Mitch's Blog
About A good Nelson Mandela quote This blog is a dog's breakfast Newsletter Follow this blog on Mastodon, Tumblr, Bluesky or Micro.blog Also on Micro.blog
  • “It makes you really appreciate how free we are as a country when you’re hiding under a desk with bullets flying over your head.” The Onion: Americans Describe What It’s Like Surviving A Mass Shooting.

    → 9:28 AM, May 20
    Also on Bluesky
  • Jamelle Bouie: There is a reason Ron DeSantis wants history told a certain way. DeSantis is continuing a long tradition. Lawmakers in the antebellum South censored textbooks to remove criticism of slavery.

    → 9:23 AM, May 20
    Also on Bluesky
  • The Four Freedoms, According to Republicans

    Jamelle Bouie at the New York Times:

    There is the freedom to control — to restrict the bodily autonomy of women and repress the existence of anyone who does not conform to traditional gender roles.

    There is the freedom to exploit — to allow the owners of business and capital to weaken labor and take advantage of workers as they see fit.

    There is the freedom to censor — to suppress ideas that challenge and threaten the ideologies of the ruling class.

    And there is the freedom to menace — to carry weapons wherever you please, to brandish them in public, to turn the right of self-defense into a right to threaten other people.

    → 9:16 AM, May 20
  • It amazes me when I see someone has worked at the same company for 20+ years. I respect that stability.

    → 10:35 AM, May 19
    Also on Bluesky
  • De-nerding on coffee

    A few years ago, I nerded out on coffee-making methods and eventually settled on using an Aeropress for my daily work-juice. Then I went down a rabbit-hole of looking up Aeropress coffee formulas.

    There’s an entire nerd subculture of Aeropress enthusiasts, who measure their beans and water to the gram, use a thermometer to measure the weater temperature, and time their brew to the second. They even count the number of strokes they use to stir the coffee before serving.

    While I was going through all this, and posting about it on social media, a couple of friends staged an intervention. They are themselves coffee enthusiasts, but they told me I needed to relax.

    And I learned that the Aeropress is indeed a very forgiving method of making coffee. Use good beans, grind them at home, measure using a scoop without worrying about the precise weight, use water at about the right temperature, and you’ll be fine. And that’s what I’ve been doing for the last few years.

    In the last few days I let go of the last remnant of my coffee obsessive-compulsiveness. Until a few days ago, I measured the amount of water I used to make coffee. But now I’m just doing it by eye. I have a little Hario insulated coffee server, and I just fill that up with hot water until it looks like it’s pretty close to the top. And it’s fine.

    Don’t tell the gang at reddit.com/r/coffee; they’ll ban me for sure.

    → 9:54 AM, May 19
    Also on Bluesky
  • Today I learned Alexander Skarsgård and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau are not the same person.

    → 8:25 AM, May 19
    Also on Bluesky
  • On YouTube: Unboxing Shakespeare’s First Folio..

    Amazing. The books look so new.

    I’ve always known Shakespeare was a popular writer in his time, but it’s striking to see this reminder.

    Today I learned what a “folio” and “quarto” are.

    → 7:43 AM, May 19
    Also on Bluesky
  • This is Catfishing on an Industrial Scale

    Laura Cole writes at Wired about fake dating sites that employ hundreds of freelancers around the world “to animate fake profiles and chat with people who have signed up for dating and hookup sites…. Often recruited into ‘customer support’ or content moderation roles, they found themselves playing roles in sophisticated operations set up to tease subscription money from lonely hearts looking for connections online.”

    These reps, who often work for pennies from developing countries, roleplay as women with incredibly detailed—and fictional—biographies and profiles, messaging men on online dating sites. The reps rapidly toggle through many characters in each work shift, and each operator might roleplay as hundreds of women, all while sitting at laptops in their homes.

    As with many sophisticated criminal operations, I am both appalled and amazed at the sophistication.

    → 6:01 AM, May 19
    Also on Bluesky
  • Quite a lot of nature this morning

    This morning, a little after 8, I was on my way home from walking the dog, one street over from the house, and I saw a coyote loping down the street. One of the neighbors, still in her red pajamas and slippers, stood in the street and watched. We chatted about the coyote and where it might live. That coyote has been around lately; I recognize it.

    I’m pretty sure that a coyote won’t attack a full-sized adult person. And while coyotes will kill and eat small and even medium-sized dogs if the dog is unattended, I’m pretty sure a coyote won’t attack a dog on a leash accompanied by a full-sized adult person. I need to look into that.

    Here are tips for keeping a dog safe from coyotes. I used to have a whistle on a keychain, but the keychain fastener broke a few months ago, and I stopped carrying it with me. I should replace that.

    This was only the latest in a series of nature encounters this morning.

    When policing the backyard for canine by-product at about 6:30, I heard ducks grumbling in a corner of the garden where we do not usually get ducks. It’s a little fenced-off triangle at the corner of the yard, up against the house, where there are a lot of potted plants. Later, Julie said that’s probably a good place for ducks to nest.

    Two minutes later, back inside the house, I saw one of our garden squirrels scuttling around on a big palm tree immediately outside the window.

    Two minutes after that, bringing the dog through the garden gate, I saw a skeletal-looking dragonfly hanging still next to the gatepost, about five feet off the ground. The dragonfly was dead and caught in a spiderweb. Somebody had a good breakfast this morning.

    And twenty minutes after that, I was at the park and saw two adult Canada geese and about eight goslings, almost on the footpath, much closer than usual. The goslings are half-grown now, with their adult colors. The female and goslings were pecking at the ground. The gander stood by the path and ordered me and the dog to fuck off.

    → 1:33 PM, May 18
    Also on Bluesky
  • Big Tech is parasitic on the news industry, but click taxing isn’t the answer, says Cory Doctorow, who has four better ideas.

    → 1:08 PM, May 18
    Also on Bluesky
  • jwz: “Today I learned that Church Molestation Liability Insurance is a thing that exists

    You know what’s not a thing that exists? Drag Show and LGBTQ Bar Molestation Insurance. Because drag shows and LGBTQ bars aren’t threats to kids.

    → 1:06 PM, May 18
    Also on Bluesky
  • Disney Pulls Plug on $1 Billion Development in Florida. Daring Fireball: “Vote for Republicans, they’re good for business.”

    → 1:05 PM, May 18
    Also on Bluesky
  • Kieran Culkin, who plays Roman on “Succession,” would be outstanding as Random in the miniseries of Roger Zelazny’s “Chronicles of Amber” that’s supposedly coming.

    → 6:35 AM, May 18
    Also on Bluesky
  • ME: I can drink three strong cups of coffee every day without any negative effects! ALSO ME: I wonder how I got this vicious insomnia, which is getting worse.

    → 4:19 PM, May 17
    Also on Bluesky
  • Today I learned the phrase “Taco Tuesday” is a registered trademark of the fast food chain Taco John. But Taco Bell is going to court to liberate “Taco Tuesday” for everyone.

    → 12:39 PM, May 17
    Also on Bluesky
  • Cory Doctorow: The IRS will do your taxes for you (if that’s what you prefer) “After years of expensively purchased delay, Turbotax and its fellow tax-profiteers are losing the fight to make you pay them to tell the government what it already knows.”

    → 12:33 PM, May 17
    Also on Bluesky
  • Today I learned Jeff Bezos’s biological father was a unicycle hockey player and owned and operated a bicycle shop.

    → 10:40 AM, May 17
    Also on Bluesky
  • Elon Musk: Work from home ‘morally wrong’ when some have to show up (CNBC). Wait til he finds out some people are billionaires while others struggle with poverty.

    → 9:20 AM, May 17
    Also on Bluesky
  • Cory Doctorow: Rent control works. It keeps housing costs down, doesn’t constrain supply, and sometimes increases that supply.

    We need rent control, and we need to build plenty of more housing.

    … regular housing for working people. Mr Market doesn’t want to build it, no matter how many “incentives” we dangle. Maybe it’s time we just did stuff instead of building elaborate Rube Goldberg machines in the hopes of luring the market’s animal sentiments into doing it for us.

    → 12:31 PM, May 16
  • I Will Defend Free Speech to the Death. Or Until an Autocrat Asks Me to Stop. “Let every petty dictator take notice: If you want Twitter to censor its users, just send me an email.” Via kottke.org

    → 6:12 AM, May 16
  • Want to read: Rumpole and the Penge Bungalow Murders by John Mortimer 📚

    → 1:58 AM, May 16
    Also on Bluesky
  • The people who design public bathrooms like to change the faucet designs just to fuck with us. “Let’s see those fuckers try to wash their hands NOW,” they chortle.

    → 1:57 PM, May 15
    Also on Bluesky
  • The Ugly Truth Behind “We Buy Ugly Houses”. ProPublica’s Anjeanette Damon, Byard Duncan and Mollie Simon investigate HomeVestors of America, which preys on homeowners desperate to sell, including older adults who have dementia or are in the final stages of terminal illness.

    → 10:35 AM, May 15
    Also on Bluesky
  • BlueSky supports Markdown links when cross-posting from micro.blog (which is how I post to BlueSky. Let’s see if BlueSky also supports bold and italics.

    → 10:25 AM, May 15
    Also on Bluesky
  • You’re not uncool. Making friends as an adult is just hard. One important suggestion: Assume that people will like you when they meet you, says University of Maryland professor Marisa G. Franco. “We all have this tendency to think we’re more likely to be rejected than we actually are."

    → 10:09 AM, May 15
    Also on Bluesky
← Newer Posts Page 36 of 57 Older Posts →
  • RSS
  • JSON Feed