This place was a hive of activity for a Sunday. Here’s a nice picture I took about two miles from my house on a back road I used to bike on all the time as a kid:
Like a lot of the back roads around here, it is mostly wide enough to be two lanes, and it is oil and chipped every year or so.
Cheryl Rofer
I love the icicles that form on water-bearing strata. You mostly only see that back East. Thanks, John.
And now an update on Howard Schultz’s venture into Twitter.
Elizabelle
@Cheryl Rofer: Christopher Ingraham. Isn’t he the guy in Minnesota who ordered the box of crickets?
Good to see his wife has left him alive.
Cheryl Rofer
@Elizabelle:
Kattails
Ducking in to mention that Vermont Public Radio is playing a new version of Morten Lauridsen’s Lux Aeterna for those who might want a bit of cosmic comfort. Thinking of Schlemazel even though the Latin Mass isn’t quite appropriate. Gorgeous piece and they do podcasts. Gotta get back to my desk, on a heavy deadline.
JHC it’ll be over before I get done arguing with autocorrect.
Elizabelle
@Cheryl Rofer: Making him eat some of those?
That might do it.
Yarrow
@Cheryl Rofer: That’s hilarious. He tweeted a picture of the lizard a few days ago.
Beautiful picture, John.
Mnemosyne
I’m feeling like a genius right now, but only a very tiny percentage of people are going to understand WTF I’m talking about when I tell you why:
I have a bunch of cute accessories and papers that are punched for the Happy Planner (so disc punched rather than 3-hole or whatever). But I’m not using a disc-bound planner, I’m using one specifically meant for writers that is spiral bound. I tried to attach the HP inserts to the spiral binding, but there was too much space between the disc punches.
What I figured out was that I could buy the HP punch from a craft store, add another set of disc holes between the existing holes, and the inserts would fit perfectly in the spiral notebook.
I just tried it out and, yes, I am in fact a genius and can repurpose all of my HP accessories for the spiral planner. Yay me!
The tricky part was that I assumed I would be able to use my Levenger disc punch, but it turns out that the HP punches go much deeper into the paper, so that was a no-go and I had to track down the actual HP punch.
smintheus
@Elizabelle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=es0kx4IlojM
opiejeanne
@Mnemosyne: I wish I knew what you’re talking about, but it does sound like you found a solution, so go you!
Elizabelle
@smintheus: Well there’s something we never would have heard but for Balloon Juice.
smintheus
@Cheryl Rofer: Hey Howard, we’re sick of your racist friend. This is where the Party ends.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucPwrZRhXkA
Mnemosyne
@opiejeanne:
I think Steeplejack may be the only other regular who will understand. It’s a stationery addict thing.
smintheus
@Elizabelle: I actually have that on a cd somewhere. Late ’40s Woody Herman is pretty rad.
Omnes Omnibus
@smintheus: This is better.
eemom
Reminds me of what is now called “Old 55”, as it’s mostly been replaced by the Robert C. Byrd Something Highway (because there wasn’t enough shit in WV already named after the dear departed senator). eedad and I traversed it many times back before the highway was built going out to Seneca Rocks or Dolly Sods or Greenbank. We still use it occasionally, but it’s hard to find now cuz of the highway. Makes your ears pop as you ascend in altitude.
Steeplejack
@Mnemosyne:
I’m having a little trouble picturing exactly what you’re talking about, but as a fellow stationery/pen/productivity-tools hound I feel it, I totally feel it. Congratulations on your successful hack!
@Mnemosyne:
Ha! Right on. ✊
Elizabelle
@smintheus: It’s an odd but soothing song. I will have to listen to it again. But for the drum solo, I could listen to it while trying to get to sleep.
And it’s got pretend language for the crickets at the beginning?
joel hanes
@Mnemosyne:
Levenger
In their early years, I made sure I got the calendar for the bookshelf offerings.
I bought almost nothing, but I’d spend an hour or so fitting out a home library in my imagination.
joel hanes
@joel hanes:
“calendar” should be “catalog”
no edit button showing
Steeplejack
@joel hanes:
As part of the site rebuild we are updating the commentariat, so it is thought that editing won’t be needed.
It’s the “To Serve Man” phase of the plan that we didn’t get around to discussing this afternoon.
smintheus
@Elizabelle: The song was written or at least orginally recorded by a South African folk singer, Josef Marais.
Aleta
@smintheus: Some good things in that, thanks.
joel hanes
@Steeplejack:
It’s the “To Serve Man” phase of the plan
Well, I’m well-marbled, but I’m old so the connective tissues are all ossified. Like chuck roast from range cattle, I’ll probably be too tough to chew without long slow moist cooking.
joel hanes
Ah. I visited my noscript settings, and now I see the edit button.
Mnemosyne
@Steeplejack:
Short version: the disc-punched stuff had exactly half as many holes punched into it as the spiral binding, so by adding an extra set of disc-sized punches in that empty space, I was able to make it match the spiral binding.
The main problem was that Happy Planner has a different punch depth than Levenger, so my test with the Levenger punch had uneven rows of holes.
Mnemosyne
@joel hanes:
Oh, I know. I still lust after one of the “No Room For a Table” tables, but I just can’t justify it. ?
Elizabelle
@smintheus: It’s kind of beguiling.
And I like Christopher Ingraham, the WaPost writer up top with the tweets. He is almost jackal-like in many of his comments. Perhaps why they exiled him to Red Lake County, MN. He had some funny tweets:
and
Does not sound like John’s life? If he had a lizard? Which I guess is now really well fed. With all those crickets.
And, they did try those packaged Crick-Ette snacks.
Mary G
I have never heard of nor seen icicles like that. Balloon Juice is so educational.
burnspbesq
Sad day on Le Livre des Visages, between the left-wing crackpots decrying the so-called “CIA coup” in Venezuela and the right-wing crackpots saying that so-called “process crimes” aren’t really crimes at all.
Like heffalumps and woozles, crackpots come in every shape and size.
Mnemosyne
@burnspbesq:
I am happy to say that I have managed to remove all such crackpots from my FB feed.
Even better, several of the right-leaning ones self-deported or have started self-censoring. Last year, a pro-lifer who is a relative of my BFF proudly proclaimed that she and her daughter were on their way to the March for Life and President Trump was going to protect all the baybeez.
This year, she didn’t say why they were going to DC and I didn’t make the connection until she replied to a friend of hers in the comments. She’s a devout Catholic who works at a shelter for homeless pregnant women, so I’m guessing that she is not on board with the whole “stealing refugee kids” policy of Trump’s. Plus I think the rest of the family — including her Black sister-in-law — told her to shut up and sit down.
thalarctosMaritimus
@Mnemosyne: hooray! (yes, I grok)
Mnemosyne
@thalarctosMaritimus:
I’m still surprised by the Levenger punch being so much shallower. Now I’m wondering if that’s why my Levenger and similar pages seem to pop off more often than I’d like. ?
Anyway, now I can put my HP page markers, sticky note pads, weekly cards, etc into my spiral notebook at will. Hooray!
DHD
There are a lot of things I don’t miss about riding a bike in SWPA / WV / Ohio, but roads like these are not one of them. It’s cool that you don’t even have to go far from Pittsburgh to find them…
Terry Calhoun
Makes me homesick for the stretch of road along the Ohio just east of Newell, WV. My mother was born in Newell* and I was raised in East Liverpool, OH – right across the bridge on that stretch of road. Always icicles hanging from the rocks on the WV side. I used to climb those cliffs as a child, can’t believe it now. Sigh.
*My mother, in fact, when she was young, was selected as the Newell representative to cut the ribbon when that stretch of road along the river was completed.