Pariah

Hmm, high school juniors with rockets. What could go wrong?

Wow.  Starting in January, All American Astronomical Society Journals will be full Open Access
 
No one thinks that there'll be as great a demand for all the papers in those journals, but as the spectacular example, the open-access Astrophysical Journal Letters 2019 paper with the famous shadow of the black hole in M87 image (here) has been downloaded more than a third of a million times.

No, that was Dolly Parton, not ABBA.

... and another quarter of a cubic yard of blackberry brambles have been hacked out of my yard.  (That's the limit of yard waste I can have carried away for free each week.)
 
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Well, you know it's not me.  I'm not on FB.

I've been reminded that abusive husbands and boyfriends will absolutely have their GFs/wives investigated/attacked for having a miscarriage (a 'suspected abortion'), so they can net a 10k reward check.
 
We are going to see violence/behavior against women that will make Russia look friendly.

One day, Albert Einstein has to speak at an important science conference.
 
On the way there, he tells his driver, "I'm sick of all these conferences. I always say the same things over and over!"
 
The driver, who looks a bit like him agrees. "You're right. As your driver, I attended all of them, and even though I don't know anything about science, I could give the conference in your place."
 
"That's a great idea!" says Einstein. "Let's switch places then!"
 
So they switch clothes and as soon as they arrive, the driver dressed as Einstein goes on stage and starts giving the usual speech, while the real Einstein, dressed as the car driver, attends it.
 
But in the crowd, there is one scientist who wants to impress everyone and thinks of a very difficult question to ask Einstein, hoping he won't be able to respond. So this guy stands up and interrupts the conference by posing his very difficult question. The whole room goes silent, holding their breath, waiting for the response.
 
The driver looks at him, dead in the eye, and says, "Sir, your question is so easy to answer that I'm going to let my driver reply to it for me."

Marvel's REALLY getting out of control with their Spiderverse...

Rampage

This is really the issue. The O-line did okay in the preseason, largely against 2s and 3s. How they perform against NFL starters, even if it is the Giants, will be telling.
 
 
The Saints have three quarterbacks and Taysom Hill on their roster. Quibble, quibble. 

Pole Position  ((since we've seen Ms Pac-Man already))

An article in the August '21 Harper's may help. It's primarily about the recent fad for quoting Hannah Arendt re: fascism, totalitarianism, and lies by governments. (Summary: People quoting Arendt to condemn Donald Trump are mis-applying what she wrote.) But one subject is about the state of mind people often fall into when they have been lied to about something big, or lied to many times: a condition of all-encompassing disbelief and cynicism. Anything might be a lie, and probably is; the effort to sift truth from falsehood is futile; so while nothing is true, anything is possible.
 
Though this goes beyond the article, it follows that the normal, sane standards of competent authority are turned upside down. The more the source of a claim is perceived as an established authority, the less it is believed -- because the Establishment, of whatever kind, must be lying to maintain its position of presumed power. Conversely, the suppressed message is more likely to be true, precisely because it is suppressed. Ad if you don't know anything about the subject, whether it's science, medicine, or what-have-you -- how are you to recognize deranged nonsense when you hear it? Why wouldn't a malaria drug, a deworming drug, or, heck, shooting up with bleach,  be effective against Covid?
 
(Or, getting back to Arendt, why wouldn't you believe a blustering madman who claims all your problems are caused by Jews? [Hitler] Or counterrevolutionary capitalists? [Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot] Or Communists? [McCarthy] Or gays, or Central American migrants, or witches. You are the perfect citizen for a totalitarian state and its world of ideological fantasy, because you will never break and say, "No, this isn't true.")
 
Unfortunately... Between government, political provocateurs and advertising, we swim in lies. And I suspect we all know it. Is it any wonder that some people drown?
 
Dean Shomshak

Voted. RNA vaccines for the win!

Well, there's a judge who needs to be recalled in the next election cycle. Sadly, this being Ohio, it's highly unlikely that that will happen.

Well, that explains why my Tyrannosaurus says, "No Signal". 

When we had broken tree limbs take out the back fence (heavy snow in February), we made the claim on the homeowner's insurance and found a couple of handyman-type outfits to give us bids on replacing it.  Their bids were a bit more than twice what the insurance paid.  My son & I cleared the wreckage (rent a truck, tote it all to the transfer station about two miles away) but the fence waited half a year.  The replacement was done by an itinerant worker I've never seen before or since, cash only under the table, coming through the neighborhood doing lots of fast, cheap, and sloppy fix-up jobs, and the fence was only one part of what he did for us (back fence, clean the roof, hack an out-of-control hedge back into submission out front, pressure-wash the front walk).  He underbid the job, but I have no complaints about what he & two buddies did, for only slightly more than the insurance check for the fence alone.  All things considered we got seriously lucky there.
 
With your shed as it is ... hope you don't have much in the way of hazmat in there.  Otherwise I'd say rent a truck, buy a dozen pairs of leather gloves and some two-handed implements of destruction, and offer a fraternity a keg of beer to bash the wreckage into smaller pieces and throw it all in the truck.

"Doctor Darwin ... paging Doctor Darwin ..."

False accusations often are things the accuser would have done in your place.

I'm within a few years of retiring, and between the chaos of the world in general and the reflections that accompany planning for no-longer-in-gainful-employment, I'm forming some tentative opinions.
 
I think that in the US there are only a small number of kinds of people with regard to retirement, perhaps as few as three. 
 
One kind never retires because they have to work to support themselves until ... they no longer can.  Hope not to be in that bin. 
 
A second kind doesn't fully retire because they love at least a major part of what they do.  There's a bunch of those in academia.  They retire officially so that they no longer have to deal with an 8AM lecture section of XXX 101 with 300 whiny undergrads enrolled and a grand total of six of them actually care about the material; but they continue to do research, publish the odd paper, read their discipline's journals, come to campus for the interesting seminars, and so on. 
 
The third kind, which I think are by far the most numerous among genuine retirees, largely go back to doing whatever it was they did during the summers of their high school years (and college years, assuming they didn't hold a job during those summers for whatever reason), or perhaps what one wanted to do in those late-school-age summers.  Obviously that's glossing over lots of social and technological changes, but I think those changes are simply background stuff and one subconsciously suppresses awareness of those differences, just like you suppress the knowledge that physically you just can't do the same things at age 65 that you could do at age 15. 

Figure since this is high school, this fits here...
 
High School Football Team May Have Lied to ESPN to Play on National TV

Young teacher, the subject
Of schoolgirl fantasy
She wants him so badly
Knows what she wants to be
 
Inside him, there's longing
This girl's an open page
Book marking, she's so close now
This girl is half his age
 
Don't stand, don't stand so
Don't stand so close to me
Don't stand, don't stand so
Don't stand so close to me
 
Her friends are so jealous
You know how bad girls get
Sometimes it's not so easy
To be the teacher's pet
 
Temptation, frustration
So bad it makes him cry
Wet bus stop, she's waiting
His car is warm and dry
 
Don't stand, don't stand so
Don't stand so close to me
Don't stand, don't stand so
Don't stand so close to me
 
Loose talk in the classroom
To hurt they try and try
Strong words in the staff room
The accusations fly
 
It's no use, he sees her
He starts to shake and cough
Just like the old man in
That book by Nabokov
 
Don't stand, don't stand so
Don't stand so close to me
Don't stand, don't stand so
Don't stand so close to me