I’m turning my home office upside down looking for my passport and have not found it. But I have found nine iPhone cases and one iPad case for devices of various sizes and vintage that I no longer own.

Harlan Ellison tells the story of his encounter with Frank Sinatra. Gay Talese wrote about the incident in Talese’s classic Esquire article, “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold.” Ellison’s telling is spicier and includes details Talese left out.

Thinking about this one time I listened to a podcast episode about imposter syndrome and thought well that was very interesting but it doesn’t apply to me because I haven’t accomplished enough for imposter syndrome.

‘My songs spread like herpes.’ Why did satirical genius Tom Lehrer swap worldwide fame for obscurity?

Francis Beckett profiles the caustic singer/songwriter, who is still alive at 96. Beckett never gets an answer to the question, but concludes:

Tom Lehrer is a prodigiously talented man who has no interest at all in money for its own sake, or in money to wield power. He wants enough to be comfortable and to do the few things he wants to do, and he has that. I suspect too that, despite his protestations to the contrary, there is a serious man underneath the caustic, cynical front. He once said that you cannot be funny if you are angry. He could just about stay detached enough to be funny about Eisenhower’s America. Trying to be funny about a nation that can elect a President Trump might tear him apart.

Gilbert Gottfried talks with Roger Corman

YouTube. Podcast

An enjoyable podcast, but a little sobering to consider two of the three men in this recent episode are now dead.

The possibility of remaking Ron Howard’s debut directorial movie, “Eat My Dust,” with a bigger budget. The Sharknado franchise. Working with Jack Nicholson on “The Crybaby Killer” and “The Trip.” Casting Peter Fonda and Nicholson. Charles Bronson, legit tough guy with a sensitive character. Boris Karloff, Vincent Price and Basil Rathbone in Edgar Allen Poe movies. Peter Lorre improvises lines, creating problems with Karloff. Making a movie on a whim, when golf plans rained out. The cult classic “Little Shop of Horrors” and its unexpected success. William Shatner’s first movie, “The Intruder,” a low-budget drama about racial integration in the South, shot in southern Missouri in the face of death threats from the Ku Klux Klan. Shooting “WIld Angels” with actual Hell’s Angels, resulting in death threats from the motorcycle club after the movie became successful. And more.

The Valley of the Dolls — On the Last Archive podcast, historian Jill Lepore reads her essay on the tangled history of Barbie, followed by discussion with podcast host Ben Naddaff-Hafrey about the doll and “intellectual property, IP theft, and the relationship between corporations and feminism.”

Holly Hunter will appear in a main role in the upcoming “Star Trek: Starfleet Academy” series. variety.com — Nice!

📷 🐕 💩I’m happy to report that Minnie is a healthy dog, she got her shots, she was very glad to be done with all that, and we did not break the vet’s office’s poop-free lobby streak.

I need to take the dog to the vet later today. So much drama! Whimpering and trembling and splooting flat on the ground and refusing to move.

The dog doesn’t like it either.

The Clue of the Blue Bottle — On the Last Archive podcast, historian Jill Lepore attempts to solve a century-old murder in Barre, Vermont and explores the history of criminal investigations and trials, evidence, facts, clues and more.

Boat shoes are supposedly high fashion now.

I boggled because I’ve been wearing the same shabby pair of boat shoes in warm weather for 14 years. The opposite of high fashion.

Writer Jacob Gallagher had a similar thought.

Throughout college, I owned a pair of boat shoes that were, in a word, vile. I wore them until the soles were as thin as a Pringle and they stank like an elephant. By sophomore year, they were drenched in a Pollock-ian mélange of beer, mud, coffee, ketchup and other substances best left forgotten. They were a reliable, battered pair of shoes. They were also eventually a fungal science experiment. What they were absolutely not was stylish.

No, I am not addicted to exercise

I go for long walks every day with the dog—a little more than 90 minutes a day on average. I do it every day when I’m well and at home, sometimes arranging my day around it. I don’t do it when my body is saying NO NO NO. When I had covid two years ago, I just parked my ass in bed for a week until I felt up to walking, then took a few days to get back into the full 90-minute walk.

I don’t run, and I certainly don’t run until I puke.

Still, I am definitely compulsive about my exercise routine. And I’m OK with that.

Also, I have to watch what I eat ALL THE TIME. I can’t just eat when I’m hungry like many people do. I have to weigh and measure nearly everything.

Fifteen years ago, I was 100 pounds overweight and sedentary. Now, even though I’m 62 years old, I firmly believe I have the body of a healthy 35-year-old, and exercise and good eating are the credit for that. (Well, also the luck to be born healthy and middle-class—those are hugely important too. But not sufficient.)

Whereas if I had kept up the bad habits I had 15 years ago, I would be a physical wreck today, and there’s a good chance I’d be dead.

Group chats rule the world.

Most of the interesting conversations in tech now happen in private group chats: Whatsapp, Telegram, Signal, small invite-only Discord groups.

Also:

… every group chat has a n-1 group containing everyone except that annoying member. And if you think your chat doesn’t have such a group, oh boy, do I have some bad news for you.

x.com

I loved the “Planet of the Apes” movies and TV series when I was a kid. We’ve recently seen the first two of the current series, starting with “Rise” in 2011, and I think those are pretty great too.

We watched “Dawn of the Planet of the Apes” last night. The motion-capture/CGI performances of the ape characters were brilliant. Thematically, the movie was of a piece with the 1968-70s series, at least as I remember it, about the futility and misery of violence, war and hate, and of seeing other races as animals—“vermin”—and how violence and hate becomes a tide that sweeps good people away.

The movie came out in 2014, and some of the parallels to the ten years of events that were to follow—the last 10 years we’ve lived through—are eerie. A plague. The rise of a megalomanial leader who’s driven by self-love and hate for others.

Jamelle Bouie: The Underappreciated Genius of ‘Planet of the Apes’

There is no franchise in Hollywood filmmaking that is as consistently good, and as consistently interesting, as “Planet of the Apes.”

I feel very strongly about this, and not because I am an admitted enthusiast of genre filmmaking. Like any long-running series, “Planet of the Apes” – which spans 10 films and more than 50 years – has its lows. But those are well outnumbered by the films that deliver real thrills, showcase strong (and occasionally exceptional) performances and, rare among Hollywood movies of its type, provoke thoughtful discussion of serious ideas.

nytimes.com

When Humanity Gets Messy, Sometimes the Best Tech Solution Is To Do Nothing — The people who set up the New York-Dublin video portal learned the wrong lesson, says Mike Masnick. They should have just kept it going, and accepted a certain amount of bad behavior.

techdirt.com

The rise and fall of the personal jetpack

Jetpacks were ubiquitous in midcentury pop culture, including James Bond, the Jetsons and Gilligan’s Island. “… it felt like a matter of time before people could ride a jetpack to work.” But we never got personal jetpacks. This delightful episode of the 99% Invisible podcast looks at the history of the jetpack—how it came to be developed after World War II, how it became a pop culture phenom, and why it flopped. As always, the website has great images to accompany the podcast. 99percentinvisible.org

Also: Cory Doctorow—You were promised a jetpack by liars. pluralistic.net

The jetpack—technically a rocket belt—was developed by Wendell Moore at Bell Aircraft Corp. in the 1960s.

Moore was a consummate showman, which is to say, a bullshitter. He was forever telling the press that his jetpacks would be on everyone’s back in one to two years, and he got an impressionable young man, Bill Suitor, to stage showy public demonstrations of the rocket belt. If you ever saw a video of a brave rocketeer piloting a jetpack, it was almost certainly Suitor. Suitor was Connery’s stunt-double in Thunderball, and it was he who flew the rocket belt around Sleeping Beauty castle.

Suitor’s interview … for the podcast is delightful. Suitor is a hilarious, profane old airman who led an extraordinary life and tells stories with expert timing, busting out great phrases like “a surprise is a fart with a lump in it.”

But what’s most striking about the tale of the Bell rocket belt is the shape of the deception that Moore and Bell pulled off. By conspicuously failing to mention the rocket belt’s limitations, and by callously risking Suitor’s life over and over again, they were able to create the impression that jetpacks were everywhere, and that they were trembling on the verge of widespread, popular adoption.

What’s more, they played a double game: all the public enthusiasm they manufactured with their carefully stage-managed, canned demos was designed to help them win more defense contracts to keep their dream alive. Ultimately, Uncle Sucker declined to continue funding their boondoggle, and the demos petered out, and the “promise” of a jetpack was broken.

As I listened to the 99 Percent Invisible episode, I was struck by the familiarity of this shuck: this is exactly what the self-driving car bros did over the past decade to convince us all that the human driver was already obsolete. The playbook was nearly identical, right down to the shameless huckster insisting that “full self-driving is one to two years away” every year for a decade:

Cory also sees similar scams in hype about robots and AI.

I’m far less skeptical about AI than Cory is. Generative AI in particular. I use GenAI several times a week, and find it helpful. Still, I wave off claims that GenAI is on the verge of superhuman intelligence. Lesser claims, that GenAI will be as transformative as the smartphone or Internet, are more credible. But I’ll believe that when I see it.

I asked ChatGPT to summarize the 99% Invisible podcast episode about jetpacks, and it summarized the wrong episode. When I pointed it to the right episode, the summary it delivered was bland and useless. ChatGPT gets it spectacularly wrong like that nearly as often as it gets it right.

Floppy disks are still in use today, in planes, trains, industrial sewing machines and more.

Steven Vaughan-Nichols @sjvn@mastodon.social:

In the late 1960s, IBM engineers Alan Shugart and David L. Noble envisioned a compact and portable solution for storing data. This pioneering work, Project Minnow, led to the creation of the first commercially viable 8-inch floppy disk in 1971. Its 79K of storage may seem like nothing to you, but it held the equivalent of 3,000 punched cards. Which would you rather drop? A single disk or thousands of cards?

zdnet.com

🌮An Oakland, California woman was arrested after allegedly stealing a taco truck and being discovered by police inside the vehicle, consuming its contents.

She explained that she was hungry.

hoodline.com

I do not often work in Microsoft Word, and when I do, I remember why.

WORD: “You’ve been writing this document in a 12-point font. 10-point font from now on!”
ME: “Why are you doing this?”
WORD: “I was bored.”

We saw a trailer for “Evil” last night and liked it enough to add it to the to-watch list. “Team investigating paranormal shit” is a good formula.

We like our current vet but they do not take appointments. I got up early on two Saturdays in a row and found they already had a 3+ hour wait. This does not bode well for our long-term relationship.

Grantchester returns June 16. By extraordinary coincidence, I bet the new vicar solves murders too. pbs.org

The House Oversight Committee erupted into a pissing contest after Marjorie Taylor-Greene made a wisecrack about Rep. Jasmine Crockett eyelashes. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was in the middle of it. [abcnews.go.com] — Coming soon to cable: Real Housewives of the House of Representatives.

For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been using Continuity Camera for meetings. This feature allows you to use your iPhone as a webcam. It works great, except for one small problem.

When I work from my home office, my phone lives either in my pocket or in a charging cradle on my desk. So now, when I get off a meeting and want to step away from my desk, I pat my pocket. No phone. Look at the charging cradle. Where the hell is my phone?

Oh, yeah, it’s on top of my monitor.

Every. Time.

An editor advised me at the beginning of my career that when I’m editing someone else’s article, I should first read it all the way through without touching it. Don’t even change a typo.

This is excellent advice and nearly possible to follow.

Esperanto was a popular trope in some of the science fiction I loved as a kid. Harry Harrison. Philip Jose Farmer.

Like quicksand, Esperanto proved far less significant in my adulthood than I thought it would.

On our team meeting this morning I explained that Christopher Pike was not the first Captain of the Enterprise. Rather, it was Robert April, who was a character in the animated series, which was at first not considered canon but later included.

I’ve only been on staff a few weeks but I can tell I’m already making an impression.

Overheard: Don’t forget Moms are half price tomorrow.

Attempting to talk about the movie “American Fiction” without using the word “woke.”

We watched “American Fiction,” a 2023 movie which opens with a blank screen and the unmistakable squeaking of a marker on a whiteboard. We pull back to see a college professor addressing a class, but we cannot see what’s written on the whiteboard behind him. A student says the word on the whiteboard is wrong. The teacher says he’s pretty sure he spelled it right. The student says the word is offensive. The camera pulls back to show what’s written on the whiteboard: It’s a title of a story by Flannery O’Conner. The includes the N-word.

The professor says, “This is a class on the literature of the American South. We’re going to encounter some archaic thoughts and coarse language, but we’re all adults here and I think we can understand it within the context in which it’s written.”

“Well, I just find that word really offensive,” says the student.

“With all due respect, Brittany, I got over it. I’m pretty sure you can too,” says the professor, who is Black. The student, who is white, exits the classroom upset.

I am going to avoid using the word “woke” in this review because I hate that stupid word. But it’s hard to avoid because “American Fiction” is in part a movie about wokeness.

The professor, we learn, is Thelonious Ellison. Most people call him “Monk.” He’s not doing well. He’s unpopular with students and colleagues; following the N-word incident, he’s suspended from teaching at the school. He’s bitter and angry, and turns that anger inward, expressing it outwardly by witty insults aimed at the people who bother him, which seems to be most people. The comments are funny and entertaining to us, the audience, but you can see how being around a person like that would be toxic in real life. Nonetheless, as a fictional character, he’s likable and fun. And when he turns off the nastiness, he’s a warm and loving person.

He’s a novelist, and his books aren’t selling. He blames it on a kind of racism. He’s a literary writer. His agent explains to him that publishers don’t want that from someone like Monk. They want a Black novel. “This IS a Black novel.” Monk says. “I’m Black. This is my novel.”

Monk spontaneously decides to write the kind of novel publishers want. Violent, semi-literate, about angry Black people living in the ghetto and shooting each other and being murdered by police. He calls it “My Pathology,” and then changes the title to “My Pafology.” To show his contempt for the publishing system, Monk has his agent submit he novel under a ghostname, “Stagg R. Leigh,” with a persona that “Leigh” is a fugitive from prison. Monk does interviews and meetings as Leigh, affecting a deep-voiced terse grunting speech. “My Pafology” and Leigh are cheap ripoffs of “The Wire.”

And Leigh’s book, unlike Monk’s literary fiction, sells. It becomes a bestseller. Monk was trying to ridicule white guilt and wokeness (ugh, that word), and instead he’s feeding it.

Monk lives and teaches in L.A.,but he returns home to Boston for a literary conference and to visit his family, from whom he is estranged. Monk’s mother is advancing into Azheimer’s and Monk finds himself with the duty of becoming primary caregiver. His family is affluent—both his late father and two siblings are medical doctors, and they have a live-in maid—but not as well off as they once were. What’s shown and not quite said explicitly is that Monk is appalled at the ruse he’s perpetrating as Stagg R. Leigh, but he needs the money to get his mother the best possible care.

We also see Monk’s attempts to overcome his emotional isolation and connect with his family and a pretty neighbor.

The whole thing reminds me of a Richard Russo novel, and I love a Richard Russo novel.

What ties the two plots together is a comment by Monk about Stagg R. Leigh’s novel, and books like it, “My life is a disaster, but not in the way you’d think reading this shit.”

The movie stars Jeffrey Wright as Monk and a solid cast of names and faces that I didn’t recognize, although I did recognize Leslie Uggams as Monk’s mother. I remember her turning up a lot in the 70s on game shows and second-tier talk shows like Mike Douglas and Merv Griffin. Then she surprised me with a starring role on “Roots,” paired up with Sandy Duncan—I remember thinking, holy shit those two can actually act. Then she fell off my radar until she reappeared as Blind Al, Ryan Reynolds’ roommate in the “Deadpool” movies.

Also featured is Sterling Brown, from “This Is Us,” as Monk’s brother, Cliff.

The screenwriter and director is Cord Jefferson, who previously worked as a writer on “The Good Place” and “Watchmen,” making his directorial debut. [imdb.com]

Jefferson talked in an Esquire interview about a scene where Monk is writing a sequence from Stagg R. Leigh’s novel. [esquire.com]

The scene in the novel features a young criminal confronting an older criminal. The younger criminal is brandishing a gun. Jefferson chose to cast two first-rated actors to play the two characters—Keith David, known to me as Childs, one of two characters who lives to the end of John Carpenter’s “The Thing” (1982) and Okieriete Onaodowan, known to me as Hercules Mulligan in “Hamilton.”

Jefferson said:

We’ve all seen that scene of the writer pounding the keyboard frantically, then taking a big sip of coffee and getting back to it. That’s how you depict somebody intensely writing. But I thought, ‘We can’t have that. It’s tropey and silly, and it doesn’t get the audience’s minds going.’ So why not have these characters manifest in front of him? When I wrote that scene, I wrote the language to be very silly. It had to be ridiculous so that everybody could see how stupid this book is and what a sham it is. Then we got Keith David and Okieriete Onaodowan, who are both such tremendous actors. All of the sudden, it wasn’t silly anymore. They made it seem like the book might be good. I love what the scene became in their hands: suddenly you’re questioning whether or not the book is good, which is evidence that something as ridiculous as this book could become a hit.

A character named Sintara Golden is both Monk’s nemesis and inspiration. At the outset of the movie we see she is already fabulously successful playing the same game Monk plays: She went to Oberlin, got a job in publishing, and then made a success for herself writing a book affecting illiterate victimized Black voices. Her book is titled “We’s Lives in Da Ghetto.” But unlike Monk, she’s doing everything in the open. Despite this, Monk thinks she’s just as cynical and pandering as he is. We come to see more of her, and learn that she’s playing a more sophisticated and sincere game than she first appears to be.

In an Esquire interview, Jefferson says he sometimes agrees with Monk and sometimes agrees with Golden.

The actor who plays Sindara Golden is Issa Rae, who apparently first become prominent on YouTube. [imdb.com]

About that first scene: Monk is right to push back against banning the N-word even in discussions of racism—even when used by Black people. But he didn’t have to be such a jerk about it to his student, “Brittany.” She’s just a kid. He’s being a bully.

Monk’s punishment for using the N-word has a parallel in real life: Black writer Walter Mosley, author of the Easy Rawlins novels, quit a job as a writer on “Star Trek: Discovery” in 2019 after he was chastised by the studio human resources department for using the n-word in the show’s writer’s room. Mosley was quoting someone else’s use of the word; he was making a point about racism. [hollywoodreporter.com]

Additional reading:

Cord Jefferson Wants You to Argue About American Fiction [esquire.com] That’s the Esquire article I mentioned earlier.

Did You Catch the Meta Nod of Sintara Golden’s Current Read in ‘American Fiction’? [themarysue.com]

Director Cord Jefferson was formerly a jouranlist, who often wrote articles about race and racism. Here’s his 2014 essay: “The Racism Beat.” [medium.com]

Roger Corman, The B-Movie Legend Who Launched A-List Careers, Dies At 98. npr.org

The movies Corman willed into being are their own loopy, glorious world of teenage cavemen, X-ray eyes and humanoids from the deep. His 300-some movies barely even rose to the level of camp. But many of Hollywood’s most respected directors have at least one Corman credit buried in their resumes. And by teaching so many people how to deliver on-budget and on-schedule, Corman was arguably one of the most influential figures of American film.

Roger Corman Dead: Independent Filmmaking Legend Was 98. hollywoodreporter.com

[Jack] Nicholson, then 21, made his big-screen debut in Corman’s The Cry Baby Killer (1958)_. _Corman hired a young [Martin] Scorsese to direct Boxcar Bertha (1972) and [Jonathan] Demme to write Caged Heat (1974). He made new college graduate [Gale Anne] Hurd his production assistant and later his marketing chief and handed [James] Cameron the job of designing props for Battle Beyond the Stars (1980).

The giant of independent filmmaking also gave Howard a chance to direct his first feature, Grand Theft Auto (1977). When the former child actor complained about the producer’s refusal to pay for more extras, Cormanfamously said, “Ron, if you do a good job for me on this picture, you’ll never have to work for me again.”

All are proud members of “The Roger Corman School of Filmmaking.”

It has taken me literally years to figure out how to drink hot coffee directly from a Zojirushi travel mug without burning my mouth. The trick, I learned, is this: When drinking from a normal cup, I suck the liquid into my mouth after tilting the cup to bring the liquid to my lips. With a Zojirushi, I get too much liquid that way—ow!—so I have to tilt the thing just right so that just the right amount of liquid flows into my mouth.

But now I think I’ve got the hang of it … and I think I like it. Maybe I prefer to drink coffee that way. Less hassle. Coffee always at the perfect temperature without spending $200 on an Ember mug.

On the other hand, maybe I’m missing out on aromatics and other qualities by drinking directly from the Zojirushi.

What do you think? Do you prefer to drink from the Zojirushi (or other travel mug) even when you’re not on the go?

… in the US, the car, philosophically, is a house you drive around. While in China, EV manufacturers are treating them like giant smartphones.

— Ryan Broderick, Garbage Day. garbageday.email

I've started a new thing with Fierce Network

It’s a weekly research bulletin, called the Fierce Network Research Bulletin (it does what it says on the tin).

Kicking things off: a report on the state of US 5G. tl;dr dismal for now, but hopeful.

U.S. companies have been snoozing at 5G — and are losing to international counterparts. But they can regain the lead by playing to their strengths, says a director at the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), speaking unofficially.

The US is losing at 5G. But Next-G is just getting started [fierce-network.com].

OpenAI has an announcement Monday. openai.com

I feel like generative AI is on the verge of being great, but not quite there yet.

Nifty: Cometeer ships concentrated frozen gourmet coffee in single-service pods for your home and business. Dilute it and drink it hot or cold.

I found out about this when Marco Arment brought it up on the Accidental Tech Podcast.

Arment is a coffee enthusiast—he even roasted his own beans at home for a while—but he’s been busy, and his house, including his kitchen, is under construction, so he used Cometeer and bought take-out coffee.

He says the Cometeer coffee is excellent, but it is too expensive and too much hassle to make it a regular habit. Yes, it’s convenient once it’s in your freezer, but it has to be kept frozen until it’s there.

Cometeer ships in allotments of 32 or 64 one-cup pods. Their least expensive rate comes to $2 per cup. I guess that’s not bad for take-out coffee, but it’s too much for the coffee you have at home.

Still, a neat idea.

Arment is a tech podcaster (obvs, his podcast is called the Accidental Tech Podcast), developer of the Overcast podcast app, and formerly in charge of technology for Tumblr.

Google Cloud’s asteroid hunt could mean better AI models for astronomy. [fierce-network.com] Astronomers are working with Google Cloud to build AI models that detect asteroids, identifying nearly 30,000 candidates in a few weeks. The research has implications for pure science, of course, and to detect potential hazards to space navigation and threats to Earth. My colleague Diana Goovaerts reports.