PICTURE THIS, if you will.

By Sturgeone, a Trail Mix Contributor

Days on end at the goodwill….108 cups…..

Off to the Catskills with the lot of you.

Do YOU have a hobby?

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57 thoughts on “PICTURE THIS, if you will.”

  1. drip drip drip

    the hill:  Mueller alleges that bank executive helped Manafort obtain loans while trying to get Trump campaign role

    […]
    “The government intends to present evidence that although various Lender D employees identified serious issues with the defendant’s loan application, the senior executive at Lender D interceded in the process and approved the loan,” the document states.
    The bank executive, who is unnamed in the filing “expressed interest in working on the Trump campaign, told [Manafort] about his interest, and eventually secured a position advising the Trump campaign,” according to the court document.
    The executive “expressed an interest in serving in the administration of President Trump, but did not secure such a position,” the filing reads.
    The development marks the first sign that Manafort’s role as Trump campaign chairman will be mentioned in this month’s trial.
    […continues…]

  2. Well I got the photos out of order, but you get the picture……from soup to nuts…..

  4. I’ve been collecting coffee cups for years of places visited by myself, family and friends with only one rule:  It has to be unique to the place, none of those “I Heart Wherever”, so some of them are pretty interesting.

    Then there are the owls.  The flock really is getting out of hand.  A cease and desist order may be in the offing before the next gift giving occasion.

  6. now what are they up to?

    the guardian:

    Vladimir Putin was not in attendance, but his loyal lieutenants were. On 14 July last year, the Russian prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev, and several members of his cabinet convened in an office building on the outskirts of Moscow. On to the stage stepped a boyish-looking psychologist, Michal Kosinski, who had been flown from the city centre by helicopter to share his research. “There was Lavrov, in the first row,” he recalls several months later, referring to Russia’s foreign minister. “You know, a guy who starts wars and takes over countries.” Kosinski, a 36-year-old assistant professor of organisational behaviour at Stanford University, was flattered that the Russian cabinet would gather to listen to him talk. “Those guys strike me as one of the most competent and well-informed groups,” he tells me. “They did their homework. They read my stuff.”
    Kosinski’s “stuff” includes groundbreaking research into technology, mass persuasion and artificial intelligence (AI) – research that inspired the creation of the political consultancy Cambridge Analytica. Five years ago, while a graduate student at Cambridge University, he showed how even benign activity on Facebook could reveal personality traits – a discovery that was later exploited by the data-analytics firm that helped put Donald Trump in the White House.
     
    That would be enough to make Kosinski interesting to the Russian cabinet. But his audience would also have been intrigued by his work on the use of AI to detect psychological traits. Weeks after his trip to Moscow, Kosinski published a controversial paper in which he showed how face-analysing algorithms could distinguish between photographs of gay and straight people. As well as sexuality, he believes this technology could be used to detect emotions, IQ and even a predisposition to commit certain crimes. Kosinski has also used algorithms to distinguish between the faces of Republicans and Democrats, in an unpublished experiment he says was successful – although he admits the results can change “depending on whether I include beards or not”.
    [….]
    The aim of his research, Kosinski says, is to highlight the dangers. Yet he is strikingly enthusiastic about some of the technologies he claims to be warning us about, talking excitedly about cameras that could detect people who are “lost, anxious, trafficked or potentially dangerous. You could imagine having those diagnostic tools monitoring public spaces for potential threats to themselves or to others,” he tells me. “There are different privacy issues with each of those approaches, but it can literally save lives.”
     
    “Progress always makes people uncomfortable,” Kosinski adds. “Always has. Probably, when the first monkeys stopped hanging from the trees and started walking on the savannah, the monkeys in the trees were like, ‘This is outrageous! It makes us uncomfortable.’ It’s the same with any new technology.”
    […continues…]

  7. Sturgeone’s theory of evolution:   Weak monkey has to leave the tree, becomes smarter monkey. Ad infinitum.

  8. ms petri sounds a bit perturbed today
     
    The disgusting ‘normal’ under Trump
     
    The trouble with living in this year of our Lord 2018 is that startling, bad, once-in-a-generation things happen with such swift and disconcerting profusion. You can be upset about some things all of the time, and everything some of the time, but you can’t be upset about all of the things all of the time.
     
    Or can you? If it is, in fact, possible, this would certainly be the year. Then again, it may give us all ulcers, and that seems risky given the current state of our health-care system.
     
    I understand that so many other nightmare things have happened that when the president of the United States makes a cruel crack about the #MeToo movement at a rally, it barely ripples on the surface. I understand that we as a country look at this man, our president, and say, “Yes, that sounds like him! That is exactly the sort of thing that he would say,” and then we leave what should be a full month of just outrage by the side of the road to fend for itself — maybe with an apologetic note that we hope to get back to it in 2019, when we will maybe not also have to be upset at the speaker of the House for not bothering to familiarize himself with who Scott Pruitt was even after he hit his 58th scandal. I understand that we cannot be indignant about everything all the time or we would never sleep.
    [….]

    ….. Everything is happening, and we cannot give every injury the time it deserves. But how disgusting that this is what we expect. How disgusting that this is what we take for granted.

     

  9. bw, wonder if we’re about to see “the beard” get shaved

    business insider:

    A playboy model just sued a Republican fundraiser over the $1.6 million hush-money deal that Michael Cohen helped facilitate

     
    Shera Bechard, a former Playboy model, sued a prominent Republican financier, her former lawyer, and the attorney for porn star Stormy Daniels in relation to a $1.6 million hush-money payment the financier reportedly stopped paying her, The Wall Street Journal reported Friday.
    Bechard sued Eliot Broidy, the financier; Keith Davidson, her former attorney; and Michael Avenatti, Daniels’s attorney, in California Superior Court. The lawsuit was filed under seal.
    […continues…]

  10. it’s a bird! it’s a plane! it’s super-Musk to the rescue!

    Bloomberg:
    Elon Musk’s engineering team is set to arrive in Thailand on Saturday to help free a boys’ soccer team from a cave, where a diver died in the rescue effort.

    The Thai government confirmed the timeline for Musk’s group in a Facebook post. The billionaire’s companies may assist by trying to pinpoint the boys’ precise location using Space Exploration Technologies Corp. or Boring Co. technology, pumping water or providing heavy-duty battery packs known as Tesla Inc. Powerwalls, a spokesman for Musk said earlier.
    […]
    In recent hours, Musk suggested ways to help, including the possibility of inserting tubes and then inflating them with air, similar to the way bouncy castles work. The mechanism “should create an air tunnel underwater” that conforms to the shape of the cave, he wrote in a tweet. Other tweets reference the location of water and depths of different parts of the cave, making clear he had studied diagrams in detail. He also held a Twitter exchange with Thai satellite entrepreneur James Yenbamroong, asking questions about the voltage and amperage of electricity produced by generator trucks at the rescue site.
    Musk’s tunneling startup Boring Co. could potentially make available its massive drills or excavation expertise, but such an approach could be too dangerous for this mission.

  12. also from fortune:  Elon Musk’s Team Due in Thailand to Help Rescue Soccer Team Trapped in Flooded Cave

    [….]

    Musk, who studied physics, has floated ideas on Twitter such as using a double-layer Kevlar pressure pod or a long inflatable air sock to penetrate the narrow passageways and provide a rescue conduit. The tubes and pods are being built in the U.S., a spokesman said. Some equipment is traveling with the team and some will be express shipped.

    […]

    “No need for SCUBA mouthpiece or regulator,” Musk wrote about his suggested pods. “Training unnecessary & less susceptible to panic attack.” Musk said they were being tested Friday afternoon in a pool with a subject who had never been scuba diving.
    Any air sock or tube would have to be tough enough to withstand high water pressure — potentially two tons of force at a depth of 15 feet– and sharp rocks, said Douglas Hart, a professor of mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
     
    […]
     
    A spokesman for Musk has previously said that the billionaire’s companies may assist by trying to pinpoint the boys’ precise location using Space Exploration Technologies Corp. or Boring Co. technology, pumping water or providing heavy-duty battery packs known as Tesla Inc. Powerwalls.

  16. It’s odd that there are some people who still sit around and wonder where all the nazis came from all of a sudden.

  18. Follow Follow @MichaelAvenatti

    More

     
    Michael Avenatti Retweeted Women’s March London
     

    Excited to be joining for the Women’s March in London. With Roe under attack by Trump/Pence, inequality far too prevalent, and children stripped from mothers, it is more important than ever that we stand up for what’s right and be heard

     
    Michael Avenatti added,
     

    Women’s March London @womensmarchlon
    On July 13 ,We invite YOU (people of all genders, races, identities, ages, cultures and creeds) to join our resounding chorus and #BringTheNoise. We’ll be taking to the streets again as President Trump visits the UK , creating a day of joy and love …
    Show this thread

     

    6:32 AM – 7 Jul 2018

     

  20. Adams work is simply amazing. I’m exceedingly fortunate in being the custodian of one of his signed Yosemite prints that my Dad picked-up at his studio going on sixty years ago.

    The work of artists of his generation caused me to buy a pre-War Linhof camera with the tilts and swings through which geometric distortion is overcome during picture composition. I was never able to find someone to repair the sets of bellows at a price I could afford. Then I went in the military….

  21. craig, 60 years of statehood in usa, purchased from Russia in 1857. compare Alaska to what  happened to another property once so owned since 1783, lost in 1991 and taken back in 2014.

    that cartoon above isn’t so far fetched given the twit’s bromance with vlad

     

  22. So SFB is going to visit stately homes. These are the places that the descendants of the landed owners open the doors, for a fee, hoping to keep the properties in repair and in their families. As is his wont, Trump will probably stiff them.

  23. Pat, this Alaska talk reminds me of a story from my Senate page days. Strom Thurmond and Clifford Case (R-NJ) sat close enough to the well where we sat that I could eavesdrop on their conversations (both hard of hearing, talked rather loud). Mike Gravel of Alaska was ranting and raving as usual on the floor about something (he was not popular with other senators). And Thurmond says to Case, “Where did we get Alaska anyway?”  Case thought a moment, said, “The Russians, I think.” Thurmond: “Reckon they’d want it back?”

  29. I get my potassium in tablet form. Those things are hard to swallow, but makes the heart happier.

    I collect a few things, mugs being one, but is collecting a hobby?  Doesn’t one have to do or make something to consider it a hobby?   I swim every day that the weather allows it.

  30. I don’t have a hobby.  I have thought about that more since I am retired.  I don’t think I want one.

  31. Today – September 6, 2017 – presents the third and final full moon of northern summer (southern winter). In other words, this is the third of three full moons to occur in between the June 21 solstice and the September 22 equinox.Sep 6, 2017

    The Corn Moon

  33. wait wait I do have kind of a hobby

    a friend bought us a bird feeder that sticks on the window

    so I guess I’m a birder as long as I don’t have to leave the house

    This is a acorn woodpecker and I think it is a female

  35. I was more of a hoarder before the great fire at Dry Storage Annex #1. After that, not so much.

  36. I’m about ready to get the Zenith Transoceanic down from the third floor. I heard some really neat stuff on it especially when we were in Panama. Like the comings and goings of the Glomar Explorer.

  37. I had one of those…….it perished in the flames……

    It was a beautiful piece of work.

  38. On this day in 1947 the alleged and disputed Roswell UFO incident occurred

     

  39. Craig

    Alaska was admitted to the union on January 3, 1959.  This was followed by Hawaii on August 21, 1959.

    In case anyone doesn’t believe racism was alive and well, it had to be done in that order.  First the “White” state before the “Multi-racial” one.  The posters in opposition to Hawaii circulated at the time showed a white woman holding hands with a black man.

  40. Jamie, in 1972 I took a closer look at the flag in my commander’s conference room because it just didn’t look right. It was very fancy, seemed like silk. But, that wasn’t the problem. Then I counted the stars; sure enough, there were just 49.

  42. Jamie, I shoulda known to be more specific with a librarian in the house. My reference point is that Eisenhower signed Alaska statehood on July 7, 1958.

  43. BiD, England was looking forward to giving them a good thrashing.  who knows tho’ what vlad may pull out of his ushanka-hat to discredit Croatia, dope the players and make sure Russia wins the cup.

  46. more about super-musk to the resue from TechCrunch:

    [….]
    Now, suggests Musk, working with cave experts in Thailand, Musk and engineers from his rocket company, SpaceX, have decided on the “primary path” to attempt to freeing the group: a “tiny, kid-size submarine” that uses the “liquid oxygen transfer tube” of SpaceX’s Falcon rocket as hull.
    It’s “[l]ight enough to be carried by two divers, small enough to get through narrow gaps. Extremely robust,” Musk tweeted a couple of hours ago, adding that construction on the vehicle will be “complete in about 8 hours” after which it will be sent on a 17-hour flight to Thailand. (SpaceX is based in Hawthorne, California, outside of L.A.)
    Whether the creation is made and shipped out remains to be seen, but Musk suggested on Twitter that it would be “[f]itted for a kid or small adult to minimize open air” with “[s]egmented compartments to place rocks or dive weights” and “adjust buoyancy.”
    [….continues…]

  47. The movie “Red Dawn” just started.  NATO dissolves…the US stands alone.

  49. The Beatles recorded “Here Comes the Sun” on this day, 7th July 1969. The song was written by George Harrison at his friend Eric Clapton’s country home, while avoiding Apple Corps’ business meetings.

    https://youtu.be/GwmVfewqu7I

     

  50. Flatus

    A lot of people still don’t like that 50th star including the majority of the few actual Hawaiians left who resent the takeover by the US to benefit corporations.  The descent into overpopulated tourist attraction has pretty well ruined all but the small percentage they have managed to save or buy back.

    The Struggle for Hawaiian Sovereignty

     

  53. My hobby is daydreaming about turning this into a cabinet.  Working from printed pictures, so far I’ve  got it to scale at 20″ deep. 40″ wide, and 27 1/2″ Height.     I have to expand it yet, as I want it to come in around at least 36″ Height and however much that adds to the width, still 20″ deep to accommodate 18″ drawers. I’m open to going up as far as 40″ Height but haven’t reckoned yet what that does to the width.. The blue parts are doors, the rest drawers, on Blum soft-close drawer slides, the doors on free-swinging hidden “euro” hinges, also by Blum. Everything is inset, ie flush with the face. No knobs, all open by touch latches which have a 1 1/4″  throw, which means the drawer or door is pushed out that far.   The outside (carcase) is hand-rubbed mid-gloss black, while the rest are the true colored oil-base spray, and the entire box will rest on a 3″ recessed base, which adds 3 inches to the 27 1/2″  for the overall height.

  55. Figuring the margins, the black parts, need to come in around 7/8″. Except for that wider horizontal over the left blue door.
    Also the base could be a little taller to make up an inch or two for the overall height.
    i still have to print up a bigger pic yet, for all of that.

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