Sounds like an easy way to get out of going to a dinner where he was going to get roasted.

Ridiculous Fishing

“As of December 10, 2025, the Android version is no longer downloadable from the Google Play store.”

:(

I used to play the web version of Bee Sort. Unfortunately, I got stuck on level 371 and the web version doesn’t have the option to skip a level. Does the app version have that option?

Good choice - I was going to suggest Simon Tatham’s Puzzle Collection.

Congratulations, The Onion!!!

I think the elevator one is the same as escalators: to minimize traffic disruption. If you’re facing away from the elevator doors, you can’t tell if you’re at the right floor (causing a delay), you can’t see if there are people interested in entering (another delay), people interested in entering will likely assume this isn’t your floor (yet another delay), it takes time to turn around when it is your floor (delay), and you disrupt anyone behind you in the elevator who also wants to exit there.

So, the mandate is the BBC is (was?) to inform, educate, and entertain, which was the mandate they created Doctor Who under. The entertainment is obvious, but where’s the informing and educating? Go back to the first Doctor: the stories alternated between going back into the past and going forward into the future. To inform and educate the viewer, we had history teacher Ian and science teacher Barbara, who would briefly include some information within the episode.

Also, if you watch the opening credits of (I think, it’s been a long time for some of them!) the Doctors’ color episodes, not only do you have the Doctor/TARDIS going forward and back (movement in time), you also have the colors red and blue in the background colors, denoting red shift/blue shift (movement in space).

Anyway, I would argue that Old Who had a more factual/educational underlayer through most of it’s run, making it the more “science-y” of the two versions; while NuWho, while much flashier and with generally stronger storylines, is much more space opera/space fantasy, without the underlying educational layer.

I don’t understand the clock one.

Part of the western Florida panhandle (WFP) is on Central time. Part of southeastern Oregon (SEO) is on Mountain time. That puts them one hour apart.

In the fall, when we go back into Standard Time, when the clock hits 2am, you flip the clock back to 1am.

So, during a normal night, WFP would be at 2am and SEO would be 1am. But on the night the time changes, WFP hits 2am and immediately flips their clocks back to 1am - which means that, for one hour a year (until SEO hits 2am and flips their clocks back), part of Florida and part of Oregon’s clocks are showing the exact same time.

I kinda struggled over how to word this - they’re not in the same time zone, but for this one hour they might as well be.

For one hour each year, part of Florida and part of Oregon have the exact same time on their clocks.

Sharks have existed long enough as a species to have orbited the entire Milky Way Galaxy - twice.

.

First Luigi, now this guy.

And don’t spend money on fancy prescription sunglasses - that gives you an extra pair of expensive glasses to lose. You can get over-glasses sunglasses for like $20 each. They fit over your regular glasses; provide more sunglare protection from the sides, overhead and even reflected upward; you’ll still be wearing your regular glasses so you won’t lose them; and they’re cheap enough that you don’t need to worry about scratching or losing them.

Name eight members of his Cabinet that you think would’ve voted to remove Trump.

Vance didn’t have a majority of the Cabinet.

The New York Times also reported that despite polling his top advisers, he often only heard “what he wanted to hear,” and his team wound up serving as an echo chamber for his gut instincts.

Vice President JD Vance was the most vocal in his opposition to the United States going to war with Iran, while CIA Director Jim Ratcliffe, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Gen. Dan Caine, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, warned Trump that Netanyahu had “oversold” him on what could be achieved by the bombing campaign, according to The New York Times.

None of them, though, except Vance, went as far as to say to the president that war was a “terrible idea,” according to the report. The vice president is said to have played a key role in negotiating a ceasefire between Iran and the U.S. as Trump threatened to wipe Iranian civilization off the map.

Honestly, this sounds both like Vance is trying to recover his image after those disastrous press conferences, and Team Vance trying to position themselves as “the more responsible alternative” in the impeachment stakes.

Iran also gets to charge every tanker that goes through the Strait $2,000,000 (they’ll split it with Oman, who has the other side of the Strait), in order to rebuild everything that got bombed, but I’m sure that toll will go on pretty much forever. So gas supplies may slowly start to recover, but prices won’t. We’re going to be paying higher prices for gas, energy, any goods that need to be moved, anything made of plastic, and anything that needs fertilizer to grow, for a long time.

Do Not Obey In Advance.

You might check around with your friends and relatives, to see if any of them digitize stuff; I’ve done it on a casual basis for some of my friends and relatives.

Alternatively, you can probably get an old VHS machine at Goodwill, give it a quick cleaning, and pick up various digitizers (standalone recorder or computer-input) and convert your own tapes. If you do it yourself, I would strongly suggest checking your setup with old commercial tapes first, so that you iron out any setup issues on something you don’t care about, before sending your irreplaceable tapes through whatever process you have.

[Note on commercial tapes: some of them have copyright protection on them, which will make the video fine when you send it to a tv, but just make it erratic when you send the video through another device. Very very occasionally, for undetermined reasons, an entirely home-recorded tape will also exhibit this behavior. If this happens to you, there are two main options: (1) if the device you’re recording onto has front input jacks, switch your setup to record through those jacks, as many of the front inputs lack the monitoring needed to screw up your recordings. (2) Check eBay or other online shopping places for a “video stabilizer”, which is old-timey code for “copyright buster”. Look at the listing for some indication that it’s used for VHS or VCR.]

If you think there might be issues with the tape quality (for example, dropouts or the magnetized bits sticking to the back of the previous strip on the reel), you might want to go professional - but only after seeing what steps they take to minimize this, and what that might cost.

Edit: when I did this for family and friends, I’d monitor the first five minutes or so of each recording, simply to make sure that the tape wasn’t crinkling (more likely to happen at the start of a tape, or some midpoint that was heavily used (repeatedly rewatching a single scene) of where someone had left the tape sitting. And then I’d check in periodically, to see if the tracking needed to be adjusted. I’d also try to at least stay in the same room, so that I could react quickly if I heard the tape crinkling.

Also, in an attempt to minimize problems with the tape having become slack over the years (even if properly stored on their spines), before I started any new tape, I would: if it was stopped partway or at the end of the reel, I would rewind the tape to the start, fastforward it to the end, then rewind it again, to try to reset the tension on the tape. If the tape was stopped at the start of the reel, I’d fastforward and then rewind, to reset the tension.

Also, if you do this yourself, it’s good to have some old tapes lying about that you don’t care about, either old commercial tapes or home-recorded tapes with content you don’t care about. This is because every so often, a tape will jam inside it’s cassette, at which point you need to open it up and unjam it. But sometimes the cassette itself (but not the tape) has developed problems, and you need to re-shell the tape into the shell of a different cassette.

The government never announces that it is becoming fascist. They announce that anti-fascists are the enemy.

So do Rubio, Noem, Bondi, and Stephen Miller. Tulsi Gabbard and the White House budget director are looking into moving as well.