2020
How big tech distorts discourse: It’s the monopoly, stupid. Making the case for job guarantees. Activists dox Chicago cops in realtime. 759 Trump atrocities, documented. Congress introduces bold, sweeping Accessible, Affordable Internet for All Act. It’s great for America, and telcos will hate it. Cory Doctorow’s Pluralistic
More photos from our African safaris – one year ago
These were taken June 18, 2019, in Namibia.
Our cabin at Kipwe Lodge in Namibia.
View from the cabin.
View from the cabin toilet.
The cabin bathroom.
The cabin sitting room.
Another view of the cabin sitting room.
The cabin bedroom.
Driving across the Namibian desert.
Typical of the planes we used when flying between lodges in Botswana and Namibia.
Plaque inside the passenger hut at a Namibian airfield.
A passenger hut at a Namibian airfield. More posh than most we encountered in Botswana and Namibi.
🌍📷📓
Africa journal – one year ago – spectacular leopard encounter
June 17, 2019 [Note from 2020: Overlap here with yesterday’s entry. I’m repeating myself.] We arrived at Windhoek in Namibia two days ago, after a commercial flight of less than two hours, and were greeted outside customs by Antone, who put us in an enclosed VW van with air conditioning and car seats. He drove us through Windhoek, a relatively new city 29 years old [Note from 2020: That’s what Antone said. Wikipedia says it’s about a century older], the capital of Namibia and apparently a commercial center as well. Antone told us that Windhoek grew up as a crossroads between other major Namibian cities and for its proximity to mines. Because Namibia is surrounded by mountains, the airport is 38 km out of town. We drove out of town, stopping at a Shell service center that seemed a little sketchy, though it was clean and well stocked and I suspect that if I were to ever find myself living and working in Windhoek, that service center would be a place I’d stop for gas and coffee and a snack and never think twice about it. [Note from 2020: It looked like an ordinary American or British highway rest stop. These moments of sheer normality were dissonant on our trip. Almost everything was so alien.]
It was a 3.5 hour drive to our camp, which was frankly too much.
The Okonjima Bush Camp turns out to be inside the Okonjima Game Reserve, which is owned by the Africat big cat rehab center. We stayed in a spacious private round lodge, with a simulated hut motif and what appeared to be stone walls. The lodge was separated in half by a partial wall, with the bathroom facility on the opposite side of the beds. The shower was open.
Opposite the beds, a picture window with two comfortable chairs overlooked a desert plain, beautifully silver lit by moonlight at night.
A separate round building with a thatch roof was a sitting room, with chaise lounges and an open wall overlooking the plain. The wall had a two-foot ledge separating the room from the outside plain. The sitting room is equipped with a jar of birdseed and a small flock of guinea hens comes hopping over for treats when we come into the room, like the dog and cats at home gathering for feeding.
(Click the photos for a bigger view)
We were feted by the staff for Julie’s 70th birthday and our 25th anniversary. The staff came out and sang in African harmonies and brought champagne and fruit and chocolate. We already had sparkling wine in the car from the travel company, so that’s a lot of bubbly. And we have had similar birthday celebrations from other places we’ve stayed. We met a few nice couples at the lodge, and had dinner with one, Becky and Anthony from Leceistershire, England, who have been on many safaris previously, including to Namibia. We had dinner with them and split the wine.
We had spectacular success on our game drives. On our first morning, yesterday, we went to the big cat rehabilitation center, and learned about the work they do there. We saw a few cheetahs in a fenced in reserve.
In the evening we went out in search of leopards. Danny, our guide, had a handheld radio antenna like a capital “I” with broad top and bottom, attached to a device that looked like a walkie talkie. That was used to detect the cats’ radio collars. We located a big, 12-year-old male sleeping on the side of a large riverbed. We watched a while to see if he would get up but he did not. Still, the experience was interesting and we saw a few other animals and birds and stuff so we were satisfied.
On the way to our sundowner drinks Danny caught another signal and so we abandoned sundowners and went in search of more leopards. And we scored big.
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First we found a half-grown leopard cub gnawing on part of a baboon carcass on the side of the river. Then its mother came from across the river, with another cub about the same age. A brown hyena stalked the smell of the carrion, and came slowly down the riverbed, but thought better of the project when it saw three leopards, and retreated with its fur all bristly to look more threatening. Somewhere along the way, the first leopard cub retreated to the top of a dead tree, taking the baboon carcass with it, and it gnawed on the carcass from up there,sometimes letting it dangle, playing with its food.
This whole process played out over the course of an hour or so, and was very exciting.
This morning we went out and used the same radio mechanism to locate several white rhinos. We tracked them quietly on foot for the last part of the expedition.
Then at 1:15 or so our guide drove us to the local airstrip – why didn’t we fly in there in the first place, rather than drive? Compared with some of the airstrips we saw in Botswana, this was elaborate, with a hangar and a small waiting area, a two-room rectangular structure with glass sliding doors, the interior of which looked like it had been transported from an office building in a big city. It was decorated with flying memorabilia.
Our plane was an eight-passenger prop driven Kodiak, and we got to our next destination in 35 minutes.
Getting out of the plane was quite a contrast. Okonjima was a scrub desert, with lots of thorn bushes and other dark green foliage, much like home in San Diego. Temperatures were about 40 degrees F in the morning – I needed my puffy jacket and hat and midweight pants and wished I had gloves too – to barely 70 in the hottest part of the day.
Our current location, Twyfelfontein, is hardcore desert, a flat plain of khaki colored sand punctuated by hardy shrubs each a few dozen yards from the other, and big piles of rocks dozens of feet high, with mountains off of the distance in every direction like a backdrop. The sun was bright and the temperature topped 90, maybe even topped 100. And me still in my heavy fleece, which I ditched quickly.
We took one of the ubiquitous khaki colored trucks, with comfortable seats mounted in the bed, to Camp Kipwe, our home for the next two nights. The camp comprises the usual cabins with a hut motif, built into stacks of boulders on the side of a hill. I have sworn off of my usual media pop culture references for the duration of this trip, but if I had not done that I would say this place reminds me of the Flintstones, whereas Okonjima reminded me of Gilligan’s Island. It’s beautiful and luxurious here, and we have the suite, at the highest point in camp, with a bedroom and living room, and open walls overlooking the spectular desert vistas. Even the bathroom has specatulcuar views of the desert; from the toilet I can see a beautiful plain.
As ever, the food is delicous, though all we’ve had to eat so far is a couple of grilled ham and cheese sandwiches done up for our late arrival, along with small green side salads.
On a housekeeping note: Apparently we may not have laundry this stop. And us sweating in the heat. I don’t think anyone will be offended. Also, I decided for the first time to convert my convertible pants, which I have resisted doing until now because it seemed like getting the legs back on might be a hassle. Why have convertible pants if you don’t convert them?
Also, no Internet here whatsoever for two days. We’ve had good internet in Okonjma; I got to upload photos to the cloud and update Flickr. OK internet in Johannesburg, as you’d expect at an airport and airport hotel. Bad and unusable internet in Botswana. but now two days without Internet whatsoever.
Sundowner in a few minutes, then dinner. Tomorrow we’re up at 5 am for a game drive and visit to some interesting archeological formations and ancient bushman wall decorations. As with the other places we’ve stayed, other than Chobe, we have a nice long break in the early afternoon to regroup. Then we’re off to our next location the day after tomorrow.
I can feel we are on the downhill side of our African holiday.
🌍📓
I saw these chairs on a New York City street a few years ago. The gentlemen who occupied the chairs were very nice. 📷
African safari journal – one year ago – a travel day
June 15, 2019 – Yesterday was a travel day. We had an 11:25 am charter flight from the LLT airstrip [Note from 2020: That’s the Leroo La Tau safari camp, where we stayed for a few days], and could have jammed in a short game drive, packing and breakfast before then, but it would have been too stressful. Instead we decided to sleep in, which turned out to be 6:30 am for Julie and 6:55 am for me. We were done sleeping. Noteworthy because at home we can sleep hours later if we don’t have to get up. We packed, had breakfast and killed about two hours reading and such before we left for the airstrip at 10:40 am.
The resort staff, who adore Julie, packed us bag lunches, which was lovely but more to carry, so we had mixed feelings about that.
A guide named Bones, who provided star lessons two evenings earlier, was our driver and with many heartfelt farewells to the staff, we set off for the airstrip. After three days together it felt as if we were leaving friends, as we had before at Camp Xakanaxa.
We drove along unpaved roads. The Toyota moved slowly and fishtailed on fine white sand like beach sand that buried the road. A few times Bones stopped to shift gears to get us out of a particularly deep sand drift. A couple of times he hopped out of the car to inspect the wheels and undercarriage. We slowed down once to avoid goats in the road, and another time to avoid cows. We arrived at the LLT airstrip, with its only building a structure that looked like a Little League dugout, along with fire protection equipment. The airstrip was just a long narrow rectangle of flat packed dirt a thousand or so feet long. We had been told earlier that sometimes flights were delayed because animals wandered out on the runway, and sometimes elephants dragged brush on the runway, which had to be cleared for takeoff and landing. But none of those things were problems yesterday; our plane was waiting for us, a four-seat prop job with the pilot standing beside it. The pilot was named Myello; he had joined us for breakfast earlier. We climbed in the plane and he warned us that the plane was light and the skies were windy, so we might be blown around a bit. That concerned me; I don’t do well with vertigo; my brain shuts down in panic mode. Myello taxied us to the far end of the runway. He consulted a computer printout folded in his hand. We were sitting immediately behind him in the snug little plane, closer than the backseat passengers to the driver of a car. He held his hand behind him to show me a line of text demarcated with his thumb; I saw Julie’s surname, Brown, with letters and numbers in a row. I looked at it blankly. He gave me a querying look. We couldn’t speak because the engine noise was too loud, and he was wearing a headset. The line of text was clearly an important question, but I had no idea what it was. I smiled and nodded and gave him the thumbs up. He appeared satisfied. He reached the end of the runway, turned the plane around, paused and gunned the engine. The plane lunged forward and we lunged into the air. [Note from 2020: I wonder if bush pilots do that pause-and-then-floor-the-accelerator for dramatic effect?]
The warning about rough skies proved overstated. Our half hour flight was relatively smooth and comfortable. I looked out the window and photographed the desert. The desert gave way to our destination, the city of Moun, which is more of a town of a few tens of thousands of people. I could see houses below us like ordinary suburban subdivisions, but with apparently unpaved roads.
(Click the photos for a bigger view)
Moun has a proper, but very small, airport, with a tower and many commercial planes lined up and a terminal where we were met by a porter and representative of our travel company, who together helped us get our bags checked and get us through customs. The porter disappeared before I could tip him. I didn’t tip the travel company representative, although now I think maybe I should have. [Note from 2020: Tipping was a mystery in Africa. I just gave money to people at random.] The terminal has a bare-bones but comfortable cafe, where we had $5 water bottles, attempted to get on the WiFi, and waited for our flight at a gate that looked more like a bus terminal than an airport, crowded with what seemed to be backpackers, safari travelers like us in khaki and olive green, businesspeople – a couple of them tapping on laptops – and just regular people taking a flight.
Our flight to Johannesburg was a regular commercial flight, same as any intercity hop in the US. Again, our travel agent arranged to have a porter meet us at the gate, who escorted us and helped us with our bags through customs and deposited us at the CityLodge hotel, located inside the airport, where we spent our first night in Africa 11 days ago. By now we felt like Africa veterans, light years beyond the greenhorns we’d been when we arrived. We’d faced down lions and hippos and elephants and the aggressive porters who hang around the airline check-in desks (completely different than the lovely porters who’d met us at the gate when we landed – we’d have another encounter with the check-in variety of predator the next day).
I had been looking forward to returning to the airport hotel, to enjoy a restaurant meal, sleep in a climate controlled room, and use reliable WiFi. But the room was too warm, the food was mediocre at best and the service was slow, and once I’d spent 15 minutes on the Internet I was done with that, though I did leave my iPhone and iPad connected to back up photos to iCloud and Flickr.
We discovered we were able to check luggage at CityLodge until we returned for our final night in Africa before going home in 10 days. For some reason the desk clerk on our first night 10 days ago told us we couldn’t do that. Huh? Julie insisted we buy a cheap duffle at the airport shops for that purpose, and we did. I filled it in part with unnecessary electronics, including a power brick, several electrical adapters that are lightweight but relatively bulky, and a noise canceling headset, also lightweight but bulky and unnecessary until my flight home. Julie checked clothes and a travel pillow and backrest for the flight home. I estimate we cut our travel weight by about 25% and I am delighted by that.
And now we’re on a commercial flight to Windhoek in Namibia, eager to get back to the bush and resume our holiday.
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Anton, our driver, takes us through Windhoek. He says it’s a city of about a half-million people, only 29 years old, built because it’s a crossroads between other Namibia cities. It’s the nation’s capital, and also seems to be an industrial town. Seems relatively quiet for midday. [Note from 2020: Wikipedia says Windhoek was founded in 1840, abandoned, and then founded again in 1890. I remember it felt more like a large town than a city of a half-million.]
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We were taken on a long, 3.5-hour drive from Windhoek to the Afrikats lodge, which was our next destination. The highway is rural between towns, mostly devoid of human construction, flat and well paved and maintained, two lanes in each direction narrowing to one each way. In towns we see construction, a sign of affluence, alongside poverty, people living in shanty villages. We see warthogs and baboons on the side of the road. Once or twice we pass big clusters of shacks and some tents forming bazaars of traditional crafts.
We drive through mountains. In other places the desert is flat enough to see to the horizon.
It is a long drive, much of which we sit in silence.
[Note from 2020: It was a looooooong drive, in an air-conditioned modern minivan, more comfortable than but not as interesting as the Toyota safari vehicles. Later, when we returned to the US, we asked our travel agent WTF she booked us for a drive rather than a short flight – Afrikats has an airstrip a few minutes away. She said the flight would have cost literally thousands of dollars US. So, yeah, the drive was a good idea.
[Also: I was puzzled during the drive by the juxtaposition of prosperity and poverty – new city construction immediately adjacent to squatter camps. A few days later, one of our guides told us the squatter camps were populated with people who were coming to work on the construction.]
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We stopped at a Shell rest area to stretch our legs and wash up. All variety of people there, very busy. We saw several stout middle aged women wearing traditional clothing, flowing print dresses with two-part hats representing animal horns. A skinny man approached Julie to try to sell wooden beads bigger than golf balls. She has difficulty brushing him off.
[Note from 2020: The dresses are traditional women’s clothes for the Herero, a Bantu ethnic tribe of about 250,000 people. The dress is based on colonial German women’s dresses. Photos and more information on Wikipedia: <en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Here…>]
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"City of Girls," by Elizabeth Gilbert, was very enjoyable and a nice change of pace from my usual reading 📚
Elizabeth Gilbert is of course the author of “Eat Pray Love” and a writer who until recently I never gave any thought to because I pigeonholed her as a women’s novelist. But I heard her interviewed on two of my podcasts recently, and she seemed wise and smart and likable. And the novel is set in 1940 New York, which is a time and place that fascinates me – it’s the time and place where my parents and aunts and uncles and many of my childhood friends' parents grew up (and then they moved out to Long Island and had us).
And I’ve been trying to read more variety lately, particularly books by women and PoC. So I said sure, why not.
And I’m glad I did.
“City of Girls” is the story of Vivian Morris, a privileged 19-year-old who has been kicked out of Vassar because she is a bad girl. Her parents are at a loss what to do with her, so they ship her off to New York to live with her Aunt Peg, the black sheep of the family, who runs a seedy theater. Vivian, who is beautiful and a brilliant seamstress, gets to work as the theater’s costumer, and immerses herself in the world of theater and nightclubs.
She has a lot of sex. A lot. Gilbert said in her interviews that she wanted this book to be about how someone could be a good person without being a good girl. Vivian isn’t always a good person – she does one thing in particular which is awful – but she tries to be her best, which is all any of us can do, right?
The novel is written in the first person, by 90-year-old Vivian in 2010, writing to a younger woman who has asked Vivian what Vivian’s relationship was to the younger woman’s father. “City of Girls” is Vivian’s answer. She takes a while getting there, and I loved going on the trip with her.
The characters are great, the plot twists are surprising, defying what we have learned to expect from romance (and from action-adventure with romantic B-plots, which is something I read a lot of) and the characters are extremely well-drawn and lovable (except for when we are supposed to dislike them, which we do). The writing style is breezy and witty, and if Vivian sometimes uses language more appropriate to a Millennial or Gen X than to somebody of her generation, well, so what?
Particularly appealing to me, Gilbert fleshes out the worlds of midcentury New York in great and fascinating detail.
The title is “City of Girls” and this is a novel about women; men are peripheral characters, though a couple of them are fascinating.
This novel kept me up late reading one night, which is something that rarely happens to me anymore and I love it when it does.
I expect I will read more Gilbert. But I’ll save Eat Pray Love for last. It still doesn’t seem like my kind of book.
The pandemic comes close to home
This morning I talked with a friend who lost his sister to covid Friday. I learned about that on a professional mailing list my friend and I share; another member of the list also said he’d lost a family member to covid.
I then talked with a family member of someone who is close to me, and is very sick and may well pass, well, any minute now. This person had covid a couple of months ago, and we thought they had recovered from it, but now it appears possibly not.
And last night I saw a tweet from someone who lost their mother to covid a few days ago, and is expecting to lose their father to covid any day now.
Please do not leave any condolence replies here. We do not deserve them; we are among the fortunate and blessed.
But please do wash your hands regularly and thoroughly, practice social distancing when you can and wear a mask where social distancing is impractical.
Alaska Airlifts ‘Into the Wild’ Bus Out of the Wild
Alaska has airlifted the “Into the Wild” bus out of the Alaska backcountry. Too many tourists made the trek to the location and had to be rescued.
The abandoned Fairbanks city bus that Christopher McCandless lived and died in has been removed from the Alaska backcountry. Photos that went viral on Facebook on Thursday show the bus being hauled out by a Chinook helicopter and then loaded onto a long flatbed trailer for transport to an unknown location.
Trump wants to dismantle the OTF: Trump wants to dismantle the US Open Technology Fund, a nonprofit that funds development of open source communications tools used to counter oppression throughout the world.
Cory Doctorow:
The Trump admin wants to nuke the OTF and give all its money to a bunch of grifty, closed-source privacy and firewall-circumvention tools. These tools are NOT auditable, and the companied that make them stand to make BANK from the move.
I have no idea whether these companies are CIA fronts, but I tell you what, if i was a Uyghur in Xinjiang or a dissident in Tehran, I would NOT trust my life to these tools. No goddamned way.
Even if these companies aren’t fronts for spooks, they could be in the future. Because if the companies that made these tools – companies that had been dealt a huge favor by the US government – were suborned for surveillance later, it would be very hard to catch them.
OTF’s ironclad rule of funding open, free code isn’t just a way to allay suspicions about the tools' true purpose – it’s also a preventative against corruption, because the projects OTF funds can’t insert spy code without being caught right away….
This money built the tools that Black Lives Matter protesters use, to say nothing of the Hong Kong protests and many other movements around the world.
It will be a genuine, deep, widespread tragedy if this move isn’t stopped.
Algonauts: Experimental artist Shardcore uses machine learning to generate “Algonauts” – uncanny, fake Peanuts panels – Cory Doctorow
That’s the art of the deal, people! Trump paid $7.3 million for covid “test tubes” that turned out to be contaminated miniature soda bottles – Cory Doctorow
Avia, c’est mort: French courts struck down a law that would have required the Internet Archive to remove 15 million documents, including a repository of Grateful Dead music, for violating anti-terrorism rules – Cory Doctorow.
Keep on truckin', you French courts you.
Austerity in disrepute – Cory Doctorow: 75% of Americans favor maintaining or expanding extended unemployment benefits from pandemic stimulus bills. The extensions are popular even among Republican voters.
But GOP politicians intend to terminate the payments, and they’ve been clear about why: poor people won’t risk death or permanent disability in order to serve cocktails or give manicures unless the alternative is homelessness and starvation.
Cory Doctorow: Microsoft criticizes Apple’s monopolism – and Microsoft oughta know about monopolies!
But companies that try to sic antitrust regulators against competitors need to watch out, because that kind of thing bites back.
Thousands of tampons! The Hugo Girls discuss Mary Robinette Kowal’s Hugo award winning novel, “The Calculating Stars,” which is, they say, basically Mrs. Maisel in space. They also discuss women’s body hair. And also feminism and sexism and stuff.
Today, Explained: A good day for DREAMers: The Supreme Court’s decision upholding DACA was a wonderful surprise, but Trump can strike down DACA again in literally a few hours. The Supreme Court didn’t rule on the specifics of DACA; it just said Trump didn’t file the right paperwork. Transcript
Still, it’s a good day for for DREAMers, who can breathe a little easier. And also a good day for all Americans with empathy for their fellow human beings. And now we all get to enjoy a little more the contributions that DREAMers make to society.
Ice skating in a suit. 1930s via