When I still had kitties (and a house), I bought a litter box with a lid. I then fashioned a vent hose with a 120mm 12V PCM fan running at low RPM. The hose went through the ceiling in a closet and exhausted out an attic vent. Zero cat box smell and no noise. While my exact implementation isn't available to everyone (like in apartments), the basics can be adapted to almost any situation.

Sailing, scuba diving, cooking a big meal for friends, having a lazy start morning sipping coffee with my partner.

Right there with ya. Oh, I tried so hard. Walking and junk collection simulators in a depressing, ugly setting. The humorous bits are way too infrequent to make up for the litany of misery.

A recumbent racing league would be awesome, both fared and non-faring

Oooooh! I'd watch this. Hell, I'd probably get back into racing. And I don't even like recumbents that much (but still think they are the superlative design for most people). Without the UCI interference, we'd see some crazy cool stuff. I feel like the best we can get right now are the recumbent speed/distance records.

So... about tree-fiddy?

The UCI could fuck up a wet dream. They actively harm the advancement of bicycling. Whenever the UCI starts administering a race type, that whole industry sector is permafuct. Disc brakes (regardless of how one might feel about discs) were banned for many years, resulting in delay of that technology despite the demand being there. Recumbents are a superlative bicycle design for most humans, but thanks UCI ban.

One of the main reasons gravel bikes have innovated so quickly is because the UCI has yet to stick its stupid nose into the races. But they'll be along shortly to ruin the fun.

Oh, I guess I must have imagined the Roosevelt administration being stridently anti-Nazi from the beginning, and the mass protests whenever Nazis showed up in the US. Silly me.

You are correct that you are imagining this, because the US' relationship to Germany was definitely complex. Roosevelt was far from "stridently anti-Nazi" until Kristallnacht (1938 Nov 9), at which point Roosevelt recalled the US ambassador to Germany and allowed the 12,000 visiting Germans to remain in the US. However, despite allowing those Germans to stay, he did not push to increase immigration quotas.

Prior to Kristallnacht, the Roosevelt administration, Hollywood, petroleum companies, and much of the manufacturing base were very pro-Nazi Germany. The administration assisted Germany in circumventing boycotts while US petroleum companies provided fuel and oil despite European sanctions. Sources: Robert Evans ("Behind the Bastards"), Rafael Medoff ("Roosevelt's Pre-war Attitude Toward the Nazis")

The history of the US isn't "fascist-adjacent;" we've had our heads ALL THE WAY UP THAT ASS since the beginning and ongoing. Most of the founding fathers were worried that an "excess of democracy" would be bad for business (season 4 of "Scene on Radio," https://sceneonradio.org/category/season-4/page/2/).

The US' crusade against all things vaguely left of center goes even deeper than I ever thought. It's a bit surprising how many of the most dreadful dictators in the past 100 years were graduates of the School of the Americas and/or installed by the CIA. See: "The Jakarta Method" by Vincent Bevins.

Prunebutt is right here: the US was, at best, laissez-faire about Nazis until it wasn't. Nazis were good for business. I've read a lot on the topic, but can't find any good citations at the moment. This is an accessible, albeit lightweight entry point: https://time.com/5414055/american-nazi-sympathy-book/. But listen to just about year of "Behind the Bastards," and it's a deep rabbit hole of how closely tied to fascism the US had always been.

If my juggling of balls catches your fancy, you might also be interested to know that I also smoke meat, play the flute, and churn butter. 😆

Oh, throughout the whole thing, he and his employees were treated like garbage. He would get through security, go directly to the person's office, and reassemble the pistol in front of the manager. And then my friend (or one of his employees) would get interrogated for hours on unrelated questions, like it was somehow my friend's fault that the TSA failed their audits.

I travel a lot for work. US Customs and the TSA are absolutely a sick joke. I could easily write a novella on the extremely poor training of TSA employees. I have a small permanent retainer (read: braces); about 25% of the time, that is considered suspicious, and I get an enhanced inspection. "Ya know, I could just open my mouth and show you what's in there."

The TSA always determines that my juggling balls are suspicious, so I never pack them in carry-on anymore. I have NEXUS, yet I always get an enhanced inspection on return to the US. Literally every other country to which I have flown just waves me through, even before I got Pre-Check/NEXUS/Global Entry.

My partner had her rigging knife in her backpack on a flight out and back. She was unpacking and found it in her backpack after the trip. Good catch, TSA.

And the absolute frosting on the TSA shit sandwich: one of my close friends owns a private security firm. His company was approached by the TSA to assist in security audits at a major international airport. He and his team were contracted to "smuggle" fake firearms through TSA checkpoints, any way they could. The TSA repeatedly failed to detect the firearms for each of five audits. The TSA division (district? regional?) manager, frustrated at his group's 100% failure rate, determined that my friend's company must have specialized criminal training, and everyone who worked that contract were put on the no-fly list. It took him about 18 months to unfuck that mess for him and his employees.

I had written a few more paragraphs about TSA hassles, but I think y'all get the picture.