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Monthly Archives: February 2018

What the hens eat

There are many people who believe, ostensibly as a matter of science, that there is no nutritional or health advantage in organic foods. I beg to differ. For years, I searched for organic chicken feed and couldn’t locate any. A horticulturist friend who helped with the search reported that a feed maker in Virginia said, […]

My first library book, rediscovered

I have a clear memory of the first book that I ever checked out of the public library. It was Space Cat, by Ruthven Todd. It’s a short (72 pages) science fiction children’s novel. Whether I was in the second or third grade, I’m not certain. I think the book would have been within my […]

Wholesale salvation, priced to go

Even for those of us who don’t deify Billy Graham, it would still be hard to say anything bad about him. He never preached hatred. In fact he was friends with Martin Luther King and once bailed King out of jail in Alabama. Though he meddled in politics, he was reasonably nonpartisan about it. He […]

Apple’s 1987 “Knowledge Navigator,” and Alexa

My opinion is that Alexa and Siri are useless. Last week, I met my first Apple HomePod at a friend’s house. Siri was a total idiot who knew nothing and who kept getting things wrong. I feel sure that HomePod buyers shout “Siri, stop!” much more often than they say, “Hey, Siri.” It was like […]

Free VPN that seems to work (so far)

When I first started shopping for VPN services some years ago, there was a sleaziness involved. VPN providers seemed to be located in countries that we don’t trust, the kind of countries that Internet scammers work out of. The targeted customers for VPN service seemed to be criminal types with a great deal to hide, […]

Two portraits, 35 years apart

Click for high resolution version I went on a road trip to Asheville earlier this week, and while I was there I shot portraits of my oldest friend, whom I have known for almost 50 years. I shot the earlier portrait, below, around 1984. It was shot with a Yashica camera, medium format. The new […]

Oh no. More low-end grocery stores.

I went into a Lidl store for the first time yesterday. I had no idea what it is, any more than I knew what an Aldi store is the first (and last) time I went into one. I was shocked that this is the way the grocery business is going — extremely wide aisles, not […]

Even crummy tips aren’t safe from Republican taking

We recently learned that Trump’s labor department wants to change the rules so that restaurant tips would belong to restaurant owners rather than servers. Here’s a link to a story in the Guardian, “Restaurants have no right to take employees’ tips.” The cruelty of this is just business as usual for the Republican Party. And […]

Robots and inequality

Amazon’s new automated store in Seattle. Source: Wikipedia Trump voters and consumers of Fox News are having the time of their lives these days, glorying in how their big man is sticking it to liberals, immigrants, and brown-skinned people. They actually feel safer, now that a con man is in the White House who feeds […]