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.

Numerous poorly-sourced stories are making the claim that Team Hillary blames Obama for her loss.

While this is plausible, it not only ignores the toxic effect Obama support has had on other candidates in the past, but if embraced by her supporters has absolutely terrible optics:

She couldn't do it without a man.

Not the message you want your “feminist icons” to be sending, I think…

This is a terrible list of possible security questions.

How many of these questions are trivial to answer for anyone with even a small social-media presence? How many of the rest are things that people over 30 probably don’t even remember? And seriously, zip code? Date of birth? Last four digits of SSN? To stop someone from trying to break into my brokerage account?!?

How about these, instead?

• Who do you most regret voting for?
• Who would you go to jail for sex with?
• What's the ugliest car you've ever seen?
• What pistol do you keep by the bed?
• What's the name of the first person you begged for sex?
• Did it work?
• What do you only wear when no one else is around?
• Lid up, lid down, seat down, or "Asian squat toilet"?
• What's the most ridiculous food fad?
• What do you keep losing?
• What does cilantro taste like to you?
• What was the first thing you had surgically removed?
• Where do you usually masturbate?
• What foreign country would you never visit?
• What historical figure would you travel back in time to kill?
• What's your favorite smell?
• What part of your body was involved in your first emergency room visit?
• What celebrity would you clone?
• What's your favorite food you can't find any more?
• What's the worst injury you ever caused by accident?
• Who would you lock up and throw away the key?
• What superpower would you abuse the most?

Don’t answer in the comments, or I’ll steal your identity…

“Ninja” was obviously too broad a category, but “ninja cat_ears” wasn’t quite enough. Besides, you can’t have too much Yuki, so I expanded the search to include all animal ears, real and fake.

No red half-rims, so let’s start off with a little Nonsense:

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I decided to see how much detail I could get with the 20-degree v-bit. This was carved out of the end grain of a generic hardwood 1-inch square dowel.

Update: I shined a flashlight onto the seal to get a better look at it.

This is a 2-inch square seal created in Illustrator with my script, imported to VCarve Desktop, and cut from a mounted linoleum block on my Nomad with a 20-degree v-bit. The hardest part about getting a good firm impression on paper is that my stamp pad is too darn small; I’ll have to buy an uninked pad at an office supply shop and load it up with the good pigment.

Also making a good impression is glamour model Meru Tsujimura, who cannot be found at office supply shops…

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…in a Republic far, far away:

"The more you lose your grip, Left-wing, the more our systems will slip through your fingers."

(via, and he’s got lots more!)