Lee.org

Cunk on Life is so funny!

Read how a major nonpartisan medical organization describes how Trump and RFK Jr’s cuts are making medical care in America decidedly less safe. Remember how much more risky surgeries were in years past? THIS organization has been making them safer. And they’ve still got a lot of work to do to!

This is just one of many articles Medscape has written recently about problematic policies (read: killing Americans) enacted by the new presidential administration. It’s like Trump is trying to save the people a few bucks by removing the seat belts from our cars.

From the article

“If you’re going to spend $5 trillion a year on health care, it would be nice to know what the best use of that money is,” said a senior AHRQ official who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of losing his job. “To gut a 300-member, $500 million agency for no other reason than to placate a need to see blood seems really shortsighted.”

I don’t recall exactly where I heard this story… it might have been at a trade convention in Las Vegas in 2000 where I saw William Shatner across the way.

The storyteller was sitting at a coffee house, chatting with William Shatner in about 1998. Shatner’s cellphone rang, and he opened his StarTAC phone with the exact same motion he’d used 30 years earlier with his Star Trek communicator. The same dramatic snap, the same effortless cool. Only this time, it wasn’t a prop. It wasn’t science fiction. It was real. The storyteller sat there, stunned. And the punchline? Shatner didn’t even notice the magic of the moment. To him, it was just Tuesday.

I think a lot about how in just 30 years, absolute science fiction was turned into an everyday item!

For reference, the most modern phone available when Captain Kirk was cruising the stars in 1966 was this Western Electric Rotary Desk Phone.

1966 Western Electric Rotary Desk Phone

1999 StarTAC phone

2266 Star Trek communicator

Megan and I went on a date to Emotionair: Art You can Feel San Francisco, AKA The Balloon Museum at the Palace of Fine Arts on Monday (while Abigail was at school and she was on break!). It was astounding! It was filled with interactive, imaginative, immersive, big art! Go! Warning: they say it’s a 1 1/2 hr tour but it captivated us for 3 hours and could have stayed longer if we had a snack and didn’t have to get on with our day! I think we might go back. :-)

Megan in the smokey laser bubble room!

We played with the projected kaleidoscopic squishy light plastic sheet table for half an hour!

The Washington Post, fact-checked everything Trump said during his first term. They declined to do it again for his second term in office because… well, he lied so much, he exhausted the fact-checkers. Here is the full story

Why we’re not doing a Trump claims database for his second term
Many readers keep emailing: Why is the Washington Post Fact Checker not keeping track of Trump’s false and misleading claims during his second term, as it did when Trump was first president? Lots of conspiracy theories abound, but the answer is simple. We needed to get back our lives.

In his first term, we documented that Trump accumulated 30,573 untruths during his presidency. Trump averaged about six claims a day in his first year as president, 16 claims day in his second year, 22 claims day in this third year — and 39 claims a day in his final year. Put another way, it took him 27 months to reach 10,000 claims and an additional 14 months to reach 20,000. He then exceeded the 30,000 mark less than five months later.

While the database won wide acclaim — it was nominated by the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University for inclusion in a list of the Top Ten Works of Journalism of the Decade — it took a personal toll. We lost many evenings and most of our weekends to keeping it up.

That’s why we only compiled a database for the first 100 days of Biden’s presidency. If Kamala Harris had won, we likely would have done the same. But Trump is in a different realm. He’s constantly talking, repeating the same false claims over and over, no matter how often they have been debunked.

The fact checks in the original database amount to about 5 million words and many include links to sources that debunk Trump’s statements. He keeps repeating many of them in his second term, even while making new ones. To examine it, please click the link below.
Read the database

I’ve been switching plans trying to find the best at Madera Elementary School. Cricket (AT&T MNVO), Mint (T-Mobile MVNO), and Redpocket (using their AT&T MVNO) all offered terrible service in the past year, which is to say that phone calls and texts rarely connect. Right now I have Visible (Verizon MVNO) and service is “less terrible”, which is to say phone calls and texts connect about 1/2 the time. But I’m frustrated with Visible at my home on Potrero, SMS sometimes take 30 minutes to arrive and 1/2 my incoming calls go straight to voicemail instead of ringing. Argh!!

The Madera “BYOD” wifi apparently blocks all messaging services like Signal and Whatsapp and wifi calling. It’s actually worse to turn my wifi on because then my phone thinks “ah, the wifi must be better than the cell service” but it is not! Hey, if anyone has found a messaging app that works on the Madera wifi, please tell us!

I’m thinking of switching to Redpocket and using their Verizon MVNO (Redpocket offers both AT&T and Verizon MVNO service), or switching to Verizon, but paying $70/month instead of $25/month is a bother for only getting “less terrible” service!

The geography, flora, and fauna of El Cerrito and the East Bay is fascinating and here’s a big glimpse into it! Read (or maybe browse!) this 264 page, encompassing report:

Hillside Natural Fire Resilience and Forest Conservation Management Plan- El Cerrito, December 2024 Draft

Backstory: the city of El Cerrito commissioned a report on maintaining and cleaning up the Hillside Natural Area (HNA) as part of the Hillside Natural Area Plan. In it, they offer all manner of details about the area, what could be cleaned up and how it would be done.

Some parts I found interesting:

• The Quarry Hill eucalyptus grove was planted around 1910 by the quarry operator to minimize slippage of quarry overburden. The report mentions that removing those giant, highly flammable, invasive trees will be hugely expensive ($100k at least)

• 

  Arlington Park / Hayward fault

• The Hayward fault runs some 1,000 feet east of HNA. That puts it 500 east of my daughter’s elementary school! Apparently it runs right through one of our local parks, I’ll have to check that out!
• Geologist nerds will know what this means, I hope! “The HNA’s geology is a complex assemblage of metamorphic rock (blueschist, Tiburon melange, Angel Island nappe, and Alcatraz nappe), overlaid in areas by the Northbrae rhyolite, a lava layer.”

I often think about how native and non-native species of plants in the area and whether I could help make a native area thrive. Well, according to the report, the hillside is a crazy mix of native and non-native:

“Ruderal/Non-Native Grassland (33.47 acres, 31.2 percent of the HNA) consists primarily of nonnative annual grassland species, with patches of perennial grassland and ruderal plant species. Grassland vegetation consists primarily of introduced annuals such as wild oats (Avena spp.), soft chess (Bromus mollis), ripgut brome, (Bromus diandrus), Italian ryegrass (Lolium multiflorum), and foxtail barley (Hordeum leporinum)…”

Though the natives have a time of it, all is not lost. The native plants have found their niches.

“Native Grasslands consist of small, dispersed patches of native graminoids, including perennial bunchgrasses. These are generally rare but fairly common in certain areas, such as El Cerrito Memorial Grove and the Julian Fuel Break, which supports a healthy stand of purple needlegrass. Needlegrass grassland within the HNA is dominated by native perennial bunchgrasses such as purple needlegrass, foothill needlegrass (Stipa lepida)…”

The report covers a lot more!

Sometimes I think about how lucky I am.

In 2007, I was there at Burning Man as The Man was burned early by a prankster, Paul Addis.

In 2010, I got to meet the man who did it. You may be able to tell in those photos that I appreciated this particular man’s free spirit, showing up to an event, years later, wearing face paint idolizing him!

In 2012, he jumped in front of a subway train. Not so merry, after-all.

The San Francisco Chronicle wrote about Paul Addis after his passing:

Addis served nearly two years in prison in Nevada after the August 2007 stunt in Black Rock Desert in which he set the 40-foot-tall man-statue ablaze ahead of schedule. He told The Chronicle after his arrest on arson and other charges that Burning Man had become too suburban and needed spontaneity.

“This was not an act of vengeance, it was one of love,” Addis said. “A love of the ethos that is fading at Burning Man. There’s no sense of spontaneity. No sense of ‘F- it. Let’s burn this down.’ “

Tonight at Juku’s monthly gaming night, I played The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine, a rather fun trick-taking game!

Moreso, Abigail came and really enjoyed playing with the other kids there!

It was a win of a night!

I sent this letter to Unilever today on their website.

I hear that Unilever recently fired the CEO of Ben and Jerry’s due to social mission disagreements and has blocked many of the social mission outreaches that the Ben and Jerry’s Independent Board has approved of.

When you bought Ben and Jerry’s in 2000, you bought their social mission too. It is in the contract.

If you abandon Ben and Jerry’s social mission, I will stop purchasing your product and strongly suggest to my friends the same. Please uphold your end the agreement.

A response would be appreciated. Thank you,
Lee Sonko

Reference: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/03/19/ben-jerrys-ceo-unilever/