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I had a leftover crust, so tonight I decided to make spinach-bacon quiche so I'd have something good for breakfast.

Funny you should mention that. We finally did the surrender of the vehicle and got our check -- even though the "transfer agent" didn't have the check at first. Apparently it was sent before our prior appointment date and the agent went and found it after completely pissing me off telling us there was no check in her paperwork. Anyway, thanks for all the good wishes everyone!

^Got a nice thermos bottle with NASA gravity fed flow technology engraved with the logo of my local bike shop / brew pub. 👍🏻

Unexpected sunset serenade on the ferry ride back.

Outstanding Baja Fish Tacos 🐠 🌮 🌮 At http://www.mayanbeachclub.com/

Happy Birthday Al!, Last year's prompts, this years images, plus a bonus image incorporating your recent car troubles!

Lunch meatloaf

Rode 20 miles with a fair amount of climbing in the heat today and felt like I had done something. But then I watched the 150th Milano - Torino race that was a bit longer with more climbing. Oh well. HBO Max and Peacock have way more cycling during the classics season than was available here before and I watch lots of it.

This is my personal apocalypse. I don't drink booze, I don't smoke or vape. Weed makes me paranoid and miserable (edibles make me trip balls in addition to being paranoid and miserable.) I sure as fuck don't mess with any powder or pill drugs. While I am a believer and advocate of the use of natural psychedelics for purposes of therapy and personal growth, I'd never do them recreationally. Tapatio is my one drug. Long term listeners may recall when I told the tale of driving to a Walmart Black Citadel Super Center in W.Mass to buy them out of Tapatio. I've done that two other time, but not photographed it. I did the math once and I went through ten 32oz bottles in 2 1/2 years, or about four per year. I've had dozens of other brands of hot sauces. Many are weak, some are insanely spicy (extracts are just dumb), and most taste rather bad. Tapatio isn't the hottest of the widely available brands, but it's the best balance of heat and flavor. Vulture capital is the ruiner of all things good. I fully expect Tapatio to turn into something on par with Frank's Red Hot in the next six months. I posted in the hot sauce subreddit and already people are panic buying. I'm seriously considering buying a box of four one-gallon jugs and a pump (usually sold to the restaurant market.) This is a nightmare.

Calling him a cunt is too kind. RIP Bob Mueller

Not late, for those on the Best Coast! Happy Birthday, Al! Hope you get lots of bike stuff!

Sorry to be late to the thread. Happiest of birthdays, Al. You're the best, man.

Happy Birthday!

There's a persistent internet rumor that Benjamin Netanyahu died on March 9th (Biggie Smalls is not happy to share the date.) The theory is that Bibi was killed or injured in an Iranian air strike. Supposedly he's missed some key cabinet meetings. Also, there's a (in my jaded opinion, extremely flimsy) theory that one of Bibi's kids was observing Shiva ...by not posting on social media for seven days. The Israeli government has released three videos of Bibi since then, and all have been "debunked" on the internet as AI generated, enhanced, manipulated, etc. In the first video, Bibi appears to have six fingers on one hand for a moment. In the second, he's in a coffee shop. In that one he actually counts to five in Hebrew on each of his hands and takes a sip of some mocha latte whatever. There are a lot of theories about the coffee video: The cafe in question is not currently open because of the attacks on Tel Aviv. The original footage was shot in 2024 (some say 2020) for a different propaganda effort. The third video is him and the huckster himself Ambassador Mike Huckabee. It's clearly a scripted bit, where ol' Huck meets Bibi in a hallway, they have a stilted and awkward conversation about Israel's assassination list, shake hands and talk about the number of fingers they have. There are a number of weird digital artifacts in the video, but it all seems pretty real to me. An AI generated video wouldn't seem stiff and forced in the same way (it'd be unreal in a completely different one.) I did go on a bit of a deep drive, which even lead me to Xitter for a bit. Wading through the legion of Nazi posts, I found some pretty funny remixes. (There may not embed correctly.) https://fxtwitter.com/abdulhyefahad/status/2034006657722982435 https://fxtwitter.com/drvijaysrinivas/status/2033988906576974124 https://fxtwitter.com/JaiNDoC_RL/status/2034032032813040007

Sweet Italian sausage and leek Detroit pizza

In other news from China, here we have the fake SR-X1: I've known about these for a while and I finally bought a set as they are so cheap... and very, very rough. They didn't arrive with any earpads but the knockoff leather X1 pads you can find in Asia do work nicely. They are clearly not a 1:1 clone and that headband is something really special in terms of being pure and utter garboleum but it was stupid cheap to add it to them. Housing is 3D printed and quite badly done but look at that cable... to make the 3D print soft and pliable it looks like an absolute mess. Same on this end but the actual plug is nice quality. Nothing wrong with those pins and the spacing seems just fine. Better look at the actual cable used, it is pretty stiff and unwieldy but at least it is 6 parallel cores so the capacitance shouldn't be too bad. It's too short though at 1.5M or so and who knows what the voltage rating is on that thing. I did order a couple of extra ones (and some extra housings too) so I'll zap it with some high voltage and see how it holds up. Anything that can't withstand 1kV AC over an extended time isn't really suitable for this role. Better shot if the actual plug, nothing wrong with those pins and it even has the cutout relief for the bias pin which I always skip on my own plugs. The driver face and the electrodes are etched aluminum or stainless steel. Not sure which as I haven't taken them apart yet. This headband was clearly an afterthought and that metal bends if you look at the wrong way but it does function... kinda. Here we can see the assembly "quality"... or very much lack there of. The housing does not fit correctly together and you might ask... why was this printed in white and the painted? Well I paid extra for the paint... but whey when there are excellent black filaments. Dunno and why not resin print this? Done right and that is superior to injection molding. More of this ace paintjob and the headphones falling apart but nice gold pins there as well. As for how they sound... well sound is produced but something is very wrong inside those drivers. They are far more inefficient than a stock unit and there is audible distortion... quite a bit of it actually. It gets worse and worse as you push the volume to normal levels for me so I'll have to take them apart and see if the drivers are misaligned. They are balanced between the channels though and at low level listening... these are not the worst ever. Now all of this is pretty terrible but clearly a work in progress and not done by some estat fanatics as one would suspect. The drivers don't really work (well they do produce some sound) and the quality is downright atrocious but funny enough, that crap cable does have strain reliefs on both ends which the aftermarket Stax cables do not have. Needless to say, best to stay away from crap too...

My nephew is doing a space walk (his first, the woman he's doing it with is on her fourth)! Live link, think it will be saved as well: Trying to watch while at work, very cool stuff!

Finished this morning, devoured at work.

Saturday was Pie Day so we had previously agreed to celebrate this week. So tonight I made but did not bake Taco Pie and also made the crust (and did bake) for a Chocolate Chess Pie.

Once again, a new wireless standard is rolling out. The ISOAL lossless audio codec sounds interesting... I doubt many manufacturers will implement it, since Apple AAC and Qualcomm aptX have bigger install bases: https://www.soundstagesolo.com/index.php/features/481-bluetooth-6-0-is-here-sort-of

"The speakers ARE the room treatment."

So, updates from our little shelter. Since cats are now used to find proper food whenever they're hungry, they are not coming in big numbers when we put food in containers. Also the time for remaking the upper side has come. We'll redo it this summer. Also recently we added a proper sleeping place for hard weathers. We modified an old bed base, isolated it, put some rags and cushions in it. Here are the most recent pics from visitors: We had our doubts if cats wants to use the shelter for sleep but as we can see from "biscuit" marks, they do. And Şanslı (Lucky). She was abandoned (by an ex neighbour, she is neutered), was hanging around our backyard. She was attacked by a dog or dogs. Dog caught her by her lower back. There was clear bite marks. She couldn't use her back legs but after long treatment and thanks to her will, now she is fine. Bad thing is she and Şirin cannot get along. So we made a proper place for her in the building, in front of our enterance. When Şirin is not at home or sleeping, she comes in and hangs out. We named her "Şanslı" cuz, well, she survived a very bad dog attack and recovered well.

for scale None of those chairs are in the sweet spot. But I did find a room for Ric.

Wake up babe, the GabeCube just dropped.

I started posting this in the ambient/IDM thread and quickly realized I was talking about cats, not ambient music. I have mentioned Martin Strutzer to my (sainted, octogenarian) mother a number of times over the years, specially how he does live ambient "jams" while his incredibly well behaved cat sits patiently beside him. She asked me to play a video of him performing, and I found this one on the YouTubes: The cat does its job to a T. I continue to be amazed how cooperative it is. Compare to my attempts to DJ with the "help" of Ozzie the cat some 15 years ago: I never DJ'd around Heidi the cat, but I am positive I know what she'd have done if I did. It would NOT be "sit there patiently and wait to be petted."

Which president would you respect more? What a fucking cunt. The second one, to be clear. Note: Brent's image won't load for me, so this may be partly repetitive.

This is how I found out Robert Mueller died today.

Happy birthday! I miss that particular hangout. 🍺

Nicholas Brendon (Xander from Buffy) died today too. Dammit.

RIP Chuck.

Bobby (the cat pictured in the beginning of this thread) was put down a year and a half ago. Skye (companion I got for Bobby in 2014) got sick the next month. I fed her through a feeding tube and saved her life. But not fully. She passed away a week ago. In my hands. I was heartbroken. She made this trilling sound -- like a pigeon cooing -- all the time, to get my attention. It was always very insistent. I heard it today. I started to respond (I make a version of that noise in response, to let her know, "I hear you."), but then I realized I will never hear that sound again from her. My heart broke all over again. RIP Skye (2014-2026)