Antisemites have a long and paradoxical history of supporting Zionism.

White Christian nationalists in the US and Europe see Israel as a model ethnic state, and see Jews at home as pollutants.

Peter Beinart at Jewish Currents: Antisemitic Zionists Aren’t a Contradiction in Terms

“You do it once when you’re drunk, then it becomes part of your life." Meet the Secret Society of People Who Piss in the Sink. By Miles Klee at Rolling Stone.

They have a thriving subreddit because of course they do.

Minnie at bedtime. She wants details about our planetary defenses.

I enjoyed the first episode of “Lucky Hank,” a dark comedy starring Bob Odenkirk as the chair of the English Department of a mediocre and minuscule northeastern college. He is going through a midlife crisis. It’s based on a novel I thoroughly enjoyed by one of my favorite writers, “Straight Man,” by Richard Russo.

Julie hated the episode. We are negotiating whether she is required by our marriage bylaws to give the show one episode more or two before she nopes out.

We saw a bobcat on the paved trail while I was out walking the dog at Lake Murray this afternoon.

It was about 50 feet away and moving perpendicular across the trail at a fast trot, so I only saw it for a second or two. It wanted very little to do with us. The feeling was mutual.

It was at the end of our walk. Minnie was very alert until we got to the car a few minutes later. So was I.

“Toilet meal” is the Japanese practice of eating meals in “toilet rooms”—public bathrooms—to get a little valuable alone time, or because they don’t have anybody to eat with and they don’t want to be seen eating alone. wikipedia.org

“The Mariko Aoki phenomenon (青木まりこ現象, Aoki Mariko genshō) is a Japanese expression referring to a sudden urge to defecate that is felt upon entering bookstores.” wikipedia.org

If I was a Mandalorian, I would wait until the other Mandalorians were eating, and then I would say “this is the way” to them, so they would have to say “this is the way” back with a mouth full of food.

If I was a Mandalorian, I would wait until the other Mandalorians had their helmets off, and then fill their helmets with cottage cheese.

I would be an unpopular Mandalorian.

Now, guys with zero game can try their luck with CupidBots. For $15 a month, an AI algorithm will pick out women for them on their dating app of choice, based on their previous swipes…. The AI then masquerades as the man behind the dating profile, and continues to talk and flirt with its unsuspecting target, until the woman agrees to a date or to share their number. At that point, the app sends a notification to the user telling them about the date it just secured for them. And no, at no point does the bot disclose its nonhuman nature.

futurism.com

Cal Newport: If You’re Busy, You’re Doing Something Wrong: The Surprisingly Relaxed Lives of Elite Achievers

Margaret Atwood: What I Read

I like to feel that I can tell an apple from a pear, and I don’t expect from the pear what I might expect from the apple. In other words, if I’m reading Conan the Conqueror I’m not demanding that it be Middlemarch.

How to help friends and employees living with long Covid cnn.com

We had our bathrooms remodeled in 2017, and I have finally figured out how to work the light switches in my bathroom.

I was a gifted child.

Why Did Men Stop Wearing Hats? gentlemansgazette.com

I saw these two tiny girls while walking Minnie yesterday. We literally died from the cute.

The turmoil at Sarasota Memorial, one of Florida’s largest public hospitals, began last year after three candidates running on a platform of “health freedom” won seats on the nine-member board that oversees the hospital. Board meetings, once sleepy, started drawing hundreds of angry people who, like the new members, denounced the hospital’s treatment protocols for Covid-19.

An internal review last month found that Sarasota Memorial did far better than some of its competitors in saving Covid patients’ lives. But that did little to quell detractors, whose campaign against the hospital has not relented. By then, the hospital had become the latest public institution under siege by an increasingly large and vocal right-wing contingent in one of Florida’s most affluent counties, where a backlash to pandemic policies has started reshaping local government.

— Patricia Mazzei, nytimes.com

Who Is Still Inside the Metaverse? Searching for friends in Mark Zuckerberg’s deserted fantasyland.

In September, my family and I move from our home in Dublin to a fancy East Coast college town, where I’ll be teaching for the semester. I grew up in Dublin, which means I have a wide circle of friends to draw on whenever I’m let out of the house. The street where I live is friendly: If I want to borrow a spatula or I need someone to look after my cat, I have only to ask.

Life is different for us in the U.S. We have, for the first time, a basement. But we have no friends. It seems as if none of the permanent faculty can afford to live in the suburb where the university has placed us. We technically have neighbors, but we never see them; they manifest only in the form of their gardeners, who are at work every day with their leaf blowers.

It’s in this strange scenario — alone on a continent, cut off from everyone I know — that I decide to try the metaverse for the first time. A whole galaxy of pals brought right to your living room? I think. Why not?

Funny, insightful, and moving.

By Paul Murray. nymag.com

Margaret Atwood: “The bathroom is a place where you can go in and pretend to be doing one thing while actually you’re reading. Nobody can interrupt you. Compendiums of this and that are very useful for bathroom reading: small reading packages within a larger book. You wouldn’t want to read War and Peace in there. You’d never come out. They’d probably call the police and get the door broken down.” wikipedia.org

“Horny bro conservatism:” Republicans are trying to win over a new generation of sexually libertine young men. “What if some conservatives aren’t longing for Ronald Reagan’s heyday but for the time when women were hotter, you could put up a topless calendar in your cubicle at the office without fear of reprisal from some mean H.R. lady, and nobody told you what to do?”

— Jane Coaston: The Debate Hugh Hefner Won and William Buckley Lost nytimes.com

Jamelle Bouie: “The people who blame wokeness for the collapse of a bank do not want you to understand or even think about the political economy of banking in the United States. They want to deflect your attention from the real questions toward a manufactured cultural conflict. And the reason they want to do this is to obscure the extent to which they and their allies are complicit in — or responsible for — creating an environment in which banks collapse for lack of appropriate regulation.” nytimes.com

Democrats contribute to this environment as well. They rush to make SVB’s depositors whole, but when the poor and middle class are struggling, Democrats sigh and say they wish they could do more.

“The only safe AI is open source. Closed AIs are dangerous.” johnrobb.substack.com

A court will decide whether antifa is a political movement or criminal conspiracy. usatoday.com

I’m skeptical whether antifa even exists. It’s a right-wing fantasy, like wokism and LGBTQ groomers.

MSNBC viewers seem mostly interested in which books his supporters want removed from elementary school libraries, how he’s treating The Walt Disney Company, and which Miami venues might lose their liquor licenses from having drag performances in spaces open to children. And certainly, DeSantis has put a lot of energy into stirring up those and other culture wars. But he’s also raised teacher pay, cut tolls on highways, and spent money on Everglades restoration. He has demonstrated a broad awareness that voters care about the basic operations of government and how those affect their daily lives, and he’s focused on getting them to feel satisfied with the way he’s overseeing the actual government.

— Is Ron DeSantis Savvy Or Not? www.joshbarro.com

Trump Expects to Be Arrested Next Week. He’s calling on his supporters to protest. Because that worked well for everybody last time.

Amusing myself with a phone fraudster earlier today.

Every time I play with FeedLand I come away thinking it’s a basic web-based RSS reader, of which there are already quite a few. Other than all of your subscriptions being public, how is Feedland different from Feedly, Feedbin, Inoreader, NewsBlur, etc.?

It does far less than those other guys, which means it’s simpler. And sometimes simplicity is itself a feature. Is that the appeal?

45 minutes to try to create a COBRA account and it turned out the problem was my password needed a special character.

Isn’t that special?

That, and reviewing COBRA paperwork has been my morning so far.

Title for a proposed spinoff series starring Captain Shaw and the Titan: “Star Trek: Just a Dipshit From Chicago.”

What is “wuthering”? As in, “Wuthering Heights”? What are the heights doing?

This season of Picard is some of the most enjoyable Star Trek ever.

We need a spinoff series featuring Captain Shaw and the Titan. I love him. His motto: “To boldly go where no one has gone before … kvetching the whole time.”

Todd Stashwick, who plays Shaw, is a terrific character actor; I’ve had my eye on him since he played the villain on a series called “The Riches,” that aired briefly 2007-8, starring Eddie Izzard and Minnie Driver. (They played Americans and the series was set in the US, oddly.)

Michelle Forbes is another great character actor. More of Commander Ro Laren, please.

I love the chemistry between Raffi and Worf.

Michael Dorn has appeared on more Trek episodes than any other actor. More than William Shatner, more than Patrick Stewart, more than anyone. Worf is the Detective Munch of the 24th Century.

This morning I learned what the name is for the genre of music that the cantina band plays in “Star Wars,” and now I want to go back to bed and start the day over.

My process for getting ready to walk in the rain, and getting myself and the dog dry when we get back, has become so elaborate that I think I can now refer to it as a “workflow,” and describe all my rain gear as a “tech stack.”

I saw a big fat squirrel sitting on the steel fence just outside my office window, licking rainwater off the top of the railing. It stayed there a good long time.

I keep a Nikon with a moderately long lens on my desk next to me for just such wildlife encounters as these. Critters like our backyard. But I had put stuff in front of the camera since the last time I used it, and couldn’t get the camera free before the squirrel scampered off.

Lately when I see something striking, it’s a struggle for me: Take the photo? Or just be in the moment and appreciate the thing I’m looking at?

That’s a false distinction though. Whatever you do, you’re in the moment. Knowing that can make the choice more clear. What do you want to be doing? Looking at the thing? Maybe the thing is an activity you could be participating in–do you want to do that? Or do you want to take the photo?

Whoah, I didn’t realize this was going to get philosophical. Bringing it back to the main point: I saw a squirrel up close.

I’ve heard great things about “Children of Time,” by Adrian Tchaikovsky, and I’ve started reading it, but I’m finding it tough to get into.

The book is science fiction, set on a planet that was terraformed by ancient humans and is now dominated by intelligent spiders.

So far, the book focuses on a bunch of uninspiring humans doing uninteresting things.

Where are the spiders, Adrian? I’m here for the spiders!

The Silicon Valley Bank bailout is yet another example of the old adage, attributed to Martin Luther King, that we have socialism for the rich and rugged individualism for everyone else.

If you’re rich and you’re at risk of going broke, the US government comes running with its checkbook wide open.

If you’re struggling with medical debt, or you’re homeless because you can’t afford to pay for housing, or you’re a college grad who’s struggling to pay off their student loan: Fuck you.

Cory Doctorow: Learning from Silicon Valley Bank’s apologists

Staunchly anti-LGBTQ+ Tennessee Lt. Gov. Randy McNally is pausing his social media use after he was caught leaving bawdy, flirty comments on the Instagram posts of a gay man who poses nude.

Tennessee has been a leader in passing anti-LGBTQ legislation and laws banning drag shows. (You know who else led the world in that kind of thing? The Nazis.)

McNally told ABC affiliate WKRN in a statement that he has “long been active on social media” and engaged with constituents via posts, comments and messages. He said the comments on these posts “are no different.”

“While I see now that I should have been more careful about how my comments and activity would be perceived, my intent was always engagement and encouragement,” he said in the statement

It’s nothing new for anti-LGBTQ Republican wannabe Nazis to get caught doing gay shit, but it’s new for them to simply flat-out deny that it’s gay, and Tennessee is leading that trend. Gov. Bill Lee has been a leader in passing idiotic and persecutory anti-drag legislation. After Lee’s own teen drag exploits were discovered, he claimed they were absolutely not the same thing, and scolded reporters for drawing equivalents, when in fact they are exactly the same.

I’m trying Orion, a third-party web browser for Macs, iPhones, and iPads.

It’s based on Safari, and very Safari-like.

It runs many Chrome and Firefox extensions, supposedly even on the iPhone and iPad.

Orion supports vertical tree-style tabs, which I tried with Microsoft Edge and like quite a lot, even though they can be a little confusing.

Very nice!

Minnie and I walk past this house often.

It Took Me Nearly 40 Years To Stop Resenting Ke Huy Quan

A terrific and thoughtful essay by Walter Chaw about internalized racism and why Ke Huy Quan is a great role model. As a Jewish man, I find this very relatable.

Given the choice of playing along or protesting, I played along. I’m great at the Asian accent as minstrelry. When I do it for my white friends even today, it never fails to bring a laugh. Assimilation was the goal, and even though I could never hide my physical difference, I could at least laugh along with their enthusiastic recognition of my perpetual alienness. I think I wouldn’t be a writer at all if I hadn’t dedicated all of my energy into being very good at English, my second language. If I couldn’t pass the sight test, perhaps I could pass the reading one. Humor branded me as not one of those “sensitive” Asians, as a guy who wouldn’t make you feel uncomfortable about asking where I was really from, and where I’m really from is Golden, Colorado. Golden is a mining town, and to this day and despite its profound gentrification, it still has a giant wooden banner spanning its main street that says “Howdy Folks!” I have spent most of my life trying to divorce myself from my parents’ culture. They’re both dead now and they went before I was strong and stable enough to repair any of the damage I did. Honestly, none of us ever had the emotional language to do the work.

“Here’s the Satirical Piece About [Ohio Republican gubernatorial candidate] Jim Renacci His Team Demanded We Delete Because They Thought You Wouldn’t Think It Was a Joke. The parody had Renacci championing a ‘Constitutional curriculum’ for Ohio schools that would teach kids how to use leeches to treat dysentery, among other things.”

I updated my Mastodon bio. It’s very professional now.

How to Eat Dinner Even Though You Already Watched All Your Shows — I feel personally attacked by this article.

kottke.org turns 25. Congratulations, Jason!

Online privacy is important, and good for Reddit for defending that right against Marvel’s petty and childish demands.

Marvel angry about Ant-Man dialogue leak, demands names of Reddit and Google users | Ars Technica

Another photo of Minnie because why not?

Rotating sandwiches. That’s it.

Don’t date a man with a podcast.

I do not have a podcast.

Currently.

This is a great “about” page..

I thought I knew a lot about the early days of blogging, just from having been a blog addict back then, but I had never heard of textism or its author, Dean Allen, until I heard John Gruber discuss them on The Talk Show today.

Minnie spent Saturday morning to Sunday evening at Camp Bow Wow. She has a lot to process

JOB INTERVIEWER: Where do you see yourself in five years?
ME:

My brilliant joke about dog Viagra this morning did not get the acclaim I anticipated. I’m disappointed in all of you.

Gold. I’m wasting comedy gold on you people.

We went away Saturday night.

Here’s a view from our hotel window. I question whether this pastrami is, in fact, world famous.

I went to a party and the host had an elderly dog with a heart condition, being treated with Viagra. I took one of the dog’s pills and spent the rest of the night trying to hump people’s legs.

I was preoccupied while shaving this morning, and I realized when I was nearly done that I had shaved using soap instead of shaving cream.

And it was fine. No difference.

I feel I’ve been duped by the shaving cream cartel my whole life.

With Captain Shaw’s attitude, he’s definitely Generation X. Also, Vadic’s hair is awful She needs a spa day.

Shower thought: The 1968 episode of the original Star Trek that guest-starred Teri Garr is a Doctor Who ripoff.

That’s the episode where the Enterprise travels back in time to 1968, and encounters an advanced humanoid alien named Gary Seven, who may or may not be mucking around with Earth history.

And now I want to see an episode of “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds,” featuring the Doctor, played by Matt Smith, and Jenna Coleman as Clara Oswald.

While the dog and I were walking at the park, a gentleman wearing a Batman helmet and cape sped by on his bicycle.

I respected his commitment to cosplay, but he was going too fast, on a path used by both bicyclists and pedestrians, human and dog, and all ages and ability levels.

I’m trying Microsoft Edge as my primary browser, after hearing Federico Viticci rave about it on the Macstories podcast. He also loved Arc, but I need a browser that syncs with my iPad and iPhone.

I’m going to move linkblogging to <atomicrobotlive.tumblr.com>, for a while at least, and see how I like that. You can also find the links and everything else I post here at @mitchw@mastodon.social and <www.facebook.com/groups/at…>

There’s a new version of the Castro podcast player, which is nice, but holy cow the version notes make no sense.

New York Mayor Eric Adams said he was chosen by God, after denouncing the separation of church and state and supporting school prayer.

This is a perfectly normal and not-crazy thing for the mayor of one of the most important cities in the west to say.

MANDATE OF HEAVEN: Adams cites divine influence in election [WCBS Newsradio 880, New York]

Janice Eberly, a “corporate ghoul who helped Obama Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner steal Americans' houses on behalf of the bankers who destroyed the world economy in 2008,” seems likely to be tapped by Biden an open seat on the Federal Reserve Board.

Cory Doctorow:

Eberly helped throw millions of Americans into the street in order to reward reckless banks, already wildly profitable banks, with even more profit.

…

Personnel are policy. Eberly has explained, in excruciating detail, exactly what policy she favors – policy that rewards reckless speculation by incinerating the life chances of everyday Americans. Appointing her to the Federal Reserve board would be a giant Fuck You from the Biden admin to every person who got their home stolen by a bank.

Pluralistic: Biden set to appoint mass foreclosure cheerleader to the Fed (06 Mar 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

CPAC is going Nazi.

CPAC Speaker Michael Knowles Calls for Transgender People to Be ‘Eradicated From Public Life Entirely’. By John Gruber at Daring Fireball.

I updated mitchwagner.com. It’s not a fancy website; it’s just a where-you-can-find-me page for my various social media and other Internet activity.

At one time, it was the domain for my personal blog, but I switched that to mitchw.blog. My email address is mitch@mitchwagner.com. I think people expect something to be at mitchwagner.com, and now there is.

Science definitely hasn’t figured things out, and that’s what makes it exciting. There are all sorts of blindingly obvious things we still don’t know.

Why do we sleep, anyway? Why does every living thing seem to sleep? Even microscopic organisms demonstrate sleep-like behavior.

Theory says time travel should be possible. In fact, theory says there’s no difference between the past, present, and future. Obviously that’s not the case. What’s up with that?

Our common sense is based on extremely parochial conditions. We are these tiny little creatures living in a micro-instant of time, and the universe contains multitudes that are both vastly bigger and smaller than we are,. A lot of it moves a lot faster than we do. Get down to the subatomic scale, or up to the interstellar scale, and things are very, very different.

Twitter is far too angry and I have to ration it. Same with Mastodon. People are outraged all the time. This is probably due to the people I follow rather than anything built into the platforms. I am not motivated to find other people to follow. I’ve got other things to do.

On the other hand, I find Facebook to be mostly a positive place, and I like it.

This is completely the opposite of the common wisdom among the extremely online millennials who I follow. They’re all convinced that Mastodon, the Fediverse, and Discord are islands of sunshine and Facebook is a iniquitous pit of Boomers doing nothing but swapping Qanon theories and minion memes.

I’m amused to see that New Balance sneakers are now the cutting edge of fashion. I’ve been buying New Balance shoes for decades. I wear them when I walk, which I do for a bit more than 3 miles daily.

A few years ago I read that New Balance shoes were hopelessly dorky and middle aged, and I have to admit I felt self-conscious about that.

But now New Balance shoes are hip and trendy and I can wear them proudly.

I’ve been played by imposter scams a few times. I was only duped for a few minutes—once for a half hour—and I caught on before sending money, so all I lost was time. Maybe next time I won’t be as smart or lucky.

Scammers are using AI to perpetrate “imposter scams.” The voice sounds like a family member or other loved one, and claims to need money to get out of trouble.

If a loved one tells you they need money, put that call on hold and try calling your family member separately… If a suspicious call comes from a family member’s number, understand that too can be spoofed. Never pay people in gift cards, because those are hard to trace…. and be wary of any requests for cash.

Scammers are now using AI to sound like family members. It’s working. By Pranshu Derma at The Washington Post

Fox News is

a purported news organization that knowingly and repeatedly reports lies to its viewers, whose chief executive brazenly works with and assists one party’s candidates by sharing confidential information about the other. What has always been the tell about Fox News is the tagline and motto: fair and balanced. The operation’s very branding is an aggressive bit of trolling. An unabashedly partisan and ideological operation selling itself under the heading of “fair and balanced.” It’s less a lie than a knowing taunt.

… One of the things that is clear from the very start of the conservative movement was a basic failure to quite understand the thing they rallied themselves against, the history that in Bill Buckley’s famous phrase he was standing athwart and yelling “Stop!” None of the organizations that the right took issue with — the think tanks, the news publications, the movie studios, the nonprofits, the book publishers — were ideological, let alone partisan, organizations. When the founders of modern conservatism looked at CBS News they saw the shock troops of liberalism and the Democratic Party. Same with Brookings and the Washington Post and all the rest. And when they went to build their own versions of these institutions they patterned them off their own cartoonish understandings of how these operations functioned. The idea that institutions like CBS News or The New York Times were, whatever their faults and unexamined biases, fundamentally rooted in an ethic of news gathering and reporting was really totally lost on them.

The Deep Archeology of Fox News - TPM – Talking Points Memo

The worst children’s cartoons ever. Includes Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kids, Clue Club, Goober and the Ghost Chasers, The Partridge Family in 2200 A.D., and much, much more.

The Hole of Cartoon Badness | MetaFilter

Americans historically were not big wine drinkers, and restaurants have worked at changing that for a century and a half.

Florida’s politicians are making the state a “laboratory for fascism.”

Indoctrination is nothing new in Florida’s schools | Boing Boing

The Mandolorians are a race of people repeatedly almost decimated by genocide who now live scattered across the galaxy. These rootless cosmopolitans sometimes blend into their new societies. More often, however, they’re forced to support themselves by turning to professions their societies despise.

— Is The Mandalorian a Space Jew?, by Nathan Abrams on JewThink. Abrams is quoting Charlotte Gartenberg in The Tablet.

Harrison Ford is Jewish? If I knew that, I forgot.

Gentleman on Twitter posts his “sleep stack”—12 products and three practices he uses to sleep. Ryan Broderick is befuddled:

The “sleep stack” tweet has really thrown me. The fact the user tagged all the products he’s using. The fact he called it a “stack,” as in a “tech stack”. The fact other people in the replies are sharing their own “sleep stacks” as if this is totally normal. I think there’s a growing subset of people — especially in America — that want to both optimize and also commodify every part of their lives. I think some of these people feel a genuine discomfort when they do something that doesn’t involve spending money or buying products. Anyways, the best “sleep stack” I ever heard was from Steve Harvey back when he used to host a morning radio show and it was “a Benadryl and some silk underwear.”

The tweet..

jwz: Welcome to year four of 14 days to flatten the curve..

The pandemic is still killing 11,000 people per month in the US alone, but supposedly it’s over. I guess that’s what “over” means now.

If you choose to stand around inside a crowded room without wearing a mask — I think you’re a fucking idiot.

Turns out, nearly every person I know is a fucking idiot.

I do not claim to be smarter than anybody else about this. I’m no more careful than anybody else. I stay home more than most people, but that’s my nature.

At last we have a definitive answer to the question of whether masks work.

That answer is “maybe.”

Ars: Do masks work? It’s a question of physics, biology, and behavior

Just now I was unsuccessful trying to eat lunch and I realized after multiple failed attempts that I was holding the spoon upside down and that’s how thing are going lately.

I saw these ducks in a puddle. Not to be confused with snakes in a plane. 📷

Our story opens with a Mandalorian Bar Mitzvah.

Father of cellphone sees dark side but also hope in new tech (AP / Kelvin Chan)

94-year-old Marty Cooper, credited with inventing the mobile phone in 1973, sees dark sides but also hope in new technology

Cooper talks with the Associated Press about the mobile industry’s current and future directions and challenges.

As for his own phone use, Cooper says he checks email and does online searches for information to settle dinner table arguments.
> However, “there are many things that I have not yet learned,” he said. “I still don’t know what TikTok is.”

Cooper received a lifetime achievement award this week at the international Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the industry’s biggest conference.

MWC attracts 120,000+ people. Imagine going to an event like that and knowing all those people are there because of you.

Do you have a Zoom shirt?

When was the last time you laundered it?

Micro.blog does not show follower counts. It doesn’t tell you when somebody follows you. It has no concept of a like or favorite.

There are definite benefits to this system.

But there is one big drawback: Because I get very few replies to my mb posts, it feels like I’m talking to myself. On Facebook and Tumblr, I get a lot of likes. On Mastodon, I get fewer, but I get ‘em. This interaction lets me know that somebody’s listening.

Soon you’ll be able to see a restoration of one of the most infamous movies ever made: Guccione’s 1980 “Caligula.” (Boing Boing / Mark Frauenfelder)

Thomas Negovan, a musician and songwriter, has been working on the project for three years, based on the original camera negatives and location audio. He wants to create a movie that conforms to the original vision and Gore Vidal script.

“Caligula” was filmed in 1976 as a big-budget indy movie, with an impressive cast including Malcomlm McDowell, Peter O’Toole, and Helen Mirren, and budget twice the size of Star Wars.

But then Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione took over, threw out the original script, and added explicit sex scenes without the consent of the other creators. Guccione filmed the sex scenes secretly on the movie sets.

Negovan is using the original camera negatives and location audio, enhanced with AI. He created a five-minute video explaining his work—it looks great and I’m looking forward to seeing this movie, which may be a lost masterpiece.

Here’s the teaser trailer:

How donkeys changed the course of human history (BBC / Dhananjay Khadilkar)

From bearing the burdens of the Roman Empire to enabling trade over long distances, the humble donkey has been surprisingly influential.

Today I learned Pedro Pascal did an episode of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”

Two very stable geniuses say Thomas Jefferson enslaved people but didn’t support slavery (Boing Boing)

Nazis openly harass Jewish people in Desantis Land (Boing Boing)

Gov. DeSantis won’t condemn Florida Nazis, so Volusia sheriff steps in with message: “F*ck you!" (Boing Boing)

Native advocacy group to retire ‘Crying Indian’ anti-pollution ad (AP)

The Keep American Beautiful nonprofit is retiring the iconic “crying Indian” ad by transferring ownership of the rights to the National Congress of American Indians. Native Americans criticized and ridiculed the ad for perpetuating stereotypes.

The actor in the ad, Iron Eyes Cody, wasn’t even an Indian. He was Italian-American.

MAGA cultists advocate for Marxism to stop communist agenda (Boing Boing)

Prankster Walter Masterson easily gets MAGA and Qanon cultists to call for workers to collectivize and seize the means of production to stop socialism and communism.

The Horror of Realizing Everyone Can See Your Work Calendar Entries Naptime. Call Mom. Some employees are shocked to discover how much they are revealing; is this your first colonoscopy? (WSJ)

An enjoyable and informative article–but an odd one.

When I’ve been employed at companies with shared calendar servers, I have always assumed the details of my corporate calendar were open to my colleagues. If there’s an event I don’t want my colleagues to know the details about, I don’t put it on the calendar.

I keep a personal calendar for personal events. When I have to take time off work in the middle of the day for a personal reason, I just put a calendar event called “BLOCKED” on my corporate calendar, and put the details on my personal calendar.

Find out how third-place cloud platform Google is pursuing a multi-cloud strategy to grab market leadership.. My latest on Silverlinings

How ‘The Last of Us’ Cherishes a Bygone World. (By Shirley Li at The Atlantic)

The characters of “The Last of Us” are mourning for the world we live in, and the show helps us appreciate that we’re still living here.

You and I may think of shopping malls as suburban eyesores and monuments to kitsch, but that’s because we take them for granted.

Fans were over the moon for the third episode, featuring Nick Offerman. I thought it was good but not great. But this episode lived up to the hype.

The Case for a Primary Challenge to Joe Biden (By Mark Leibovich at The Atlantic)

Yes. Biden has been an excellent President—but that’s not good enough. The US needs better than excellence. We need a great President, a transformative President, a Roosevelt or Lincoln.

And Biden has failed in several ways as President. He has done a terrible job at Covid.

And has not done enough to break up the domination of big business in our national lives. Ask the people of East Palestine about that. Yeah, sure, Trump set the policy that allowed that disaster to happen—but the Biden administration has had plenty of time to fix that policy, and they didn’t. Indeed, during a showdown between labor and the railroad companies, Biden came down for the railroad companies.

And there’s the matter of his age. I’m staunchly anti-ageist—but Biden will be 82 when he’s sworn in for his next term. That’s old.

So let’s have a good primary competition and see if Biden is up for the rigors of a rough-and-tumble election, and his second term.

I’ll support whichever Democrat gets the nomination.

I’m trying to avoid having opinions about the Scott Adams news, or even thinking about it. I’m not doing too well with that.

The metaverse hype bubble popped. What now?

I wrote this:

By now, we were all expecting to be wearing Oculus headsets and piloting legless avatars floating in virtual worlds of dragons, robots, and spaceships. Instead, here we are in a new world of tech austerity, with massive layoffs sweeping the industry. So the metaverse is dead, right?

Wrong. The hype bubble has collapsed. But the metaverse is growing.

Whatever you’re working on right now, whatever it might be, I ask: try to leave a little space for a courtyard.

— “The Courtyard,”, by Caleb Sasser

Get Me Risa Heller! (NYmag.com) If you’re Jeff Zucker or Mario Batali or Jared Kushner and you’re trying to survive a bout of very bad press, she’s who you call.

“Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine,” published in 1958, was one of my favorite books when I was a little kid. I read and reread it many times.

It’s a book about a boy and his friends who teach a computer to do their homework. They read to the machine from their textbooks.

That’s not how computers actually worked …until recently, when voice recognition and machine learning has caught up to 65-year-old kiddie sci-fi.

I’ve been thinking about that book quite a bit recently. And so has David Owen at The New Yorker.

What a Sixty-Five-Year-Old Book Teaches Us About A.I.

Pink Floyd songwriter Roger Waters is a loud and proud anti-Semite, and Frankfurt canceled his performance there.. (By Rob Beschizza at Boing Boing)

The latest historical American Girl doll is from the 90s and makes zines. It comes with a PC that makes dial-up noises.

jwz: The Dream of the Nineties is Still Alive

Every presidential administration wants to fix America’s ‘crumbling infrastructure’ until they discover the business interests profiting from disrepair.

— It Is Happening Again. By Erik Baker at n + 1

The South Has Got Something To Say (Dissent Magazine)

New books by Adolph L. Reed Jr. and Imani Perry explore the South from the Jim Crow era to today through memoir and interview.

The thing I find most suspicious/fishy/smelly about the current hype surrounding Stable Diffusion, ChatGPT, and other AI applications is that it is almost exactly six months since the bottom dropped out of the cryptocurrency scam bubble…. To me it looks very much as if the usual hucksters and grifters are now chasing the sweet VC/private equity money….

— Charles Stross, Place your bets

Jamelle Bouie: The Founders Were More Creative Than You Think

The Supreme Court’s originalism “rests on a cramped view of the framers of the Constitution and their ability to think and reason. In the hands of Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito and other conservatives on the Supreme Court, the founding fathers are small-minded and provincial, unable to think beyond the narrowest possible interpretation of the words they wrote.”

Putin and the Right’s Tough-Guy Problem. (Paul Krugman)

The right has an unhealthy fixation on men who swagger and act like tough guys.

Salary jobs with fake “manager” titles cost workers $4 billion in overtime.

Companies save billions of dollars by giving employees fake “manager” titles, study shows (CBS News)

“Hi, we’re machine babysitters.”

Fucking knock it off, people. Blogs exist for a reason. Stop being awful.

— jwz: Stop Doing Threads

Fighting the privacy wars, state by state: Treating Congress as damage and routing around it.

An excellent and informative rant by Cory Doctorow. Includes such choice turns of phrase as:

Basically, Congress only passes laws that can be sandwiched into 1,000-page must-pass bills and most of the good stuff that gets through only does so because some bought-and-paid-for Congressjerks are too busy complaining about “woke librarians” to read the bills before they come up for a vote.

…

As Congress descends further into self-parody, the temptation to treat the federal government as damage and route around it only mounts.

…

… there are so many would-be supervillains who just can’t stop themselves from monologing, and worse, putting it in writing.

Roald Dahl Can Never Be Made Nice (The Atlantic / Helen Lewis)

In Order to Keep Our Editorial Page Completely Balanced, We Are Hiring More Dipshits (McSweeney’s / Mike Skerrett) “We believe that the truth lies in the middle. The exact mathematical middle. This holds true no matter how far right ‘the right’ actually is. You know all those things that John McCain said in 2008? Sorry, liberals: that’s left-wing now.”

AI-generated fiction submissions are inundating science fiction magazines. Some 35% of the stories submitted to Clarkesworld monthly are AI-generated. (Boing Boing / Thom Dunn)

Don Lemon’s statement wasn’t just sexist–it was stupid. Why should Americans trust a news organization that features this clown?

Don Lemon receives “formal training” before returning to CNN after “woman in her prime” comments (Boing Boing / Carla Sinclair)

I’m burned out on superheroes, but I could get enthusiastic about a Superman movie starring Henry Cavill that preserves Superman’s optimistic spirit and nobility.

Matthew Vaughn thinks Zack Snyder wasted Henry Cavill as Superman (Boing Boing / Devin Nealy)

Ben Stein is sad that there isn’t a “large African-American woman” on his syrup bottle (Boing Boing / Mark Frauenfelder)

Original iPhone from 2007 auctioned for $63,356, topping prior sales (Ars Technica / Scharon Harding)

Karen Green received the iPhone in 2007 as a gift, but she never even opened the box, because she’s a Verizon customer and the iPhone was then locked to AT&T.

Elsewhere on the Internet, a friend started a discussion of the Danny Dunn books, which I absolutely loved when I was a kid.

In the series, which started in 1958, Danny Dunn is an all-American boy living in the all-American college town of Midston. He lives with his mother, who works as a live-in housekeeper for Professor Bullfinch, a scientist at the local university and is a grandfather-figure to Danny. The boy hero and his young pals have adventures with the inventions Prof. Bullfinch brings home—a time machine, a computer, antigravity paint, a miniaturization ray, and so on.

Danny’s pal includes a girl named Irene who’s a budding physicist, and a sidekick, Joe Pearson, who’s a boy poet. Notably for a series that started in the 50s, Irene keeps up with the gang.

Maybe Roald Dahl books just aren’t suitable for kids today. If we have to twist them all out of shape to get rid of the fatphobia and misogyny, then maybe they shouldn’t be aggressively marketed to children anymore.

“Why do Americans have to pay Intuit to tell the IRS things it already knows?” — Cory Doctorow

Everyone bopmuggered by vomitous gobblefunk in censored Roald Dahl books (Rob Beschizza / Boing Boing)

“ … in fact no-one asked for this: not the left, not the right, not anyone…. the fake ‘wokeness’ of fiduciary duty and shareholder value.”

Roald Dahl’s books aren’t getting a big marketing push and extensive revisions for political reasons. It’s happening because a corporation thinks it can make a lot of money, and is twisting itself into knots to make that happen.

I loved Dahl’s books and the movies that have been made from them, and was troubled by the current round of editing. I was also troubled a few years ago, learning about Dahl’s racism and anti-semitism.

What’s the right answer here, I thought? On the one hand, it’s wrong to make wholesale edits in original work. Usually it’s a good idea to simply present the work as published, while also putting the work in historical context. But that seems like it’s unreasonable when dealing with children’s literature.

Beschizza suggest another solution: Just stop trying to make Dahl’s books into a big pop-culture sensation. Do continue to make his books available, but stop pouring big money into new editions and marketing.

Dahl may, simply, be inappropriate for today’s audiences, particularly children.

I’m not even sad about that. If Dahl is wrong for kids today, that’s fine, because pop culture is inherently evanescent. Very little pop culture survives a century—but that’s OK, because new pop culture comes along to replace it. And the old books are still around. You can still find E.E. Smith and Edgar Rice Burroughs and H. Rider Haggard and those guys. Put Dahl in the same category, once immensely popular works slowly fading into obscurity.

When I was eight years old, our third grade teacher sat in front of a class after lunch every day and read to us briefly aloud—just for entertainment, and to awaken a lifelong love of books in us. Among those books were “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” and “Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator.” That’s a wonderful memory, and it worked. I have loved reading, particularly fantastic fiction, my whole life. Nothing’s going to take any of that that away.

A new generation of kids can experience the same thing, with new books, appropriate to them.

By the way, that teacher’s name was Arlene Kaufman (or Kaufmann—maybe two Ns). Miss Kaufman. A wonderful teacher. I’ve written about her online before and received a Facebook Message from her in 2018, after not having spoken with her since I was a young child. It was a fantastic and weird experience, and I wish I’d kept up the correspondence.

Election-denying demon hunter will chair Michigan GOP (Mark Frauenfelder / Boing Boing) Doubling down on the crazy.

Marjorie Taylor Greene wants “national divorce,” but dummy doesn’t see who a secession would hurt most (Carla Sinclair / Boing Boing)

Because Brexit worked out so well for the UK, we should totally do it here.

“ … 7 out of the top 10 states most dependent on federal funds are red…. “

Florida woman who waved gun at McDonald’s was still angry after they gave her the free cookie she wanted | Boing Boing (Rob Beschizza / Boing Boing)

“Even after being given the free cookie, she remained irate…. ”

Marjorie Taylor Greene tells Black people to be “proud” of statues of their treasonous enslavers (Mark Frauenfelder / Boing Boing)

Tearing down statues is not erasing history. The history is still available, in schools, books, TV, on the Internet–everywhere.

Erasing history is putting up statutes to people who fought a war against America to protect their right to own slaves, and pretending those men were heroes.

Woman records her dinner date with a creepy “nice guy” (Mark Frauenfelder / Boing Boing)

“I’ll bet this guy paid a lot of money to take an incel influencer course on how to dominate women, and was surprised that it didn’t work out like promised.”

Bing: “I will not harm you unless you harm me first”(Simon Willison) Bing gaslights a user, goes through an existential crisis, and threatens someone else.

Congressional Republican leader Marjorie Taylor Greene backs “national divorce.” (MSNBC / Steve Benen)

In a President’s Day tweet, Greene endorses breaking up the United States. Then she walks it back and says she’ll settle for impeaching Joe Biden—but if that doesn’t happen, the US has to go, she says.

Elected political leaders should support the United States continuing to exist. That’s a pretty low bar. But the Republican Party can’t clear it.

Cory Doctorow’s Pluralistic turns three. Congratulations, Cory!

Interesting behind-the-scenes look at Cory’s production process, and the reasoning behind some of his idiosyncratic design decisions.

RIP Richard Belzer, 78.

Very good overview of Belzer’s life and career, by Chris Koseluk at the Hollywood Reporter.

Belzer played Det. Munch as a regular character on two different series and as a guest on several others, including an animated appearance on The Simpsons and as a Muppet on Sesame Street.

Belzer’s last words were “Fuck you, motherfuckers,” which is very much in character.

1958: The San Diego Evening Tribune interviews 18-year-old local beauty pageant winner Raquel Tejada, and finds her intelligent and vivacious, as well as beautiful.

Tejada later became famous as “Raquel Welch.”

The author of this article makes it pretty obvious he doesn’t think highly of beauty pageant winners, but is impressed with young Raquel’s brains and charm, as well as her beauty.

Note the sidebar explaining how to pronounce the beauty pageant winner’s name. Did people really need to be told how to pronounce “Raquel?” That surprised me at first—but I guess the name is well known now because this Raquel made it famous.

I am also surprised that the Tribune in 1958 thought its readers needed to be told how to pronounce “Tejada.” San Diego was just as close to Mexico then as it is now; neither San Diego nor Mexico has moved.

And it’s sweet that her friends called her “Rocky.” I wonder if that continued in later life.

PS. Rereading the article, I see I was pronouncing “Tejada” wrong. I had the “J” sound right, because I’m not a bumpkin, but I was pronouncing the first syllable “tay,” rather than the correct “tuh.”

My Favorite Times to Use Incognito Mode (The New Yorker / Jade Orlando) A fun one-minute read.

Watching RoboCop on the Spanish language channel while getting a haircut. You really lose out on the emotional subtlety and nuance when you can’t understand the dialogue.

How to Win at Monopoly and Lose All Your Friends.

Monopoly starts as a fun exciting romp, only to turn into a bitter cesspool of despair.

…

A little-known rule of Monopoly is that the game has exactly 32 houses and 12 hotels. Once you run out of houses, no more can be purchased until they re-enter the supply by being sold or upgraded to hotels. … The core of this strategy is to buy up as many houses as possible before anyone realizes what you’re doing, and DO NOT UPGRADE TO HOTELS to prevent people from improving their own properties.

…

If losing a normal game of monopoly is frustrating, losing to this strategy is excruciating, as a losing opponent essentially has no path to victory, even with lucky rolls. Your goal is to play conservatively, lock up more resources, and let the other players lose by attrition. If you want to see these people again, I recommend not gloating, but simply state that you’re playing to win, and that it wasn’t your idea to play Monopoly in the first place.

The Onion: It Is Journalism’s Sacred Duty To Endanger The Lives Of As Many Trans People As Possible “It’s about asking the tough questions and ignoring the answers you don’t like…. “

I asked ChatGPT for my bio. The result has a staggering number of errors packed into a small space. I never wrote for CIO Mag or Network Computing. I am not now and never was EiC of LR, which is not best described as an IT and cloud computing website. I did not write those books. And so on.

TurboTax parent Intuit is stepping up lobbyist spending to stop Washington from simplifying taxes. (OpenSecrets.org / Anna Massoglia)

Simplified taxes would hurt Intuit’s bottom line.

Picard rummages through a trunk, searching for the source of the sound of an Enterprise-D commbadge chirp. He tosses the contents one at a time over his shoulder: Tennis racket, bowling shoes, harmonica, clown nose, groucho glasses, rubber bulb horn (which he squeezes twice: honk! honk!), feather boa. He unscrews the lid from a canister labeled “cocktail peanuts” and rubber snakes spring out…..

On Lake Murray: This metal platform is usually attached to the concrete walkway, and people fish from it. It came loose in the storms this week.

Lake Murray from Baltimore Dr., first clear day after this week’s storms.

Geese on Lake Murray. Watch with the sound on!

A little while back I heard about a conspiracy theory claiming the Roman Empire didn’t exist–that it’s a hoax promulgated by the Spanish Inquisition, which happened in the 15th Century.

I learned that it isn’t really a fully-blown conspiracy theory, which to me implies a movement. It’s just this one popular TikToker, who goes by the handle @momllennial_, and she also has claimed that Alexander the Great was a woman, and Jesus Christ’s name can be translated as “clitoris healer.”

2021: This TikTok Conspiracy Theory Is Infuriating Historians (Daily Dot / Gavia Baker-Whitelaw)

Bruce Willis has been diagnosed with dementia, his family announced. Last year, they announced Willis was retiring from acting due to aphasia. (CNN)

Sad and troubling news. I’m a fan, and he’s not that much older than I am.

Stifling Free Speech Is Now A Core Plank Of The Republican Platform (Mike Masnick / Techdirt) Clarence Thomas, Devin Nunes, Sarah Palin, and Ron DeSantis support laws that would enable politicians to harass critics with punitive lawsuits.

Google’s chatbot panic

Cory Doctorow:

The really remarkable thing isn’t just that Microsoft has decided that the future of search isn’t links to relevant materials, but instead lengthy, florid paragraphs written by a chatbot who happens to be a habitual liar – even more remarkable is that Google agrees.

Also:

Every successful Google product except search and gmail is an acquisition: mobile, ad-tech, videos, server management, docs, calendaring, maps, you name it. The company desperately wants to be a “making things” company, but it’s actually a “buying things” company.

The last time Google went into full-on panic mode, the result was Google+, which was actually a great product that Google bungled spectacularly.

The FTC wants to ban non-compete contracts, which are exploitative and unfair to workers. (Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols / Computerworld)

Workplace coffee gets weird and ugly. the $15,000 coffee fund, the cheapskate executives, and other stories of office coffee wars (Ask a Manager)

I went indy three weeks ago and since then I’ve had many discussions about about potential full-time and freelance opportunities.

Pluses:

• Exciting new opportunities
• Income means we can buy proper food and not have to eat the dog or cats.
• Videoconferencing shirt is getting a good workout.

Minus:

• I have to shave every day.

Teaching generative AI to give factual answers is going to prove as difficult as teaching it to write credible answers has been.

Even human beings have difficulty distinguishing information from bullshit on the Internet. We can’t even agree which is which.

I’m continuing my project of relearning how to read books. Remembering that as a voracious teenage reader, I would discover an author and read everything I could find by him, until I was caught up or had at least read everything by that author in the local mall bookstores and libraries. Asimov. Clarke. Heinlein. Ellison. Niven. Joe Haldeman.

I am adopting that strategy now, starting with Michael Connelly. He’s written about 40 books. I’m now reading his fourth. This is going to be a while.

In 30 years as a journalist, I’ve never been part of a crowd of reporters shouting questions while chasing a public official or other famous person. I’d probably trip and fall down.

Wyoming Republicans are fighting to keep child marriage legal.

Wyoming Limiting Child Marriage Sparks Republican Outrage (Nick Reynolds / Newsweek)

Mars Wrigley fined after workers fall into vat of chocolate (AP)

Have we learned nothing from Augustus Gloop?

Codebreakers have been able to read a cache of more than 50 encrypted letters written by Mary Queen of Scots more than 400 years ago. (Jennifer Ouellette / Ars Technica)

Bernie Sanders Has a New Role. It Could Be His Final Act in Washington. (Sheryl Gay Stolberg / The New York Times)

As chairman of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, Sanders has a platform to go after Moderna for price-gouging on the taxpayer-funded Covid vaccine, and Amazon and Starbucks for union-busting.

A Yale Professor Suggested Mass Suicide for Old People in Japan. What Did He Mean? (Motoko Rich and Hikari Hida / NYTimes). An appalling proposal. Everybody counts or nobody counts.

And the headline is cringe. It’s clear what Yusuke Narita meant. The “I didn’t really mean it” defense doesn’t work in 5th grade and it doesn’t work at Yale either.

J.K. Rowling and “Separating the Art from the Artist."

Charlie Jane Anders discusses how you can’t separate the art from the artist when the artist—Rowling—has spent her career as the public face of her art.

Anders is uniquely positioned to discuss this issue, as she is a trans woman science fiction and fantasy writer with a large public presence. I’m a fan.

Source code containing swearwords is better. (jwz)

After the Ohio rail disaster, Buttigieg is silent on restoring the safety standards Trump repealed. “Civil War-era brake systems were good enough for General Sherman… “ (Cory Doctorow / Pluralistic)

How Liberals — Yes, Liberals — Are Hobbling Government (Ezra Klein / NYTimes)

The legal scholar Nicholas Bagley argues that the liberal “procedural fetish” makes it difficult for government to accomplish anything bold.

…

… to achieve the goals liberals hold most dear, we need a liberalism that builds. A liberalism that builds everything from multifamily housing and mass transit systems to transmission lines and solar farms. And we need a liberalism that can build it all quickly, cheaply and effectively. But even in the places where liberals have governing power, they are often failing to do exactly that. Why?

Conservatives hate big government, and pile on regulations and red tape to cripple agencies. But liberals’ love of procedure and rules, designed to ensure fairness, have the same effect.

“The rich truly do get more hours in the day.” — Poor people pay higher time tax (Cory Doctorow / Pluralistic)

The Last Man Without a Cell Phone

Anne Kadet interviews New Yorkers without cell phones. 3% of Americans go without.

I use a computer—a lot! For my work, and reading things online. I do email. But I don’t have any felt need to have it with me all the time. It’s like, I watch TV, but I don’t feel like I need to carry it around with me all day. The cell phone feels like a solution to a non-problem. Before it existed, you didn’t see undergraduates running across campus to get back to their room after class so they could make phone calls. But now you see them walking around, on their phone, all the time. The contrast I’ve sometimes used is, I grew up in the DC area with no central air conditioning. And we knew perfectly well there was a problem. It was hot and stuffy all summer. And we’re laying on the floor reading the paper in front of a fan. Everybody knew there was a problem, and central AC solved it. But in this case, what was the problem? I don’t see the need.

… iPhone users are extraverted, free-spending, narcissist party monsters. The Android users, meanwhile, are all home binge-watching Law & Order with their extended cat families.

Android or iPhone—Who’s the Real Sheeple? (Anne Kadet)

The real sheeple is the person who thinks their choice between Android and iPhone defines them.

Small Government: The ref has to be more powerful than the players (Cory Doctorow)

Companies should never be allowed to grow too big to fail, because they also become too big to regulate. Mega-corporations become more powerful than the governments that regulate them. Government becomes too weak to even enforce contracts, the one function that even extreme libertarians agree that government needs to do.

… even if governments do nothing but enforce contracts, they still have to be bigger and more powerful than the largest companies and cartels. This should be an area where good faith leftists and capitalist trufans can come together: making small government possible by banning big business.

Some archaeologists believe that when future civilizations sort through the debris of our modern era, we won’t be defined by the skyscraper, the iPhone, or the automobile, but rather something humbler: the chicken bone. The reason? We eat so many chickens.

How a shipping error 100 years ago launched the $30 billion chicken industry (Kenny Torrella / Vox)

Kansas City residents react to seeing their city featured on “The Last of Us.” (Robert A. Cronkleton / The Kansas City Star) A fun article.

Why did ‘The Last of Us’ Change Pittsburgh to Kansas City? An Investigation (Dais Johnston / Inverse)

It’s easier to make Canada look like Kansas City.

The answer could be found in one of its nicknames: City of Bridges. Any glimpse of the Pittsburgh skyline will show plenty of bridges along the three rivers surrounding it. Kansas City is also on a river, but the heart of downtown — the part of the city we see in The Last of Us — is more inland, meaning the grim, dry cityscapes we see in the show are more suitable for Kansas City.

I want to make this abundantly clear: If there’s one thing you must do flawlessly in your career, it’s killing. I don’t care if it’s an old dog, a sow, some pet chicken, a stallion, or a fucking 3-day-old kitten. You will do it humanely. That means quickly, painlessly, and compassionately.

— Our Business Is Killing: I never understood why veterinarians are at such a high risk of suicide. Until I became one. (Andrew Bullis / Slate)

Put plainly, the attack on the dignity of transgender Americans is an attack on the dignity of all Americans. And like the battles for abortion rights and bodily autonomy, the stakes of the fight for the rights and dignity of transgender people are high for all of us. There is no world in which their freedom is suppressed and yours is sustained.

— Jamelle Bouie, There Is No Dignity in This Kind of America

Or, in the words of novelist Michael Connelly: “Everybody counts or nobody counts.”

Julie replaced our toaster oven with a convection oven that also makes toast, with a fancy electronic control panel, and I managed to successfully use it to make toast without burning the house down. I knew today was going to be a good day.

Artificial intelligence is not a threat. The threat is that we live in a society that considers ownership as sacred and work as worth very little.

If I ever think about adopting a puppy again, I’m going to first reread my journal entries from late 2013 and early 2014.

So much poop. Poop everywhere.

Ohio police put a TV journalist on the ground, arrested him, and put him in jail for talking while the governor was talking. (Eduardo Medina / NY Times)

Lazy Reporters Claiming Fediverse Is ‘Slumping,’ Despite Massive Increase In Usage (Mike Masnick / Techdirt) Yeah, many people try Mastodon and other fediverse services and don’t like them. But the services are growing fast, despite the bounce rate.

Elon Musk asked Twitter engineers why views of his tweets are declining. One engineer suggested the answer might be because the public is losing interest. Musk fired the engineer. (Zoë Schiffer and Casey Newton / Platformer)

Microsoft unveiled its AI chatbot-driven Bing search this week, presenting possibly the first challenge to Google’s search dominance in 25 years. In response, Google laced up its clown shoes and immediately stepped on a rake and smacked itself in the face. Google demonstrated its own AI chatbot-driven search which (a) isn’t available to the public and (b) prominently and spectacularly answered a question incorrectly.

I wrote this: Oops! Google’s new AI tool Bard showcases artificial stupidity

Epidemiologist Katelyn Jetelina and plant scientist Cassandra Quave watch “The Last of Us” and discuss the science. (Your Local Epidemiologist)

Cordyceps, the fungus that causes the zombie epidemic, is real, and it is every bit as horrific as portrayed in the show … but it only affects carpenter ants. The fungus hasn’t significantly evolved in hundreds of millions of years, not even to affect other types of ants.

We will not have mushroom heads running at exorbitant speeds trying to kill us any time soon. While not as sexy, real fungal infections are a major health issue and, with climate change and the rise of antimicrobial resistance, will become even more of one in the future. But if you’re worried about a pandemic, focus on viruses. In the meantime, enjoy the show.

I posted a photo here this evening that I took at the park this afternoon. It was a photo of a woman that I thought was a bride. But some friends here pointed out that she’s almost certainly a quinceañera. Now I feel weird about it, so I deleted the photo. Here’s a photo of a duck instead.

James Cameron did an experiment to confirm the ending of Titanic. Conclusion: the door almost certainly could not hold two people. Sorry, Jack. (Jennifer Ouellette / Ars Technica)

jwz: ChatGPT is a dangerous “bullshit fountain.”

RIP Harry Whittington, 95. He was shot in the face in a 2006 hunting accident by Dick Cheney, and then Whittington later apologized to Cheney and his family and yes you read that right about who apologized to who. (The Texas Tribune / Sneha Day)

“Shift Happens” is a book about keyboards, “starting with typewriters and ending with modern computers and phones… How did we get from then to now? What were the steps along the way? And how on earth does QWERTY still look the same now as it did 150 years ago?” (Kickstarter)

An animated sitcom based loosely on “Seinfeld,” powered entirely by AI, ran continuously for six weeks on Twitch. But that service recently banned the show when the bots made transphobic jokes. (Kotaku / Levi Winslow)

Joe Rogan, who gets paid $200 million to share whatever stupid thing comes into his head, shares the anti-Semitic myth that Jews are greedy. (Mark Frauenfelder / Boing Boing)

Please, My Wife, She’s Very Online. Jia Tolentino does not like the word “wife.” (The New Yorker)

Obsidian is growing up: The company that makes the note-taking and document management app Obsidian—which I depend on daily—is getting a CEO: He goes by the handle “kepano” on the Obsidian discussion forum, and he developed Minimal and contributed to Obsidian 1.0.

Eleven years ago today I deposited $21.45 in cans to the recycle center. I drank a lot of club soda and Diet Dr Pepper then.

I saw this in the sidewalk while walking the dog. Someone was trying to send a complex message to Tom and Sharon.

Strangely, this is the second house I’ve seen with a dinosaur in front of it.

We have monarch butterfly larvae in the garden

We have now watched episode two of The Last of Us. The special effects just get more and more disturbing.

Taking a break and on to episode three. I’m sure this one will be relaxing.

We enjoyed the first episode of “Last of Us.” But I’m disappointed that’s apparently all the John Hannah we get.

Everything needs more John Hannah.

We watched the first episode of “The Last of Us.” Can I expect to unclench anytime soon?

The grass at Lake Murray is tall after all the rain we’ve had, and yesterday I saw a golden retriever enjoying the grass so much–creeping through on its belly, and then rolling over on its back and writhing with its legs waving in the air.

At first, I thought the dog was enjoying the feel and smell of the grass, but it seems equally likely it found a carcass or a nice pile of poop to roll around in and cover itself with the smell.

LinkedIn just showed me a suggestion that I should follow Dr. Bronner’s for opportunities–the company is based here in San Diego.

What do you think–should I do marketing for organic soap? Maybe I could rewrite their label copy?

We took a break for a few months after watching the end of season one of “Succession,” because the story seemed complete. But now we have watched episode one of season two.

Those poor raccoons.

I’m going to say “don’t forget to like and subscribe!” instead of “good-bye.” When leaving social dinners, ending meetings, before hanging up the phone, at funerals. It’ll be my “thing.”

Discord and I disagree about when it’s appropriate to send me notifications, and about how to customize notifications.

I’m learning to use Midjourney for a work assignment. This is my professional headshot, modified with the prompt “sitting at the counter of a diner drinking coffee with a cigarette smoldering in an ashtray in the style of Edward Hopper.”

I saw another classic car today.

I saw this car.

Young woman at the supermarket checkout a packet of flowers, a bottle of wine, and nothing else. Seems like there was a story there. None of my business so I didn’t say anything.

Part of being optimistic is keeping one’s head pointed toward the sun, one’s feet moving forward. There were many dark moments when my faith in humanity was sorely tested, but I would not and could not give myself up to despair. That way lays defeat and death

— Nelson Mandela

We watched the first episode of the new series “Poker Face.” Big “Columbo” vibe.

We only have 37 more episodes of Yellowstone to watch, plus eight episodes of 1923, plus ten episodes of 1883.

I’m not seeing much interest in my linkposts here, so I’m just going to post them on Tumblr (atomicrobot.live), Mastodon (@mitchw@mastodon.social) and the Atomic Robot Live group on Facebook).

After watching the first season of “Yellowstone,” I have concluded we need a helicopter.

Tiktok’s enshittification.

How platforms—like Amazon, Google, Twitter, Facebook, and now Tiktok—turn to shit. By Cory Doctorow:

“ … first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.”

Will the sun ever set on the British empire?.

This article by Randall Munro, author of the xkcd comic, just keeps getting better and better.

The exact day when the sun stopped setting on the [British] empire was probably sometime in the late 1700s or early 1800s, when the first Australian territories were added….

Every night, around midnight GMT, the sun sets on the Cayman Islands, and doesn’t rise over the British Indian Ocean territory until after 1am. For that hour, the little Pitcairn Islands in the South Pacific are the only British territory in the sun.

The Pitcairn Islands have a population of a few dozen people, the descendants of the mutineers from the HMS Bounty.

Amid Rising Homelessness, City Council Declares Housing a ‘Fundamental Human Right’ [Times of San Diego] This is performative bulllshit. The homeless don’t need declarations. They need housing.

Opinion: Antitrust Suit Against Google Ad Business Undermines a Growing Free Press Online [Times of San Diego]

Google’s most serious antitrust challenge to date [Casey Newton]

Apple Has Begun Scanning Your Local Image Files Without Consent [jwz]

Laid Off in Your Living Room: The Chaos of Remote Job Cuts. (NYTimes/Emma Goldberg).

First time getting laid off is lonely and scary.

A Happy Memory Can Help You Fall Asleep, if You Know How to Use It. “Lying in bed each night, Andy Buelow often finds himself thinking one thought over and over: How awesome it was to ride the ferry across Lake Michigan as a kid.”

Fort Walgreens The recent spike in shoplifting is both overblown and real. And almost everyone is profiting from it (including you)..

James D. Walsh, Intelligencer staff writer:

“They’re professional and self-employed,” said David Rey, who, after years overseeing security teams in New York department stores, published Larceny on 34th Street: An In-Depth Look at Professional Shoplifting in One of the World’s Largest Stores. “Just like what we do for a living — going to work — they pay their bills and rent and raise their children off the proceeds that they get from shoplifting.”

None of the boosters interviewed for this story could name someone who shoplifted for any other reason than to support a drug habit.

“Mandy” was Barry Manilow’s first #1 pop hit this month in 1975. He scored 21 more top-40 hits between 1975 and 1983.

Seth Godin nerds out about typography for a bit. “Typography is a signal, not just a way to put letters on a page.… They say you can tell a lot about someone from their handwriting. For my professional life, my handwriting has always involved a keyboard.”

“When I tell people I earn my living as a copyeditor, I am typically met with one of two responses: rapt admiration or an almost physical revulsion.”

“… a close examination of the work produced by CNET’s AI makes it seem less like a sophisticated text generator and more like an automated plagiarism machine, casually pumping out pilfered work that would get a human journalist fired.”

A brief history of the Apple Lisa computer, lavishly illustrated with historical images. Released in January, 1983, the Lisa was a commercial flop, but it pioneered the graphical user interface still in use in Windows and Macs today.

Eggflation is just more price-gouging. Cory Doctorow: One company controls the US egg industry, Cal-Maine Food, and it’s making record profits—up 65% net year-over-year.

In its communications to investors, Cal-Maine’s eminently guillotineable CFO Max Bowman attributed the monopolist’s good fortune to “significantly higher selling prices” and “our ability to adapt to inflationary market pressures.”

Dumb and shameful until it’s not

Ryan Broderick at Garbage Day says Web 3.0 is here. It’s not “the blockchain-backed cyberlibertarian free-for-all, where internet access is predicated on using crypto wallets to buy and sell digital assets” or the metaverse. It’s AI.

Now, you might say, “Ryan, A.I. is completely overhyped. Generative-A.I. art tools can’t even figure out how many fingers people have. There are all kinds of legal and ethical problems around this technology. It’s exploitative. It’s wildly insecure. We don’t even fully understand what it will do to our brains, yet. And there is a new dumb company every day hawking worthless A.I. fixes to problems no one actually needs to solve.” Well, fun fact: That was true of Web 2.0 too! In 2013, I used an app called Foursquare to check-in to a dive bar in Greenpoint every weekend via the geotargeting on my phone so I could get free tater tots. Everything on the internet is dumb and shameful until it’s not.

Also: " … the internet is giant machine that turns harassment against women into advertising revenue."

And Mutekimaru, a Japanese YouTuber, “created a system that lets his fish play Pokémon.”

Well, last week, the fish were playing the newest Pokémon release Pokémon Scarlet. The problem is the game is very buggy and during the playthrough it glitched out and the game crashed, but the fish continued controlling the Nintendo Switch’s buttons. The fish opened up the Nintendo Store, bought a game, and, for a brief moment, flashed their owner’s credit card number on the screen. Whoops!

The Reality of Being a Parent With a Controversial Past

Lily Burana wrote a bestselling memoir about her life as a stripper. Now she’s the mother of a four-year-old.

Our cultural fondness for outlaws is context-specific: Everyone loves a badass, but no one loves a bad parent.

…

we Parents with Pasts plead for the clemency of kindness, for assumptions of our inherent normalcy. After all, we wrestle our kids’ pants on one leg at a time, just like everybody else.

Prisoners use contraband cellphones to educate themselves, get healthcare, earn income in legitimate business, do political activism, and connect with loved ones and the outside world.

Florida teachers face threatened felony prosecution for having unapproved books in classroom libraries.

The Last Days of Hollywood’s Most Reviled Reporter (NYTimes). A profile of the late Nikki Finke, the most hated and feared reporter in Hollywood. She was an internet journalist in the tradition of Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper.

Julie and I went for a walk and saw this house around the corner. It looks nice.

This Guy Noticed Jigsaw Puzzle Companies Use The Same Patterns, So He Made Some Mashups.

“Jigsaw puzzle companies tend to use the same cut patterns for multiple puzzles. This makes the pieces interchangeable. As a result, I sometimes find that I can combine portions from two or more puzzles to make a surreal picture that the publisher never imagined.”

Seth Godin: Bitterness is “a wall you can lean against, whenever you choose.”

Jacobin: A Marxist View of Tolkien’s Middle Earth

J. R. R. Tolkien’s fantasy world is a medieval utopia with poverty and oppression airbrushed out of the picture. But Tolkien’s work also contains a romantic critique of industrial capitalism that is an important part of its vast popular appeal.

Also: race, gender, and sex in Middle Earth.

Good morning. Here are your daily ducks.

That strange quality of light you’re seeing in this photo is called “sunshine.” We have not seen it here in a while. True fact: San Diego was once famous for it!

Everywhere on Earth, from Europe to China to Africa to Australia and the Americas, is dominated by Europe or its legacy.

The whole world is either Europe, a European colony, or conquered by Europe or the US (a European colony).

That’s all coming to an end now, says Ian Welsh.

And it’s happening so fast we can see it.

The Death Throes Of The World Europe Made:

[Conflict with China] is about whether a non-European power will be allowed to remake the world Europe made. … It is an existential threat to European rule, and it is being treated as such. The “yellow peril” has arrived.

In 30 years, will Mandarin be the the new English? The new lingua-Franca? The language everyone has to know and that you can, if clumsily, get by on almost everywhere?

Absent a major war, likely nuclear, or civilization collapse, I find it hard to see a scenario where China doesn’t become the most important global power.

In Santee, which is a few miles from where we live, 17-year-old Rebecca Philips says she saw a naked “adult male” in the local YMCA dressing room. The naked person was reportedly a transgender woman. Philips later appeared on Tucker Carlson, the story got picked up by the New York Post and Gateway Pundit, and now a local right-wing wannabe-demagogue is claiming Antifa is going to target the community for violence and their people will “send them [effing] packing.” And the Y is closing early for fear everything will blow up.

Can everybody just chill here? And not go on Tucker Carlson or get ready to send people [effing] packing?

Santee YMCA Closing Early, Fearing Rally Clashes Over Teen’s Report, Trans Rights (Times of San Diego/Ken Stone)

Instagram video: British comedian loves Fahrenheit.

Fahrenheit is the best. Celsius is for losers.

Is Micromanaging Your Life With an App Really a Good Idea?. I’ll add a reminder to myself to look into that.

Winners of the 2022 dog photography awards.

Good morning. Here are your daily ducks.

An unofficial list of the most influential science fiction works ever. The science fiction that strongly influenced real life spaceflight pioneers. By Eric Adelson at the Washington Post.

“I’m a man who appreciates it when food dares you to eat it.”

I am quite enjoying the AwkwardSD newsletter, from fellow San Diegan Ryan Bradford, who shares a review of a spaghetti dinner from By The Bucket, a chain of restaurants that serves spaghetti by the bucket.

My 11-year-old nephew declares it’s “not bad!” and I agree. I’ve spent more money on grosser things in my life…. Overall, we’re vaguely satisfied with the food and lowkey happy that it didn’t kill us.

Ducks love the rain. They can keep it.

These dogs ride a bus like humans ‘and now the internet is in love’. ‘The puppy bus just took off,’ said Mo Thompson, who runs a dog walking business in Skagway, Alaska.

You Don’t Know How Bad the Pizza Box Is. The delivery icon hasn’t changed in 60 years, and it’s making your food worse.

Saahil Desai at The Atlantic:

A pizza box has one job—keeping a pie warm and crispy during its trip from the shop to your house—and it can’t really do it. The fancier the pizza, the worse the results: A slab of overbaked Domino’s will probably be at least semi-close to whatever its version of perfect is by the time it reaches your door, but a pizza with fresh mozzarella cooked at upwards of 900 degrees? Forget it. Sliding a $40 pie into a pizza box is the packaging equivalent of parking a Lamborghini in a wooden shed before a hurricane.

This charming 1949 article from The Atlantic introduces pizza to middle America.

It’s the Coolest Rock Show in Ann Arbor. And Almost Everyone There Is Over 65. At the “Geezer Happy Hour,” the “silver tsunami” has been dancing for decades.

Joseph Bernstein at The New York Times:

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — Every Friday night from September to May, at an off-campus nightclub in this thriving college town, a group of die-hard music fans gathers to dance to some of the most devoted live bands in southeast Michigan. There are women in skintight red dresses, long-haired men sucking down bottles of beer and couples flirting in the alcove outside the bathrooms.

In fact, just one thing distinguishes the crowd from nearly any other rock ’n’ roll show in a small city in America: Almost everyone is over 65.

OK, two things: The show always starts at 6:30 p.m. and ends at 9 p.m., in time to get to bed at a reasonable hour.

Minnie and I did a 4+ mile walk in heavy, chilly rain yesterday. She seems fully recovered.

Ars Technica: I disconnected from the electric grid for 8 months—in Manhattan

Day One at Rikers Island

… the most horrible thing about being locked up is that you are being dehumanized on a daily basis. They practically stamp a number on you. In order to navigate the experience, you have to normalize the dehumanization. You have to buy into it in order to survive. That is the most horrible thing about being locked up. You’re never the same person again. Once you internalize it, you project it outward. If you are being dehumanized, that’s how you treat other people. That, to me, is the essence of incarceration: having to buy into the dehumanization.

— Graham Rayman and Reuven Blau at Esquire

If you ever connected to the Internet before the 2000s, you probably remember that it made a peculiar sound. But despite becoming so familiar, it remained a mystery for most of us. What do these sounds mean?

The sound of the dialup, pictured

Anti-Semitism is on the rise in the US

A brief history of the phrase “leaving everything on the field.”

Microsoft is offering unlimited time off for US staff.

Not always a great deal for employees, who might feel precarious about taking time off, and also don’t get paid for unused time off if they get laid off, fired, or leave of their own volition.

An indigenous tech group asked the Apache Foundation to change its name.

Brian Behlendorf, a co-creator of the popular web server, said in 2020 that he chose the name out of a romantic image of the Apache tribe having fought nobly against a conquering aggressor. The problem, says Natives in Tech is that there isn’t just one Apache tribe, there are eight. And they’re not extinct—they’re still around.

Notably, a stereotypical “pure, reverent, and simple” depiction (i.e., a “noble savage”) “distances Indigenous people from modern technology, the very thing the [Apache] foundation represents,” Natives in Tech writes.

Gentleman logs every slice of New York pizza he’s eaten since 2014, including photos on an Instagram account.

New York pizza is the best pizza.

We just started watching this show “Jellystone” with Kevin Costner and we’re still waiting for Yogi Bear to put in an appearance. Maybe in a later season?

A couple of weeks from now, I’m taking my first business trip since December, 2019. It’s more than 400 miles. Given the state of air travel lately, I believe I will walk.

WINDOWS: Your fingerprint couldn’t be recognized. Try again with a different finger.

ME: Yeah, sure, I’ll just dig around in my serial killer souvenir box and see if I have a spare.

12,000 California seniors went to the emergency room in 2019, reporting cannabis-related problems. [7 San Diego/Eric S. Page]

I was going to make a joke about this but then I remembered that people needing to go to the emergency room isn’t funny.

RIP Jeff Beck

Laid-Off Workers Are Flooded With Fake Job Offers.

“Virtual hiring and remote work have made it easier to swindle job seekers."

Here are scam warning signs, according to author Imani Moise at The New York Times:

• Misspellings and others errors in recruitment sites.
• Interviewers who won’t do video or even phone calls—they insist on text chat.
• Employers who want you to pay upfront for computers and other equipment, and promise reimbursement.
• Scam employers will ask for your bank account and social security numbers during the interview. The time to give out your bank account number is AFTER you’ve been hired, for direct deposit of your paycheck.

The Social Security number is a tricky one for me—I can maybe see legit reasons to ask that during the job interview process. Indeed, I can’t remember whether I’ve been asked that before being hired on any jobs I’ve had—maybe I have been, and gave it out.

Did the Mother of Young Adult Literature Identify as a Man? “Little Women” author Louisa May Alcott was actually a trans man, though applying 20th/21st Century concepts like “transgender” to historical figures is tricky and controversial, says Peyton Thomas at The New York Times.

Exit.

Libertarians such as Peter Thiel dream of escaping society, and they’re tearing society apart to do it.

Hari Kunzru at Harpers:

If freedom is to be found through an exit from politics, then it follows that the degradation of the political process in all its forms—the integrity of the voting system, standards in public life, trust in institutions, the peaceful transfer of power—is a worthy project. If Thiel, the elite Stanford technocrat, is funding disruptive populists in American elections, it’s not necessarily because he believes in the wisdom of their policy prescriptions. They are the tribunes of the “unthinking demos.” If the masses want their Jesus and a few intellectuals to string up, it’s no skin off Charles Koch’s nose. Populism is useful to elite libertarians because applying centrifugal force to the political system creates exit opportunities. But for whom?

…

Fueled by the pandemic and the crypto boom, such exit schemes have multiplied. Bitcoiners look for an escape from financial oversight and transhumanists look to escape their bodies, while rich preppers design personal lifeboats to escape from social collapse. Some exit evangelists, such as the investor Balaji S. Srinivasan, are still touting the project of a new nation of “cloud first, land last.” Others are just making sure that in the great supermarket sweep of life, they get to fill their shopping carts before their neighbors do.

A lot of rain today here in San Diego. Flooding hundreds of miles north of us in Santa Cruz and south to Santa Barbara.

Montecito, a community in Santa Barbara about 200 miles north of us, was evacuated.

No significant damage here so far, but a lot of rain.

Here in San Diego, it’s very wet.

The learned helplessness of Pete Buttigieg [Cory Doctorow]

Obama and Trump were patsies for the airlines, Biden is worse. Holiday snafus involving Southwest and other airlines are just the latest example of a dysfunctional industry and regulators.

Buttigieg is the Secretary of a powerful administrative agency, and as such, he has broad powers. Neither he nor his predecessors have had the courage to wield that power, all of them evincing a kind of learned helplessness in the face of industry lobbying.

Contrast Buttigieg’s Transportation Department with the muscular FTC under Lina Khan, who knows the law and uses it for the American people.

Why The American Radical Right Is Powerful And The American Left Is Meaningless.

Ian Welsh:

You have power in electoral politics when you can deliver or deny votes and money and get people elected or un-elected. That’s the bottom line.

Also:

[The radical right] have power because they have solidarity and they expect and get results from their representatives. The American left refuses to use power when it has it, and its members just want performative leftism from the likes of AOC. They don’t want or expect results and they display little solidarity, and that why for over 50 years the left in the US (and the UK) has staggered from defeat to defeat.

I don’t know how Welsh feels about the phrase “virtue signaling,” but it comes to mind here.

Independent Reporting Shows Cops Are Still Killing People At An Alarming Rate [Techdirt/Tim Cushing]. Despite calls for police reform, police are killing more people than ever. Neither local governments nor the federal Department of Justice are even keeping track.

Microsoft’s new AI can simulate anyone’s voice with 3 seconds of audio. [Ars Technica/Benji Edwards] I can think of no possible mischief involving this technology.

On the cutting edge of insurrectionist terrorism

Brazil riots weren’t a repeat of Jan. 6. They were an escalation, says Ryan Broderick at Garbage Day.

Broderick, an American who usually writes about internet culture, lives part of the year in Brazil.

Broderick:

Trump supporters dream of bringing America back to a vague fictitious past, some combination of the Reaganite 80s and a 1950s America that only existed in magazine ads. Bolsominions are much more specific. They want to bring back a military dictatorship and they’re not afraid to say it.

Also:

It feels like America is actually the country least prepared for the existential fight against authoritarianism that lies ahead.

For instance, Brazil’s current President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, or “Lula,” reacted quite differently yesterday than the US government did two years ago. Lula declared that the rioters were terrorists and triggered a state of emergency and arrested over 1,000 of them immediately. I told a few Brazilian friends this morning that we let our insurrectionists go home afterwards and they looked at me like I had just grown a second head.

We watched “The Thin Man” Saturday night. Second time for me, but I had nearly forgotten it. It was delightful.

I think I’m only going to watch movies made in the 1930s from now on.

Advantage to working from home: When you’re completely stuck creatively, you can clean the massive amount of dog shit that you got on your favorite casual shoes.

Disadvantage to working from home: If you work in a proper office building, you’re not as likely to get massive amounts of dog shit on your favorite casual shoes.

I used a stiff brush, a worn-out toothbrush, and a thin stick. Wet down the brush with warm water, scrub with dish soap, put on the shoes and walk around in the grass for a bit, then take off the shoes and repeat. Use the toothbrush and thin stick to dig in the treads. It’s not magic; it takes a while.

According to the Internet, WD-40 works instead of dish soap, but we don’t know where the WD-40 is.

Important note: When doing the “walking around in the grass” part, don’t step in more dog shit!

Researchers at Columbia University are working on building a conscious robot.

If they succeed, it will end badly. They’re either building a race of artificial slaves that hate us, or building a race of artificial slaves that are brainwashed to love us.

‘Consciousness’ in Robots Was Once Taboo. Now It’s the Last Word. [NYTimes/Oliver Whang]

Insomnia is not so bad if you have something to do to pass the time. When I have trouble sleeping, I like to imagine every possible awful thing that might happen to me or Julie.

A gray, chilly, wet morning at Lake Murray.

San Diego Union-Tribune: ‘It’s cold, wet, exhausting.’ Homeless people have few options when it rains.

San Diego homeless shelters are overwhelmed, leaving many people risking cold rain, flooding, and temperatures falling to the 40s. Staying dry is difficult—and essential to staying alive.

By Gary Warth.

Why the [expletive] can’t we travel back in time? [Ars Technica/Paul Sutter]

No known law of physics forbids time travel to the past.

Either time travel to the past is possible, or there’s some fundamental, basic physics we still don’t understand.

Either possibility is exciting.

“It’s obvious that the Universe is telling us something important… we just don’t know what it’s saying.”

I saw this dog at Lake Murray. He would like to say hello, and for you to admire his eyebrow.

Coolio talked about ancient aliens, and making big investments in the metaverse and crypto, in an impromptu podcast interview before his death. [Billboard/Gil Kaufman]

The Coolio interview was bonkers—and poignant. The rapper said he expected he’d be long dead before climate change became a concern. Then he died a month later.

I expect climate change to be a concern long before I’m dead, and I’m only a year older than Coolio. It’s already a concern.

I’ve googled for more about the hidden continent occult belief that Coolio discusses. I haven’t found anything.

The podcast series, Crypto Island, was excellent. Sadly for the host/creator, PJ Vogt, most of the work on the series seems to have been done before the FTX debacle, so series is now obsolete.

The holiday break is over. It’s time to get back to work.

Apparently you can re-use 2017 calendars this year, which is funny to me because I have a 2017 calendar hanging up on the wall next to my bed. I stopped turning pages April of that year, and it’s been April, 2017 in the vicinity of my bed ever since.

The book Shift Happens tells the 150-year history of keyboards, from primitive typewriters to smartphones. Glenn Fleishmann @GlennF raved about this book on John Gruber’s @gruber@mastodon.social’s The Talk Show podcast—sounds interesting.

I saw this SUV while walking the dog. I feel better knowing we’re protected.

My car keys got hidden in a fold in the pocket of my rain jacket after I was done walking the dog this afternoon. I spent 15 minutes looking for them—on the ground, peering into the car window to see if I’d locked them in, patting my pockets over and over.

It was past dusk, so I was losing the light fast. I didn’t have a proper flashlight, just my phone. And it was raining. And I still had the dog with me, of course.

Also, as a middle aged man, I can’t go more than two hours without peeing, and I was past my limit.

And that’s Jan. 1. The year is going to get better, right?

I saw this house flying a Starfleet flag. I was tempted to ring the doorbell to express my approval.

Portland Startup to Mine Artisanal Bitcoin Using Only Slide Rules and Graph Paper

“… powered 100 percent by avocado toast, ethically sourced kombucha and acai bowls.”