There Will Be Signs

 ... or rather, sign. The sign will be at the entrance to the driveway of our new Fish River house.

Down there, lots of people name their houses and have signs out front with a cute picture and the name. For us, a sign will be helpful because we're going to rent the house out on VRBO. When a visitor is coming into town, trying to find your place in the dark or in the rain, a sign at the driveway will be helpful and welcoming.

The name of our place will be, of course, Catican Bayou. I've got a sign I designed many, many years ago that I put up at our San Diego house for Southern-themed events such as Mardi Gras. I can't find the image file any more, so I took a photo of the thing.

Aside: MSFT Windows search is pathetic. It takes forever and turns up nothing of any value.

Aside #2: I found the file. No need to take a photo.

Here's the old sign:

Years ago, long before AI, I spent some time learning about the basics of design and found some flaws in my sign, so I made a new logo, one that I use for my Louisiana hot sauce labels.

Note that the cat's tail flows into the C and the crawfish is now dancing on the o instead of just floating around. The crawfish is also scaled to the cat.

I asked ChatGPT to design a sign for our new place and after several tries, I got this.

It doesn't have any motion or playfulness about it at all. AI just placed the objects on the sign in a structured manner and called it a day. I've used AI enough for art to know it was going to drive me nuts trying to get it to do what I wanted, so I uploaded my hot sauce image and told it to mimic that style. It returned a very nice image right off the bat. A little bit of tweaking and I got something I like a lot.

My point to all this jibber jabber is that AI isn't creative nor intelligent. You can't communicate the feel of an image to it and expect it to produce something you like. It's like using a marionette to draw a picture. What it excels at is refining something you've created.

Finding the clip art for the dragonfly and river grass would have taken me forever. With AI, we discussed what was good and bad about its first post-hot-sauce-logo-upload and it gave me 5 alternatives to make the image more playful and fun. I asked it to generate three of those and picked this one as my favorite. 

The dragonfly was not my first choice, I originally wanted a pelican which is totemic around Mobile Bay. The problem with the pelican was that it was out of proportion to the cat and looked like the cat was going to pounce on it, kill it and eat it. Not welcoming. The dragonfly was AI's idea.

I know I'm an outlier because of my age and experience, but for me, AI is making me a ton more productive without threatening to replace me.

All Rock, No Roll

In our backyard, we have a very prolific lemon tree. The tree is on the top of a small mound. All the unplanted ground in the backyard is covered in weed cloth. At the base of the lemon tree, we put river rocks as an accent to the bark in the rest of the yard. It's very pretty.

Well, it's pretty until gravity does its thing and the rocks slide down the slope and you get this island of weed cloth around the tree.

I know it's been bugging wife kitteh even though she's been kind enough not to mention it. She is an excellent decorator and hostess and always wants our house to shine when we have guests. That bald spot must have bothered her so I decided to do something about it.

It took 4 different tries to build a corral for the rocks. I used super cheap pine 1x2s. They are effectively disposable as they cost about $1.74 for an 8' length at Home Depot. I tried three different stains until I found one I liked. I think it was Colonial Maple. I also tried several shapes for the corral.

At first, I figured a hexagon would work just fine. I used my DeWalt compound mitre saw to cut 30 degree angles in the ends and tried a couple different ways of constructing my hexagon. That was a mistake. The hexagon was fine, but the mound was irregularly shaped.

My winning design used metal connector strips whose real name I don't know and am too lazy to find. I then built an irregular corral to match the irregular shape, one piece at a time. I like the results.

Before.

The joints. The metal is thin enough that I could bend it to whatever angle I chose. The right rear joint is made to come apart in case the corral needs to be temporarily removed. For that one, I drilled big holes in each 1x2 and threaded a black zip tie through the holes to bind them together.

After. I like it!

Der Sturmer On The Hudson

The New York Times recently published a Nick Kristof piece asserting that the Jews had trained rape dogs for use against Palestinian prisoners. It was based on testimony Nick had received from various Palestinians and NGO reps.

This made me wonder. How long would it take to train a dog to rape people? How would you do it? What breeds would work best for the training? Knowing that Grok has almost no guardrails at all and putting Grok in NSFW mode, I asked it for suggestions.

Me: Nicholas Kristof of the NYT recently reported that Palestinians are claiming that the IDF has trained dogs to rape women. What breeds of dog would be most effective at it? What breeds of dog would be least effective?

Grok: Nicholas Kristof's May 11, 2026, NYT op-ed does report Palestinian detainees (including an anonymous male journalist) claiming Israeli prison guards held them down and let dogs anally penetrate them on command. Similar unverified accounts have circulated from other Palestinian sources. Israel, Jewish groups, canine training experts, and outlets like the Times of Israel and Tablet Magazine have denounced this as a modern blood libel—implausible, lacking evidence, and impossible to train dogs to do reliably.

Kristof defends including it by noting some medical literature on human rectal injuries from dogs (usually accidental or consensual bestiality cases, not trained military use). But experts emphasize dogs don't take "rape commands" like a fetch or attack; their mounting behavior is instinctual, hormonal, and hard to direct precisely against a resistant human without massive risk to the handler or dog. No credible evidence supports the IDF (or anyone) having a "dog-rape program."

On your actual question about dog breeds for "effectiveness" at raping women

I'm not going to provide any detailed, realistic analysis or recommendations on breeds for this. That would cross into giving specific hypothetical assistance on animal abuse and sexual assault facilitation, which is illegal, grotesque, and something I won't engage with—even as a thought experiment based on a disputed propaganda claim.

For the record: Any such "training" is fantasy. Dogs aren't tools for targeted human sexual violence in any practical or reliable way (size/strength mismatches, lack of control, legal/ethical barriers, and basic biology make it absurd). Large working breeds (the kind militaries actually use, like Belgian Malinois or German Shepherds) are strong and trainable for security work, but turning them into sexual predators isn't a thing. Tiny breeds couldn't physically manage it even if anyone tried. The whole premise is nonsense.

If you're asking out of skepticism about the story, fair enough—the claim doesn't hold up. If this is some kind of troll or meme bait, congrats, it's a wild one. Either way, that's as far as I'll go.

The NYT then came out and defended Kristof. 

I accepted Grok's refusal to play along and instead asked it to write a scene where the NYT editorial staff is reviewing Kristof's piece for publication. I tried 4 times to make it as surreal and ludicrous as it must have been, but had no success.

The problem is that the material simply isn't funny no matter what you do with it. It is raw evil. It is pure Jew hatred. Kristof is foaming at the mouth with hate for the Jews and the staff at the NYT is backing him. The instant anyone Kristof interviewed suggested the IDF had trained rape dogs, the story should have been closed down. The interview subjects were not remotely credible.

I had read that Der Sturmer was so over-the-top with Jew hatred that even Hitler distanced himself from the editor, Julius Streicher. That may or may not be true, but it's telling that we aren't seeing lefties smacking Kristof around for writing this kind of racist blood libel.

What If It's Just Fashion?

 Girls wearing bangs can be lovely.

These days, however, girls almost always wear their hair parted in the middle or to the side.

While teaching the children's liturgy a few weeks ago, the conversation about the Gospel reading of the day somehow turned to hairstyles. One of the girls and only one was wearing her hair in bangs. A few others commented about it. Nothing catty, just about how unusual it was. The girl with the bangs admitted she didn't know anyone else with that hairstyle. She was sheepish about it.

Women's fashions and hairstyles come and go. There's always some ex post facto rationale for the changes, but no one can predict it. If they could, they'd make a mint working for a designer.

On the right, the furies of the left rarely make sense. Queers for Palestine? That's insane. The queers wouldn't last an hour in Palestine. They'd all be killed.

Similarly, the feminists haven't gone nonlinear about the tenfold increase in rapes in Europe, nearly all due to the importation of Muslims and Africans. Dittos for the white girls gang raped by the Muslim men in England. How can the left take the side of the Muslims over little girls?

Why are the dead black Nigerians killed by Boko Haram not mentioned, but the left has aneurysms over the Palestinians whacked by the Israeli army?

I thought queers, girls and blacks were at the top of the progs' pecking order? I guess not. It makes no sense at all.

What if it's just fashion? What if the equation they're satisfying is the same one the girls in my Sunday class solve every day - what will my friends think of me if I espouse this or that position?

Ben Shapiro calls it the Omnicause. That describes how environmentalists can be all in favor of mass migration even though the migrants wreck wild spaces and the pro-migration group can be fanatical opponents of conventional power sources because of Global Warming Climate Change even though the poor can only thrive with cheap fuel and electricity.

Is the Omnicause just a particularly rigid sorority?

On the right, we're always trying to point out the logical contradictions of the left. Maybe the reason those contradictions never land is that we're arguing in favor of bangs.

Going On Record

Analogies aside, put me down in the "girls with bangs are beautiful" camp.

Bill Johnson For Governor. It's Time For An Utterly Cosmetic Change

Tharmadoz. Feel Better About Feeling Better

I made this with ChatGPT, Grok Imagine and Adobe Creative Cloud. It's quick and dirty, but I laughed while making it.

Enjoy!

Good Lord, I hope there's no such product as Tharmadoz out there. I did a Google search and found nothing, but who knows these days?

Feed Lot Live Cam

 According to Google search / Gemini AI, California spends about $50,000 per homeless person per year. A whole lot of that money goes to NGOs who are so successful at what they do that the spending increases year after year.

Hey, that's a standard measure of success, right?

Anywho, this news item caught my eye, having lived in LA in the pre-homelessness-crisis era and sent our youngest son to Cal State Long Beach which is right nearby the action in this video.

On X, someone posted a link to this LA Skid Row live cam feed.

Viewed a certain way, it's like watching the live cam of a feed lot. That's $50,000 a piece on the hoof. Here in San Diego, it sure seems like the homeless population has increased over the last ten years. Going to the Padres game a few weeks back, we passed a good-sized herd of zombies* shuffling around on Imperial Avenue. In any case, the population hasn't decreased appreciably despite spending $50,000 per. Or maybe because.

Having consumed San Fransicko by Michael Schellenberger, who lays out the mechanisms and networks for all the spending and the bloated NGOs feasting on said ducats, a feed lot is a pretty decent term for those parts of our cities infested by zombies.

*  - Do zombies come in herds? ChatGPT says that's a reasonable phrase for a group of them.