While the wood I bought a couple days ago dries out in the house for 2 or 3 weeks, I'm contemplating what to build next and have some ideas. FYI those cedar fence pickets I've been using are really wet when new but dry quickly. In the summer when it's 110 degrees in my garage, it only takes a week.

If you didn't see my other thread with my latest endeavor, it is HERE

My first thought was to continue with the theme of my first build either by making the original design double-wide or by turning it into a corner cabinet. Excuse the quick and dirty bad Photoshop.



I thought if I did make it double-wide, as envisioned with some more really bad Photoshop type work, I could put some doors on the top but there is a problem with doing either of the double-wide ideas - weight. I can just barely lift and move the single-wide hutch thing as it is and if I make it bigger and heavier with no one to help me move it around, it won't be very practical. On the plus side, I could build it fairly quickly having just built the single-wide version.



What I'm leaning toward is something like this:



I'm really digging that old red cabinet thing and think I could replicate the look pretty easily. Although I haven't done it in a while, I even know how to cut glass - my handy mom taught me when I was in high school. The other thing is a pie safe. It looks easy to make and would be cute if painted?

I could even make this bookcase thing or this weird skinny cabinet?



Speaking of cutting things, and excuse me for sharing but I just had to, I had about 6 or more inches cut off my hair a few days ago. It hadn't been that long since I was in high school. It was pretty shaggy and a total pain to deal with. I'll go back in a couple weeks for a touch up trim so the ends look better. There were no weird conversations with my stylist!



If anyone else has any ideas for old rustic farmhouse style stuff to make, post 'em up! With a few more builds of gaining experience and learning techniques, I might move on to more refined stuff but hardwood is sooo damn expensive. Even regular pine isn't cheap. If I get good enough making this stuff, maybe I'll try selling some at a craft fair or farmer's market or something but for now it's to take up space I don't have in my house.

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Elaine Chao's sister drowning in her car (Tesla?) that may have driven itself into an artificial pond and then cocaine Mitch McConnell almost immediately announcing that he's stepping down from GOP leadership 8 full months before the election... Now that's something.

Certainly nothing to see here:

Quote:The death earlier this month of Foremost Group CEO Angela Chao, the sister-in-law of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, is currently under “criminal investigation,” a Texas sheriff’s office said Thursday.

Chao, 50, was found dead shortly after midnight on Feb. 11 after being pulled out of a car that had gone into a pond on a private ranch in Johnson City, Texas, about 40 miles from Austin.

“This incident was not a typical accident,” the Blanco County Sheriff’s Office wrote in a letter to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton on Thursday.

“Although the preliminary investigation indicated this was an unfortunate accident, the Sheriff’s Office is still investigating this accident as a criminal matter until they have sufficient evidence to rule out criminal activity,” the letter said.

Since Chao’s death remains the subject of a criminal probe, the Blanco County Sheriff’s public information officer told the attorney general that reports, 911 logs, audio and video evidence as well as other material should not yet be released to media outlets that requested them, including CNBC.

“Releasing the reports, videos and other information prior to the completion of the investigation would interfere with the investigation and possible prosecution of this matter,” the sheriff’s office wrote.

The letter did not say that there was evidence that Chao died as the result of a crime.

But the statement in the letter that Chao’s death was not “a typical accident” and the prospect of a potential prosecution marked a shift from an initial statement released days after Chao’s death.

The sheriff’s office in that Feb. 16 statement had said, “EMS attempted emergency measures on Ms. Chao but she succumbed from being under the water.”

“Our preliminary investigation has determined this to be an unfortunate accident. The investigation is ongoing at this time,” the prior statement said.

The ranch where Chao died is owned by a corporate entity connected to her husband, venture capitalist Jim Breyer, who has an office in Austin.

Chao was the sister of McConnell’s wife, Elaine Chao, who has served as secretary of both the U.S. Labor and Transportation departments. Their father and mother founded the Foremost Group.

The letter Thursday to Paxton from the Blanco County Sheriff’s office went on to ask the attorney general for his opinion on whether the records and other material should be kept from the public for now.

Once the probe of Chao’s death is complete, “all reports will be released to all requesters,” it said.

A spokesman for Foremost Group declined to comment on the letter. CNBC has requested comment from spokesmen for Breyer and Elaine Chao.

McConnell announced Wednesday that he would step down as the Republican leader in the Senate later this year.

“This has been a particularly difficult time for my family,” McConnell said on the Senate floor. “We tragically lost Elaine’s younger sister Angela, just a few weeks ago.”

“When you lose a loved one, particularly at a young age, there’s a certain introspection that accompanies the grieving process,” said McConnell.

Angela Chao was a double Harvard graduate who became CEO of Foremost in 2018. She previously served on the board of the Bank of China and as a director of the China State Shipbuilding Corporation.

Her husband Breyer is part owner of the National Basketball Association’s Boston Celtics, and previously served on the boards of Facebook, Walmart, Marvel Entertainment, News Corp. and Dell.

Death of shipping CEO Angela Chao under criminal investigation

Quote:Description

Rapid transport: passengers travel on a model horse driven by steam; a postman equipped with wings travels by air; a steam-powered waggon travels between Bath and London in six hours; a pneumatic tube takes passengers from Greenwich Hill to Bengal; there is a suspension bridge between Bengal and Cape Town; a giant flying fish takes convicts from England to New South Wales; Irish emigrants are fired from a cannon; etc.

Mechanization: boot-polishing and shaving are powered by steam; bodies are lifted by crane up on the roof of a church for burial in order to foil body-snatchers

Sophisticated tastes among the masses: dustmen eat icecream and pineapples; cat's meat is called "delicate viands for quadrupeds"; a street-vendor sits under a tasselled parasol reading fiction. A tombstone marking the grave of the "Select Vestry" is decorated with dining implements, implying that the introduction of local government elections will stop aldermen etc. from extravagant dining at public expense

Extravagant building projects: Marble Arch and Buckingham Palace; a church with Chinese, Indian and Gothic features; literally building castles in the air to pay off the national debt.

Lettering

March of intellect. "Lord how this world improves as we grow older." [Paul Pry] Esq.re del. The "March of intellect" or "March of mind" was a popular phrase in the 1820s and 1830s, used seriously by some, mockingly by others, to denote trust in mass education and technological progress to solve the problems of society: see British Museum, op. cit., pp. xliv and 67-68 "Lord how this world improves as we grow older." This is a heavily ironic quotation from the poem The knight and the friar (ca. 1800) by George Colman the younger (1762-1836): "The Lady wrote just what Sir Thomas told her; For, it is no less strange than true, That wives did, once, what husbands bid them do;– Lord! how this world improves, as we grow older!"

References note
British Museum, Catalogue of political and personal satires, vol. XI, London 1954, no. 15779

Reference
Wellcome Collection 37252i

Creator/production credits
By William Heath using the pseudonym Paul Pry, represented by a vignette of Paul Pry.

Wellcome Collection

Quote:What did the future look like in 1820s Britain? Poking fun at liberal ambitions for education reform, the rapid pace of industrialization, and a fashionable interest in applied knowledge, William Heath’s March of Intellect series offered a satirical vision of the wonders and potential cost of progress. While extravagantly dressed ladies window-shop for pastel finery and forgo stairwells in favor of belt-driven slides, a child is moments away from being paved into the road by a carriage at full gallop. The automation of domestic labor — through a device called the “Grand Servant Superseding Apparatus for doing every kind of household work &c &c &c &c” — leaves women more time for recreation (or idle folly): smoking shisha in public, riding horsy hovercrafts, and traveling effortlessly to South America, Bengal, and Cape Town through the use of vacuum tubes, accelerator bridges, and pedestrian tunnels. Men gorge themselves on pineapples and guzzle bottles at the Champagne Depot. Postmen flit around with winged capes; a clocked-in shoeshiner has the time to read a newspaper in French, thanks to his boot-cleaning engine. Even convicts have it better: they embark for New South Wales on a gargoyle zeppelin, but still have panoramic views.

In their imagination and satire, Heath’s prints reflected debates about the early-nineteenth century “March of the Intellect” or “March of the Mind”. For those who championed progress, this period roared with possibility. Encyclopædia Britannica first became available to the British public in 1771; by the early nineteenth-century, at least fourteen major encyclopedias, and reams of subject-specific dictionaries, were passing through all kinds of British hands. Magazines, reference books, and lending libraries rapidly circulated knowledge beyond the portered gates of elite institutions. Organizations like the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge promoted mass education as a mode of political reform. If knowledge was truth, then trustworthiness and moral action could be inculcated in the middle and working classes by providing autodidacts with affordable materials. That was part of the worry. Not only did the democratization of learning threaten an old cultural regime and potentially stoke the kind popular unrest seen in the Spa Fields riots and Peterloo Massacre, its liberal gloss was marred by suspicions about the machinations of political economy: “many believed that knowledge was foisted by the powerful and wealthy on the working classes in order to indoctrinate them into a culture where knowledge validated a simple work ethic”, writes Alan Rauch in Useful Knowledge.

Quote:We find a more apocalyptic vision of the future in Robert Seymour’s 1820s The March of the Intellect, where a jolly automaton stomps across society. Its head is a literal stack of knowledge — tomes of history, philosophy, and mechanic manuals power two gas-lantern eyes. It wears secular London University as a crown. The machine smokes while crusading, blowing hot-air-balloon follies from a pipe bowl, carried on the breath of its menacing exhalation: “I Come I Come!!”. Wielding a straw broom, capped with the head of reformer Henry Brougham, it sweeps away all potential encumbrances. Gone are the pleas, pleadings, delayed parliamentary bills, and obsolete laws. Vicars, rectors, and quack doctors are turned on their heads. Like Frankenstein’s creature, birthed from a pick ‘n’ mix of exhumed organs and ossified science, the monster in this satirical cartoon is patchwork knowledge itself, practically applied and made widely available for the very first time.

Fifty years after these prints appeared, Shanghai merchant guilds would attempt to prohibit silk filatures driven by steam to protect handicraft workers. A half-century later, John Maynard Keynes forecasted a future of “technological unemployment”. Fifty years after that, the General Motors Corporation announced a lights-out “factory of the future” to be run by robots in Saganaw, Michigan. And, in 2023, artificially intelligent chatbots have fueled ongoing anxieties about the mechanization of intellectual labor. In an era when “full automation” seems to mean anything but “less work”, the projections of these images — whether earnest or caustic — let us glimpse what the future might have looked like, and what it could still be.

Below you can browse a selection of cartoons related to the March of the Intellect by William Heath, Robert Seymour, and other artists.

Quite enlightening. News reports and they are not good (For NY that is).

Sky New Video of not only this but a US commie meeting of full crazy. This is the modern "Progressive" Left. A must see.

Quote:Sky News host Rita Panahi has reacted to a video of a woman who took her son to be treated by a vet because he identified as a cat. “It’s becoming impossible to figure out what’s real and what’s parody,” Ms Panahi said. In the video, the woman said the vet told her he could not treat her son because he had human anatomy. “So while I do think that is a form of discrimination, because if my son says he is a cat, he is a cat – then he needs to be treated like one. “But I’m not going to press charges because I know that he could lose his license if he did work on my son.”

We have seen it coming for the last few years. Here is another public example of how they feel about you.

Christian White Rural Voters Are A Threat To Democracy

https://twitter.com/JohnRLottJr/status/1...0902982880

Video of the Day: Seven years later, what can we make of our first confirmed interstellar visitor, ‘Oumuamua? In this entertaining lecture (w/slideshow) from January 2024, Chris Lintott, professor of astrophysics at the University of Oxford and professor of astronomy at Gresham College in London, makes the case that, while this object’s fleeting presence in our solar system wasn’t coordinated by extraterrestrial life, it still has much to teach us about the nature of the Universe.

Quote:In 2017, the Solar System was visited by an object named 'Oumuamua, which came from another star. The unusual properties of this first interstellar visitor led some to suggest it may be an alien spacecraft - but the truth is that its oddness is already teaching us lessons about how solar systems form.

This lecture also considers the prospects of discovering more unusual objects in the Solar System, and what we might do about asteroids that threaten the Earth.

This lecture was recorded by Professor Chris Lintott on 24th January 2024 at Barnard's Inn Hall, London.

Chris is Gresham Professor of Astronomy.

He is also a Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Oxford, and a Research Fellow at New College.

The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website:
https://www.gresham.ac.uk/watch-now/oumuamua

Not shocked at all off course by this. The way the corrupt 'government' has been handling taxpayers money, it should be obvious to anyone that this is done on purpose .

With the one purpose being to degrade the US from a 1st world nation to a third world nation , and then the WEF comes in and 'saves the day' with their 'great reset' 

Just a quick review.  "Where the Crawdads Sing"

Normally I never would have watched this movie but 'True Love' and I sat through it as we of course had never seen it.

Put up with the adds on free TV.

From my perspective I was very impressed. I will be purchasing this movie to watch it without breaks and put it in my dusty collection of fav movies.

I would go into detail but I suggest watching it for yourself.  Bit slow at times but that paints the picture for the ultimate ending and had us guessing, was there an actual murder, and, if so who was the culprit.  

We enjoyed it and will watch it again.

Kind regards,

bally)

I can't tell from this video if this is verified true or not , but I wouldnt' be surprised in the least