willedoo

The hashtag will locate all posts that contain that hashtag. In the last screen grab, you can see people can attach multiple hashtags to their posts. They are a link of sorts, but general and not specific to one post.

Another one trending this morning is #HarrisButtgieg2024, related to speculation Harris might pick Pete Buttgieg as a running partner for VP. Clicking on the hashtag brings up stuff like this

The hashtag will link to any posts related to the title of the hashtag. In Xcrement there is an area on the right of the screen showing which topics are trending and a lot of these are preceded by a hashtag. You can enter a hashtag followed by whatever you seek in the search bar as well. In the attached screen grab below, the hashtag #AFLPiesTigers will bring up everything related to their match. I saw one this morning in the trending section that was #DonaldtheDodger. I didn't click on it but assumed it was all about Trump dodging death, but maybe it was just all about Trump in general.

It's supposed to be a peaceful thing but there's been a lot of debate and criticism of the IOC's decision to allow Russian and Belarusian athletes to compete as neutrals. Conditions are that they must not be active supporters of the war and not work for the country's military or security services. In more normal times almost 50% of Russia's Olympic athletes are members of the military in their day job. Of the 57 Russian and Belarusian athletes declared eligible, an investigation by the Netherlands-based Global Rights Compliance found 33 had backed the war. According to Ukraine’s Ministry of Youth and Sports, at least 487 Ukrainian athletes and coaches have been killed over the course of the war. In Russia athletes and the elites don't go to fight in the war. It's in sharp contrast to Ukraine where they have lost so many talented people from the fields of science, sports, education and the arts, all fighting in front line jobs. It's easy to excuse the IOC by saying politics shouldn't come into it, but in my opinion Russian and Belarusian athletes should be banned, whether competing under a neutral flag or not. A lot of Ukraine's athletes who would have been competing are now dead because of those two countries.

In the mid 80's myself and a few mates rented a Batak house on the shore of Lake Toba in Sumatra which had a complimentary dugout canoe thrown in. It was one of those small hollowed out log types of canoe. I was never game enough to get in it. Not a strong swimmer and Lake Toba is very deep, up to 500 metres. It was on Samosir Island in the middle of the lake so there was a very sharp drop off in water depth from the shoreline. I suppose it makes no difference whether you drown in ten feet of water or a thousand feet, but the deep water there certainly added a physiological factor to it.

Nev, this is how you do it:

Re: Trump's habit of playing the air accordion when speaking. Has anyone seen the videos where they have shopped in an accordion to fit his weird hand gestures. Most of the videos were done back when he was president.

It's healed well. A small dent in the top of the ear is the only visible effect.

Those streaks have run down his cheek when he was lying prone on the deck covered by agents.

I guess it fits with an organisation that now has break dancing as an Olympic sport.

The FBI have now said it was a bullet or bullet fragment that hit Trump. My money is on a fragment ricochet given the appearance of the injury to the ear (photo attached). Even though an ear is flexible, the kinetic energy of an unhindered bullet would have taken a fair bit of his ear off. Fragments can still give a nasty cut depending on a lot of factors. If a hard bullet fragment comes off steel it can have razor sharp edges. Possibly the fragment (if it was a fragment) broke off a bullet that hit something on stage or the metal on the spectator stand. If it was a fragment, Trump is lucky it didn't hit him in the eye. I've been hit on the cheekbone with a sizeable bounceback, about half a projectile, and it felt like getting punched by someone and that's a lot less momentum than a ricochet. I used to accompany my dad to his 2/9th. AIF Battalion annual reunions and have seen some of the damage on diggers from bullet strikes and you could see how much extra damage the kinetic force did to them. One old bloke I spoke to had been hit twice with machine gun bullets at Shaggy Ridge. One went through the front of his helmet and left a big groove across the top of his head. The other one hit him in the left collar bone area and left a hole the size of a cricket ball in the top of his shoulder.

Originally I thought the crane that got hit resulting in a blown hydraulic line was a ricochet. After looking at these photos you can see it was directly in the line of fire. I've marked the yellow crane (red arrow) and the line of fire as the green line and you can see the crane was directly in line. In the early videos released you could see a big spray of hydraulic oil and the boom contracting as it lost hydraulic pressure. The gunman was rushing his shots. Trump would have had no chance if it was a professional job, and certainly if there was a second shooter after the SS bungled their duty for Trump's photo op with the clenched fist thing. I think most assassinations and attempts on presidents have been done by amateurs.

That looks about right.

In this photo the position of the gunman is just generalised to that rooftop. He was over on the far left hand side as you look down on the roof. That narrow position enabled him to get a line of sight past the first angled seating stand closest to him.

From the photos I've seen, the deceased was on the smaller angled stand which is consistent with the trajectory from the shooter to Trump. But maybe not, it's a bit hard to figure out.

The White Stripes, Meg and Jack White. A low overhead band with just one guitar, a drum kit and a few amps. They can make a lot of noise for just two people. Meg White's drumming was always a topic of much discussion. Critics called it simplistic, but when it pulled apart it's brilliantly simplistic. She's won one Brit Award from six nominations and six Grammy Awards from eleven nominations and made it onto Rolling Stone's list of '100 Greatest Drummers of All Time'. This bloke give a good explanation of Meg White's drumming:

Actor Jeff Daniels (with son Ben) when he's not acting.

A photo that circulated from day one of the shooting shows a symmetrical vapour trail next to Trump of a type consistent with a bullet and not of a shrapnel piece. Whether or not the photo is manipulated is another thing. Another photo showed a piece missing from an onstage piece of equipment that looked like a teleprompter. That lead to some public speculation that shrapnel from it hit Trump's ear, but again, the photo might have been shopped. As far as I know neither photo has been proven to be genuine.

Do you know why the Soviets and Russians built the world's biggest subs? It's to compensate for the weight of their leather greatcoats when resurfacing. I've got a double breasted one hanging in a cupboard somewhere, the same type Sean Connery wears in Hunt for Red October, and the weight is crazy. I've never weighed it but it would be several kilos. A lot of their leather stuff is made from reindeer hide but this naval coat seems to be made from very heavy cow hide with a flock's worth of lambswool inside. Good for the arctic chill I suppose but very uncomfortable to wear.

One of my dad's mates copped a bullet from a Jap machine gun when they were in Borneo and he lived with it lodged in his spine until he died aged in his late 80's. I think it was too risky to remove it and it didn't cause much trouble throughout his life. He spent most of his post war working life as a screen printer. The bullet hit him in the arm, spun 90 degrees around the humerus, went between two ribs cracking them, straight through the lung and ended up in the spine. Someone picked his slouch hat up and gave it to my dad as he had lost his, so he saw out the war and the post war service period with his mate's hat.

Just curious, how did he get the name Zoro?

Mad Max VW.

It certainly would be challenging. As far as I know, my cousin is one of the new breed of high tech farmers and relies on a lot of data for decision making. I guess with the high input cost of requirements for that type of soil, cost reduction is the way to make it profitable and that's where the data crunching comes into play. It must be working as they get up to 15% return on investment (depending on seasonal conditions and prices) when the national average is around 4%. I remember him as a smart kid and his father was a clever farmer for his time. Taking up cropdusting was a good backgrounding in how data can be used to improve productivity. A lot of them now are also putting in multiple weather stations on properties that include soil moisture meters. The tech has come a long way since the days when John Deere first started logging crop yields in their harvesters and collating that with GPS data. Putting the right amount of fertiliser in the right place and not wasting it where it's not needed would be a big cost saving on large broadacre properties.

I've got a cousin who lives just south of there near Tammin. Those blokes with the beer can boat would know him for sure. He moved over there in the early 2000's to run his wife's family's property as well as his cropdusting business. They farm about 11,000 hectares. I still can't get my head around the type of soils in that wheatbelt compared to the black soil plains I'm used to. I guess at the end of the day, the soil is just a medium to hold the plant up and the W.A. farmers put a fair bit of fertiliser and additives into it.

It's amazing how trusting some birds can get. I think there's three parts to it. One is food, another is the humans not presenting a threat, and lastly some species are naturally more confident and trusting around humans than others. An example is the difference between Kookaburras and crows.