Kakistocracy, noun - government by the least suitable or competent citizens

Forty years living in their range and having a name that sounds like their call, and they are still never my first assumption.

Why do I hear my name being called in the woods? Gray catbirds

Hah it was killer doing a first course of stone for a slope stabilization project but I’ll see what I can do

I wonder if the neighbors would let me borrow their horse…

Not just you, I thought it was engaging and interesting as well. The comment about artificial refuges really strikes a chord as well, and I would add man made brush piles to the list of reclamation structures for encouraging animal resurgence.

Also, I’m excited that I might be able to describe the various rock structures on our parcel with greater scientific rigor.

If you’re in a situation where you need and have outdoor lights, placing them on a timer is an easy way to drastically reduce the negative impact to the surrounding wildlife. Choosing bulbs or using a film to produce yellow or amber light is another way to improve the effort, and can make it safer for people who have to move between the lit area and an unlit one since amber lights reduce effects of night blindness in people.

<3

I’ll figure out where to drop it off eventually, maybe

My understanding is that this program only applies to federal taxes, so I’m not sure that the particular state’s income tax laws will have much bearing on selection for participation or which stage of rollout they’re added with.

Arizona, California, Florida, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Hampshire, New York, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Washington State and Wyoming are participating.

It’s a shame more aren’t participating but I can see the reasoning behind staged access and iterative improvement. The real pity is that data they’ve already got won’t be preloaded in this stage. It would have been the nail in the coffin for Intuit and other companies’ predatory practices on lower income folks, at least as they exist currently.

I got an invitation from someone I had been talking to online to come and have dinner with their family. It. Was. Awesome. I got a tour of their gardens, talked pest management, chicken composting, and propagation strategies, got a ukulele concert from their usually shy daughter with some special medical needs (and got to play something for her on the instrument she never shares), and had a lovely meal from their garden. Oh, and we traded plants and cuttings with each other to help diversify our gardens (and who they support)!

Glad you haven’t come down with “ionlycommunicateinkelvinuenza”, I’ve heard the baseline for recovery is absolute zero

Hilarious and accurate

Neat article! When I was young, one of the schools I attended had a unique approach to punishment - you’d spend lunch and recess copying a page out of the OED letter for letter. No idea how many I ended up copying, but I was precocious. I wonder how many words my mental dictionary contains.

My experience has been that the “-” was exactly the same as a skip. Spotify still plays those songs and even if I’ve gone to the artist or group and selected “don’t play this artist” they’ll still come up. So this redesign seems more honest, in that you don’t like the song but they’ll still play it.

Jimothy

Tomathan

Kevincent

Jachary

Esteburt

Stanthony

A ghostwriter is usually someone hired to produce a piece of written work, with set terms like deadlines, payment, possibly confidentiality, and other things. Things like memoirs (even some presidents’) are ghostwritten by someone who listens to rambling stories and takes notes to produce something readable.

Plagiarism suggests Person B presenting Person A’s work as their own without Person A or their intended audience knowing that fact. In this scenario there is no compensation for the claimed work and presumably no communication or cooperation between the writer and plagiarizer.

I am the current incarnation of the-timer’s-about-to-go-off man: every time there’s a timer I’m physically uncomfortable in the seconds right before the notification beeps begin. “It should be done by now” I’ll say, just before the oven timer sounds, or the dryer plays its jingle.

Yesterday I took the dog for a walk around another store while my wife did the grocery shop, but I forgot my phone at home. Sure enough, I got the familiar itch between the shoulder blades and the dread “she’s probably done by now” and had to excuse the pup and I from the group of people giving him scritches. We all reached the car at the same time.