Litha
Today at 4:14AM [CDT] is the Summer Solstice, technically considered the “first day of Summer”, but the mid Summer by much of Europe.
Many Wiccans celebrate the day as Litha, while computer programmers honor their predecessors, the druids, who built the first solid-state computing devices, the megaliths, like Stonehenge.
The Slavs celebrate St. John’s Night, Иван Купала [Ivan Kupala], the battle between the White god [Белобог – Belobog] and the Black god [Чёрнобог – Chyornobog] for control of the Sun. The Black god always wins and the night begins to expand.
The sound track to the battle is Иванова Ночь на Лысой Горе [Night on Bald Mountain ] by Модест Петрович Мусоргский [Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky], which everyone should play very loudly.
14 comments
If it’s Midsummer, why is it so freakin’ cold here?
However, I suppose I should be careful what I wish for; the weather fronts move from west to east… 🙁
I know. Bern & Marsha outside of Rochester have been having 70° days, It’s weird. Down here we are in the second week of heat advisories, which shouldn’t be happening until late July and August. I think the high pressure heat dome over the center of the US is pulling down Arctic air in the Northeast, but that’s just a guess.
does litha mean that we take up stoning or that we all get free lithium prescriptions now?
Dylan explains everything.
🙂 ihad forgotten that one 🙂
The title is Rainy Day Women 12 & 35, so it tends to get lost.
It’s definitely winter here! Though, so far we haven’t dropped below zero. Gotten close a few times. Currently around 13 C just after Midday (inside). Bit warmer outside as the sun is not hidden by rain clouds! That’s a rare event the past couple Months!
My NBN Internet has been utter rubbish on and off the past two months. I blame the old copper lines, some of which haven’t been replaced since the 60’s. With all the rain & some flooding we’ve had, I’m not surprised. Sometimes it disconnects for up to a day or two, and then the speed drops from my usual average of 6.6 MB/s to 1.4 MB/s, where it has been for 3 days now. I’ve logged a fault of course. Turns out that if you don’t, you don’t get a refund.
Anyway, I hope you are better Bryan. And hipparchia, Anya and all are staying safe and well. Take care everyone!
We have rain half the month and drought with heat advisories the second half to ensure that the humidity never drops. Rain was a problem when I had DSL because the lines were buried and people kept running into the above ground patch points. Nothing was on poles. If you saw a backhoe working anywhere in the neighborhood you could depend on an outage. Now the problem is people running into the utility poles or boats on trailers that are too tall tearing out the cables. It’s always something to annoy you.
Well, at least you don’t have shooting over mayo and your new prime minister doesn’t look to be the type who throws food against the walls of the official residence. The days are getting longer for you, while shorter for me, so stay warm. Yeah, if you don’t complain they’ll ignore you.
Yeah. I tweeted about that lunatic that killed one young waitress & wounded the other because “they put too much mayo” on his sandwich. It would be unbelievable… But its the USA. 🤦♂️😖
Most people think Albo PM is a left-winger. he’s really more center than that. Like, he’s happy to throw $millions at the Ukraine, but won’t budge on a meager $50/w rise for pensioners etc. who haven’t had a cost-of-living increase in over 2 Decades. Whilst he & the MP’s get will over $2K / wk & a guaranteed rise every year! Especially when he cites “lack of funds”! Irony. anyone? 🤦♂️😖
So… NBN Co. is finally sending a Technician out on Thursday! We’ll see.
First off there is no such thing as too much mayo. When I was at Monterey, California for the Defense Language Institute for the advanced Russian courses the local restaurant I ate lunch at brought a separate bowl of mayo for the club sandwich I always ordered. [If you tip well you are remembered and receive special treatment.] Second, you are standing there watching them make the sandwich at a Subway, so you have total control. Third, there are no sandwich shops with Michelin stars, so you can’t expect perfection. The US has too many guns and not enough common sense.
It’s amazing the way elected governments treat foreign spending as opposed to domestic spending. Treating people who can’t vote for you better than those who can is not logical. The minimum wage in the US needs to double and then be indexed to the cost of living, like Congress. The US Congress doesn’t vote on its pay, it’s automatic.
Good luck on them finding the problem and actually fixing it.
Maybe we should put anti-depressants in the drinking water.
I gave up taking mine last summer, carefully weening off this time. I was fine for a while, but after the Professor’s passing, I would freak out over… everything. I was a total ball of frustration rage. I would not have been surprised if I had been moved to slap someone for over-mayonizing my sandwich. Fortunately, I never went out. Mayo was not an issue.
Needless to say, I called my doctor and got a new prescription, the smallest dosage available. Two weeks later, I was back on an even keel.
Currently we have achieved balance with the uppers and downers in the water supply. If they could filter them out individually the price of the most common prescribed and/or abused drugs would drop to near nothing.
For some time we had a series of people renting the house next door who were bipolar. It is apparently common for bipolar people to stop taking their meds after their doctor has managed to balance everything. It’s easy to spot the problem as they stay awake and active for 2 to 4 days and then sleep for nearly the same amount of time.
If you have found a balance, stick with the program. It avoids legal problems and court dates. I find that meditation helps to deal with anger.
I’m on my 5th AD med’s in 4 years. Sertraline SSRI. Stared them 9 Mths ago on a low dose & gradually increased them to 50 mg. They appear to be working well for me in treating MDD & PTSD. Haven’t had any sudden panic attacks and stress & anxiety are significantly reduced. A couple of side effects, but minor or intermittent and ignorable. Takes a lot of trial & error to find what works best for individuals. There may be something better, but these will do for me until “something better” is guaranteed!
The NBN Technician spent 4 hours here. There were two issues, the copper from the node to the property telco box had an intermittent fault to my connection, and two of the Node Modems were also intermittently faulty. They all got replaced. Only took about 14 Months! Probably a record for NBN Co. (unless it’s a wealthy suburb or where an sitting MP lives!)
Did some tweets. Seems Elon Musk’s bid for buying Twitter was likely a scam. That would be unsurprising. But it seems his penalty payment claim against Twitter is weak to me.
https://twitter.com/Kryten_42/status/1545933989902696449
People at the “bottom end of the wealth scale” always end up being screwed. 🤷♂️🙄🤨
The games he played with Twitter has already cost him about a quarter of the value of his Tesla stock. The Federal regulators will probably fine him again for the negative effect of his comments on the market value of Twitter and Tesla. I would guess that the Delaware Court of Chancery will probably go for the $1 billion solution as making Musk buy the company would cause too much harm to Twitter going forward. The problem with the Musk’s claims are that he failed to do any due diligence on the areas he is now complaining about before he signed the purchase agreement. You can’t buy a car and take it back a month later because it isn’t the right color. Or, fail to go through with the purchase of a house after you have signed the purchase contract because it doesn’t have a solar hot water heater. These are things you should have checked out before agreeing to the purchase.
It could be worse, you could be a Canadian Rogers subscriber and have your ‘Net access and cell service go down. Apparently it was a problem with their backbone. Meanwhile they want to merge with Shaw, which make Rogers an even larger monopoly who will cut staff, reduce redundancy, and raise prices. Back in the days of the Bell System the unofficial motto was “We’re the Phone Company, we don’t have to care because you don’t have a choice.” If copper flakes out in rainy weather it’s almost always one or more bad connections. I paid to have all the cable between my modem and the network connection replaced as I was sick of calling the cable company every time we had heavy rain. There were too many connections in a cable that was twice as long as it had to be.
Finding the right meds for the individual is more art than science. In the US you are looking for meds that work at a price you can afford.