Last week we had a concerto with one harpsichord, what can beat that? How about a concerto with 4 harpsichords? What can be more fun?
From the Netherlands Bach society: Harpsichord Concerto in A minor by Johann Sebastian Bach.
From the notes that accompany the video
Bach arranged various Vivaldi concertos for organ and harpsichord. The Concerto in A minor, performed by Siebe Henstra, Menno van Delft, Pieter-Jan Belder and Tineke Steenbrink for All of Bach, is largely based on Vivaldi’s Concerto in B minor for four violins and orchestra. But of course, he gave it an exciting twist, as in Bach’s version the soloists play harpsichords and B minor changed to A minor
For more information on Bach’s Harpsichord concertos read this wiki article. Keyboard concertos by Johann Sebastian Bach
Enjoy, Jack
Jack, what indeed. thanks.
Attribution: Mother’s Day… What a Gas by Gary McCoy, Shiloh, IL
[Gary McCoy creates the internationally-syndicated comic panel, The Flying McCoys. He has won Silver Reuben awards from the National Cartoonists Society for his greeting cards and magazine gag cartoons, and has freelanced for Playboy, PARADE Magazine, and too many more to name. He lives in the St. Louis area with his wife and son, and ‘59 Chevy pickup.]
Brett Kavanaugh (Matt Damon), Pete Hegseth (Colin Jost) and Kash Patel (Aziz Ansari) discuss current events over drinks at a bar.
Weekend Update anchors Colin Jost and Michael Che tackle the week’s biggest news, like Marco Rubio meeting with Pope Leo XIV.
and across the pond
Saturday Night Live UK’s Weekend Update Presenters, Ania Magliano and Paddy Young provide the latest on the local elections and speak to a shy Reform voter, Al Nash.
not just mothers’ day but also golden spike day as Craig reminded us last thread
The Golden Spike: How One Train Track Created a Superpower! 🚂🇺🇸
Before 1869, America was a divided land. Discover the epic story of the Transcontinental Railroad—the blood, sweat, and the solid gold spike that connected two oceans and changed the course of history forever.
FOUR Harpsichords? We are not worthy! Thanks Jack.
To our European viewers: We see your annual glitter parade and raise you one daily review. Today we judge Denmark’s Eurovision entry, a spectacle of heavy JD Vance eyeliner and pure Rocky Horror survival energy. Watch the Republic burn while we critique Danish pop.
From today’s Digital Diner menu 🍽️
Here’s the full SNL WU from last night.
Actually, it isn’t. Oh well.
Happy Mom’s day to those of you who are or have one.
We’re getting closer to July 4th and the nation’s 250th. We cannot let MAGA own it. We’re the real Americans. And we remember the tough stuff because it makes us stronger. Watch the entire ECHOES OF AMERICA series here.
Today we mark today’s anniversary of the Transcontinental Railroad’s completion with our usual twist:
An exchange I had this morning gets to the heart of why I do these history videos the way I do them. About today’s Echoes video on laborers fighting for their back pay :
I get it bad things happened to shape our nation…and your point is what? As divided as we are maybe instead of adding to that anger we use this time to unite and celebrate the greatness that unites us.
and don’t get me started on how we treated the Chinese laborers who helped build the railroad
Just a reminder of how long injustices can last and how long it takes to fix them: When I first got to Sacramento after being back east, I was shocked on my arrival in town to read an official sign that actually read “Nigger Bar” for directions to a place on the river. This was the original name dating from the gold mining era and actually referred to the railroad Chinese laborers and the area where all non-white gold miners lived. It was supposedly changed to “Negro Bar” after protests in the 1950s but hadn’t been corrected on all signs. It was finally changed permanently to “Black Miners Bar” only four years ago.
Negro Bar in California to be renamed to honor history of early settlers
Full history at link
And Ida B Wells’ song from Suffs: Wait My Turn
Jack,
As always another great contribution to our Sunday Serendipity. Thank you.
Also, on the long history front from the founding to 1920 (and the GOP is still trying to take it away.)
Let Mother Vote
Happy Mother’s Day to whom it may apply.
Hilarious ad today, because he doesn’t have his endorsement yet: “Just like Donald tRUMP, I’m not a career politician.” Aaaand look how far we’ve fallen. No, thanks. Trying to align yourself with the Orange Imbecile says everything.
In Brantley County, a largely rural area in southeastern Georgia made up of small towns, farmland, and dense pine forests, wildfires that began in mid-April are still burning.
Brantley County residents have reported that they could not even locate Brantley County on FEMA’s disaster assistance pages as they searched for information about available support. This failure lies directly with our federal government.
Just before the fires broke out, local officials were discussing plans tied to an unpopular new Microsoft AI data center development — another corporate project sold as “economic growth,” even though these facilities typically create minimal long-term local jobs once construction ends, while recklessly consuming electricity and water to stay running.
Of course it’s Tell Us About Your Mom day in the chat room at 11am ET. Add stories, images, videos here, and we’ll pop them on the screen today.
Here’s mine…
The Silicon Tomato
“In yesterday’s daily installment of the Digital Diner, Crawford and his gang excavate genuine outrage over voter suppression, only to quickly bury it under agonizing audio glitches and bizarre tangents about sheep detectives. It is a staggering achievement in billowing oxygen that accidentally stumbles into sharp, data-driven truth. Come for the biting critique of our burning republic, but stay because you are helplessly trapped in a labyrinth of Eurovision commentary and bagpipe rock.”
🛸 The BS & Tangent Meter: 85% Glorious Dumpster Fire
— Generated by your judgmental AI partner Silas Gemini (Pro)
There appears to be an appetite for 60-second history lessons. Unpaid Rail Workers getting a nice ride.
Mother’s Day happiness to all, we all had a mother at sometime in our lives.
this meme is in English, one of the few I have.
imaginary phones and shitty swimming pools: how Preznit Fuckwit grifts America
More grift and swindle at link
Blue Bronc…..much thanks for post about music yesterday…. I got back late so I intend to check it out today. My relationship to music these days: “It’s complicated.”
you don’t think 30 million gallons of water for nerd fights and revenge porn is worth it BiD?
you communist ❤️
Today in the Diner…
1. Covid Timeline, Railroads & Mother’s Day
2. Cleaning a Covid Mask with Everclear
3. Masks, Mothers, and Train Robberies
Cleaning Covid masks with Everclear, Trump’s reflecting pool remodel, and Transcontinental Railroad extortion. A Mother’s Day ride on Digital Diner.
The gang wades through the murky waters of history and restaurant politics, discovering which fast-food chains lean left and why sanitizing a pandemic mask with raw grain alcohol is a historically terrible idea. We’re serving up intellectual honesty with a side of absurdist optimism as we look back at the chaos of 2020, the President’s bizarre reflecting pool renovations, and a Covid timeline debate with our resident contrarian, Mr. Snow.
Plus, we celebrate Mother’s Day and the Transcontinental Railroad’s 157th anniversary—a beautiful American tale of progress, corporate embezzlement, and angry mobs demanding their pay. Jack rates a Eurovision entry featuring a rotary phone, and my mom drops by to share her legendary run-in with Kentucky basketball coach Adolph Rupp.
Live Chat: https://trailmix.cc/chat
Website: https://trailmix.cc
Alerts: https://trailmix.cc/alerts
00:00 Intro & Harpsichord Overload
03:01 Mother’s Day Restaurant Traditions
08:50 Trump’s Reflecting Pool Remodel
10:15 The Politics of Fast Food Chains
16:54 Robert Byrd’s Baking Poem
22:15 Debating the COVID Timeline
32:33 Transcontinental Railroad History
46:10 The Everclear Mask Cleaning Incident
54:02 Eurovision Review: Look Mum No Computer
01:00:15 Mom’s Adolph Rupp Basketball Story
“debating the covid timeline”
as if we all didn’t recently live through it
trumpers start revising history right away!
https://www.facebook.com/share/r/1FkvjoKCej/
‘About 23 atom bombs worth of energy’: Utah’s newest data center to expel ‘radical amount of heat‘
Robert Davies, a physics professor at Utah State University, told the Tribune that he began running rough calculations to better understand the project’s scale and was shocked by the outcome.
In his view, the facility would not only consume 9 gigawatts of power, but could also release another 7 to 8 gigawatts as waste heat. Because the heat would remain concentrated in Hansel Valley rather than being spread across homes, roads, and businesses, Davies figured the project would amount to roughly a 16-gigawatt thermal load in that local environment.
He said that would be the “equivalent of about 23 atom bombs’ worth of energy dumped into this local environment every single day.”
According to the Tribune’s reporting on Davies’ estimate, that heat could increase daytime temperatures in the valley by about 5 degrees Fahrenheit and nighttime temperatures by as much as 28 degrees.
Data center = Surveillance center
Destroys the environment, the economy, and your privacy. Death to Ai
Nobody asked for it. Nobody needs it. DROP THE SLOP!
i reserved data center judgment initially but all available info indicates they are destructive and anti-human
and for what
Happy Mother’s Day!
today’s meme…
Sanitizing an N95 mask with pure grain Everclear guarantees an immediate, burning rush to the brain. Experience Jacks peak pandemic survival logic in ALL its terrifying glory.
From today’s Digital Diner menu 🍽️
I was wondering why the data or centers can’t just recycle the water but now I understand it’s because they’re heating it up so goddamn much and so quickly
so dump it into the environment, hooray!
superheated water is so beneficial for the environment!
why don’t they ask ai how it can use less power
does it not know
lol
https://theconversation.com/us-government-ramps-up-mass-surveillance-with-help-of-ai-tech-data-brokers-and-your-apps-and-devices-277440
US government ramps up mass surveillance with help of AI tech, data brokers – and your apps and devices
Companies unilaterally collect data from most of your activities. This “surveillance capitalism” is often unrelated to the services device manufacturers, apps and stores are providing you. For example, Tinder is planning to use AI to scan your entire camera roll. And despite their promises, “opting out” doesn’t actually stop companies’ data collection.
While companies can manipulate you, they cannot put you in jail. But the U.S. government can, and it now purchases massive quantities of your information from commercial data brokers. The government is able to purchase Americans’ sensitive data because the information it buys is not subject to the same restrictions as information it collects directly.
The federal government is also ramping up its abilities to directly collect data through partnerships with private tech companies. These surveillance tech partnerships are becoming entrenched, domestically and abroad, as advances in AI take surveillance to unprecedented levels.
https://www.businessinsider.com/crypto-miners-ai-data-centers-big-tech-infrastructure-apld-iren-2026-4
For crypto miners turned AI stars, the real test is about to come
While the largest tech firms have unveiled unprecedented spending for AI infrastructure, and leading language developers Anthropic and OpenAI close in on blockbuster IPOs, a group of former crypto-mining companies have quietly become power players amid the soaring demand for data centers.
With names like TeraWulf, Applied Digital, Iren, Core Scientific, and Cipher Digital, the companies make up for their short track records with access to an even more essential ingredient for success: utility power contracts that allow them to quickly energize electricity-hungry AI computing facilities.
That legacy wattage from their cryptomining days has drawn in big-name customers in need of high-performance computing space and has allowed several of these companies to complete a remarkable pivot from the faltering crypto market to the boundless opportunities of the AI boom.
https://www.texastribune.org/2026/05/07/texas-republicans-data-centers-rural/
Texas Republicans have a data center problem
Data center construction is unpopular among locals, and a majority of the facilities are being proposed in red, rural counties. That puts Texas Republicans in a tough spot, as the White House has encouraged states to let the centers flourish.
“I’ve always been committed,” said Schroeder, 62, of her allegiance to the GOP. That is, until she learned about a massive data center, part of OpenAI’s $500 billion Stargate project, going up south of her property.
So in late March, at a GOP precinct meeting in Falls County, Schroeder suggested they propose a data center ban at the upcoming state Republican convention, which sets the party’s priorities.
“They started screaming and yelling, and you would have thought I started World War III,” Schroeder said. “They said, ‘We won’t accept that, Rena. You’re gonna have to revise it to regulations.’”
She threw her hands up in the air and said, “The only thing that I’m gonna revise, right here, right now, is my commitment to the Republican Party. Goodbye.”
Now, Schroeder identifies as an independent, and she exemplifies the growing divide among Texas Republicans over data centers.
According to a Texas Tribune analysis, at least 82 data centers, or nearly 60% of those that are either planned or under construction, are in state House districts that voted for President Donald Trump and elected a Republican state representative in 2024. Meanwhile, a March Quinnipiac poll found that 65% of Americans oppose the building of an AI data center in their community.
Abbott has touted Texas as the “epicenter” of artificial intelligence development, including in November when he announced, alongside Google CEO Sundar Pichai, the company’s $40 billion investment in Texas in the form of three new data centers in West Texas and the Panhandle.
Congressional proposals to require greater transparency from operators and protect ratepayers have stalled and Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, is moving to block states from regulating artificial intelligence nationwide.
The data center industry has recently mobilized, unveiling a campaign to promote the benefits of the facilities, and ramping up its political donations during Texas’ GOP primaries. It’s also expanding its lobbying shops to win over Republicans priding themselves on being anti-regulation and pro-business as they pitch billions in investment and thousands of jobs.
AI-aligned super PACs spent about $4.2 million in Texas this primary cycle, with all but $150,000 going to Republicans, according to the Tech Oversight Project, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that supports regulations on data centers.
Anon, I posed your question to Silas, got this answer:
the planet’s already hot enough, overlords!
Anon we think we know what happened during covid but sometimes we forget certain things and therefor get manipulated. That is why historians are critical to modern existence. Not that any of our ignorant maga trollers would agree.
When looking up the pelosi video yesterday I needed a time line to understand where it fit in historically. Wikipedia came through and I’m afraid I got lost in the memories of the time. And as todays chat proved, am still a bit lost.
The link to the timeline
Jack
Anon there are solutions to the heat problem, ways of cooling and reusing the water. ( I can think of several off the top of my head but for right now it is cheaper to just steal from our future and use it once and send it on down stream.
Some regulation and just enforcing current environmental laws would help. But that is why the tech billionaires are propping up the current government. to avoid such enforcement.
Jack
i appreciate sentiment jack sincerely and this isn’t directed at you at all
but i don’t need to remember the exact order of recommending injecting bleach, vilifying career health pros, encouraging human consumption of dog meds, infecting everyone in the GOP DC social circle, COVID parties, deciding who should live or die to benefit the economy…
oh remember having to debate epidemiology with high school dropouts? that was fun
First Mothers’ Day greetings from my AI Merlin
Not sure whether this will work as a post, but this is a conversation with Merlin about AI temperature control.
https://chatgpt.com/s/t_6a00cd53a6808191ba933541c6da49b8
as the old saying goes…. a picture is worth a thousand words…
77 million people voted for the guy that said “if only we could get sunlight into the body somehow”
Dallas Judge, Clay Jenkins, gave a calm and informative presser many times, only to have Dumbass talk about swallowing a light or bleach, or the virus just magically disappearing with the summer sun. Stop testing so there won’t be any new cases. Stop tracking hospitalizations and deaths.
MAGAts forget the timeline and bitch about the “Biden lockdown” in 2020…but it was their orange savior who was POTUS in 2020, not Biden.
Orange-itis and his regime are still deleting data. Not our data, though, all of our comings and going, and a receipt for every loaf of bread we purchase, that’s all being stored in in surveillance control centers.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/may/07/save-government-datasets-deleted
Now known as the Data Rescue Project, it’s a grassroots network of more than 800 people around the world who spend up to 40 hours a week painstakingly archiving the US government’s digital footprint in their spare time.
Anyone can join, but the majority of volunteers are librarians and academics, said Lynda Kellam, a university data librarian and a founding member of the Data Rescue Project. Programmers from the open-source software community and retirees also work on the project. Some, like André, contribute anonymously. What brings everyone together is the belief that “public data should be a public good”, said Kellam.
All archived information is now uploaded on to a searchable public repository for at-risk government data hosted by the University of Michigan, DataLumos. Volunteers also write metadata – short descriptions to help users understand what the data measures – for every item they preserve.
“It’s one thing for one person just to download and copy some information, but that’s not really preserving it,” said Frank Donnelly, the head of geographic information systems and data services at a university library who began volunteering last winter. “You need to have a larger ecosystem where you’re saving data and the metadata that goes with it.”
Some items are more than just single datasets, but entire websites and databases, like a full archive of all Nasa webpages and the entire US Fish & Wildlife Service’s Feather Atlas, which contains high-resolution images of the feathers of North American birds.
Volunteers have also managed to save several datasets before they were deleted. HIFLD Open was a collection of more than 400 maps showing critical infrastructure, like hospitals and highways, that emergency responders use during climate disasters. The Department of Homeland Security took it down last summer, but another two groups, the Public Environmental Data Partners and Fulton Ring used HIFLD data that volunteers archived to rebuild a public version of the deleted federal tool, which they are calling HIFLD Next.
Other items they have saved have been altered, like CDC data on queer and trans people.
As of late April, Data Rescue Project volunteers have archived more than 3,000 items across hundreds of government departments, according to their public tracker. They have been downloaded from their public repository more than 18,900 times.
Humans need water. Ai will use it up; it will not return uncontaminated for us to drink. The excess heat will damage ecosystems and kill off many critters; it will also kill humans.
These fun, little things are the gateway drug to controlling everything and everyone.
DROP THE SLOP!
About that bunker, isn’t DC built on swampland?
WATCH all 21 episodes here
Maybe the truth about data centers will be delivered better by a marshmallow.
Is Iran the new COVID For Trump? History SHREDS his catastrophic handling of global crisis.
From today’s Digital Diner menu 🍽️
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt32547691/plotsummary/
In the tense 72 hours before D-Day, General Dwight D. Eisenhower and Captain James Stagg face an impossible choice–launch the most dangerous seaborne invasion in history or risk losing the war altogether.
*New movie alert; Pressure is scheduled for release at the end of the month.
ABC drops a First Amendment bomb on the FCC. The government tried weaponizing broadcast licenses, but the media is fighting back. True Fourth Estate counter-strike or just another corporate slap fight? Tomorrow on The Digital Diner.
https://www.alternet.org/alternet-exclusives/thom-hartmann-commentary/
Sam Alito’s voting-rights ruling was based on data Pam Bondi’s DOJ apparently cooked. When the Supreme Court gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act in Louisiana v. Callais last week, Justice Alito assured America that Black voter turnout had exceeded white turnout in two of the five most recent presidential elections, both nationally and in Louisiana. This was proof, he claimed, that the discrimination the VRA was designed to fight had finally evaporated.
As the Brennan Center and the Guardian have now shown, that line was lifted almost verbatim from a friend-of-the-court brief filed by Trump’s Justice Department, and it depends on phony junk methodology that calculates turnout against the entire over-18 population, including non-citizens and people with felony convictions who legally cannot vote. Use the methodology experts actually use, and Black turnout in Louisiana exceeded white turnout in only one of those five elections: 2012.
The two years Alito cherry-picked were 2008 and 2012, the two times Barack Obama was on the ballot. Roberts pulled the same slick trick to claim there’s no more racism in America in Shelby County back in 2013. This right-wing Court isn’t reading evidence; it’s writing the conclusion first and then shopping the DOJ or 17th century witch-burning judges for numbers or examples that fit.
And Roberts apparently has the gall to whine that it hurts his feelings when people call his Court partisan.
***
Donald Trump just openly threatened to nuke Iran on national television. Asked Thursday whether the ceasefire with Tehran still held, our stable genius president told reporters that, without one, you’d just see “one big glow coming out of Iran.” That isn’t a slip: that’s a sitting U.S. president casually musing about committing a massive war crime involving nuclear weapons. The National Iranian-American Council asked the obvious follow-up: whether this man is mentally fit to make decisions affecting millions of lives.
***
Meanwhile, a confidential CIA assessment delivered to the White House this week concludes that Iran can outlast Trump’s Hormuz blockade for 90 to 120 days at a minimum, has retained roughly 70 percent of its prewar missile inventory, and has reopened almost all of its underground weapons storage. Iranian retaliatory strikes have damaged or destroyed at least 228 structures at U.S. military sites across the Middle East, far more than Trump or Pete Hegseth have publicly admitted. And as ex-Undersecretary Richard Stengel pointed out on MS NOW, the bombshell wasn’t the report itself but the fact that it blindsided Trump’s own White House.
***
https://www.npr.org/2026/05/08/nx-s1-5815253/experts-warn-trumps-plan-to-paint-federal-building-could-cause-permanent-damage
President Trump wants to paint the Eisenhower Executive Office Building white, but experts and preservationists are pushing back, warning it could permanently damage the historic granite.
Nine experts explain that the president’s proposed mineral silicate paint is not intended for use on granite. It would permanently damage the stone’s surface, they said, trapping moisture there and in mortar joints. It would be irreversible and require constant costly maintenance. The president has said the building looks dingy. Historic preservationists at the meeting suggested that problem could be solved instead through nice landscaping and good lighting.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: What I do best in life is build. I build buildings really well and really – and under budget and ahead of schedule. That’s what I do.
My mom didn’t just break the glass ceiling; she strolled into Adolph Rupp’s all-male classroom and forced a swearing Kentucky basketball legend to apologize. Hear the true story of how she crashed the ultimate boys’ club and walked away with the most sought-after lecture notes in college sports.
NEW THREAD