Sea Turtles – Politics Plus

Open Thread August 23 2026

Posted by Joanne Dixon at 6:00 am Open Thread, Personal, Politics

Aug 232026

Yesterday, the radio opera was Giuseppe Verdi’s “Luisa Miller” – one of his early successes which made masterpieces like Il Trovatore, La Traviata, Rigoletto and more possible. It reminds me of La Gioconda, in that both have a character who has the hots for the heroine (who is in love with someone else) and is so resentfl at being turned down that he destroys pretty much everyone else in the cast. Verdi named this character “Wurm,” so you know right up front just who he is. (Come to think of it, “Andes Chenier” has one of those too.) Off to see Virgil now – will of course check in upon return.

Dave is not the first male Drama Queen I have ever encountered – not even the first male felins Drama Queen. But he may be the loudest.

Open Thread August 9 2026

Posted by Joanne Dixon at 5:57 am Open Thread, Personal, Politics

Aug 092026

Yesterday, the radio opera was Pelléas and Mélisande by Debussy = the only opera he ever finished. The plot is basically Tristan und Isolde without the love potion, and so steeped in turn-of-the-20th-century symbolism that it’s tricky to follow – a listener just needs to go with the flow. The libretto is from a play by Maurice Maeterlink – who was pissed off that his girl freind was not cast as Mélisande ay the premiere that he didn’t see it until agfter Debussy died, at which time he said, “In this affair I was entirely wrong and he was a thousand times right.” As a listener/viewer, I would say this quote from Wikipedia nails it: “The deliberate vagueness of the story is paralleled by the elusiveness of Debussy’s music.” Off to see Virgil now. Will check in upon return.

Archived from abc news because theirs only stay up for a while and I need to spread them out to avoid running short.

I am impressed. I did know that birds – particylarly columbids (which includes pigeons) and corvids (crows and ravens), but a bird knowing, first, the it needs oxygen, and second, that it could get some from the right humans, andthird, that these were the right humans -that’s quite a feat.

From GOODGOODGOOD. Just look at all the volunteers it took to make this happen.

Here’s a link to the GIF at the bottom, since it isn’t GIFing: https://martiniambassador.substack.com/p/baby-okapi-is-okie-dokie

These Grannies are from Charlotte (I assume NC.)

PHP is a programming language used to build websites. We have it at all through our hosting partner, BlueHost. In order to update it, we have to go through Bluehost. During his life, TomCat was the only one who had access to our account there. I (JD) am now the only one. I have been to BlueHost and investigated updating our PHP to 8.3 or even to 8.1. I found instructions to do so - in fact, I found two conflicting sets of instructions. I went through one set of the steps and got the message that Our site could not handle 8.3, but that it had successfully updated to 8.1. I then went back here to see what it looked like. But I couldn't get in - either as an administrator or as a reader. It was just gone. I had to reach BlueHost by phone. It was determined that Politics Plus is in fact not compatible with any version of PHP newer than the one we have. BlueHost therefore uninstalled it for me, and the site came back to normal. Of course, like everyone else, I care about security. But I also am aware that TomCat elected to use different providers for several of the services that BlueHost provides, for instance backups. We are backed up daily - but not by BlueHost. However, out PHP is through Bluehost. I feel that if they are not worried about the older version, I am not going to worry about it. I believe that our security here is all or mostly through WordFence, whom I trust.