Activity from Toddles
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Nothing to see here.
Clash Over Phone Hacking Article Preceded Exit of Washington Post Editor. In mid-May, the newsroom editor, Sally Buzbee, clashed over whether to publish an article about a British hacking scandal with some ties to the chief executive, Will Lewis. Buzbee informed Lewis that the newsroom planned to cover a judge’s scheduled ruling in a long-running British legal case brought by Prince Harry and others against some of Rupert Murdoch’s tabloids. Lewis stated that the case involving him did not merit coverage.
When Buzbee said The Post would publish an article anyway, he said her decision represented a lapse in judgment and abruptly ended the conversation.
I think I’m going to have to go supersize.
Morgan Spurlock, ‘Super Size Me’ documentary director, dies at 53. Morgan Spurlock, a documentary filmmaker whose Oscar-nominated “Super Size Me” chronicled a month of watching his body swell and health decline while eating only McDonald’s meals, launching a highflying career that later imploded after he acknowledged past incidents of sexual assault and harassment, died May 23 at a hospital in New York City. He was 53.
Where did Justine Go?
Drawn to a Hare Krishna ashram for its yoga, meditation and vegan meals, she’s still figuring out what went wrong. Ms. Payton didn’t think of herself as part of a larger story about the popularity of alternative spiritual practices in the splintering religious landscape of 21st-century America. She hadn’t yet parsed the borderlines separating willing self-abnegation, mental illness and abuse. She craved transcendence, and like an increasing number of Americans, she didn’t find it in Christianity or another historic monotheistic religion.
Exactly how stupid was what OpenAI did to Scarlett Johansson?
We ranked it. It's #6, so you know - somewhere between Musk and Uber.
Where to eat in Las Vegas?
I'm heading to Last Vegas this month for work and want to eat healthy. I'm limited to $15 for lunch and $30 for dinner, including tip. No alcohol. Any tips?
Styling dresses with large arm holes
Somehow I ended up with a few dresses with large arm holes. They are so large I can't wear a normal bra and they show a surprising amount of side boob. How am I supposed to wear them?
Big ships in even bigger waves.
Ships rolling in the sea. Just for fun.
The children who remember their past lives
What happens when your toddler is haunted by memories that aren’t hers? In Louisiana in 2000, 2-year-old James Leininger would wake screaming, repeating the same phrases to his baffled and disturbed parents: “Airplane crash on fire! Little man can’t get out!” Over the following year, a story unspooled in memories and drawings: He was a World War II pilot whose plane took off from a boat, and he died when he was shot down by Japanese forces. James offered names of people and places, and his account would ultimately become one of the most prominent and thoroughly documented “cases of the reincarnation type,” or CORT, ever recorded.
Avalanche!
What the heck bro! Here are 16 videos of avalanches (no audio needed). Just for fun.
If you consider yourself an activist, what media do you consume?
If you consider yourself an activist, what media do you consume to inform your opinion? For example, I am generally very involved in local, state and federal (in the US) politics, and I read newspapers that cover those issues to inform my opinion. I don't though typically watch movies or use social media (even first person accounts). I never listen to the radio and rarely listen to podcasts. My question isn't about judging that choice, I'm just curious what others use.
What's a picnic alternative to Matzah pizza?
I'm helping to organize an event for families at a park where pizza will be served. It'll be during Passover, so it'd be nice to have an alternative for Jewish families. I'm struggling to think of an equivalent we can offer since we won't have access to a stove or even a kitchen. Suggestions?
Tell me about race car racing in the US
I'm organizing a group of families to go support a local race car racing team. What should I expect?
In Defense of Never Learning How To Cook
Finding independence in a perfectly cooked egg I found it while walking through the home-goods section of T.J. Maxx, the American retail equivalent of the Garden of Earthly Delights, at 8:00 on a Tuesday night in 2015.... Somewhere among these novelties I spotted a carelessly abandoned gadget calling itself the Dash Rapid Egg Cooker. The cashier who rang me up did not share my enthusiasm for the cheery cockiness of its packaging, which proclaimed that it “Perfectly Cooks 6 Eggs at a Time!” Baffled, she asked me a question, the answer to which would have embarrassed anyone but me: “Don’t you know how to boil water?”
The unluckiest generation
Here’s why Americans under 40 are so disillusioned with capitalism Millennials have had such a tumultuous start in the workforce, they have been nicknamed the “unluckiest generation.” They are struggling to navigate the most unaffordable housing market since the early 1980s. And that’s before anyone talks about the larger challenges of climate change, wars and political partisanship and paralysis.
Piloted with precision
Parents Are Highly Involved in Their Adult Children’s Lives, and Fine With It New surveys show that today’s intensive parenting has benefits, not just risks, and most young adults seem happy with it, too.
What's good on daytime TV these days?
I'm taking looooong flights in the US this weekend with an Airline that provides access to Live TV. I haven't had Live TV in 10 years. I'll be traveling during the daytime hours on both Saturday and Sunday - let's say 9am-10pm ET. Any good talk shows these days? A new Judge Judy? Soaps not to miss? I realize the weekends are different - are there still Saturday morning cartoons?
Creating an embedded gif video for email signature
Someone I knew a while ago had a really neat small gif (I think it was a gif) in her email signature that was a brief video of her. I am no longer in contact with her, so I can't ask how she did it. But for reasons, I'd like to create one. How do I do this?
"The wealth of the wicked is laid up for the righteous"
A Marketplace of Girl Influencers Managed by Moms and Stalked by Men The troubling interactions on Instagram come as social media companies increasingly dominate the cultural landscape and the internet is seen as a career path of its own. Nearly one in three preteens list influencing as a career goal, and 11 percent of those born in Generation Z, between 1997 and 2012, describe themselves as influencers. Content warning: Instagram Child Pornography
Why is Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry "often complicated to unravel"?
I was reading this article in the LA Times (CW: decapitated murder victim and gated article) and it said that it was difficult to discover who the murder victim was through DNA and constructing family trees because she was an Ashkenazi Jew. Why is that more complicated than anyone else?
Finding my son a sole-mate
My son (under 10) wears Crocs. He is the sort of person who tries one thing, likes it, and never wants to change, so he has been wearing Crocs since he could first walk. These are not great though for running around and probably not awesome for his feet. He needs real sneakers. Problem is, I got him running sneakers and he does not like them. He says they are too heavy. That's fine. But is there a better brand? Maybe a brand more like Crocs? This is the US. Happy to order online or in person.
The person on your block you should fear the most is...
The guy at the keyboard (gift link) Are you bummed you weren’t around when the Stasi ruled? Do you wish you could’ve been one of Mao Zedong’s millions of neighborhood snitches? Maybe watch the Red Guards drag off your least favorite aunt?
Not to worry, the bad old days are back — thanks to Nextdoor.com.
iPhone is confusing a few couples' numbers
I keep running into this issue with iPhones confusing numbers. Description of the issue under the fold.
Beans in a rice cooker?
I heard you can cook beans in a rice cooker - tell me how!
If you like it, don't put a ring on it.
For older women with money, it’s yes to love but ‘I don’t’ to marriage. Money is, of course, only one of many considerations. But for many, the answer is clear: Date, fall in love, even live together. But make it legal? No thank you.
This is the good news story you needed on the last day of the year.
The Washington Post Revisits Stories from This Year to See Where They Are Now In January, I posted this thread about Devon Henry, a Black Virginia contractor who was hired to take down a Confederate memorial at Arlington National Cemetery when no one else would. In doing so, Henry took on significant risk with workers walking off site, being told his business would be ruined, and having to wear a bullet-proof vest to work every day. An update is the 5th story at the gift link above.
Gold for Whom?
The ACLU of Delaware filed a complaint arguing that too many Deaf children are being referred to Deaf schools. When the ACLU of Delaware filed a complaint against the Delaware Department of Education earlier this month, calling for the investigation into the Department's treatment of Deaf children, it raised some eyebrows. When they argued that the state was keeping Deaf students from the Least Restrictive Environment by sending them to the Deaf school, more eyebrows were raised. When they further argued that Listening and Spoken Language, a trademarked certification for oral-only education given out solely by AG Bell association, designated by some in the Deaf community as a hate group and who claim they can "make Deaf people hear", was the "gold standard" for Deaf education...well, you can imagine what happened next....
How can we pay our landlord?
We are having a surprisingly hard time getting money to our landlord. Maybe you know the answer? This is in the US.
She'll take the town by storm
Nicaragua’s dictator goes after Miss Universe As Nicaragua has marched steadily toward dictatorship in recent years, its government has attacked opposition politicians, the Catholic Church, journalists and universities. Now it’s going after the beauty queens.
Ham for two
Ham is on sale at my local supermarket - there are only two of us who would eat it. Is it worth getting? If so, what should I do with it?
Yellowjacket information, without photos
Today I saw Yellowjackets picking off spiders from a walkway. It was cool to watch, particularly since their hunting strategy was both thorough and also sort of not (they checked every stone, leave and piece of dirt to see if it was a spider). I want to learn more about the Yellowjacket/spider predation AND Yellowjacket hunting strategy in general, BUT I don't want to watch videos or see any (or many) photos. Any good websites for this?
Why don't children swear in movies anymore?
I've been watching a lot of movies from the 80's with my kids: Uncle Buck, Goonies, Flight of the Navigator. These are movies for kids about kids, and the kids swear a lot to each other (rarely to adults, but sometimes). The adults rarely swear, if at all.
I feel like the 80's had the christian right and moral majority in the US, so I'm pretty surprised that movies would have children swearing then, but not now. What changed?
I heard crunch, crunch, crunch, crunch
A surfer wanted to catch waves from Hurricane Lee. A shark bit his face. Around noon, he watched a six-foot-long spinner shark leap out of the water 20 feet away and fall back in, barely missing another surfer. Sumersett was terrified but stayed in the water. Several other surfers, including the one nearly bodied by the spinner shark, seemed unbothered.
He kept surfing.
He saw another shark fin in the afternoon.
Kept surfing.
Around dusk, he watched three sharks “come swimming through the waves like dolphins do.”
Kept surfing.
Five minutes later, he saw three different sharks doing the same thing.
Kept surfing.....
What happens after a complaint to the ABC (booze edition)
What happens after a complaint (or multiple complaints) go to the California Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control?
I don't understand Mark Meadow's testimony
I was reading Mark Meadow's testimony today, and I have questions.
A deep betrayal
For Michael Oher, understanding the truth of the document he signed when he was 18 was, he says, a final, deep betrayal. Michael Oher, a former NFL player whose story was told in the 2009 movie “The Blind Side,” filed court documents Monday alleging that a Tennessee couple he once called mom and dad had falsely claimed that they had legally adopted him when he was a struggling teenager.
Oher further alleged that Leigh Anne and Sean Tuohy had him sign conservatorship papers that he didn’t realize would give the couple power to make business deals for him.
As a high school student in 2004, Oher signed the paperwork, believing it was part of the adoption process, according to his petition filed in a Tennessee probate court. He realized in February that the paperwork stripped away his rights, the petition says.
I was looking for a new direction in life.
She hired him as a caregiver for her family. They fell in love. Sanhai’s husband had died a few years earlier of a heart attack, leaving her to raise her two sons as a single mother. Not long after they relocated, the family faced another crisis in 2014: Sanhai’s father had a stroke, sending her on a desperate search for a caregiver. Her job as a scientist was demanding, and Sanhai needed someone to tend to her father — who moved in with her family after the stroke — as well as help out with her two sons, then 16 and 10.
Double secret probation.
I was on campus when ‘Animal House’ debuted. It changed everything. Although “Animal House” was a professedly anarchic comedy that identified with the freaks, the misfits and anyone wanting to fight for their right to party, the movie ironically helped crystallize a new strain of cultural and political conservatism that started on campuses and ran all the way up to the National Mall and Wall Street.
In other words, “Animal House” is where the 1960s finally and decisively turned into the 1980s.
Preserving old newspaper clippings and photos
My parent just sent me a giant box of old photos and newspaper clippings. Some of them are 50+ years old. The newspapers are yellow and fall apart when I try to unfold them and some of the photos are stuck together. It's a big mess, but I'd love to preserve what I can. How can I do this? Is there someone I can hire?
Games for the iPad without in app purchases
I'm looking for games for the 5-10 age range on the iPad that you just pay for once when you purchase it and does not have in-app purchases.
Preparing children for a move
We are looking to move in the coming year, and our kids (under 10) are not thrilled about it. Have you done this as either a child or parent? If so, how can we make this a more positive experience?
How the union dies
Maybe this quiet fading, engineered by a company with time and money to burn, is how the union dies. A billionaire who doesn’t want to be called a billionaire, who blusters when his company’s service workers get likened to the blue-collar worker who raised him — this is the chasm between our putative national values and our daily reality. We want to believe in a middle-class America where hard work weaves its own safety net. But millions of workers don’t earn enough money to cover basic expenses.
The Most Hated Man in Hollywood
The reviews are in on you sir, and they are not good. On Monday, GQ published a story from freelance film critic Jason Bailey summarizing Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav's rapid and shameful ascent from anonymous executive to widely loathed cultural villain. Bailey's key observation is that Zaslav seems neither to care about nor especially like movies, which makes his leadership of such a powerful company a tragic outcome for everyone who does.
Within hours of the article's publication, readers observed that the piece had been heavily edited and its sharpness sanded down. Shortly after the edited version of Bailey's story went live, GQ deleted the entire blog from its website.
A recipe for meat salad
I was reading a book recently (autobiographical - so this is real) and the writer was talking about her grandmother's meat salad. The basic ingredients are meat (undefined), beets, walnuts, and pickles. This sounds...not good. But I'm curious, is there a version of this that is delicious? If so, what would it include - seasoning, dressing, cooking instructions (roasted, boiled, raw etc.), served hot or cold?
The author is American and white, but her ancestry is not discussed beyond that. She grew up in New England (Connecticut).
Beyond the rainbow.
Finding a visual way to represent an inner identity can be complicated. (WaPo Gift) For much of American Sign Language's history, those who have had the most power to disseminate signs have been straight, White, cisgender people. The rise of video-based social media is allowing ASL to spread more rapidly and is empowering the Deaf queer community to exert more influence over American Sign Language.
Face-eating leopard eats own face, burps.
Revenge served ice cold. Top L.A. law firm outs former partners’ racist, sexist emails. Last month, Lewis, Brisbois, Bisgaard and Smith, one of the nation’s largest law firms, was rocked by the announcement that two top partners who ran their labor and employment practice, defending corporations against harassment and discrimination lawsuits, were starting their own boutique practice and taking as many as 140 colleagues with them. The shock inside the’ downtown Los Angeles headquarters soon gave way to anger as the recently departed partners embarked on a press campaign that portrayed their former employer as a profit-focused legal mill that ground down the aspirations of its lawyers. In an extraordinary move, the law firm's management team directed the release of scores of emails in which Barber and Ranen used vile terms for women, Black people, Armenians, Persians, and gay men and traded in offensive stereotypes of Jews and Asians.
Fringe of the fringe
Aaron and Christina had never attended school when they were children. Until a few days earlier, when Round Hill Elementary held a back-to-school open house, they had rarely set foot inside a school building. Both had been raised to believe that public schools were tools of a demonic social order, government “indoctrination camps” devoted to the propagation of lies and the subversion of Christian families. Christina and Aaron were supposed to advance the banner of that movement, instilling its codes in their children through the same forms of corporal punishment once inflicted upon them. Yet instead, along with many others of their age and upbringing, they had walked away.
Go be a lighthouse keeper, do!
Want to own a historic lighthouse? The U.S. government is offering at least 10 lighthouses to the public and government agencies as demand for the once-critical maritime facilities declines due to technology such as GPS. Some of the buildings, which can be centuries old, have colorful histories — and some are even said to have ghosts.
Can I use AI for work?
I know that I physically can, but what should I consider before I do?
Sure, Dave, let's do it!
I want to take more advantage of the robots, computers and assistive technology available to me living in 2023 for work, life, whatever. What am I missing?
Virtual assistant using Microsoft suite
I use the Microsoft suite at work and want to leverage it more to do assistant type work for me. I tried today, and it was, not great. Help?