Second for TP Link. I’ve been on TP Tapo lights for the last year and they’ve been pretty painless. Amazon puts them on sale pretty often. I mainly use them as a wake up light and to turn on the inside lights when I’m carrying in stuff at night.

I had him in my mind writing my original comment. I don’t know much about him before the war, but he seems to be doing admirable if anyone had concerns at his election.

It’s fun to turn back the clock and read old news:

BBC: Ukrainian comedian Volodymyr Zelensky has scored a landslide victory in the country’s presidential election. 22 APR 2019

“I will never let you down,” Mr Zelensky told celebrating supporters.

Russia says it wants him to show “sound judgement”, “honesty” and “pragmatism” so that relations can improve. Russia backs separatists in eastern Ukraine.

Mr Poroshenko, who admitted defeat after the first exit polls were published, has said he will not be leaving politics.

He told voters that Mr Zelensky, 41, was too inexperienced to stand up to Russia effectively.

Mr Zelensky starred in the long-running satirical drama Servant of the People in which his character accidentally becomes Ukraine’s president.

He plays a teacher who is elected after his expletive-laden rant about corruption goes viral on social media.

He ran under a political party with the same name as his show.

With no previous political experience, Mr Zelensky’s campaign focused on his difference to the other candidates rather than on any concrete policy ideas.

NPR: Comedian Wins Ukrainian Presidency In Landslide 22 APR 2019

“What’s amazing is that despite Zelenskiy being a household name, people don’t really know what he stands for,” NPR’s Moscow correspondent Lucian Kim told Morning Edition. “During the election campaign, he was very vague about his positions, and in that way he really became a blank slate for people to project whatever they wanted on him.” The fact that voters chose Zelenskiy shows how desperate people are, Kim said.

But Ukraine’s outgoing president cautioned that the Kremlin is celebrating the election of an inexperienced candidate. Russia believes that “Ukraine could be quickly returned to Russia’s orbit of influence,” Poroshenko said on Twitter.

According to The New York Times, many voters said they had supported Zelenskiy “not so much because they thought he was a good candidate but because they wanted to punish Mr. Poroshenko for deflating the hopes raised by Ukraine’s 2014 revolution and for doing little to combat corruption.”

The Washington Post notes that Zelenskiy is just the latest comedian to win public office in elections around the world. In Guatemala, the former comic actor Jimmy Morales won the presidency on an anti-corruption platform with the slogan, “Not corrupt, not a thief.” In Iceland, comedian Jón Gnarr ran for mayor as a joke candidate and won, serving one term before he stepped down in 2014. And in the U.S., Saturday Night Live comedian Al Franken became a senator from Minnesota.

Maybe laughter and self-reflection is what the world needs right now. The comedians seem to be picking things up when everyone else is dropping the ball.

Wow, that was a ride! I read the Wikipedia synopsis and saw there was a documentary made about it with Orson Wells as the narrator and it was on Youtube and only about 40 minutes, so I checked it out. The intro was so trippy, with brash visuals and loud, violent sound effects combined with a generic John Carpenter synth soundtrack. It was like a deleted scene from Clockwork Orange!

I don’t know how much the content differs from the book, but it was a nice insight to my parent’s generation and their feelings to the future, or our now I suppose. It was somewhat eye-opening hearing them talk about built by number babies and cloning years before the first IVF baby was born, and things like an interview with a polyamorous couple. The idea of things like changing race at will is still somewhat crazy, but I guess one could carry thing over to confusion about gender fluidity.

It was a crazy mix of 'Member Berries, Old Man Yells at Cloud, but also with some empathy one can actually relate to less mentally flexible people experiencing the titular Future Shock. Where I lose a bit of that sympathy though is in reading the Wiki entry on Toffler himself, it quotes him:

“Society needs people who take care of the elderly and who know how to be compassionate and honest,” he said. “Society needs people who work in hospitals. Society needs all kinds of skills that are not just cognitive; they’re emotional, they’re affectional. You can’t run the society on data and computers alone.”

I got to spend a lot of time with all 4 of my grandparents from the Greatest Generation. To varying degrees, all seemed to eventually accept, if not embrace the modern times of race equality and even bits of homosexuality. None used computers or much advanced tech, but they didn’t seem to begrudge it either. I certainly never heard them complain about too much electric lighting, air conditioning, or running water.

My parent’s generation, the Boomers, seem to be going kicking and screaming into the future though. My mom was, and still at heart is a hippie, so she does not have these issues for the most part. My dad and all his friends though seem deeply upset we are not in 1970 anymore. If they didn’t have it then, they don’t need it now. There seems to be no desire to learn, or to accept new things or ways of seeing the world.

Perhaps life has sped up faster than our minds have changed to handle that. Those rooted in tradition perhaps had more time to adapt in the past. But I don’t think my generation has just turned our backs on our parents. They just do not seem to be accepting the embrace we are offering, and I don’t know if we can make them.

It’s definitely a deeper topic to continue to explorer that can go far deeper than writing it off with an “OK, Boomer,” but it’s an unfortunate circumstance when you reach out a hand to someone you care about and they just smack it away. My immediate family is not close for a number of reasons, and as they age, I fear how tense things will get whenever the point arrives where they are forced to start relinquishing some control to my brother and me.

I wonder how their intelligence would scale against your average person in physics. They’ve gotta do some complex trajectories, vectors, and what have you while performing a divebomb for their dinner. They’ve got to know a thing or 2.

I saw a big GHO just chilling on the edge of a road with no shoulder the one night, as I was so nervous for it! I was so scared to drive down the road the next day worried I’d see it had gotten hit. I swear some people aim for stuff even if it isn’t in their path of travel.

It was a new one to me.

I’m sad the reboots were never able to capture the same lightning in a bottle as some of the OG Muppet media.

The fact this isn’t localized to the US is the part that has me sweating. We’ve moved on from a lot of terrible things in America’s past, but with so many countries experiencing much the same thing at once, I don’t know where we find the good influence in the world.

I hope this will end up being a great wake up to the responsibilities of democracy, but I’ll probably be long gone before the ripples of the event of Bush v Gore are done shaking the system. It’s going to take a long time to clean things up even if we start tomorrow since the power hungry have gotten away with so much up until this point.

Not everyone can pull off the Edna look.

I was going to ask if they replaced Sam Eagle with an owl, would anyone be upset, but looking up owl Muppets, most seem to be pretty creepy looking too.

I did enjoy this one though:

Zelda Rose and Owl

Scary to think that in the future, some parts of the country may talk about the 2020 election the same way they do about “The War of Northern Agression.”

I thought it was touching where he discussed his worries about using his last opportunity to speak before the election, and that he could be left wondering if there was something else that he could have said to change the outcome if it ends up going bad. I imagine there has to be a good bit of pressure when you have such a large platform.

For a show that points out so many wrongs with our country, it’s easy to look at things negatively. But for now, at least, we are able to point out those wrongs and still have a hope we can do something about them. Not even 5 years a citizen, I imagine it could be scary as well that if a re-elected Trump goes for a type of “media reform,” Oliver is likely going to be high on the list of people to be looked at.

I hope tomorrow goes well for America. I’ve been disappointed the last few elections that the comedians have been more critical than the mainstream journalists, but right now, I’m glad we’ve had them if nothing else, motivating us to still be our best.

Me too! They’re so vibrant, and they even make the owls look a little less grumpy! 🙂

Are you from a place that gets nice fall colors? I fear leaf season is almost over where I’m at and I will miss it.

Barred Owl may be looking down on you, but I’m singing your praises for this great shot!

I’m next to a firework park also. I always seem to catch the bats losing their minds from it.

It’s the same show every year too, so I feel bad they get all scared for the same old thing.

I saw some cities doing drone light shows. I wonder if that is any better.

Sometimes I’ll think of the title first and then I have to remember it until I get a good photo. 😅

They always look at the camera… It’s good they stick to open grasslands!

I liked how we still get a bit of green with that moss/lichen on the tree too!

Autumn is probably my favorite season, so I’ve really been enjoying these pics. I feel it contrasts the owls very nicely as well.

I was wondering if it was original or not, I’m not very up on meme culture, so they’re fresh to me at least!

Very true. Planting a non-native monoculture forest isn’t good for very much other than saying you planted something. It’s still an ecological desert that doesn’t really support life in a holistic way. A healthy forest had tons of trees and plants in various states of growth and decay, providing different types of animal shelter or food.

It will take generations of people who will literally plant the trees of which they themselves will never sit in their shade, as the old saying goes.

I feel bad for the future generations who will be paying the price for what has been kicked down the road for them by long dead individuals with selfish goals. It’s scary to think about losing animals in our lifetime that aren’t some exciting things we’ve only seen in books or zoos, but regular backyard creatures not existing anymore.