I took an actual taxi, rather than an Uber, on a business trip last week. I paid with a plastic credit card and received a paper receipt.
Now I know what Civil War reenactors feel like.
This year, for Halloween, I’m wearing normal clothes. Somebody asked me, “What are you supposed to be?” I said, “I’m a former gifted child. I was supposed to be a lot of things.”
I don’t like Halloween.
To me, the Halloween season is like a joke that goes on far too long. It’s like a three-hour movie that should have been 90 minutes, but it lasts four to six weeks.
Also, death and decay are awful and not to be celebrated.
On the other hand, I love Thanksgiving and (even though I’m Jewish) Christmas.
The best of Japan’s mundane Halloween costumes for 2024. Includes “Man who keeps getting mistaken for a store employee” and “Students who went to the cafe to study but ended up spending the whole time reading manga and looking at their phones."
We’re still deciding what to give out for trick-or-treaters. We’ve narrowed the choices to carrot sticks and travel-size toothpaste.
I'm looking forward to Daylight Saving Time ending Sunday. Not a fan.
I was a night person when I was young, routinely getting to bed well after midnight. In the late 80s, my work often ended after midnight, and then I’d usually go out to bars and often roll home after 7 am.
That drastically changed in 1989, when I got a day job, and my clock gradually shifted over the following decades. I’ve seen a big shift over the last few years. And now I seem to be a morning person.
I’m looking forward to the end of Daylight Saving Time on Sunday because waking up and walking the dog in daylight is more important to me than that extra hour of sunlight in the evening.
Walking Minnie this morning, our neighborhood coyote passed us from behind on the other side of the street, loping along at about 1.5x our walking pace and giving us a wary side-eye. Minnie got excited and wanted to play. Minnie is a wonderful dog, but not intellectually gifted.
RIP Teri Garr, 79, after a long battle with multiple sclerosis.
She starred in “Young Frankenstein,” “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” “Tootsie,” “Mr. Mom,” Martin Scorsese’s “After Hours,” and the “Assignment: Earth” episode of “Star Trek.” She appeared on “M*A*S*H,” “The Odd Couple,” and “The Bob Newhart Show,” and in many more roles.
Starting out as a go-go dancer, she can be seen shimmying behind the performers in filmed rock concert “The T.A.M.I. Show” and in six Elvis Presley features….
Garr’s first speaking role came in the Monkees' offbeat feature film “Head,” written by Jack Nicholson, whom she had met in an acting class. On the “Assignment Earth” episode of “Star Trek,” she played a ditsy secretary, the first in a string of many such roles.
That was the Star Trek episode where the Enterprise goes back to 1960s Earth and encounters a super-advanced alien named Gary Seven, who is undercover as a human secret agent. In later life, Garr said that Trek producer Gene Roddenberry was a perv who kept wanting her to wear shorter and shorter miniskirts, and she didn’t do Trek fan appearances.
Garr explained to the A.V. Club in a viciously frank and feminist 2008 interview why she was often cast as the “long-suffering wife” in films such as “Mr. Mom”: “If there’s ever a woman who’s smart, funny, or witty, people are afraid of that, so they don’t write that. They only write parts for women where they let everything be steamrolled over them, where they let people wipe their feet all over them. Those are the kind of parts I play, and the kind of parts that there are for me in this world. In this life.”
I read a Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr post where he talks about using a plain text file as a to do list. And then I listened to this Cortex podcast where one of the hosts talks about using four different to do list apps and the other host uses two. I’m dizzy and need to lie down.
OMG stop me from looking at election news, and if I can’t stop looking at it, at least let me stop sharing it.
The rallies remain the same. In 2016, writer Scaachi Koul thought she might learn something attending Trump rally. “When Trump and his acolytes descended on Madison Square Garden in midtown Manhattan this Sunday, there was little left to learn about our once-again maybe-president. Nothing feels new anymore.”
There’s a helicopter flying over the house announcing something about a “suspect,” but I can’t make out anything they’re saying. If we’re to be murdered momentarily by a desperate criminal, this would be a cool self-referential final post.
A year of modest victories and tough losses for California's reparations movement
Robin Buller at The Guardian interviews Kamilah Moore, chair of the Californial taskforce on reparations for Black Americans.
We hired five trained economists to help us crunch the numbers to figure out what compensation could look like. We didn’t want to just come up with any number. We wanted it to be rooted in data and a solid methodology.
The final figure – $800bn – got a lot of attention. There was shellshock even among taskforce members. But we weren’t saying that the state should give $800bn to Black Americans in the state. We were saying that’s how much the state has dispossessed from African Americans in California. That’s how much the state has stolen from African Americans in California through exclusionary public policy – like housing segregation, mass incarceration, over-policing and the devaluation of Black businesses – that has hindered our opportunities to build wealth over time.
Then, the University of California, Berkeley, released a poll that found most Californians opposed direct cash payments, and that became the major headline. Speaking from the outside looking in, I think that played into the calculus of the Legislative Black Caucus. To me, it appears their strategy was to take a low-hanging-fruit approach by introducing recommendations from the taskforce report that were easy wins instead of more substantive ones, like direct cash payments and other forms of material reparations.
Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes: ‘We want to make America hate again’. He blames the “corrupt leftwing media” for Jan. 6 attack. Um … sure.
Washington Post writers say don’t dump subscriptions over non-endorsement
Edward Helmore at The Guardian:
From outside the Post, the CNN anchor Jake Tapper wrote on X: “Canceling a newspaper subscription helps politicians who don’t want oversight, does nothing to hurt the billionaires who own the newspapers and make decisions with which you may disagree, and will result in fewer journalists trying to hold the powerful to account.”
Tapper presents a false choice. Subscribers can choose to reedirect their Post subscriptions to publications that are willing to take a stand against tyranny.
I canceled renewal on my subscription. But the Post can win me back.
‘I’m not afraid. Let’s do it’: the Arizona abortion clinic testing the limits of the state’s ban. This is what courage looks like.
Nearly a million Puerto Ricans live in swing states. More than 470,000 in Pennsylvania alone.
