The Blues Brothers - Soul Man

The 1980 film assembled an all-star cast of musicians.  This was perhaps the weakest song in the movie. 

How far back in time can you understand English?

The English language has evolved for basically as long as there has been English.  A great book on this subject is Robin MacNeil (and company) in The Story Of English (highly recommended if you are a history nerd like me). 

Well, via a link from someone I've forgotten (sorry! Midwest Chick? A Large Regular?) there is a fabulous demonstration of this where the writer starts in the present and where each paragraph goes backwards in time 100 years.  I started getting lost around 1200 AD, and I've messed around casually with Old English before.  I would catch the odd word before 1200 but the overall gist was a mystery.

And I love the URL for his site.  LOL.

But at the end of his post he links for a Youtube video of a guy who speaks the different versions of English, starting in 400 AD and going forward 100 years at a time.  I found this a lot harder than reading, only starting to pick up some comprehension around 1500 AD.  But when he turns on transcriptions it's amazing how far back I recognize a lot of words.

Wild.  I've embedded it here.  Highly, highly recommended. And I guess I'm not the only one who's interested - 1.2 Million views in two months?  Yowser.

New Zealand Navy grounding update

I posted about this 15 months ago. Midwest Chick has an update:

The New Zealand navy was so proud and happy to have a lesbian from Britain come on board that they gave her a $100M survey and dive vessel, which she crashed and sank.

The lesbian “diversity hire” captain of a Royal New Zealand Navy ship that ran aground and sank off Samoa has been charged with negligence along with two other officers over the loss of the vessel.

The $100 million HMNZS Manawanui, which was under the command of UK-born homosexual Yvonne Gray, crashed on the south side of Upolu on October 5, 2024, due to human error including failure to turn off autopilot, an inquiry found last year.

This is the official inquiry report which is leading to Commander Gray's Courts Martial.  Obviously the entirety of His Majesty's New Zealand Navy is a bunch of dirty misogynists ...

Midwest Chick adds this tidbit that I had missed:

This isn’t the first time that a NZ naval diversity hire damaged a ship. It happened in 2024 with a different female captain.

And that’s what happens when you choose diversity over competence. Wonder if the New Zealanders will actually learn from this??

Now maybe our own Navy could do something about our (multiple) female commanders who run into ships on the high seas. 

 

Bravo Zulu, Coasties

A cruise ship got stuck in the ice off Antarctica, and the Coast Guard (by chance) had an icebreaker nearby.  Well done. 

Country Comfort - Waimanalo Blues

I stumbled across this and like it.  Not sure if it's Country or not, but if it's finger-pickin' then you're at least Country adjacent. 

Tatiana Eva-Marie & Avalon Jazz Band - La Mer

11 Million views can't be wrong. 

Borepatch, you magnificent Bastard! I read your blog!

So Donald Trump seems to be following the ravings here.  Consider this post from December: 

In general, mid-term elections favor the party out of power.  This is true so often that it is almost considered a law of nature, particularly during a President's second term.  What you don't ever see is anyone ask why do voters reject the party in power in the mid-terms? There's quite a simple answer.

Fatigue.

The voters have had some time to get used to the Administration and starts to tire of the typical amount of scandal, incompetence, and general dum-assery that any administration accumulates.

That's not at all what we see today.  The main focus of the Trump 47 administration has been border security, deporting criminal illegal aliens, economic growth, and lower inflation.  There are remarkable results for all of these, despite the legacy media's frantic efforts to hide them.

Each of these are 80% issues - i.e. the issues all get 80% support in polls.

I would go so far as to say that the voter fatigue is on the other foot.  It's the Democrats who spent the last four years stumbling through a morass of dumb-assery.  And who are all on the 20% end of the issues that voters care about.

And here comes DJT with the State of the Union Address.  Here's the TL;DR version:

Boy, those Democrats are crazy, aren't they? 

You're welcome.

Johnny Horton - Battle Of New Orleans

We are fresh off of President's Day, and this is one of the few country songs that name-checks a President. 

Don't buy TP-Link home firewalls

This is pretty skeevy:

TP-Link is facing legal action from the state of Texas for allegedly misleading consumers with "Made in Vietnam" claims despite China-dominated manufacturing and supply chains, and for marketing its devices as secure despite reported firmware vulnerabilities exploited by Chinese state-sponsored actors.

The Lone Star State's Attorney General, Ken Paxton, is filing the lawsuit against California-based TP-Link Systems Inc., which was originally founded in China, accusing it of deceptively marketing its networking devices and alleging that its security practices and China-based affiliations allowed Chinese state-sponsored actors to access devices in the homes of American consumers.

Anyone who has ever ordered something from Amazon that looked like a good deal, only to discover that the photos weren't exactly depicting what you got - you know that the People's Republic of Chine (a.k.s. PRD, a.k.a. Red China a.k.a. West Taiwan) has a very different (dare we say "predatory") concept of truth in advertising than we do on these shores.

Me, I wouldn't buy one of these things on a dare.  FYI, they are something like 60% of the market because they're cheap. 

 

Photo Editing - A Tale in Three Pictures

 In the great digitization of all my family photos I came across this image.

 The story is that the boy in the picture was mad one day and he tore, crumpled, and poked holes in the picture. It was saved anyway because there not many pictures and you could still see the image.

I worked on it in GIMP, because Photoshop costs too much for how often I would use it, and managed, despite my woeful lack of skills, to get it looking like this.

  

 

This is how I put it in the archive I created, alongside the original. 

 

Recently, I read an article on using AI to repair damaged photos and thought of this image, so I gave it a try. The image I uploaded was this second image, the one I had labored over for a couple of hours. What I got back in about 90 seconds was this.

 

 

 

 

There's valid concerns about where all of this is going, and so much of the AI generated stuff on FB and YouTube is terrible, but this is amazing. I have a handful of pictures I scanned and saved because they seemed important to the family story in some way but are damaged, faded, or in need of color balancing. I'm hoping for more results like this.
 

 

Hallucinations come to Mass.gov

Okay, okay - Mass.gov has been hallucinating for years and years.  But now they're automating things:

Today, Governor Maura Healey announced the launch of the ChatGPT-powered Artificial Intelligence (AI) Assistant for the state’s workforce, with the goal of making government work better and faster for people.  

"Open the pod bay doors, HAL." 

Louis Jordan - You Can't Get That No More

Is this plausibly the first rap song?  Probably not because it's actually a fun listen. 

Spotted by The Queen Of The World.

Secure Your Home Network: Why Mint Linux?

I've recommended Mint Linux before, but this is a great overview of why users new to Linux should consider Mint.

Tomorrow we'll talk about how a seasoned IT guy has moved from Windows to Linux.  Spoiler alert: it's less technical work to make Linux work right than it is to make Windows work.