This Counter class is one of my favorite new-ish features of Python. It's very handy and saves me some coding. It could be helpful for producing data for a histogram or other graphs.

It seems to have been introduced in Python 3.1, which was a few years ago, but I've been using Python for 23+ years, so it's "new" to me.

⚠️ SPOILER ALERT ⚠️

"Fast Food". Female house sparrow (Passer domesticus) on a city street prepares to feast on a discarded french fry. (Credit: hedera.baltica / CC BY-SA 2.0) HEDERA.BALTICA VIA A CREATIVE COMMONS LICENSE

What I like about this photo is that when I was a kid, I was amazed when I saw a sparrow doing this very thing, scavenging french fries. I was around 7–8 years old. My mom had taken me on a shopping trip in her 1968 Buick Skylark, green with black roof. We stopped at McDonald's for a snack. She went in to get food and left me sitting in the car. She had parked in front of the shop, facing the hedge-bordered outdoor eating area. I saw sparrows hopping through those hedges and on the ground around them. A lucky few of them found several french fries and were either eating them or carrying them away in their beaks. As a little kid growing up in a rural area, I expected birds to eat only seeds or bugs, so this sparrow french fry feast was surprising and hilarious to me.>

I'm annotating the full text of the article so that others can see it despite the paywall.

This article is of very little help at all. It might help some people learn how to enable sharing via a few apps that have use the Apple sharing API. It doesn't help with enabling other apps. For example, I'm in a web browser and I want to share the current page with my contacts in Google Chat. I have the Chat app installed, but it doesn't show up as a choice in that list of apps. So, what can be done about that?

Captions with lyrics: • https://amara.org/videos/OAP67rT5Zzrw/info/the-wild-rover-luke-kelly-the-dubliners/ • https://www.opensubtitles.org/en/subtitles/9459314/the-wild-rover-luke-kelly-the-dubliners-en

"mastodons"

It's a service called Mastodon, with a mastodon mascot. Why would the video show elephants‽

My great-aunt Marguerite.

My great-aunt Marguerite.

Shown to be a forgery…

This demonstrates that the Mael brothers are true composers.

https://genius.com/Sparks-simple-ballet-lyrics

From (https://texags.com/forums/16/topics/3175273/replies/58488734):

On Doug Sweet's first trip to the U.S. Capitol, as a 13-year-old in 1975, he tilted his head back, gazed up at the glistening white dome and thought it was the most awesome thing he had ever seen. On his second trip to the Capitol, he joined a mob of Trump supporters who smashed their way into the seat of the U.S. Congress, and finished his visit handcuffed facedown on the floor. The 45-year journey between those two visits was marked by bright idealism and belief in dark conspiracies, by a solitary existence and a newfound fraternity with those convinced there is no way Joe Biden beat Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election.

The mob that stormed the Capitol last Wednesday was a combustible stew of QAnon conspiracy theorists, armed rampagers and extremist personalities, as well as more ordinary Trump loyalists determined to fulfill the president's desire to persuade or intimidate lawmakers into undoing his election loss. Among those who have been arrested are a leader of the far-right Proud Boys for his alleged role in the siege, and an online provocateur and white nationalist who before the attack warned of rioting if the results weren't overturned who live-streamed from inside House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's office.

Mr. Sweet and a friend, Cindy Fitchett of Mathews, Va., first visited the Ellipse, where President Donald Trump told his supporters that the election had been stolen and that he planned to walk with them along Pennsylvania Avenue to take their anger to the Capitol.

"We fight like hell," the president said. "And if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore."

People waving Trump flags and wearing MAGA hats were swarming the bleachers erected for Mr. Biden's inauguration. They were scrambling up the walls. Rioters had overrun Capitol Police and forced their way into the building. Mr. Sweet could hear the thuds and see the smoke from flash-bang grenades going off inside. He says he hesitated. He says he felt the need to go inside to share his views with Congress but wanted to consult God first. He prayed aloud: "Lord, is this the right thing to do? Is this what I need to do?" He says he felt God's hand on his back, pushing him forward.

"I checked with the Lord," he says. "I checked with Him three times. I never heard a 'No.'"

They walked in and, he says, found themselves in a whirlwind of broken glass and debris. He says he was shocked; the event on the Ellipse had been all picnic blankets and puppy dogs. This was an orgy of destruction.

Robyn Sweet, now 35 and the operator of a group home for disabled adults, says she has been saddened and puzzled to see her father's views grow more extreme. She says she loves him and still sees his good qualities, calling him "charismatic, lovable and funny outside of all this." Yet she says he has become someone she doesn't quite recognize.

"I don't know this person anymore," she says. "It's almost like a lot of these middle-aged white men are afraid, I'm not really quite sure of what, but it's like they're paranoid...It's mass hysteria." She says their relationship has become increasingly strained "because it just seems so crazy some of the stuff he would talk about."

Ms. Sweet marched in support of Black Lives Matter in June after the killing of George Floyd in police custody, and started a Facebook page to highlight bigotry. She says her father supported her exercise of her constitutional right to free speech, but some people "in his camp" began accusing her of "being antifa," a loose collection of sometimes-violent left-wing activists. "She's caught up in the idea that BLM goes into cities and helps Black children," Mr. Sweet says with a wheezy laugh. "I wish they did. I would get behind that," he says. "She's really hard to the left," Mr. Sweet says of his daughter. "I'm really hard to the right. We're polar opposites. But I love her."

https://www.wsj.com/articles/one-trump-fans-descent-into-the-u-s-capitol-mob-11610311660

From (https://texags.com/forums/16/topics/3175273/replies/58488734):

On Doug Sweet's first trip to the U.S. Capitol, as a 13-year-old in 1975, he tilted his head back, gazed up at the glistening white dome and thought it was the most awesome thing he had ever seen. On his second trip to the Capitol, he joined a mob of Trump supporters who smashed their way into the seat of the U.S. Congress, and finished his visit handcuffed facedown on the floor. The 45-year journey between those two visits was marked by bright idealism and belief in dark conspiracies, by a solitary existence and a newfound fraternity with those convinced there is no way Joe Biden beat Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election.

The mob that stormed the Capitol last Wednesday was a combustible stew of QAnon conspiracy theorists, armed rampagers and extremist personalities, as well as more ordinary Trump loyalists determined to fulfill the president's desire to persuade or intimidate lawmakers into undoing his election loss. Among those who have been arrested are a leader of the far-right Proud Boys for his alleged role in the siege, and an online provocateur and white nationalist who before the attack warned of rioting if the results weren't overturned who live-streamed from inside House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's office.

Mr. Sweet and a friend, Cindy Fitchett of Mathews, Va., first visited the Ellipse, where President Donald Trump told his supporters that the election had been stolen and that he planned to walk with them along Pennsylvania Avenue to take their anger to the Capitol.

"We fight like hell," the president said. "And if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore."

People waving Trump flags and wearing MAGA hats were swarming the bleachers erected for Mr. Biden's inauguration. They were scrambling up the walls. Rioters had overrun Capitol Police and forced their way into the building. Mr. Sweet could hear the thuds and see the smoke from flash-bang grenades going off inside. He says he hesitated. He says he felt the need to go inside to share his views with Congress but wanted to consult God first. He prayed aloud: "Lord, is this the right thing to do? Is this what I need to do?" He says he felt God's hand on his back, pushing him forward.

"I checked with the Lord," he says. "I checked with Him three times. I never heard a 'No.'"

They walked in and, he says, found themselves in a whirlwind of broken glass and debris. He says he was shocked; the event on the Ellipse had been all picnic blankets and puppy dogs. This was an orgy of destruction.

Robyn Sweet, now 35 and the operator of a group home for disabled adults, says she has been saddened and puzzled to see her father's views grow more extreme. She says she loves him and still sees his good qualities, calling him "charismatic, lovable and funny outside of all this." Yet she says he has become someone she doesn't quite recognize.

"I don't know this person anymore," she says. "It's almost like a lot of these middle-aged white men are afraid, I'm not really quite sure of what, but it's like they're paranoid...It's mass hysteria." She says their relationship has become increasingly strained "because it just seems so crazy some of the stuff he would talk about."

Ms. Sweet marched in support of Black Lives Matter in June after the killing of George Floyd in police custody, and started a Facebook page to highlight bigotry. She says her father supported her exercise of her constitutional right to free speech, but some people "in his camp" began accusing her of "being antifa," a loose collection of sometimes-violent left-wing activists. "She's caught up in the idea that BLM goes into cities and helps Black children," Mr. Sweet says with a wheezy laugh. "I wish they did. I would get behind that," he says. "She's really hard to the left," Mr. Sweet says of his daughter. "I'm really hard to the right. We're polar opposites. But I love her."

https://www.wsj.com/articles/one-trump-fans-descent-into-the-u-s-capitol-mob-11610311660

This article is pretty funny. Imagine writing such a long rant about whether a sock is just a little taller than the edge of a shoe. Forget it! If a sock makes you comfortable, wear it.

How can the PHP DateInterval() implementation (and others) claim to support ISO 8601 when they don't allow fractions in the strings they parse?

• https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=53831
• http://php.net/manual/en/dateinterval.construct.php#121981

Unfortunately, I can't login. Must be a problem with the hypothes.is proxy.

"lsloan_umich" is my work account.

Google announced the new Google Pixel phone and lots of cool Google Home new features.

I like the "Stranger Things" AR stickers for the Google Pixel camera.

I'm glad I can use Hypothes.is for page notes like this, because Google disabled chat for this live stream. (Did you know that in YouTube live streams, chats are destroyed when the event is no longer live? They don't become video comments.)

I've noticed that if I share this annotation, when the via.hypothes.is link is opened, YouTube gets confused and shows the message: "Your browser does not currently recognize any of the video formats available. Click here to visit our frequently asked questions about HTML5 video.". It includes a link to: https://via.hypothes.is///www.youtube.com/html5

my first annotation