I just made a final round of donations to the Harris campaign, Swingleft.org and the San Diego Democratic Party.
Swingleft is an organization that supports Democrats in competitive races nationwide.
I don’t know how many Ms there are in “hummus.” Definitely more than zero and fewer than three.
I just finished an hour of phoning for the Harris campaign
Friday, November 1, 2024
I did it from my house, from my home office, the same place I work all day. I did it after work.
My work involved making cold calls many years ago, so I have no phobias about doing that. When I was in the cold-calling business, I used to dial each number manually, like a caveman; the Harris campaign has an autodialer, so you just call up the website in your web browser and click to dial. The campaign provides a script with contingencies on what to say if the person says they’re not sure who they will vote for, if they’re undecided on whether to vote, if they’ve already voted, etc.
The auto-dialer assigned me to make calls in Georgia. There was (cough) a bit of a language barrier on many of the calls. In theory, Californians and Georgians both speak English, but in reality the dialects are drifting. I predict in a hundred years the languages will be separate.
All the calls went to Democrats. That’s the purpose of making the calls — to get out the Democratic votes.
90+ percent of the calls didn’t pick up. Many of the others hung up on me as soon as I identified myself.
I had a lovely conversation with a 91-year-old woman who said she is not planning to vote this year. I gather from the conversation that she’s not well enough to do so.
Three people I talked to said they want to vote but don’t know where and how. The auto-dialing software has a contingency for that — I arranged to text them information on where and how to vote.
Those three people are why I volunteered.
I only had one outright hostile caller. He answered the phone, “Who the fuck is this?” and I literally laughed out loud at that. I ended the call soon after that. I clicked the button on the website to let the campaign know that I had encountered a hostile caller.
While waiting for the callers to pick up, the software displayed a series of Halloween-themed Dad jokes. It seems possible, though not likely, that Tim Walz picked the jokes himself.
I will try to do this phoning every day between now and Election Day, both to help put Kamala in the White House and for more Dad jokes.
Anyone call do this. Here’s where to sign up. go.kamalaharris.com/calls/ There’s a five-minute video orientation, which is rather confusing; I suggest watching the video and don’t worry about being confused; just push through. You’ll figure it out as you go, and if you make mistakes, it’s not a big deal.
Photos of the outrageous monumental architecture of Turkmenistan, the most isolated country in Asia.
Japan’s mundane Halloween costumes include “Person listening to the song they’re about to sing next at karaoke,” “Cast member at some kind of theme park,” “parents when they were young,” and “That person who brings you weird gummies as souvenir from their vacation.” More. Via
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.
Wednesday, October 30, 2024
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.
What’s the weirdest or most inappropriate thing you’ve seen or done in a video meeting?
RIP Teri Garr, 79, after a long battle with multiple sclerosis.
Tuesday, October 29, 2024
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
Monday, October 28, 2024
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.