Please circulate -- U of Regina has stepped up to host displaced female Afghan students, with a safe place so they can complete their degrees and not be sent back to Afghanistan from school in Qatar. (Lost funding due to destruction of USAID.) Hoping to raise $500k. www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...
"...oh, it was heaven! Nothing like it. Nothing like that rushing through the water at what seems to you a speed of about two hundred miles an hour; all the way in from the far distant raft, until you arrived, gently slowing down, on the beach, and foundered among the soft flowing waves."
It's cool to read her description of how exhilarating she found it, in her memoirs (looking back on it in her 70s). She even brought a surfboard home with her -- though it looks like the shorter type she tried out in South Africa bsky.app/profile/tapi...
Agatha Christie was born on this day, back in 1890. Even though she lived into her mid-80s and a lot of people imagine her as elderly like Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot, in her youth she was quite adventurous and an "early adopter". She drove a Morris Cowley in the 1920s, and learned how to surf.
Also, this cultural "uncanny valley" gets really weird for science fiction, which is supposed to be about "the future" but was written for a then-contemporary audience (with a then-contemporary understanding of tech/science) so it has two full vectors of cultural shift, running at different speeds
For everyone in the comments trying to identify the animal: there was heavy internal debate in our office over what this was. We eventually landed on a capybara. That’s Portland for you.
He is 13. A 7th grader w/ a pending asylum case. Being held more than 500 miles from home & housed w/ adults. He called his mom crying, & reported that he’s sleeping on concrete w/ an aluminum blanket.
The URL in the link seems to have been active in 2017 (I'd just commented that I went back that far on archive.org ) and there does seem to be something there re: Compaction
When I went back to 2017 (thanks to archive.org) there does seem to be a set of documents there, including one on the Compaction Cycle -- not sure if that's what you recall?
A double surge of tropical moisture from former hurricanes Priscilla and Raymond turned deserts into rivers, unleashing flash floods and forcing water rescues across the Southwest.
Thanks John! I'm going out to get emergency snacks (friend arriving from SFO tomorrow and I suspect he won't eat before the flight and will land hangry, before a 90-min ferry ride then 2+ hours on the bus). But after I get back I'm putting a salmon in the oven and starting the rice cooker.
This is a useful site, if you've got a whistle and want to measure how loud it is. My Acme Samba Whistle came in at over 90 dB (about as loud as my Fox 40 Classic). My Taxi Whistle (also by Acme) was a bit softer at around 80 dB. (I got it secondhand, so showing age?) sounddecibelmeter.com
I actually overheard the "its own little house" quote when I was standing next to one of the few pay phones left in Hamilton a couple of years ago, and a small child walking past with her parents pointed at it in amazement.
