F ³: Grins and Giggles

I can’t exactly explain it, but I found this headline hilarious:

Larry Hogan says he has no obligation to help Maryland GOP if members won't listen, By TINASHE CHINGARANDE and KONNER METZ , Baltimore Sun

I can’t image this article (or at least this framing) appearing anywhere but the Sun. Enough said. But I very nearly guffawed.

*****

Do you know what this is? It was for sale this week on Facebook Marketplace. I thought it was a musical instrument, probably percussion. Perhaps a relative of a cajon?

Silly me. It’s a two-story house for a cat. (The clue was right there on the lower right hand corner.) Perhaps if you’re a musician everything looks music related.

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People are sharing this photo beyond Howard County. I’ve already seen it twice today on Bluesky. Do you know why?

The Normies visiting this Howard County, MD library

must be so very confused.

We know it's not the same, but we're here for you in these dark days. Each book can be checked out for 3 weeks, which fits right into a 2-4 week fanfiction outage.

Nice work, HCLS.

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I saved this photo several years ago because it made me smile.

Guess what? He’s now on YouTube. Off-beat and slightly full of himself. Fun, though. I didn’t know that middle school math teachers could be fun.

Jay Wamsted - - your new favorite teacher

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Look! Upstairs at the mall! It’s a bird, it’s a plane! No, it’s Trendy Man!*

Longtime readers of the blog will know my fixation with Local Man/Columbia Man. This may be why I giggled when I read this announcement from The Mall in Columbia.

New location alert!

Trendy Man is now open on the

upper level above the food court at The Mall in Columbia.

Stop by their new space and see what's in store!

I can’t tell from the wording whether Trendy Man was a preexisting store that has simply changed locations or whether it’s entirely new. But now I’m stuck with the idea of “Trendy Man” as a new animated superhero flying through the Mall and…taking selfies?

It has been a long week and I’m open to all grins and giggles. Happy Friday.

Village Green/Town² Comments

*I’m hearing a strong accent on the first syllable here.

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Separate and Unequal

Remember “Separate but equal”? Remember how that really meant that Black schools languished in broken-down buildings without adequate heat or toilet facilities, with cast-off, ragged learning materials, underfunded and largely ignored? The Supreme Court struck that down in 1954. The evidence was clear that separate was not equal. Plessy v Ferguson had led to - - no, endorsed - - deeply unequal schooling and opportunities. We tend to think of Brown v Board as being purely about racial integration. It was not. It was about the logical consequences of segregation. And they were not, not, not equal. The ruling in 1954 didn’t transform public education for non-whites into a land of milk and honey by any means. But it articulated some essential truths in a way that made including everyone a legal precedent which could be relied upon and built upon. It was better than what came before it but it rested upon unsteady ground. It did not necessarily change the hearts or minds ...

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