If you were able to target it properly to the right species, depending on where you are in the world, there’s a good chance that the rats and sparrows you’re thinking of are invasive.

I know around me in the US I see a whole lot more house sparrows (native to Europe, Asia, and some parts of North Africa) than I do any native Sparrows.

And the two most known rat species- the black and brown rats, originated in different parts of Asia and more-or-less spread around the world with human trade and migration.

So getting rid of those would probably be a good thing to reduce competition for native animals.

Also, everything on that Amazon page seems to be “shipped and sold” by various 3rd parties. I don’t really understand the inner workings of how being a seller on Amazon works, but I’m not convinced that WSU actually has anything to do with that page, at the very least it doesn’t seem like you’re getting your cheese directly from them when you go through Amazon and there’s some extra companies adding markups and taking a slice of the pie along the way.

Maybe try their actual website

I think it depends a lot on the community and what you’re posting.

But in general, if you’re posting good quality, relevant content and not just spamming with every article you come across, engaging with people in the comments, not x-posting things to a bunch of different communities, and of course not being a dick, I don’t think there’s an issue.

Not sure where you’re seeing $70, price is $33/30oz can

It sounds crazy, but it is a legit cheese, it’s even won some awards. It’s basically a wheel of cheese that happens to be packaged in a can.

Washington State University has pretty big agriculture and food science programs, so they make cheese, and back in the 40s the us government gave them money to research how to put cheese in a can, so they’ve been doing it ever since.

Possibly one of the best cheddars in the world is from the US (and comes in a can)

Cougar Gold

I’ve had it, it’s really good, and it keeps basically forever in the refrigerator, arguably getting better as it ages

I was raised Catholic, but it’s been a long time since I’ve done a confession, I’ve been an atheist since before I knew there was a word for it and so I haven’t set foot in a church in decades except for weddings and funerals.

But I’m not entirely clear on how this sort of reporting would be supposed to work

There’s usually some sort of screen between the priest and the person making confession, so you can’t really get a good look at someone to identify them. I’m sure there’s some cases where a priest might be able to identify a regular regular parishioner by voice, but that feels like kind of flimsy evidence. And if someone goes to confession at a different church, or just doesn’t attend or interact with the priest one-on-one regularly, then there’s basically nothing to go on. Are they going to launch an investigation into half the Catholics in town to determine which one of them might be a child molester?

I suppose the priest could get up and try to chase the person out of the church to get a good look at them, but thinking back to the fat old guys who were the priests at the churches I went to growing up, I’m pretty sure I could be out the door and in my car speeding away before the priest managed to stand up in his booth to try to follow me.

If you’re lucky, maybe someone waiting in line for confession could identify them, but the handful of times I went, the church was never very crowded for confession, and I doubt most of the people there were paying too much attention to who was coming and going around them.

If the church has security cameras, I suppose you could identify someone that way, it’s been like 20 years so I can’t remember if my church growing up had cameras or what their current situation may be. If they did, I doubt they were pointed at the confessionals of all places.

Sure, they should be required to report what they can, but I doubt there would be many cases where it would lead to anything actionable.

In my experience in American high school (20 or so years ago now) I wouldn’t say they’re ridiculously overdressed, but certainly kind of an outlier, we might’ve had a couple girls dress like that on any given day. They’d also probably be violating or at least very close to the limits of my school’s dress code with the skirt lengths.

The left one looks about right to me though. Maybe slightly more dressed up than average, but would blend into most crowds well enough. Except for the heels, I wasn’t exactly looking at people’s shoes but I don’t remember anyone ever wearing heels to school unless there was some sort of special event.

In general, I’d say the average high schooler back then wore a t shirt or maybe a sports jersey, and if it was cold maybe some of them wore a flannel shirt sweater of some kind (mostly the girls for sweaters)

A hoodie if it was cold

Jeans, sweatpants, sometimes pajama pants, shorts when it was hot out, cargo pants (mostly the guys) and once in a while some of the girls would mix in a skirt or dress, but not often.

You’d also get a handful of preppier kids with khakis and polo shirts or a button-up, a few goths or artsy types, etc. who might wear something crazy, the one weirdo who wore a suit, etc.

But mostly it was jeans or sweatpants and a t shirt.

I was more of a cargo pants and t shirt guy myself.

I don’t pay too much attention to what my local teenagers are doing these days, but from what I’ve seen of them it looks like they’ve slipped further towards the sweatpants and pajamas end of the spectrum.

I think we’re going to need some details or pictures of how your couch is constructed and how it broke to really answer this

Since you mention unscrewing the other legs, could you just go out to home Depot (or local equivalent big hardware store) and purchase 4 of something like this and replace them?

Thanks to ambiguous sans-serif fonts, we don’t really have to choose

Gen AIpha Gen Alpha

Il

At least on my phone, those look damn-near identical.

Temperatures in fahrenheit, because that’s what I think in.

Winter should be cold and snowy, I’d like there to be about a foot of snow on the ground at all times between December and February.

Spring should be about in the upper 60s-mid 70s during the day, and rain maybe a couple times a week.

Summer, I don’t ever want the temperature above the 80s, and humidity should be low with a nice breeze. I also want the occasional really good thunder storm, often enough to keep us out of any sort of drought or burn ban, but not so much that we have flooding issues.

Fall I’d mostly like to be in about the 50s, cooling off towards the end of the season so that it’s in about the lower 40s or upper 30s for deer season

I have no doubt that this will attract some people to turn out and vote

But I really worry that this will just create a second party of brainwashed idiots who are just riding the hype train and not actually engaging with politics.

Which, to be fair, is probably what the party leadership wants. If they can get a bunch of people who blindly show up because they bought into the hype, then they don’t have to actually of the things those of us who have been paying attention have been begging them to do.

I’m at home in a town about 10-15 miles from the town and hospital I was born in (as the crow flies.)

And I’ve lived the majority of my life in a town that’s probably about another 3 miles from there.

If I were asked to name my home town, I wouldn’t give the name of the town with the hospital, I’d give the town I grew up in.

But it’s all close enough together that all three towns share a certain sense of hominess for me, I have childhood memories from all 3 towns.

We all speak, more-or-less, the same local dialect with the same slang (there’s a couple shibboleths and bits of local lore that are unique to one part of the county over another) We enjoy the same local foods, root for the same sports teams, attend a lot of the same big local events, etc.

I proudly, and without a hint of irony, tell people that my ancestry is from that town I grew up in.

Yes, if you go back 3+ generations, you’ll find that all of my ancestors came from various European countries. Little bits of that has trickled down to the current generation, like a certain fondness for pierogi and kielbasa from my Polish side.

But that’s also part of my local culture, those are fairly common food items here too.

I don’t speak any of the languages my ancestors spoke, I’ve never set foot in those countries. Even my family name hasn’t really carried over, my great great grandfather changed the name after having already lived here for some time under the original Italian name. It’s a pretty unusual anglicization that barely resembles the original name, and anywhere in the world you may happen to encounter someone with my name, you know they can trace their heritage back to my home town.

And if you try to go much further back from that, the trail kind of goes cold. You can kind of make some educated guesses at which regions in their various old countries the different branches of my family came from, but not much more than that, except on the aforementioned polish side, some of those ancestors were a little more recent immigrants (though still well-before my time) and we have some communication with some relatives in Poland. Nothing regular, but once in a while someone on either side reaches out to see how things are going, and we know enough that if we really wanted to we could probably track each other down if we ever ended up in each other’s countries.

But overall, my family history pretty much begins with my great-great(or so) grandparents arriving in America and settling in my hometown.

This is secondhand, half-remembered information I picked up from some stranger on Reddit probably a decade ago, so take it for what it’s worth

But my understanding is that in some parts of Asia, being a monk is just sort of a thing that some young people do for a short time, and a lot of them aren’t really what we’d think of as “clergy.” Not sure if that’s the case in Thailand or not.

It’s almost more like taking a gap year to go backpacking through Europe or whatever the kids are into these days, or taking a summer job that just happens to be in a Buddhist temple and the uniform is a robe and shaved head instead of a polo shirt and khakis.

Now these seem to be involving “senior monks” so probably not just teens and 20-somethings trying to find themselves.

But I kind of have to wonder how many of those senior monks are more like that friend you had in high school who took a summer job working at a surf shop or something and just never went back to finish college and are still working there a decade or two later than they are someone who truly felt a calling towards religious service.

I work a weird night shift schedule, so I find myself doing a lot of grocery shopping and such later at night, because that’s when I’m awake (and also the stores are less crowded)

One time I was heading back to my car, it was dark, probably around 10pm, the lot was mostly empty. A Hispanic guy with a heavy accent was flagging me down from a couple rows over, asking if I had jumper cables, so I drove my car over and gave him a jump. Shared some brief chitchat over whether we thought it was his battery or his alternator, shook hands, and we went on our separate ways.

Another time, I was walking into the store, and stopped in the fire lane was a car, with a handful of younger black people trying to get it started with a jump starter. It looked like they knew more or less what they were doing, so I went in and did my grocery shopping. They were still there when I came out, so it was pretty clear that the power pack they had didn’t quite have enough juice to do the trick, so I grabbed my cables and headed over to lend a hand. Again, got their car started, shot the shit with them a bit, and went about my night.

Neither one was a big deal, I’d hope that anyone would do the same for me.

But when I think about those situations, empty parking lots, late at night, people of color, I think about how many people probably would have just ignored them and not lent a hand.

Guess I should have been filming, I could have a political career.

But the real moral of the story is if you have a car, go buy some jumper cables. They’re not that expensive, they last basically forever, and sooner or later you or someone else is going to need a jump and you’ll be ready to save the day. When I bought my first car at 18, my first stop on my way home from the dealership was to buy a set of jumper cables and some other basic emergency supplies to throw in my trunk. I probably find myself using them at least a couple times a year. Still have those same cables going on a decade later. Probably one of the best purchases I’ve ever made.

Thank you, and you’re not the first person to say you’ve enjoyed my writing. I do like to think I’ve had some interesting experiences and that I have a certain knack for storytelling.

I tend to consider myself more of a storyteller or conversationalist than an author though. Sitting down to write a book that maybe someone somewhere will someday read doesn’t really appeal to me, and I don’t think my stories necessarily hold up as well on their own without the support of a conversation around them, to some extent I’m usually crafting how I tell stories as a response to something someone said or asked.

But if you do enjoy what I have to say and how I say it, by all means creep on my profile here a bit, I won’t pretend everything there is gold, but there’s a couple things mixed in I’m a little bit proud of. This is pretty much the only place you’re going to find me online.

EDIT: Lemmy search is terrible, so good luck finding anything, but for a couple highlights, somewhere in my comment history I have a short history of the Falkland Islands that I’m pretty proud of, a few interesting stories from my job as a 911 dispatcher as well as a long rant about alarm companies that some people seemed to have enjoyed, and a lot of thoughts about life, the universe, and everything.

Years ago, I was in boy scouts (in the US)

For those not familiar with the scouting program, one of the main philosophies is “boys teaching boys” so in a well-run troop, the older, more experienced, and higher-ranking scouts are responsible for actually running the troop. The adult leaders hand down some general guidelines- we need to be ready to do X at Y time, but actually getting the scouts to do that falls to those older scouts.

At the top of the youth hierarchy, is the “staff” patrol, the most senior members of the troop. At its head is the Senior Patrol Leader, and under him there would be various other positions- quartermaster, scribe, one or more Assistant Senior Patrol leaders, etc.

In this story, I was a member of the staff patrol, I believe at the time I was quartermaster, or maybe one of the ASPLs, so I wasn’t normally the one running the show, and truth be told I tended to avoid the leadership responsibilities when possible, and I wasn’t exactly the most by-the-book, type-a, over-achieving model scout, but I was generally well-liked and respected by the younger members of the troop, I knew my stuff, and I was happy to share my knowledge.

On this particular camping trip, most of the staff patrol were unable to attend. I believe it was just my friend Dan and myself. Dan is very much the type-a, overachieving type, and, on paper, much more of a model scout, he may even have already earned his eagle by that point, while I was still chilling at star or life rank. So nominally he was the one in-charge for this trip.

And I was happy to leave him to it. I took my back seat and let him run the show, and I just helped facilitate in the background. And he did a fine job of it, his organizational skills were put to good use throughout the day.

Dan is exactly the type of person you want schmoozing with businessmen and politicians and such, I won’t say that he lacks people skills. But he’s not necessarily the kind of guy you want to hang around a campfire with and drink a couple beers. There’s a time and place for both skill sets, and sometimes when the task at hand is wrangling a bunch of 11-17 year olds who have been let loose in the woods with pocket knives and taught how to build a fire, it’s the second kind of skill you need.

So towards the end of the day, when the task at hand was basically “get all of these asshole kids to settle down and start getting ready for bed” Dan was kind of at a loss. He enjoyed being the one in charge and didn’t particularly want my help, so I sat my ass down and started reading my book, while he tried to herd cats.

And slowly the younger kids began to gravitate towards me. They asked what I was reading, what it was about, and I told them. They hung around, some read their own books, others busied themselves with other quiet tasks, I think a game of magic or two sprung up around me. More kids drifted over, and they’d ask what I was reading, lather, rinse, repeat.

It frankly made it pretty hard for me to read my book, I could only get a couple paragraphs in at a time before someone interrupted me.

So at some point, I decided what I’d do was I’d start reading aloud to them and have a little story time. I wasn’t very far into the book, so I started over from the beginning. I gave them a quick run-down of some of the important things from the first book in the series, and I began reading.

And before too long, all of the younger scouts were gathered around me, listening to me read.

Mission accomplished. I got them all settled down, and I got to read my book.

Dan was kind of amazed at how he had spent about 20 minutes trying to get them all to calm the fuck down, and I did it in like 5 minutes by just reading to them.

That book was The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, the 2nd book of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy 5-part “Trilogy”

So that’s my recommendation. I figure if it works on a bunch of teens and tweens, it will probably work on a dog as well.

I guess you could start with the first book, but there’s something that feels appropriately Douglas-Adamsian to me about starting from the middle and reading to your dog.

I’m admittedly a little better read on the subject than most Americans

Off the top of my head, I’d probably be able to rattle off Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Dachau, Krakow, and Treblinka off the top of my head.

Small side rant, my mom’s side of the family is Polish. Most of my mom’s grandparents (my great grandparents) were off-the-boat from Poland, I know at least one of them never became a US citizen. We have some family still in Poland, we’re not exactly in regular contact but we know more or less how to track each other down when we want to.

Years ago, well-before I was born, my mom’s family went to visit those relatives. There is honestly probably enough material from that trip (and from when a relative from Poland was able to visit the US back then) to write a pretty decent short book, or at least a couple solid blog posts. Lots of interesting comparisons between the state of things in the US and Poland during the Cold War to be made.

One of the things they did was visit Auschwitz. Seeing that was something that definitely shaped my mom’s worldview from there on out. To her credit, my mom already had her head screwed on pretty straight before that when it came to racial tolerance and such.

She would occasionally tell us little bits about it when we were growing up, not like she purposely sat us down and gave us a Holocaust talk or anything, it was just something that came up occasionally when appropriate

I don’t know if this was ever an intentional choice by her, but she never really said who built and ran the camps, who was sent there, why, etc. she pretty much just left it at they were places that existed, and that people did various kinds of horrible things to other people there.

As far as I knew, it was all Polish people (not unlike myself) doing horrible things to other Poles, for reasons I couldn’t really wrap my head around. It wasn’t until we started learning about WWII and the Holocaust in school that the details of who and my started falling into place.

But by that point, I think the key message about people being capable of immense cruelty towards other people had really been firmly planted in my mind. The fact that one side or the other are Jews, Poles, Germans, LGBT people, Romani, black, white, Hispanic, Christian, Muslim, Palestinian, Hutu, Tutsi, Armenian , Uyghur, etc. isn’t really important compared to the idea that this is something that people like me could do to other people who are also just like me, and I need to be vigilant to make sure that doesn’t happen.