Mitch's Blog

A bad day for local journalism.

LA’s Richest Man Sells Union-Tribune to Feared ‘Chop Shop’ (Voice of San Diego / Will Huntsberry and Scott Lewis)

Update: I emailed Slate to cancel my sub, and they replied promptly and said they had done so. So, points to them for that. But there really needs to be a button on the site.

At the park this weekend I saw a bulldog wearing a pearl necklace. Big chunky pearls, like Barbara Bush used to wear.

The pearls probably weren’t real, but the dog probably was.

Slate Plus is raising its subscription rate from $59 to $119 annually. That’s a nope. I searched the website for 15 minutes to find out how to cancel my subscription and was unable to find a link. That’s sleazy, Slate.

Parakeet Panic. “When invasive parakeets began to spread in New York City in the 1970s, the government decided it needed to kill them all. Today: The offbeat panic about wild parrots, and a history of anxieties about population growth.” (The Last Archive)

Wait, should I not be drinking airline coffee?. On the new Search Engine podcast, PJ Vogt investigates rumors that the water used on airlines is dirty and full of bacteria, and the flight crew won’t drink it, and won’t even use it to wash their hands.

“Harry Milas' sleight of hand skills are so good that he now helps to expose gambling rings. He explains the tricks of the trade and why he hates casinos.”

The Magician Who Catches Card Cheats in Casinos (The Guardian / Sian Cain)

In her new book “Nuts and Bolts Seven Small Inventions That Changed the World (in a Big Way),” structural engineer Roma Agrawal identifies and examines the seven of most basic building blocks of engineering that have shaped the modern world: the nail, the wheel, the spring, the lens, the magnet, the string, and the pump.

— Nuts and Bolts [99% Invisible]

Born into extreme poverty, [Cary] Grant was told as a child his mother had died. She had actually been placed in a psychiatric institution. It was the start of a life of repression and extraordinary reinvention.

— The Trauma of Cary Grant: How He Thrived After a Terrible Childhood - As Told by His Daughter. (The Guardian / Emma Brooks)

Grant was determined to give his only child, a daughter, born when he was 62, the good upbringing he never had. So he walked away from his film career to devote the rest of his life to raising her. That daughter, Emily Grant, is now an executive producer on a four-part TV series about her father’s life.

Want to read: This Bird Has Flown by Susanna Hoffs 📚Good interview with Hoffs, formerly of The Bangles, on Debbie Millman’s podcast. Hoffs is surprisingly smart. She’s written a novel and it sounds good.

Finished reading: Persian Fire by Tom Holland 📚 Fascinating story, a non-fiction history of the Persian-Greek war 2500 years ago. But a challenging read. The author uses ornate sentences that I had to read two or three times to get the gist of. I’ve read other Holland history books and enjoyed them, and did not find them quite so difficult.

Yesterday at the supermarket, I saw a man with a dog. The dog wasn’t wearing a service dog vest. It was just a dog, but inside the supermarket. It looked like a chocolate lab, but with a wiry tail.

I happened to be buying treats for Minnie at the dog treats shelf at the moment I saw the dog. The supermarket dog sniffed the shelves with great interest, then turned away.

Later, I saw a teen-age girl with an e-bike in the supermarket. She wasn’t riding it in the supermarket. She was just pushing it. Still, it was odd.

After that, I decided we were just bringing any dang thing we wanted into the supermarket, so I brought in the car and drove it up and down the aisles rather than walking, throwing my purchases from the shelves over my shoulder onto the back seat. I knocked a lot of things over, but it was otherwise very convenient.

I deleted Meta Threads from my phone. I may come back to the service, but I’m not feeling urgency, and I don’t like app’s privacy policies.

Threads grabs a great deal of user information, including text messages.

Text messages?! Are you kidding?!

I’ve got Facebook on my phone. That’s bad enough.

Has anybody found a news alerts service for the phone that only alerts you for world-changing news? All the news alert services I’ve tried are too noisy.

I want an alert if Biden or Trump drops dead, or if Ukraine boils over into World War III. I don’t need an alert to let me know somebody got murdered 15 miles away, or the Walmart killer got sentenced or—true alert I got from CNN yesterday—how to not get bedbugs from hotel beds.

Basically, I only want to get a news alert once every few months. All the news alerts I’ve subscribed to send alerts every few hours.

I fear the service I’m looking for may not exist.

Dolly Parton does not want to be an AI hologram, thank you very much: ‘I don’t want to leave my soul here on Earth’ (Boing Boing / Rusty Blazenhoff)

Jo Walton writes about Heinlein’s Worst Novel. I 98% agree.

My favorite Heinleins are his early books, particularly “Citizen of the Galaxy.”

I loved “The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress” and “Starship Troopers,” but I’d love them even more without the lectures.

I loved “Stranger in a Strange Land” when I was 13 years old, but it ages badly.

And “The Cat Who Walks Through Walls” and “To Sail Beyond the Sunset” are just plain bad.

I often think about the failed US Heinlein describes in “I Will Fear No Evil” and “Friday.”