A friend of my family recently had Covid and has had a really rough recovery. She’s going into a long-term care facility, and her two kitties need a new home. Zoey and Lucy are a bonded pair, about 3.5 – 4 months old. They have been dewormed and gotten their first round of shots; they will need round 2 and to be spayed when they are old enough. They are very sweet and playful. I currently have a cat who will not tolerate any other felines, so I can’t take them. I’m hoping the jackaltariat can help me find the perfect home for these cuties.
Hola, Juicers! We have 2 lovely ladies in LA that need a new home. I’m gonna let friend of the blog, Maxim, tell you all about Zoey and Lucy.
As you can see, these two starlets are lovely, talented and perfectly worthy of gracing the firmament of your home. Please reach out to us here at the Juicy Blog Council and let us know. I know this place is the best non-animal charity site possible to get things done for animals so, have at it, Jackals. – RM
I’ve long used Western Digital and SanDisk drives, moving with them from their spinning days to the solid state era. I now have three portable SSDs acting as the Time Machine backups for my desktop and for my own and my wife’s laptops. And I’m about to buy their replacements (or rather, the second disks in an alternating back up scheme).
…Numerous owners of the drives, including Ars Technica’s own Lee Hutchinson, encountered a problem where the drives seemingly erased data and became unreadable. Lee saw two drives fill approximately halfway before showing read and write errors. Disconnecting and reconnecting showed the drive was unformatted and empty. Wiping and formatting didn’t resolve things.
Complaints about the drives littered SanDisk’s forums and Reddit (examples here, here, here, and here) for at least four months before Western Digital released a firmware fix in late May. The page for the update claims products currently shipping are not affected. But the company never noted customers’ lost data claims.
It did, however, name the affected drives:
SanDisk Extreme Portable 4TB (SDSSDE61-4T00)
SanDisk Extreme Pro Portable 4TB (SDSSDE81-4T00)
SanDisk Extreme Pro Portable 2TB (SDSSDE81-2T00)
SanDisk Extreme Pro Portable 1TB (SDSSDE81-1T00)
Western Digital My Passport 4TB (WDBAGF0040BGY)Subsequent reports from The Verge, which received a replacement SSD, and some Reddit users, though, claimed the drives were still broken. Western Digital didn’t answer requests for comment about newfound grievances.
I’ve never bought anything terribly large, so at least the sunk cost isn’t too great, but I do have a couple of the listed 1 TB problem drives. For now, I’ve switched over to some old spinning disks (Western Digital ones, as it happens)… but they’re old and the reason I switched to the SSDs was because of the alleged greater mean time between failures.
All this by way of saying be careful: any data you care about should (in my belt/suspenders opinion) enjoy multiple backups, and if you are relying on SanDisk/WD and, like me, have been oblivious to this long-running issue, take a look at your drives and protect yourself.
Like I do every year, here are some songs I’ve been listening to this summer — a mix of old and new. Look forward to hearing what I’ve missed. pic.twitter.com/H2Do2iaD1p
… The playlist also features throwback songs by the Rolling Stones, the Pretenders, the Beths, the Bangles, Janet Jackson, Ella Fitzgerald, and Leonard Cohen. Plus, how could you leave “California Love” by 2Pac off a summer playlist?
Last month, Obama sat down with Hasan Minhaj and was asked whether he actually curated his year playlists. “People seem to think, ‘Well, he must’ve had some 20-year-old intern who was figuring out this latest cut,’” he said. “No, man! It’s on my iPad right now!”
A highly technical process is underway in Los Angeles to put NASA's retired Space Shuttle Endeavour on display in the vertical launch position complete with external tank and two solid rocket boosters. https://t.co/HrA97VMGY6
Jason Momoa, who dreamed of a career as a marine biologist before Hollywood anointed him as Aquaman, is going back to his roots as Discovery Channel's new host for "Shark Week." https://t.co/ycwsYuEs9r
Otter chaos: A sea otter launched into the spotlight after social media images circulated of her aggressively wresting surfboards away from surfers off the coast of California is building a fan club as she continues to evade capture. https://t.co/tR69P5Lg79
It's now a porcine of interest: Authorities have determined that there is “no acute danger” near Berlin where a potentially dangerous animal was spotted. Experts analyzed a video and concluded the animal may have been a wild boar, not a lioness. https://t.co/edTJIrjkcW
they just declare war on any movie that they think will be big. if they're wrong (ie people generally like the film), they'll just memory hole the outrage. if they're right (ie people generally dislike the movie often for unrelated reasons), they get endless mileage
— Lesbian Death Bed: The Bed that Eats Pussy (@bitterkarella) July 21, 2023
I love that the Obamas are out there living their best lives and how mad it makes the haters. https://t.co/KC4P8ot7dF
— The Biden Accomplishments Guy™ (@What46HasDone) April 28, 2023
We voted to restore democracy and build a more hopeful future.
We also very specifically voted for a guy who sleeps in a big bed with his wife and is therefore uninterested in ruining our collective off hours with random, Diet Coke-fueled insanity.
people jeered when biden said he'd bring down the temperature of politics but right now the media is reporting he has meetings during "the daytime" as republicans fuss about "gay beer", look up m&m voice actors, and argue whether chocolate chip ice cream is a hatch act violation
Wow. Is NYT Pitchbot off for the day and the actual paper of record picking up the slack? Because, wow, guys. Hats off to you for this one! @DougJBalloonpic.twitter.com/DyV2r5PLn8
Unlike many have hoped, the Democratic Party has not yet desibanded and arrested itself for communistic treason, but continues to field candidates in elections. What is behind this blatant power grab?
Biden is leaning strongly into the idea that the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party is composed of leopards who eat people’s faces. Whether you agree or not, this rhetoric is highly divisive and unlikely to persuade leopard-leaning voters
“She’s now sporting a bracelet made of bullet shells, a gift from a Ukrainian soldier who she met at the Munich Security Conference in mid-Februar “: Nancy Pelosi, untethered: ‘If you don’t like your pillow, it’s not my fault’ https://t.co/JNaaz9KlKU
… “You don’t have any responsibilities,” the former speaker told herself, attending the annual getaway for House Democrats as a congressional commoner for the first time in more than 20 years. As Biden administration officials gave policy presentations on Wednesday, Pelosi said she whispered a message to those at her table: “If you don’t like your pillow, it’s not my fault. If you don’t like the menu, I don’t care. I don’t even care.”
That’s not entirely true, because the longest-serving House Democratic leader of the past 60 years still cares deeply about her caucus’s future. And Pelosi, 82, is as busy as she’s ever been, but just in a much different way than in the last two decades.
Veterans of her team have labeled this new period “Pelosi 3.0,” after a career that saw a 15-year climb to the highest ranks of leadership, then two decades at the top, and now this next phase where she has begun to serve as something akin to roving ambassador for the Democratic Party.
She’s not in charge of anything, has no real responsibilities in the House other than casting votes (she declined to take any committee assignments), yet she maintains a level of influence that goes well beyond her rank-and-file status. Inside the Capitol, Pelosi has taken up a mentoring role: not to the trio of new leaders of the Democratic caucus but to the junior lawmakers who want to learn, particularly the few dozen freshmen Democrats who never served under her.
And she maintains a role as a fundraising eminence, particularly for an outside group led by former attorney general Eric H. Holder fighting legal battles to draw up House district maps. She’s hosting former president Barack Obama and Holder in San Francisco on Friday for high-dollar donors.
“I get my tasks, and I do them,” she said, predicting a large haul for this event. “We’ll do well.”…
While she led the Munich congressional delegation last year, on the eve of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, she returned this year as a dignified member participating in multilateral meetings that seemed to always focus on Russia. She praised the Republicans, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who led his own delegation there, for the unified voice that lawmakers presented to their allies.
“Everyone who was there was very unified in support for Ukraine,” she said.
Her calls to President Biden now happen on an “as needed” basis, an understandable drop after his first two years in the Oval Office hung so much on Pelosi working her narrow four-seat margin in the House.
“I’m a busy person. He’s a busy person. And I respect being busy, and I know how it is to be completely busy,” she said, reiterating her full support for his reelection…
And she will not tolerate any criticism of her behavior toward Donald Trump when he was president. In Munich, she found the veteran diplomat, Richard Haass, to thank him for sending her his new book, “Bill of Obligations.” Then, she lit into him for the book’s criticism of her ripping up her copy of Trump’s 2020 State of the Union address on live TV. Pelosi felt as if it were a false-equivalence moment compared to Trump’s supporters’ deadly attack on the Capitol.
“There is no equivalence,” she told Haass, mocking the thinking of a MAGA rioter justifying trashing the Capitol: “Oh, she tore up the speech, so we can pee all over the floor, and smear our poo-poo all over the walls.”
She didn’t intend to rip up that speech after making notations of things she felt were false claims. But by the time Trump awarded the medal of freedom to Rush Limbaugh — “That bozo, may he rest in peace” — she began to plot exactly how to tear that tough parchment paper apart, her only hesitation coming from how she might upset her curmudgeonly top press aide at the time, Drew Hammill…
Of the last 11 House speakers, only one lasted more than 10 months after giving up the gavel and returning to the rank-and-file. But Pelosi won’t address when she plans to retire and instead enjoys how much freedom she has to mentor young lawmakers. She pushes new women toward committee assignments that will check national security credentials so that if they run for higher office, they will not look weak.
“We will have a woman president. I study it very carefully,” the most powerful woman in American political history said…
In Baltimore, she had just one role: to formally introduce Jeffries and the new leadership at Thursday night’s dinner. One attendee recalled how she regaled the Democrats about her trip to Charm City’s National Aquarium, where she learned that dolphins sleep with half their brain awake and one eye open.
In a metaphor that could explain her own long success, Pelosi gave the crowd a final bit of advice: “Always sleep with one eye open.”
I’m not gonna argue about musical genres, but here are tributes to a couple of great women:
"Long renowned as an interpreter, she has quietly built a catalog of her own. Up for song of the year on Sunday, she talked about her nominated track, 'Just Like That,' and a lifetime onstage." — @JonPareles, @nytimes
A Bonnie Raitt concert was the first show I paid to attend, when she was doing college tours back in 1973/74… (Unpaywalled ‘gift’ link):
Bonnie Raitt is no stranger to the Grammys, which will be awarded Sunday in Los Angeles. She has won 10 of them since 1979, and she has also been a frequent presenter and performer on the show, befitting a musician who has long been the model of a sustainable, self-guided rock career.
Raitt has never depended on hit singles or spectacle; instead, she relies on the quiet power of a voice that draws on blues, country, soul and rock to speak plainly about complicated emotions. Modestly but tenaciously, Raitt has cycled through decades of recording albums and touring, selling out 3,000-seat theaters and playing regularly at festivals. Musicians like Adele and Bon Iver have drawn on her repertoire, and younger musicians, particularly women, have cited her example as a bandleader and producer…
You’ve been an example for a lot of younger performers as a woman who is indisputably the bandleader.
Maria Muldaur told me that years ago. She decided that she could actually be a solo act after watching me with my band in the studio in Woodstock, making “Give It Up.” And in the last 10 years of Americana events, I meet all these other women like Brandi Carlile, and they’ll tell me that they were growing up on my music and what an influence I’ve been.
But it’s hard for me to think about that because I know my foibles and my failings. I still hold myself up to a standard I probably can’t live up to. But I’m really grateful when people say those kind things about me…
At your concerts, it seems that you’re totally relaxed and casual, but you’re onstage in front of thousands of people. Do you think about pacing, timing, theatricality?
Somehow I just learned to put a show together. There’s nothing like performing live. It’s just something I was born to do. And when I put together a show, I leave room for some wild cards. It’s a joy every night — to know that you have the aces on each of those instruments, and that we’ve rehearsed enough where we can have some fun with it. And I think the audiences are not there to see a jukebox show. They’re going with me wherever I want to go. I’m more comfortable onstage than any other place in my life. I wish I was as comfortable offstage as I am onstage…
Happy 46th birthday to the talented Shakira.
Throughout her career, the Grammy-winning icon has made undeniable impact in both the Latin and English music industry. With outstanding longevity, she ranked as Billboard’s Top Female Latin Artist of the Decade twice (2000s, 2010s). pic.twitter.com/e6hXfO1EDh
Happy 93rd to Gene Hackman, who was told by everybody he didn't have what it takes to be an actor, was given the lowest score ever by the Pasadena actors studio, worked as a doorman, didn't get his first film role until his mid-30s and didn't become a leading man until his 40s. pic.twitter.com/RGp8Imbw09
There’s something for every taste in Hackman’s vast filmography — he always gave the word ‘workmanlike’ a good reading, no matter whether the current project was a high-end star project or a quickie throwaway. His ‘best’ film, in my opinion, would be The Conversation, though there’s probably half a dozen other contenders.
My favorite Hackman movies, however, are Enemy of the State and a mostly-forgotten midranger thriller from 1985, Target. Both of which allow Hackman, as a second-in-the-trailer supporting role, to expand his gifts as a quiet, unpretentious ‘normie’ who just happens to be much more than that. Target, in particular, has a memorable scene where Genial Fish-Out-of-Water Midwestern Tourist suddenly morphs into Killer Alphabet-Agency Rottweiler… while his disbelieving ‘ugh, my boring dad’ son (Matt Dillon, at his most posterboy-ish) looks on agape…
