Today I learned that if you spill a nearly full cup of fresh hot coffee on your lap, it doesn’t hurt a lot and doesn’t leave a stain but the pants take a surprisingly long time to dry.

Profile of Steve Nikoui, the Gold Star father arrested for protesting at the State of the Union last week. [timesofsandiego.com] — Nikoui’s son, “Camp Pendleton Marine Lance Cpl. Kareem Nikoui, [was] one of the 13 service members killed near the airport in Kabul during the August 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan.”

“He was born the same year [the war] started, and ended his life with the end of this war,” the elder Nikoui has said. Nikoui has said Biden used the slain Marine as a publicity pawn.

Heartbreaking what this man has gone through.

Five ways Israelis have changed, after 5 months of war. [kpbs.org] — Israelis believe the world has turned its back on them. They have no sympathy for Palestinian suffering; they believe the Palestinians want to kill every Israeli, and that there is no potential partner for peace among the Palestinian people. Israelis are preparing for a longer and harder war with Iran-backed Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Horrible as this war has been so far, I fear it’s just getting started.

I loved all five of Frank Herbert’s Dune books and enjoyed the first Villeneuve movie, but I can’t get motivated to see Dune 2 in theaters.

First, I would need to rewatch the first Villeneuve movie, which I am not particularly in the mood for. Then, I’d need to sit for nearly three hours for the second movie.

What happened to intermissions? Really long movies used to have intermissions. Bring back intermissions!

I like my windows the way I like them

Many people have multiple overlapping application windows open on their screens while working. But I’ve always maximized whatever window I’m working in.

When I need to have two windows open, I tile them vertically, with no overlapping pixels. I rarely need more than two windows open onscreen at the same time.

I use a 27” external display for my Macbook. The 27” display is my primary display. I keep the Macbook open next to it. Sometimes I’ll throw an application window over to the Macbook.

I use Cmd-Tab a million times a day to move between applications and windows. Sometimes, rather than tiling windows, I just Cmd-Tab rapidly between them.

I’m always interested in hearing how other people work.

(I’m fine with food touching on my plate, but I eat one course at a time, finish one course, then move on to the next. Main course, then veggie. If there’s a potato course, it’s main course, then potatoes, then veggie.)

I need a nickname. Help me choose one:

  • The Bandit
  • Big Mitch
  • “Mitch” is already a nickname, you nimrod
  • Nimrod

I’m having a tough time getting started this morning, so please enjoy this video of Jerry Reed performing “Eastbound and Down,” the title song from the immortal 1977 cinema classic “Smokey and the Bandit,” featuring Burt Reynolds, Sally Field, Jackie Gleason, Jerry Reed and Fred the dog.

Buford T. Justice was the name of a real Florida highway patrolman known to Reynlods’ father, who was a police chief in Florida. Reynolds’ father was also the inspiration for the word “sumbitch.”

Much of the dialogue was improvised on-set. Reynolds said director Hal Needham’s original script, handwritten on legal pads, was terrible. Needham was a first-time director and previously worked as a stuntman, as did Reynolds early in his career.

Reed wrote the theme song, “Eastbound and Down,” in a couple of hours and played it on acoustic guitar for Needham, who immediately stopped him. Reed thought Needham didn’t like the song and offered to rewrite it. Needham replied, “If you change one note, I’ll kill you.”

Gleason suggested adding the character of Junior to the movie. “‘I can’t be in the car alone,’ Gleason said. ‘Put someone in there with me to play off of.’”

The movie was a breakout role for Sally Field, who previously played virginal characters: as teenage California surf-girl Gidget in the eponymous TV series, as a literal nun in “The Flying Nun,” and as a severely mentally ill young woman in the TV movie “Sybill.” In “Smokey and the Bandit,” she struts around in tight jeans, flirts bawdily with Burt Reynolds swears and flips police the bird.

I think wearing a big cowboy hat inside a Trans Am is perhaps impractical.

Sources:
Smokey and the Bandit - Wikipedia
Smokey and the Bandit (1977) - Trivia - IMDb
Sally Field - Wikipedia

Hell of a great speech by Biden last night.

His Presidency is in many ways like Harry Truman. That’s high praise and I mean it.

“… the strange and fascinating creature known as the American teenager – as we now understand the species – came into being sometime in the early 1940s.” A 1944 LIFE magazine photo essay.

There is a time in the life of every American girl when the most important thing in the world is to be one of a crowd of other girls and to act and speak and dress exactly as they do. This is the teen age.

Los Angeles Rabbi Sharon Brous: Since Oct. 7, “many American Jews … understand themselves differently. There are people who have never stepped foot in a synagogue and who would never take their family vacation to Israel, who … are talking about being a part of this people in a way that even takes them by surprise. We have been changed by this moment.”

That describes how I’m thinking and feeling.

I’ve thought about this interview often and was surprised to see just now that it aired Nov. 17. So long ago? Can that be right?

The This American Life podcast shares “a series of phone calls to a man in Gaza named Yousef Hammash, between early December and now. He talks about what he and his family are experiencing, sometimes as they are experiencing it.” This American Life

It’s easy to lose sight of humanity when the devastation in Gaza and suffering in Israel are related as cold numbers. But it’s heartbreaking to hear Hammash and his younger sister tell their stories matter-of-factly.

He tries to get his sisters to safety and finds himself

managing a camp of 60 people in Rafah, including his youngest sister, who is 8 months pregnant. Every day there’s talk that Israel will launch a ground assault in Rafah. Yousef and his sister make a plan for her to give birth safely, but it doesn’t go according to plan. And all 60 people in the family are looking to Yousef to tell them where they should go next and how to stay safe.

A friend reminds me of this scene from “Escape From the Planet of the Apes” (1971). Of course, Kim Hunter’s line delivery is very good, but I also love her earlier “Are you fucking kidding me?” face.

youtu.be/G3Phb8Ayr…

My friends and I were 10 years old when the movie came out. The ending slayed us.

youtu.be/dL6yCUCFk…

And yes that is Ricardo Montalban.

“Does the other one talk?”

youtu.be/ctFpZhVY0…

… instead of passing a privacy law or regulating data brokers, Americans get a sort of regulatory simulacrum designed to distract you. Most recently that popped up in the form of hysteria about TikTok privacy, as if TikTok’s privacy abuses aren’t a broader symptom of our corrupt failure to protect consumers from a vast and unaccountable network of ethics-optional surveillance and monetization.

— Karl Bode at Techdirt

I’m re-reading “Everybody’s Fool,” by Richard Russo (or, more precisely, listening to the audiobook). One of the heroes, Donald “Sully” Sullivan, is old, he has slowed down, he’s sick, and he’s disabled by injury. Sully is deeply flawed. But he’s still a better man than most and certainly better than the dimwitted, narcissistic villain.

The book was published in 2016, but it can be read as a political metaphor for the present day. That only just now occurred to me, more than halfway through my re-read of the 544-page book.

I asked the AI-powered Perplexity search engine “Who is Mitch Wagner?”

Mitch Wagner is a versatile individual with various roles and achievements. He is known as a talented journalist and creative editor, as well as an athlete in CrossFit Games[1][2]. Wagner has been involved in the CrossFit community, showcasing his dedication to fitness and competition[3]. Additionally, he has had a successful career as a trial lawyer in San Diego, being involved in notable cases such as the 2007 wildfire litigation against San Diego Gas & Electric[4]. Wagner’s commitment to excellence is evident in his pursuits both in journalism and athletics.

Citations:
[1] www.linkedin.com/in/mitchw…
[2] games.crossfit.com/athlete/2…
[3] swolverine.com/blogs/ath…
[4] jcfsandiego.org/individua…
[5] www.bodybuilding.com/content/m…

Three people. Those are three different people, all named “Mitch Wagner.”

A Department of Veterans Affairs official tried to ban the famous Kiss photo, taken on VJ Day after World War II, from hanging in VA facilities because it “depicts a non-consensual act.” The department quickly rescinded the decision after predictable anti-woke shrieking. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2…

Cory Doctorow: Exxon CEO Darren Woods says the quiet part out loud: The problem with renewable energy sources is that they “don’t generate above-average returns for Exxon’s shareholders.” pluralistic.net/2024/03/0…

The sun generates virtually limitless and free energy, with much of it available in the form of wind and tides. And we’re already well under way to harnessing that energy.

On the other hand, fossil fuels and uranium are limited and expensive, so Exxon can make money on them.

If you sawed open my skull and examined my brain (and I’m not actually asking you to do this!), you would find that the portions devoted to writing, reading, drinking coffee and memes are huge, while everything else is shriveled raisins.

Hours before the deadline, I just pledged to back the Kickstarter for Tapestry from Iconfactory. I said I wasn’t going to do it, but then I figured why not. It looks like a very appealing and intriguing project, if it comes to fruition.

Benj Edwards at Ars Technica analyzes Anthropic’s announcement of the latest version of its Claude AI, which for the first time beats GPT-4 on benchmarks and demonstrates “near-human” capabilities in some areas (or so Anthropic says).

Benchmarks don’t necessarily show how effective the tool is, Edwards notes.

Also:

It’s probably true that Opus is “near-human” on some specific benchmarks, but that doesn’t mean that Opus is a general intelligence like a human (consider that pocket calculators are superhuman at math).

I used Google to find a PDF of the movie “Love, Actually.” I fed the URL to ChatGPT and told it to create a poster. It said it can’t access documents on the Internet—even though it had done so a few minutes earlier. I uploaded the PDF and tried again. It gave me a text description of the poster. I told it to create the poster and it did.

Lazy robot!

I used Google to find a PDF of the screenplay of “Die Hard.” I fed the URL to ChatGPT, with the prompt, “Here’s the screenplay for a movie titled ‘Die Hard.’ Create a poster for this movie.”

I asked ChatGPT to create a poster to promote the TV show “M*A*S*H.”

City leaders in Escondido reject “Housing First” policies for homelessness because they say homeless people need addiction and mental health treatments first.

“Homelessness is a complex problem that requires complex solutions,” San Diego County Supervisor Jim Desmond said.

I’m skeptical. Are most homeless people mentally ill? Or is the problem caused by housing being too expensive and scarce?

And even if many mentally ill people are addicted and/or mentally ill, to what extent is homelessness driving that problem? Living on the streets could drive anybody nuts, and make them turn to alcohol and drugs to get through their lives. And it seems ridiculous to ask someone to get sober and sane while they’re living on the streets.

Inside me are two wolves.

One wants only the finest coffee, ground just before brewing from the finest beans roasted delicately within the past two weeks from a local microroaster.

The other wolf will drink anything that’s brown and hot and has caffeine.

I asked ChatGPT to create an illustration for the book “Cities in Flight” by James Blish. ChatGPT responded with the illustration, and the text:

Here’s the illustration for “Cities in Flight” by James Blish, capturing a futuristic city lifting off from Earth’s surface, enclosed in a transparent, dome-like force field, transitioning from the planet to space.

That’s an accurate description of the premise of the world Blish created: A force field called a “spindizzy” enables whole cities to lift off the Earth and fly around as spaceships.

I asked ChatGPT to create an illustration for the novel “The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet,” by Becky Chambers.

I asked ChatGPT to create a cover illustration for the novel “The Yiddish Policeman’s Union,” by Michael Chabon.

I asked ChatGPT to create a cover illustration for the novel “The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet,” by Becky Chambers.

We watched Rise of the Planet of the Apes, the 2011 movie starring Andy Serkis as a motion-capture chimpanzee. We expected to enjoy it of course – why else would we have decided to watch it? – but It was better and had more heart than we expected.

Seen on a Techmeme headline: Threads is planning to open a developer API in June. I’m happy to hear that—less cut-and-pasting for me! @manton

Facebook is my favorite social network. It is also the one I hate most, and consider quitting several times a month.

Terry Pratchett doesn’t work for me because he writes loving parody of a genre I don’t read.

Julie started drinking coffee again regularly, and I’m drinking more. The Aeropress is getting to be too much hassle.

I ordered a drip of coffee machine. It arrives this afternoon.

This seems like more of a big deal than it actually is. It’s weird how little things become attached to our identities.

The Shirky Principle: Institutions Try to Preserve the Problem to Which They Are the Solution.

Examples: Tax preparers that lobby against laws to simplify tax filing, private prisons that lobby to support increased incarceration, a bus company suing a carpooling service, an employee resisting attempts to automate their work.

Also, British colonial officials in India set a bounty on dead cobras to reduce their population, only to find that people were breeding cobras to collect the bounty. In 1902, in Vietnam, French colonial rulers set a bounty on rat tails—figuring people would kill the rats to cut off their tails. Instead, people captured rats, cut off their tails, and set the rats free to breed more rats. Later officials found that people were raising rats to collect the bounty.

I thought I had invented the Shirky principle because I couldn’t remember hearing or reading about it anywhere else.

Josh Marshall: The Republican effort to impeach Biden was a Russian operation.

Press Watch:

… the ludicrous Republican impeachment investigation has now been exposed as a Russian intelligence op. This, even as Republicans do Russian President Vladimir Putin’s bidding by blocking support for Ukraine and only a few short years after Trump aides welcomed Russian moves to help the Trump campaign in 2016.

David Roberts:

The entire Biden impeachment effort was built around a guy who was peddling Russian disinformation. This seems like significant news, unless … [finger to ear] … never mind, I’m being told Biden is still old.

I’d like for micro.blog to become a Mastodon superset, supporting the important features of Mastodon—including likes, boosts and compatibility with Mastodon clients like Ice Cubes. I would cancel my Mastodon account and use micro.blog to participate in Mastodon and the Fediverse. @manton

The Twenty Thousand Hertz podcast does a delightful episode on industrial musicals.

For more than three decades, it was common for American companies to put on “industrial musicals” for their employees. These elaborate productions could rival Broadway shows, and featured original songs about the company and its products. And while this music was never intended for the general public, once you hear it for yourself, you might just get hooked. This is a story about bathroom remodeling, corporate art, and one man’s obsession with a forgotten corner of pop culture. Featuring comedy writer and collector Steve Young

Young discovered industrial musicals in the 1980s when he was a writer for the David Letterman Show. Letterman did an occasional segment where he showed the viewers the covers of weird old record albums, read the title and made a snarky comment about each. Part of Young’s job was to scour old record stores and look for those records. Of course, industrial musicals were ideal for the show.

Young started out mocking the records and productions behind them, but he came to enjoy them noncritically.

I feel the same way about the 70s kitsch and 50s recipes I sometimes post. I started out mocking them, but over time I just came to enjoy it. Midcentury was a courageous, experimental and playful time. We’re more cautious and beige today.

Young says this about people who produced the industrial musicals:

There were so many that said, “We only have one setting: Use all our talent and make it as great as it can be, even if it’s a lawnmower show that’s going to be heard once at 8 am in a hotel ballroom. Because that’s just the reason they got into this world of work, because they enjoyed making things great.

That’s how I try to approach my work as well. I know if I’m writing a whitepaper, case study or guest article that what I’m writing is not literature. But I try to approach it as if I were writing the Great American Novel.

Treat your work as if it matters and it will matter.

Also: I was peripherally involved in the production of an industrial musical in the very early 1990s. It was a production for the computer trade publication I wrote for at the time, Open Systems Today. The writer/director/producer was my friend and then-boss, Evan Schuman, whose day job was as news editor of the publication. The whole experience was a blast—great fun, though I didn’t have much to do with it myself, I just served as a sounding board for Evan for his ideas and helped out a bit backstage during the production.

I did a little blog maintenance yesterday: streamlined the header to mitchw.blog, updating the about page and the my favorite posts page, adding a page on where to find me on social media and deleting several pages nobody was looking at.

I’m trying to make mitchw.blog into my home page (remember “home pages,” kids?) along with mitchwagner.com, which looks terrible and is badly in need of updating.

Micro.blog, the excellent service that hosts this blog, recently made it relatively easy to redirect mitchwagner.com to a single-page website hosted on micro.blog. The keyword here is relatively; I have ten thumbs when it comes to anything having to do with configuring DNS and domains. The mitchwagner.com domain is the domain I use for all my email—professional and personal—so I’m waiting to make the change to that domain until I have time to back out if I botch it.

I love that Pat Gelsinger’s plan for turning Intel around is to make things. He’s not turning to financial mumbo-jumbo, Web3, crypto, advertising, sprinkling AI magic dust and the other nonsense that Silicon Valley and Wall Street dudebros do when they want to grift the last nickel from a dying business.

Gelsinger’s idea is let’s make things! like Americans used to do!

I interviewed Gelsinger a couple of times when he was at VMware, and followed VMware closely during his tenure. He impressed me.

I’m always surprised to hear about companies still using faxes. Bring back pneumatic tubes!

App review: Map routes with your finger using Footpath

The Footpath app makes it easy for you to plan a route for walking, running, biking or driving, and then follow turn-by-turn directions when you’re out and about. I’ve been using the app several times a month for a few years while taking the dog out for her daily 3.2-mile walk. Footpath helps me vary my route and lets me explore the streets of my neighborhood.

I have plenty of useful iPhone apps. Footpath is the app that brings me the most happiness.

Footpath supports iPhones and Android phones. You can also use it on the Web and iPad, but the phone is the best experience..

When you open the app, Footpath presents you with a map showing your current location. Tap with your finger to set a starting point.

Then tap again to the next point on your route. Footpath prompts you whether you want to walk, bike or drive.

Footpath connects the two points, snapping the route to follow roads and trails on the map. Or you can disable snapping and just map straight lines from point to point.

From there, you tap the next point on your route, then the next and so on until you’re done. Footpath shows you the distance as you go. When you want to get back to your starting point, Footpath presents you with the choice to loop back—in which case Footpath offers you the shortest route—or “out-and-back,” to retrace your path. I like to use the loop option, which often gives me a different route on my return.

You can preview the elevation along your route. I like to do that when planning my route, to check to see if the route is relatively flat, or if it takes me on a steep climb.

Here’s a different route—a steeper climb. The red bits on the line are the steepest.

Footpath doesn’t just know about streets and roads. It also knows about, well, footpaths, even “desire paths”—unofficial paths made by people walking across vacant land between one road and another.

Footpath gives you the option to open the starting point of a route in Apple Maps or Google Maps. I usually drive a few minutes to the starting point of my walk, so it’s useful to be able to easily map a driving route.1

When you’re walking, Footpath will give you audible turn-by-turn directions—that’s a premium feature, for paid subscribers. Footpath plays nice with my podcast app (Overcast), the Audible audiobook player and Spotify; when giving directions from Footpath, the podcast, audiobook or music playback pauses and then resumes when done. You can check turn-by-turn directions and a route map on your screen as you go.

Turn-by-turn directions inside the app

Turn-by-turn directions on the phone lockscreen.

Footpath has an Apple Watch companion app, which I’ve set to tap my wrist diffidently and silently when it’s time to turn again. The Watch app itself is not as easy to read as the phone app, so I mostly just use the Watch app when I am already familiar with the route and just need a couple of reminders about when and where to turn.

Footpath gives you the option to view several different types of maps. I use “Mapbox Streets,” which resembles the default Apple Maps or Google Maps view. Sometimes I use the satellite maps view when planning out a new route, which will show me if there are sidewalks all along the way, for safety. I’m OK walking along the shoulder if I’m alone, but I’m concerned about the dog getting hit by a car.

There are topographical maps, too, to show elevation—this sounds great in theory, but I am not skilled in reading those, so instead, I just map out the view with my finger and then view the elevation.

Footpath is a freemium app. The free version gets you capabilities including tap-to-map and saving up to five routes. The Footpath Elite subscription gives you cue sheets to tell you where to turn, turn-by-turn audio directions, unlimited saved routes, and more. Here’s more information about plans. The subscription is priced at $4/month or $24/year. I pay for an annual subscription.

Footpath works in conjunction with the Workouts app on the Apple Watch. I use both together—Footpath to map my route, and Workouts to record the walk.

Footpath isn’t perfect. The home screen is confusing. Even after using the app for years, I get confused as to how to find a saved route, for example.

I have never been able to figure out how to edit existing routes with Footpath, even though that’s a supported feature.

Routes mapped and saved on the iPad don’t reliably sync to the iPhone.

The controls for manually playing your next prompt are the same controls for pausing a podcast, so when someone stops me on my walk and I pause my podcast to chat, Footpath starts talking with me and I look like an idiot waiting for it to shut up.

Despite a few hiccups, Footpath is a great, user-friendly tool for people looking to inject variety and exploration into their walks, runs, bikes or drives. Footpath does the job when the journey is more important than the destination.

  1. The dog loves it when I park the car when we’re driving together because she’s sure that means a walk is going to begin. I feel like a fink when we’re actually going to the vet. ↩︎

There is a road called Princess View Drive near our house that I have driven on many times, but I have never seen a princess.

The American Nazis (the organization formerly known as Republicans) aren’t coming for Jews—now. They say they love Jews.

They’re coming for migrants and LGBTQ people. They’re turning women into breeding cows.

But they will come for the Jews soon enough. We will not have to wait long.

“AI search is a doomsday cult…. Does anyone even want an AI search engine?”

when they aren’t hallucinating, what they’re capable of is still impressive, though it’s a bit like watching a dog walk around on two legs – fun, but not exactly an efficient way to get around.

Ryan Broderick at Garbage Day says AI search is worse than conventional search and could potentially kill the web. AI search feeds on existing blogs, articles and other websites, while removing incentives for people to create those things. In this scenario, generative AI is like a wild animal that kills everything in the food chain that feeds it and then starves to death.

Also, Cory notes that we gave Google a monopoly on search and Google in return was supposed to protect us from search spam, a job at which it is utterly failing. “Google literally has one job: to detect this kind of thing and crush it.”

For what it’s worth, I’ve been using ChatGPT for search, and have also used the Perplexity AI search engines. They’ve been fine for quick hits; I haven’t tried either on deep research.

Google is still good for some things, but I’ve noticed it falling down in two areas: Product reviews (I go to reddit or Wirecutter for those) and how-tos, where Google serves up a half-dozen videos before it gets to the actual instructions I’m looking for.

During our last time going out to lunch before the pandemic, my dad (who was the only member of his family to survive the Holocaust and later spent years in the Partisans fighting the Nazis) and I were walking toward a restaurant, and he expressed his dismay that Americans weren’t taking the threat to our country seriously enough. I suggested that while most Americans were concerned, they didn’t see the Trump era as being that ominous because they assumed the kinds of things that happened in his life could never happen here. My dad stopped walking, looked at me, and asked, “You think vhen I vas a kid any of us thought it could happen there?”

— Dave Pell, NextDraft

When I was a boy attending Hebrew school, the Holocaust was living memory for the adults teaching us. They told us: “You think of yourselves as Americans first. That’s exactly how German Jews thought of themselves in the early 1930s.” I think about that more and more lately.

Cory’s Pluralistic blog turns four. Here, he talks once again about his Memex Method of taking notes in public. I have never been able to make that work for me, though I’ve tried. pluralistic.net

Alabama’s supreme court rules frozen embryos are ‘children’ theguardian.com

In a decision using flagrantly unconstitutional religious language, the court allows two wrongful death lawsuits to proceed against a fertility clinic.

Haley’s plan to unite the United States: pardon Trump. “It is unclear why or how Haley thinks this move would bring the American people together unless the together she speaks of is a civil war.” boingboing.net

My five-year-old Mac wheezes to a halt if I have more than a few Safari tabs open, but I recently switched to the Vivaldi browser, and now I have 93 open tabs. So, um, yay?