Unless Maine also repeals their use of instant runoff voting for the presidential election, their own votes won’t count toward the national popular vote. The compact makes no provision for counting ranked ballots, and there isn’t really any fair way to do so anyway.

I have a bolo tie whose slide ornament is carved anthracite.

I’ve never shoveled coal.

Bob said he’s coming, but Janice said they can’t make it.

The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson

It starts with the nameless narrator experiencing a near-fatal car crash due to his drug and alcohol induced hallucinations. During his lengthy recovery in the burn ward, he meets a psych patient who alleges their story begins 700 years ago in a German monastery. She tells him stories about their past in Germany, including how she obtained and translated a copy of Dante’s Inferno predating all known German translations. She tells other stories too, about a Japanese glass craftswoman, an Icelandic Viking, an Italian blacksmith, maybe some others, most of whom die young and tragically. She’s also a talented sculptor of stone gargoyles, a skill she allegedly learned from the narrator. The narrator suspects her stories are just the delusions of a schizophrenic, but can’t go back to his pre-accident life, so he agrees to go home with her to continue his recovery, and maybe learn a little more about her and why she’s taken an interest in him.

I’m about 3/4 through it and impressed with how it’s written. Unfortunately, I never read the Divine Comedy, so I’m pretty sure I missed some things that a better educated reader would have recognized.

Once, I made an account for something that let me write my own security question and answer. I thought that was much better than the usual options and wrote something that cryptically referenced a difficult problem I once worked on. The answer could possibly be found online, but only to someone who properly understood the question. Later, when I needed to authenticate myself again, I got my security question. The answer isn’t something you typically memorize, but I knew what the prompt meant and how to work it out so I did so.

But I was too slow. Apparently you had to answer within one minute. It took me about ten so it locked me out. Tech support helpfully reset my password after merely verifying my phone number and SSN which are probably known to thousands.

Seems simpler for the good people of Wisconsin to just vote on a new law that says whatever they think is proper. Obstetric science has advanced somewhat since the time when Ignaz Semmelweis first proposed doctors washing their hands before delivering babies (especially if they’d just come form the cadaver lab), so some of the reasoning behind the 1849 law might be out of date.

Unfortunately, that would require certain politicians to go on record about something that might be used against them if they later ran a national campaign, so better to let the court take the matter out of their hands and (mis-?)interpret an old law in a politically advantageous way.

Verge’s editorial standards may discourage printing out the f-word in question, but following the links shows it to be the f-word for homosexual, not the f-word for copulation.

Panera should go ahead and put prominent warning labels on it. Call it The lemonade so charged it killed [name of latest victim]. It might double sales of the product.

Are they keeping the loophole where you only have to discuss side effects if you also discuss the intended use?

I’ve seen an obnoxious trend in pharma ads where you get 25 seconds or so to guess what ailment the actors are concerned about from their demographics and general demeanor, followed by an instruction to “ask your physician if [brand name] is right for you too.”

Is Hiller Lake not pink anymore?

Two is the only even prime number, which makes it the oddest prime of them all.

I support giving convicts with death sentences the right to choose the means (within reason). Nitrogen hypoxia is probably more humane than most of the methods we’ve tried, although I personally prefer bringing back the guillotine. If we’re willing to kill a man for justice, we ought be willing to reject childish euphemisms (putting him to sleep) and make a bloody mess of it.

Might work for MD size states, but most smaller even EV states would split their EVs evenly, even if the state voted 60/40 one way or the other – while odd EV states would always cast a net vote for the winner.

For example, using the 2020 election numbers Trump would win if the election included only the following states:

• AK (R+10) Trump 2-1 Biden
• GA (D+0) Trump 8-8 Biden
• WI (D+1) Trump 5-5 Biden
• PA (D+1) Trump 10-10 Biden
• NV (D+2) Trump 3-3 Biden
• NH (D+7) Trump 2-2 Biden
• ME (D+9) Trump 2-2 Biden
• RI (D+20) Trump 2-2 Biden

I don’t know that it’s any nobler to for electoral influence to discriminate on the basis of even states and odd states than swing states vs safe states. Unless you’re also one of the group wanting to expand the legislature until there are no 4 and 6 EV states …

La Disparition by George Perec in French, translated to English as A Void. Neither version uses the letter ‘e’. I think the French original is better since the translator had to cheat a bit with the numbers (5 and 26 appear frequently for self-referential reasons, and when spelled in French don’t use e, but are translated as numerals.) but was still impressed. I read the side-by-side translated version, although I’m only marginally literate in French.

High hundreds for sure, maybe about 1000. Some on bookcases, some in boxes, some stacked on the floor.