Category: Local / Living

Gray Rocking, Definition of

Gray rocking is a technique for disengaging with manipulative or abusive people by becoming as dull, boring, and uninteresting as a gray rock, thereby removing the “supply” or emotional reaction they seek. This involves giving brief, non-committal responses, keeping your tone and expressions neutral, and avoiding sharing personal information that could be used against you. While it can be effective in managing difficult interactions, especially in inescapable situations like co-parenting or workplace relationships, it can also be emotionally exhausting and may lead to feeling disconnected or numb.

Definition from Google AI

Colorado Govenor Chats with Reddit Users

brosef321
What are you going to do about the dictator in the White House who is actively rigging future elections and imposing martial law in blue areas?

jaredpolis
Verified – Governor of Colorado
We are in 29 active lawsuits against Trump right now.

Bella_Climbs
Are you planning to do anything at the state level to make the covid vaccine more accessible after the CDC’s recent and unpopular change?

jaredpolis
Verified – Governor of Colorado
YES, and I think it will be fixed early this coming week

Haroldhowardsmullett
What(if anything) can you do to safeguard our public lands against future attempts to sell/develop them?

Mike Lee’s recent horrible proposal was stopped for now, but that’s just a single battle in a war that’s definitely not over. There will be future attempts to do the same thing.

jaredpolis
Verified – Governor of Colorado
I am so grateful and glad the effort to sell off public lands was defeated (for now! we must stay vigilant.) I will continue to lobby against selling off our public lands.

OtterlyDeplorable
What are your thoughts on ManBearPig? What is your administration doing about him?

jaredpolis
Verified – Governor of Colorado
We are continuing our work to make Colorado 100% powered with renewable energy by 2040 and 80% by 2030.

TheyCallMe_OrangeJ0e
Manbearpig was South Park’s allegory for climate change.

https://www.reddit.com/r/boulder/comments/1n4b3m1/im_jared_polis_governor_of_colorado_former_member/

Routine-Activity Theory and Serial Killers

There is a third possible explanation for the serial-killer epidemic, and although Fraser doesn’t mention it, it happens to be the prevailing inclination among contemporary criminologists. “Routine-activity theory,” which was first elaborated by sociologists in the late nineteen-seventies, treats crime as a matter of ecology. The “golden era” of serial killers was made possible by the contingent rise of some technologies and practices—the automobile, the interstate highway system, the prevalence of hitchhiking—that happened to facilitate crimes of opportunity. In the last quarter century, the development of other technologies and practices—surveillance cameras, phone tracking, interjurisdictional coöperation, and DNA evidence, along with a much greater degree of interpersonal paranoia—have drastically limited those opportunities. Ted Bundy might have been profoundly lead-poisoned, but he also lived in a time and a place where it wasn’t hard to kill with impunity.

Did Lead Poisoning Create a Generation of Serial Killers?
Ted Bundy, Charles Manson, and many other notorious figures lived in and around Tacoma in the sixties. A new book argues that there was something in the water.
Gideon Lewis-Kraus

No One Is Really Average

Even though I was born in Perth, Western Australia, I have lived in the UK for so long, my accent is now 60 to 80 percent British. While I enjoy sports, I’m not a super-fan of any of them, and it has been a very long time since I’ve applied a prawn to a barbecue. I’m not a typical Australian. But then again, no one is.

After the 2011 census, the Australian Bureau of Statistics published who the average Australian was: a thirty-seven-year-old woman who, among other things, “lives with her husband and two children (a boy and a girl aged nine and six) in a house with three bedrooms and two cars in a suburb of one of Australia’s capital cities.” And then they discovered that she does not exist. They scoured all the records and no one person matched all the criteria to be truly average. As they rightly pointed out:

While the description of the average Australian may sound quite typical, the fact that no one meets all these criteria shows that the notion of the “average” masks considerable (and growing) diversity in Australia. – Australian Bureau of Statistics

…
Having unmasked one Mr. Average, I was prepared to make amends and find a replacement. I contacted the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) to see if it was possible to find someone with the reduced criteria the newspaper used, instead of the full average Australian range of statistics. The fine people at ABS found my request interesting enough to dig through the data for me. Expanding the population considered from West Australia to the whole country subtly changed the averages: Mr. Average is now a woman with one fewer bedrooms in her house. They estimated that, for the loosest definition of average (using only a few main statistics), there would only be “roughly four hundred” matching people out of Australia’s then population of 23,401,892. So there you have it: 99.9983 percent of the Australian population is not average. I’m in pretty good company after all.

Humble Pi: When Math Goes Wrong in the Real World
Matt Parker

Recommended book

Supermarket Music Sounding Good These Days

Meirl
byu/Contemporary_Scribe inmeirl

cutedorkycoco
I heard Fall Out Boy on a classics station once and wanted to cry. Spotify made me a playlist called divorced dad rock alternatives and I don’t understand the need to be so violent. I’m not even a guy or divorced!

INeedReasons
Omg this made me snort laugh so loud. The divorced part is so unnecessary yet perfect

cutedorkycoco
Yeah I was so mad because I knew what it meant, but I didn’t like it. Like, just let me listen to The Killers in peace.

lordretro71
Jammed out to Sk8tr Boy at Walmart this morning…

Particular_Ticket_20
The oldies station in my area that played doo-wop and motown and 60s pop now plays the music I listened to in college and high school.

My local grocery store just plays cheesy over the top patriotic music now.

i_should_be_coding
I got out of the car once just as Everlong finished playing. Went inside the store and Everlong started playing. Took me a second to recompose myself.

alphi10
I remember this change literally happened the day I graduated high school. I worked in a grocery store the last three years of HS and had to listen to Neil Diamond and Barbra Streisand all day. The day I graduated and quit they started playing TLC, Destiny’s Child, Britney and Christina. I was like, I guess I’m an adult now

Memes as Form of Business Communication

And organized levity is now an expected part of professional life, especially in sectors like tech. A friend of mine briefly worked for a massive Internet search company that will remain nameless. He told me that the buzzy new time-waster at work was trying to handle as much internal communication as possible not with e-mail or instant messaging, but with funny memes. A whole platform was designed from scratch to facilitate this dubious-but-“fun” goal. If the boss from Office Space pops up on your screen saying “That’d be great,” that’s a Level Three problem. But if Rambo pops up, uh-oh. That’s a Level Five. You might be working late tonight. “Considerable time and effort has gone into developing this tool,” my friend said, smiling ruefully.

Planet Funny: How Comedy Took Over Our Culture
Ken Jennings

Colorado Inventions: Modern Tampons, Crocs, Christmas Lights – Happy Colorado Day

https://mix1043fm.com/10-colorado-inventions/

Tampons are said to have existed for centuries, but the first person to patent the creation with an applicator was Denver resident, Dr. Earle Cleveland Haas. By using telescoping paper tubes, Dr. Haas was able to invent an applicator to make insertion simpler and more sanitary. In 1932, Dr. Haas trademarked the name Tampax, a combination of the terms “tampon” and “vaginal packs.”

A trend most of us didn’t see coming was spawned directly in Colorado from the minds of natives Scott Seamans, George Boedecker, Jr., and Lyndon “Duke” Hanson. The trio introduced the footwear as a boating shoe in 2002 and since then 850 million pairs of Crocs have been sold.

David Dwight (D.D.) Sturgeon is believed to be the person responsible for making outdoor Christmas lights a thing. Sturgeon founded his own electric company in 1912 and in 1914 is said to have dipped ordinary bulbs in red and green paint so that he could string the lights outside his ill son’s bedroom in an effort to cheer him up.

https://www.colorado.gov/governor/news/celebrate-colorado-governor-polis-invites-coloradans-celebrate-149th-annual-colorado-day

Friday, July 25, 2025
COLORADO – Today, Governor Polis announced the return of Celebrate Colorado, a week-long, statewide celebration of everything Colorado. August 1st marks the 149th anniversary of Colorado’s entrance into the Union as the 38th state, now celebrated as Colorado Day. In honor of Colorado Day, statewide celebrations will take place starting today, July 25, 2025 through August 3, 2025. Celebrate Colorado is a great opportunity to come together and show support for local businesses and community organizations.

Starvation in Gaza

The World Health Organization said Sunday there have been 63 malnutrition-related deaths in Gaza this month, including 24 children under the age of 5 — up from 11 deaths total the previous six months of the year.

Gaza’s Health Ministry puts the number even higher, reporting 82 deaths this month of malnutrition-related causes: 24 children and 58 adults. It said Monday that 14 deaths were reported in the past 24 hours. The ministry, which operates under the Hamas government, is headed by medical professionals and is seen by the U.N. as the most reliable source of data on casualties. U.N. agencies also often confirm numbers through other partners on the ground.

The Patient’s Friends Hospital, the main emergency center for malnourished kids in northern Gaza, says this month it saw for the first time malnutrition deaths in children who had no preexisting conditions. Some adults who died suffered from such illnesses as diabetes or had heart or kidney ailments made worse by starvation, according to Gaza medical officials.

The WHO also says acute malnutrition in northern Gaza tripled this month, reaching nearly one in five children under 5 years old, and has doubled in central and southern Gaza. The U.N. says Gaza’s only four specialized treatment centers for malnutrition are “overwhelmed.”

PBS News
Israel’s leader claims no one in Gaza is starving. Data and witnesses disagree
World Jul 28, 2025 5:17 PM EDT

SUMMERS: So tell us, if you can, what are families, people there in Gaza, able to eat now?

TANIS: Fundamentally, food is not available for the more than 2 million Palestinians there. There’s a very small supply of local vegetables, like some eggplant, zucchini, rarely maybe onion or garlic. Now, before things got so bad, people could at least eat bread. Now, flour is very expensive, and there’s not enough of it. So even if you have money, you can’t buy food.

And it’s not just food, though, because there’s a serious shortage of fuel and water for cooking and drinking. And the IPC report said today that nearly 9 out of 10 families in Gaza have to resort to extreme coping measures. I asked Beckie Ryan with the aid group CARE – she’s in Gaza right now – to tell us what she’s hearing from mothers who come to their clinic.

BECKIE RYAN: Some of the coping mechanisms they’ve had to resort to is choosing which child, you know, will be fed that day. You know, are they going to buy supplies for the baby, or are they going to buy something that the 5-year-old can eat?

TANIS: Aid workers also told me they’re seeing children rummaging through garbage daily, but not finding any food.

NPR
Famine is unfolding in Gaza, an alert from UN-backed food security experts confirms