Even before [the DeSantis Campaign's] official launch, the campaign and its allies were conducting polls and focus groups to test various anti-Trump messages. Across several months, the source familiar with the campaign said that it consistently struggled to find a message critical of Trump that resonated with rank-and-file Republican voters. Even attaching Trump’s name to an otherwise effective message had a tendency to invert the results, this source said. If a moderator said that the COVID lockdowns destroyed small businesses and facilitated the largest upward wealth transfer in modern American history, seventy per cent of the Republicans surveyed would agree. But, if the moderator said that Trump’s COVID lockdowns destroyed small businesses and facilitated the largest upward wealth transfer in modern American history , the source said, seventy per cent would disagree.
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Doorway effect
The 'doorway effect' or ‘location updating effect’, is a known psychological event where a person's short-term memory declines when passing through a doorway moving from one location to another when it would not if they had remained in the same place.[1] It claims that we tend to forget items of recent significance immediately after crossing a boundary[2] and is often experienced by forgetting what one was thinking about or planning on doing upon entering a different room.[3] Research suggests that this phenomenon occurs both at physical boundaries (e.g.
, moving from one room to another via a door), and metaphysical boundaries (e.g., imagining traversing a doorway, or even when moving from one desktop window to another on a computer).[2]
I forget how I found this.
Dirty Thoughts
I bought some topsoil to level off a few low-spots in our yard. I figured one yard would be plenty, since the spots weren't very big. So I called a local landscape supply company and they said it would be $28 a yard, with a delivery fee of $45. So, I ordered two yards to be safe.
I noticed their website said a yard of soil weighs 1.3 tons. I assumed I was misunderstanding. How could 3x3x3 feet of dirt weigh 2,600 pounds?
They delivered it. And there it was - two yards, 54 cubic feet, of dirt - sitting on a tarp in our driveway. Didn't look very big. Didn't look very heavy. So I filled up my wheelbarrow with a load and... oof. Yes, it was heavy. Then I believed what the website said. I had 5,200 pounds of dirt in my driveway. And it's 95 degrees out all week.
That, and a summer of too many funerals, got me thinking...
Assuming a grave is six feet deep, six feet long, and three feet wide, and assuming a coffin is 6 feet long, three feet wide and two feet deep, you'll need 72 cubic feet of dirt to fill the hole after the coffin is in there (6 x 4 x 3). That's 2.6 cubic yards. That's almost 7 ,000 pounds of soil. Zombies must be far stronger than movies give them credit for.
(h/t russell with the math check!)
Fact check
No, Montgomery Brawl wasn't caused by 'witches' opening portals
Heads I Win, Tails You Lose
A conservative legal group led by a former adviser to Donald Trump is suing Target over shareholder losses in the wake of boycotts of its Pride Month displays.
Fuck Texas
Children are being traumatized by rainbow flags and posters of multi-racial children holding hands, say trustees of the Conroe Independent School District (CISD) of Texas. The trustees now want more strict rules around classroom displays.
Even though the district already has a policy prohibiting political displays unrelated to curriculum , CISD trustee Melissa Dungan said she wants a more restrictive “crackdown” by trustees on such displays, KTRK reported.
Duggan said “a number of parents” had contacted her about “supposed displays of personal ideologies in classrooms.”
“I wish I was shocked by each of the examples that were shared with me, however, I am aware these trends have been happening for many years,” she told her fellow trustees at a recent meeting.
When asked about these “trends,” Dugan mentioned a first-grade student who was reportedly traumatized after seeing a poster of people of different races holding hands. The traumatized child, according to Dugan, had to change classrooms.
Ladies And Gentlemen: Judaeo-Christian Values
It was the result of having multiple pastors tell me , essentially, the same story about quoting the Sermon on the Mount, parenthetically, in their preaching — "turn the other cheek" — [and] to have someone come up after to say, "Where did you get those liberal talking points?" And what was alarming to me is that in most of these scenarios, when the pastor would say, "I'm literally quoting Jesus Christ," the response would not be, "I apologize." The response would be, "Yes, but that doesn't work anymore. That's weak." And when we get to the point where the teachings of Jesus himself are seen as subversive to us, then we're in a crisis.
We're still going to let them tell us that their religion must determine how we apply laws though, right?
La vie en rose
Let's listen to Emmet Cohen and Cyrille Aimee!
You're welcome.
In The Grotto
At the Ave Maria Grotto in Cullman, AL- home of the in-laws.
Here are a few pictures of a large collection of miniature Catholic folk art works done by a Benedictine monk in the first half of the 1900s. It's all made with donated materials like dishes and figurines and jewelry , shells, bits of glass, tiles, cement - whatever he could get.
There are many small scenes that duplicate churches or shrines from around the world , and then large sections dedicated to Rome and the Holy Land.
Quite a sight.




Shocking
In recent years, research showed that many professionals consider their work to be socially useless. Various explanations have been proposed for the phenomenon. The much-discussed “bullshit jobs theory” by the American anthropologist David Graeber
, for example, states that some jobs are objectively useless and that this occurs more frequently in certain occupations than others.
