Links and ephemera Tuesday 7.29.2025
✪ “Never share a foxhole with a character who carries a photo of his sweetheart.” Roger Ebert’s Glossary of Movie Terms. greaterandgrander.com
✪ Cory Doctorow reviews Daniel de Visé’s “The Blues Brothers,” a book about the making of the movie, its influence in popular culture and the lives of Belushi and Aykroyd. “This isn’t a book about a movie; it’s a rich and engrossing tale of an extraordinary creative collaboration that found an unlikely foothold at just the right time and place.” pluralistic.net — I had no idea Cory is a “Blues Brothers” superfan. I love the movie too. Time to see it again!
✪ “Usually south park’s relevancy feels very fake and surface level to me, but it’s really something how trump and his base are actually, visibly much more enraged by this than they’ve been about any other criticism, any other show, any other enemy I’ve seen in the entire near-decade of his political career.” tumblr.com — My gut feeling, in the absence of evidence, is that MAGA sees “South Park” as their own and therefore sees this episode as a betrayal.
✪ How the Grateful Dead built the internet. Deadheads and lyricist John Perry Barlow helped build the WELL, a pioneering online forum, and Barlow founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). bbc.com
✪ A little something to take the edge off. tumblr.com
✪ Ghislaine Maxwell is pleading with the Supreme Court and Trump to intervene in her criminal case. thehill.com — I am enjoying great schadenfreude for all parties.
✪ RIP Tom Lehrer, musical satirist and mathematician. nytimes.com — He only performed and recorded music for a few years, devoting most of his professional life to mathematics. “His music was ultimately just a momentary detour in an academic career that included teaching posts at Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of California, and even a stint with the Atomic Energy Commission.”
✪ How twiddling enshittifies your brain. pluralistic.net — Cory Doctorow: Online services like Google Search become “cognitive prostheses,” and when they enshittify, it makes us stupider. “The more useful and important a service becomes to you, the more the service’s proprietors can extract from you. They don’t care if you hate them, so long as you love the utility you get from the service.” Also: Moral panics about pocket calculators and literacy, Gen Z’s inability to read analog clocks, blogging as a cognitive prosthesis, a San Francisco man who got locked out of his Google account when the algorithm stupidly tagged a legitimate photo of his child as kiddie porn and how AI trickery keeps tech companies' stock prices artificially inflated.
Related: On recent trips to London and Copenhagen, we relied on Google Maps to navigate and we were able to move around like natives.
Even when I’m home, I rely on GPS (at home, I prefer Apple Maps), even for places I go to frequently. Why bother storing directions in my brain when I can keep them in my pocket?
✪ The South Park thing. “… if this episode made Cheeto Mussolini throw his ketchup at the wall, I’ll take it.” jwz.org
✪ “Bagpipes drowning out Trump as he’s speaking. Can we make this a thing everywhere he goes” bsky.app
✪ Trump Threatens To Withhold Billions From States That Try To Make Broadband Affordable To Poor People techdirt.com
✪ It turns out there’s a right and wrong way to pee. washingtonpost.com — Something else for me to feel performance anxiety about!
Volkswagen Beetle parked on a street in San Francisco, 1970
Lady wearing dark ball gown with lace bolero, dark gloves and a fan, 1880.
Elton John’s giant Pinball Wizard boots from the movie “Tommy.”
