If you can hang with the tech, listen to this 5th Column podcast. No Welch or Moynihan, but the brilliant Balaji Srinivasan (@balajis) (with Conor Friedersdorf as sidekick) offers some fascinating ideas about how Twitter and a blockchain might be blended in such a way as to make reliably-verified news available to everyone. Basically individual facts would be issued much like tweets (or like BTC transactions), each subject to recall as conditions warrant; journalists (or bloggers, or your favorite nephew) would compose a news story around those facts, and charge whatever someone would pay for it. It's a brilliant mix of bitcoin-style authentication and data verification.

As always, when Kmele Foster starts speaking, just move your media player forward three minutes to see if he's stopped. (I love him but he's the worst blowhard in at least two generations of media figures.)

In other tech, I bet TI will have to roll this back. You can't remove functionality from a tool like that (to prevent students from cheating on tests) without warning. Users are pissed. It would be like taking your alarm settings out of your smartphone without warning.

We still haven't crossed 100,000 in the USA yet. Miraculously, only a couple hundred died on Monday after 1200 died on Friday... Meaning offices were closed so reporting was delayed. We'll probably cross 100 before lunch on Tuesday. (98,223 as this is typed.)

Oh, boo-fucking-hoo!

Lying gutter-scum Amy Cooper has had her "life turned upside down" after maliciously lying about a man who asked her to leash her dog.

So, caught up in her determination to lie on her cell phone to police, she wasn't even mindful of the fact that she was strangling her poor dog.

She did apologize and surrendered her dog to the animal shelter where she first got him. This however, is only a first step. This incident may have taken place in the Ramble in Central Park, but she's not out of the woods yet.

The link didn't work. Not sure why. Here it is: https://edition.cnn.com/2020/05/26/us/central-park-video-dog-video-african-american-trnd/index.html?utm_medium=social&utm_term=link&utm_content=2020-05-26T09%3A10%3A04&utm_source=twCNN

Squirrels vs engineer. If you picked the squirrels to be the winners, you'd be right.

https://youtu.be/hFZFjoX2cGg

If you picked the squirrels to be the winners, you'd be right. ~ I R A Darth Aggie at May 26, 2020 7:36 AM

After spending months unsuccessfully trying to keep squirrels out of my bird feeder, I'd never bet against squirrels.

The little buggers may have a brain the size of a cashew, but they're ingenious, and persistent.

Great video, btw.

Crid, according to Worldometers, we did. Sometime this morning.

So that means it took about nine days to go from 90,000 to 100,000. That means things are slowing down a little. Good.

Conan, I assume you've looked up all kinds of tricks on YouTube.

In the meantime, I once heard of putting Vaseline on the post that holds up the feeder. Of course, if the feeder is near a house or a tree, that won't help.

One of the reasons why having multiple twitter accounts:

https://twitter.com/JoCat105/status/1253928582025555970

> you picked the squirrels

The Temptress' Siren Song instantly takes one back to 1987.

Patrick, this worked better. Interesting extras about the dog, too.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/26/nyregion/amy-cooper-dog-central-park.html

A tip of the hat to Chicago coming out of the lockdown with their shootin'-ist Memorial Day weekend since 2015.

C'mon, America, you can do better than that!

Baltimore, get those numbers up. Atlanta, WTH, dudes, you're slackin'. Kansas City's not even pretending to compete. Houston and Detroit, Compton and Indianapolis will have to pick up the pace if we're going to get anywhere near the annual average.

I think Oakland's sleeping in late or something. But keep an eye on Milwaukee, an historically surprising team.

Squirrels are rats who don't need minoxidil. These pests are even more harmful than the cats because these animals target the nests of birds high on the trees.

Now the trees in the area are devoid of birds because of them. Not to mention the damage they do to the crops. They love to bite -not eat, just bite- very single fruit and they also love to dig into the cassava and the taro plants and bite them.

We used to keep the population under control with these brightly colored, almond-shaped poison "cookies" but the local agri-stores don't sell them anymore.

> Patrick, this worked better

Her boss's website is loading again, though slowly, after being overwhelmed for the past 16 hours. It makes no mention of her. I almost feel bad for the company, but her reflexively dishonest behavior is probably one reason she became a VP at a financial firm: They need that kind of talent.

I feel bad about linking to the story here last night. There's a powerful component of Gladys Kravitz busybody-hood at work here, and I shouldn't have been part of it. However odious and racist her conduct, this was just an unremarkable urban skirmish. ('Hey! That was *my* taxicab!') If it wasn't because he was black, it would have been that he was Hispanic, or white, or in a wheelchair, or Jewish.

> according to Worldometers,
> we did. Sometime this morning

Johns Hopkins is still showing 98,584 at 12:38pm pst. I guess we know *whose* offices were closed for the holiday....

On a lighter note (it's from April and it's about Elton John, David, the joy of being legally married, and fatherhood):

https://www.goodhousekeeping.com/life/relationships/news/a47743/elton-john-husband-david-furnish/

There are video links too. The short one I saw is embedded in "they've been vocal."

Excerpt:

...It's safe to say that their two children also keep their fathers humble. "They're not that keen on what I do. They are kind of more interested in their Legos, which is fine with me," Elton said.

Glitz and glamour aside, the couple is adamant about giving their children as normal of a life as possible. They've been vocal about how they'll force their children to earn money, learn the value of hard work, and pay their way through life. After all, Elton didn't sell 300 million albums by relying on someone else...

Conan, I assume you've looked up all kinds of tricks on YouTube. ~ Lenona at May 26, 2020 11:03 AM

Looked 'em all up, Lenona. Thanks. Oiling the pole works for a while, but they find a way around it or the oil dries or gets worn away.

We finally started bribing them with a bowl of black oil sunflower seeds at the base of the feeder. Problem with the squirrels is that they take more food than they eat, so the clean out the feeders faster than the birds would.

In addition, squirrels don't share. Two or three birds will share a feeder, but the squirrels don't let any other animal near the feeder when they're feeding, not even another squirrel.

If your feeder is sufficiently far from a place they can try to jump from, these work perfectly

https://www.amazon.com/squirrel-baffle/s?k=squirrel+baffle

RE: LinkFace - let her. Maybe this is her way of civil disobedience. Afterall, when you consider how useless most masks are in protecting the wearer and how useless other wearers of masks are in protecting others (i.e., wearing the mask below their nose), why not wear a crocheted mask - at least she can breath! And she is satisfying the "requirement" of wearing a mask.

RE: bird feeders vs squirrels, I don't have a problem with squirrels. I have a problem with crows and jays that rip the openings of my bird feeders even wider to get at more seed which causes the seed to just pour out onto the ground. ha! that's why the squirrels are not a problem; they just wait for the crows and jays to feed them on the ground.

Crid:

I feel bad about linking to the story here last night. There's a powerful component of Gladys Kravitz busybody-hood at work here, and I shouldn't have been part of it. However odious and racist her conduct, this was just an unremarkable urban skirmish. ('Hey! That was *my* taxicab!') If it wasn't because he was black, it would have been that he was Hispanic, or white, or in a wheelchair, or Jewish.

Or a man.

Yes, of course, there's a racist element to all this, but there's also a misandrist element. I doubt she would have a problem doing the same thing if he had been white.