I don't feel like I'm going to get covid. I don't know if wearing a mask on the plane helped or not.

1: good luck! I don't recommend it.

Seems like I might be starting to get better today

I am home sick with a shingles vaccine reaction. I can't remember ever having a noticeable reaction to a vaccine before, but this is miserable.

3: first shot or second?

First. Although the doc said the reactions are usually comparable -- if it's bad once, it'll be bad twice.

About to start the second meeting! These are really more like presentations.

Why are grand jury proceedings so secretive?

I guess everyone agrees with peep because no one was wearing a mask on the plane but me.

5: For me, the reaction to the 2nd Shingles shot was about twice as bad as the reaction on the first. But I didn't have much of a reaction to the first.

6.2: Because evidence is being presented by the prosecutor but there is no defense. So it's unfair to the ham sandwich. Or something. I'm not a lawyer.

That makes sense.

We just had a grand jury decline to press charges against a cop who killed a young man with a knife. (Two knives, technically. But the cops were clear that he did not have a gun. He was running away through a grocery store parking lot and they were maybe worried that he'd run into the grocery store? and chop some vegetables? idk.)

Anyway it seems like one of these cases where the well-worn ruts and channels of society are functioning normally to prevent any consequences of the shooting. I am going to be discussing this on the local blog so I'm trying to think it all through thoroughly.

I temporarily forgot the word "indict" but I now recall it.

The guy was trying to indict some vegetables?

Yes.

If there were people in the direction he was running toward and he had the knives out, the cops may have been right.

Maybe so. The young activists and the family aren't seeing that side, though.

Or they're keeping it to themselves at the podium.

If anyone has noticed I'm commenting a lot more than usual (I'm sure you all pay a lot of attention to this), it's because I'm working while traveling. My cousin's wedding, a general family reunion, and visiting some family and friends of Cassandane's as well. Unlike a pure vacation, I have a computer with me, and I prefer Unfogged on a computer to on a phone. But it's my work computer rather than my personal computer, so I have to keep my time-wasting SFW. Unfogged qualifies and very few other things do.

I sort of feel I should have taken an actual vacation instead of working a week of roughly half-days, but Cassandane gets a lot more PTO than I do.

I'm headed to Cologne tomorrow for the third of four weekends of clearing out relatives' former house. "It might take a year to sell," said the realtor. Guess what didn't take a year. Anyway, I hope the new owner's contractors are out for the day by the time I arrive.

Dust there has led to bronchitis, whee, so more-or-less working from home this week, and probably next week as well.

Anything still there on Sept 1 belongs to the new owners, so the porcelain and family photos definitely have to come to Berlin, the dining room table and then the two-meter teak sideboard having taken up most of the transport space in the first two rounds. A moving company would have cost easily twice as much and not been amenable to fine-grained supervision, so here I am. Wake me up when September starts.

If there were people in the direction he was running toward and he had the knives out, the cops may have been right.

I'm really hung up on this question, to be honest. The cops had been called because the kid was acting creepy - following people at a distance and generally exhibiting signs of mental illness and homelessness. The cops talked to the kid in a convenience store. He sort of rushes past them and runs into the night, and they follow on foot. They aren't close enough to taze him. He cuts across the parking lot and so one of the cops shoots him, 2-3x.

The argument I keep wanting to make is that:
1. he had been creepy, but not actually violent.
2. It's seriously unlikely that he would get to the grocery store after a long, full out sprint, and then have the energy and violence to start stabbing people.
3. And even if that was the course, the cops were seconds behind him, with a tazer. Just catch up and taze him.

I can't tell if that's sound, or if I'm just feeling so sad for the family (and especially the grandfather) who keep showing up and talking at city council meetings.

...and then have the energy and violence to start stabbing people

Conditioning is key. I feel sad for the family too, but my guess is that the grand jury is going to identify with the people in the store. I have no idea what the law says.

17: Condolences and best wishes. Clearing out a house is not easy.

If he'd actually been following people home and threatening them with knives, that is not great.

18: It sounds like this is a failure of the police department rather than the individual officer or grand jury. Once he's running towards a crowded place with a knife, shooting him doesn't sound wildly out of line. Maybe if the cops were more trained and equipped for de-escalation, they could have prevented that situation to begin with. The likelihood of that depends on details I don't have and maybe nobody does.

1. he had been creepy, but not actually violent.
2. It's seriously unlikely that he would get to the grocery store after a long, full out sprint, and then have the energy and violence to start stabbing people.
3. And even if that was the course, the cops were seconds behind him, with a tazer. Just catch up and taze him.

1. Granted, but this doesn't seem very important? Like, if the be-on-the-lookout included the phrase "he wouldn't hurt a fly" and the cop shot the kid anyway, that's bad. But my impression is that they usually don't include details like that.
2. My first thought on reading 9 is that the kid would get to the grocery store and take a hostage, because they'd relatively reasonably think they'd get shot otherwise, and that doesn't take as much energy as a stabbing spree. At that point a good cop trained in de-escalation would have to talk them down but it would still be harder and riskier before getting into a hostage situation. A merely human cop with the training they're likely to actually have would a decent chance of shooting someone other than the kid. So the cop really wanted to prevent the hostage situation entirely.
3. Tasers suck. They're a thousand-dollar toy so police departments can say they have nonlethal options, but for victims on drugs or with heart conditions they're almost as bad as guns, and they still encourage police officers to have adversarial relationships with the community. This is ex recto, I hope no one gets hung up on the exact percentages in "almost as bad as," but at the point where an officer is reaching for a weapon, I wouldn't worry too much about which one.

17: My wife is facing sale of her Dad's house at a distance; fortunately, her brother lives across town, but she doesn't want the full burden to fall on him just because he's local. She's heading out next week to help with his transition to a nursing home, then will work on sorting through what can be sorted. Fortunately, distance gives her a good excuse not to bring much back to CA, beyond photos and the like.

22: The individual officer might have failed too, but there's a big difference between "this could have been handled better" and "this is a crime". Especially for police officers.

20, 23: Thanks for the good wishes! This is a semi-happy clearing, as these things go. The relation who died passed several years ago; my semi-f-i-l, who is nearly 90, has found a smaller place where he can live on his own and be much closer to his surviving sisters.

Yes, those were the only two pieces of furniture that were really wanted, but both were serious items to move. My better half is the only child of an only child, so a lot of archival stuff is now funnelling down to us. Things like handwritten diaries from WWI, photos and documents from even before then.

In a previous round, we found a very large album of photos of extremely early flight tests by Junkers, apparently made and/or kept by a great uncle who had been an engineer for them. (And who spent several years doing similar work for the Soviets somewhere very easterly, as "living reparations" after the war.) That album went to the company's museum; I'm sure it was a unique document.

22, 24: this is helpful. It's just not as clear-cut as the activists wish it was, and I like to pander to them, but I'm going to have to be a grown up about this.

I would still be very tetchy about the difference between "they found a knife on his dead body when they searched it" and "he was brandishing a knife and threatening people with it." First, you can find a lot of things on a dead body, and even if he had them, I've got a knife on me fairly often. Mentally ill guy fleeing the cops isn't a mortal threat to anyone just because he has a knife in his pocket.

Maybe he was brandishing it and threatening people, but you haven't said he was.

Based on the chief's press conference, the story is that he was following some people at a distance, and loitering on the sidewalk when they went into a house. Not brandishing a knife at them, but holding the knives in his hand, and creepy enough that they called the cops on him.

By the time the cops showed up, he'd gone to the convenience store and was in the bathroom. He was holding the knives in his hands, I think? Big kitchen knives. But not brandishing them.

Apparently the cops followed de-escalation protocol by letting him go when he went for the door, and then the footrace began.

Yeah, that's more in the range of where it sounds to me like there's a good chance it could have been handled better, but plausibly not criminal.

It bums me out. Of course it's the actual death which is the sad part, but there's such a strong urge to transform it into a political issue to fight for, and sometimes these things are just murky or there isn't a bad guy, and then you're stuck with the sadness without the fight.

I sometimes suspect that activists are not good at being stuck with the sadness, without the fight, and complacentists are too quick to just shrug off the sadness and aren't moved enough to fight and transform things. Maybe no one is good at feeling sad, and everyone is just doing different things with it. This concludes another episode of Heebie's Deep Thoughts.

The reporting said:
"The police were called at 9:32 p.m. April 11 by a man who alleged he and another person had been threatened and assaulted by Williams, who was armed with two large knives. Williams had followed the pair out of a convenience store to their home, where the victims went inside and called 911."
https://eu.statesman.com/story/news/crime/2024/08/16/malachi-williams-san-marcos-police-officer-shooting-grand-jury-indict/74810242007/

Now presumably that's accurate in the sense of "there was indeed a 911 call in which someone said that" because 911 calls are recorded.

The contractors who came to fix my deck apparently left some nails lying around in my driveway, because I drove over one and flatted my tire. Worse, this caused me to miss my neurology appointment, which took me six months to schedule. I'm having a lousy morning.

The tire shop is just half a mile from my house, but because there are stores and things closer to my house I rarely walk around in this neighborhood. Anyway, I was thinking how seedy it has gotten here, streets full of people clearly tweaking or otherwise unwell in the midmorning, but looking for a place to sit I see that a cup of coffee around here is seven dollars and the cafes are filled with, like, actors in yoga pants. I mean, I'm just in a bad mood, but this city is so dumb and dysfunctional.

I'm sorry. That's awful.

31: I'm pretty sure the word "assault" is getting used because following someone with a knife qualifies, without there being an actual incident that we'd think of as an "assault". The people who called 911 didn't speak english, so they didn't use that word, and I remember from jury duty that threats count as assaults, and having a weapon elevates certain kinds of threats to the next level of severity under the law. And based on my memory of the chief's press conference and recounting the incident.

32/33 sounds shitty! I'm sorry about that.

I know! Seven dollars! Almost nine, including tax and tip!

I was in Texas last weekend and it is so hot that I think I would assume everyone wants to stab everyone else. The high in Pittsburgh today is more than ten degrees below the low in Dallas last Sunday.

We've recently had an incident similar to heebie's but significantly worse at least on the face of it. Cops shot and killed a 16-year-old girl in her home where they had been called after she was acting erratically and allegedly brandishing a knife. There's been a lot of protest and uproar especially since it's just the latest in a recent string of police shootings.

3. I had full blown shingles a couple of years ago, and I promise you that's worse. I still haven't recovered normal sensation on half my face and at my age I imagine I never will.

I believe it, but this is still impressively unpleasant. I have fun weekend plans and I had better be recovered by tomorrow.

5: I've heard of many people being fine with the first but finding the second hard.

We have a staff member who I secretly believe to be Kenneth Parcell from 30 Rock. He's giving a presentation right now, and the sheer amount of chuckling is amazing. I skipped out on the in-person version, and over zoom, I can't really hear the questions or comments from the audience. I just get the chuckling. So much chuckling.

We're now empty nesting it. It feels like a big change even though he was mostly not in the same room with us.

Someone paid for beer using their phone. Which is not something I realized was possible here.

I don't know how to pay for things with my phone. It kept asking me for a credit card, but I if Google wants my credit card, they can just look it up.

The tow truck and auto shop people were all very nice, at least. The past two days have been frustrating. Yesterday was spent at my parents' house, because over the course of the last forty-five years and my father's diminishing health and memory, my parents misplaced and forgot certain critical documents and details relating to my dad's federal pension benefits, and I needed to work with them to try to figure it out. It really felt like the call center workers at the Office of Personnel Management get a certain glee out of being obstructionist and unhelpful. I spent an hour on hold, only to be told by the person who finally answered my call that I had called the wrong department, and I should hang up and start all over again. When I asked for the phone number of the correct department, she gave me the number I had just dialed, the one that had led me to her. I finally persuaded her to transfer me to someone who could assist me (she at first claimed that she was prohibited from doing so). Anyway, I eventually got the information I needed, but it seems unfair that a task should be both so emotionally taxing and such a petty irritation. I'm going on vacation tomorrow, which can't come soon enough.

Vacation is nice. I took off a week because of the funeral and the college move in. But it's time off, not a vacation.

I am taking off tomorrow and Monday for a mini-vacation. My sister is visiting the States with her baby and my dad's family is doing a party for them in Arizona on Saturday.

Go and be avuncular.

My uncle told me the meaning of "avuncular".

32/47 That sounds incredibly taxing. Sending you good wishes and hoping things get easier.

If you miss a neurology appointment because of a flat tire, can't you just flatten the neurologist's tire so you can catch up.

I once knew a guy who was a brain surgeon, but he moved.

He's probably still a brain surgeon.

Trepanning might still be a thing.

UPMC only uses the highest quality drills to let the evil spirits out of your head.

I played "Fairytale of New York", but it hasn't aired yet because some asshole keeps boosting his Talking Heads.

The first Google engineer I ever met injured himself seriously because he picked up a knife by the blade. This was the best preparation life possible.

Is this the clearing out houses thread?

So we abandoned the second half of our holidays because of an emergency call that the opinionated academic's much (17 years) older sister had fallen and broken a hip. Expensive dash to Paris follows. She gets operated on and eventually transferred into physio rehab. Having put things in place we return home. And then learn she has unexpectedly died. Which nobody seems to have noticed despite being in a hospital. Second emergency dash. We get to organize a funeral in Paris in August during the Olympics, while clearing a flat because the landlord wants it back, and needing to get rid of a no kidding church grade organ. Cremation done; 700km road trip to the family vault in the Ardéche; en route back I managed to leave my work laptop on a train.

Here's your payoff for listening to this: someone in the funeral after us* had their phone go off during the wake. Minor, if it hadn't been for the fact their ringtone was Alicia Keys, this girl is on fire.

*nothing happens, notoriously, in France during August, but people insist on dying, which leads to logistical problems

My condolences.

60: Wow, the double trips and moving stuff in a hurry during the Olympics does sound like hard mode.

What a nightmare, Alex. Thinking of you and your family. And the person with the phone.

Holy shit. My better half allowed the buyer early access to the house for cosmetic repairs. They tore up the floor of the whiole ground floor, reduced the kitchen to bare walls and God know what all else I didn't see in the dark. I hope the money's in escrow already because this is *not* what I expected when I arrived to drive another load of family photos and heirlooms across Germany. Fuck me.

(I mean, nobody died, I can keep some perspective. But still.)

Maybe someone did die and they had to get rid of the wall coverings to clean the scene?

A scammer just called and said "I'm calling from your electrical company." So I asked him what electric company that was. He got rather pissing and eventually hung up on me.

65: Maybe! I am not looking under the rubble on the patio, so they're safe there. But I am going through basement, attic and garage in some detail.

63: I think the language barrier saved her; none of the French seemed to notice anything but every English speaker I've mentioned it to has cracked up

I was in Texas last weekend and it is so hot that I think I would assume everyone wants to stab everyone else.

It's been a much lower key summer heat-wise than last year but anyway it is SO much less stab-inducing to some of us than cold winters or long, damp Californian non-seasons.

Texas has cold winters though.

I am very sorry about many parts of that, Alex, and also quivering with curiosity about what you did with the organ. Pianos are hard enough to give away!

My sweetie and I are on the other side of this, having just bought property that was cheap partly because tired old dude let it fall into *such* disrepair. So much that it simplified our decisions; the house and well and septic are completely not rescuable, everything must go, clean slate planning. Kind of a pity about the 1920s little house, but honestly, even in the 1920s they should have known to dig the septic *downhill* of the well if they had to put them that close to each other.

That was after Einstein taught science how to pour piss out of a boot, but it took a while to notice because he wrote the instructions on the heel.

My condolences, Alex.

quivering with curiosity about what you did with the organ

Are we not doing phrasing anymore?

I can't catch everything.

I think we have bats in the attic. We heard the chirping yesterday afternoon. The wildlife management company agrees that that is probably what it is. They are coming out tomorrow to do an estimate. If it is bats, they charge $1350.

There is nothing that frightens me more than bats. I can't even watch television programs about them.

My youngest kid started her senior year of high school today, which is a bit surreal.

My sister's whole family had to get rabies shots because of a bat that lives in their house. I don't know why people have to get expensive shots instead of the vaccine baits they use for the raccoons.

Texas has cold winters though.

We do?? This is exciting. When do they start?

It happened in 2021.

It's been a much lower key summer heat-wise than last year but anyway it is SO much less stab-inducing to some of us than cold winters or long, damp Californian non-seasons.

I felt this way 30 lbs ago, but this extra insulation I'm now carrying has really warmed my globe even more than Big Oil.

77: That is wild. You're going to have so much time and money on your hands.

It's because the bats shit in your palm sap.

76: I had a housemate in college who was getting her doctorate in biology I think, but specializing in bats anyhow. At the time, it seemed like she knew as much about bats as any person I had ever met knew about any single thing, but I suppose she couldn't have even been the top bat person in Chapel Hill at the time.

I feel like I'm supposed to stare at 83 until the letters rearrange themselves.

So much money, other than the simultaneous college tuitions.

I haven't seen any, just heard them.

I'm not sure where to get eabies shots other than the ER. The clinic my hospital used to run that carried them closed.

We just had exhaust fans put in our bathrooms last week, and above the bathroom is where I heard them. I wonder if the electricians dislodged something when they were working up there.

When we put on a new roof, we put in the opening and pipe, so that's not new.

They literally throw rabies vaccines out of helicopters for the raccoons.

Bat limb development is pretty interesting-- for most mammals, getting samples that distinguish between fingers is a challenge, not so bat embryos. Also their immune systems are cranked way way up-- they live in dense groups and have a metabolic rate much higher than other mammals because they fly. Probably echolocation is interesting also...

Also don't they have some wild anti-aging features? I have a memory of a kid-science podcast along these lines.

Yes. They're born so ugly that aging doesn't show.

I just spent two and a half weeks on vacation. One week in Barcelona, then a week and a half in Maine. It was pretty splendid overall - first solo exploring, then hosting a ton of people in Maine, then several days of relaxing with just my mom.

Fruit bats are extremely cute!! They're like actual puppies with wings.

93: I just googled and found pictures of the fruit bats. I strongly disagree.

91: Heh

I found these tiny little rice grains on my bathrobe on which our cat had been sleeping and it turns out: she has a tapeworm. And on the drive back from the tennis court kid#2 was googling and filling me in on the biology (sample: cats get the tapeworm by ingesting a flea that is infected with tapeworm larvae) and while I think nobody is less squicked about biology (or bats, love em!) than I, it turns out that too many parasite facts might not be good to know. Especially when your cat has been shedding bits of those parasites who knows where around the house and bed. I'm mostly over it (and just picked up anti-worm medicine a half hour ago from the vet). But research with caution.

If you start referring to yourself as "we", I won't assume you've become royalty.

We have a sudden flea infestation in our living room, but no pets. Ugh.

I have two working theories right now. One is that an animal is living directly under our living room in the crawl space, and the fleas are coming from the animal. But I think more likely is that there *was* an animal living in our crawl space and the fleas in their sleeping area went dormant when the animal left, and then when we got back from vacation they all woke up and came out.

Could it be bats?

We've done the cat tapeworm thing. It's so, so gross.

Twice this summer a new thing has happened: literal maggots in the cats water bowl. All we can figure is that we changed the water in the morning, a fly laid eggs pretty soon thereafter, and by bedtime you can see wriggling maggots in the water. Cue all the puke emojis. It took awhile the first time to convince ourselves that it wasn't something that came from the cats. But apparently harmless even if ingested. More puke emojis.

I would be blaming the cats, too.

Don't they have cat water bowls that circulate the water to keep bugs out?

That might attract bats though.

Do cats not get preventive worm medicines like dogs?

Could be bats, I was guessing squirrel or possum though. Or maybe our neighbors outdoor cat who moved away over the summer.

Or mice, the bats of the ground.

The ground hog that lives under my neighbor's deck needs to die. It's eating my siding.

96 just don't research ascariasis and you should be fine

107. Wire cage traps are $60, they love cantaloupe.

The people who used to live there in 2010 tried that. They caught possums. Lots of possums.

I'm pretty sure bats are bugs.

The clear plastic binder is very convincing.

This isn't the sports thread, but I just got a shiny Pheromosa.

I'm pretty sure bats are baseball.

the ex of my good friend who is being treated for non-hodgkins lymphoma was told recently that he needs a couple more rounds of chemo beyond the first and a stem cell transplant. this seems like not great news for his medium term chances. my friend is handling the very limited amount of information she is getting from her ex and co-parent very graciously and apparently calmly. aaargh.

I have been told a Pikachu gives one "infinite electric". Am I to understand there is some kind of hamster wheel arrangement?

I figured where the bats hang out on the lake, so if I paddle to the right spot just after sunset, I can hang out while being surrounded by like 100 bats as they fly around eating their bugs and whatever.

107. Wire cage traps are $60, they love cantaloupe.

The feed store near us rents them for a few bucks/day.

So, they came and found some a little bit of bat droppings in ten Attic. They seal off any place they can enter and then figure out where they have been coming in and put up a bat exclusion device which allows them to leave but not come back in.

The guy was very helpful. I asked the tech guy how he got into the business, and he said he just kind of fell into it, that his old job was much more gruesome - forensics. I assumed that would mean some kind of lab, but it just means cleaning up dead bodies.

I asked him if they are vaccinated against rabies, and he said they only get vaccinated if they are bitten. This made me sad and feel guilty, because the way I read the CDC erecommendations, they should be getting it pre exposure. https://www.cdc.gov/rabies/hcp/prevention-recommendations/pre-exposure-prophylaxis.html

One time I had a bat fly out of my underwear drawer. That was pretty bad.

119: you shouldn't feel guilty, their employer should.

121: If I'd known, I would have gone with a different company.

The other company runs their vehicles on compressed kittens.

If the bats shit in Attic their anti-aging features are wild indeed.

I once helped a priest kill a bat.

-bat, +Methodist

Luckily the blog is now invisible to the internet, so that confession is unlikely to be noticed by the authorities.

Yeah. Ogged has really dropped the ball on publicly.

Anyway, confessions don't count if you're drunk.

I had a guest post idea, but it involved an Atlantic article and they mostly piss me off anyway. So I went to the bar.

De plus, il était trop grand pour tenir dans la marge.

Tout va bien, j'ai posé ce cable et je suis de retour chez moi á Brest. Comme ca: https://marine.orange.com/en/fleet/pierre-de-fermat/

Moi aussi, j'ai eu une idee pour un post de blog, mais d'avant il me faillait faire une grande pause, qui continue presqu'a ce moment.

We have kind of a dumb, frustrating situation.

Ace is getting tongue tie surgery (frenectomy) to help with some ongoing speech issues. The way the speech therapist is having us do it is that Ace does all these exercises for 4 weeks before the surgery, and then more exercises for 4 weeks after the surgery, and then actual speech therapy starts. And these exercises are time consuming - it takes about 30 minutes, and it's supposed to be 4-5x/day. On school days, Ace manages 3x/day, but still. You get the idea.

Ace's surgery was scheduled for Sept 6th. Recently the doctor had to go on bedrest for her pregnancy. I panicked a little because they told us she'd be taking clients again in November. Speech therapist recommends Surgeon B at a different practice, who can get us in pretty immediately, so Ace doesn't have to do months and months of these stupid exercises. Great.

Speech therapist reaches out to Surgeon A, to send the records to Surgeon B. Surgeon A says that she's had the baby (which was due in October, so it's very preemie) and she really, really wants to keep Ace as a client. (I don't understand this, but ok.) She wants to come in and just do a few frenectomies on September 18th.

I ask Ace if they prefer doing the exercises until the 18th, or scheduling sooner with Surgeon B. Ace says they want to stay with Surgeon A. Ace likes Surgeon A, who is very warm and fuzzy. It's worth doing the exercises for a few extra weeks.

So fine, it's settled. But in the back of my mind, I'm thinking: This woman just had a preemie? Is she sure that she's going to want to come in and do frenectomies in a month? In order to keep a patient who lives over an hour away? This does not seem like a good plan. Bleagh.

I have covid. Second time. Seemed to have gotten through the fever though and now have no real symptoms other than feeling shitty.

At least it's not bubonic plague from the fleas.

134: With frenectomies like that, who needs any pregnancies?

136: Bubonic plague from fleas is bad, but some survived even before modern medicine. Pneumatic plague can be spread from person to person directly and is more deadly.

I mean, covid is still better than any kind of plague. So, good choice.

And an additional grievance is that we have a second, separate appointment with the orthodontist in Austin that I put on the same day as the frenectomy, so we're now trying to re-schedule to the new date. But this adds to the amount of logistics that are riding on the fact that a new mom with a preemie baby wants to be back in the office 3 weeks after giving birth.