Archaeologists reveal life stories of hundreds of people from medieval Cambridge

‘I was told not to make eye contact with Tom Cruise’: meet the world’s most prolific film extra. Over a 60-year career, Jill Goldston has been a face in the crowd—literally, that’s her job—in 2,000 movies.

Raycast has a new feature where you can activate your Mac camera and look at yourself before jumping on a video call. I tried it out as soon as I got to my desk this morning, before having my first sip of coffee. That was a mistake.

So it begins. My Tumblr blog, formerly known as “Atomic Robot Live,” is now “Mitchipedia.” Now to discover the inevitable breakage! Let the wild rumpus of error messages begin!

Hollywood Goes Home: How Celebrity Endorsements Are Helping Dems Win Down Ballot. “In towns across the nation, there is _that _person — the kid who made it big, starred in some movies, became an action hero, maybe even won some awards. What if that person told you about an upcoming local election? Or a candidate who you should consider supporting? They are famous, sure, but they are more than that: They are _your town’s _famous person, someone with local credibility because they know what it’s like to grow up where you did. That’s the theory behind The Hometown Project, an progressive effort that looks to pair celebrities with candidates for state legislature, school board, or other local offices from the areas they grew up in.”

I will gladly endorse any Democrat running for office in my home town of East Northport, N.Y.

A Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable. We should stop pretending.

Also, by Alexandra Petri: I’m starting to think Donald Trump is sounding like Hitler on purpose

I’m having a couple of mandarin oranges with lunch. They’ve been sitting around the house a while. I think I will use the remaining fruits as billiard balls.

I recently discovered the power of not having opinions about things. Was Henry Kissinger a war criminal whose death we should celebrate? I don’t know. Maybe one day I’ll learn some things about him and come up with some conclusions. I have other things to do right now.

I registered the domain mitchipedia.org and now I love it so much I’m thinking about going to the hassle of changing alllllllll my social media accounts and my blog domain to that.

Red Hat kickstarts king-size Kubernetes cloud cost cuts. The Flaming Fedora fellowship debuts OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA) with hosted control plane, which it claims can cut costs of running Kubernetes clusters by 20%. I wrote this.

RIP Frances Sternhagen, 93, a solid character actor whom I have always liked. She had prominent supporting roles on “Cheers,” “ER,” “Sex and the City” and “The Closer,” and she was a Broadway veteran, winning two Tony awards, all while raising six children.

She liked playing “snobby older ladies. It’s always more fun to be obnoxious,” she said.

Before I upgraded to Sonoma I heard people saying the screensavers were great and I thought that was ridiculous. How great can screen savers be, I thought. But damn those are nice screensavers.

I’m going to try using this account as my main place in the fediverse. I’ll only use @mitchw@mastodon.social for reading, favoriting, boosting and replying.

If the experiment works, I’ll move my followers on @mitchw@mastodon.social here, using the magic of fediverse automation.

The Washington Post: Race isn’t real, science says. Advocates want the census to reflect that.. Race isn’t real, but racism is.

Why Do Superheroes Wear Spandex? The Rise, Fall, and Return of the Super-Stretchy Material

Thousands of papers seized from Spanish ships during the 18th Century are now online. The letters are from and to ordinary sailors, revealing details of daily life from that time.

The correspondence was seized by the British during wars in the 1700s, and is being published by British researchers.

“My dear beloved husband I will celebrate that this letter has reach[ed] your hands and finds you with the perfect health that I wish for myself," [writes Francisca Muñoz in Seville to her husband, Miguel Atocha, in Mexico on 22 January 1747/]. “I would like to know the reason why I did not receive any response to the 13 letters I sent to you; I would like to know if perhaps over there [there] is no paper or pen or ink not to have written even a letter…. “

Kvetch kvetch kvetch. But Francisca is just getting wound up.

Serious questions: At what point do rights of privacy end? If these people were alive, it would be a crime to publish their private letters. Do rights of privacy end at death? Even after 300 years, should these papers continue to be kept private?

Everybody who was Anybody had Dr. Feelgood and his Speed Shots on Speed Dial

Dr. Max Jacobson, aka “Dr. Feelgood,” injected amphetamine-based concoctions into the arms of celebrities and powerful people including JFK, Alfred Hitchcock, Truman Capote, Marlene Dietrich, Marilyn Monroe and more.

Capote described the “vitamin shots” as “instant euphoria.”

Messy Nessy Chic quotes Capote:

You feel like Superman. You’re flying. Ideas come at the speed of light. You go seventy-two hours straight without so much as a coffee break. You don’t need sleep, you don’t need nourishment. If it’s sex you’re after, you go all night. Then you crash – it’s like falling down a well, like parachuting without a parachute. You want to hold onto something and there’s nothing out there but air.

On the Our Opinions Are Correct podcast: While robots and self-driving cars get all the attention, four mundane technologies have the potential to change the future: Artificial wombs, smart toilets, new forms of public transportation and new cleaning machines.

… the Court felt that bringing the chicken into the courtroom to play tic-tac-toe would degrade the dignity of the Court. I thought that the dignity of the Court was degraded by executing a mentally-ill person.

— This American Life. Poultry Slam

The Pneumatic Tube Mail System in New York City

… the first cylinder tube to travel through the New York City system contained “a Bible, a flag and a copy of the Constitution. The second contained an imitation peach in honor of Senator Chauncy Depew (He was fondly known as “The Peach”). A third carrier had a black cat in it, for reasons unknown.”

Residents of North Sentinel Island off India are one of the few surviving tribes that resist contact with the outside world. When a missionary successfully contacted them in 2018, in violation of international law, they killed him brutally.

Turns out they (or their neighbors) were in contact with the outside world previously—a Victorian English adventurer—and it went badly for them, tragically and unsurprisingly.

Why Uncontacted Tribes Want to Stay Uncontacted

Placebos are effective treatments for many conditions, such as chronic pain. They work even when the patient is aware they are receiving a placebo, according to a leading researcher in placebo studies.

In other news, “placebo studies” is a thing.

An ode to ‘Gilbert Gottfried’s Amazing Colossal Podcast’. “… if you want to understand the man behind the squinty eyes, listen to the 600-plus episodes of ‘Gilbert Gottfried’s Amazing Colossal Podcast,’ one of the great love letters to twentieth century Hollywood.”