A few things… with a special message for IOWA

A few things..

Those of you in Iowa… no matter the weather, please go caucus.  I suggest that you caucus for Bernie Sanders even if you are GOP or other.  Operation Chaos!

Are you as annoyed with PDFs as I am?  It seems that if you want to do anything online these days you are showered with PDFs.  I’m sick of them.

Why give money to Shriners Hospitals for Children (their commercials irritate me) when you can give to St. Jude’s Children’s Hospitals?

This day in history in 1884 the OED debuted.  It is also the day in 1790 when Chief Justice John Jay presided over the first meeting of the SCOTUS. Puccini’s La Bohème premiered in Turin in 1896 and the space shuttle Columbia broke up during its reentry in 2003.

Don’t miss Andrea Gagliarduci’s Monday Vatican today.

Do pop ups on webpages vex you?  They vex me.

The etymology of “caucus” is uncertain. Dictionary.com says: “1755-65, Americanism; apparently first used in the name of the Caucus Club of colonial Boston; perhaps < Medieval Latin caucus drinking vessel,Late Latin caucum < Greek kaûkos; alleged Virginia Algonquian orig. less probable ”  Same HERE

On the recommendation of a friend, today I checked out a local Bavarian sausage company aptly named called The Bavarian Sausage Company.

 

About Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

Fr. Z is the guy who runs this blog. o{]:¬)
This entry was posted in SESSIUNCULA. Bookmark the permalink.

13 Comments

  1. benedetta says:

    Good to know, Father, and thanks for that.

    As for myself I am caucusing for Bernie from within the confines of my consciousness, many light years away from Iowa. I am caucusing for Bernie, because, I believe in the future. I also believe I can fly. I believe I can touch the sky. I think about it every night and day, to flap my wings and just fly away…Etc.

  2. benedetta:

    Yes, caucus for Bernie! Take all the support away from whatsherface that you can even before she’s indicted.

  3. MarylandBill says:

    I am not in Iowa, but when the election gets to Iowa, I probably will vote for Bernie (given I am still registered Democrat… being it is the only way in MD to really hope your vote will have an impact). Aside from all the other issues, I have a real problem with our recent trend to elect family of previously elected politicians to office. Despite her qualifications or lack there of, do you believe that Hillary would have had her first elected office be as Senator if she had not been former President Clinton’s wife? Or that either of the Bush’s would have been elected Governor of their states?

    That being said, If I was registered with the GOP, stopping Trump would probably be equally high on my agenda. I honestly think that he ultimately will say and/or do anything to attain power and he won’t reveal what he really believes until he is in office.

  4. benedetta says:

    MdBill, “what he really believes” …

    That is sort of the major question, for all of the candidates. I mean, remember back in the day when Obama said that he would dialogue with prolife? Hmmm, good times…As a bona fide Bernie shill though who wants to keep HRC out of office, what does “believe in the future”, which is Bernie’s slogan du jour, mean to you exactly?

    I have to say a lot, I mean a lot of people, where I am seem to be earnestly caucusing for Bernie, you know, from afar, and out on the byways and highways. God Bless’ Em!

  5. Federico says:

    @FrZ: “Why give money to Shriners Hospitals for Children (their commercials irritate me) when you can give to St. Jude’s Children’s Hospitals?”

    Both are worthwhile institutions.

    The answer is that Shriner’s treats gruesome burns (that they don’t even show in the commercials) and orthopedic problems that nobody else does, and never charges families a dime.

    Oh, and one of Shriner’s Hospitals burn centers airlifted my then 12-year-old son in and saved his life and his eyesight….

    [I asked. You answered!]

    Fr. Z's Gold Star Award

  6. TC says:

    Yes, I hate pop-ups!
    Thanks to AdBlock I no longer see adverts for products but apparently there is no stopping pop-ups from a site itself, thus one is barraged with “Please Turn Off Your Adblocker”, “Sign Up fo Our Email List” and the pathetic “Don’t Go Yet!”

  7. aegsemje says:

    Shriners deals with different illnesses/conditions than St. Jude’s. My son was born with Osteogenesis Imperfecta (brittle bones). He had 8 fractures at birth. He died of a blood infection at just 5 weeks old, but by that time, I had already heard from 3 Shriner’s hospitals offering to treat him with the best treatments available…..and for free! They seemed like a great hospital to me. By the way, my little guy was well prepared for heaven….he was baptized, confirmed, and received the Precious Blood on his tongue before dying.

  8. mtharnish says:

    Correct me if I’m wrong but American Life League gave St Judes Hospital a negative rating for its involvement with embryonic stem cell research.

  9. aquinasadmirer says:

    This is St. Judes medical that ALL is talking about. they are a med equipment and service company.

  10. The Cobbler says:

    Popups are so bad that most browsers these days have a popup-blocking setting built in, no plugin necessary. Of course, you may have to dig through the advanced and/or security-related settings to find it. And it’s apparently not guaranteed to block everything, though I couldn’t say exactly why not.

    If all else fails, or if the ads on a site slow it to a crawl or reload the page every time you get halfway down the article you’re reading, the last-resort, sure-fire fix is to read the site in Lynx. A tip for programmers and other particularly tech-savvy types: if you’re using Windows and have Cygwin, you can get Lynx in Cygwin’s program installer (I think it might even be among the default set of programs installed, I’m not sure). (If you’re a programmer using Windows and you aren’t already familiar with Cygwin, that’s also a situation to go fix — you’ll find the combination of grep and sed helpful if nothing else, and chances are you’ll find something else invaluable once or twice, as there are powerful Unix/Linux commandline tools for pretty much everything.)

    Unfortunately, I have no such simple solution for PDFs. It’s sort of amazing how they continue to be popular, but I suspect that’s partly because we don’t have (to my knowledge) any high-quality editors with the right document-centric approach for HTML (the file format of web pages, which, ironically, can also be used as documents outside of websites — they display in your browser just like a webpage does). Fixing this situation is on my to-do list, but it’s a rather lengthy to-do list…

  11. The Cobbler says:

    (I should clarify that the tip about Lynx via Cygwin isn’t strictly necessary — the Lynx webpage has other sources for Windows builds of Lynx — it just might be more convenient for those also using Cygwin.)

  12. The Cobbler says:

    One last thing:

    Remember the scene that gave us the immortal, “Coincidence? I think NOT!”?

    That scene also contained the exchange:
    “Bernie…”
    “Don’t ‘Bernie’ me!”

  13. WYMiriam says:

    Father Z, did the Bavarian sausage at the aptly named The Bavarian Sausage Company meet with your high standards? And if so, will it be featured in one of your famous meals with the recipe being posted on the blog? :-)

Comments are closed.