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Doing something we haven’t tried in around a decade: a full day at a park for the 4th. Got here early enough to find good parking, have claimed a prime fireworks viewing spot, and have food, books, card games, and people watching to last us through the day. Should be a good one! Have a good #fourthofjuly everyone.

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Patches (as we have dubbed this very friendly neighborhood cat) decided that Prairie’s lap was the place to be, caring not one whit that poor Prairie is allergic and would immediately have to go change clothes. “It was worth it,” says Prairie. #cat #kitty #catsofinstagram

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Ronald pounds desperately against the glass, trying to escape before the building collapses around him…. #mcdonalds #ronaldmcdonald #urbandecay #construction

Linkdump for May 28th through June 15th

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Sometime between May 28th and June 15th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

  • Why is English so weirdly different from other languages?: No, English isn’t uniquely vibrant or mighty or adaptable. But it really is weirder than pretty much every other language.
  • PureText: Have you ever copied some text from a web page, a word document, help, etc., and wanted to paste it as simple text into another application without getting all the formatting from the original source? PureText makes this simple.
  • Let’s Be Real: Americans Are Walking Around With Dirty Anuses: “I find it rather baffling that millions of people are walking around with dirty anuses while thinking they are clean. Toilet paper moves shit, but it doesn’t remove it. You wouldn’t shower with a dry towel; why do you think that dry toilet paper cleans you?”
  • The Racist History of Portland, the Whitest City in America: All in all, historians and residents say, Oregon has never been particularly welcoming to minorities. Perhaps that’s why there have never been very many. Portland is the whitest big city in America, with a population that is 72.2 percent white and only 6.3 percent African American.
  • No more ‘product of its time,’ please:I don’t think that we should hide texts with troubling elements. They are part of the literary canon and they have influenced us, for both good and ill. We should definitely be reading them, and we should also be talking about them. A lot.
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Cleaning up Prairie’s old G4 #iMac to be given away. These were such adorably cute machines! And it’s fun to be using MacOS 10.4.11 again, with its stylish brushed chrome UI. Kind of sad to be letting this go, really, but we haven’t used it in six years, so it’s better to let it go in the downsizing.