2020
Clearly we should not elect people President just because they are celebrities, but if we’re going around electing people President just because they are celebrities, why couldn’t we have elected Dolly Parton?
We’ve started watching The Morning Show, which I am pleased to see continues an unbroken record of TV characters named Mitch being jerks.
Every time I read up about IndieWeb I get a headache. So confusing!
I get that regular people may never be interested in IndieWeb but the technology is downright hostile to people who don’t already understand it.
Martin Luther King: Blacks and poor people get "welfare" but whites and rich people get "subsidies"
Whenever the government provides opportunities and privileges for white people and rich people they call it “subsidized” when they do it for Negro and poor people they call it “welfare.” The fact that is the everybody in this country lives on welfare. Suburbia was built with federally subsidized credit. And highways that take our white brothers out to the suburbs were built with federally subsidized money to the tune of 90 percent. Everybody is on welfare in this country. The problem is that we all too often have socialism for the rich and rugged free enterprise capitalism for the poor. That’s the problem."
It is absolutely fine to rip your books in half
On Monday morning, an apparently innocuous tweet summoned a storm of controversy on Twitter.
“Yesterday my colleague called me a ‘book murderer’ because I cut long books in half to make them more portable,” said the novelist and editor Alex Christofi. “Does anyone else do this? Is it just me?”…
There is something deeply romantic about the idea of holding a physical book in your hands: feeling the weight of it, the smoothness of the pages, and above all else the smell. The smell of books is a particular obsession in popular culture; you can buy candles or perfumes that try to approximate it, and on TV, characters who love books are always demonstrating their bookishness by waxing poetic about the smell….
The codex — the printed paper book that we hold in our hands, which took over for the scroll as our dominant reading format in the West in the fourth century AD — is an old, old technology. We’re still working out the kinks with e-books, but at this point, the codex is out of beta testing. Most of its bugs have been fixed over the past 17 centuries. It’s been streamlined and optimized into an incredibly simple, intuitive system.
And part of what makes the codex so valuable is that it is a malleable technology. It is easy for individual users to reshape it in whatever way best suits their own individual needs.
Fetishizing books, says Grady, started in the 18 Century, by the paper industry.
I still read a lot of books. I have been a compulsive reader since I was 8 years old. I went through one or two books a week as a teen-ager. I read fewer books than I used to – today, I read a lot of articles on the web – but, still, I read a lot of books. About a dozen a year.
And I have never fetishized the books themselves. They have always been text delivery objects. I’ve dog-eared the pages, broken the spines, left them on the bathroom floor, and spilled stuff on them. Once, when I was still smoking, I accidentally set one on fire.
And now I don’t even read print books anymore. I’ve been virtually ebook only for nearly 10 years, since I got my first iPad in spring of 2010.
Also, same deal for sockpuppetknifefight.com. If you want that domain for a real project – not to squat on – it’s yours.
My blog used to be called Monkeys in my Pants. Explanation. I own the domain monkeysinmypants.com. It expires Feb. 19. You can have it at cost.
Just promise to put a real website there – no domainers.
On Reddit: “My great uncle Charley Brock. Played football at Nebraska then the Green Bay Packers. Pic taken ~1936.”
That young gentleman knew how to wear a hat.

Brooklyn, 1945. Students protesting the “no pants to school” rule via

“Are you ready to get out the vote in 2020? Because I guarantee you these fuckers are.” mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/post/1903…

“Never Before So Much Livability in 35 Feet” - Richardson’s Regent Bi-level mobile home [1950s] https://www.reddit.com/r/vintageads/comments/ero59t/never_before_so_much_livability_in_35_feet/

Batman and the Fonz Via

Silicon Valley Abandons the Culture That Made It the Envy of the World theatlantic.com
Alexis Madrigal: Silicon Valley is killing startup culture. Now, executives from Facebook and Google are facing antitrust action and argue they need to be big to compete with China.