GiraffeNecktie

The author lost me at the end when they said to stop pulling up dandelions. Dandelions are not a native species (at least in North America) and are not a good food source for native pollinators.

For overcoming pitchiness, the "one weird trick" I learned from a singing teacher is to imagine you are moving in the opposite direction from the actual pitch. If you're going higher, imagine you're going lower and vice versa.

This helped me overcome the tendency to constrict the throat when reaching for a higher note or to go flat when heading lower.

When CBSA searched your car were they doing it as a power trip or were they doing it for some unexplained reason? The latter is just part of the job. I travel quite often to the states and find that the CBSA agents are almost uniformly polite and often friendly. Going the other way, I find CBP agents are generally surly and aggressive.

No, DHS did not "steal" your boat. They confiscated it and you'll get it back by following some lengthy and convoluted appeal process.

But I seriously don't understand Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) and why they have to be such utter dickheads on the Canadian border. Their Canadian counterparts (CBSA) are just as effective and efficient and somehow manage to be generally sane and rational.

Yep.

It's important to distinguish two, seemingly contradictory positions:

1 People won't love me for who I am. In fact, it's the job of the rest of the world to show me where I need to improve. But, on the other hand ...

2 I should love people for who they are. It's not my business to make people over. My job is to make myself over. There's more than enough work to be done there. Working on other people's supposed failings is just a distraction from my real business.

That's a rough paraphrase of Byron Katie's "Work", an approach that has helped me tremendously for the last dozen years or so. Whenever I get miserable it's usually a clue that I'm working on someone else's 'business'.

1. I believe that was addressed in the video. These are very short range devices that can be recharged by solar energy or by sitting on power lines.

2. See the video.

3. You might be able to deny access to buildings with mosquito nets but you're not going to stop close range surveillance, painting targets and other uses. Mosquito nets themselves would be relatively trivial to dismantle with a swarm of these (you'd only need to land one with explosives on the net).

But the nice thing about a publicly financed health care system is that early interventions become much more likely when people aren't forced to make decisions like "Should I spend my paycheck getting this lump in my breast checked out or should I spend it on groceries for the family."

One reason is that it represents the first acknowledgement that health care is something that every man, woman and child should have.

That's not to say there aren't horrible things about Obamacare (i.e. terrible business model) but yes, it's a start.

When I was a kid, I used to read paper books in bed, at the dinner table, relaxing on the couch, sitting on the toilet, riding the bus, in my room when I was supposed to be doing my homework etc. Apparently that wasn't a problem but now if I use a digital device in much the same way, it's an ominous sign of the collapse of society and the coming apocalypse. Damn those corrosive pixels!

"To the oncologist who told me I couldn't survive: fuck you."

Although maybe he did you a favor by externalizing the thing you had to fight. Sometimes life is funny like that.

I'm astonished that anyone would hesitate for even a nano-second to give this kid anything less than a godspeed and God bless. I'm sorry, but the kid has already launched himself into orbit, he's not going to come back to earth for the sake of two or three years of choking down generic, all-purpose pablum at the local high school.