Out west at Disneyland, Scott and Diana Anderson want badly to belong to a club that will no longer accept them as members. After years of waiting, they gained membership to Disney’s exclusive Club 33 in 2012, and made it the center of their social life. In 2017, however, their membership was revoked due to a pair of incidents. Since then, they’ve sued to be reinstated. It’s not going well.

“My wife and I are both dead set that this is an absolute wrong, and we will fight this to the death,” Scott, who owns a golf course in Gilbert, Ariz., told The Times. “There is no way we’re letting this go.”

He said the lawsuit has cost him about $400,000.

“My retirement is set back five years,” he said. “I’m paying through the nose. Every day, I’m seeing another bill, and I’m about to keel over.” He said he will appeal.

His wife said she wants to keep fighting.

“I’ll sell a kidney,” Diana said. “I don’t care.”

I’ve certainly heard of better causes.

Previously, in less sympathetic Disney lawsuits: A Very Bad Look for Disney

I invite you to read this piece about the ridiculousness of the American penny, so you can be as bothered by it as I am.

A chemical called tartrazine, which is found in food dye yellow No. 5, might one day make it possible to temporarily see through skin. That’s disgusting and neat, in equal measure.

Last year, several crew members on the USS Manchester took part in a scheme to rig up their own wifi network via a secret Starlink connection. This was a bad idea.

When I was a young boy, my parents took me into the city, to see a marching band the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. As we passed through the Lincoln Tunnel en route from New Jersey into New York City, I asked “Are we underwater right now?”. There was likely a note of fear in my voice, which led my mother to tell a comforting lie. She assuring me that we were not, in fact, underwater. I imagine I believed her.

Had we been driving in the Queens-Midtown Tunnel, and doing so this week, her lie would have been a lot less believable. Thanks to a drilling excursion in the East River, that tunnel recently sprung a leak. Whoops!

“There are many redundancies in the tunnel but, you know, when someone drills through all those layers, it’s going to cause a leak,” Sheridan said at a press conference.

Yes. Yes, I suppose so.

I previously missed Todd Heisler’s remarkable photo from the Democratic National Convention, and it is very much worth a look.

Todd Heisler/The New York Times via Redux via CNN

Shot by New York Times staff photographer Todd Heisler, the photo features Amara Ajagu, one of the vice president’s young grandnieces, staring on as Harris delivered her address to the convention. More so than most little girls, Ajagu can say that Harris could be the first president who looks like her.

From his lens to the swing state voters’ ears.

One way or another, HR is surely going to have some work to do here.

For several years, I’ve been enrolled in my power company’s “ConnectedSolutions” program. This program allows them to modulate the demand for power, by enabling them to remotely adjust customers’ thermostats to reduce load during what they call “Energy Rush Hour”s. I imagine that might sound strange or even disturbing if you’re not familiar with it, but it’s worked quite seamlessly for me. Most of the time, I don’t even notice it, and if I need to, I can always override their changes.

A recent temperature adjustment notice

I recently learned the industry term for these aggregated smart systems. They’re called “virtual power plants”, and that makes me feel even cooler about participating. I also spent several minutes trying to rewrite the previous sentence to avoid that wordplay. Having failed to come up with anything I like more, I will now acknowledge and apologize for the pun.