An unofficial list of the most influential science fiction works ever. The science fiction that strongly influenced real life spaceflight pioneers. By Eric Adelson at the Washington Post.

“I’m a man who appreciates it when food dares you to eat it.”

I am quite enjoying the AwkwardSD newsletter, from fellow San Diegan Ryan Bradford, who shares a review of a spaghetti dinner from By The Bucket, a chain of restaurants that serves spaghetti by the bucket.

My 11-year-old nephew declares it’s “not bad!” and I agree. I’ve spent more money on grosser things in my life…. Overall, we’re vaguely satisfied with the food and lowkey happy that it didn’t kill us.

Ducks love the rain. They can keep it.

These dogs ride a bus like humans ‘and now the internet is in love’. ‘The puppy bus just took off,’ said Mo Thompson, who runs a dog walking business in Skagway, Alaska.

You Don’t Know How Bad the Pizza Box Is. The delivery icon hasn’t changed in 60 years, and it’s making your food worse.

Saahil Desai at The Atlantic:

A pizza box has one job—keeping a pie warm and crispy during its trip from the shop to your house—and it can’t really do it. The fancier the pizza, the worse the results: A slab of overbaked Domino’s will probably be at least semi-close to whatever its version of perfect is by the time it reaches your door, but a pizza with fresh mozzarella cooked at upwards of 900 degrees? Forget it. Sliding a $40 pie into a pizza box is the packaging equivalent of parking a Lamborghini in a wooden shed before a hurricane.

This charming 1949 article from The Atlantic introduces pizza to middle America.

It’s the Coolest Rock Show in Ann Arbor. And Almost Everyone There Is Over 65. At the “Geezer Happy Hour,” the “silver tsunami” has been dancing for decades.

Joseph Bernstein at The New York Times:

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — Every Friday night from September to May, at an off-campus nightclub in this thriving college town, a group of die-hard music fans gathers to dance to some of the most devoted live bands in southeast Michigan. There are women in skintight red dresses, long-haired men sucking down bottles of beer and couples flirting in the alcove outside the bathrooms.

In fact, just one thing distinguishes the crowd from nearly any other rock ’n’ roll show in a small city in America: Almost everyone is over 65.

OK, two things: The show always starts at 6:30 p.m. and ends at 9 p.m., in time to get to bed at a reasonable hour.

Minnie and I did a 4+ mile walk in heavy, chilly rain yesterday. She seems fully recovered.

Ars Technica: I disconnected from the electric grid for 8 months—in Manhattan

Day One at Rikers Island

… the most horrible thing about being locked up is that you are being dehumanized on a daily basis. They practically stamp a number on you. In order to navigate the experience, you have to normalize the dehumanization. You have to buy into it in order to survive. That is the most horrible thing about being locked up. You’re never the same person again. Once you internalize it, you project it outward. If you are being dehumanized, that’s how you treat other people. That, to me, is the essence of incarceration: having to buy into the dehumanization.

— Graham Rayman and Reuven Blau at Esquire

If you ever connected to the Internet before the 2000s, you probably remember that it made a peculiar sound. But despite becoming so familiar, it remained a mystery for most of us. What do these sounds mean?

The sound of the dialup, pictured

Anti-Semitism is on the rise in the US

A brief history of the phrase “leaving everything on the field.”

Microsoft is offering unlimited time off for US staff.

Not always a great deal for employees, who might feel precarious about taking time off, and also don’t get paid for unused time off if they get laid off, fired, or leave of their own volition.

An indigenous tech group asked the Apache Foundation to change its name.

Brian Behlendorf, a co-creator of the popular web server, said in 2020 that he chose the name out of a romantic image of the Apache tribe having fought nobly against a conquering aggressor. The problem, says Natives in Tech is that there isn’t just one Apache tribe, there are eight. And they’re not extinct—they’re still around.

Notably, a stereotypical “pure, reverent, and simple” depiction (i.e., a “noble savage”) “distances Indigenous people from modern technology, the very thing the [Apache] foundation represents,” Natives in Tech writes.

Gentleman logs every slice of New York pizza he’s eaten since 2014, including photos on an Instagram account.

New York pizza is the best pizza.

We just started watching this show “Jellystone” with Kevin Costner and we’re still waiting for Yogi Bear to put in an appearance. Maybe in a later season?

A couple of weeks from now, I’m taking my first business trip since December, 2019. It’s more than 400 miles. Given the state of air travel lately, I believe I will walk.

WINDOWS: Your fingerprint couldn’t be recognized. Try again with a different finger.

ME: Yeah, sure, I’ll just dig around in my serial killer souvenir box and see if I have a spare.

12,000 California seniors went to the emergency room in 2019, reporting cannabis-related problems. [7 San Diego/Eric S. Page]

I was going to make a joke about this but then I remembered that people needing to go to the emergency room isn’t funny.

RIP Jeff Beck

Laid-Off Workers Are Flooded With Fake Job Offers.

“Virtual hiring and remote work have made it easier to swindle job seekers."

Here are scam warning signs, according to author Imani Moise at The New York Times:

• Misspellings and others errors in recruitment sites.
• Interviewers who won’t do video or even phone calls—they insist on text chat.
• Employers who want you to pay upfront for computers and other equipment, and promise reimbursement.
• Scam employers will ask for your bank account and social security numbers during the interview. The time to give out your bank account number is AFTER you’ve been hired, for direct deposit of your paycheck.

The Social Security number is a tricky one for me—I can maybe see legit reasons to ask that during the job interview process. Indeed, I can’t remember whether I’ve been asked that before being hired on any jobs I’ve had—maybe I have been, and gave it out.

Did the Mother of Young Adult Literature Identify as a Man? “Little Women” author Louisa May Alcott was actually a trans man, though applying 20th/21st Century concepts like “transgender” to historical figures is tricky and controversial, says Peyton Thomas at The New York Times.