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