dormant bitcoin wallet flicker to life, and a manhunt began.

For over a month, police tracked the mastermind of one of the UK’s largest money-laundering cases – from a lonely bungalow on the shores of Loch Tay to a red-tiled house outside Glasgow, and finally to a quiet Airbnb in suburban York, where the 46-year-old was arrested in late April alongside four Malaysian nationals working illegally as her domestic staff.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/nov/11/fraudster-who-hid-in-london-is-jailed-over-bitcoin-scam

guardianworldnews_feed

Posted by Tiago Rogero, South America correspondent

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/nov/11/navy-carrier-trump-drugs-caribbean-latin-america

USS Gerald R Ford’s arrival marks the largest US military presence in the region since the invasion of Panama in 1989

The US navy has announced that the USS Gerald R Ford, regarded as the world’s newest and largest aircraft carrier, has entered the area of responsibility of the US Southern Command, which covers Latin America and the Caribbean.

The deployment of the ship and the strike group it leads – which includes dozens of aircraft and destroyer ships – had been announced nearly three weeks ago, and its arrival marks an escalation in the military buildup between the US and Venezuela.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/nov/11/navy-carrier-trump-drugs-caribbean-latin-america

guardianworldnews_feed

Posted by Madeleine Aggeler

https://www.theguardian.com/wellness/2025/nov/11/peanut-allergies-declining-children-explained

Blockbuster research has upended assumptions about the allergy. Experts shared what parents should know about introducing food allergens

According to a paper published in the Journal of Pediatrics this month, the number of peanut allergy diagnoses among children has dropped over 40% since 2017.

The reason? Food allergy guidelines have undergone a sea change in the past decade.

https://www.theguardian.com/wellness/2025/nov/11/peanut-allergies-declining-children-explained

guardianworldnews_feed

Posted by Nina Lakhani

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/nov/11/israel-attacks-palestine-water

Armed forces and settlers used bombs, dogs, poison and machinery to attack people and infrastructure at key sites

Israeli armed forces and settlers have attacked Palestinian water sources more than 250 times in the past five years, amounting to the most sustained assault on civilian water supplies in recent years, new research reveals.

Bombs, dogs, poison and heavy machinery were among the weapons used to attack Palestinians and their infrastructure at drinking water, irrigation and sanitation sites in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip on at least 90 occasions between January 2024 and mid-2025, according to the Pacific Institute, a California-based nonpartisan thinktank tracking water conflicts.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/nov/11/israel-attacks-palestine-water

bbcnewsworld_feed

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj6ng120pggo?at_medium=RSS&at_campaign=rss

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj6ng120pggo#1

Istanbul's chief prosecutor accuses Ekrem Imamoglu and 400 others of running a corruption network.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj6ng120pggo?at_medium=RSS&at_campaign=rss

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj6ng120pggo#1

bbcnewsworld_feed

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cqx31ezjr04o?at_medium=RSS&at_campaign=rss

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cqx31ezjr04o#0

"I have lost the people whose faces I used to see smiling," says Abdu-Rabbu Ahmed after escaping el-Fasher.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cqx31ezjr04o?at_medium=RSS&at_campaign=rss

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cqx31ezjr04o#0

metafilter_feed

Posted by subdee

https://www.metafilter.com/211011/Remembering-the-77

While the nation focused on the government shutdown ending, Trump quietly pardoned 77 people connected to the 2020 election subversion effort, including Rudy Giuliani, Mark Meadows, Sidney Powell, and the fake electors from swing states.

The Big Names: Rudy Giuliani Trump's personal lawyer who led the fake electors scheme and defamed Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss so viciously that they won a $148 million judgment against him. (He settled in January 2025 for an undisclosed amount after being found in contempt of court twice.) Giuliani has been disbarred in both New York and Washington, D.C. Mark Meadows Trump's White House Chief of Staff from March 2020 to January 2021. Faces state charges in Arizona and Georgia. Sidney Powell The attorney who promoted baseless conspiracy theories about Dominion voting machines "flipping" votes. She plead guilty in the Georgia case and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors. John Eastman The lawyer who wrote the memo outlining how Pence could refuse to certify the election. Facing possible disbarment in Washington, D.C. Kenneth Chesebro The attorney who first proposed the fake electors scheme in a memo to Trump. He plead guilty in the Georgia case. Jenna Ellis Former Trump attorney who promoted false fraud claims. She plead guilty in the Georgia case and struck a cooperation deal that led to her Arizona charges being dropped. Jeffrey Clark The Justice Department official who tried to weaponize DOJ powers to overturn the election, drafted a letter claiming the department found "significant concerns" about fraud in Georgia (his superiors refused to send it). Now works at the Office of Management and Budget. Boris Epshteyn Longtime Trump adviser and campaign lawyer who prosecutors say helped organize the scheme. Christina Bobb Former senior election integrity counsel at the RNC, faces charges in Arizona. All the Fake Electors: The pardon covers fake electors from Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, which are all states Joe Biden won but where Trump's team submitted fraudulent electoral certificates. Key names include: Tyler Bowyer (Arizona fake elector) Kathy Berden (Michigan fake elector) James "Ken" Carroll (Georgia fake elector) Brad Carver (Georgia fake elector) Hank Choate (Michigan fake elector) And dozens more across all seven states Three of these people had already pleaded guilty and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors and Trump pardoned them anyway. Trump explicitly stated the pardon "does not apply to the President of the United States, Donald J. Trump" dodging, at least for now, the thorny constitutional question of whether a president can pardon himself.

https://www.metafilter.com/211011/Remembering-the-77

maju

Aria is a girl who will go far - if she can concentrate long enough! A while ago she asked for and received a ukulele for her birthday. I thought she would just play around with it until the novelty wore off and that would be the end of it, but apparently not. Every so often I hear someone strumming it reasonably tunefully, and my daughter told me that Aria has been teaching herself chords by watching YouTube videos, with some success it seems. I'm so impressed! She just turned six three months ago!

Both Eden and Violet are in band at school, but they don't seem to be driven to learn music the way Aria is.

My ex husband taught himself to play the piano when he was in his teens, and my son in law is very musical and plays the piano for at least an hour if not more every day, so it's not surprising that the girls show musical talent.

=========

The weather has turned very cold (along with much of the rest of the east apparently). This morning it was about 1℃/33℉ with a blustery cold wind blowing, but I braved the weather and went for a walk for about an hour. I've been avoiding going out walking or running in such cold weather for the last couple of winters because I'd been getting nose bleeds, but my nose seems to have healed up and I haven't had one for a while so this morning's walk was a successful experiment. It was nice to get back into the warm house afterwards though. (I had to unearth a warm jacket - my winter clothes are mostly packed away because it hasn't been very cold since I arrived here, until now.)

ysabetwordsmith

From

prettygoodword:

apastron (uh-PAS-truhn, uh-PAS-tron) - n., the point of greatest separation between a celestial object and the star it orbits.

Many dictionaries specify that the celestial object is another star in a binary system, but the more general definition is correct. Contrast with periastron, the point of closest approach. Coined on the model of aphelion from Ancient Greek roots ap(o)-, away/apart (the form of ad- before vowels & h) + ắstron, star (ultimately from PIE root *h₂stḗr, burn/glow).

This sounds useful for my nerd friends. :D

Current Mood: busy

guardianworldnews_feed

Posted by Andrew Sparrow

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/live/2025/nov/11/bbc-crisis-labour-conservatives-donald-trump-lawsuit-politics-live-updates

Work and pensions secretary says new evidence has emerged on women who say they were not properly warned about the rise in the pension age