that TOP casts in this direction will subside fairly quickly - I wouldn't sweat it.

In one week, a group of my husband's crazy friends will descend upon us to ride the Assault on the Carolinas bicycle ride. I am going to be running a bed and breakfast next weekend. This ride started about seventeen years ago with only 40 riders and has grown into a huge event that brings riders in from all over the United States and even Canada. For two years in a row, over 100 Canadians came to ride the Assault. The weather and the scenery along the ride routes is gorgeous and the people here support it enthusiastically.

Each year the registrations close out earlier and earlier and none of the guys were registered before the closeout date (the day they hit 1,000 registrations) which came over a month earlier than last year. But a wonderful neighbor of ours, who is also riding it, has been working very hard to find transfer registrations and five of the six guys coming now have a registration. Next year, they need to register the day that the registrations open to be sure of getting in.

In the past, my husband and his friends have always ridden the 60K route, but at least three of the guys are now talking about doing the 100K which is extremely challenging. The route dips down into South Carolina and then has a more than six mile long steep uphill climb up to Ceasar's Head state park in SC before returning back into North Carolina. The climb up to Ceasar's Head is used by professional cyclists as a training ride. I keep telling my husband that if he decides to do the 100K, he will miss the awesome lunch that the ride always provides for the finishers.

Anyway, for now I have to figure out where everyone is going to sleep and how I am going to feed them all. LOL Everyone have a great day and thank you, Tim, for this wonderful Open Thread.

Just in case anyone from AZ is online and/or knows someone in AZ who had trouble in the primary, it appears the Sanders campaign is collecting data for a push to either recount or revote. You can post your information to them here: https://go.berniesanders.com/page/content/arizona/

I'm guessing the attorneys are looking at some sort of class action suit or possibly working with the ACLU to sue over election fraud. I kind of wish this would move faster and stay in the public spotlight, but I'm going to guess that the convention will have come and gone by the time this is resolved...

That success depends on content and community (above and beyond a refuge from the GOS). During this transition, though, people who have felt silenced do need to bit of screaming room. I like meaty content, but sometimes we need to just rox/sux/rant. My main issue is that the rox/sux is drowning out the meaty content. And much of that rox/sux are short clips/paragraphs, not essays that would be better in a daily thread. So, I ask, should we start a new daily OT called The Daily Scream and encourage everyone to focus their outrage at GOS in there?

Gonna repost this comment in Gerrit's essay, too.

Hope you have a great weekends eve.

Reddit has deleted its surveillance "warrant canary" in transparency report:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Social networking forum reddit on Thursday removed a section from its site used to tacitly inform users it had never received a certain type of U.S. government surveillance request, suggesting the platform is now being asked to hand over customer data under a secretive law enforcement authority.

Reddit deleted a paragraph found in its transparency report known as a “warrant canary” to signal to users that it had not been subject to so-called national security letters, which are used by the FBI to conduct electronic surveillance without the need for court approval.

The scrubbing of the "canary", which stated reddit had never received a national security letter "or any other classified request for user information," comes as several tech companies are pushing the Obama administration to allow for fuller disclosures of the kind and amount of government requests for user information they receive.

http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSKCN0WX2YF

Does c99p have a similar "warrant canary"?

Maybe a misspelling of "Evenning Blues" or something innocuous that can be attributed to a mistake.

if all the screaming from the poor darlings in pain on the left hand sidebar comment thread wears you down, follow my Red Green tip. I've run a strip of duck tape over the sidebar so I don't have to hear the screaming. When I go anywhere else, I just rip it off and stick it to the coffee table. I came up with the trick this morning and it helps. I hope it helps someone else.

For anyone deprived of Red Green knowledge:

Remember now, as Red Green always says, "If the wimmin don't find you handsome, they should at least find you handy."