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Canyonlands National Park

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New post from Drafts

Test, will delete.

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Brunchy munchy

I had brunch yesterday with a colleague and really enjoyed our conversation. He mentioned a book series that his son was reading, and really enjoyed. I bought and started reading that book with my daughter last night and she enjoyed it. She’s now excited to pick it up to find out what happens next. It’s been a challenge to find books that she engages with, so I’m very excited to see if she picks up the series too.

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Interesting breakdown of gas & oil reserves vs. production.

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We broke ground (walls?) on a bathroom remodel last week. I’m bummed I had to hire this out instead of doing it myself, but I don’t think we’d survive a couple months of my puttering along between work and family schedules.

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So our little one has started hockey, which for him, is basically glorified skating lessons. So far he’s loving it.

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Hug your children. Hard.

More children died at gunpoint yesterday. Guns are now the leading cause of death in children. Where, and when, do we get off this ride and control guns in a meaningful way? Fuck gun-clutching hicks and stand-your-ground and castle doctrine and conceal & carry and Trump and Cruz and Abbott and the NRA. Fuck all of it.

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What in the hell is with every browser deciding to warn when told to quit!?

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Simple pleasures — things organized neatly.

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Retired FBI agent cracks 75 year/old cold case

This is a fascinating read revealing who most likely betrayed Anne Frank’s family during WWII.

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Good morning, mountains. (at Elko, Nevada) https://www.instagram.com/p/B5xpxZ7HCXZ/?igshid=1qqp4k6fhyvli

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Bit o’ lumber for some little projects. https://www.instagram.com/p/B1_sqOFHBjr/?igshid=uhwwd2qs2an7

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A little midweek @rincenachroi never hurt anyone, helped by @jigjamlive doing their thing. (at Turf Club) https://www.instagram.com/p/B1sU4J3nJfP/?igshid=139y6ehttdml5

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I've been wearing a fitbit for a few months now, and I really like the awareness that these trackers bring to how you move, sleep, etc. It's about time someone makes one that isn't identifiable across a room. More than that, since none of these do much more than track steps/movement, this design has been minimized to a sane level where I don't need to plug it in every week. (I would be willing to do so if it covered other things like heart-rate or somesuch, but very few of the bands on the market do, and those ones are big and ugly.)

Now we’re talking. First “smart” watch design I like. Hint: a classic, minimal, round face. Useless for me - I wouldn’t use a pedometer and I don’t sleep enough to analyze the coma I fall into every night - but nice nevertheless.

That is a product category that may become interesting, after all.

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Emmanuel Ndayisaba, left, and Alice Mukarurinda, recount their experiences of the Rwandan genocide at Alice's house in Nyamata, Rwanda Wednesday, March 26, 2014. She lost her baby daughter and her right hand to a manic killing spree. He wielded the machete that took both. Yet today, despite coming from opposite sides of an unspeakable shared past, Alice Mukarurinda and Emmanuel Ndayisaba are friends.

Do captions get considered when they pick Pulitzer winners? God damn.

Click through for more amazing photography from the memorial/commemoration of the Rwandan genocide of 1994.

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Posted without additional commentary, because it is not needed.

Dick Cheney is ready to laugh about waterboarding.

Conservatives gathered at the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan Monday night to roast the former vice president at an event where many of the biggest laugh lines touched on the most controversial policies of a key architect of his administration’s war on terror. At the gathering, hosted by Commentary, figures including former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and former Attorney General Michael Mukasey drew a mix of chuckles and winces with jokes that left few lines uncrossed, according to three guests.

Senator Joe Lieberman “said something to the effect that it’s nice that we’re all here at the Plaza instead of in cages after some war crimes trial,” recalled one person who was there.

Other major targets included former Secretary of State Colin Powell, mocked for leaking, and President Barack Obama, who was mocked, repeatedly, for the relative strength of Russian President Vladimir Putin. The event, sponsored by Rupert Murdoch, Paul Singer, and other top conservatives (listed here) also starred former Senator Joe Lieberman and Scooter Libby, the Cheney aide convicted of lying to investigators in a leak hunt. Two attendees said the edgy jokes were in appropriate spirit of a roast; the third found them in poor taste, even in that setting. The dinner was, to the surprise of some guests, punctuated by a live performance of Yiddish songs and by an video featuring Cheney’s face on others’ bodies, which emcee and Commentary editor John Podhoretz joked in an email to BuzzFeed he would release only for $1 million.

“There were some waterboarding jokes that were really tasteless,” the guest said. “I can see the case for enhanced interrogation techniques after Sept. 11 but I can’t really endorse sitting there drinking wine and fancy dinner at the Plaza laughing uproariously about it.”

Cheney himself told one waterboarding joke, the attendees said, which he attributed to Jay Leno. It centered on a one-shot antelope hunting contest in Wyoming in which the loser had to dance with an Indian squaw. Cheney’s shot got caught in the barrel, producing a dispute over whether it counted as a hit or a miss — and Leno, according to Cheney, joked that Cheney wanted to go catch the animal with his bare hands and waterboard it.

Waterboarding Is A Big Joke At Cheney Roast

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The whole of everything should be written this way.

What I tell my law clerks is that we write these so that they are accessible to regular people. That doesn’t mean that there’s no law in it. But there are simple ways to put important things in language that’s accessible. As I say to them, the beauty, the genius is not to write a 5 cent idea in a ten dollar sentence. It’s to put a ten dollar idea in a 5 cent sentence.