Thursday miscellanea #98

• I’m working on the main Oshkosh air show post.  I’ll have it up this weekend.  Thanks for your patience.
• We got brief, rain-generated respite today, and we have a chance for more tomorrow.  After that, it’s straight back to 100º next week.  Go away, August.
• Reggie Gibbs has written a few pages on his recent trip to North Korea, and it’s riveting.  Read Five Days in Pyongyang.
• The boys start back to school next week.  “They”‘ve taken almost a whole month of summer break away since I was young.  Kids really only get June and July anymore.  I’ll refrain from making a snarky comment about the relentless march of the state, but rest assured I thought it.
• Here’s an inadvertently hilarious piece on artisanal ice cream—made with only organically grown this, rare strains of that, free range chicken, and so forth.  “Since when is ice cream so expensive?” someone whines in the article.  Hey, lady?  If you don’t want it, don’t buy it.  Capitalism is still (mostly, for now) the way it works.  For your $10, you can have three tubs of mass-produced, or two scoops of “artisanal.”  God bless entrepreneurship.  God bless choice.
• Did you know that Karen Carpenter considered herself a drummer first, and a vocalist second?
• That I can recall, I haven’t had anything public to say about the proposed mosque near Ground Zero.  Now I’ll say that if you’re in favor of it or ambivalent about it, you need to thoroughly research exactly who’s building it.
• I’m making new lists of semi-defensible fast food items, and looked up a Taco Bell Soft Taco Supreme today.  It’s down to 240 calories.  I think that number was significantly higher quite recently.  (That’s how they raise the price without raising the price.)
• Nathan’s getting his first aquarium soon.  I remember mine so fondly.  Dad was/is a very experienced aquarist, and was just perfect with me on it.  I’m really looking forward to being the dad this time through.

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