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I got about 2/3 of the way through playing Small World world at Monday night gaming. I had to bail because Abigail said she missed me, so I rushed home. I think it takes a few playings to get the hang of all the characters and their powers. We all played quietly, focusing on the many many pieces on the board.

Pope Francis passed away 2 weeks ago. Would it be strange and deeply offensive if I put on a pope hat, robes, and a cross around my neck and posted a photo here? Well, that is what Donald Trump did. I am loathe to repost it but proof of this offense needed.

What if a week after the pope passed away, I said I thought I should be the next pope? Would that be strange and offensive? That’s what Donald Trump did.

It is disturbing in the extreme that anyone would seriously support such a notion. That is what the “Honorable” Republican senator from South Carolina did with his sycophantic remarks.

I tried Visible Wireless because they are an MNVO for Verizon and those towers have slightly better service at my daughter’s elementary school than the other networks.

But there is, apparently, congestion on their network most of the day in my area. With my phone sitting in front of me on my desk, calls often go straight to voicemail, with wifi calling on or off. Texts take 2-60 minutes to arrive. Their website is so terribly slow; logging in takes 13 seconds, every page load takes 3 seconds. Ugh.

I called support and they walked me through a 40 minute eSIM card reset that didn’t help. On the next call, they sent me a physical SIM card to try to fix the issue but it did not.

I upgraded to “Visible+” in the hopes that more money would magically fix the problem, but no.

After 2 months of trying, I’ve got to say goodbye to Visible Wireless.

This is a followup to my long running work on getting people to understand the proper medical symbol, the Rod of Asclepius. Read.

I finally reached someone at Mayo Clinic Proceedings, Dr. Alfredo Sansone, Executive Publisher at Elsevier and STM Journals.

Right now,  it appears that Dr. Sansone doesn’t appear interested in making sure good and correct articles are published and visible, but to… I don’t know! He responded to my first message having obviously not read it thoughtfully. For example, I made a summative statement and backed it up with a detailed reasoning along with several hundred citations (yes, several hundred). But his response was to attack the summative statement in a sideways manner, ignoring all the rest. His other disagreements with my thesis just don’t make sense. I followed up with a long clarifying letter, hoping to further progress but while he has definitely viewed it, and another message I sent, he hasn’t responded. I’m considering publishing our weird interaction and just giving up on this part of the project.

I had pursued this because when you google “medical symbol” an article on Dr. Sansone’s Mayo Clinic Proceedings (MCP) site came up first. Today I note that the MCP article doesn’t come up first any more! Google still gets the answer wrong in summary, but EVERY article it links to reports that the Rod of Asclepius is the more appropriate symbol.

Donald Trump sent Abrego Garcia from the United States to an El Salvador prison despite a long standing United State’s court order prohibiting his deportation to El Salvador. Trump says that the characters “MS13” tattooed on Mr. Garcia’s fingers are the reason enough to believe he is a gang member. To be clear, Trump doesn’t believe the letters were put onto the image as callouts showing how the image of the marijuana leaf on his finger may represent the letter “M” etc. He believes that the completely obviously “photoshop” applied callouts are tattoos on the man’s hand. What do you think?

(via)

Here is Trump saying, and arguing strongly that he believes the text was plainly written on his hand. Trump, “He had ‘M’ ‘S’ as clear as you can be, not interpreted…”

I also note that Trump wrote on that X (Twitter) post, “…two Highly Respected Courts found that he was a member of MS-13”. While every news report I’ve found says that Abrego Garcia has no criminal record.

Update 4-30-25: I found this news report released today where there was talk by police of him being a gang member in 2021 and having domestic dispute issues. It still stands that the Supreme Court told Trump to get him back from El Salvador and Trump completely refuses. See the the previous 10 minutes or so of the interview above

In brief: I get my news from NPR, The Washington Post, and Fox News Online. Where do you get yours?

A bit more: A few months ago, I decided to get a subscription to a newspaper. I wasn’t sure what to get, but I ended up with the Washington Post.  I was a little worried that since the Post is owned by Bezos is connected to the Trump oligarchy, possibly making the reporting unfair. That doesn’t seem to be the case! Here are today’s headlines in the Washington post, a pretty typical day.

Here’s new research on what to eat so you it is more likely that you will age better.

Put the photo below on your fridge. It’s simple, eat more of what’s at the top of the list, less of what’s at the bottom and you’ll be more likely to have good things like “intact cognitive function”, and “survived to 70 years of age”.

Medscape pointed me to this article on the correlation between what people eat and how well they age: Optimal dietary patterns for healthy aging, in Nature Medicine. (local copy)

Here’s the money-shot page as a PDF

The list isn’t perfect. It has “creamy soup” near the bottom. Do they mean that creamy soups kill you? No, but it’s hard to tease the data with all of our daily lifestyle choices!

Laura’s Facebook account kept getting messed with despite me installing 2 Factor Authentication! I finally found that the baddy had been hiding their access to her account under a Facebook “Connected Experiences” account. I show you exactly how I found them and removed the baddy.

In brief, go to accountscenter.facebook.com and look for Connected Experiences | Logging in with accounts. If you see any names there, especially if they are logged in from an unexpected place (in my case they were logged in from Vietnam!) it’s probably a bad actor who has access to your account that shouldn’t!

To fix it, go back to accountscenter.facebook.com and look for Accounts. Remove the offending accounts!

Last night I got to play Raiders of the North Sea with the Hall of Heroes Expansion at Monday Night Gaming. It’s a fun group to play with. I still prefer games where I’m playing directly against my opponents’ wit. In this game, there are lots of ways to accumulate Victory Points. Sadly, very few involve direct interaction with the other players. I was most enthralled with the notion that when each of your raiders gets killed on a raid, you get an increasing amount of Valhalla points, which translates into exponentially more Victory Points. I thought about using that strategy…. “get killed as much as possible” but it didn’t work out. Instead I played a middling game and… tada ended up winning! I’m still not in love with games that focus on Victory Points for the win, but we had a good night of gaming!

Megan and I went to a wonderful magic show last night, Kevin Blake, The Illusionist at the Palace Theater.

It was a very enjoyable evening with my wife. Oh and dinner beforehand at a restaurant down the street… “606” I think it was called, was a real treat!

Particularly memorable parts of the show include the first moments of the show when he threw a paper airplane and after a few feet, it just hovered in the air impossibly!

He talked eloquently about neuroliguistic programming and the debunked “magic” behind it and then proceeded to magically force people to take numbers and sit where he wanted them to in order to manifest a perfect arrangement of people, numbers, and chairs.

Dice rolling: He rolled dice down a clear acrylic dice rolling tower and audience members got to call out what number they would roll. His showmanship was excellent and the whole room cheered on as each die came up with the roll that was called out!

Mentalism: when we walked in at the beginning of the evening, we found envelopes on our chairs, asking us to write down a personal question, and then answer it. Just before intermission, Kevin asked us to put the envelopes into a box on the stage. The box sat there under a spotlight during intermission. After intermission, he came out, and did the impossible!

First, he talked about and showed that he didn’t have some insanely sophisticated technology to watch and listen to people during intermission, and he didn’t have an earpiece. And then he began…

He picked up the first envelope without opening it and read off the initials on it. He set the envelope down and started addressing the person with slowly increasing certainty… sounding out their name, details about the question and answer. He nailed it. For the next person, he didn’t pick up an envelope, he just called out some initials and started in. For the next, he pointed to the person in the audience as he said the next initials, gave details about the person, what zodiac sign they were, brought up the question and the answer in what was a beautifully creepy mentalism! Most astoundingly, he talked about more than 50 people as if he KNEW them and all of their secrets. But how!?! At a minimum, he needed to MEMORIZE ALL THAT INFORMATION after IMPOSSIBLY extricating it from the cards that we put in the envelopes! Or, the most obvious answer would be that he just knew everything… EVERYTHING! It was awesome!

Multiplication Board: after he was done with the envelopes, he rolled a board out. He had asked people to fill in the board during intermission, each of the 24 cells were to be filled in by a patron with a 2 digit number and their initials. He looked over the board for a few moments and then did the impossible! He turned to the audience and did things like reciting ALL of the numbers, all of the 10’s place numbers, adding up all the numbers of a row, adding up ALL of the numbers. Then, still without looking at the board, he rattled off all the initials!! Had people stand up and then sit down as he recited their initials! It was insane! He did everything with such speed and precision, there is no way he was listening to a secret prompter. He must have memorized the entire board and done all the math! He must have!

Cards: A fun, elaborate card trick where he dealt cards and gave one person a royal flush, and yet he ended up with a higher hand!