dpbsmith.bsky.social

The Dickeyville Grotto was built by the local Catholic priest from 1920-1930, and it is a place that is intensely charming, even beautiful, because it represents the realization of a completely personal, idiosyncratic vision. He knew what he wanted and he built it.

It holds the center position in a group of three--Washington, Lincoln, and Columbus. Facial likeness was not Father Wernerus' forte. Not on any beaten tourist track, but absolutely worth an hour if you are in the area. You are in the presence of Something--what exactly, I'm not sure, but Something.

Why not take ordinary coffee and add orange zest, toffee, and dried cherry? But it does remind me of the description flavor of the "Drink Me" bottle in "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland," which was "cherry-tart, custard, pine-apple, roast turkey, toffee, and hot buttered toast."

6 Sept

Watch for discontinuation of the paper dollar bill. That will force use of dollar coins. And as they put Trump dollar coins into circulation, they might quietly withdraw all the other designs. Ending the penny plays into this by freeing up a coin compartment in cash registers.

17 Aug

Stopped at a McDonald's because of desperate hunger, ordered my favorite--double quarter-pounder with cheese deluxe--and bit into it before realizing that by ordering "deluxe" I had ordered shredded iceberg lettuce. Too hungry not to eat it. The suspense mounts.

6 Sept

Got away with it!

3 Sept

I know it doesn't matter. But it should. These are not Presidential commemorative medals, they are circulating coins. (And it's a trivial detail, but where's Trump's name "inscribed below the portrait?")

nytimes.comTrump’s Top Trade Representative Details Offer That Canada RejectedIn an interview, Jamieson Greer, President’s Trump’s trade representative, laid out details of what the United States offered to Canada before talks crumbled.

23 Aug

WHAT? "Mr. Carney said the United States also asked for concessions that would affect Canada’s culture and maintenance of protections for the French language." WHAT WERE THOSE? Canadian cherries mustn't say "cherries/cerises" on the package? Montreal must be renamed? www.nytimes.com/2026/08/22/b...

19 Aug

The US power grid, the whole thing, is dangerously vulnerable. Two fascinating/terrifying/important story in the weekends' New York Times. 1) The grid relies on giant transformers at every substation. It turns out that these giant transformers are individually custom-built by hand, it takes five

nytimes.comWhy Is It So Hard to Build a Transformer?Transformers are the linchpin of modern civilization. A single one can take five years to build.

19 Aug

years to get a new one built, read the article for details and interactive graphics. 2) It also turns out that they are easily vulnerable to sabotage, not theory because it has actually occurred. Attackers took down a substation with rifles by knowing what to shoot at www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

nytimes.comThe Blackout That Could Devastate America (Gift Article)The power grid relies on thousands of aging, hand-built transformers. If enough fail, the blackout could last years.

19 Aug

The second article discusses how many substations would need to be attacked to take down the US power grid, all of it, and--the writer says--the resulting blackout could last... _years_. Gift link: www.nytimes.com/2026/08/18/m...

15 Aug

It was a mistake called EMALS catapults "electromagnetic," since Trump is calling them "electric" and he thinks everything electric is woke. They should have called them "magnetic catapults" since he's on a thing about magnets and has been urging defense contractors to "do magnets."

9 Aug

On 8/5/2026, Deputy Defense Secretary Steve Feinberg told munitions contractors to speed up production, saying "Years-long development cycles are not acceptable." I hope the contractors said "You won't give us a year, when YOU took six months to get around to asking us?" Why the heck didn't

9 Aug

the Defense department approach them back in February and give the contractors six more months to get ready?

4 Aug

"Asked later what is different this time around, Trump replied, “I want to give them every last chance before decapitation.” Trump already decapitated Iran once. It didn't work. Why does he think it would work this time?

1 Aug

Why eleven icebreakers? Ten for actual service in the Arctic. One to be named Navy One and made into a floating White House. Gilded hull. Gold figurehead of Donald J. Trump, himself. Eighteen-hole golf course (real turf) on the top deck. Carrara marble columns somewhere. Poop deck.

18 July

"Look, we have totally destroyed their military. They have some missiles left. They have some drones left."--Donald Trump, 6/9/2026. "On July 17, two U.S. service members in Jordan were killed in action as CENTCOM and partner forces defended against Iranian ballistic missile and drone attacks."

14 July

I don't know what made these marks on the bottom of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. But I know what didn't make them. They were not made by a "sharp knife," a "razor," or a "box cutter." You don't need to be a forensics expert to tell that.

11 July

Trump, 1/21/2026 he said that the Greenland agreement brokered by NATO is a deal "everyone is happy with.... It's a deal that people jumped at, really fantastic for the USA, gets everything we wanted, including especially real national security and international security."

11 July

So why is he fulminating and threatening all over again, when he got "everything we wanted" back in January? Trump reneges on everything he agrees to.

A bit of a downer, but three of our most familiar patriotic songs--"America, the Beautiful," by Katherine Lee Bates; "God Bless America," by Irving Berlin; and "This Land is Your Land," by Woody Guthrie--ALL celebrate the our bicoastal "manifest destiny." "From sea to shining sea;" "From the

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across it. I don't think we have a single patriotic song that acknowledges the existence of native Americans, do we? "The Star-Spangled Banner" simply doesn't talk about the "winning of the West" which wasn't really a thing in 1814.

I guess you can't have a song celebrating the US as a unified whole without including all the states, and "coast to coast" is quick shorthand for that. But still.

mountains to the prairies to the oceans;" and "from California to the New York Island, from the redwood forests to the Gulf Stream waters." Particularly interesting because Woody Guthrie wrote his song as a criticism of "God Bless America." Bates wrote

"O beautiful for pilgrim feet Whose stern impassioned stress A thoroughfare for freedom beat Across the wilderness." Why yes, growing up I thought that America was an empty "wilderness" that the Indians were hardly using, and that it wasn't all THAT much of an imposition to "beat a thoroughfare"

1 July

Donald Trump, 2020, on the risk of fireworks starting wildfires at Mt. Rushmore: "I said, what can burn? It's stone. You know, it's stone."

28 June

Not the Reflecting Pool.

21 June

Trump recently claimed that "They took some form of knife or blade, and put a 250 foot long gash into the beautiful facade" of the reflecting pool. As the WSJ commented, "It wasn't immediately clear what the president meant by this." (What is the "façade" of pool?) But I had a feeling of déjà vu.

21 June

First term: "The Rose Garden is completed... Three days ago, while admiring the stonework, I happened to notice a huge gash in the limestone that extended more than 25 yards long,” the president wrote, adding, “It was deep and nasty!”

14 June

Donald Trump said an agreement would be signed today. I didn't believe him. I was wrong about that. That's all.

15 June

Correction: I believed a Trump lie. The agreement won't be signed until Friday, the 19th. The Strait of Hormuz won't be opened until then. Assuming there are no snags in the coming five days.

7 June

"Iran’s promise is in the first paragraph of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal.... Asked for clarification about the matter, including what commitment Iran might have made to Mr. Trump, a White House spokesperson had nothing to add to the president’s remarks." www.nytimes.com/2026/06/07/u...

6 June

Every darn time Blue Bell changes its flavor lineup, Yahoo! treats it as "news" and Google News picks it up. That seems very wrong.

6 June

And while I'm griping, I hate click-bait stories that say "Major department store chain closing its doors" and don't name the chain until after six paragraphs of AI slop about department stores in general.

5 June

Data centers should be required to generate their own electricity on site, and to discharge all their waste energy by radiation from the site. This would not solve all the environmental problems long-term, but it would at least solve the social inequity problems.

4 June

Funny, when a news story wants a quick visual identification of "the White House," they only use file photos, never actual pictures of the White House today. I guess there's no angle from which the UFC arena arches don't show.

3 June

Reflections in the windows of an elementary school in Massachusetts.

31 May

Donald Trump is proposing to cancel the America250 concert series after six of the nine acts books have withdrawn. He calls the entertainers selected by the Donald Trump Organization "overpriced" and "boring". The three that still want to perform are learning how Trump rewards loyalty.

27 May

Apart from the stupidity of bragging that the length of a pool is more than the height of a building, apart from bragging about the size of a pool he had nothing to do with building...it is not "bigger" than any but smaller skyscrapers.

27 May

This is so unspeakably stupid it's hard to know where to begin. But let's begin here. The length of the reflecting pool is nothing special, and is less than the height of the Burj Khalifa.

26 May

Donald Trump, May 24th: "The Enriched Uranium (Nuclear Dust!) will be ... destroyed ... with the Atomic Energy Commission, or its equivalent, being witness..." The Atomic Energy Commission (AEC)? Abolished so long ago most Americans have probably never heard of it. Does he think it still exists,

26 May

or did he realize, just in time to catch himself, that he doesn't know who in the government has charge of US nuclear weapons?

26 May

Cue Bob Newhart voice: "US strikes cloud peace deal? Well, I guess they might at that."

youtu.beByron Allen Makes History As The Youngest Stand-Up Comedian to Appear on The Tonight ShowYouTube video by Johnny Carson

23 May

Byron Allen is described as a "former standup comedian," but his last standup performance seems to have been at age 18 in 1979, over forty years ago. Here it is, and I've set the link to start at a particularly risible knee-slapper: youtu.be/FGnui6uUpI4?...

23 May

"I find the Indians so interesting because they take the cutest stuff, peyote... just like marijuana but it's stronger. That explains a lot of things, like why they talk like this:" (goes "ooooo" and produces a ululating sound by hitting his cheeks alternately).

22 May

Donald Trump on the Strait of Hormuz, 5/21/2026: “We want it free. We don’t want tolls. It’s international. It’s an international waterway." Also Donald Trump: 4/6/2026 “What about us charging tolls? I’d rather do that than let [Iran] have them. Why shouldn’t we? We’re the winner. We won.”

21 May

OMG Matt Levine, in his Bloomberg column, nailed it: "Lots of very smart people have had high-minded ideas about intergalactic travel for centuries, but perhaps it will turn out that a critical step in getting there is building an app to generate short-form pornographic video on demand."

17 May

One-month anniversary. truthsocial.com/@realDonaldT...

13 May

I don't want to single out any particular post or photos, but daily BlueSky convinces me of one great fundamental truth: It is very hard to take a good picture of food.