leviramsey

Kid, growing up... finally getting back into a more mature synthesis of my prior phases in life (or something like that).

There were a fair number of bands/members of bands in the UK in the 60s that were definitely bigger in the UK than the US at that time, but (perhaps thanks to Lee Abrams more than anybody else) broke in the US roughly between '75 and '85 after they had basically faded into the background in the UK. You could definitely argue that the likes of Pink Floyd and The Kinks resemble that description (even arguably the likes of Yes or Genesis, too).

That projection is for the group stage pots. We need three of these possibilities to happen, as far as I can tell: Brugge, Basel, Gent, the Turkish cup winner or 2nd place, PAOK, Maccabi, or Viktoria Plzen to bottling it in the 2nd qualifying round of the ECL or Slavia Prague or Olympiakos winning in the 3rd qualifying round of the EL or not-Sevilla to finish 7th in Spain I rather like those chances.

Certainly the best title since the days I was posting updates about our UEFA coefficient.

He's pretty good, isn't he?

Rumors of my demise have been greatly exaggerated.

Best bit of general interest nonfiction I've read in recent years has been Peter Zeihan's Disunited Nations. The broad thesis (published in early 2020) is that TL;DR: the outlooks for various powers

If you count Trader Joe's as Aldi, I guess. There's a running genre of tweet which boils down to "Trader Joe's is Aldi for white university graduates". Store footprints are about the same, but the merchandise mix and a most operational practices are radically different. I do have a fascination with areas which can support both a Trader Joe's and an Aldi.

It's almost like position relative to oceans matters in the Northern Hemisphere.

The population centroid of the UK was, in the 1990s, basically Appleby Parva in Leicestershire. It's likely now somewhat south and east of there.

The reason the Mercator exists is because a rhumb line (following the same bearing) between two points is a straight line on a Mercator map, thus it simplifies navigation. Different projections of the same underlying facts simplify answering different questions (true of any means of organizing/presenting/transmitting information).

Mostly Ulster Scots (aka "Scotch Irish") if you trace lineages (perhaps with the odd cycle in the graph) back a few hundred years. Cousins of the modern DUP voters. Not making it up: when the great wave of emigration from Ulster and SW Scotland crossed the ocean in the mid-18th century, the existing colonial elite (East Anglian in New England, South West/Midlands in Philadelphia, various younger sons of Anglo/Anglo-Norman nobility from Maryland south) all strongly suggested that the newly-arrived Borderlanders go inland to the hills to drink whiskey, live in poverty, fight each other and the natives, follow itinerant preachers, and shag their relatives. The new arrivals were more than OK with that arrangement.

Why anybody would trust a German (regardless of degree or certification) with anything to do with pizza, is beyond me. As for gravy and chips vs. cheese and chips: why not both with poutine?

Added to my ThinkPad collection with this beauty: C13 Yoga. I don't use the "enterprise" features, as my intended use case is as "light ordnance": since my other ThinkPads are uniformly 15-inch T-series (T560, T590, T15 Gen 2), something smaller for just media consumption, email, poasting, and Google Docs, especially on the go. The keyboard has the proper (at least post-2015) ThinkPad feel for typing (one of the chromebook-specific youtube channel reviews called it the best feeling keyboard ever on a chromebook), and the trackpoint works (including the middle-click scroll). Vivaldi's Android browser works reasonably well (I get the desktop versions of sites, but I can't customize the keybindings (especially Ctrl-N for new tab and Ctrl-T for new window)). All-in-all, it's working well for its purpose.