Kristi Noem stepping up to give a speech to a law enforcement conference at the same time that Trump posts on social media that he is shit-canning her reminds me of my all-time favorite moment in TV chyron history....

Watching me try to navigate Slack workspaces must be much like watching a cow try to do quantum mechanics.

My problem with texting is that if I keep autocorrect on, it changes half my correctly spelled words into garbage, but if I shut it off, the other half of what I type are fat fingered misspellings.... Sigh.

Still have never had a gut-punch while reading a book that's been as hard as this passage from Ray Bradbury's "Something Wicked This Way Comes...."

OK, in the scheme of things this is minor, but I do appreciate when, downloading a monthly statement, I get a file that's named something like <company>-<acctid>-YYYYMM.pdf instead of hfebYUsg1.pdf.

Important public service announcement: Only 242 days until Halloween!

Haha, responding to a feedback poll from AAS Publishing. The poll has a preamble that says "We will not collect your name or other information unless you provide it yourself". Then question #1 is "Please enter your name (*required)".

Just re-watched "Sinners". My gosh, that was a spectacular movie.

Why yes, I did just make tuna noodle casserole for dinner!

Post a jedi,wrong answers only.

Look, I’m not a pacifist. I genuinely believe that some wars are just and necessary (although they are always still horrific and no amount of justification lessens that horror or the moral weight that attaches to it). But this doesn’t meet any of the just war criteria. For anyone who wants a quick…

I am reminded of the 70s-era SNL Weekend Update episode where Garrett Morris delivered a special segment of news for the heard-of-hearing -- by putting his hands around his mouth and shouting. "OUR TOP STORY TONIGHT....."

Spent the morning sawz-all-ing out a fence post to remove a dead deer stuck in a gap in our backyard fence. I'll spare everybody the pictures.... I hope everyone's day is off to a better start than mine!

Please tell me it's not gonna be email alerts, one-by-one! 😱

I remember I was traveling to give a talk when the Gulf War broke out in January 1991. My very first talk as a young grad student. I'm traveling to give a talk tomorrow, this time as an old-fart senior astronomer. Still, makes me wonder if another Gulf War is about to start.

One of our local dog shelters runs a program where they have elementary school kids come in and sit with the dogs and read stories to them. I'm not sharing pictures, because, you know, kids and online privacy, but it's probably the cutest damn thing I've ever seen.

proud to have served as the official sewer/stormwater utility for Cleveland Heights native and *now* Olympic GOLD MEDALIST Laila Edwards.

Right, I had forgotten that Bud Cort was in MASH!

If you see this post a Star War

The other day in class I explained to our undergrad majors that just when they thought they were getting the hang of the magnitude system, it was time to talk about Vega vs AB mags. They were not amused.

I do adore this album.

Before giving a colloquium talk at another university I always have to send the obligatory email asking "will this be mostly astronomers, or will there be a bunch of physicists there that I need to explain color magnitude diagrams to like I'm Dr Seuss"? One star, two star Red star, blue star....

My first ever live concert. Aldo Nova opening up for Blue Oyster Cult at Meriweather Post Pavilion in 1982. I went with @wtaf-ufb-ffs.bsky.social $8.50, ahh the good old days....

Is dinner ready yet, Dad?

A reliable source told me today that in their English class there was an engineering student mouthing off that the astronomy program was way overfunded compared to engineering. Those poor underfunded engineers, I'm thinking it might be time to launch a few more of them into the Sun.

Totally unsurprised by these differences between physics and astronomy programs.

Reviewing ApJ proofs drives me crazy. They are always littered with stuff like this: replacing "Hubble Space Telescope" with "Hubble Space Telescope", replacing "galaxy's" with "galaxy's", etc. It makes it hard to track down where the cases where they really are actually changing things....

This is like watching a Browns game.

Oh, hey.

"The thing about the old days-- they the *old* days." --Slim Charles, "The Wire"

What the heck is the "Metascience Novelty Indicators Challenge"? Did anyone else get one of these emails? It seems spammy as hell but also purports to come from some research group at the University of Sussex, so.... ????

Fresh squeezed -- out of a cardboard can. I can still hear the "Sssshhhh-plooop!" of the frozen concentrate sliding out of that can and dropping into the plastic pitcher.

Not everything that is valuable is profitable. (Thank you for coming to my TedTalk.)

1) Irish potato famine 2) Nazi occupation of Greece

Bringing Up Baby (1938) is one of my favorite movies. Cary Grant absolutely cracks me up every time. Cary Grant: It took three expeditions and five years to find that intercostal clavicale! Katharine Hepburn: Well now that they know where to find one, couldn't you send them back for another? 😂

Feeling over-committed. Verrrry over-committed. Looking for someone else to blame for this.

Only five?

This cat could play.

There will come a day in their lives when my daughters will miss my regular "be careful about the weather!" texts. But that day is probably not today.

They probably got paid a bounty as well....

Come, you masters of war, you that build the big guns You that build the death planes, you that build all the bombs You that hide behind walls, you that hide behind desks I just want you to know I can see through your masks

They circled him on the ground and shot him dead like it was a firing squad.

Oh, God said to Abraham, "Kill me a son" Abe said, "Man, you must be puttin' me on" God said, "No" Abe say, "What?" God say, "You can do what you want, Abe, but The next time you see me comin', you better run" Well, Abe said, "Where you want this killin' done?" God said, "Out on Highway 61"

My class this semester ends at 4:35pm. What kind of class schedule sets an end time of 4:35? That's such an unnatural time to end that I have actually had to set an alarm on my phone to start blaring at me if I start to run long.

All the legal arguments from Trump's legal team seem to boil down to this.

Unlike our previous dogs, our new pup Juno really likes to play tug-of-war.... grrr.... Grrrr.... GRRRR!!!!

But yes, keep pushing AI into our classrooms, dear university leadership.

Spousal unit and I paid Elderkid's final college bill today.

This semester I'm teaching a late afternoon class (3:20-4:35) and I'm just utterly exhausted when its over. I have no freaking idea how my colleagues who teach night classes do it. It would probably kill me.

Its telling that for a minute I thought this might be a US story.