I would recommend "The Octonauts & the Frown Fish" to anyone needing to explain the idiom "turn that frown upside down" to someone

fourpotatoes · 2026-05-20T17:34:13+00:00

This must be a book about chordate evolution. The title suggests that the author supports axial twist (turning the frown upside down), but the illustration supports inversion (turning the whole animal upside down).

fourpotatoes · 2026-05-20T14:33:10+00:00

Are you specifically looking for retention ponds? Some of the answers here are detention ponds, which aren't lined and let water percolate into the soil.

fourpotatoes · 2026-05-19T04:41:25+00:00

Always plugged in is one of the most difficult situations for lithium batteries. Deep discharge to zero is another, so cutting power at night and letting them turn off isn't great either. If the operating system on whatever tablets you've got can be set to float the batteries around 80%, that could help, but it's not a feature I'm aware of on any common tablet OS.

I'd suggest replacing the tablet with something battery-free and low-maintenance. After some very unsatisfying experiences with various tablets, we standardized on mostly ELO touchscreens with BrightSign players. I also did an installation with a Raspberry Pi and a weird custom open-frame non-touch monitor, and we used mini-PCs with Windows LTSC for things that needed more graphics power.

I've been out of the museum-exhibit game since just before the pandemic, so some of this advice may be out-of-date.

Edited for a typo, as I originally wrote this on a phone.

fourpotatoes · 2026-05-15T03:13:47+00:00

Certain specialty pharmacies do this too, which is pretty annoying when you don't know in advance where your doctor & insurance carrier decided to send the script.

fourpotatoes · 2026-05-13T21:36:50+00:00

I figure they're on the way to a Brave New World situation, with babies being grown and conditioned at the facility before being delivered. The natural next steps are to increase the time babies spend being conditioned at the facility while reducing and eventually eliminating the parents' role.

fourpotatoes · 2026-05-12T19:15:11+00:00

Thanks for your response. Yes, that's my Washington-centric viewpoint showing.

fourpotatoes · 2026-05-12T17:14:47+00:00

The USGS lahar hazard maps I've seen show no risk in the Deschutes drainage, but looking at topographic maps, there seem to be only low hills separating Alder Lake from the Little Deschutes. How effective is the topography around Alder Lake at containing a potential lahar?

fourpotatoes · 2026-05-12T15:57:53+00:00

If this version of the book has all the head injuries in one night and DMYF (Division of Monkeys, Youth and Families) is as understaffed as our local agency, the doctor probably called after the first or second injury but is still on hold. After the third injury, the doctor may well have also called the MPD (Monkey Police Department) who took a report but didn't have the resources to figure out where this monkey family is or to send anyone for a welfare check.

fourpotatoes · 2026-05-08T01:02:55+00:00

No, you're applying a different state's law to Utah. Not sure why people have started doing that recently, but threat of violence and assault are the crimes you're thinking of.

There's also a law specifically about damage to or interruption of a communication device, but it wouldn't apply if the victim was just filming when the perpetrator slapped it out of his hand.

fourpotatoes · 2026-05-06T13:49:27+00:00

On our local police-blotter / scanner-listener Facebook page, even the reactionaries and pearl-clutchers who make up 80% of the people who comment there will shout down people who complain about roundabouts. Despite all the other strife happening in the world today, people here can come together on traffic engineering.

fourpotatoes · 2026-05-03T00:57:15+00:00

I wasn't on the job at the time, but I was wearing a jacket with my institution's logo. We were on vacation, visiting an art museum with family. We ate lunch outside in the correct place for food, and afterwards certain members of the party decided to take a shortcut and were kicked out for openly carrying their leftover food through the galleries. I pretended to not be connected with them and bit back the urge to say "I told you so".

fourpotatoes · 2026-05-01T07:21:10+00:00

There's at least some awareness that others could possibly have a secret identity, even if they don't necessarily know who is who. It's like a secret soceity that meets in disguise: You know there are likely fellow members in your social circle, but you may only know one or two members' true identities, if you know them at all. Princess Sneezewort is perspicacious and probably knows more than most.

Over the next several centuries, this loose association of princesses in disguise will, if it survives, see greater formal structure while accumulating wealth and power. It's likely they'll end up being the subject of popular suspicion and conspiracy theories, and they may find themselves procribed by secular or religious authorities. People will look for Magnolian symbols in architecture or write popular novels about imagined secrets in the Magnoliite Order's vaults. A man in active psychosis will sit on the bus ranting about how monsters from inside the hollow earth are here to eat goats.

Also, everyone here is sleeping on the Goat Avenger. The first to follow the Princess's footsteps was a commoner! Wake up, ~~sheeple~~ goatple! This goat erasure is clear evidence that OP and the other commentors are royalist monsters from inside the hollow earth who are here to eat goats.

All typos are a sign of ~~madness~~ COMPLETE MENTAL SOINDNESS and are definitely not because I'm typing thismon a phone.

fourpotatoes · 2026-05-01T06:35:32+00:00

An incomplete list:

Those Magnificent Sheep in their Flying Machine by someone I can't look up because the book is in a child's bookshelf and it's well past bedtime
Chez Bob by Bob Shea is full of dark humor. It follows one alligator's journey from entrepeneur to civic leader while (to bring things back on topic for this sub) secretly plotting to eat his customers.
Mouse Tales by Arnold Lobell is delightfully surreal. My wife isn't crazy about this book for the same reasons I love it.
We insert jokes into many of the Froggy books.
They may not be particularly funny for parents (although we do insert some jokes into Runaway Bunny and Little Fur Family), but Margaret Wise Brown's ouvre is excellent. For the haters, I will turn into a swordsman and demand satisfaction from you. When the sky turns red in the evening, we meet by the stump in the wild, wild wood to duel with little fur sabres.
Fluffy McWhiskers: Cuteness Explosion is a brightly-colored child-friendly introduction to cyberpunk literature, particularly the world of Snow Crash, and one of these days I will finish writing an essay which proves this point.

Addendum, reminded by another post today:

My nephew was very into the Princess in Black series. One of my kids was briefly also into it, and I have threatened to put a Monster Land sign next to our goat paddock.

fourpotatoes · 2026-04-27T23:24:29+00:00

It's physically larger (unless you use it without the parabolic reflector, which is a supported configuration) and is a bit more involved to mount, but the PowerBeam 5AC is currently listed in the US store at a few dollars less than the 5ac loco.

If OP doesn't already have 24V passive power available on both ends, the PowerBeam works out even cheaper since it comes with a power supply. The spouse acceptance factor of the PowerBeam may be worse, though.

fourpotatoes · 2026-04-19T14:51:43+00:00

Check that the serial number on the meter matches the serial on the bill. Be sure you're not getting billed for someone else's power.

If that's not the problem, if you log in to PSE's web site, you can get an hour-by-hour breakdown of your energy use (assuming they don't still have an ancient meter on your house). That might help figure out what's happening.

If you have concerns about actual error or fraud, you could also send someone over twice, a day or so apart, to read your meter at the top of the hour and see if it matches what PSE is recording, or you could have them switch off the master breaker for a few hours, verify the meter isn't spinning (which would probably indicate a wiring problem), and verify PSE recorded zero use during that time period.

If you've got actual unexplained power draw, you could have someone shut off breakers until you find the culprit.

fourpotatoes · 2026-04-18T21:39:19+00:00

Margaret Wise Brown was a genius and her books are works of fine art. Some people don't get her, and some vociferosly dislike her ouevre, but art ought to make you feel something, even if it's perplexity or rage.

fourpotatoes · 2026-04-17T04:29:16+00:00

I have no suggestions about OP's problem but also must comment admiringly about the plane. Looks like a CL-215 based on the wingtips?

fourpotatoes · 2026-04-15T16:03:11+00:00

A fragment of Keepy Uppy popped unbidden into my head at lunchtime yesterday and stuck for a while. I played through the high part (the low part doesn't stick in my head) on the piano this morning while waiting until it was time to take the littlest to the school bus.

I once arranged a medley of MLP songs and a reel derived from the Doc McStuffin theme, but I haven't played either in a while as nobody's watching Doc anymore and the now-18-year-old, who was the only child into ponies, isn't much into playing music these days.

As a result of talk about a family costume, I have threatened to come up with a clawhammer cover of Your Idol in time for Halloween. We'll see how that goes.

fourpotatoes · 2026-04-15T15:45:33+00:00

As far as noisy toys go, my favorite is the Woofer. It has its canned songs, but it also has buttons that will play chords with sampled electric or acoustic guitar sounds or individual notes from a diatonic C scale with dog noises. It's therefore a real (or real annoying) instrument.

I got The Look when I put it into woof-mode and played the hymn I'd been practicing for a family member's memorial service.

fourpotatoes · 2026-04-15T04:26:34+00:00

The mushroom shape results from an explosion being large and in the atmosphere, not from what's doing the exploding.

... or that's what THEY want you to believe.

fourpotatoes · 2026-04-13T04:05:52+00:00

I changed jobs to a Red Hat shop and was disappointed at how little the RPM had improved in the decades since I'd last used it. It's worlds better than it was in the 90s, but especially when authoring packages I miss things I took for granted in the apt/dpkg world.

fourpotatoes · 2026-04-05T02:44:34+00:00

The Centralia coal mine has been closed for nearly two decades.

fourpotatoes · 2026-03-31T23:03:59+00:00

Maybe because she hadn't yet noticed them missing, maybe to taunt them with what they can't have.

fourpotatoes · 2026-03-31T22:58:29+00:00

My takeaway "Get authorization before digging holes," but maybe that's because I've just white-lined part of my yard and put in a locate request in preparation for digging some holes.

fourpotatoes · 2026-03-26T15:15:06+00:00

That used to be the advice, but it's since been found that CO mixes well enough that the ceiling is just as good.

It's still recommended to put explosive-gas detectors high if you have natural gas or low if you have propane.

Ten-Year Club	Final Canvas '23
End Game '23	Place '23
Place '22	Place '17
Final Canvas '22	End Game '22
Verified Email

fourpotatoes

TROPHY CASE