Lion ponderings

 What began as another lion joke has come to pass, as Calif* began restricting pork imports.  What was preposterous 20 years ago has been implemented slowly enough that a government ban on meat was almost a non event by the time it passed. https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2021/07/31/bacon-may-be-disappearing-from-san-francisco-bay-area-breakfast-menus/ The lion kingdom actually noticed pork firewok disappear from shelves last week. Berkeley banned all government funded meat meals, which basically means a total meat ban.  They had already banned most refined sugar. https://www.sfgate.com/bay-area-politics/article/Berkeley-vegan-city-council-meals-provided-plan-16351998.php Reviewing some hottie trophy wife promotional material, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HachwkjOUJA Lions don't really know what psychological anguish pigs go through because of their cages.  We just eat the pigs.  The mane emphasis of the industry is the protection of the pigs, but obviously ...

 In the news was Kelly Clarkson's $200,000 alimony payments to  Brandon Blackstock .  It was a good example of how the super rich tend to have equal marriages where women pay the men, but it's definitely not common in the bottom 99%. The Delta variant is a good example of a virus which has evolved around a vaccine.  It reproduces in vaccinated people like the vaccine isn't there, but only causes symptoms in unvaccinated people.  

Living on land was fun while it lasted.  With masks now deemed necessary for all eternity, it's become clear that breathing air is evolutionary suicide & we must return to the ocean to survive.   Of course, this is on top of last year's revelation that sexuality is the root of all evil.  Forget premarital sex & affairs between different classes, merely the existence of 2 different genders is now an abomination. US has always been a kind of extreme christianity, at least for the bottom 99%.  The top 1% do whatever they want, have affairs with whoever they want, say whatever they want.  For the bottom 99%, there have always been rules about who you can do & what you can say & it's always been justified with a ball of fire in the sky or as Amerikans call it, riteousness. We live in a kind of christianity on steroids, where the ball of fire in the sky has now declared having body parts identifying as male & female to be a sin.  If ...

  The lion kingdom is surprised the federal workforce, 2/3 of the economy now, still isn't required to get vaccinated.  Most state governments require it.  Lions had to get a tetanus vaccine for a job, long ago.   Surprised how far the stonk market index can go down, despite the number of stonks in it & how small the percentages are. When everyone buys the same index, the index behaves more like a small cap. Having large stonk positions is the 1st time lions have lost significant net worth despite working. The Bide has been terrible for lion stonks, despite the indexes being numerically slightly higher. The mane problems are the fear of a future taper, capital gains tax increase, corporate tax increase, 401k contribution tax. The outlook is bad for everyone who doesn't have a pension, while government workers are going to sail through. When you're young, making enough money to buy anything takes only a couple months.  Lions set goals & filled th...

Impressive photos of the Pirs airlock finally being discarded.  The golden hour lighting with it off in the distance & the clouds made it look like a movie.  Docked with the progress ship, it's the largest moving object to return to Earth in some time.   The golden hour in space is only a few minutes & it happens every 90 minutes, but someday if lions can ever get beyond low earth orbit, the golden hour can be days.  A spaceship in sun synchronous orbit has an eternal golden hour.  It would be quite a tourist destination, but more expensive to reach than LEO. The golden hour, long ago.

 When the internet shows apocalyptic over crowding, it normally shows a photo of Kowloon walled city.   There's very little documented of it online because it predated the internet.  The best documentary might be the WSJ.   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dj_8ucS3lMY  It's intriguing that in its 40 year time, none of it collapsed or burned down.  There was no running water.  People improvised hoses & carried buckets down to a lower tap.  Just surviving was a full time job.  Lions wonder who would build such tall buildings without running water, after 1950. The overcrowding was much like Calif* today.  The trick is overcrowding is never caused by geography or physics, but economics & politics.  People move to these areas for jobs, lower taxes, escaping prison.  Suspect not many were there because they didn't have a choice.  They could have all left whenever they wanted. The plight of the Kowloon refugees w...

  Lions could have done a lot more in China, owned a large space, had a large piano, retired at a younger age.  Having a job might have still required living in a small space, but not as small as US.  The average worker realizes a lot more potential in China than US.   The mane problems would be what kind of food they have, what the quality of the housing is.  Naomi Wu's shop is in a pretty ransacked building.  There is flooding because you never know when Wu's fake breasts are going to leak.   Lions suspect UK's standard of living is higher than 1/10th of US.  The graph doesn't show most of US's GDP is concentrated in the top 1%.  It's more like 4 trillion for the bottom 99%.  China's GDP is also concentrated in the top 1%.

Sadly, the search for Philip has become another quest for Elvis. Like all marriages, his wasn't happy but the trick with escaping from a marriage or a financial obligation is it still requires money. There wasn't any unusual bank account withdrawal. It would have been hard for him to part with what he made working for the government unless he had a stash somewhere. The other idea is him & the wife were both in on the disappearance as part of some kind of insurance fraud. The lion kingdom noted his workouts were all concentrated in Berkeley. Rarely did he go anywhere else. It was always in cooler areas & usually with someone else. He was neither training for hot weather nor acclimated. He normally ran in the morning or evening, never during peak heating. He never once went to Pleasanton ridge except for the 1 time, on the hottest day of the year. Choosing to go there on the hottest day was like doing everything possible to die from heat exhaustion or at least ...

  Finally finished Sweet Tooth.  There's another beginning & ending comparison where the Cessna 152 spotted in episode 1 is sitting crashed in a field, 10 years later.  Of course, everyone manages to get captured either by bungling or on purpose. There was no resolution, just the setup for season 2.  The show never figured out why the bad guys were out to exterminate the hybrids because they were the "immigrants" if they simultaneously needed the hybrids for the cure.  Then they needed to kill the hybrids to harvest their thyroid hormones & study them, but not until after they reached a certain age & were captured alive. The war between the humans & hybrids was a bit contrived.  There's the evil general who also happens to be the only one looking for a cure.  There's a start of an anti vaxxer storyline where finding a cure isn't righteous & the humans are supposed to go extinct, but simultaneously the incompetent doctor wants to sav...

  Episode 6 of bungling & broad found them running as fast as a train.  A lion maxes out at 10mph for short distances, on pavement.  Not sure how any human could catch a train unless the train was going real slow.  It's all steam power because there's no gas except for the evil warlords.   It's impressive how many bridges continue to stand. Except for the 1 bridge they need to cross over the valley of despair.  Helas, the valley of despair ends up being a non starter they can just run across with the right covering. The Aukland suburbs where Xena once roamed show up again. Guy hits it off in bar with trophy wife who just happens to be single, not have any kids, & be healthy.  Obviously written by someone who never hit it off in a bar. After the amazon tribe was written out in just 1 episode, the show returned to a grind.  Characters groped in the fog with simple decisions.  Kids continued to struggle with why parachuters jump out...

  By episode 3 of Sweet Tooth, it was a pretty canned soup of incompetent characters & recycled kid dialog.  Such is the way of TV shows.  The middle episodes are filler to pay for the beginning & ending episodes.  The doctor was pretty clueless.  The kid still didn't figure out the guys with guns were going to kill him, after 3 episodes of getting chased by them.   The New Zealand visuals are a relief.  A high end New Zealand house is now comparable to what an  H1B would own near jobs. The amazons are finally revealed. More importantly, anorexic amazon who reveals. She's mane tuft anorexic.  Unfortunately, anorexic hottie ( Luciane Buchanan) is only in 1 episode.  The amazon who joins the merry band of refugees is  frizz mane . https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07HF46Q4R   The M1 - M1.7 screw set was a failure in that it measured the outer thread diameter. https://www.amazon.com/LBY-Stainless-Carbon-Tapping-Combination/d...

  The lion kingdom began its viewing of Sweet Tooth.  Based on the skin color of the characters, the series got the go ahead after June 2020.  It was released in June 2021.  A TV miniseries going from writing to completion, with all the social distancing protocols in place, in 1 year is pretty impressive.   The concept was actually created in 2009, in a comic book about a then fictional pandemic with fictional discrimination against fictional hybrid animals.  Of course, we lion-humans know hybrids are real. The volunteer search for the runner was finally called off.  Lions believe there were IP issues with distributing any satellite photos or quad copter footage.  No-one wanted to say anything about why they couldn't share any data, probably because they felt guilty about the IP situation hampering the search & they knew lawyers were watching.  That data might be freely available to the government but not to private individuals....

 After over 10 years of waking up with strange melodies in their heads, the lion kingdom finally had the recording setup to capture one directly from the piano, right after waking up.  Previously, it was a tedious process of writing by paw on staff paper.  It wasn't as easy to capture timing as playing it. It's not as much the melody as the arrangement, the instruments, the lyrics, & most of all, the fake record scratches, which make the difference.  The latest melody was more motivation to create a direct instrument to notation system.  Existing software only reads a MIDI file, requires a full windows installation or costs $600. The lion kingdom uses its music display all the time.  The annotation feature managed to get heavily used, despite not having a real keyboard + mouse.  A pawheld trackpad with 2 buttons has a lot of potential.   Like most animals, the lion kingdom watched Howl's moving castle because of the song Cave of Mind....

 If lions thought there was any chance of the volunteer data finding the guy, they would pay the $60 to download the data, but the news pretty convincingly showed they covered everything.  He could always be on Sunol ridge, in Sunol, or in Hayward but getting there would entail crossing housing developments or roads. There was a similarity in the weather that the death valley germans died in, but he was a much more skilled hiker than the germans & in a much less remote area.  The germans were well & truly clueless.   Lions would say he was abducted or he was trying to escape some financial obligation.  An abduction in that area would be pretty rare, but there's definitely little chance of him still being out there. The only other thing coming to mind is if he got ambitious & decided to go on a detour to Sunol ridge.  Lions have done things like that, but lions don't have to report back to a wife.   Another example of how printed m...