Ron

For a little something different... https://www.facebook.com/reel/1596633758376460 One of my all-time favorite albums from Tears for Fears.

Like @Bill W, my insurance plan (an amalgam of various insurance players) offers free rides to and from healthcare appointments. I tried the service for the first time last week. Unfortunately, the driver to my appointment was late (although, to be fair, I did arrive on time) and the tiny little Toyota Prius car reeked of smoke (even though it was cold out I didn't complain when he left his front window open), yuck. He ate snacks and talked on the phone for nearly the whole one hour ride. For the return trip I had to give up my prebooked ride because things were just taking too long for my appointment. But as luck would have it, because it was late afternoon by the time I needed a ride home, the car service booked me a ride using Lyft and a hybrid Toyota Camry. The difference between the two rides was night and day. I don't think I need say which ride was day. Otherwise, when I lived in Boston and public transportation was not an option I used Uber. Why? Well, it was the first to arrive in the city and I signed up right away (cabs were unpredictable) but by the time Lyft arrived I was too lazy to sign up for it.

Here is the obituary in the Boston Globe: Link Here is the obituary in the Washington Post: Link Also, here is a lengthy discussion of Mr. Stewart's memoir with Post film critic Ann Hornady from back in 2023: Link

Yes, the world lost Walter Koenig recently, too. Here's his obituary from the Boston Globe: Link And, if you can access this, from the Washington Post: Link I'll link Patrick Stewart's obit when it shows up in the paper.

Where would we be without this:

His character from the movie Contact comes first to mind for me. He captured the political opportunist very well in that movie.

Living in MA means we change twice a year but I would prefer that we didn't do it and stayed on Standard Time (ST). Daylight Saving Time (DST) is a misnomer as we don't actually save any daylight. And the last time the U.S. chose permanent DST in the seventies there was an uproar to turn the clock back to ST. Besides there's that little thing called the bodies circadian rhythm which aligns with the clock being set to Standard Time. Now, I enjoy Science Fiction stories which often include the colonization of new planets. Not every planet has the same rotation as our Earth but I don't recall every reading in any depth about how humans learn to deal with a slower or faster planetary rotation (the movie Interstellar dealt with planetary time but the planet was near a black hole, which just throws everything off kilter). If we complain about an hour here and there here how would we like a twenty-eight or twenty-one-and-a-half hour day somewhere else? Food for thought.

When visiting the site today I keep getting a screen that states 'Please wait while your request is being verified' before GA opens in Chrome's newest iteration and also the most previous one before I updated Chrome this afternoon. This is new. Any idea what's going on?

On November 18, 2026 Voyager 1 is expected to reach one light-day from Earth, about 25.9 billion kilometers.

Here in the States that would not be allowed. We are allowed to trim any overhangs but you can't impinge on another's property.

That's permissible in many places even today. That's likely to get you a charge of trespassing today if you're not on very good terms with your neighbor.

@wildone Don't think of them as birthdays per se but as celebrations of a trip around the sun. I've just celebrated my sixty-something trip around the sun in the last week. Like @chris191070 I am also considered to fall in with the Libra crowd (we are a hoot at parties). A good friend and his father took me out to lunch at the new Hawksmore ($$$$) restaurant in Boston. It's the British groups first restaurant in the U.S. and I enjoyed my meal very much. It was the first time I've had the pleasure of eating potted beef & bacon, it came with an onion gravy and not one but two popovers. Yum! And, of course since the restaurant has a steakhouse vibe, I had steak frites (wagyu-style) and the fries were fried in beef tallow. Now I know for most of history people used beef tallow but I've become so accustomed to vegetable oil fried fries that the tallow fried ones were not as ... Shall I say, tasty. There I said it. At the end I was presented with a plate upon which was written happy birthday in rather elegant chocolate script and not one or two pieces of chocolate but a small box with eight little half-round chocolates of the melt-in-your-mouth kind that exploded with caramel. Wow! Cheers to more trips around the sun!!!

I happen to be very impressed by the rhinoceros. One sees them on the various nature shows certainly, but actually seeing one... Dang! They are impressive creatures indeed. Which reminds me that although I've lived in Massachusetts for nearly twenty-seven years (most of that time in Boston), I've never made it to the Franklin Park Zoo.

According to Neal deGrasse Tyson in one centimeter slice of your lower colon lives and works more microbes than the total number of humans who have ever been born. That's both astonishing and cool to know. But is it ice-breaker information suitable for parties?!

That looked wrong to me but I couldn't quite place why at first. It turns out that it is incorrect. Astronomical Fall begins on the 22nd of September and Meteorological Fall begins on the 1st of September (this applies just like @Graeme says on the first day of the month that the Astronomical season date lands in wherever you live on the map).