Saw this display at “Gifts from FL”, one of many cheesy-yet-charming gift shops in the more tourist-heavy areas of Orlando. Florida requires only a license plate on the rear, leaving the front free to personalize. Which one of these should I go with for my car?
Click the photo to read the story on NPR.
When New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern gave her first speech to Parliament after last week’s terrorist attacks on two mosques in Christchurch, she said this:
“That’s why you will never hear me mention his name. He is a terrorist, he is a criminal, he is an extremist. But he will, when I speak, be nameless.”
It’s an idea along the same lines as one expressed in 2015 in the webcomic The Nonadventures of Wonderella. Wonderella just makes it a little spicier:
Click the comic to read the whole thing.
And hey, even the American answer to Uday Hussein tweeted the same notion. His tweet pretty much mirrors his life: it has a great start, flounders mid-way just like he did in college, and ends like the dumpster fire that one would expect:
Click Diaper Don’s tweet to read it on the original site.
When very different people have the same idea in science, it’s called multiple discovery. Let’s follow the example of this sort of multiple discovery and not mention the terrorist by name. I myself will be following Wonderella’s advice and simply refer to him as “some asshole”.
Click the photo to see it at full size.
Thanks to Jeannie Cool for the find!
Patheos sums it up quite succinctly: Led by conservative Christians, Republican lawmakers in Idaho vote down legislation that would have ended child marriage in the state.
On Thursday, the state of Idaho’s Republican-controlled House of Representatives voted down legislation aimed to prevent children under the age of 16 from getting married. The bill would require the consent of…
Defenders of this terrible vote included Republican representative Bryan Zollinger…
“I do not think courts should be involved in marriage at all. I don’t believe there should be a license required to get married. I think two willing people should be able to go and get married.”
…and Republican Representative Christy Zito mentioned abortion, which is legal in Idaho before age 18 with approval from a parent or judge:
“It will then become easier in the state of Idaho to obtain an abortion at 15-and-a-half years old than it will to decide to form a family.”
Source: UnchainedAtLast.org. Click the image to see the source.
Click the photo to see it at full size.
My move from Toronto to Florida — five years ago! — forced me to really apply a rule I try to follow: if you’ve been hanging onto something and never use it, sell it or give it to someone who really needs it. I’ve had to use this rule more since moving from Toronto to Tampa, as the move required me to take only what I could fit in my old car, and because I didn’t want to treat my mother’s basement in Toronto like a free storage place forever.
In spite of this rule, I’ve hung on to one piece of clothing that I’ve had since 1999 and that I almost never wear. It’s a grey zippered sweatshirt, a photo of which you’ll see later on in this article. There’s nothing terribly bad about it; I like the color, but the cut’s all wrong, it’s a little too big, it has ridiculous snap-straps all over (in the photo, you can see one of them around the neck). While it’s perfectly serviceable, I don’t like it enough to keep it under normal circumstances. It would’ve ended up at the drop-off of a Goodwill or some other charity ages ago. But it remains with me, because it’s a special gift from my dad.
In 1999, my former high school classmate André Fenton was doing neuroscience research at the Czech Academy of Sciences and decided that he wanted to ring in the year 2000 by throwing a big New Year’s Eve party in the nicest place that he could rent somewhere near Prague.
He found a great place — Zamek Roztěž (although these days, it’s marketed as Casa Serena Chateau and Gold Resort). It’s a “hunting castle” originally built in the late 1600s in the village of Roztěž, located in the Kutna Hora district, about 80 kilometers (50 miles) east of Prague. I was invited to the party, and while there, had a grand old time:
Upon hearing that I would be staying at a castle somewhere in the central European woods in the dead of winter, Dad decided to surprise me by buying me something to keep me warm. That thing was the zippered sweatshirt, and he gave it to me just as he dropped me off at the airport to catch my flight to Amsterdam, and then Prague.
“I got this for you. I don’t want you to be cold when you’re in that castle.”
I thanked him for the sweatshirt, gave him a big hug, wished him a happy new year in advance, and told him that I’d send photos that I’d take with my still-newish digital camera (1024 by 768 pixels in super-fine mode!) to mom via email (he never had an email address).
It’s not really what I would’ve bought, but it’s big and warm, I thought, and it served me well on the flight, in the castle (which wasn’t all that cold — they’d been doing a fair bit of renovating), and especially well on a hike around the castle grounds with some lovely company on the night of January 1st, 2000:
Because I am a big ol’ sentimental softie, not only have I kept this sweatshirt that I don’t really like all these years, but I take it with me whenever I travel far to someplace cold, as a sort of comforting tradition. I wore it walking through the streets of Prague, while shivering on the slopes at Whistler while trying to figure out how snowboarding worked, when I was conducting mobile technology assessments in the bitter cold of Athabasca’s oil sands, and as I drove through the snow-covered hills of West Virginia on those chilly days of March 2014 as I moved to Tampa to be with Anitra. I brought it with me on our most recent trip to Toronto just after Christmas. It keeps me warm, not only in the physical sense, but also in the way that it reminds me of his kindness and generosity.
Me, in the “Dad sweatshirt”.
Dad died thirteen years ago today. But thanks to this sweatshirt that I normally wouldn’t be all that crazy about, I have a little bit of him that I can take with me when I’m cold and far from home. That’s why I’ll never part with it.