I love the fact that multiple people actually read my three-comment-long story about crazy shit happening - it made me feel good :)

Various epilogues:

The FBI confiscated the crystal ball and the Osiris statue, and re-confiscated the stand, for “forensics analysis”. But the staff at the Museum had thoroughly cleaned the stand before putting it into storage, the housekeeper took obsessively good care of the crystal ball, and the Osiris statue had been through too many locations under different conditions and entirely too many hands for anything useful to be found. Eventually, after many years of us asking, they returned the items to the Museum.

There had been a reward offered for the successful return of the items - maybe $10k or something? The homeowner tried to claim it, but was turned down. I personally think it should have gone to Al the homeless junk guy: he explicitly saved the statue from the trash, his actions are the ones that triggered the whole recovery process, and he’s definitely the one who could have benefitted the most. But no :( Eventually they decided to give the money to Jes, who promptly turned around and donated it back to the Museum.

While the theft shows clear signs of some insider knowledge - that there would likely be no Security response to alarms going off, and that the garage would be open and homeowner away - they never caught the thieves. I personally think the number of people who knew both things would be pretty small, but no one was ever charged.

The FBI did a bunch of press conferences congratulating themselves on their diligent fieldwork and years-long persistence in recovering the objects - completely ignoring that they’d long since given up and that there would have been no discovery at all if Jes hadn’t wandered into that junk store. Years later, one of the FBI guys wrote a book and it turned out these were the guys from the FBI’s semi-newly-created Art Crimes Unit, and this was one of their first successful “investigations”.

And, finally: the artifacts have been lovingly cleaned and returned to their display positions at University Museum. If you visit the Museum today and head to the Rotunda, you can see the Dowager Empress Cixi’s crystal ball sitting proudly on it’s solid silver stand, while the Osiris statue lives just a few yards away.

Anyway, OP, that’s my answer to your question: a stolen, 2500 year old, 60 pound bronze statue of the Egyptian god Osiris. I can guarantee that it will cause much confusion over many years.

Then one day, Jes Canby (one of our Museum workers) happens to visit a junk store a few blocks off campus - Jes loves junk stores! As she’s wandering around looking at stuff, several aisles over, she sees something and thinks to herself, “Hunh. That kinda looks like the Osiris statue that was stolen from the Museum a few years ago.” She gets a couple aisles closer and thinks, “Wow, that really does look like the Osiris statue that got stolen!” She goes over to get a closer look and discovers the Museum accession numbers still on the side of the statue. She calls the police.

The police show up. The FBI shows up (again). The shop owner is interrogated: Where did you get this statue?! Why, from Al the homeless junk guy, of course. Al wanders around on trash day and pulls out stuff, and the junk store guy buys it from him. Just last week, he paid Al $25 combined for the Osiris statue and an old side table. Does the FBI want the old side table, too? After much examination and consultation, the FBI does not want the old side table.

And where, they ask, might the FBI find Al the homeless junk guy? I dunno, says the store owner, he’s homeless. So the FBI starts searching West Philly for Al.

Eventually they find him. Where did you get the statue? they ask. “From the curb in front of some house a couple miles away; sometimes they throw away some nice stuff in that neighborhood.” They put him in the car and drive around a whole lot until they eventually find the right house (things look different from a car).

They question the homeowner: Where and how did he get the Osiris statue? “I didn’t,” he says. "I have a large garage and my family and friends sometimes store things there. I was on vacation in Europe a few years ago, and when I got back, this statue was there. I asked my family and and friends about it and no one knew anything about it.

“I started clearing out my garage a month or so ago, and asked again and no one still knew anything about the statue, so I gave it to my brother-in-law; he wanted it for a lawn ornament. Except his wife thought it was ugly and made him bring it back. I didn’t have any use for it, so I put it out with the trash.”

Oh? asks the FBI real casually. Did anything else happen to show up around the same time?

A pause while the homeowner thinks. “Oh yeah - there was a crystal ball, too. I gave it to my housekeeper - she’s really into all that New Age-y stuff. Where does she live? Oh, somewhere across the river - maybe Trenton, I think?”

So the FBI gets the housekeeper’s info and drives across the river to Trenton and knocks on her door. She truly does have a bunch of New Age-y stuff in her place. They ask her about the crystal ball the homeowner gave her.

“Oh yes,” she says. “You know, I used to keep it in my bedroom, but the light in there was just too strong - it burned a hole in my arm!”

And where, they ask patiently, is it now?

“Oh, it’s right over there.” She points. It’s on the coffee table; she’s using it as a hatstand. [continued]

Oh. Oh god.

Okay, so bear with me.

Many years ago, some friends and I worked at the University Museum of Archeology and Anthropology at University of Pennsylvania. At the time of this story, the museum was undergoing a bunch of renovations. The renovation dust would intermittently get kicked up by the ventilation system or would fall in a clump or whatever, and the movement would set of the security alarms. After a couple months of this, Security became somewhat lax in responding to alarms, because every night there were a number of false alarms.

So, one early morning, a student is walking to the university and spots something weird sitting in the middle of the pedestrian walkway on the South Street bridge. As they get closer, it starts to look familiar. They get up close and recognize it as the solid silver stand that usually supports in the Rotundra of the Museum. This is the first indication that anyone has that the museum was burgled the night before.

The police are called, the stand goes through evidence collection, everyone traipses over to the Museum, Security (and the museum administration) is shocked. Everyone starts looking around for whatever else might have been taken. Eventually we conclude that only three items are missing: the Dowager Empress’ crystal ball, the solid silver stand the ball usually rests on, and a 2500 year old bronze statue of the Egyptian god Osiris. [The ball is gorgeous: it’s like the third largest crystal ball in the world, it’s absolutely flawless, and John Wanamaker bought it for like $50,000 back in 1920.]

All three items were taken from either the Rotundra itself or just nearby. This is somewhat confusing, as the Rotundra is all the way toward the back of the Museum, and up a couple staircases. Why wouldn’t the thieves grab stuff from a more accessible area instead of crossing almost the entire Museum? Also, the objects are heavy or difficult to carry - why wouldn’t they take something smaller, more easily portable, and more valuable - for example, the Tang dynasty horses that are also in the Rotundra and much more valuable?

Even more confusing is why the thieves decided to ditch the stand for the crystal ball. Presumably they were having problems carrying all three items and decided to leave one behind. Did they drop the four-foot tall 60-pound statue of Osiris? No. Did they leave the 50-pound crystal ball which is very round and can be hard to hold safely? No. They decided to leave behind the 20-pound stand, which has lots of easy finger-holds, is made of solid silver, and is easily meltable into easily-sold unidentifiable metal. It’s all just … very weird.

Anyway, the police show up. Because of some University association with the state that I can no longer remember, the FBI shows up. There’s lots of chaos. And … nothing happens. The FBI takes the stand into custody for forensic examination, but they can’t find any clues. They keep the stand in custody for a couple years in case “something else turns up” but the case goes cold.

Eventually they return the stand to the Museum. We clean it carefully and, heartbroken, put it into storage. And for a couple more years, nothing happens. [continued]

I use an app (iOS, Android, Windows, web) by TMSoft called White Noise. I think it was like $2.99. It has a bunch of pre-programmed sounds (waves, chimes, birds, traffic, etc) that you can use. You can also import sounds, change existing sounds (alter pitch, make slower, etc), create your own mixes, etc.

My current “sleep sound” is a mix. The base is pink noise, which nicely muffles many sounds. Since a constant hiss can be annoying on it’s own, I topped it with a pitch-lowered heavy rain (the regular pitch was a little annoying). To avoid being woken up by bass noises (lawnmowers, vacuum cleaners, delivery trucks), I added in a slowed-down heavy thunderstorm: it has intermittent peals of thunder that rumble on and then fade away; any base noises that I hear, my sleeping mind interprets as a long peal of thunder and doesn’t bother waking me up. Underneath all that, I have a very slowed-down heartbeat; my heart will tend to try to match it, prepping me for sleep. And I’ve added in some very intermittent birdsong and frogs croaking to make it a little more cheerful, and a kitten purring because that’s relaxing too so why not?

I tinker with it occasionally, but it really helps me sleep through any disturbances at night.

While [Grok] didn’t develop a MechaHitler DJ personality, it did behave about how you’d expect from an AI model trained primarily on tweets and the opinions of Elon Musk. It apparently hallucinated advertising agreements with “xAI sponsors” and “crypto sponsors,” failed to separate its internal reasoning from its external DJ output, issued an identical weather report every 3 minutes, and got obsessed with UFOs.

Lmao

You remember that old saw about getting a job done: “fast, cheap, and good - pick two”. Well fast food used to be cheap, and it used to be fast: I could pull up to Burger King drive-through and drive away with a burger, fries and drink in 5-10 minutes for like $7. It might not have been the best food, but it was tasty enough and filling enough that it was worth it.

A few years ago, I was on a road trip and tried stopping at a McDonald’s. It took me 45 minutes to get through the drive-through lane and I was about ready to scream because the layout didn’t show the backup until there was no way to get out. Last year, I was on another trip and stopped at Burger King. Got a burger, fries and drink, and it was over $20.

If fast food is no longer fast, no longer cheap, and was never very good, why would I opt for it?

Speech-to-text AI prompt, with someone slurring “Iran”?

CSA will be more expensive than big box stores.

Probably, yeah, and I don’t want to minimize that. However, chances are also that the food is either more unique (heirloom varieties that taste better but either don’t travel well or “looked ugly”), or it’s fresher and will last longer (because they’re not being sent to a sort-and-pack facility, put in a warehouse, sent to a regional warehouse, a local warehouse, and then the back of a store).

I also like that it forces me to eat more vegetables than I would in my ‘normal’ diet.

I realy have to look into that.

Try googling CSA and your county (if in the States), or CSA near your town. There’s also local harvest.org, but they don’t list everyone, and some of the ‘too far to consider’ farms will have local drop-offs.

My most recent discoveries are scalloped diakon and butternut squash bread [not entirely sure that’s the recipe I used, but I’m at work, lol].

I found butternut squash bread because last year’s harvest brought me no less than ten butternut squashes and I didn’t want to eat all of them broiled or in soup. The bread is great - it’s like zucchini bread or banana bread - light, mild, good with a bit of butter or cream cheese on top. I cooked down the squashes and froze the cooked innards, then made the bread over the winter, when I had more time (and partially because I couldn’t have fitted all the fully cooked loaves into the freezer, lol). It’s good and simple.

The second one’s a little more complicated to cook but I’m actually delighted with the scalloped diakon because I’ve been trying to find a decent daikon recipe for years and everything either makes it too noticable (I don’t actually like diakon, but I refuse to waste food) or it makes the dish bland and unappetizing. That scalloped daikon recipe makes them mild and tasty and just right for me. Daikon saves well, so my plan for diakon season this year is to just save them all up and make one large batch of scalloped daikon all at once.

I also made a really nice ground cherry tart once, but I’ve been struggling to re-find the recipe :( There are also fairly easy recipes for using display pumpkins to make pumpkin pie, which I often do: I’ll process the pumpkin and make pie filling, freeze the filling flat in a Ziploc, them unfreeze it and stick it in a pie shell for Thanksgiving or Christmas. If I’m eating with someone, I can legitimately claim it’s a pie made literally from scratch.

If anyone has questions, I’m happy to answer!

On Sunday night, I sit in front of the tv, once again watching guilty-pleasure shows, and I use whatever veggies are left over to make salads. Each week I try for a mix of styles so I don’t get bored: for a couple salads I may toss in some nuts and berries or apple pieces to make it a bit sweet, while others I’ll put in extra peppers or onions to give it some zing. Any lettuce goes on top so it doesn’t get soggy over the week; crunchy stuff like croutons goes in a snack Ziploc on the side so it stays crunchy (ziplocs get rinsed and reused every week, and some recycled year to year). Dressing goes in an old pill bottle along the side. I make ten salads: one for each lunch and dinner for the week.

In front of Sunday night’s tv, I’ll also make little veggie snack-packs: veggies in a Ziploc (add a little water to keep them fresh), some of them with an old pill bottle of dressing or dip on the side After I’ve finished, any veggies that haven’t been used cooking, salads or snack-packs, they get frozen to be used in future meals.

Herbs tend to come in small bunches during the season and it can be annoying to process small amounts each time. I’ve settled on cleaning and chopping them up each week (in front of Friday nights tv), then freezing them. At the end of the season, I’ll take them out of the freezer and dry them and add them to my spice cabinet.

Once or twice a year, I’ll spend a couple hours making freezer jam, which is insanely simple: mash the berries, add sugar and pectin, stir, put in containers, leave them on the counter for a day, then move to the freezer. I can use the jam for sandwiches, cake filling, topping for pancakes and waffles, or give them out as stocking stuffers over the holidays.

And once a year during high tomato season, I’ll spend a Saturday afternoon processing tomato: I’ll make and can some salsa, make and freeze some marinara, boil down a bunch of tomatoes into tomato paste (freeze them in ice cube trays, then move them to ziplocs; you can use them as-is or dilute them into soup, sauce or puree).

How much time is all this? I find it helps to reframe things and count them toward other goals or desires. The hour I spend doing PYO on alternate weeks isn’t “farm-share time”, it’s counted toward my weekly exercise goals. Time in front of the tv isn’t counted either, as I’m catching up on guilty-pleasure tv (without the guilt, since I’m actually working, lol). The couple hours batch-cooking on alternate Saturdays, I would likely to have been batch-cooking anyway. That really leaves like 1.5 to 2 Saturdays each year, where I’m making jam, making and canning salsa, etc.

Price-wise, I’m paying $400 a year for a ten-week share, but again I re-frame it: I eat the fresh meals over the summer and fall and the frozen meals over the winter and spring, plus there’s also whatever I’ve pickled, canned, jammed or frozen. For me, it’s really a year-round benefit that works out to about $7.70 per week for farm-fresh (often organic) ingredients and homemade meals spiced to my personal tastes. It provides over half the food I eat each year, which means the rest of my food budget stretches further. And I’m eating healthy foods, not highly-processed stuff.

For me, the key has been coming up with a set of recipes for the ingredients I’ll get, for dishes that I’ll enjoy, and that preserve well - usually frozen. I only have the normal freezer-on-top-of-fridge, but by the end of the season, it’s crammed with lasagna, French onion soup, eggplant Parmesan, scalloped daikon, strawberry pancakes, blueberry muffins, stuffed tomatoes and peppers, zucchini boats, butternut squash bread, seven-layer casserole, chili, etc.

I’ll admit this isn’t for everyone: you need to adjust your habits to what’s in season instead of what you buy from the store, you need to find recipes that work for you, you need to spend time cleaning, processing and cooking the veggies. But for the people who do adjust, it can save money.

I have a farm share (CSA). At the start of the year, you pay up front for a share; in return, you get boxes of veggies during the season. Since the farmer is paid up front, they don’t need to borrow money from the bank and hope for a decent harvest to repay the loan, so there’s less pressure on them: they know their farm will still be around next year. And you get boxes of veggies that were picked within the past 24 hours, so they’re all incredibly fresh. You’ll get some stuff you can find in the grocery store (ex: roma tomatoes, bell peppers) but since all the middlemen have been cut out, they last a long time (I’ve had heads of lettuce last like a month); and you’ll get some that’s either heirloom varieties (too fragile for handling by the supply chain feeding grocery stores) or unusual (ex: pawpaws, ground cherries).

I’m going to say up front that a farm share isn’t for everyone; it takes some adjustment and a bit of work to make it work well, but for me it’s worth it. I’ll note that I’m single (so it all falls on me) and vegetarian (so I can sometimes eat a lot of veggies).

Each farm chooses how to operate, so I can only speak in generalities. To accommodate different family sizes, some farms offer boxes of different sizes/prices; others offer a half-share, so instead of getting a box every week for 20-26 weeks, you get a box for 10-13 weeks (you choose which weeks you want a box). You can also find a friend to split the cost and content of a share, either splitting each box, or alternating pickup weeks.

Some farms will pre-pack the boxes for you; others will put the veggies on a table and let you choose among them; for example, this week’s share might be something like “choose 3 zucchinis/eggplants; choose 2 lbs of a bunch of different types of tomatoes; choose 4 varieties of hot peppers”, etc. Some farms you have to pick up at the farm itself; other farms have distribution points in outlying areas, will let you pick up at local farmers markets, or have home delivery for an additional fee. Some farms have work shares: instead of paying for a share, you can choose to work like 4 hours a week during the season and get a box of veggies each week in return. Most farms have pick-your-own availability for veggies that may not be to everyone’s taste (okra, herbs), where some people may want extras (tomatoes, peppers, beans), or where personal taste is important (flowers).

I’ve been with a bunch of different farms over the years (I’ve moved several times; and sometimes I’ve joined a farm that isn’t a great fit for me). For the past couple years, I’ve been getting my own box instead of splitting a share, and I’ve opted to get a 10-week share (I choose the weeks). One thing I like with the 10-week share is that I’m not facing fresh veggies to work with every week; sometimes a weekly share can seem overwhelming!

Most people make some adaptations to make a CSA work for them. It’s taken me a while, but I’ve finally come up with a set a recipes for stuff that I like, that uses the veggies I tend to get, much of which stores well; and I have a pattern of processing that works for me:

Each week, the farm sends out an email ahead of time, letting you know what’s in season and sometimes with a rough idea of how much to expect (“this’ll be the last week for blackberries, but we have lots of tomatoes!”); that helps me plan what to do ahead of time.

On weeks that I have a share, I go to the farm, do the PYO (it’s included in my share, and my starving Irish ancestors would be upset if I didn’t get them!), and choose the veggies for my box. When I get home, I wash everything, then sit in front of the tv, watching my guilty-pleasure shows and processing the veggies - as applicable, I trim, peel, slice, dice, mince, etc. As I finish each veggie, it goes into a sealed bowl or a Ziploc and goes into the fridge. I also have a spare bowl for scraps - ends and peels of onions and carrots, trimmings from peppers and leeks, etc. Those join other scraps in a big Ziploc in the freezer; when I have enough scraps, I use it to make veggie stock. And there’s another bowl for stuff I can’t use, that either goes in the garbage or a compost pile (I’ve stopped composting in recent years).

On Saturday, I spend a couple hours cooking, usually 2-3 big dishes or 4-5 smaller ones - it depends on my mood and what’s in season. Then half the food gets portion-sized and frozen; the other half gets eaten over the week or so following. While cooking, I may pickle some veggies. Pickling is easy: you put your chosen veggies and spices in a jar, heat up your pickling brine, pour the brine over the veggies, and seal the jar. During a season, I may pickle dilly beans, beets, giardinieri, garlic, onions, cucumbers, etc; I may eat them out of the jar or use them as ingredients in future dishes.

[continued in next comment]

two high-capacity water connections were not being properly monitored. One had been installed without the utility’s knowledge, and another was not tied to a billing account.

Yeah, you don’t just “accidentally” install an “extra” water pipeline like that.

People should be responsible for their own comfort. Bring your own sleep mask, ear plugs, neck pillow, blanket, or whatever else you need to be comfortable.

Do not draw on the window with permanent markers.

If it’s a sharpie, you can get rid of the mark with hand sanitizer.

No Child Left Behind. If a kid failed a grade, the school got less money, which eventually leads either to the school going into a financial death spiral and closing, or just passing kids regardless of whether they understand the work. There are teachers who failed kids, only for the principal overrule them and pass the kid anyway. The next teacher inherits the kid, can’t make up the various learning deficits, and is also forced to pass the kid.

Teachers have been warning about this for like 20 years. Several years ago, college professors also started warning about it. If you read through some of the threads on /r/teachers, you’ll see some common comments: kids struggle to read and do math. They have no reading comprehension skills. They want everything spoonfed to them, and have no curiosity or drive to find things out for themselves. There’s a group in college now that has no social skills: when they show up to class, they never talk to their classmates, they just sit there staring. They want step by step instructions on how to things, but they often don’t mentally retain those instructions for subsequent exercises, and they rarely generalize that knowledge. They don’t look at manuals to follow processes or resolve issues. When they hit a roadblock on doing something, they just sit there and wait for someone to come, figure out the issue, and tell them how to proceed.

/r/teachers has been saying for a while now that they’re graduating cohorts of students that are unprepared for the world and explicitly unprepared for working independently.

It’s not every kid, of course: there’s occasional talk that they’re seeing kids move from a bell curve distribution to a K-shaped distribution: that the classes divide between kids who are curious, or have learning support at home, or whatever, who are doing fine as always; and the other half just aren’t.

I don’t know what to tell you: mentorship programs help some who are struggling, but businesses don’t want to spend money training people anymore. Questioning candidates about how they’d solve individual problems, or their approach to solving problems in general, may filter out some of the bad candidates but (as with “what’s your worst quality”) that’ll only last until they come up with a standard answer.

Behold the field in which I have planted my fucks and see that it is barren.

So … Some people’s brains are wired with directions being absolute, and some people’s brains are wired with directions being relative. One of the easiest ways to tell which way your brain is wired is to switch your mouse to the other hand. If your brain is absolute-wired, then the main button is always on the left; if your brain is relative-wired, then the main button is always the one closest to your body.

I doubt whether animals really understand this.

Not in the way you’re thinking of (“my human loves me!”), but they almost certainly understand it as a form of scent-marking (“we are tribe-family”), which is a pretty similar concept.

it seems to be on a level of intimacy to me that I find weird sharing with a pet.

Have you had (m)any pets?

Mom’s so busy with my brother’s marriage plans, haven’t have much time to talk to me. Idk what to even say on the phone… I just wanna hear her voice… I kinda have a panic attach if i don’t hear her voice or if she takes too long to respond…

The people I love, I’ve started saving their voicemails offline, so I can remember their voices. Maybe you can do the same?