Rangoon

@cosyposter Thought the toaster was on fire for a second

So if I don't have a passport I don't have to pay my child support?

@SteveNomadic @Nomadic_OMD Y'all are about to get real busy. See you flying N725NK out of bush already

Pat Lewis ⬇️ @Nomadic_OMD

🤣🤣🤷‍♂️

You buy a German anvil. It contains 83 moving parts and requires winding twice a day. It's forged from excellent steel, holds tolerances across all three striking faces to within three microns, includes a beautifully indexed horn-adjustment mechanism nobody asked for, and requires a proprietary 11-point spanner should you need to replace the rebound calibration bushing. It runs flawlessly for years, but one day it starts up in limp mode because the onboard anvil-management system detects that it's overdue for its 50,000-strike inspection. You search AliExpress for a Chinese anvil, and are presented with a multitude of offerings from such household-name brands as DUKXJYIBF, HDBTGMXI, AND UEJQIP. They're all priced to within a few pennies of each other, appear completely identical except for the nameplate, and obviously all came out of the same factory. You text your blacksmith friend to ask if they're legit. He tells you he got one like that from KIXJBU a few years ago, and that it's been great and a terrific deal. You thank him, but KIXJBU seems to have folded so you buy the one from UEJQIP. When it arrives, it feels suspiciously light. You scratch it and realize it's iron-plated aluminum. You buy an American anvil. It's five times the price of the competition, but it comes from a brand that your great-grandfather used to love. It comes boxed with a warranty registration postcard, twenty pages of safety instructions, assay certificate, and a regulatory slip which lists its FCC certification and ITAR registration. It looks just like your friend's KIXJBU. There's a "Made In China" sticker on the bottom. You buy a Russian anvil. It arrives coated in cosmoline, wrapped in newspaper from 1974, and weighing 40% more than advertised. The finish looks like it was machined with a shovel. The face is not flat, but somehow this does not matter. You drop it off a truck, accidentally leave it outside for six winters, and use it to straighten a bulldozer blade. It's fine. You buy a Swedish anvil. It comes flat-packed in a long cardboard box with cheerful Neo-Grotesk lettering and a line drawing of a smiling man assembling it with an Allen key. The instructions contain no words, only pictograms showing the anvil face, horn, waist, feet, and 112 identical-looking fasteners. Halfway through assembly, you discover that the pritchel hole was installed upside down, but only because you used peg B17 where you should have used peg B71. Once assembled, it is clean, stable, and works better than it has any right to. You immediately wonder whether you should have bought two. You buy a Japanese anvil. It arrives wrapped in rice paper inside a paulownia box, accompanied by a certificate bearing three generations of signatures and a photograph of the first production example being presented to the Emperor. The face has been hand-polished by a seventy-eight-year-old master whose family has made striking surfaces since the Muromachi period. You are given detailed instructions for oiling it with a cloth folded in a specific way. It is the most beautiful object you own. You never quite work up the nerve to strike it.

Lots going on at St. Louis International Airport

Here's a lawsuit filed today about "the Ferrari or Prada of canned tomato varieties." We're talking about San Marzano tomatoes, of course. California consumers say that Cento Fine Foods falsely advertises its tomatoes as being "Certified San Marzano." The tomatoes allegedly are "inauthentic, and indeed illegal in Italy." ICento was ejected from the Italian Consortium that approves San Marzano tomatoes in 2011. The Consortium "is the only entity which can certify and approve San Marzano tomatoes." Following an Italian police raid of Cento's operations in 2010, a manager was convicted of criminal fraud for selling counterfeit tomatoes. Yet Cento continues to give the "false impression that [its product] contains Consortium certified San Marzano tomatoes."

@Tutrifour And they were doing so well!

Probably shouldn't be driving 50 mph in such conditions.

top 5 CNBC clips of all time

@KHOU Is there a candlelight vigil scheduled?

After 20 years, a devoted parker says goodbye to the garage she counted on every day. The Avenida South Garage has officially closed to make way for the George R. Brown Convention Center expansion. khou.com/article/news/l…

@astrooalert Why is the sunlight *behind* the ISS? Why is the ISS transiting so slowly (slowest moon transits are around 1.5 seconds, with most significantly faster)? (It’s because this is fake) Here’s a real one!

I don’t know why Spirit went bankrupt. It’s complicated & there are many factors, but trying to blame it on high fuel prices is not accurate. Delta & United aren’t going bankrupt. Rather, it’s the Ultra Low Cost Carriers (ULCC) that are having issues. Allegiant, Frontier, Spirit. Why? That’s not entirely clear to me, either, but United CEO Scott Kirby has been predicting this for years. The thought is that rising labor costs make that “discount” ticket unsustainable, and that customers are willing to pay a little more for a better experience. The mainline airlines have their own basic economy seats that compete with ULCCs, coming close on price, but bookings on their premium products make the operation sustainable. Well, that and their credit card programs. The joke that airlines are actually credit card companies that fly jets on the side is not too far off. In the eyes of Wall Street, the credit card programs were more valuable than the airlines themselves when the pandemic hit. In any event, the ULCCs are in trouble in the U.S.. There is a pivot, with airlines like JetBlue & Southwest going away from this model. ULCCs still work in Europe, but the conditions are different there. In any event, Spirit & others were in trouble long before fuel prices surged. Other airlines are still profiting despite the fuel prices. While I can’t show you the books, I can say that this has been a long time coming & isn’t that surprising. Sad, yes, but I don’t know what else could be done.

Notice a ghost driving an 18-wheeler northbound on I-45 last night? For the first time, a fully driverless truck delivered freight from Houston to Dallas and a lot more are on the way.

There's a common misconception that Brutalist buildings were unpainted, but thanks to microscopic analysis of the exteriors we can now recreate what they looked like in their prime.

As I get older the more I realize the homeless are not some unfortunate Bubba angels but more often than not genuinely evil people

(casually) "oh yah you mean HDMI Type E"

@DocStrangelove2 No building permit

I could swear Outdoor Boys talked about why this is actually a really bad idea for a variety of reasons.

@DigitalEU Any idea what 🍆 🍑 mean? My wife’s work colleague keeps sending her this

@RBeansTx @slocumfortexas Mostly true, but downtown is different block to block. Northwest part is where you want to be.

@opopinionus @slocumfortexas Downtown is downtown. The damn homeless people are rough there too

If you live in Houston, chances are you have had a vehicle broken into before. I’ve had SEVEN tailgates stolen off of ONE F-250 since 2013. SEVEN @ $4,000 for a new tailgate = $28,000 in tailgates alone