2020
Opening shot of one of my favorite movies, “Almost Famous,” then and now. Ocean Beach, San Diego – about 12 miles from our house. Via
Bernie Sanders getting arrested at a civil rights march, 1963 Via
Escape from a burning skyscraper by floating gently down like a giant inflated badminton birdie.. Or just, y’know, do it for funsies.
Nonprofit plans to bring mobile showers to San Diego’s homeless – sandiegouniontribune.com
The lost neighborhood under New York’s Central Park
The land that is now Central Park was site of a village of 1,600 people, “many of whom were escaping the crowded and increasingly dangerous conditions of lower Manhattan.”
Ranjani Chakraborty, vox.com:
Among them was a predominantly black community that bought up affordable plots to build homes, churches, and a school. The area became known as Seneca Village. And when Irish and German immigrants moved in, it became a rare example of racial harmony in an integrated neighborhood during this period.
Everything changed on July 21, 1853. Through eminent domain, New York City took control of the land to create what would become the first major landscaped park in the US. They called it “the Central Park.”
Ranjani Chakraborty, vox.com
Nototo note taking software organizes notes on a literal map, with islands, flowers, trees, etc. Nifty, but practical?
I have several questions. Via
A dentist was convicted on 46 felony and misdemeanor counts after filming himself performing a dental extraction while riding a hoverboard – cnn.com
Oddly, this did not happen in Florida.
Isaac Asimov's roaming hands
Asimov’s Empire, Asimov’s Wall – daily.jstor.org
Alec Nevala-Lee reflects on Asimov’s twin legacies: As a prolific and talented writer who made strides for science fiction, science and reason; and as a serial groper and sexual harasser who made science fiction and the scientific community more hostile to women – even as Asimov declared himself to be a feminist and spoke out loudly in favor of women’s rights.
Thanks to @manton for responding to a help request from me on Friday night, within minutes, and without pointing out that the problem was my own fault in the first place.
Within minutes, he responded. On a Friday night.
Dave Winer: I'm re-thinking RSS now
RSS forces “blogging into the title-description-body model of journalism. But blog posts are more free-form, they don’t all fit into that structure,” Dave says.
One major reason I’m taking a break from WordPress now and trying micro.blog full time is that micro.blog is more graceful in how it handles untitled posts. For most blog posts, I dislike titles intensely. It’s a big deal for me.
Somewhere in the mid-2000s, there evolved a consensus opinion that blog posts needed to be at least a few hundred words long, with a title. Blog posts needed to be carefully composed and ideally with at least one image, according to this school of thought.
This is dead wrong. Blogging can be those things, but it should be freeform. Just write what you want, for however long you want, organized or disorganized, with or without an image. A blog post can be a single sentence, casually tossed off while waiting at the grocery cashier. Or it can be a long article, composed and revised carefully over several days.
A four-year-old answers job interview questions.
The advice about writing is spot on.
“911—what’s your emergency?” “Hi, I . . . uh . . . I work from home." [Colin Nissan/The New Yorker]
I never watch “meerkat videos.”
