Don Edwards

Fundamentally, she was appointed to be their nominee for President by the party leadership that (IMHO) has been doing since at least the 1970s pretty much every totalitarian or corrupt thing they're accusing Trump of. (Without regard to whether their accusations are true. Some of them definitely are. For example, two of Trump's White House advisors went to prison for ignoring Congressional subpoenas. The puzzle there is why two Democrat Attorneys General also ignored Congressional subpoenas, and didn't even get their hands slapped.) In principle, I like this idea. It SHOULDN'T matter what race etc. someone is, at least not to the point of creating selective lists and having masses of people care about those lists. However... .... it's too soon. Race etc. STILL DOES matter. And just making those selective lists go away, won't speed the day when nobody cares.

Wight lifting.

The sad thing is, while I agree with everything you said about Trump, I still think he's better than the alternative we were offered. Or, at least, he was better. Up until 2021 or so. Not so sure about now, and it isn't because of improvements on the other side; if anything, they got worse, and he may be just as bad as they are now.

Perhaps she & Tedd have fun with the mirror...

Prof, it sounds like a good time to visit (and hopefully see) an ophthalmologist...

There will be an earthquake tomorrow. Where, how big, I don't know. Whether it will be detectable without seismographs, I don't know (probably not). You can believe this prediction. It isn't very useful, though. (There have been at least five earthquakes in the US's 48 contiguous states within the last 24 hours. Two in California, one each in Texas, New Mexico, and Wyoming. The two biggest ones — Texas and Wyoming — measured M 3.7.)

Or perhaps taken some with you, so you could take it if needed. (If it would take effect quickly enough to help. On that, I have not the slightest clue.)

These tiny flies. They seem to be attracted to sources of moisture - the sink, the toilet, my tea, my food, up my nose...

The one situation where the "examine yourself in a mirror" cliché actually works in a story. (It normally doesn't work because it's used as a tool to work in a description of the character's normal appearance, but what the character would be looking at/for is differences from their normal appearance — usually, differences they don't want and will need/wish to correct.)

Yeah, if proportions are kept, tiny creatures are absurdly strong relative to their size. I had to figure some of this out recently for a story, and found that Barbie, being 11 inches tall, should weigh 13.4 ounces and be able to carry 37 ounces. And if you think that's bad, Tinkerbell - 5 inches tall - should weigh 1.3 ounces and be able to walk around (but not fly) carrying 8 ounces. Personally I think she'd have a tough time keeping that weight balanced. (How does this work out? If you multiply the height by 1/2, keeping the same density and *all* the same proportions, you multiply the cross-sectional area of bones and muscles and a bunch of other stuff, and thus the strength, by 1/4 - and the mass by 1/8.) But none of that would allow squirrel-Grace to move something weighing 500 pounds.

Yeah, I've heard from several sources that if you have a herd of goats and you don't have an escape artist, then you have two escape artists. And then there's this story...

Aren't these games supposed to be weird?

That case to the right of the computer console wasn't there earlier. In its place was a much taller cabinet. I wouldn't be surprised if the actual computer is intact. I also wouldn't be surprised if Tedd has good backup discipline - possibly because their father and/or Mr. Arthur insist on it - and there's a backup in a location somewhere outside the house, said location known only to Tedd and maybe their father. (For that matter, I wouldn't be surprised if DGB computer-tech people have visited and planted a worm in Tedd's computer, so they have a complete & current copy of its contents at headquarters.)

By the way, that "let them eat cake" thing was not quite as stupid as it sounds. (Still pretty stupid though.) At the time, France had a law specifying the price of bread - a rather cheap price, leaving barely any profit for the baker. The law also specified that if a bakery had any product on the shelves for sale, then they had something that could be bought for the mandated price of bread. No bread? But there's a cake, so the peasant who came in with just enough cash for a loaf of bread gets to eat cake. (And bakers were eager to bake enough bread that they wouldn't get bit by that law.) The concern, though, was for the peasants who didn't have the coin for a loaf of bread.

Cats, like pretty much every other mammal and lots of non-mammal critters, need a small amount of salt. However, their biology is about as bad at detecting and signalling "that's ENOUGH salt, stop now!" as ours.

Moths, sort of. The wings do swing in, but don't actually fold, and they lay roughly like this: — — (It's one of the defining differences between them and butterflies; the latter's usual resting wing position is more like || or an inverted and very narrow V - although occasionally they emulate moths.) However, moth wings don't look much like dragonfly wings. Or Hope's wings. Most depictions of fairy wings are either dragonfly wings, or butterfly wings held flat. And now I'm thinking about those wings, and doorways...

Oh, it would be pretty much impossible to hide the fact that she's a dragon. At least if she's outside in an open area, so is allowed to breathe fire; otherwise some people try to insist that dragons don't exist and she must be some sort of lizard. (Not my favorite picture of her - but I couldn't find that picture on the web again.)

I suspect that he & Hope are in Hope's room. I want to see Bishop's reaction when Edward goes over and talks to a solid wall for a moment, and Jeremy (and maybe Hope) steps out of the wall.

Actually... a human generation is often thought of as 30 years, but if you look at our biology, 20 years is more than enough. Let's go with the larger number, and to make the math easier shift it up to 33.333... years. So 100 years is 3 generations, 1000 years is 30. Assume an average of two surviving children per adult. 30 generations gives about 1.07 billion. The population of Europe and the United States - according to Wikipedia - is about 1.08 billion. The difference between reality and "everyone's descended from..." pretty much amounts to where the family trees are actually tangled vines.

Aw gee... and I have a story in progress where a young dragon shows up at Moperville High. As an exchange student.

There is a species or subspecies of hominid that we know only one thing about: a bit of their DNA got into the inhabitants of a cave in north-central Asia, who were mostly Denisovan but also had distinctive traces of H.Sapiens and Neanderthal DNA. (You can find traces of both Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA in some populations of modern humans.) And that's ALL we know about them. We have no fossils of them, except the DNA traces in fossils of that tribe. We've found no identifiable trace of their DNA in fossils from anywhere else. Because we know so little, it's pretty much a guess when or where that subspecies met that tribe's ancestors. For that matter, we know too little to have assigned them an actual name. There's a similar situation in central Africa. With a different species/subspecies. Or maybe more than one - that's just how little we know of them. We think the division between that subspecies (assuming only one) and modern humans predates the division between Neanderthal and modern humans. And let's not forget about H.floresiensis in southeast Asia and some nearby islands. Thought to have gone extinct about 50,000 years ago, but at least one scientist is looking for live ones. And yep, there's traces of their DNA in some living human populations. ---- Raven is somewhere over 400 years old. And fertile with (at least some) normal humans, to the point that he has surviving descendants. If - assumption with very little evidence - he and his descendants are as fertile with humans as a normal human, then statistically a noticeable fraction of the population of Europe and North America should be descended from him; if he's over about 1000 years old, then make that "statistically all...". And he's only one child of immortals. It's rather less likely (but not impossible) that the Kitsune line of mages are descended from him, so there probably are (or have been) other hybrid human/immortal children. Most likely some of them were born thousands of years ago, if not tens of thousands. People who could use magic should be a lot more common than it appears. Maybe there's a large population who could but don't know it...

Phoenix blood can have that effect...

Yeah, I don't think that either Elliot nor Cheerleadra want her to be a dragon.

Just annoying... when a song that you haven't heard in years, and never liked, suddenly infests your brain... for no apparent reason...

Then you'd love this one subforum at the Crosstime Cafe. You finish reading a message thread, and there at the bottom of the page it says