Snowflake's Forum

  The machine has been perfected.  You can now control the weather.  Tough cookies to all the others. For Bunny, the final three weeks in August can be the hot summer.  The cool fall will start promptly in the beginning of September.  The cold winter will start with November and end sometime in March.  Mild spring until August. What are your plans now that you have the machine? J.P. Bunny

  A cute video short about too many darn pups! Lots of pups! (Just click on the link.  Sorry about the lack of a picture.

 This is just too cute. Next? A song in honor of  Laura Ingraham?

In my area right now, it's in the lower '60's -- awfully cool for the time of year in my view. Is it cooler than usual for anyone else?  

  Not all of us spend all of our time actually working.  Decorating fruit definitely not in the job description. What do you do at work that helps keep your sanity? J.P.  Bunny

  (Courtesy of Tom Nichols)   View in browser Almost 15 years ago, I was in bad shape. I was divorced, broke, drinking too much, and living in a dated walk-up next to a noisy bar. (It was only minutes from my young daughter, it had a nice view of the bay here in Newport, and I could afford it.) The local veterinary hospital was a few doors down; they always kept one or two adoptable animals in the window. One day, a gorgeous black cat, with a little white tuxedo patch and big gold-green eyes, showed up in a small cage. I stared at her for a while. She stared back patiently. I wasn’t taking very good care of myself at that moment, so I decided I couldn’t take care of a cat. I walked on. For weeks, the cat sat there. For weeks, we stared at each other. One day, as I was deep in my cups, I took a walk with a friend and co-worker who also happened to be my next-door neighbor. “You look at that damn cat every day,” he said. “Just go in and get it.” So I did. The cat was called “RC” and she

  Posters encouraging people to “ Steal From Loblaws ” popped up last week across Toronto and have been gaining steam online, drawing mixed reactions from Canadians. The posters for the “first annual Steal From Loblaws Day” invite customers to rob retail grocery chains owned by  Loblaw , including the Real Canadian Superstore, No Frills, Fortinos and T&T, and suggests that 2024 could be just the start of this proposed illegal protest, with the inclusion of “first annual.” No organizers of the May 12 event have come forward to claim responsibility for the posters. Justifying the protest, another X user wrote that “grocers are blatantly stealing from consumers in creative new ways without government intervention.” “You brought all this on yourself,” another post reads. Others are shocked that Canadians would resort to stealing to send a point to Loblaw. https://globalnews.ca/news/10449334/steal-from-loblaws-day-posters-food-inflation/ Posters  declaring May 12 the first annual “Steal

Old Favorite Kids' Books In the picture above are three books our parents read to us before we began reading on our own.  I've brought them out to share with some elderly people in a nearby rest home.  My question is: what books were your  favorites when you were little? Posted by Jennifer A. Nolan

for all your well wishes. still sore, so will keep this short, copy and paste isn't a hard task. but this one was too cute to pass up. BRUNSWICK, Ga. (AP) — A Pennsylvania man who credits an alligator named Wally for helping relieve his depression for nearly a decade says he is searching for the reptile after it went missing during a vacation to the coast of Georgia. Joie Henney has thousands of social media users following his pages devoted to Wally, the cold-blooded companion that he calls his emotional support alligator. He has posted photos and videos online of people petting the 5 1/2-foot (1.7 meter) alligator like a dog or hugging it like a teddy bear. Wally’s popularity soared to new heights last year when the gator was  denied entry  to a Philadelphia Phillies game. Now Henney said he is distraught after Wally vanished while accompanying him on an April vacation in Brunswick, Georgia, a port city 70 miles (112 kilometers) south of Savannah. He said he suspects someone stol

  A complaint about chattering concertgoers A comment I made on Dear Abby's uexpress column a couple of years ago about the increasing problem of noisy, disrespectful show-goers ( not necessarily young people!!! ) "Some advice from Schroeder to Lucy in an awesome old Peanuts strip: "Beethoven was Beethoven and YOU are YOU!!" "Music fans go to these concerts to listen to the pros, not the wannabes. And they certainly didn't come for the chatterboxes. I have never thought I had a voice to match Kathleen Battle (talking or singing) -- and now I know I don't. We don't go the nearest fine-arts museum to see the works of local Bob Ross buffs, do we?" 👋👋👋: "[F]ree outdoor concerts are usually not the 'top-level" professional performers.  Those are rare & attract huge crowds.  Most local concerts Simon & Garfunkel at Central [P]ark." Jennifer A. Nolan to 👋👋👋 : "I'm sure they're not usually the Boston P

Hi y'all!!!  Y'all must be thinking, what the heck is going on here aren't ya 😂! I don't think I've ever done a thread here on Snowy's side of the interwebs but here I am! I'm here at the special request of our dear Snowflake, as he has injured his hands and is finding it very difficult to do much typing. He'll be lurking around to moderate and comment from time to time but doing more than a few words is hard for him for the time being since he has sprained one of his hands and may have even tore a ligament! He's of course seen the doctor, has to wear a brace and was told it could take up to 4 weeks for it all to heal. He really did a number on it! Most of you all already know that I don't do the whole political thing but if I see that there's no thread up for a day, I'll attempt to get something posted if I can think of something interesting. Being a stay home mom/house wife, I don't have much to ramble on about other than regular d

  Smrnda on Troubler of Israel: "Church Membership Isn't Optional." Another comment on that rather long-ago post on church membership being a mandate from On High.  This time, the author goes by the name of "Smrnda," and like to read blogs by atheists and Christian progressives. "A mark of adulthood is when a person no longer needs some external authority to keep them in line. Adults don't outsource their decision making to outside parties. Sure, they might consult with people, but in the end, adults make their own decisions and live with the consequences, and take ownership of them. Perhaps in simpler times people could merely do as they were told and get by, but those days are long past. Even in employment, the value of people who 'do as they are told' is declining. People who can make autonomous decisions are more valuable. A person who needs to be told what to do is basically a failure unfit for much of anything. "So, if people aren

  With the rare exceptions, Bunny dislikes shopping.  In and out within minutes.  If a cart, it doesn’t stop moving.  Mrs. Bunny loves it.  An adventure, with every single item to be examined with great care, over and over. How is it with you and shopping? J.P. Bunny

  My first contribution to this blog in too long!  Part of an ongoing argument between white Christian churchgoers and the former co-congregants who are leaving in droves. KMR to Guest on Troubler of Israel : "Church Membership Isn't Optional,"   1/7/19: Australia has done quite a bit to counteract their gun problem. Congratulations on that. Wish the US would do the same. You do realize though that you can't love your neighbor as you love yourself though when tell them their sins disqualify them from a relationship with God. That's a judgement and one that all people know in first world countries means that you think they are going to be tortured for all eternity. They're not going to take kindly to that and harmony goes out the window because you immediately become an asshole for God. All psychologically healthy people tell themselves that they are doing their best and give themselves a break when crap happens. Do you tell yourself you are going to hell when

Humans do moral reasoning about right vs wrong all the time. AI (artificial intelligence) software can also do its own moral reasoning. Researchers are looking for a point where humans cannot distinguish human moral reasoning from AI. We are at or close to that point. Nature Scientific Reports reports : We conducted a modified Moral Turing Test (m-MTT), inspired by Allen et al. ( Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Intelligence , 352:24–28, 2004) proposal, by asking people to distinguish real human moral evaluations from those made by a popular advanced AI language model: GPT-4. A representative sample of 299 U.S. adults first rated the quality of moral evaluations when blinded to their source. Remarkably, they rated the AI’s moral reasoning as superior in quality to humans’ along almost all dimensions, including virtuousness, intelligence, and trustworthiness, consistent with passing what Allen and colleagues call the comparative MTT. Next, when tasked with identifying the source