Pickles
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Pickles
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The Other Coast
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The Other Coast
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The Other Coast
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It’s not just millennials and social media. A lot of people ignore the news for their mental health. Things are really getting wild.
August 29, 2026
Country legend Dolly Parton received a Buckingham Palace tribute after her death aged 80, with military guards performing a version of her hit single 9 To 5.
Household Division officers performed the song on Wednesday morning, hours after the loss of the much-loved singer who had been suffering from cancer.
—Daily Mail
How neat is that?
August 28, 2026
I would never hire him to do work for me.
Betty
Do you watch YouTube videos much? I have been lately, often enough to actually pay to see them without ads. I hadn’t expected that to happen.
August 27, 2026
From Angus yesterday:
Sunrise. Two of the villages rather polite ( and usually apolitical ) seventy year olds are heading off in their little red Volvo. He a retired professor of economics, she a designer of fabrics for Harrods. They’ve prepared a packed lunch and will be joining a protest against the building of a data centre in a village on the road to Edinburgh. Scotland is an ideal location for these things. It has lots of wind power and no shortage of water to fuel and cool the servers. This combination has attracted droves of resource hungry AI companies. What is only now becoming apparent ( and generating unhappiness ) is the size of these things. The one they’re protesting against will cover 60 hectares and be 12 metres high. That will dwarf the wee place.
12 meters is about 40 feet, and 60 hectares is 148 acres. So presumably it would be an approximately four-story building covering about 6-10 square city blocks, about 84 soccer fields. Why would anyone object?
Angus also mentions the cruise liners he and his wife can see from their garden in the evening:
We stand by the garden wall looking out over the sea as the Orkney bound cruise liners twinkle like gin palaces in the gloaming.
The whole world is changing fast
August 26, 2026
In 1975, a movie filmed in Martha’s Vineyard made people afraid to go into the water. Today, a real animal in Martha’s Vineyard is making people afraid to go outside. “It’s gotten to the point now that grandparents are not allowing their grandchildren to come visit them,” said Sam Telford.
Kaitlin and Torben told me about this yesterday, and I read this article last night.
Scary stuff!
August 25, 2026
Some dogs like to chase squirrels.
But not all of them do.
August 24, 2026
We were at Cornell University for about 8 1/2 years — over fifty years ago. And I still remember the dogs and the squirrels. The dogs were always hopeful, but the squirrels always won. They would often wait until the last couple of seconds to scamper up the tree.
August 23, 2026
Cockroaches have reputaton for being resilient. They’ve been on earth about 320 million years, 100 million years before the dinosaurs. And they’ve survived multiple mass extinctions, including the one that wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. It’s hard to believe they won’t continue thriving.
August 21, 2026
