frith | This is the Frith

I'm on a tear! I've now watched four good movies in a row! The fourth and best movie so far was No Country for Old Men (2007), a Coen Brothers film. It has been sitting on my pile of unwatched movies for so long that it was taped shut and there was a layer of dust on the clam-shell. The goodwill-type store stopped taping the DVD cases shut about two years ago. So I hadn't touched it because I thought it was some tired revenge flick about World War Two, but no, it's a western detective story, set in 1980. The story telling was great! I'm shocked. This streak can't last.

It won that year's Academy Award for Best Picture, and yet there is no mention of such on the DVD case. Of the four other movies nominated that year for Best Picture, none interest me. In the animated Feature category, Ratatouille was good.

No Country for Old Men is going to give me nightmares. Probably.

I finished the seventh and final season of Buffy The Vampire Slayer. At around halfway through season five it got better and less predictable but it was still heavy on the soft porn and male gaze. The last two disks had scratches which cut out half an episode (where Xander gets bled to unseal the Hellmouth) and the last eight minutes of the finale, right before Spike lights up. I managed to catch those last 8 minutes on YouTube.

I have lots of nits to pick, but the major one is why are there only two slayers, Buffy and Faith? Faith is the result of Buffy kinda dying by drowning in Season One. Well, Faith actually replaces Kendra when she (Kendra) dies, but this just solidifies the slayer fork where there are now two slayers. Then Buffy _really_ dies a few seasons later, as in dead and rotting in her grave for five months, before getting resurrected. Where is slayer three? Then there was the flatliner moment in a hospital, where Buffy would have been just as kinda dead as she had been when she drowned. Ergo, there must be a slayer #4. Until the final season smashes the chain and suddenly it's Oprah time:You get to be a slayer and you get to be a slayer and you get to be a slayer and...! Slayers, slayers everywhere. Out there. Happily ever after. Oh wait, what season eight? There is no season eight. Comic books do not a season make.

Another big nit: Angel was given a ring of invulnerability, he should be a day-walking vampire now. What happened to that? Plus, the Sunnydale cops are useless and everyone gets away with murder and destruction of property. Sunnydale is pretty posh for a town of 35,000 lost in the desert, it has a top notch museum, a hospital that does brain surgery, two hopping hotspots, five graveyards, a gigantic "state of the art" high school, no Hispanics whatsoever (not even Spanish classes), a University of California campus, greystone buildings and churches and crowds of people milling around downtown when there's a huge mall they could go to instead. And furthermore, Buffy goes to live in a university dorm (a luxury dorm at that!) because home is too far from class and too far to visit to boot, but not so far that she doesn't continue visiting Angel, the Bronze and all the graveyards. And last but not least, the ewww dead! vampires that Buffy is both kissing and copulating. Characteristics of said dead people: bad smell, no heartbeat, not breathing. And yet, they bleed red (ergo, oxygenated blood), it takes breath to pass air through the vocal cords to speak and Spike was getting repeatedly _drowned_ by an "Ubervampire". Then there's the whole 'a vampire is a demon that remembers the host's body's past but is not that person' shtick. Shenanegans! I see ducks walking and quacking. These vampires are still the people they were before they died, but with a gleeful evil personality shift and a craving for blood. People with brain damage.

Well, I watched it. Now to send the seasons back to the goodwill-type store, except season one, it's totally toasted.

On the plus side, I watched three good movies in a row: Toy Story 5 (played in English at the flea pit and not at 9:30 at night!), and via DVD, Rango (weird animated western about a town of anthropomorphic animals desperate for water) and Sneakers (a team of freelance security hackers out to steal a de-encryption program). Sneakers had been on my movies to see list but in 1992 it wasn't available in English near me and if it turned up in a rental store, that would have been on VHS, ergo, French only. Rental DVD's were great while they lasted, they'd always include the original English soundtrack, but not rental VHS tapes.

It's been rainy, then sunny and back to rainy again. Last night there were many fireflies out, it might be from the hot weather and the rain. I had thought I'd go garage sale hopping this weekend as it is the only weekend where garage sales are allowed in my town this month, but Saturday I was out being sociable. So today was plan 'B' but it's rained most of the day, so no garage sales until next month for me. I'll try my luck at the goodwill-type store. The 'once a month and only May through September' deal for garage sales is because the municipal government isn't big on local colour, they decided too many people were trying to make a living off garage sales.

With the rain coming and going, I've got it in my head that I'm going to get pictures of wet flowers. When the rain stops, I have been running out to see what I can find. Photography, the art of discovery. Like E-Z Make Machine Pastiche Surprise, but with more control and less choice. There are still lots of buttercups, so I choose them.

I combined my social sortie Saturday with a stop to see a movie. I went to see the final episode of The Amazing Digital Circus. I got into my car late and I had to stop to buy gas. Then I got a bit lost in the whole maze of stores and interconnecting parking lots around the movie-plex. Imagine a strip mall that has metastasized into a village made only of boutiques. I found the movie-plex by dead reckoning and parked about 10 minutes late. Fortunately, the first half of the movie was the entire second-to-last episode which I'd already seen. So I didn't miss a thing. The movie did not have the sci-fi horror I was expecting. I should have tried to catch The Sheep Detectives instead.

I saw a hummingbird hawkmoth yesterday for the first time in twenty plus years. Must be because I can now just bum around and appreciate, instead of racing with the rats.

Also because I have tons of flowers thanks to my woolly selective browser.

Around first light it was harvesting from the creeping charlie (also popular with the bees) and around noon it was having a go at all the buttercups. Meanwhile, in my planted garden, I have a couple of bearded irises in bloom, and in the ditch, over a dozen yellow irises. Not exactly nectar city there.

So, I lounged in my rescued outdoors chaise lounge and took many pictures. The hawkmoth is about the size of a large bumblebee.

I'm watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer for the first time. It's mostly shallow and awful. I can even guess many of the lines before they're said. Plus so much soft porn. I'm halfway through season five. At least now we know why slayers snuff it by age 25.

Source: https://www.gocomics.com/breaking-cat-news/2026/05/17

To add the Breaking Cat News feed to your reading list, go here and click "subscribe". (Note that the profile pages suddenly require both cookies and JavaScript to display, at least that's the case for me and Firefox 115. Up until now, profile pages required neither of those to display. I've submitted a request to get that fixed.)

In related SNAFU's, I can't get my cursed Win 10 laptop to save 6 GB files to USB (the files are "Checkpoints" for ComfyUI, I _don't_ want to spend 4 months downloading them all over again after I've driven a Linux-shaped stake into Win 10's heart). Then FireFox would _not_ let me search the web or even change the URL to linuxmint.com on the Win 10 laptop. It is getting worse. Also, my ISP sent me a message stating that I'd exceeded 75% of my bandwidth allocation and for the next 31 days all I'd have is 6 GB to play with. I had my doubts. I used the link provided to go verify that the 75% was for the period that ended last night (links look legit, same as other internet usage links from months past). I had to go through the usual typing and retyping and rereretyping of my obtuse username and password, email confirmation, phone voicemail confirmation, a four digit PIN. 9_9 For the PIN, I wondered how to spell out F_U in 1337. Finally got my info: No, I had not burned through 75% of my allotment last night.

First world problems.

Maybe I can convert the "checkpoint" file into a multi-part batchfile? (idea! Search intensifies...) OK, it's a FAT32 problem, chunks of data have a 4 GB max size. Reformat USB drive to NTFS format and try again. X^/

My Venus flytrap looks like it's about to give up the ghost. So I went looking for fresh ~~blood~~ sap. I had seen some at Walmart (of all places) over a month ago (I think I was looking for lava lamp light bulbs), so I tried there. No luck. I tried the garden sections of three hardware stores. Nope. Bought groceries. Met Alain F. by chance by the frozen seafood, chewed the fat. Neither of us feel the urge to visit the exotic Animal Farm we left. Finally, since the route I took home kinda approached a big garden center, I drove the extra ten minutes and went there.

'Lo and behold, carnivorous plants! Fly traps, and Nepenthes and pitcher plants and sundews, oh my! Very expensive too. But oh no, oh woe, no tall red and green Sarracenia. Sadness. I fought the tears and got a bag of potting sphagnum moss, a wee sundew and two flytraps, one for me and one for the neighbour. The sundew is flowering! 8^D The neighbour gave me a two week supply of apple juice. I gave him a gallon of rainwater. And the flytrap, of course.

Well that's it for fringe Three Weeks for Dreamwidth, where I'll post Harry Potter and "A.I" slop if I feel like it, thankyouverymuch. Not that I'll go looking for a bot to spit out a text for me, what would be the point? Why would anyone want to read something by something that does not understand what it is that it is stringing together?

Gotta post and run: it's nice out and the first garage sale weekend of 2026 starts now. It will give me an excuse to ride my 38 years old bicycle. Time to get up, go out and melt some lard.

Six hours later. I bought 1 cookie (75¢), 1 orange/vanilla milkshake ($5.60), 1 DVD ($1 Jumanji II The Next Level) and some stretchy bead string that looks like fishing line ($2 because I asked, she had some and assured me it wouldn't snap after a few years). I also took over a dozen pictures of one lawn. I am ze tired.

There's a new discount store selling the stuff I like: groceries that are nearly at their "best before date"! I just heard about it on the radio, looked it up and I see it's in the old booze store, temporarily a book store and next to the Yellow (empty and expensive) shoe store. I know that spot! Unfortunately, on the radio they said people start lining up to get in at 5 in the morning. Lining up and crowds is not my jam. Hmph. Maybe the crowds will die down in a few months?

The Thursday 7 PM Movie in English of the week was Mortal Kombat II. It sure was hokey. Barely watchable although a pair of gamer girls I met on the way out liked it. They appreciated quips from the game and the mention of Big Trouble in Little China and they are looking forward to Mortal Kombat III. They said the first Mortal Kombat was better. That's a really low bar but I said I'd watch it if I find a copy on DVD. It would have to be dirt cheap. I would have preferred it if Sheep Detectives had been the Thursday English movie. Fat chance. Would you believe that Mario Galaxy is _still_ playing (in French)? They even have a Mario Galaxy poster outside that's like three stories tall.

After the movie I swung by the new discount store to see what the opening hours are. "Les Retrouvails de Marie" or something like that. They'd closed at 8 PM but the lights were on (people were restocking the shelves). It looked like just canned, packaged and refrigerated food stuff and nothing that interested me or particularly cheap. I'll pass.

I heard on the radio that houseplants with yellow leaves could be a sign of iron deficiency. I did a quick internet check and got much the same information, young leaves with green veins but otherwise yellowing: iron deficiency. I've been watering my plants with rain water, snow melt and dehumidifier water as a way to keep mineral deposits from building up in and on the soil in the pots, as they used to do when I used well water and before that, municipital water. So iron deficiency seemed likely, especially for my orange/grapefruit/kumquat/unknown citrus plants that are growing ever larger but are not flowering and have been sporting yellow leaves.

I plopped in about 2 cups of manure rich mud and poured another two cups of well-water (probably iron rich) on top. Did it work? I don't think so. I also have a dwarf banana and some sort of spotted-leaf house plant living in the same pot because I suspect a multi-species situation is why the citrus was growing well in the first place. It used to be some kind of yellow asteridae (that refused to die), maybe some sort of sow-thistle, living in the pot with the citrus, but spider mites finished it off a few years ago. Spider mites! They took over the year I tried to grow cantaloupe indoors. I eventually sprayed them to death.

Maybe I should shake a fistful of "wildflower seed mix" seeds into the pot and hope. There's still a bit of room, but shaking in some goat weed flowers two years ago did nothing.

I looked for citrus plant food on eBay. That stuff was really expensive, even before the outrageous shipping fee. No deal. So I bought some bluegreen "plant food" sticks instead. Contains iron. I stuck a "plant food" stick into the soil in the pot with the citrus plants. A few months later I noticed that my indoor azalea was turning yellow brown! It got a bluegreen stick too. A year later, I'm not convinced that the citrus is doing any better, but the azalea is sprouting green leaves. Maybe I have to double the dose in the citrus.

Florida's orange crop is dead, down by 95%, mostly due to citrus greening disease, caused by the Liberibacter asiaticum bacterium and spread via a species of sap-sucking psyllid, the Asian citrus psyllid Diaphorina citri, and apparently another as well, the African citrus psyllid Trioza erytreae. Psyllids are small and related to aphids and whiteflies, the Asian citrus psyllid looks like a brown lacewing and the African citrus psyllid looks like a little brown moth. The age of orange juice for breakfast is over and the Florida orange groves are not coming back, they're getting replaced with housing developments.

What's the attraction to living in Florida? With hurricanes getting more frequent, destroying houses, cutting the electricity, downing trees, it sounds like Russian Roulette. High risk should have a high payoff. I don't see the payoff, unless you're Disney or a drug running cartel. Here in the Land of Ice and Snow, we have clothes, houses and infrastructure that keeps everyone from dying from exposure. It doesn't look like everyone in Florida can keep dry under a 4m storm surge or relax with a book while high winds throw uprooted trees around outside. I live in the sweet spot of North America. No floods, no fires, no 40°C heat waves, actual health care and less snow than last century, but just enough for winter and spring needs. I would like more deer 'k thanx, and a pony. Many ponies. Little ones. Pasture pets. I'd need a stable. I'd have to move. I hate moving.

I hear that Gamestop (of meme stock fame) is keen to buy eBay. Suddenly eBay absolutely requires cookies to work. I really don't like sites using cookies to second guess me and furthermore, potentially using cookies to inflate prices. So I've switched to finding what interests me, strip the URL to the item to a bare minimum (everything after and including that first '?'), copy the URL to Notepad, and later, if I still want it, use the URL to navigate straight to the item (after I've erased my browsing history and restarted my browser).

Unlike where LLM's are used to generate texts, programs or images, where reams of slop output are at best a nuisance and at worst an impediment, when LLM's like Anthropic's Mythos model are asked to find flaws in cyber security, it only has to be right once in a while to churn out a lot of serious vulnerabilities.

That said, I'm hearing that LLM's are continuing to improve and that automated research is looking like a probable outcome, and not "research papers" of the fake variety that have no basis in reality. It would be nice to finally get a review of available data and compare the dentition of wild bears vs captive bears vs diet. My suspicion is that a diet high in cereal content rots the teeth in captive bears.

The outcome I'd like to see is to be able to get a LLM to design and build a realistic talking and walking plush pony using available hardware, like Raspberry pi's. That would be an upside if the "AI robot revolution" actually happens. Robot pets. And also a downside. Already alarmists are griping about chatbot addictions interfering with people's ability to deal with messy everyday person to person interactions.

sweetiebot_does_not_like_cats_by_cannibalus

Source: http://cannibalus.deviantart.com/art/SweetieBot-does-not-like-cats-442132308

Custom robotics notwithstanding, for universal automation to enable a universal utopia divorced from the monetary economy to which we are presently shackled, there has to be first a state sponsored universal basic income, free universal healthcare, free education up to and including higher education, free transportation and a universal creative commons for all intellectual property. Otherwise we will continue to worsen the present 'utopia for billionaires' and deepening poverty for everybody else.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aN114Cq4fv4

Every evening, when there's not enough time to watch a movie or read a book, or while listening to the news or something else on the radio, or when I don't feel like doing anything at all, I play a My Little Pony themed "mahjong" tile matching game. My motivation is to release my favorite pony from beneath the pile of tiles. Over and over again. It's the moral thing to do. She's buried alive, everypony! At least I feel better after she emerges. There is no morality beyond what benefits me. But that's a different conversation.

I also have a gravity golf flash game where the point is to retrieve all the cake slices for Princess Celestia. That one takes a while. I can never remember which planets pull and which planets repel or how much.

I picked up a few more flash games off the Equestria Gaming Arcade for variety. Like Memory Tiles which is a memory game in which you match tiles. That link will prompt you to download the .swf file for the flash game. It opens and plays in either Media Player Classic or IrFanView (a photo viewer). If you'd rather not download it, go here to play it online. I also picked up a Connect Four game where you play against Fluttershy. I think she always wins. Try it online here and let me know if you _ever_ manage to beat Fluttershy at Fours. The Flash file for the Connect Four game is here, click this link and save it to your My Little Pony games folder.

I'm not keen on "platforming" games or point and shoot games, but on a whim I saved this disturbing slingshot game to disk. Disturbing because Fluttershy is using a slingshot to shoot birds, a not very friendly and especially a not very Fluttershy thing to do. Want to shoot hungry birds with seeds? Play Orchard Defender online here.

Another frustrating game in flash form is Sweet Apple Cider, which is a MLP version of Tapper. You can play Sweet Apple Cider here and if you just can't get enough Cider frustration, click on this to download it to your PC.

But simple puzzle games are fine by me and now I have two more.

Bad news! Opals are not forever! They're like glass sponges, leaky wet glass. Glass is an amorphous solid, so somehow there is room for water in opals. They dry out, they can/will soak up water and chemicals and they will turn yellow or brown if left in the sun. Not good. I'd stuck the couple I'd got off eBay (one was a "gift" from the seller) on a turning platform in my box window for maximum sparkles and a week or so later I had the impression that the small dark "gift" opal had turned from blue to brown. =8^( I did a bit of digging via DuckDuckGo. Opals are _not_ worth getting, especially not worth getting on jewelry if you plan wearing that jewelry. Same goes for amethyst and citrine, so ix-nay on amethyst eode-gays. But synthetic opals should have more staying power. Anyway, I put the two opals back into my curio cabinet. They look OK, for now. I think the blue is back and I think the clear one now has larger coloured sparkles than it had before. Maybe it shrank.

Spring keeps on springing. Caught the llama sleeping this morning around six AM, lurching as she dreamed, long enough for me to crouch down and pull two ticks off her face before she woke up. I heard on the radio that there's a website for collecting pictures of ticks along with a questionnaire, but the two had already expired on the stove's hotplate and they want the ticks frozen, not cooked, just in case they're special ticks.

I can't find any comic books to read. That is, newsstand, paper comic books. There's nothing good. I just read the five-part "The End" 2099 (Marvel) comic and it was a chaotic tag team of Marvel 2099 characters, lead by Spiderman in an all out rumble against a load of alt-universe characters, all because Galactus melded with a Symbiote and wants to eat everything, soul and all. Why is the Spiderman of Spiderman 2099 leading the charge, or at least planning the winning strategy? He's easily the weakest of the bunch. And anyway, I don't really care. I never liked bickering X-Man team comics and this five part "End" comic had just two many cameos of characters I never followed. While there was action, the action looked like mostly opportunities to draw humanoids in mid leap, floating, doing gymnastic moves, or blasting at whatever. Chatting and comparing skills all the while.

What I liked about Spiderman 2099, back in late last century, was that it was set in a cyberpunk, corporate dystopia New York and that Miguel gave himself an experimental gene alteration in an attempt to escape a chemical addiction. All very plausible. Then, the rest of the story is him trying to reverse the gene modification, avoiding getting trapped and/or found out, and living with freaky strength, sticky polymer excretions and razor sharp talons in his finger tips. The comic was good for a while, then Marvel had a meltdown, the story got more convoluted, never reached a conclusion, crashed and died. There have been a few resurrections of Spiderman 2099 this century and they all lack.

Now Girl Genius, there's a good comic. The authors are going to die before they ever reach a conclusion, which at the present rate of progress won't be until 2050. But it's a wild ride. I frequently reread long sections.

I may have achieved lawn recovery! The raking out of two or three years of weed growth with a thatching rake and pruning a proto-stand of poplars, already two to seven feet tall, has left me with a lumpy but mowable residue of moss, weeds and some grass. I am not worried for the few flowers that might have been in the small cleared area in front of the house, between my llama tended field of colt's foot, the Spring beauties, trout lilies, trilliums, hyacinths, ground ivy and more, insects have have had and will continue to have a plethora of pollen and nectar sources all over my property, both native and invasive. Much better flowers than dandelions.

I saw a grand total of one dandelion on my lawn. Twenty meters west, on my neighbours gigantic, frequently mowed lawn, many dandelions.

I noticed that my garden flowers are not all staying put. Grape hyacinth will not persist where I planted it but has popped up twenty meters away under the staghorn sumac. The staghorn sumac appeared on its own decades ago and is cheerfully trying to take over any open area. At least the staghorn sumac doesn't grow tall enough to bother the hydro line, it feeds murders of crows in the winter and is a nice plant screen between me and the passing traffic, so go grow sumac, I choose youuu! Like the grape hyacinth, I have Scilla serbica migrating away, as well as lily of the valley. The lily of the valley is fine with persisting in the garden (one of the few plants to do so) but suddenly I've found some emerging further into the lawn and clear across the lawn to where I have (also un-killable) lilacs growing into a future hedge. Now what I really really want (so tell me what you want, what you really, really want), I wanna really, really, really wanna, innocence flowers to grow in my lawn.

I removed a huge quantity of brown dead vegetation out of my lawn. I had a mound five feet high and seven feet long. I spread it over a low spot beyond the furthest I've ever been able to mow. It will make a nice nesting area for a cottontail rabbit or maybe a hibernaculum for garter and red bellied snakes. I disturbed a few snakes while raking so I know they're around, snacking on slugs.

It's hilarious that a former über all natural shoe company, that sold expensive shoes to rich tech hippie types swimming in cash, have completely ditched the greenest of the green footwear now that software engineers are all getting the boot. The Allbirds footware company has pivoted to server farms "training" LLM's. Spicy autocorrect pin-the-bit-on-the output file programs. The ones that consume as much power and water as a small town while trying to develop into automated software engineers. Oh so very much not green. It's like that Smashmouth song all over again: What the hell happened?

At long last, some good news for human teeth. It appears that everyone has a "third dental crest", a full set of tooth buds that are laying dormant, the development of which is switched off by a protein called USAG-1. When USAG-1 is blocked, the buds grow into new teeth which replace the permanent teeth that replaced your first set of "baby teeth". That would be a whole new set although I do not know if there are buds still where wisdom teeth have been surgically removed or where posts have been anchored into the jaw bone.

Dr. Katsu Takahashi et al at Kyoto University in Japan have developed a monoclonal antibody that blocks USAG-1 with a single injection. The monoclonal antibody, named TRG-035, binds to USAG-1, freeing the BMP and Wnt signaling pathways to start the growth process, turning the buds into fully functional teeth.

The researchers created a startup company, Toregem BioPharma Co., Ltd. and received permission to accelerate the usual test trial sequence necessary for approval of a novel medical treatment. A human safety trial on 30 healthy adult males aged 30 to 64 started in October 2024. The following phase of the study, sometime in 2025, is a two year efficacy trial involving children aged 2 to 7 born without a complete set of teeth. Large scale phase three efficacy trials will conclude in 2029. The objective is general availability of this TRG-035 shot by 2030.

What is strange is that this is not showing up in the Associated Press circuit. I see several "benchchem" pdf's, MSN in Spanish once, a few posts on Shitter ("X") and YouTube. Searching for 'toregem biopharma' got a mention on Global News and the National Post three years ago, plus more hits on Shitter and Instagram.

Dr. Katsu Takahashi appears in Local application of Usag-1 siRNA can promote tooth regeneration in Runx2-deficient mice found here: Scientific Reports 11, Article number: 13674 (2021); in a paper not found online: Takahashi, K. et al. Feasibility of molecularly targeted therapy for tooth regeneration [In New trends in tissue engineering and regenerative medicine: official book of the Japanese Society of Regenerative Medicine (eds Hibi, H. & Hueda, M.) 55–65 (Intech, 2014).]; and in Scientific Reports Volume 8, P:1-13, Article number: 5169 (2018).

Scientific Reports is a peer-reviewed open-access scientific mega journal, the largest in the world by number of articles where anything is published, as long as it is technically sound in methodology and analysis. So this whole tooth regeneration thing might be legit. It looks like results from the first trial are due in about six months.

A few years ago, might have been four, the person who dropped off llamas on my property starting over a decade ago, wanted to grow catnip for a cat toy project. On my front lawn. Sure, why not. So he rented a rototiller, dug up a section, planted a bunch of plants, which never grew big enough to harvest. The crowd of volunteer weeders never materialized, and by the next year I think he lost interest. It's easier and probably cheaper to buy dried catnip in bulk. So I have a lumpy overgrown "garden" area, and I have a small mountain of woodshavings/llama manure compost. What to do, what to do. I hear that blueberry bushes like woodchip compost. Could be true. I sent an email this week to the catnip farmer indicating that I think the crop is pining for the fjords and that I'm toying with removing the plastic tarp weed suppressor material and burying the area in mulch... No answer yet. Often times, like when I say I'm running low on hay, he just shows up several days later.

Did I mention that I gave up waiting for the few missing DVD's to show up and watched all of the Avatar: The Last Airbender series? A quick search and oh yeah, I did, in February of last yeah. Well, I'm still salty. It was not worth the hype. The interactions and the characters were good (I like the Uncle character the most) but the basic Element "bending" aspect was really half baked. Especially the water bending. When it gets revealed that the Fire tribe captured and held captive a bunch of Water Benders, we find out that any little bit of water can be used as a lethal weapon. Everybody _urinates_ several times a day. There's your water supply right there. As long as a bender can dance, they're armed and dangerous, but did they use urine? How about sweat? Nope, one Bender succeeded in extracting blood from a guard and bent that. Similarly, there's the Earth Benders. I wondered what was special about refined earth: metal, that kept adept Earth Benders from breaking out of metal prisons. Then along comes Ms Champion Earth Bender and even wood qualifies as earth. By the time they assembled a strike force and assault the Fire fortress, I didn't care that I didn't have the final DVD for that part. It all went back to Goodwill.

I saw a Sunny Starscout plush at goodwill the other day (Generation five My Little Pony, the series that got lobotomized and then aborted mid series, along with whatever toys that might have been). I did not buy it. On another day I saw a Furreal Friends winged unicorn which I did not buy. Nor had anyone else when I went back about a week later. It did finally get picked up after maybe two weeks. Last time, I bought a sickle. I've been wanting one, I've been using a bread knife to cut tall grass. I also picked up a knife sharpener while I was there. I've tried the sickle since then, with mixed results. It was good for harvesting narcissus blooms that had been bent double by the snow. If I can just get up and go before 9 AM today, I'll go do a grocery run and see what else I can scrounge at Goodwill. The first garage sale weekend of 2026 is in two weeks. I want another lava lamp, the one I have has lost its pizzazz, the wax no longer makes globs that rise and fall.