So did anyone else in Chicago get an emergency alert for flooding on their iPhone this morning?

I got one a couple of hours ago. Unbelievable intrusive noise.

Oh, I made the mistake of reading the comments page on the LDS church owned news station. Some voices of reason, more voices bewailing the moral decline and decay of America. Fortunately the Salt Lake Tribune is a reliable source of moderate-looks-like-raging-liberal-here stuff. But I hoped the other place would have some sense.

I may be able to explain the Prop 8 decision. Standing is one of those concepts that's easy to state but often tricky to apply in a particular case. Standing is basically "why do you care?" Taken to an absurdity, it means you can't sue if I get into a car accident with my next door neighbor. One of the principles of standing is that you can't challenge a law simply because you're a taxpayer who doesn't want your taxes spent on X, Y, or whatever.

Thanks for this, Fred Pete! I was feeling completely lost on the whole standing thing.

Glad to help, Polgara.

Well, we just found the source of the smell in the pantry.

In other news, yuck.

Gift with purchase?

Oh, no, totally our fault.

Old potato? (That's what I'm most guilty of in the pantry. I think "Oh, the pantry is cool and dry, I'll toss the taters in there!" And that's fine, as long as I remember to cook them within a reasonable amount of time. If not -- a rotten potato is a foul thing indeed.)

We had a potato peeling machine at the commercial kitchen at my highschool where I worked one summer. When our summer work started we discovered that the machine had not been cleaned out from the last use during the school year. It was beyond disturbing and we all had to take turns cleaning out because of how gross it was and we needed breaks after a few minutes.

Pre-packaged pastry mix that we were given ages ago, and that I've now discovered contained shortening.