I love this article by Joel Stein, about his fashion makeover. I laughed out loud at the headline and description alone — “A sartorial remaking, inspired by Ted Danson’s character on ‘A Man on the Inside’” — because I had the same impulse after watching the show.
My resolve to become natty only lasted a couple of days. I bought a cardigan sweater for about $110. I got away with spending much, much less money than Stein did.
I do at least want to wear nicer T-shirts. My T-shirts get stretched at the collar after I repeatedly push my massive Charlie Brown head through the neck hole.
Last night, we watched the movie “The Man From Earth.” I liked how the main character dressed: Cargo pants, a crew neck sweater and a corduroy sports jacket.
I love RSS but find all RSS clients annoying. I’m trying bazqux now and I like it.
Until a week or two ago, was sure I wanted an RSS reader that also supported email newsletters, but now I think you know what’s great for reading email? Email is great for that.
I’m looking at a 15-hour flight in about two weeks and then another one a week later. I need to try this to get an upgrade.
A big reason I enjoy reading /r/AITA is so I can say, “Yes, often I’m TA but at least I’m not that guy." I suspect this is a common motivation.
NTA. The commenters are saying she needs to leave him and they’re right. Is “Cat’s in the Cradle phase” a common name for the evolution of abusive Dads, or is it just something they’re saying here?
NTA. A person has a right to politely decline offered food for any reason or no reason at all. Good grief, people, stop being jerks.
An ambulance tech on Reddit advises:
People in an emotional state following another vehicle will develop tunnel vision and forget all traffic laws. You will blow stop signs. You will follow me right through an intersection even if the light has already turned red for you. And you will slam into the back of the ambulance if we need to make a sudden stop. Remember, the patient faces backwards and can see out the back window as you blow a red light and get t-boned by an overloaded ice cream truck.
After we leave, wait ten minutes, take a deep breath and slowly make your way to the hospital.
“fresh babies” lol
Slow at the start, late bloomers are still sprinting during that final lap—they do not slow down as age brings its decay. They are seeking. They are striving. They are in it with all their heart.
— David Brooks at The Atlantic: You Might Be a Late Bloomer: The life secrets of those who flailed early but succeeded by old age
CenturyLink users struggle with multi-month outages and turn to journalists at Ars Technica for help.
Reasons to be hopeful: Jay Kuo writes about acts of resistance at the personal, political, legal and popular levels. People are doing something. In particular, Congressional Democrats aren’t just twiddling their thumbs; as the minority party in both houses and the White House, they have limited power but are using what power they have.
One of my most enduring memories from my ten years traveling the US was being in a dive bar somewhere in Ohio when a woman got all upset that her man had went into the bathroom, locked it, and that was half hour ago and he wasn’t answering and he had history of falling asleep on the toilet and passing out and she needed help and for the next twenty minutes every man in the bar gave it their best shot – some running and throwing their shoulder against the door, some with pool cues and other improvised pry-bars, some trying to pick the lock, some with absurd Rube Goldberg like schemes – finally, one of the guys got it open by taking the door off the frame using tools from his truck and after the guy inside was woken from his concoction-of-substances induced sleep, for the next two hours the man who opened the door strutted around like the cat’s meow. He was the hero of the night and everyone bought him free drinks and that dude was one proud dude, beaming, and recounting the story of how he opened the door to everyone, including me who heard it about four times, and each time he told it, it got more impressive.
The image sticks with me because it was both so comical and telling. This was one of the divey-est dive bars in the US, with a collection of intoxicated, high, and strung out customers that didn’t discriminate by race, gender, age, or faith. Every demographic of the US was represented, with the exception of the successful and the whole scene played out with a chaotic bluster – with each actor, when it was their time in the spotlight, entering with a swaggering bravado that soon collapsed in cartoon-ish ways – a humiliating slip and fall, a crushed finger, a yelp of pain, and so on and so on until the hero finally dismantled the door only to reveal a rail thin spiky haired man sprawled on the toilet who, when woken, walked directly to the bar with an oblivious grin, ordered another drink, confused over all the buzz around his release, but loving the attention, which he used to try and hit on a woman right in front of his woman, the one that had bothered to rescue his useless ass in the first place, who quickly jerked him out of the bar like a momma cat carrying their mischievous kitten.
Behind that humor though, is an example of behavior that I’ve seen across the US, from Wall Street to trap houses, and across the world from Amman to Uganda, which is that all men need to feel like the hero, if not over the course of their lifetime, then at least every now and then. They get an immense sense of worth if they are being valued, and appreciated, for rescuing, protecting, building, and solving.
While the need to feel important isn’t exclusive to men, the roles that give them the most satisfaction (generally sacrificing their body for the greater good), and how they respond if they don’t have those roles (anger, despair, vengeance), is very different from females.
A San Diego migrant shelter run by Jewish Family Services, hailed as a national model, is shutting down and laying off 115 employees due to “changes in federal funding and policy” by the Trump administration.
I rewatched the first two episodes of the first season of “Severance” this evening. I am pleasantly surprised how much I’m enjoying it the second time around. I remember it was an extremely weird show, but I am surprised by how weird it is already.
Here is something I saw walking the dog this morning: Dozens of parrots hanging out on overhead wires on the street. A neighbor said they had been making a racket a few minutes earlier.
What we’re witnessing in the US now resembles the fall of the USSR. But instead of Boris Yeltsin giving a rousing speech on top of a tank, a tiny car drives onto the Washington Mall. Then, a bunch of clowns spring out of the car, spraying confetti everywhere and hitting each other over the head with giant mallets.
Eleven years ago today, according to my journal, we were having a great deal of difficulty potty training the dog.
I found this article to be a useful guide to getting more from Grammarly. I’ve subscribed for years, but I see now there are capabilities I was not taking advantage of.
In the article, Adam Engst at TidBITS says Grammarly beats Apple Intelligence. I find that believable. I switched Apple Intelligence off all my devices; it seems to be Apple’s biggest flop since the butterfly keyboard. Apple Intelligence makes everything worse.