See, that’s the thing: It’s the passing lane, not the fast lane. A lot of semis are speed governed to 65MPH, so if I’m doing the 70MPH speed limit, I need to use it to pass them.

Think of it like chemotherapy, when you have to invest poison in order to get better.

The left lane, and how no, it’s not for going as fast as you want to drive.

They’re missing out, then.

Villagers: Let’s sacrifice a virgin to the volcano god.

Virgin: Help me, step-bro!

“Plot”: proceeds as one would expect

Yeah, the real question about him: Does he accept his payoff in rubles, or is he the kind of two-faced mercenary who demands dollars? (I know my guess.)

I left my bathroom clock on standard time, because it’s hard to reach. Now I have to remember that it’s correct again.

That last but is almost NMEA 2000, which standardizes exactly that kind of information, but in boats. It’s old enough that they based it on CANbus, but there are many repeater products to add IP devices (Ethernet, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth) to the network.

ETA: By which I mean to say, plenty of designs already exist in the marine market which could be used to bridge a car’s CANbus to consumer devices, if they wanted to.

I used to know a woman named April, and her two daughters are May and June. (Both still under age 12.)

A lot of people do, it just got me in this case because the meaning of break lined up with the action of turning onto county roads, so I thought it was some special thing.

True story. I remember back in the bad old days when Firefox had notorious memory leaks, so when building my latest PC, I put in 32GB. The monitor app on my desktop has only ever topped out at showing 30% of memory allocated.

We couldn’t get new parts from Yugoslavia, for some reason.

Oh, I was thinking of the definition of break, “a noticeable change in direction,” not brake, “to slow or stop by or as if by a brake.” Got it!

They break harder? I’m not familiar with this term, is it a regional thing?

That would explain my first experience driving in Massachusetts. We came down from New Hampshire to pick up a family member at Logan. At one point, I got onto the freeway from an entrance ramp on the right, into stop-and-go traffic, with about 1/4 mile to the left exit ramp I needed to take to the airport. I put on my signal; immediately somebody let me merge. Signal again; immediate merge into the middle lane. Signal and merge into the left lane, again right away. I’d heard about Massholes, so this was perplexing.

Now I understand: They were dazed and confused by the strange, blinking light!

Funny thing, when I moved in, my last apartment had a refrigerator that was made in Yugoslavia. It died.

Back in 2020, I read op-eds from several pundits who worried that choosing Biden was a mistake, as he ran on a platform essentially of returning politics to “normal.” They worried that once he won, people would settle back into the old routines, and forget about the simmering fascist threat and do diddly about it. I remember this well, because I feared the same.

That’s pretty much what happened. Credit to the House January 6th special committee for finally forcing Merrick Garland to get off his ass and do a something about the insurrection… 2 years later. (Which made it easy to delay the trial until after the next election.) That’s about it, though. Hell, this wasn’t difficult to predict, given the way that Obama decided to “look forward” and not hold Bush administration officials accountable for their crimes.

That is to say, if Harris wins, I predict more of the same. Folks on the blue side will breathe a sigh of relief, make excuses for why they can’t act, and do their best to forget about it until the next most-important-election-in-history. We (Americans) don’t have a plan to deal with it, and they’ll instead just get angry and call you and me disingenuous, or Russian bots, for pointing it out.

That really hurt the elephant’s feelings to be always singled out, so no wonder.

Maybe it’s genetic, but also, my skin improved vastly after I stopped doing the things that harm it, primarily long, hot showers, scrubbing/exfoliating, and overuse of strong soaps. Plus, bonuses like no more oily hair, no more stinky socks, and greatly reduced pit odor. These things are backed up by good science; I just saw a WaPo article the other day with these recommendations from dermatologists. I see a lot of talk about exfoliating, and I know from experience that most people take long, hot showers, so I figure it’s worth passing that information along.

That is my answer, though. I shower in lukewarm water and a little bit of dilute Castile soap where needed, and wear wide-brimmed hats in the sun. I get compliments on my skin softness, people guess that I’m 10 years younger. Honestly, it seems to me that a good half of people’s elaborate skin-care routines are just trying to undo the damage caused by the other half. Our skin is really remarkable in taking care of itself, if you let it.

And, eliminate Euclidean zoning in the U.S., so that people can live near where they work, or work near where they live. (Not all of us can do it, or like working from home.)