This blog is a dog's breakfast

Dogs start the day with a spoonful of Alpo or some other canned meat on top of a heap of patented, vitaminized kibble. In no time the meal is gobbled down and the dish licked clean and, like as not, poked noisily about the kitchen like a hockey puck, amid waggings. But I can recall another era, when every dog took a quick first look into his dish, to see what was in there. It was different each morning, but might contain a last chunk of pot roast or ham hock, plus gravy, from the previous night’s dinner table, a scraping of scrambled eggs, a slice or two of stale bread, leftover lima beans or spinach, a fresh but limp carrot, a splash of milk, and a half-bitten doughnut. It went down just as fast and probably did no harm, but what I’m getting at here is the old phrase “a dog’s breakfast,” because that’s what this book is. A mélange, a grab bag, a plate of hors d’oeuvres, a teenager’s closet, a bit of everything. A dog’s breakfast.

— Roger Angell, “This Old Man: All in Pieces.”

I have found a simple fix for a pebble in my shoe since I resumed blogging in earnest a few years ago: Finding some way to signal to people that I’m posting almost entirely the same things on my blog and all my socials. Today, I saw the easy answer on Nick Heer’s blog pxlnv.com : Instead of saying “follow me… “ say “follow this blog.” Problem solved! I have added the appropriate text to my blog header.

A new bill would grant Marco Rubio the right to declare any U.S. citizen a terrorist supporter based solely on their speech, and revoke their passport. “In March, Secretary of State Marco Rubio stripped Turkish doctoral student Rümeysa Öztürk’s of her visa based on what a court later found was nothing more than her opinion piece critical of Israel.” The proposed law would give Rubio similar power over U.S. citizens. theintercept.com/2025/09/1…

Is ‘The Pitt’ Really an ‘ER’ Spinoff? Michael Crichton’s Estate Says It Is.

Nicholas Kulish at The New York Times:

In February 2020, the actor Noah Wyle decided the moment was ripe to bring back his most successful television character, Dr. John Carter from the hospital drama “ER.”

Mr. Wyle wrote an email to John Wells, who had served as the showrunner on “ER,” to propose a “character study in the vein of LOGAN, PICARD and JOKER.” He described his idea for the show as “a 12-episode Hulu limited series, where we take another look at the guy who showed us the world the first time,” adding: “Darker and grittier. Aged. But still him.”

“Get a few band members together,” he suggested to Mr. Wells, “and write a beautiful new song in an old and familiar key.”

From the kernel of that idea emerged the hit HBO Max hospital drama “The Pitt"….

I find this question of copyright law fascinating. When does using genre tropes trend over into copyright infringement? A serialized TV show set in an emergency room is going to have to follow certain story formulas. It’s going to be fast-paced, will use a lot of medical jargon, etc.

My gut feeling as an Internet lawyer is that “The Pitt” is going to lose this one if it goes to court. No one is disputing that “The Pitt”’s creators and the Crichton estate were in talks to make an ER sequel. And Noah Wylie plays the main character, an ER attending physician.

As the article points out, it ended up being a better creative choice to not have the show be an ER sequel. When you create a sequel, it’s creatively limiting — cameos and guest spots by former stars, and so forth. Hard to maintain the fourth wall of viewer disbelief.

Also: copyright should not extend 17 years past the death of the author. “ER” should be in the public domain. I am firmly a Doctorovian on this matter; copyright is a brilliant invention and should be limited, as America’s Founders intended.

Also: We love “The Pitt.”

Also: Noah Wylie’s character on “ER” vs. “The Pitt” are internally inconsistent in a fundamental way: John Carter on ER was heir to a fortune who, by the end of the series, was running his own clinic with the support of that fortune. His character on “The Pitt” is head of the ER, but he answers to the hospital bureaucracy and is apparently living on his doctor’s salary. Different people.

Shocked by Epstein’s birthday book? That culture was everywhere before feminism [Rebecca Solnit]. Child sexual abuse was everywhere in the U.S. in the 1970s and was celebrated in pop culture in movies like “Pretty Baby,” and stories abut rock stars and teen groupies. www.theguardian.com/commentis…

It’s Time for Americans to Start Talking About “Soft Secession.” “States don’t have to actively resist. They can simply refuse to help. And without state cooperation, much of the federal government’s agenda becomes unenforceable.” cmarmitage.substack.com/p/its-tim…

Charlie Kirk’s assassination is influencers all the way down. “In the immediate aftermath of the murder, everyone had something stupid to say.” todayintabs.com

Blogging for me is an attempt to balance how posts will look on the blog in desktop vs. mobile, in the newsletter on desktop and mobile, in Mastodon and on Bluesky. It’s always a compromise, and I change my habits every few weeks depending on which platform seems most important.

Under Pressure, Rady Children’s Hospital Strikes Shaky Middle Ground on Trans Care. The San Diego hospital is reportedly still offering gender-transition care for children but has taken down its web page promoting the services and refused to answer questions from a journalist. voiceofsandiego.org

Comcast executives sent an email to employees endorsing free speech and warning that if you use that speech to criticize Charlie Kirk, you’ll be fired. The word “Orwellian” is overused but I can’t think of a better description. 404media.co

Headline of the week: 1,200 undergrads hung out to dry after jailbreak attack on laundry machines theregister.com.

My hot take: A clothes washer should not have an internet connection.

I briefly wondered why I put on a shirt when working from a home office, and then I realized I am absolutely someone who would forget to put on a shirt for an important work video call and then my next call after that would be with HR.

Five technological achievements! (That we won’t see any time soon.) crookedtimber.org/2025/09/0…

“Anytime soon” = 25 years. By 2050.

The first is sending humans to Mars and bringing them home alive.

The final two predictions are particularly painful.

“The Dems are terrible at politics. They should be running ads on TV saying that no workers in the fields means food prices soaring as we’ll have to import food because all the American crops are dead because there was no one to harvest them.” scripting.com/2025/09/0…

“Reminder: Sept 18, one week from today, is the 3rd anniversary of the 20th anniversary of the release of RSS 2.0.” I love RSS. I use it every day, and have for more than 20 years. scripting.com

I published and deleted two posts about Charlie Kirk yesterday, and then wrote one more today, and I don’t expect to publish it.

Anything I can think to say about the subject seems like something that will just add heat, rather than light, to a situation that’s already in danger of boiling over.

ActivityPub and ATPro need to fully interoperate. A Mastodon user should be able to follow a BlueSky user and vice versa.

It’s insane that this is not possible today. My iPhone on AT&T doesn’t care if you have a Samsung phone on Verizon. We can just talk to each other.

Twitter, Threads and Tumblr have financial interests in blocking interoperability. Mastodon and Bluesky do not have those interests. So what’s the hold-up?

Elizabeth Warren sends a letter to Whiskey Pete Hegseth questioning whether it’s a good idea to grant a $200 million defense contract to Elon Musk’s MechaHitler. theverge.com

Apple’s new crossbody phone strap has a surprisingly interesting history, going back to the 1940s, when fashion designers started shrinking or removing women’s pockets “because they interfered with the form-fitting silhouettes popularized by Christian Dior’s ‘New Look.'” theverge.com

I probably won’t get the strap; my phone lives in my left front pants pocket most days.

Authoritarianism Feels Surprisingly Normal—Until It Doesn’t. Life in Venezuela was deceptively mundane. Then everything collapsed. [The Atlantic]

I am 50 followers away from 1,000 followers on Mastodon. A few dozen of you fuckers better unfollow me now because I can’t stand the pressure.

San Diego protests, rallies and resources to help you push back against tyranny

The Trump administration just pulled off the industrial policy equivalent of lighting your own house on fire to prove you have working smoke alarms.

Blue Revolution on Facebook:

On September 4 federal agencies swarmed Hyundai’s gleaming Georgia battery plant construction site like it was Pablo Escobar’s hacienda. Four hundred seventy five people were arrested, most of them South Korean nationals flown in by subcontractors to help build the very factory Trump’s White House has been bragging about for two years as proof America is “open for business.” It was the largest worksite raid in DHS history, which is less a milestone than a confession that your economic strategy and your immigration crackdown are literally punching each other in the face.

Diplomatically, Seoul is furious. The South Korean foreign ministry expressed “concern and regret,” which is diplomatic code for “you clowns just humiliated our investors and we have to pretend we still like you.” Keep in mind South Korean firms have pledged one hundred fifty billion dollars in U.S. investments, twenty six billion of that from Hyundai alone. So Washington begged Seoul to anchor its electric vehicle supply chain here, gave them fat tax incentives, and then Trump sent in stormtroopers to drag their engineers out of the trailer office. Nothing says ‘welcome partner’ quite like zip ties and detention buses.

I didn’t enjoy watching Idiocracy, and I certainly am not enjoying living it.

Also shared privately by the same friend, who is on a roll: “The socialism that scares me nowadays is national socialism.”

Shared privately by a friend, in reaction to Florida banning vaccine mandates: “Florida is the meth lab of democracy.”

A family came in with their 2mo. And they were very hesitant about vaccines. “Which ones are really important?” So I went through each disease for which the child would be vaccinated today.

www.tumblr.com/mostlysig…

The WKRP: Johnny Fever Mix

A three-hour playlist of great 70s rock hits compiled from every DJ break that Dr. Johnny Fever made on “WKRP in Cincinnati,” with introductions and comments by the Doctor himself, news from Les Nessman, and a commercial read by Venus Flytrap. I’ve listened to more than an hour so far and only heard one bad song.

A friend sent me this link, which caused my wife and me to rewatch the first episode of “WKRP.” It holds up.

Jon Nelson, who created the mix, describes himself as a college and community radio producer, audio editor and artist. He’s also done mixes for other fictional DJs, including WKRP’s Venus Flytrap and Chris in the Morning from “Northern Exposure."

After listening to the Johnny Fever mix for a while, I remembered that there are Internet archives of hours or radio DJ sets, recorded off the air on tape, digitized, and uploaded to the Internet. I found this hour of Dan Ingram on WABC New York from September 1976. I was a teenager then, living in that area, and might have listened to that hour live! But listening to it for a little while this morning reminded me that I didn’t much like WABC; I was a 99X guy and, in the 80s, WBAB. Listening also reminded me that 99% of the pop music in the 1970s was bad. However, Sturgeon’s Law probably applies here.

Dan Ingram had a heck of a career, well respected for his quick wit, spanning 50 years on radio stations and a little TV, including 22 years at WABC. “One of Ingram’s unique skills was his ability to ‘talk up’ to the lyrics of a record, meaning speaking over the musical introduction and finishing exactly at the point when the lyrics started.”

I have never liked the word “mouthfeel.” Ironically, I don’t like the way it feels in my mouth when I say it. And when I hear it or read it, I think of how it feels in my mouth.

If only there were a shorter, punchier way of saying “how something feels in your mouth.”

Stop saying “wrap your head around.” It’s a cliche, and it makes me think of catastrophic motorcycle accidents.

I was able to pill the dog this morning using “the force open her mouth, pop it in the back of her throat” method with minimal trauma to either of us. And I finished the operation with the same number of fingers I started out with.

“The housing crisis isn’t just a result of greedy landlords and investors. It’s an inevitable result of social policies that encourage people to treat their houses as in investment. Because once a homeowner internalizes the idea that their financial future depends on housing prices going up, they start favoring policies (such as NIMBYism) that make housing prices go up. “ www.tumblr.com/rudywiser…

If America continues on the path it is on now, today’s babies will grow up to dream of a life in India or China, because they will have no future here worth living.

Normalize not having TVs on in waiting rooms and other public places. If people want something to watch, they have phones.

The gulf between employers and the employed is constantly widening, and classes are rapidly forming, one comprising the very rich and powerful, while in another are found the toiling poor…. Corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people’s masters.

— Grover Cleveland, as quoted by Heather Cox Richardson in a brief history of the first Labor Day.

Spoiler: Labor Day was founded as a sop to labor after business interests defeated the labor movement.

I enjoyed chick lit and my dick didn't fall off

“Elizabeth Gilbert has a new memoir out.” The mere sentence radiates gentle inspiration–watercolors, billowy pants with elephants printed on them, sparkly truthtelling in a big straw hat.

— Elizabeth Gilbert’s Latest Epiphanies, by Jia Tolentino

I dismissed Gilbert as trivial until I heard her interviewed on Debbie Millman’s Design Matters podcast a few years ago and was impressed. Gilbert was promoting her novel, “City of Girls,” and I read that and loved it.

Debbie has exposed me to a couple of books I would normally have dismissed as women’s literature, written by women whom I previously dismissed as frivolous, and I have been surprised to find I loved the interviews and the books and that the authors were formidable. The other one was Susanna Hoffs, lead singer of the 80s group the Bangles and author of the novel “This Bird Has Flown."

Debbie and I were friends when we were teenagers, and I still think of her as a friend, even though we haven’t spoken in more than 35 years. I’ve followed her career from afar with great interest, happiness and respect.

Enshittification reaches beyond the grave

“Deadbots,” or digital representations of the deceased, are getting more persuasive, and companies are trying to figure out how to make money off them.

They’re giving interviews advocating for tougher gun laws, such as when the family of Joaquin Oliver, a victim of the 2018 Parkland school shooting in Florida, created a beanie-wearing AI avatar of him and had it speak with journalist Jim Acosta in July. “This is just another advocacy tool to create that urgency of making things change,” Manuel Oliver, Joaquin’s father, told NPR.

And in May, a bearded AI avatar of Chris Pelkey, the deceased victim of a road rage incident in Arizona, gave a video impact statement at the sentencing of the man who fatally shot Pelkey. Pelkey’s family created the deadbot. “I feel that that was genuine,” said Judge Todd Lang after hearing the AI generated impact statement. He then handed down the maximum sentence.

Eventually, maybe you’ll be having a nice chat with your dead grandma, and she’ll try to convince you to buy crypto.

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson signed an executive order requiring law enforcement, including feds, to wear masks and ID and activate body cameras when operating in the city. The order is almost certainly symbolic because Johnson lacks federal jurisdiction.

Asked about how effective his order is going to be given that federal agents don’t take orders from him, Johnson shot back: “Yeah, and I don’t take orders from the federal government. Thank you all very much.”

“The only mask ban I support."

I’ve been feeling nostalgic recently for Long Island, where I grew up. This Reddit thread is gratifying: What things represent Long Island?. Top comment: “A large paper bag filled with an assortment of fresh bagels” Followed by: “A hot salt bagel that you eat in the car on the way home because it’s a sin not to eat a hot bagel.”

The capitalism of fools: Trump’s mirror-world New Deal.

Cory Doctorow: Trump’s tariffs, demands of government stakes in companies and selective antitrust enforcement superficially echo left‑leaning industrial policy. But Trump’s policies aren’t thought out; they’re just performative chaos. Trump is part of a right-wing mirror world of imagined conspiracies that superficially resemble real problems. One danger is that when Trump is gone, America will desperately need robust state action, but Trump’s bad example will convince America that all state action is reckless.

The problem isn’t that tariffs are always bad, nor is it that demanding state ownership stakes in structurally important companies that depend on public funds is bad policy. The problem is that Trump’s version of these policies sucks, because everything Trump touches dies, and because he governs solely on vibes, half-remembered wisdom imparted by the last person who spoke to him, and the dying phantoms of old memories as they vanish beneath a thick bark of amyloid plaque.

Heather Cox Richardson shares a brief history of the Chicano movement of the 1960s. She uses the 1970 police killing of journalist Rubén Salazar as a launch point.

… in the 1960s, young Mexican Americans, most of whom had been born in the U.S., began to reimagine their community and its position in the United States. Calling themselves “Chicanos,” they called for a new identity based in the understanding that they were not outsiders at all, but rather natives of the northern region of old Mexico, a region that did not become part of the United States until long after the Chicano people–Indigenous Americans mixed with the descendents of Spanish invaders–had settled there.

Chicanos noted that they had not moved into the United States, but rather the United States border had moved over them. The U.S. had taken over the land on which they lived in 1848 after the U.S.-Mexico War. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which had established the new boundary between the two countries far to the south of where it had been before, was supposed to guarantee the land titles of those Mexican landowners over whom the border had moved. But U.S. courts had disregarded the terms of the treaty and refused to recognize the rights of Mexicans, most of whom lost their land.

I knew that the US took the land I live on from Mexico in 1848. We learned about that in public school in New York, where I grew up. But until now I did not make the connection that many of my Latino neighbors have ancestry in America far longer than my own.