“… a bunch of predominately white, upper-middle-class Londoners fall in love while being self-deprecating and swearing inventively.…“ Love Actually at 20: Richard Curtis’s imperfect yet irresistible Christmas romcom
While walking with the dog this morning, I saw these. Seeing an El Camino first thing in the morning is lucky—everybody knows that.
I have seen this sign often while walking on Del Cerro Blvd. I have no idea what the story is. Hohokam Stadium is in Mesa, Arizona, more than 360 miles away, and what does it have to do with the (presumably, Chicago) Cubs?
Time’s 200 Best Inventions of 2023 includes Sightful, an AR laptop with a 100-inch virtual screen. Also: Shift Robotics Moonwalkers are “battery-powered wheeled shoes [that] allow you to walk normally (not skate), just faster and more easily. The Moonwalkers use AI to sense when you’re speeding up or slowing down and adjust themselves accordingly, and the wheels lock when you’re taking the stairs.” Using Moonwalkers, you can walk 2.5x faster than your normal gait. The price is $1,400.
Also: Ryse Recon is a personal helicopter, the TransAstra FlyTrap is an orbital bag to pick up space debris and the Italian Institute of Technology is developing an edible battery.
I hope I love anything as much as my grandma hated ‘The Sound of Music’. A sweet and loving tribute by Alexandra Petri.
I love Dave Winer’s vision of textcasting—write anywhere you want, using any tools, and read anywhere you want, using any tools.
Today, I take advantage of micro.blog’s great cross-posting tools and ActivityPub support, but that doesn’t get me everywhere I need to be. I have to cut-and-paste to post on Facebook, for example.
Here, blogger Tim Carmody responds to some of Dave’s ideas.
… Dave’s right: this worked for podcasts (the phrase “anywhere you get your podcasts!” is a great advertisement for interoperability breaking any single platform’s dominance), it worked for blogs, and it can work for this strange multimodal thing we’ve created called social media. It worked for the world wide web! And I will be ride or die for the open web until my life comes to an end.
One reason to seek out alternatives to silos like Facebook and X is because when we use those platforms, we’re volunteering our labor to further enrich billionaires. I need the money more than they do. And much as I like Tumblr, the same goes for them. I’m happy to do volunteer work, but not for the enrichment of people who already have far more money than me.
A starfish is a “disembodied head walking about the sea floor on its lips,” according to recent research.
I did not plan to have nightmares about starfish this weekend but here we are.
Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for September 22, 1971. Zonker has a Maynard Krebs vibe.
Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for September 21, 1971. Introducing Zonker.
Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for September 19, 1971. Mike tries to meet a woman at a bar. At first it goes well.
Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for September 15, 1971. Introducing Boopsie. She evolves over the years.
Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for August 30, 1971. Nixon goes to China.
Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for August 17, 1971. Meanwhile, here in 2023, there’s a dispensary on every corner.
I’m attending an event in a few days for which I’ll be wearing a suit and tie, which means I had to bring my suits in to be cleaned and pressed.
The last time I wore a suit was on my last business trip, December 2019. I figured then that I had no travel scheduled until February, so I the suits in a pile in my closet to be brought to the cleaners.
And they’ve been sitting in that pile for nearly four years.
Telling Julie “I’m bringing my suits to the cleaners” and then doing so was weird and retro, like using a rotary phone.
The dry cleaner hasn’t changed. They still give out a paper claim ticket, rather than using a fancypants app.
Ron Rosenbaum is from Long Island. The Long Islandest part of Long Island—South Shore. And yet he hates Billy Joel. Is that allowed?
Enjoying giving office supplies and travel size toiletries to trick or treaters.
On October 30, 1945: US government announces end of shoe rationing.
The beauty of finished software: Finished software is software that’s done—it doesn’t need updates.
I missed a message from a client yesterday morning because Slack moved everything around for no apparent reason at all.
“I started reading Ed McBain when I was probably 11 or 12,” [Stephen] King said, looking at his row of several novels by the prolific author of crime procedurals. “The bookmobile would come by. We lived out in the country. The first thing I remember is, I’m reading one of these books, and [detectives] Carella and Kling go to interview a woman about some crime. And she’s sitting there in her slip and she’s drunk, and she grabs her breast and squeezes and says, ‘In your eye, copper.’ And I thought to myself: This is not the Hardy Boys. Okay? It made an impression. It felt more real.”
Also, King about why he doesn’t think about his legacy:
“There are very few popular novelists who have a life after death. Agatha Christie, for one. I can’t think of anybody else who’s a popular novelist, really. People like John D. MacDonald, he was a terrifically popular novelist in his day, but when he died, his books disappeared off the racks. They were ultimately disposable. I think that a couple of the horror novels might last. They might be read 50 or a hundred years from now, ‘The Shining’ and ‘Salem’s Lot’ and ‘It.’ If you ask people, ‘What vampire do you know?,’ they’d say, ‘Dracula.’ ‘Well, who invented Dracula?’ ‘I don’t [expletive] know.’ So, 50 or a hundred years from now, people will say: ‘Oh, Pennywise, the clown. Yeah, sure.’ ‘Who is Stephen King?’ They won’t know.”
— Book Tour: A tour of Stephen King’s personal library
Now I’m thinking about deceased popular novelists who are still bringing in new readers in large numbers. Asimov? Bradbury? Is Hemingway widely read by anybody younger than Boomers?
Either CAPTCHAs are becoming harder or I’m becoming less human.
When I was 11 years old, I wanted to be Barnard Hughes when I grew up. I’m behind schedule.