Amazon Prime Reading has free Kindle editions of what looks to be the entire Lonely Planet series of travel books, current editions.

…looking for part-time work, Carbide3D wants you. The documentation for their CNC machines and accessories is in rather desperate need of some lovin’, and they know it.

For a long time, it’s been said that the Left lives as if it’s still 1968, when civil rights and environmental protection were still in the future, not forty-plus years in the past.

Then Trump got elected, and suddenly it was 1934. Or, for Californians, 1860.

Now, with their masked “agitators” leading riots, and “celebrities” calling for violent revolution and the murder of King Donald, they’ve set the clock all the way back to 1789.

What will be their next stop on the Wayback Machine?

It was great that you had the well-publicized recall notice for your food-processor blades, and it’s nice that you sent me email to let me know you haven’t forgotten about sending out the replacements (and subtly hinting that you had to make way more than you’d expected to…), but the PDF cookbook linked to the email as “a token of our gratitude and appreciation of your ongoing patience” is bullshit.

You say, and I quote, “We put this book together exclusively for those consumers impacted by the recall.” A recall for food-processor blades.

Most of the recipes require one or more of your Electric Fondue Pot, Griddler, Grill and Griddle, Blender with Travel Cup, Hand Blender, Automatic Bread Maker, Multicooker, Spiralizer, Steamer, Waffle Maker, Hand Mixer, or Fruit Scoop™ Frozen Dessert Maker. Oh, and some of them include ingredients that can be prepared in a food processor.

As tokens go, I’m not impressed.

I’d prefer the version played in the AsoIku OVA, but life isn’t fair…

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After last night’s Cheesecake Factory bombing in Pasadena, it seems necessary to fight back with factory cheesecake, or as close as I could get at Gelbooru, wrench wenches!

(and it looks like the as-yet-uncaught perpetrator was either the most inept terrorist of the year or a typical hipster)

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I was browsing through a book on woodworking projects at the store (this one, in fact, apparently available for free to Kindle owners with Prime), and ran across the following paragraph in the tool recommendations:

Choosing a biscuit joiner is going to be limited by what's available at your home center--- most stores will have one or two brands at most. If you're ambitious, you can find a couple more to choose from at a local Sears.

This book was published in 2012. All the diagrams were done in Sketchup. It has its own web site for supplementary material. In the back it lists the URLs of 20 online suppliers, most of whom carry a wider variety of tools than “your home center” or “a local Sears” (if those still exist…). Now, admittedly Amazon’s biscuit joiner category is a bit confusing, given that it somehow includes soil compactors, cabinet legs, Super Mario Brothers magnets, jointers, electrical cover plates, and a CD by Vagon Chicano, but I’m pretty sure most tool-users were aware that Amazon had good prices and selection back in 2012, and the suppliers they did mention in the back included Woodcraft and Rockler, who have been known to sell a tool or two.

Basically, this is a “column compilation” book, and the part on selecting and using tools obviously didn’t get any editing love when they updated it. Hopefully the editor of the brand-new 2016 edition has replaced this and other dusty 20th Century artifacts.

[and, no, I’m not in the market for a biscuit joiner at the moment; it just happened to catch my eye]

When I bought my house, there was a Nob Hill grocery 3/4-mile in one direction, and a Home Depot 3/4-mile the other direction. Both are gone; I haven’t kept track of how many different Mexican groceries replaced the Nob Hill, but there isn’t a lot that can take over for a Home Depot, so it took a few years for Walmart to move in.

Home Depot had moved about three miles down the road to a new shopping center that must have involved some juicy graft, since it added massive traffic to a main road while replacing a 45-mph corner with a 15-mph corner that causes so many accidents that they add new safety features almost every year. A few more years and I figure there will be a series of pop-up barriers designed to force drivers to walk their cars through.

Anyway, the empty lettuce field across the street from the Walmart is going to be a Lowe’s Home Improvement Center sometime in the next six months. It’ll probably go up pretty quickly once the rain stops, because, y’know, building supplies. It’s a great location, at a major intersection with no accident-prone turns, and very convenient for me, being 3/4-mile down the road.

Oh, wait. The road that’s been getting backed up quite a bit since they didn’t widen it when all the houses were built 15 years ago, or when the elementary school was built in the middle of a lettuce field, or when all those kids grew up and got cars.

So it was nice to see them slip the road-widening plans into the Lowe’s article. The shopping center will come first and make things worse, of course, but some time after that they’ll add more lanes all the way from there to the Mexican grocery, past my house.

Oh, wait. They’re going to widen the main road by my house in both directions. I guess I’ll be going out the back way to Main St for a while.