Wednesday Weekly Trivia #1
A new weekly feature for the blog, five trivia questions around a central theme or concept. Today's question theme: When Harry Met Sally
- In Harry and the Hendersons, the Henderson family lived in what city?
- She was the first American woman in space
- Harry S. Truman was famously pictured holding an issue of the Chicago Daily Tribune which incorrectly proclaimed his loss to what Presidential hopeful?
- An urban fantasy novel series by Jim Butcher follows the life and adventures of a wizard. What is that wizard's full name?
- Actress Sally Field won an Emmy for her performance of Maggie Wyczenski, a bipolar woman, on what TV drama?
Hover below for answers:
1. Seattle - 2. Sally Ride - 3. Thomas Dewey - 4. Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden - 5. E.R.
Send me your suggestions for a trivia category and if I like it, I'll use it in a future week.
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Tolkien pub the Lamb & Flag is to close after 450 years
Pour out a pint friends. It makes sense to close it, and legally the university has to. I'm sure once the Pandemic is over and restaurants and pubs can return to business someone will open it in a new location, but... it won't be the same. As a Tolkien fan I'm sad I was never able to make it over and see it, though I'm sure the atmosphere isn't the same as when Tolkien and Lewis were there.
Tax Software Megathread on Reddit
When it comes to paying your taxes every year, lobbyists and corporations have pushed the IRS to not make it simple. People end up paying for tax software they don't need, and the tax software companies find newer and newer ways to add fees for the "convenience" they provide.
If you make $72,000 or less annually, you DO NOT HAVE TO PAY FOR TAX SOFTWARE. Go to the Reddit thread, it will help you.
Story of Smokey the Bear
"Only you can prevent forest fires" - Smokey is based on a real bear cub who was rescued from a wildfire.
Biden is staffing for a commission on Supreme Court reform
I am not a liberal who is gung-ho about changing the Supreme Court. But I am also not a constitutionalist, or the equivalent. I am all for a careful evaluation of our current government systems, in all branches, and an indepth study about what problems there are and what proposed fixes might be, then further investigation about repercussions of those changes, repeated out several levels of depth. It would be a slow and painful process to ensure that a change is really needed, and that any resolution or fix is carefully considered.
I regard changing something like the Supreme Court as akin to a change to a computer system's BIOS. It is something that can be done, but it cannot be done willy-nilly. It is a very serious piece of change.
So, for those reasons, I am glad to see Biden taking the first steps to make exactly that sort of in-depth investigation, knowing it is a long road ahead of us.
First Six-star System Where All Six Stars Undergo Eclipses
If you have trouble visualizing how that would work, here, have an illustration from NASA:
Florida makes bid for Olympics if Tokyo backs out
That sounds like a terrible plan. And I say that as an Ex-Floridian.
Late night Glowbug coding. I have had this idea for a few days. On the back end I can save drafts of posts. Primarily it's a link queue saved either from a bookmarklet when I come across a link to read later, or a link saved from my phone.
Well there is a cron job which runs every twenty minutes that, as of now, does two things.
- If a draft is older than 48 hours, it deletes it. Sometimes I save a link meaning to read it and I keep putting it off. Well, if it gets to 48 hours I lose the chance. Or if I meant to save it longer than that it should be a browser bookmark instead.
- If the system hasn't grabbed the page's title, it goes ahead and does that. It's a small thing but it is much nicer than the sometimes opaque URLs which I don't know what I'm linking too.
Small coding thing, took me 15 minutes. The majority of which was triple checking my timeout deletion query, but otherwise I had it mapped out in my head and it went lickety-split nice and easy.