BlueSky, May 2026 Part 1

The first half of May 2026 ended two days ago. That's how behind I am.

This will be a short BlueSky round-up post compared to most, as the first half of May tends to be, because I always miss a week of regular life. Probably nothing much happened then, right? 

We started where April left off, with proper outrage over the Supreme Court gutting the Voting Rights Act. Southern states then immediately leapt upon the opportunity to reenact Jim Crow. Corruption continued to run amok in various ways, including Trump suing the IRS for an absurd amount of money on an absurd claim. He also said he never thinks about Americans' financial situation. On camera. And then repeated it.

The half-month ended with Trump taking his billionaire retinue to China, where he got nothing and tried to give away Taiwan. Are we tired of hearing about him and from him yet? Yes we are. So tired.

Everything below the line is in quoted from the attributed account and is in reverse chronological order, except some of the images, which I move up or down for better visual balance.

__

"Data Centers" are nothing more than surveillance centers that also happen to kill the environment. Fight to keep them out of your state.
Mebs

Xi Jinping deliberately placed Trump and his lackeys in front of the COMMUNIST FLAG!!


@lepapillonblue.bsky.social

Trump brought the NVIDIA CEO on his trip to China to lobby Xi Jinping to buy advanced AI chips, even though it would create a U.S. national security threat. It turns out Trump also bought millions in NVIDIA's stock. The President's corruption is a national security disaster.
Elizabeth Warren

Q: Biden described Xi as a dictator. Do you think Xi is a dictator?
TRUMP: I think President Biden was an incompetent president. He gave us the Iran nuclear deal. (The Iran nuclear deal was actually made by the Obama administration ... )
Aaron Rupar

It does do my heart a small comfort to know that, despite all his power and wealth and hoard of sycophants; Trump is a deeply insecure and unhappy person, who desperately craves adoration. Deep down, he is the weakest man on Earth.
John Muller @mrjohnmuller.bsky.social

interesting the way the Voting Rights Act is presented as some kind of imposition from above, and not the product of one of the greatest social movements this country has ever seen
jamelle @jamellebouie.net

Just laughing at how it’s possible for a black woman to be so beautiful and talented that she sends a racist into a six-day public stroke
Kashana

Nigel Farage insisting "I cannot be bought," after being exposed for secretly trousering £5 million from a crypto billionaire, buying a house with the money, and then immediately launching a lobbying campaign for the crypto industry, is quite something
Adam Bienkov

Robotaxi deadheading irritates residents and thickens congestion. Cities should tax the hell out of it.
David Zipper

There is a statue of author Alex Haley in East Knoxville, Tennessee. Knox County just removed Roots from all school libraries:


Elizabeth Jacobs, PhD

Roots came out in the bicentennial year, so in 50 years we went from groundbreaking miniseries watched by the whole country to banning copies of the book.
Carly Goodman

still not quite over the fact that i watched 15-year-olds get sued for millions of dollars for downloading twelve songs and now we all have to accept AI slop because every tech company in the known universe decided that intellectual property laws don't exist now that they're inconvenient for them
Eric Ravenscraft @lordravenscraft.bsky.social

RFK Jr is pro-bleeding to death.
badwebsites

republicans seem to have adopted this idea that the partisan lean of a state represents some mystical General Will such that the south isn't just a place with republican voters It Is Republican and no democrat has a right to serve within its borders
jamelle @jamellebouie.net

Raising the flag:


Nick Anderson - political cartoonist @andertoon.bsky.social

WIC used to have bipartisan support because even Republicans said "Well of course we want to make sure pregnant women and babies have enough to eat, we're not monsters," but now they say "Screw those freeloading babies, we've got a gold-plated ballroom to build"
Paul Waldman

Rebranding correcting injustices as an obsession with “racial preferences” is pure fraud.
LunchCounterPunch @theultrasecret.bsky.social

we got rid of the president of unavoidable high grocery prices to elect the president of avoidable high grocery prices
GOLIKEHELLMACHINE

Every time I teach the MOVE bombing, students are shocked. And when I teach the aftermath involving an anthropologist who hoarded some of the remains and used them as teaching tools, they are even more shocked. And I teach in Pennsylvania. Even some students from Philly are unaware of this history:


Jacqueline Antonovich

Doug Burgum governed North Dakota and its 12,000 bison for 8 years. NDSU's mascot is the bison. Now he leads Dept of Interior, with its own bison logo. He is calling for eviction of bison from federal lands. What a hypocritical putz. 
Oredigger @tfiashorty.bsky.social

I don't think recent memory has featured an industrial company with as much of a reputational fall-off as Tesla, both because of the decrease in quality of its cars and the increase in blithering fascism in its CEO. A decade ago a Tesla was a status object; now it's a vague embarrassment at best.
John Scalzi

Tennessee eliminated only majority-Black district
Alabama, Louisiana eliminating majority-Black districts
South Carolina planning to oust only Black Democrat since Reconstruction
Mississippi planning to oust only Black rep
Georgia planning special session to eliminate majority-Black districts 
This is what return to Jim Crow looks like
Ari Berman

Spotted: The Red-Headed Woodpecker, a rare visitor at Stately Moffitt Manor:


Robert Moffitt @justplainbob.bsky.social

Watching a series of former Confederate states rush to eliminate any vestige of black representation in the House pretty much answers the question whether the Voting Rights Act was still necessary.
Patrick Chovanec

I am very tired of the stupid-savvy 'oh you think politicians were honest before Donald Trump' take, like yes there has in fact been a qualitative change in the way modern american politics have been conducted that is largely attributable to him, and is bad.
William B. Fuckley @opinionhaver.bsky.social

Texas is banning students from writing on LGBTQ topics and removing any references to gender identity and sexual orientation. You'll never guess what this NYT author hasn't covered but then immediately wrote this piece on NYU students disapproving of Jonathan Haidt.
Alejandra Caraballo @esqueer.net

It really is inexcusable that the NYT maintains a "free speech on campus" reporter who DOESN'T COVER OFFICIAL, POLITICALLY-MOTIVATED CENSORSHIP OF SPEECH ON CAMPUS. At some point you're actively deceiving the public, no?
Will Stancil

Planted this prairie in 2021 and it’s really struggled the last 5 years. Finally woke up today!


prairieczar

The largest ever settlement or jury award for government violations of constitutional rights to a single person is $100 million, or 1 percent of what Trump demanding for the leak of his tax returns. That case — a killing by police — was reduced to $1 million on appeal.
Radley Balko

Police procedural show but instead of cops the heroes are immigration lawyers and rapid responders thwarting ICE
Joel @joelreinstein.myatproto.social

i will never understand how jimmy carter was treated compared to today
Mike Eliason @holz-bau.bsky.social

I see all of the outrageous things that are happening and just feel…very little. I suspect I’m not alone in being out of energy to express outrage proportional to current events. It’s been a long ten years.
Leah McElrath

santa's workshop, north pole, new york, 1995:


old roadside pics

I do not think anyone is ready for how turbo antisemitic the GOP is going to be post-Trump
Matthew Downhour

Strange how so many will shame people on bikes for not wearing helmets yet don’t have much to say about bike lanes without protection.
Tom Flood

My daughter's pithy summation: "Covid reminded people they lived in a society; and they hated it."
JP Stormcrow

Americans Voting-in a Fascist Government: "Heck yeah! This is gonna be great! USA! USA!"
Americans Living under a Fascist Regime: "WTF, this sucks! Whose idea was this, anyway?"
John Muller @mrjohnmuller.bsky.social

The future of education is students learning nothing and professors not being aware of that.
David Ho

This is only breaking news to members of his cult:


Thomm53

Just wondering, has the fever broken yet, or has the obviously malignant tumor we know as the GOP become a metastatic cancer that is killing our democracy?
LunchCounterPunch @theultrasecret.bsky.social

Parallel counterfactual: Of 100+ democracies that have been set up since US Constitution in 1787, virtually none have copied US model. (Exceptions I'm aware of: Liberia, Philippines. Could be more.) It's an antiquated, flawed system. US has thrived in spite of it, not because of it.
James Fallows

Useless counterfactual but if the US had a parliamentary system, Trump would have been long since ejected from office.
Edward Luce

I wish I didn’t know as much about the end of Reconstruction as I do. If you understood what is being unleashed now, how it will touch every aspect of our civic life, and how difficult it will be to undo it, you wouldn’t be able to think about anything else.
Trevon Logan

when u tax the rich:

Smooth Dunk

given how much Tolkien *hated* allegory in fiction, he must be spinning in his grave at relativistic speeds over the literal fascists who run Palantir
Matthew R Francis @bowlerhatscience.org

Speak to a demographer for five minutes and they will tell you that most of the decline in births is just “there used to be a lot of really big families, now 3 or more kids is rare”. This banal and non-alarming fact hardly ever gets mentioned in these “demographic panic” pieces.
David Fickling

One of the many reasons that I'm *extremely* skeptical of the 'AI will mean UBI and Abundance for all' thing is how little intellectual work is being done on how that would work in practice. There are no think tanks releasing reports, no papers in economics journals, no books on the subject...
Gareth Watkins

It doesn't matter what liars say. It doesn't matter what abusers want. It doesn't matter what thieves claim is theirs. Justice must trample injustice, not traverse alongside it.
LunchCounterPunch @theultrasecret.bsky.social

Happy birthday to icons of masculinity and possible weirdest birthday twins ever, John Brown and Kermit the Frog
Patricia Wallinga

A political cartoon in the Chattanooga Times Free Press:


Michael Li @mcpli.bsky.social

We have to dream bigger and our political leaders must start speaking to these dreams. This was the roadmap of conservativism. We need our own.... I think the dynamic is getting toxic towards organizing because the best way for us to nationally organize is to take advantage of the existing infrastructure of the Democratic party, which frankly mostly Black women have been maintaining in the south, my area, despite being continuously ignored.
A cat like that @onesparkfire.bsky.social

At this point, solving climate change is cheaper than not solving it -- not only on some grand 50 year time horizon, but tomorrow, today, immediately. Solving climate change *is* affordability. Maybe Dems should tell voters about that.
David Roberts @volts.wtf

White Christians genuinely believe that anyone who chooses not to be Christian is oppressing them. They genuinely believe their religious liberty requires everyone to be just like them. They're like the Borg, but instead of "resistance is futile," it's "your resistance oppresses us."
Sheryl Weikal @leftistlawyer.com

Ladies, what’s stopping you from being a wild woman covered in hair wearing a headdress of animal jawbones and riding into battle against a fierce lion on a camel-faced unicorn?


David @archaeomather.bsky.social

So Texas, Florida, Missouri, North Carolina, and Tennessee can redraw districts without a referendum and that stands, but when Virginia lets voters decide directly at the ballot box, it gets overturned?
Juliana Stratton

2016: Black students complaining that dehumanizing language on campus and in the media is dangerous
2016-2026: cancel culture hysteria, these students are whining about nothing
2026: Black people losing the right to vote on a state-by-state basis
ANYONE WANT TO REVISE THEIR ASSESSMENT?
Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

Once again seems to me a major story in British politics is just the boring one that the right block is split two ways and the left block three ways, and we have an electoral system which makes that devastating for the left. I think this gets less attention than it ought cos it's "dog bites man".
lastpositivist.bsky.social

Today I learned that after attending Marshall-University High School in Dinkytown, Minneapolis, the co-creator of Twin Peaks, Mark Frost, worked alongside actor Michael Keaton on the lighting crew for Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.
Chris Steller

The incredible drop in homicides in Italy over the past 3 decades (~80%) deserves more attention. And it's happened in parallel with something else. Not implying causation, but Italy hasn't become a much more dangerous country as its immigrant population has grown. Quite the opposite:




Ben Barclay

Thanks to private equity and the AI bubble, betting on "the whole market" is basically "betting on AI." 35% of the S&P 500 is tied up in seven AI companies. 
Cory Doctorow

AI is a deskilling project.  To use it is to embrace your own uselessness.
Ashley Lynch

From Worldcom to Enron, from crypto to AI, the point of the bubble... was a transfer from working people to crooks. Bubbles are a system for moving the painfully sequestered life's savings of people who *do* things to people who *steal* things. The world has flushed away hundreds of billions to get paltry millions' worth of value out of crypto - the rest of that value disappeared into the pockets of crooked insiders who defrauded the public into parting with their savings.
Cory Doctorow

I don't only think that college should be FREE but I think young people should also receive living stipends while in school. Finally, I do not care what they major in because education needs to actually BE DECOUPLED from a future job. You are welcome. You should have 4 years to study anything.
Prisonculture

For some reason, this one made me laugh (not in a good way):


@pattho.bsky.social

Hmmmm, who do I trust more to look out for women, Smith College or a Trump appointee currently being sued for covering up years of sexual abuse?
Max Kennerly

In December SCOTUS claimed it was too close to election to block Texas gerrymander but now allowing Southern states to straight up cancel elections to resurrect Jim Crow
Ari Berman

The first Asian American mayor of NYC recently rode 40 miles on a bike across the five boroughs wearing a suit and tie and is skipping the Met Gala and instead using his platform to celebrate union leaders and immigrant rights activists in the fashion industry. Nice.
tamara nopper

Morning scene: A guy driving a Ford F-250 with a “No Elec” license plate pulls into a D.C. gas station where a gallon starts at $4.59. (The F-250 comes standard with a 34-gallon tank.)
Martin Austermuhle

10/10, no notes:


Worrier After Dark

The people saying that gutting the Voting Rights Act has nothing to do with racism are the same people who say overturning Roe v Wade had nothing to do with women
4fuxake @blueheartedly1.bsky.social

There is no compromise to be had with a movement whose whose whole reason for being, whose core identity is their hatred of Black people and their desire to dominate them. The right wing have their side quests and folk demons of the week, but the whole foundation is anti-Blackness.
Chad Loder

Drivers hate driving. They tell us all the time. So naturally, their answer is to make driving mandatory for everyone. It's insane. It's sociopathic.
Matthew Lewis @mateosfo.bsky.social

“You know we’re in a war,” President Trump said yesterday, as a White House letter to Congress asserted that the War Powers Act doesn’t apply because there’s no war. Utter contempt. Congress is cool with it. Because the GOP majority also has contempt for the law, Constitution, country, and people.
Nicholas Grossman

I just have a lot of feelings about the punks and the queers and the hippies and the anarchists all coming together [on May Day in Minneapolis] to make music and butterfly bikes and fire-breathing dinosaurs and use them all to say fuck fascism
Dax (David J.) Schwartz @snurri.bsky.social

POSSUM BIKE:


 @therealjoro.bsky.social

We had a snowplow naming competition last winter and the winning name was ABOLISH ICE. Sadly, the people spoke and the city did not listen:


Heather Randell

Anyone remember the Purcell doctrine, saying courts shouldn't change electoral districts too close to the election because it might cause confusion? Remember how SCOTUS applied it six months ago to say it was already too late to invalidate the Texas districts? Funny how that didn't happen in Callais
Mark Lemley

It remains very weird to me that in a world of actually useful technology -- photovoltaic power generation, mRNA vaccines, maglev trains, smart phones, etc -- the tech sector has gone so all-in on bullshit generators and plagiarism machines.
Mike Wiser @drmikewiser.bsky.social

They didn't want disruption. They want a gate to the Internet they can collect rent with. More importantly, they want to co-opt someone's tech that circumvents their existing gates.
Ken Burnside

trail drive-in, amarillo, texas, 1977:


old roadside pics

Can’t help but feel that we are living in an era of overwhelming anti-intellectualism on every front, with AI being the corporate vanguard of this cultural emptiness.
Liam Hogan

As my colleague David Rosnick puts it: the Roberts Court is just calling the balls and strikes. The problem is that they do it before the pitch is thrown.
Dean Baker

Like, what kind of cowards are we electing who can't just straight up say what we know is true: "I know drivers are the leading killers in California and are by far the leading perpetrators of violent assault. But they're also loud and angry, and I'm afraid to protect my constituents from them."
Matthew Lewis @mateosfo.bsky.social

Of all the ways to make a building more interesting - ornament, different materials, artwork - articulation has got to be the worst. Each of the extra corners from the building shifting in and out is a potential leak, and the yellow planes are extra walls that reduce energy efficiency:


Alfred Twu

The stereotype about Black people and fried chicken came about because, post-slavery, so many Black women successfully supported themselves and their families by selling homemade fried chicken to white people at train stations. It was one of the few lucrative jobs open to the newly free.
Iron Spike

Amazing INDIA!!
People using internet:
2015 = 15%
2025 = 70%
Congrats!!
We know that China in past 30 years took over 80% of it's pop. out of extreme poverty, now under 1%. But India is another giant waking up... a world power in the making. Hopefully will prioritize the poorest.
Gil Penalosa @penalosag.bsky.social

If America is so racist, then how come a wealthy white man has been lavishing me with gifts ever since his company started having cases before the Supreme Court, on which I sit? by Clarence Thomas
NY Times Pitchbot

I think about this all the time:


Sam Whyte

swear to god nothing has radicalized like me like watching rich men burn our planet, dry up our freshwater and poison our kids to invent the world’s most powerful technology — a robot chick who laughs at all their jokes
Gillian Brockell

We need a system that’s fair. We need a happy future! If I were queen of the world, that’s what I would tell Democrats to say.
Dr. Genevieve Guenther @doctorvive.bsky.social

In the next 25 years, there will be a major global city that democratically decides to completely remove personal automobiles. There will still be delivery and emergency vehicles but beyond that it will be all walking, biking and public transit.
Pedestrianize it @mplsdromomania.bsky.social

It's not so much "Russiagate was real" as "well how much of the media ecosystem *isn't* Russiagate at this point?"
Chatham Harrison

15 years ago today, Kate and William killed Osama Bin Laden at their wedding:


Ashton Pittman

Why Germany has under-15 minutes cities? Because our main food retailers are <5 minutes retailers. Two of them, Lidl and Aldi, are ranked fourth and seventh in the world. They typically need only 7k resident to build one store. The network of Edeka, which operates only in Germany, is even denser.
Carsten Diekmann

Tell the kids we use to go days, weeks even, without thinking about the president.
Bethany Albertson @albertsonb2.bsky.social

Pure Prairie League sounds like a domestic terrorist militia. I mean the band name. The band’s music sounds like country-inflected soft rock.
Chris Steller

Some people, even some liberals, really despise poor people. Despise poor people more than they hate grifters, more than they despise cruelty and harm, more than they despise genocide even -  We should unpack that before we let those people determine our public policy.
D.A. Bullock @bullycreative.bsky.social

No better place to park when delivering to a bike shop:


Robert Haider

We're headed toward a Congress where like 40 states send a single-party delegation, indistinguishable from just electing everyone at large and a population-based replica of the Senate. Thank you, John Roberts, for ushering in this nonsense era.
@kleinman.bsky.social

Use “Jim crow” when talking about the GOP and redistricting. It’s accurate, it’s easy to understand shorthand and it drives the right nuts.
Oliver Willis

Just a reminder that the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was called, "An act to enforce the fifteenth amendment to the Constitution of the United States."
Larry Glickman

Trump’s net worth has nearly tripled in his second term, reaching $6.5 billion. His administration is the most brazenly self-enriching in American history:


Steve Rattner

If you look at the *entire* sweep of Jewish history, I think it's very clear that there's no strategy that *reliably* results in Jewish safety over the long term. But of the actually available strategies, "moderate cultural assimilation while retaining a distinct identity" has the best record.
J. Sam Drolet

I wonder what philosophy departments must be like in the Marvel universe. I mean, all sorts of theoretical stuff to us in reality is their actual reality in fiction. Things like mind/body problems don't exist in Marvel. They know souls are real. That gods exist. What are the hard questions for them?
Goldstein (2026 edition)

Remember when it came out that MacKenzie Scott, who has given away more of her fortune than anyone ever, is richer than before she started giving? That’s the metric by which you have to judge the levels of greed, wealth hoarding & wage suppression the wealthy engage in.
Lupita Nihongo @otsumamiboy.blacksky.app

The Sam Alito of Star Trek:


Trekkie Bill

The guy appointed by the Hurricane Katrina President declaring racism over and done with is really grotesque when you think about it.
Mr. Business @chadstanton.blacksky.app

I do know it’s silly to some people but I do believe in Joy as an act of resistance for the currently and historically marginalized and oppressed. It’s not the only thing of course. But it’s one important component. I don’t believe my ancestors, my direct ancestors were bled dry for me to mope around.
Lupita Nihongo @otsumamiboy.blacksky.app

When I began my editing career, I often changed “utilize” to “use.” For the past eight years or so, I’ve been changing “leverage” to “use.” Now I’m changing “use case” to the noun “use.” What do you people have against “use” in its various forms? It’s a perfectly fine word.
Dave Nelsen @thegrammargeek.bsky.social

There's been a lot of speeding discourse On Here lately, and it's a good reminder of how normalized speeding is in our society and also that many drivers have completely divorced their speed from the risk those higher speeds pose to others on the road, especially cyclists and pedestrians.
Gravel Influencer

Let me remind everyone that fierce debate exists over the different classes of ebikes allowed in cities:


Fietser @americanfietser.bsky.social

I know it's been said before but just thinking about the last year here in the Twin Cities and it's really a LOT. Hortmans. Annunciation. Federal occupation. Less than 12 months.
Doug Mack

I’m fucking horrified that folk 100s of years from now are going to refer to this period as the Trumpian Age or some shit and I’m gonna be lumped in with all the dumb extremist dicks. Solidarity with dead people from the 19th century who thought empire was for arseholes and now get called Victorians
Neil Mackay

Multiracial democracy in the American South has briefly existed twice in American history, both times enforced from outside, and both times has lapsed the instant the rest of the country lost interest.
Nathan Goldwag

Imagine the thrill of a lifetime in going all the way to the moon... And then coming back and being forced to meet with this piece of trash:


Bob Geiger

Trump loves an adoring audience. Look closely at every member of his audience pictured here.
Jen Mercieca

I am struggling to understand why for so much of the media, when a sitting president and his goons kill people summarily at home and abroad that that is somehow not categorized as “political violence”
Asawin Suebsaeng @swin24.bsky.social

To process the chaos, I'm spending a few minutes each night stitching a news diary—embroidering tiny icons representing an important story of the day. I'm four months in at this point, and looking back, it's clear that April's news was full of plenty of foolishness and plenty of fools:


Jess Calarco

EcoFair 2026

I continue with doing what I can in the midst of *all this.*

Today I did a lot of gardening and went to the second annual EcoFair, hosted by Interfaith Power and Light at the House of Hope Presbyterian Church in Saint Paul. It was even better than last year's, and the weather was much nicer, too. It was well-attended.

I talked to some of my regulars (people from the Minnesota Bike Alliance, the Saint Paul Bike Coalition, Sustain Saint Paul, Our Streets) and also got information about these topics:

• District geothermal from Cooperative Energy Futures.
• The work of CURE, which is based in Montevideo, Minnesota. I had never heard of them. They had info on hyperscale data centers, energy rates, and other topics.
• The work of Urban Roots, a youth agriculture organization on Saint Paul's East Side.
• Whether it will be okay to finally work with the leaves in my yard after we clear these five days above 50°F... Even though it is going to be in the 40s again overnight later this week. (From the Pollinator Friendly Alliance.) 
• Whether one funeral home here is working on bringing natural organic reduction to Minnesota, now that it has been made legal (as of last summer). They already do water cremation and green burial here. They currently are flying bodies to Washington State (on commercial flights) to undergo the process. The answer is yes... but it is expensive for various reason. I have to email someone.

I didn't take photos of displays or bikes or anything useful. (There were lots of cool ebikes there.) I just captured a few T-shirts and one sticker that caught my eye:

 

 

And also one garage (maybe a barn, given its age) near the church, which is completely covered in Virginia creeper. Very picturesque, except for the Saint Paul array of trash and recycling receptacles:

If you're in the Twin Cities, be on the look out for next year's EcoFair the Saturday after Mothers Day next year!

The Racist White South Tries to Rise Again

We are in a new bad old age, post-Louisiana v. Callais, with Southern Republican elected officials calling for elimination of districts that have elected Black representatives in Mississippi and South Carolina (Mississippi Free Press). We even have one of those officials going on the record to impugn a Black Congress member by saying his term in office has been a "reign of terror." 

Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-MS — who chaired the United States House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack — has conducted a reign of terror. Uh huh. Right. Just by being a Black Democrat, I guess.

This kind of Klanish statement made me remember some of what I was taught about the Reconstruction period of American history. It's a vague recollection, but I know I either read in a textbook or was told in class that the Black men who were elected to Congress after the Civil War were not qualified to be there because they were not educated or worthy of being there. I think we were shown cartoons from the era that were very insulting.

I don't think this information was given to us as the point of view of "one side." It was presented as fact. 

When in truth, this assertion is part of what is called the Dunning School point of view about Reconstruction, which permeated academic historiography of the period in the early 20th century and affected mainstream schooling for much longer. 

The Civil Rights movement and the decades since have barely begun to change the antiblackness that underlies our culture, and now here we are, with elected officials using words right out of a night rider's manual. 

According to the Mississippi Free Press article, the only good possibility in the Bennie Thompson story is that by redrawing to eliminate his district in a state with such a high percentage of Black residents, Mississippi Republicans could put more than one of their own currently safe seats into play. 

Wouldn't that be something. 

Almost $2.00/Gallon Increase in 2.5 Months

I have been standing on a corner in my neighborhood several times a week near an elementary school this winter and spring because of Operation Metro Surge. 

That corner also happens to be next to a gas station, which means I've had a good view of the increase in gas prices before and after Trump's attack on Iran. The prices just went up again today, so before I lose the various pieces of paper where I've been recording this data, here it is:

• February 27, 2026: $2.79 
• March 5, 2026: $3.29
• March 6, 2026: 3.39
• March 17, 2026: $3.59
• April 6, 2026: $3.69
• April 9, 2026: $3.89
• April 15, 2026: $3.69
• April 26, 2026: $3.89
• April 30, 2026: $4.09
• May 4, 2026: $4.29
• May 14, 2026: $4.59

I know gas prices are a lot higher than that in some other states. This is what's happening in one neighborhood in Saint Paul, Minnesota.

Taking a Stand Against a Giant Data Center... in Utah

Thanks to Bill Lindeke for pointing me to this Guardian article on a giant Stratos data center that was recently approved by commissioners in a Utah county. It would be larger than Manhattan Island and will use 9GW of electricity. That's more than all of the electricity Utah currently uses. Its Shark Tank celebrity backer says they'll build their own clean energy to add to the grid, but he somehow doesn't seem to know that fossil gas is not "clean."

The data center will also, of course, use a large amount of water in a state that is not known as a water paradise, and has specifically been in a drought recently.

And get this: 

The network of industrial-scale fans needed to cool the datacenter’s hot pipes will result in so much waste heat that it could raise daytime temperatures in the surrounding Hansel valley by 2F to 5F (1.1C to 2.7C) and night-time temperatures by 8F to 12F (4.4C to 6.6C), according to an analysis by Rob Davies, a physics professor at Utah State University.

Not surprisingly, there has been huge push back from residents against the build. They have filed for

a referendum to reverse the commissioners’ approval of Stratos. If the group is able to collect 5,422 signatures from registered voters in the county in the next 45 days, the project approval will go to a vote in November.

Utah's governor, Spencer Cox, is quoted as saying, "Industry* is our state’s motto," but also that he will make sure to "require that the Stratos project doesn’t harm the Great Salt Lake or raise power bills."

His waffling sounds a lot like Minnesota Republicans promising that mining in or near the Boundary Waters Canoe Area won't affect the water there or in nearby communities, as they work to please corporate interests and billionaire owners. 

How will they guarantee that? The answer is, they won't. They'll let the project go forward and then hope people forget, once it's in place.

__

* Industry, as in the Utah motto, did not mean modern-day corporate industry. When it became the motto, it would have meant something closer to the original meanings of the word: habitual diligence or effort, which came from the Latin industria, which meant diligence, activity, or zeal. 

Kind of the opposite of how people use AI. 

Impenetrable English

This morning for some reason, the phrase "pick up where we left off" popped into my head, and I realized it's one of those English (American?) idioms that would be impenetrable to someone new to the language.

"Pick up" in general is mysterious. According to etymonline, the verb phrase is from the 14th century, and relates to the idea of using fingers (as in picking) to lift or take up. The idea of casually obtaining (like "pick up a few things") dates from the early 16th century. The sexual meaning — which naive me had totally forgotten about — is from the very late 17th century. Its use to mean improving gradually is from the mid-18th century, while gaining speed doesn't come until the 1920s. 

Tidying up is from around the beginning of the U.S. Civil War, and the cops wouldn't have picked you up until about 10 years after that. One usage the site doesn't mention is pickup basketball. And then there's the question of whether it's two words or one when it's a noun or an adjective, or how adjectival uses become nouns (as in the way "pickup truck" becomes just "pickup"). 

Despite this substantial list of uses, none of these have the meaning of "start again," as in "pick up where we left off."

Then there's "left off." That doesn't even rate a page on etymonline. 

The main use I can think of for that phrase is something like "left off a list." I'm having trouble thinking of another example that uses "left off" to mean "stopped or stopped temporarily." 

But probably any adult native speaker of American English would know what "pick up where we left off" means, despite the fact that it's illogical that it should make any sense at all.

Talking Minnesota Turkeys

Minnesota has more than 70,000 wild turkeys, including a substantial number of urban turkeys. They live here in Saint Paul (and Minneapolis), where their traffic-stopping ways are well known. I just learned they even have an Instagram account at the University of Minnesota.

A few weeks ago, Minnesota Public Radio informed me that the wild turkey population of Minnesota was extirpated back in the 19th century and was only reintroduced in the 1970s from just 29 birds, which were brought from Kansas. They were released in Houston County in the southeastern part of the state.

These thousands and thousands of turkeys are the descendants of fewer than 30 individuals. Talk about a genetic bottleneck. 

According to the Minnesota DNR, we're not supposed to feed turkeys (so keep track of what falls off your bird feeder), and if a turkey is aggressive toward you, be aggressive back.


A teenaged turkey gang at a neighbor's house, 2012.


A different teenaged turkey gang in a neighbor's yard, 2021.

How Big Bird Works

A friend sent me a link to a video about Carroll Spinney, the man who was Big Bird from the time Sesame Street began production in the 1960s until he retired at age 84 in 2018, the year before he died.

This link goes right to the part of the video about how he did it from inside the Big Bird puppet — which I never thought about before. Spinney was not nearly as tall as Big Bird, so what part of him held up the bird's head? And if that's, let's say, his arm... what controlled the bird's arms? And… how did he see out of the puppet?

All questions are answered. 

(Spinney also played the Oscar the Grouch puppet.)

The whole video is more interesting than I would have thought, even for someone like me, who has never watched Sesame Street. 

Carroll rehearsing a scene in partial costume.

That Kind of Year

I've been saving this one:

It could have been posted any time, really.
 

Economics of London, 1919

I've read that Agatha Christie once wrote, "I couldn’t imagine being too poor to afford servants, nor so rich as to be able to afford a car."

I'm not sure she put it in those exact words, but according to Slate (2022), she did describe her young married life this way in her autobiography:

The year was 1919, the Great War had just ended, and Christie’s husband Archie had just been demobilized as an officer in the British military.

The couple’s annual income was around 700 pounds ($50,000 in today’s dollars)—500 pounds ($36,000) from his salary and another 200 pounds ($14,000) in passive income.

They rented a fourth-floor walk-up apartment in London with four bedrooms, two sitting rooms, and a “nice outlook on green.” The rent was 90 pounds for a year ($530 per month in today’s dollars). To keep it tidy, they hired a live-in maid for 36 pounds ($2,600) per year, which Christie described as “an enormous sum in those days.”

The couple was expecting their first child, a girl, and they hired a nurse to look after her. Still, Christie didn’t consider herself wealthy.

“Looking back, it seems to me extraordinary that we should have contemplated having both a nurse and a servant,” Christie wrote. “But they were considered essentials of life in those days, and were the last things we would have thought of dispensing with. To have committed the extravagance of a car, for instance, would never have entered our minds. Only the rich had cars.”

In 1919, Ford’s Model T cost 170 pounds—around $12,000 in 2022 dollars. So a car was worth about three months of income for the Christie family—but almost five years of income for their maid!

I'm sure the fact that they lived in a city with an extensive public transit system and businesses on every corner also made it possible for them to never think of having a car.

The pittance paid to the maid is the real shock in all of that. Just $2,600 a year in 2022 dollars! That's $1.25/hour if it she worked what is now considered full-time work, and I'm willing to bet that woman didn't work 40 hours per week. Yes, yes, she got room and board, too... 

Can you imagine legally hiring anyone for $1.25 plus room and board in 2022?

Now That's Emphatic

I saw this in the blood-draw area of a clinic:

The blue thing is a recycling bin, if I'm not mistaken. Not sure what kind of paper they put in the "DO NOT Throw away" box, but it must be something they want to keep.

The funniest thing about this is that this is a newly built clinic. The building opened in 2025 — purpose-built from the ground up in a greenfield location — but they couldn't make the phlebotomy area functional for the people who use it.
 

The Lost Art of Bus Passes

I always appreciate posts by the English stationery and ephemera shop Present & Correct, and share some of their visuals in my BlueSky roundups. They have a blog where they write up particularly interesting finds.

A recent one was a collection of weekly 1950s bus tickets from Milwaukee. Here are a few of them:

There are 30 tickets altogether, no two alike. 

Here are some thoughts about how the tickets would have been made.

Each one was printed in three ink colors. The large dates were hand-lettered, while the smaller words were set in metal type, likely either on a Linotype or Ludlow system, then printed to a proofing press. The proof type was cut out and pasted up with the hand lettering and other ornaments.

Each color had its own paste-up, possibly done as acetate overlays with the black on the bottom layer on illustration board. Registration marks were on each layer. The layers may have sometimes include rubylith for large areas of color.

Each layer was then shot with a large camera to make an offset printing plate, which was printed in one of the predetermined colors. Offset lithography was a common printing process by the 1950s, and was faster and cheaper for the type of long runs needed like these. These were probably sheet-fed, rather than web.

Why they used three colors instead of two or four, I don't know; I assume it was based on the press they ran on. Maybe it was a five-color press and they ran two passes at a time, with black ink common to both. Or if we could match up the dates of all the passes, we would find that two consecutive passes share one color in addition to black, and therefore could run on a four-color press. 

One additional detail to note: each ticket has an individual number added in the bottom right corner. So that's a final process the tickets went through before being distributed. I don't know why some of them have a letter A added and some don't.

It's clear these tickets were designed by the same person, and it was probably a major part of that person's job to create each one — from sketch to full design to final production and press check each week. 

All replaced by magnetic strips and barcodes.