a few long links

On phonics vs. cueing in teaching kids to read. Fairly long. I find it baffling that alteratives to phonics were ever seriously considered. What do people think the alphabet is for? Mapping letters to sounds in a composable way is the entire point!
https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-how-schools-teach-reading

Old urbanism vs. sprawl in Bellevue Kentucky. Not too long. Makes the point that old walkable mixed use neighborhoods aren't just nice, they're more economically efficient -- more tax value, less infrastructure expense.
https://granolashotgun.com/2015/08/31/middle-of-the-road-kentucky/

Two pieces by the same guy on covid-19 aerial transmission and hygiene theater. People should worry less about sterilizing surfaces and more about not breathing each other's air.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/07/why-arent-we-talking-more-about-airborne-transmission/614737/
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/07/scourge-hygiene-theater/614599/

update

Have continued to make roast garlic.

Have tried to make peanut sauce and yellow curry. The former seems relatively straightforward: peanut butter + water (for consitency) plus various flavorings. I have no access to curry paste so the curry was a bit more ad hoc: coconut milk, turmeric, "Thai spice mix", chipotle and Sichuan pepper, with pork stew meat simmering in it.

My personal laptop is in a storage unit and has been since I started traveling in 2018. I thought I had its contents on an external hard drive, but I think I must have done something wrong with an rm command, because I don't. So no acccess to my fansubbed anime or RPG PDFs. I did have my music on my phone; I only just got to extracting all that onto my work laptop (now my new personal laptop, half the weight) and thence to the backup drive. Yay, I can listen to more than a dozen things on my laptop now!

I've re-read a bunch of the Twelve Kingdoms novels, and read The Children of Sanchez

Finally exchanged phone numbers with one of my housemates, so things are a bit friendlier there.