Things that don’t get you kicked out of GOP leadership:

  • Heavy petting in a crowded theater in the presence of children, on video.
  • Being under investigation for sex trafficking
  • Being Donald Trump, a senile sexual predator and con man who attempted an incompetent coup to overthrow the US government and assassinate the sitting Speaker of the Hous and VP, with 91 felony criminal charges.

Things that get you kicked out of your position in the GOP:

  • Failure to shut down the US government.

If the Democrats can sign on six moderate Republicans, the Democrats can pick the next speaker. It’s a long shot, sure, but in today’s political climate I’m not ruling anything out.

Because today has been weird, I am just now having my first coffee of the day, at nearly 1:30 pm.

Also, my will to live has been restored.

I believe these two events to be not coincidental.

I got the RSV vaccine, flu shot and Covid booster Saturday afternoon and it flattened me the rest of the weekend. I slept 16 hours yesterday. On the other hand, now I’m fine, and sleeping a lot, reading a lot and watching a couple of movies are a great way to spend the weekend.

I got the flu shot, Covid booster and RSV vaccine all at once yesterday, and that flattened me for nearly a full day. Feeling better now.

I remember when doing shots had a similarly debilitating effect but the first hours were more interesting and enjoyable.

I usually work at a standing desk but today I did some work sitting on the couch and learned I can write for short bursts while the dog is licking my face.

Later, the dog booped the keyboard to let me know she thought there should be a comma there.

There did not need to be a comma there. Dogs are bad at punctuation.

Occasionally I get annoyed at Inoreader’s quirks and I try alternatives for reading feeds. But then I come back to Inoreader. Nothing beats it for powering through many headlines quickly to zero in on the articles I actually want to read.

News about retrieving samples from an asteroid have got me thinking about a Lovecraftian eldritch horror that has been stranded on a rock in space for billions of years and has anger management issues.

I’m thinking about “Level 7,” an apocalyptic 1959 novel that had quite an effect on me when I read it as a boy 📚

”Level 7,” by a Ukrainian-born Israeli writer named Mordecai Roshwald, is written in the first person by a modern soldier whose name was taken away from him by the state, and is now designated only as X-127. He lives in an underground military complex, and his sole job is the push the buttons that launch the missiles in the event of nuclear war. X-127’s nation, and that nation’s enemy, are intentionally left unidentified.

The residents‘ lives are regimented and standardized, with the people reduced to little more than machines themselves. And yet I found X-127’s little world fascinating, and weirdly appealing.

Next paragraph is a spoiler—cut-and-paste it into Rot-13.com to read:

Va gur zvqqyr bs gur abiry, gur rarzl angvbaf unir gurve ahpyrne jne, naq rirelobql ba gur fhesnpr vf xvyyrq. Gura gur ahpyrne ernpgbe gung cbjref gur haqretebhaq pbzcyrk ortvaf gb yrnx enqvngvba, naq gur erfvqragf ortva gb qvr bar ol bar. K-127 vf gur ynfg fheivibe, naq ur qvrf ng gur raq bs gur abiry, fpenjyvat gur svany jbeqf vagb uvf wbheany. Gung ohttrq zr jura V jnf n obl—vs gur ynfg zna ba Rnegu vf qrnq, jub’f ernqvat guvf svefg-crefba obbx. Vaqrrq, V yrnea abj gung guvf cbvag obgurerq Ebfujnyq, gbb; gur bevtvany abiry unq na nccraqvk fhccbfrqyl jevggra ol Znegvna nepurbybtvfgf jub pnzr gb Rnegu naq sbhaq gur znahfpevcg.

Roshwald emigrated to America and died in Maryland in 2015.

Despite myriad potential distractions, it’s good to see Washington lawmakers focused on what really matters, which is whether John Fetterman looks nice.

A friend’s post on social media was too funny for the simple thumbs-up or smiley emoji, but not funny enough for the laughing-so-hard-I’m-crying emoji. I overthink things sometimes.

Our new mortgage company wants to have a closer emotional relationship with us than we are interested in having.

Quit: The Silo Series Collection by Hugh Howey 📚 Grinds to a halt 300-400 pages in with 1,200-1,300 pages to go. I’d rather seal myself and my descendants in an underground cylinder than continue reading.

Finished reading: Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum 📚 Extremely interesting!

I’m finishing up writing a networking product factsheet now. Grammarly suggested I change “packets” to “boxes.” Noooooo…..

I observed with interest the recent meme by young women who were amazed to find the young men in their lives thought about Rome often.

I certainly think about Rome often, though I am not a young man—I am a man in the period of life I like to call “early late middle age.” I never thought thinking about Rome was remarkable.

I’m not sure I should be considered part of the meme because I’m a history buff, and one of the historical periods that interests me is Rome. History is a hobby for me, and I think about history a lot.

On the other hand, maybe that makes me a big part of the meme.

Historian Patrick Wyman has a theory on why people (of every and all genders) are fascinated by Rome today. It’s a good theory and now I think I need to subscribe to his podcast and read his books.

And Ryan Broderick has a theory why this meme is becoming popular now:

Every 5-7 years, a whole bunch of people come of age online at the same time. Their dumb, usually playful freshman-dorm-icebreaker-level content and discourse is then pored over by media outlets and turned into these big news cycles that inevitably sour. But I think it’s just kids making sense of the world around them. It’s fun and sometimes reveals some interesting quirks about society, but it doesn’t always — and, I’d argue, rarely does — matter.

By me: Oracle & Microsoft’s big cloud partnership: It’s about AI: For the first time, Oracle is bringing its Autonomous Database to another company’s cloud, running on Oracle Exadata servers in Microsoft Azure data centers.

I have discovered Excalidraw and achieved nerdvana.

I, a complete design illiterate, was able to create a simple networking diagram for a marketing document in 25 minutes, having never used the tool before. Later, the client will be able to use Excalidraw’s built-in collaboration tools to make changes, and then hand off to a designer to polish.

Earlier I mentioned the movie “The Postman Always Rings Twice” but I brain-farted and called it “The Milkman Always Rings Twice” and now I want to see “The Milkman Always Rings Twice,” which would be about a milkman who’s seduced by a femme fatale who is lactose intolerant.

My latest article: Oracle boosts multi-cloud support for AWS and Red Hat OpenShift. It’s a big difference from previous years when Oracle tried—and spectacularly failed—to get customers to go all-in on Oracle’s cloud.

A note to my fellow Jews, particularly Jewish-Americans

Do you feel any connection to the place where your grandparents came from?

My grandparents came from Eastern Europe. Poland on my father’s side, and Lithuania on my mother’s. But I do not feel like a Polish-American or Lithuanian-American. I’m just plain American. Or a Jewish American.

I suspect this is because my grandparents left those countries to get away from anti-Semitism, and found a welcoming home here. I have had the good fortune to be born in one of the few places and times in history where Jews face very little anti-Semitism. No wonder I’ve never won the lottery—I used up all my luck when I was born.

New York occupies the place in my heart where other people put their ancestral affinity. I’m an expatriate New Yorker, the way some people are Italian-American or Irish-American.