My recommendation is sincere: “Mandarin. Learn to speak and understand Mandarin.”

We exercise them without assistance. I will call these our solitary or primary rights. The freedom to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is, perhaps, the most fundamental expression of those rights.

Two routes to get here, via Los Angeles or on secondaries, and two choices for the mode of transportation, flying or driving.

Random comments:

• The Walmart store sells Sushi. (That is not a recommendation.)
• The famous, 100 year old downtown steak place has plenty of atmosphere with city cops sitting at the counter eating dinner. My ribeye was good, but I’ve had better for less in Texas at Salt Grass, and the salad and baked potato were so stock-normal as to become boring. The apple pie was tart, but a tad too much.
• The Pla Jian at Panang Thai was as good as any Thai dish I’ve had anywhere in the world; everything was completely fresh with a tasty piece of catfish, great crust, and utterly perfect rice. The experience was unexpected and much appreciated after the foregoing.
• Expecting low of 19 degrees tonight and there’s no ice scraper in the rental car. This could be a problem.

Palmdale CA next week. I’ll be in the building with the skunk.

It’s a strap-on bunch of magnets, originally intended to hang on to nuts and bolts but here you can see it does just great with a set of channel plyers, my NRA knife, S&W 36 snubby and a combination straight and phillips head mini-screwdriver.

For example, the comment, “He was an alcoholic and womanizer,” may have been stated by someone and recorded in the raw notes that I review. Does that belong in the family story?

Open Source

Basically it means that the item, commonly a piece of software, is usually available in source code form, you can get a copy, read it, and modify it. It also says that, if you change it, you must also make those changes available to anyone and that you must do so without charging them anything.

What triggered the hostilities at this otherwise serene place on the edge of Concord was when the government took arms against its citizens.

The Declaration of Independence was motivated by the long series of grievances the colonists suffered from, at that time, their monarch.