Latest news with #Sisyphean
Daily Mirror
2 days ago
- General
- Daily Mirror
Dust will not stick on skirting or blinds if cleaned with natural household item
A cleaning expert has shared a simple way to prevent dust from sticking to skirting boards and blinds for at least a month, using a cheap household item Dusting might often seem like a Sisyphean task, as just-cleaned surfaces around the home continue to magnetise grime, but there's a nifty trick that keeps dust at bay for much longer. The hotter climate and open windows to let in a fresh breeze means air circulates more freely, making it a doddle for dust to waft about and settle down on various nooks and crannies. Window blinds and skirting boards are notorious dust magnets due to their wide flat surfaces usually made from materials like wood or plastic, which are prone to accumulating static electricity. Static looms as quite the attraction for any grimy particles, ensuring they cling on with irritating persistence unless you outsmart them by creating a dust-repellent shield. Enter Kerry, the brain behind Blissful Domestication and a whizz with a cleaning hack. She's shared a pocket-friendly yet highly effective way to bust that pesky static: just sweep over areas with dryer sheets. Kerry advised: "My top tip for a quick clean of venetian blinds? (I have them all over my house) Use a tumble dryer sheet for a quick dust. "The sheet just picks up all the dust perfectly and smells amazing too. Also extremely useful for dusting the tops of your skirting board." It may sound peculiar, but it's logical when you think about it – dryer sheets are inherently covered in an anti-static layer to prevent your washing from clumping together mid-tumble. By simply gliding a dryer sheet over your blinds or along your skirting boards, you effectively transfer that anti-static magic, stopping dust from being able to call these surfaces home. Dryer sheets are typically coated in fabric softener, leaving behind a thin waxy layer that acts as a protective barrier against dust, reports the Express. Keep dust at bay from blinds and skirting boards When cleaning skirting boards, you can utilise a vacuum cleaner and then mop them if you wish. Subsequently, use a microfiber cloth to dry the surfaces, ensuring none of them remain damp, as this could attract dust. Next, glide the dryer sheets across your blinds and skirting boards. Don't forget to also wipe them across any windowsills or bookcases present in the room, as these can be dust-prone areas. The room should remain dust-free for at least a month, although the duration depends on the amount of air circulating in the room daily. Nonetheless, this method should prevent dust accumulation on often-neglected surfaces like skirting boards and blinds for an extended period, resulting in a cleaner room with minimal effort.
USA Today
27-05-2025
- Entertainment
- USA Today
Are the Falcons a gigantic Nathan Fielder social experiment?
Are the Falcons a gigantic Nathan Fielder social experiment? The Atlanta Falcons added yet another chapter to the Bloated Book of Bafflement on Tuesday when a photo from the team's first OTA session featured a devastating self-own. In what is absolutely an accident by a hard-working social media expert and not a covert attempt to continue a troubling social experiment, the team shared to social media a now-deleted photo (which you can see below) of safety Jessie Bates III and cornerback Mike Ford posing with each other in their practice jerseys. Where's the problem? Well, Bates is No. 3, and Ford is No. 28. 3, 28. ... You get where we're going with this. It's an obvious mistake by this admin. It's just a photo of two Falcons defensive backs during a day of May NFL offseason practice. There is nothing more to it than that. Right? ... Right? *flashbacks to 28-3... looks around nervously, whispers* Have... have the Falcons secretly a Nathan Fielder social experiment this whole time? For years, the only way to chalk up the many, many bizarre happenings in Flowery Branch has been to simply look to the football gods assigning them as one of their favorite torments. When the football gods pride themselves in your folly, you may then take Sisyphean joy in your eternal embarrassments. However, what if Fielder has been behind the Falcons this entire time, orchestrating each and every Atlanta misery as some sort of social experiment to study Stockholm Syndrome's effect on fans of a sports team? Posting two players in jerseys of "3" and "28" can absolutely be an honest mistake. That's what it is... an honest mistake. But what if it isn't? What if this is Fielder's latest attempt to study Falcons fans? Just think back on these huge Falcons blunders as a Fielder experiment from Nathan For You or The Rehearsal instead of just miserable developments for a seemingly cursed NFL franchise? Imagine these quotes in his voice, providing narration before unfolding a macabre social experiment for alt-comedy purposes? 'I then decided to call a pass play in a clear run play scenario, as I further explored the possibility that, even though we were ahead by a wide margin, it wasn't impossible for us to still lose this football game. Being up 28 points to three late in the third quarter of the Super Bowl usually projects a victory, but what if, this time, it doesn't?" "Our team has become known for blowing leads in the most shocking of scenarios because of the Super Bowl, but it would be absolutely implausible if we actually kept blowing even more leads? Could we make it our identity? Could we make even the simplest of leads, like one over the Jay Cutler-led Dolphins, feel likely to slip out of our grasps into painful oblivion? Maybe." "We just signed quarterback Kirk Cousins in the offseason to a massive contract, essentially locking him into a meaningful stint with our franchise for the next few years. Our pass-rush has been a historic disaster. Logic dictates in this year's NFL Draft that we'll finally address this lingering issue with our top pick. But what if we didn't focus on our defense with that pick and we took a quarterback, instead? Of course, this has never been done in the history of the NFL in this fashion and would send the fans into a spiral, but... what if we did it anyway?" "The opportunity presented itself for us to pump fake crowd noise into our stadium, to present the illusion of fans being in our building... even though there are plenty of people already there providing plenty of noise for our underperforming football team. What will the meaningless crowd noise provide? We wanted to find out." Think even closer to the fact that Fielder's second season of The Rehearsal premiered on April 20, the same week the Falcons both traded a 2026 first-round pick to move up in the 2025 NFL Draft to take Tennessee outside linebacker James Pearce Jr. *right after* the team finally did something widely praised by fans and analysts alike in drafting Georgia outside linebacker Jalon Walker. It's also the same week Atlanta defensive coordinator Jeff Ulbrich's son, Jax, stole quarterback Shedeur Sanders' NFL Draft telephone number off his dad's iPad and orchestrated a prank call that Friday. Is Fielder trying to tell us something? His latest season has been largely centered on aviation, and the Falcons' slogan is quite literally "Rise Up." Is season 3 his grand reveal, where he and a series of others have been running the operation in the shadows for a perpetually snakebitten NFL team to see just how loyal fans can be in the most shockingly impossible situations? This social media post was probably just a human error, a small drip of misery water in the pain bucket Falcons fans drink from to sustain themselves from year to year. But what if it's not? What if, this whole time, a man with a laptop has been plotting behind the scenes to conduct more and more experiments to see just how far he can push a fan base to leave its wretched football team behind, just to see those fans stay put? Are these fans just avoiding what they know deep down? That loyalty in sports is even more barbed and jaded than loyalty in life, and that we're more likely to leave people and jobs that cause us pain than literal sports teams we only have relation to in geography and happenstance? No, that would be nonsense. But what if it's not? At... at least Michael Penix Jr. looked good at quarterback last year, right?
Boston Globe
23-05-2025
- Automotive
- Boston Globe
The Pacific Coast Highway, a mythic route always in need of repair
Since building began on the first parts of the highway more than a century ago, sections of the route, which runs more than 650 miles from south of Los Angeles to Northern California, have been closed, over and over again. In some places, chunks of the road have slipped into the ocean. In others, more than 1 million tons of earth have barreled onto the highway, slicing it to pieces. Bridges have failed. Rainstorms have flooded the road with mud. Residents have been left marooned. Tourists have been shut out. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Recently, consecutive landslides in Big Sur, a 90-mile region along the Central Coast, have closed parts of the road for two years, four months and counting. And in January, the Palisades fire, which burned thousands of homes, shuttered an 11-mile stretch of the highway connecting the Los Angeles area with the beachside city of Malibu. Advertisement That stretch reopened on Friday, but there is no timeline for reopening the road in Big Sur. The California Department of Transportation, known as Caltrans, said that the state had spent more than $370 million on fixing the highway after extreme weather events in the past seven years. Prolonged closures in 2017 cost businesses along the route more than $500 million, according to the state's tourism agency, Visit California. Advertisement New York has skyscrapers. Arizona has a canyon. Mississippi has a river. California has a coast — and one major highway to see it from. Building the road on unstable terrain took ingenuity. Fixing it in a world being rocked by climate change may take even more. In early May, a four-day trip of about 600 miles along much of the highway from Los Angeles to San Francisco (passing through a burn zone and circumventing a landslide) revealed residents struggling with the closures and contemplating the future of the route. It is officially called California State Route 1, but is commonly referred to as the Pacific Coast Highway, or Highway 1, and was built bit by bit, beginning in the early 1900s. In 1964, it was merged into a single highway. The road winds through steep granite bluffs and yawns open in salt-worn beach towns where trailers with American flags stake their place in the sand. Workers poke sticks into the earth to measure the rate at which it is moving. Tractor-trailers haul car-size boulders up the narrow pass. One of the drivers, Juan Ramirez, each day carries two or three very large rocks from near Fresno, more than 150 miles inland, to the coast. 'It's a long way,' he said. 'Four hours this way, and then, four hours out.' The boulders are used to build a retaining wall intended to hold back the force of the Pacific Ocean — one small part of the effort to keep the highway open. It's a herculean task. Increasingly, it is becoming Sisyphean. A long, perfectly-peeling point break makes Malibu Lagoon State Beach, directly off the highway, among the most well-known surfing spots in the world. Advertisement But on a morning in early May, just a few silhouettes bobbed in the water. To the east, the highway, normally four lanes along this stretch, was down to two lanes that were open only to residents, workers, and emergency services. Beach parking lots had become depots for bulldozers. Traffic crawled past charred debris. Helene Henderson, the founder of Malibu Farm, a restaurant and cafe on the pier, had no idea construction was planned that day on her doorstep. 'Because a fire is not enough,' she said. The restaurant, ordinarily buzzing even on a weekday, was empty, and Henderson said that 100 staff members had no working hours. In the wake of the fire, the closure of the highway, which is the spine of the city, had wrought a second economic disaster, said Barbara Bruderlin, CEO of the Malibu Pacific Palisades Chamber of Commerce. 'It's strangling all the businesses,' she said. 'One by one, they're beginning to close.' Though the road is reopening, many may continue to struggle. Jefferson Wagner, a stuntman and former mayor of Malibu, said that sales at his surf shop, Zuma Jay Surfboards, were down nearly 50 percent. His store, just outside a road closure checkpoint, had become a makeshift post office for businesses beyond it, with packages piling up on the floor. 'Without this highway,' Wagner said, 'this town is lost.' In the southern part of Big Sur, the road narrows to a two-lane ribbon that is the only major route in or out. On the one side is a dizzying cliff. On the other is a precipitous plunge into the ocean down jagged rocks. Advertisement Residents expect isolation, and ensure they have food and gas for the times they become trapped. For weeks in 2023, landslides to both the north and south cut off a 20-mile stretch of the coast. By the time officials cleared the highway, another cascade with earth to fill hundreds of Olympic-size swimming pools had buried another stretch. The back-to-back slides have devastated many of the community's small inns and stores and are testing even the most hardened residents. 'It's been closed, closed, and closed, and closed, and closed,' said Surge Withrow, 52, a general contractor. It used to take him 10 minutes to drop his children at the school bus. Now it takes him at least an hour each way. Big Sur has long lured writers, monks, and others seeking transcendence — as well as millions of tourists a year. In the 1950s, writer Henry Miller, who lived there for nearly two decades, was already lamenting the crowds that threatened to turn Big Sur into a 'bonanza.' Even with the closure, the northern part of the coast, which remains easily accessible from San Francisco, continues to grapple with the longer-term impact of overtourism. There has always been a complex relationship between Big Sur and its visitors — and the highway that gets them in and out. 'It is a constant project to keep this road open,' said Magnus Torén, director of the Henry Miller Memorial Library in Big Sur. At some distant time it might become untenable, he added. But perhaps there was a silver lining: Without people, the coast could be preserved. Advertisement 'I never thought of this before,' he added, 'but how wonderful that would be.' This article originally appeared in
Express Tribune
18-05-2025
- General
- Express Tribune
Teaching expression to young learners
Listen to article It is heartening that a positive shift from quantity to quality is observed in our educational institutions. Some schools have started allocating space in their academic timetable to creative writing in the early classes. However, when things are done for the sake of things, the real objective is the first thing to disappear. It also entails the loss of time and talent. Creativity pursued in one subject helps solve mysteries in other subjects as well, and the learning of a language serves purpose the best. At the embryonic stage, one's native or national language facilitates one to speak or write one's heart out. Possibility should be availed of at the early stages if a bilingualist teacher is ready to teach creative writing in the national as well as the second language. Story-telling and paragraph writing in a native or national language removes the barriers to entry, providing a threshold effect for creative writing in English. It also helps students learn narrative or descriptive structure by default without being hogtied by grammar. Provided the sparse exposure to spoken English, we think first in the native or national language, then translate it into English. This thought pattern originates in the grammar translation method prevalent in our educational institutions. In our part of the world, overemphasis on learning grammar holds back the starters from writing creatively. The main objective must be first to let students say or write whatever they think. Water flows only when the tap is turned on. Assignments of creative writing must arouse students' emotional engagement with the topic. Instead of saying, "Write ten lines on your pet", ask, "Why do you love your pet?" Students can write easily on palpable instead of abstract topics e.g., trees instead of honesty. Another anomaly is that with low and poor input, high output is expected. Having vocabulary and a sense of syntax not enough to transform thoughts and feelings into words, students cringe for the fault not of their own. Arguably, without nurturing the habit of intensive and extensive reading, teaching creative writing is reduced to nothing but a Sisyphean task. Story-telling and their enactment in classrooms have their own ineluctable importance in stirring the imagination and building a word bank for students. Story-telling, role-playing and dialogue provide students with contextual vocabulary and collocations when they pay attention to people's word choices in conversations. It will condition students to think in English, ushering in spontaneity in speaking and writing. When students fail in turning out high output, teachers jump on downplaying the students' capabilities. Negative and demotivating remarks are real killers of creativity. A teacher must be a coach, not a critic. Teachers must also allow for unrecognised learning disorders. Creativity must be prioritised over correctness as too much correction kills confidence. After a creative writing session, students must feel much more confident and happier. Creative writing should be creative. Special care must be taken in choosing the topics or props for the creative writing assignments. Students find it much easier to describe their daily routine, general events and festivals. Moreover, tasks like picture descriptions must require students to write in the present tenses. However, picture descriptions of fables like those of Aesop's require their writing in the past tense whose handling is a bit difficult for novice learners. The present tenses provide immediacy against the remoteness of the past whose perception eludes the young minds. To calibrate the written creative tasks at the early stages proves the last nail in the coffin as it quantifies the skill of creative writing, equates self-expression to solving a mathematical problem and transforms a fun activity into a race for grades. Moreover, evaluation leads to perfectionism which may paralyse the young writers. As writing reflects one's personality, comparing one's work, triggered by the grading of tasks, with someone else's lowers one's self-esteem.
New York Times
15-05-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
Quote of the Day: California's Long Record of Resilience Is About to Be Tested, Signs Indicate
'It's not helpless, but it is Sisyphean.' DONNA DOJARSKY, a longtime civic leader and Democratic activist in California, a state that some officials say is facing an unprecedented confluence of forces that will test its record of enduring catastrophes, natural and otherwise.
