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Vomiting It All Up
Why We MUST Retake The House And Senate In November
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Evening Tunes
Peter Erskine – Transition (1987)
I originally bought this disc in 1987—for obvious reasons—long before I had gotten into jazz. Despite the bear on the cover, after a few listenings, I just couldn’t get into it and ended it selling/trading it at Streetlight Records on Market Street. Nearly 40 years years later I ran across it again and wondered if my musical taste in general or appreciation for more freeform jazz had changed any.
It had. It’s that one disc I always pull out when I can’t decide what to listen to. But to be honest there is still one track on the album that I consistently skip over if the remote is handy.
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I Could Live There
I would definitely rip out that entire kitchen/maid’s room area and convert it into one large kitchen with adjacent 1/2 bath and laundry room. Might even open it up to the Dining Room. The Sleeping Porch would make a nice home office.
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This One ⬇
Afternoon Tunes
Will It Blend?
Of course it will. A mere shadow of its former self at only 280 calories. I used to love the full-sized ones.
Yeah, it’s Taco Bell again. If I was going to go to the trouble of getting there, I was going to get a couple day’s lunches out of it.
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Nutrition

This—along with pureed soups or very occasional pureed solid food— is what I’ve been surviving on since last September. After speaking with my nutritionist around the first of the year we realized I wasn’t getting nearly enough of it (hence, why I dropped nearly 60 lbs.) and she upped my intake to 7 cartons a day (twice what I’d been doing). Easier said than done, because it seemed my stomach had shrunk and now barely tolerated two cartons at a time. She suggested I split up my feedings until I can go back to three, 2-carton “meals” a day.
This was unacceptable, so I didn’t. I powered through two cartons three times a day with a “snack” in the afternoon.
The problem was this shit is boring as fuck. It’s unflavored, and as unlikely as it seems, even with tube feeding I still have a (vastly diminished) sense of taste of what goes into my stomach even if it doesn’t take the usual route.
I told the nutritionist that in addition to the isosoure, I was supplementing my diet with Premier Protein drinks. She checked the nutritional values and suggest we up the game. She had a sample case of Kate Farms vanilla and Boost High Calorie chocolate sent to me.

Initially I preferred the Boost. The Kate Farms didn’t sit well and seemed to cause more reflux than I was willing to deal with. But once again, I powered through and came to prefer the Kate Farms over the Boost. When I spoke to her again last month, I asked if we could ditch the isosource completely and do Kate Farms exclusively. The Kate Farms is hella expensive (even discounted on Amazon it’s still $60 for a case of dozen cartons) so it would be great if my insurance would cover it like it did the isosource. She said she’d check with the vendor and my insurance to see if it was covered.
Turns out it was, so the next shipment I receive will be exclusively Kate Farms. I’ve discovered it mixes extremely well with my morning iced vanilla (or lately orange vanilla) latte, boosting my caloric intake even more. Both it and the isosource (I still have about 8 cases of 24 cartons each so I’m going to be using that for quite some time regardless) mix well with the Premier Protein drinks, so yum!



So by mixing all this up and throwing in some pureed real food on occasion…

…I get enough variety daily and since my stomach has now stretched out to the point where I can handle more than 16 oz of material at a sitting, I’m consistently reaching my nutritionist-set daily caloric intake of 2.7K calories and often reaching above to more then 3K calories a day.
Have I gained back any weight? Not that I can tell, but I haven’t lost any more, so that alone is a good thing. Putting any weight back on is going to be a long, arduous process.
In other health-related news, my endocrinologist has upped the dose of my thyroid medication (my last TSH test was through the roof) and my energy level is back to “normal,” and I’m no longer falling asleep at my desk or while watching television. I’m also sleeping much better.
Insurance approved my dermatologist’s request to put me on Duplixent for the Keytruda rash. The current therapy of prednisone and cortisoid cream has helped greatly and the skin eruptions are healing nicely, but the generally accepted therapy for getting rid of Bullous pemphigoid completely includes Duplixent. The first double dose, as I mentioned a few posts ago was administered at the doctor’s office as a “sample” and the first of many followup doses due next week—through insurance—was $1K and satisfied my remaining yearly out-of-pocket Medicare Part D requirement. The good news is that because of that—and those two week-long stints in the hospital in April—I shouldn’t have to pay for anything health related for the rest of the year.
Yay, ‘murika?
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Continuing Yesterday Morning’s Musical Theme
“Eight Is Enough” Of Anything
Famous last words.
I suppose there are worst things to spend my money on, but collecting shit is a fun hobby no matter what you collect, be it antiques, Hummel figurines, Beanie Babies, Candlewick glassware (in the case of my sister), or in my case, portable CD/Minidisc players.
Yeah, I know I should be saving, saving, saving with all the uncertainty in the world right now, but let’s face it: with that madman in the White House everything could go up in a mushroom cloud at any moment because someone disrespected his fragile ego one too many times and the only solution in his addled brain was to start WWIII. And even if it doesn’t get that crazy, none of us has any guarantee of tomorrow—especially if you’re dealing with ongoing health issues—so find joy in what and where you can.
And these little nuggets bring the geek in me much joy.
I’ll admit there is a fine line between collecting and hoarding, however. Fortunately I don’t think I’ve crossed that line, nor have any of my living relatives. My late father, however, was not a collector. He was a hoarder, and no matter how many times we tried to help him declutter (or even so much suggesting that he move into a new apartment) we were met with incredible resistance to the point of outright meltdowns. When he went into skilled nursing and we knew he’d never be going home again, I spent a couple days cleaning his place while I was in town and ended up filling an entire residential dumpster. After he passed it was a Herculean task for my sister (I was back in Denver at the time) to clean the rest of his place out and get it ready for sale.
I hope that when my time comes, whoever has to go through all my shit doesn’t feel like I had crossed the line.
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365 Days Of UNF: July 1st
And With That, Another Day Of Shitposting Draws To A Close.
Very Late Night Listening
For The Windows Users In The Audience
I used to run something very similar to this on my work laptop regularly: https://github.com/Sycnex/Windows10Debloater. I can’t attest to the overall efficacy of the one in the panels about, but I know the one I linked works great.
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Get In There
Compact and Kind of…Severe (That’s A Lot Of Brick), But I Could Live There
An Unusual Find
Various Artists – Walmart Greatest Hits (2001)
I never knew Walmart was in the music business. 🤣
Also, what’s with the Playstation logo?
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Evening Ambient
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Tuesday Tiedrich
there are days when everything in the news is so profoundly idiotic that I don’t even know where to begin. yesterday was one of those days — so once again, I’m just going to drag out the Big Wheel of Moron™, give it a spin, and see where it lands. ready? here we go.
what. in the actual. fuck.
first of all, let’s all breathe a sigh of relief, because this vulgar abomination isn’t real — at least, it isn’t real yet. what Preznit Fuckwit’s shat out onto his crappy app is the product of some janky six-fingered plagiarism robot.
but the question must be asked: was the AI that ginned this up trained on a copy of The Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich? it’s a legit question, because you know who else was in madly in love with eagles with their wings all spread out and shit? of course you do.
oh look, it’s Adolf Hitler, giving a speech in front of a ginormous Nazi eagle, and everyone in the audience is sieg heiling to beat the band. which, as long as we’re on the subject, reminds us of —
why does everything this administration does turn out to be something the Nazis did first?
nobody asked for this. nobody said, ‘gee, Donny there isn’t enough golden shit trashing up the White House yet. is there any way you can wedge some vulgar Nazi-themed eagle into the mix, maybe above the front door?’
it’s bad enough that all of Donny’s policies remind that he’s trying to build his own fucked-up Turd Reich, does he really have to steal all their symbolism as well?
well, that was fun. are you ready for another spin of the wheel? here we go—
fuck, it landed on Donny again. come on Donny, stop being such an attention hog.
reporter: “what are your plans for the housing bill?”
Donny: “I don’t— know. I think it’s so— unimportant by compared to— by compared to the Save America Act. the housing bill is a bill that can get approved. they worked on it long and hard. it’s very— bipartisan. that means Democrats like it. and it’s uhhhhh— maybe— even— uhhhhh, it’s, it’s probably maybe more that way, they’re getting things that I wouldn’t necessarily agree to. nobody knows more than housing in the history of the presidency, nobody, nobody, no— well like me, in housing. I made a lot of— I made a lot of money. I made a lot of money with housing.”
heh heh, he said ‘long and hard.’
oh my god, Donny’s brain is fried. folks, I want to assure you there are no transcription errors in that excerpt. I took great pains to type out that torrent of incoherence exactly as it seeped from Dear Leader’s rancid anus-mouth. yes, he actually said ‘by compared to’ — twice.
let me ask you a question: do you think Donny even knows what’s in the housing bill he’s refusing to sign? because he sounds like a fifth-grader called upon to get up in front of the whole class to give an oral report on a book he absolutely forgot to read.
‘… and so if you have courage, they give you a red badge, and that’s why everyone should read The Red Badge of Courage.’
Donny’s oral report on the Red Badge of Housing Bill is just as nonsensical, because — spoiler alert — the illiterate fuck didn’t read it, and he can’t remember what he was told about it, because he was too busy watching himself on Fox News to listen. all he knows is that Democrats like it, which means it must be baaaaaad.
look, you can take Donny’s word for it, because he knows more about housing than all the housers. big strong housings, with tears in their eyes, come up and tell him so every day.
this guy’s a fucking idiot, and he’s making policy decisions based on vibes. what could possibly go wrong?
ugh. help us, Big Wheel of Moron™, and spin us the fuck out of here.
“let anyone who comes to this district, who thinks that he or she is going to vandalize the reflecting pool, you’re facing 10 years in prison.”
Jeanine Pirro sure loves to talk tough and come out with guns blazing, doesn’t she? Jeanine is what would happen if Yosemite Sam drank the entire box of wine in one gulp.
so, for those of you keeping score at home:
if you come to our nation’s capital and you so much as dip your pinky into the sacred and holy Epstein Reflecting Pool, you will spend the rest of your life in the hoosegow.
but it you come to DC in order to bludgeon cops with flagpoles, break into the Capitol, and take a shit on the floor of the House, the government will pardon you, apologize to you for the inconvenience, and — if Donny gets his way — enrich you beyond your wildest dreams
holy shit. spin us out of here, Big Wheel.
Dr. Oz has no freaking clue how insurance works, does he?
“of the people who signed up, 40% never use the insurance. let me ask you, John, you have health insurance — do you use it once a year? in Obamacare right now 40% of the people ostensibly signed up never use the insurance … we have a lot of fake people on the policies.”
wait, what?
on what planet is paying for insurance and not using it proof of fraud?
now look. I pay X dollars a month for car insurance. I’ve never filed a claim, because I’ve never had an accident. according to Dr. Oz, that somehow means I’ve been defrauding that cute little Geico gecko for years. I would never do that. I mean, look at this little homey. he’s fucking adorable.
now, this would all be hilarious of Dr. Oz were merely some loudmouth drunk at the end of the bar, ranting about all those goddamned Obamacare fraudsters, before passing out face-down in a puddle of his own sick.
but Oz is the administrator of the US Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. that’s way too much power for any crackpot this ignorant to hold — and he’s going to use this counterfactual bullshit as an excuse to kick people off Obamacare.
my head hurts. let’s give this accursed Wheel one final spin.
ha! you knew we’d eventually land on Donny’s Big Vacant Shitpile Of Nothingness, didn’t you?
as Aaron Rupar sagely observed when he posted this clip, ‘this is some epic cope.’
Larry ‘Three Sheets’ Kudlow: “help me out, I want to be a part of this.”
Fox correspondent: “perhaps now that the closing bell is here, we’re gonna get more people out here.”
yeah, you keep telling yourself that — that people were only waiting for Wall Street’s closing bell to ring at 4pm before heading to the Mall. let us know how that works out for you.
my god, Fox News wants so hard for Donny’s Ginormous Barren Abyss to be a success, and it just ain’t happening. four days after it opened, the Great American State Fair remains a ghost town.
oh, wait — here comes someone. let’s see if we can get them to stop for an interview.
oops, our mistake. it was just some random tumbleweed.
it’s four more days until July 4th, and things are just going to keep getting stupider.
lucky us.
this is going to be my closing message for the foreseeable future:
practice self-care. do what you need to do to keep sane. if that means you need to disengage with my daily posts for a while, I get it. this community of ours will still be here when you return.
to all the people who have signed on in the days since the election, welcome aboard. settle in as we all try to deal with the shitfuckery that’s ahead of us.
we are all in this together, and we are all here for each other.
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It Really Is Too Bad That Leona Is Such A Cunt
You Have To Be A Certain Age To Get This
I Could Also Live Here…
That Explains It
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Well, Well, Well…
@astrophilesz: Astronomers used the James Webb and Hubble space telescopes together to confirm one of the most troubling conundrums in physics, that the universe appears to be expanding at different speeds depending on where you look. This is called the Hubble Tension. A study published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters used a triple check combining both telescopes to rule out the possibility of measurement error for good.
Lead author Adam Riess, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics for the 1998 discovery of dark energy, said that with measurement errors negated, what remains is the real possibility that we have misunderstood the universe.
Here is the contradiction in plain terms. Measurements from the local universe, taken using Cepheid variable stars, give one expansion rate. Measurements based on the cosmic microwave background, the afterglow of the Big Bang mapped by the Planck satellite, give a different rate entirely. The discrepancy holds steady no matter how the data is checked.
Researchers expanded the dataset to include 1,000 more Cepheid stars across five galaxies as far as 130 million light years away, and the disagreement remained exactly where it was.
A Nobel laureate physicist did not mince words about what this means. David Gross, a Nobel Prize winning physicist, said at a conference that this should not be called a tension or a problem. It should be called a crisis.
What makes this significant is what it is not. It is not a calibration error. It is not an instrument flaw. Two independent, repeatedly verified measurement methods are producing two different answers to the same fundamental question about how fast the universe is expanding. Cosmologists are now asking whether resolving this requires new physics altogether, something currently missing from the standard model of the universe.
The universe is not behaving the way our best equations say it should. Nobody currently knows why.
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I Could Live There
Tuesday Morning Soundtrack
Donald Trump Is A Rapist
(Warning: this article contains depictions of sexual violence and may be triggering for survivors of assault)
Donald Trump is a court-adjudicated rapist.
This is not speculation.
It is not conjecture.
It’s not a Left-Wing talking point.
This is documented, established fact.
It was unequivocally declared by a judge.
It has been repeatedly upheld in the courts.
He is a rapist.
And to any decent human being, that would have been a dealbreaker.
It wasn’t for them.
Donald Trump’s name is listed tens of thousands of times in the files documenting one of the most prolific and vile child trafficking rings in history, orchestrated by a man with whom he was a close friend and collaborator, one he traveled with. partied with, and corresponded with.
For people with normal ethical standards, this would be a stark, uncrossable red line.
For them, it proved not to be.
Donald Trump has been accused by dozens of women of rape, sexual abuse, and physical violence, including a woman who testified before the FBI that Trump raped her when she was just 13 years old.
For actual followers of Jesus, this would all be stomach-turning and condemned as the darkest kind of evil.
For them, it hasn’t been.
For tens of millions of our family members, lifelong friends, neighbors, coworkers, and classmates, none of this has mattered. His well-documented brutality has never been a liability.
Despite a vast and reprehensible body of work, filled with proven sexual assault, alleged pedophilia, boasts about forced affection, credible accusations, and vicious public verbal attacks on women, he still receives their undying allegiance.
Instead of joining decent humanity in dragging him and his accomplices into the raking light of legal accountability for their atrocities against the most vulnerable, they obfuscate, they feign ignorance, they move the goalposts, and they slander the victims.
For all their performative sermonizing about protecting girls and young women, Trump’s supporters have shown through their silence, through their refusal to acknowledge reality, and through their steadfast adoration no matter how disgusting the revelations that they simply don’t give a damn.
Unthinkable violence against children, sadistic degradation of women, absolutely monstrous allegations of assault; they’re all trumped by the pathetic cultic affection they have for a man who in any other sphere of life would be a pariah where good people gather.
They have put political wins, Supreme Court Seats, and the cheap high they get off hurting people vicariously through him above the dignity and safety of other human beings. In the face of legal reckoning, he has received the protection of the highest seat of power in this nation, one they’ve helped him retain.
They know what he’s done, and it has not dampened their passion.
And this, perhaps as much as any moral or ethical malpractice they’ve engaged in to support him (and there has been so much), cannot be something we let them off the hook for, no matter what they say after he is no longer in power or no longer walking this earth.
When time and justice catch up to him, when his regime is finally dismantled, and some kind of normalcy and stability return to our nation, their breathless worship of a violent, sadistic sexual deviant will be their legacy.
He is who he is, and his supporters are who they are.
Donald Trump is a rapist.
He will always be a rapist.
His supporters will always have passionately supported a rapist.
They cannot be excused for that.
They cannot be forgiven for that.
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Released 40 Years Ago Today
Eurythmics: Revenge (1986)
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