It's easy to become inured to Trump's ceaseless depravity, which is why I'm glad I read Joe Scarborough's Op-Ed in The Washington Post about Trump's sociopathic obsession about a false story that is causing great pain to a dead woman's family.
One is a politician so obsessed with a morning cable news show that he has sought retribution by repeatedly defaming a dead woman’s memory.
The other is a soft-spoken Air Force engineer who has worked on projects for 32 years with the singular goal of protecting and defending the United States. The 6-foot-3 Florida resident is still mourning the death of a wife he lost 19 years ago. He holds on to cherished memories of Lori Klausutis as a lifelong Republican, a devoted Catholic who sang in her church choir and an avid runner so perpetually cheerful that people called her “Little Miss Mary Sunshine.” After Lori’s death, T.J. Klausutis returned alone to the home the couple had just bought in Niceville, Fla., and faced an almost immediate barrage of Internet conspiracy theories about the “murder” of his wife.
The pace of those hateful lies ebbed and flowed with the years, until they swelled recently into a slimy tsunami of bilge spewing from President Trump’s 80-million-strong Twitter feed. I have never been able to grasp Trump’s bizarre fixation with “Morning Joe,” but that sad obsession has driven him to weaponize Lori’s memory in an attempt to settle some perceived grievance against me. Or perhaps to deflect from the 100,000 Americans lost to a disease he once dismissed as “one person coming in from China.”
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Tom Austin, AKA "Venture Kapitalist Karen," had his office lease terminated after a video showed him calling the building manager to complain about a group of black men in the office gym.
From The Hill:
The incident comes just days after a video of a white Minneapolis police officer kneeling on the neck of George Floyd until he died of asphyxiation went viral. The death of Floyd, an African American man, led to massive protests in the city and calls for an investigation into the officers' behavior.
Stuart Ackerberg, CEO of Ackerberg Group, which owns the MoZaic East building, said he was still heartbroken from seeing the video of Floyd when he decided to terminate the lease.
“My heart hurts,” he told the Tribune. “This is not how we do business. ... I’m alarmed by what I saw.”
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Paper Mate introduced the Flair felt tip pen in the 1960s. I liked them when I was a kid because the lines were so clean and you could vary the line width. I kind of forgot about them until I was at Maker Faire and my toy inventor friend, Bob Knetzger, said he uses them to produce his wonderful sketches. They are also cheap! You can buy a dozen black Flair pens or a set of 12 colored ones. Read the rest
Thought you were smarter than a queue? Enjoy the shame!
The video does not show the circumstances that led up to this situation, in which a driver is backing up from oncoming traffic on a narrow mountain road. In any case, she does not seem to be pleased about it.
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Valerie Hammond was cooking a roast in her KitchenAid toaster oven when she smelled something burning, reports CBC. She discovered that the toaster oven had caught fire, causing smoke and fire damage to her kitchen. Whirlpool, which owns KitchenAid, replaced the unit, but when Hammond asked for $600 to fix the kitchen, Whirlpool told her she'd have to take it up with the company in China that manufactured the toaster oven.
The 68-year-old called and emailed Whirlpool dozens of times over more than six months but got nowhere on her claim for the damage.
Her oven was "not a Whirlpool product," a company representative told her via email, so Whirlpool wasn't liable for the damage. She was referred to Elec-Tech International.
Hammond says she tried contacting the company in China using the phone number Whirlpool provided. Her calls would ring through but no one would ever pick up. Her emails also went unanswered.
Out of frustration, Hammond contacted the media, and a reporter brought the matter up with Whirlpool. The company suddenly had a change of heart and ended up paying Hammond $5,000, six times the original amount she asked for.
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Teen Vogue posted a useful guide for what to do and what not to do when videotaping police.
5. Try to provide evidence that your footage is real
In an era of fake news and rampant misinformation online, you want to make sure that your footage is as verifiable as possible. To do this:
Film street signs, landmarks, or exteriors of buildings to help determine the location.
Film a clock, phone home screen, newspaper, or something that helps verify the time and date.
It could be helpful to also state the time, date, and location out loud on camera, or write it down on a piece of paper and hold it up to the screen.
You can turn on GPS location services to help verify your location.
Film continuously instead of stopping and starting your camera; this will help fight against claims that footage was edited or manipulated.
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In this Cool Tools video, Sean Michael Ragan reviews a wall-mounted thread-checker - a handy thread verifier for nuts and bolts.
It measures 3" wide by 39" tall, and, like the original version, features both male and female reference threads in a range of standard SAE and metric sizes. It's mounted on a half-inch thick plastic composite board, and the printing is both grease- and waterproof. It has three 5/16” diameter mounting holes for attaching it to the wall, and it is made in the USA, by the same folks who make the original thread checker: S&W Manufacturing of Chicago.
Unlike the original, the wall-mounted version can be used one-handed, which lets you quickly find a particular size in a bin of unsorted fasteners, or identify an unknown thread with one hand while you hold an assembly in the other.
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The Action Lab Man introduces binary arithmetic when demonstrating the cool Turning Tumble marble-powered computer. Read the rest
Stop-and-go waves of dense freeway traffic can flow backward for miles. This TED-Ed video explains the phenomenon of "phantom traffic jams" and shows how self-driving cars that are aware of the traffic conditions ahead can adjust their behavior to prevent phantom traffic jams. Interestingly, models have shown had just one self-driving vehicle for every 20 human-driven vehicles can dampen a stop-and-go phantom traffic jam wave.
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Charles Platt's growing series of electronics books are the best I've come across. He explains concepts very clearly, and his illustrations are excellent. His latest book in the series is called Easy Electronics. It covers voltage, resistance, capacitors, transistors, integrated circuits, and more. No tools are needed to complete the projects in this book.
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In this video we see a woman hand her husband a folder with her pregnancy ultrasound results. The husband is in their car with his smiling adorable baby son in his lap. As the husband goes through the contents of the folder, he comes to the realization that his wife is pregnant with triplets. This comes as a surprise to him, and from his reaction, it's clear that the thinks it's a big deal. Read the rest
Phone company LG Poland apologized for its TikTok video ad depicting a man taking photos of a woman in a skirt as she ascends a staircase.
From Android Authority:
LG Poland recently posted a video on TikTok, showing an elderly man apparently taking upskirt photos of a woman walking up stairs. The woman then turns around and grabs the LG V60 being used by the man, scrolling through the gallery app on the second screen. However, the woman only finds selfies of the man in question.
The woman then returns the LG V60 to the elderly man, who promptly scrolls in the opposite direction and reveals that, yes, he has indeed taken pseudo-upskirt shots.
After people complained about the video, LG Poland took it down and issued the following statement:
“A recent video posted by LG Poland failed to follow the proper approval process for social media content. It did not live up to the standards and policy of LG Electronics and was immediately removed. We apologize for any offense this ill-conceived video may have caused. We will strive to prevent such an occurrence from happening again in the future.”
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Open Culture has a page with capsule reviews of The 135 Best Podcasts to Enrich Your Mind. The list includes "great podcasts on art, music, history, philosophy, plus captivating true and imagined stories."
Some are familiar to me and I already subscribe to them. Here a few that are new to me that I just subscribed to:
Last Seen - Apple - Spotify - Google - Web Site - RSS - It remains the most valuable — and confounding — art heist in history: 13 artworks stolen from Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Twenty-eight years later, not a single piece in a haul worth half a billion dollars has surfaced. The art, and the thieves who made off with it, remain at large. With first-ever interviews, unprecedented access, and more than a year of investigative reporting, "Last Seen" takes us into the biggest unsolved art heist in history. A joint production from WBUR and The Boston Globe. Read more here.
Blackout - Apple - Spotify - Google - Academy Award winner Rami Malek stars in this apocalyptic thriller as a small-town radio DJ fighting to protect his family and community after the power grid goes down nationwide, upending modern civilization.
The Walk - Apple - Spotify - "Dystopian thriller, The Walk, is a tale of mistaken identity, terrorism, and a life-or-death mission to walk across Scotland. But the format of this story is — unusual. The Walk is an immersive fiction podcast, and the creators want you to listen to it while walking.
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What are Perler beads and why might you want to buy a big tub of 22,000 thousand? They are tiny colorful plastic cylinders. Each bead is a pixel that you place on a Perler pegboard to make a piece of art. Once you've placed all the beads down, you use a clothes iron to fuse the beads together, so your artwork doesn't fall apart.
The above video shows you a smart way to stack beads on a toothpick for faster beading.
Here are some great Perler bead drawings from around the world:
Perler Bead Majora's Mask by EP-380
Floppy disks by larrieking
Mario Perler beads by TheBeadLord
Mobile phone case by Lovely CraftsDIY
Perler beads Stormtrooper Star Wars by L000lz
Perler bead camera coasters by Maker Crate
Perler beads tree and mobile by Idee Creative
8-Bit Pixel Art Christmas Baubles by adamcrockett
Plus, imagine the fun of sorting 22,000 Perler beats by color! Read the rest
Trump and Trump Junior are tweeting accusatory nonsense about the death of a woman, and her widower asked Twitter to delete the hurtful messages because the tweets are in violation of Twitter's terms of service. But Twitter has made it clear that Trump can tweet anything he wishes with impunity, so the best it can do is say “We are deeply sorry about the pain these statements, and the attention they are drawing, are causing the family.”
From AP:
[Timothy J. Klausutis called his wife's] death “the single most painful thing that I have ever had to deal with” and said he feels a marital obligation to protect her memory amid “a constant barrage of falsehoods, half-truths, innuendo and conspiracy theories since the day she died.”
Klausutis said Trump is among the conspiracy theorists spreading “bile and misinformation” on Twitter “disparaging the memory” of his wife and their marriage.
Trump’s tweets violate Twitter’s community rules and terms of service, he said.
“An ordinary user like me would be banished,” Klausutis wrote.
In a statement, Twitter said it was “deeply sorry about the pain these statements, and the attention they are drawing, are causing the family.”
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From designer Nate Shirley, a "personal hygiene product intended for cleaning your ears. It uses disposable spiral cleaning heads that spin at a constant speed."
I wish he would Kickstart it!
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