I’m attending an event in a few days for which I’ll be wearing a suit and tie, which means I had to bring my suits in to be cleaned and pressed.

The last time I wore a suit was on my last business trip, December 2019. I figured then that I had no travel scheduled until February, so I the suits in a pile in my closet to be brought to the cleaners.

And they’ve been sitting in that pile for nearly four years.

Telling Julie “I’m bringing my suits to the cleaners” and then doing so was weird and retro, like using a rotary phone.

The dry cleaner hasn’t changed. They still give out a paper claim ticket, rather than using a fancypants app.

Enjoying giving office supplies and travel size toiletries to trick or treaters.

“I started reading Ed McBain when I was probably 11 or 12,” [Stephen] King said, looking at his row of several novels by the prolific author of crime procedurals. “The bookmobile would come by. We lived out in the country. The first thing I remember is, I’m reading one of these books, and [detectives] Carella and Kling go to interview a woman about some crime. And she’s sitting there in her slip and she’s drunk, and she grabs her breast and squeezes and says, ‘In your eye, copper.’ And I thought to myself: This is not the Hardy Boys. Okay? It made an impression. It felt more real.”

Also, King about why he doesn’t think about his legacy:

“There are very few popular novelists who have a life after death. Agatha Christie, for one. I can’t think of anybody else who’s a popular novelist, really. People like John D. MacDonald, he was a terrifically popular novelist in his day, but when he died, his books disappeared off the racks. They were ultimately disposable. I think that a couple of the horror novels might last. They might be read 50 or a hundred years from now, ‘The Shining’ and ‘Salem’s Lot’ and ‘It.’ If you ask people, ‘What vampire do you know?,’ they’d say, ‘Dracula.’ ‘Well, who invented Dracula?’ ‘I don’t [expletive] know.’ So, 50 or a hundred years from now, people will say: ‘Oh, Pennywise, the clown. Yeah, sure.’ ‘Who is Stephen King?’ They won’t know.”

— Book Tour: A tour of Stephen King’s personal library

Now I’m thinking about deceased popular novelists who are still bringing in new readers in large numbers. Asimov? Bradbury? Is Hemingway widely read by anybody younger than Boomers?

I don’t like Halloween. It celebrates death and decay. I like a little of that—I loved the Addams Family and Beetlejuice. But an entire month of zombies and skeletons is too much.

Also, while I like people changing up their identities, confining it to a single day seems unhealthy. People should change up their identities all the time.

This is just me. If you love Halloween, I’m fine with that.

Christmas, on the other hand, is awesome. I’m a Jew for Christmas.

The dog usually has to be coaxed down the front outside stairs to the front gate. I think it’s because we only go down them once or twice a week so she’s not used to doing it. It is a slow process, and she stops to thoroughly sniff every third step.

But this morning I paused on the top landing, because I realized I had not checked my podcast downloads to see what I’d be listening to on our walk.

When I looked up from my phone, she was already down at the foot of the stairs, looking alert and happy.

And there was a big cat sitting on the outside wall of the house beside the front gate.

For the dog, there’s little that’s more interesting than a cat. And ours won’t go anywhere near her.

Overheard: There’s over 7 billion ppl in this world and I’m really the best driver, that’s so wild to me

Overheard: Just wait until conspiracy theorists discover they’re part of a conspiracy to use conspiracy theorists to spread disinformation via conspiracy theories.

Cory Doctorow “The idea that creative workers aren't workers is bullshit.“

Cory: Why creative workers get screwed in labor negotiations (until very recently):

Creative workers are part of a class of workers who suffer from “vocational awe,” the sense that because your job is satisfying and/or worthy, you don’t deserve to get paid for it.

Also:

The attempt to divide-and-rule “knowledge workers” from “industrial workers” is a transparent bid to shatter solidarity and make it easier to abuse and exploit all workers.

And:

A strong, unified labor movement is necessary if America is to save itself from inequality, racism, the climate emergency – the whole polycrisis. The idea that creative workers aren’t workers is bullshit – and so is the lie that all workers are uncreative.

Threads is in the early days of the social media enshittification cycle. That’s why it’s so great—for now

The goal now is to attract users by the hundreds of millions, so Facebook is making Threads great for users. And it’s working—Threads is, indeed, a great place.

For now. But soon, Facebook will pivot to wanting revenue from Threads, and so Threads will become great for advertisers and steadily worse for users.

Then once all the advertisers and the users are locked in, Threads will become shitty for everybody but Facebook itself. Enshittification will be complete.

We saw this happen with the Facebook blue app. It happened with Instagram. And it’ll happen with Threads.

Until then, sure, I’ll use Threads. Why not? But I’m not getting settled in.

Dave Winer: We can do better than Threads.

Running from the arms of one billionaire to another is a bad idea.

Musk is the second worst thing that happened to social media, but Facebook is much worse, because they’re so much more competent, but lack any vision other than sucking up as much of the world into their silo as possible and never doing anything that could possibly benefit anyone else.

Why’d I take speed for twenty years?

Podcaster PJ Vogt writes about his 20-year use of prescription stimulants, as well as coming to terms with the suicide of a friend.

Vogt struggled to understand what his friend’s depression was like from the inside and was surprised to learn his own thinking was a product of depression.

I had been like Ahab hunting for Moby Dick, not realizing the boat he’s on is actually a large whale in a boat costume.

Cory Doctorow: A taxonomy of corporate bullshit: “… six lies that corporations have told since time immemorial…. it’s refreshing to see how the right hasn’t had an original idea in 150 years and simply relies on repeating the same nonsense with minor updates.”

We’ve all collectively decided that the 22 years since 9/11 have gone so well that we’re just gonna do it again huh?

I think maybe video has taken off and text is declining simply because TikTok and YouTube make it easy to share revenue with creators, whereas opportunities for independent writers are harder to find and harder to use. (There’s Substack and … well, Substack. And also Substack.)

If Facebook instituted revenue sharing, I could make a significant revenue stream off this—my random thoughts, memes I find elsewhere, photos I take while walking the dog. It wouldn’t replace other work, but it would be a nice supplement.

Does that sound nuts to you? Ask Mark Zuckerberg. He’s a billionaire now because of the time and effort that I, and hundreds of millions of other people, have put into Facebook.

A little bird tells me that Tumblr is going to put some effort into fixing its RSS feeds. O frabjous day!

Reading about our new Speaker of the House and seeing absolutely nothing good. He’s an insurrectionist who wants to impose Sharia law on the United States.

I had to cold-call a relative stranger for social reasons just now. I knew it was coming and I was nervous about it for days. I have become a millennial.

Until yesterday, I had never seen “Moonlighting.” Now I have.

The first episode at least.

Much comedy. Much fast witty dialogue. Some action-adventure. The clothes are fantastic and very very 80s. Cybill Shepherd is gorgeous. Bruce Willis is handsome, and his suit is sharp. I have always liked double-breasted suits.

I liked “Moonlighting,” but I had trouble getting out of my head to just sit and enjoy it. I kept thinking, “Is Bruce Willis supposed to be charming here? He kind of seems like an asshole. How would the 1985 audience perceive him?”

This morning, I concluded that the 1985 audience would have perceived him exactly as I did, and they too would have wondered whether he was really as big an asshole as he sometimes acted.

This was Willis’s first role of any stature, about two years before “Die Hard.” He was truly an overnight success. Until “Moonlighting” hit he was a bartender and sometime stage actor who had previously done one guest role on (I think) “Miami Vice.” He’s in his 20s here, already starting to lose his hair but still in possession of most of it. And such a babyface. It was a little painful to watch him here, so young, intelligent and fast-talking, knowing that real-life 2023 Bruce Willis is far along in dementia.

The other star, Shepherd, was considered old by 1985 standards. She was 35 then! Heavens! The people of 1985 were idiots; Cybill Shepherd was stunning. Also, she’s great at the witty banter, and—like Lucille Ball—she’s a beautiful actor with no compunction about doing physical comedy that makes her look ridiculous.

On the downside: The show could’ve been better if the villains had any kind of backstory. They are stock 1980s villains. A boss wears a bespoke suit (with a collar pin—nice 80s touch there) and speaks in an educated manner. He has a giant, nonspeaking henchman. Another villain is a punk rocker with bad skin.

The stunts were phony.

The show suffers from having been shot for smaller, lower-resolution TVs of the 1980s. Much of the time I could see Bruce Willis’s makeup slathered on. One of the villains seemed to be a 35-year-old man wearing old-age makeup.

But overall, thumbs up. I’ll keep watching. I think I’ll enjoy it more over time.

I think Julie enjoyed it without reservation. She watched the series when it first aired, but said she’d never seen the first episode.

“Moonlighting” and “Miami Vice” were the two iconic TV series of the 80s. I didn’t watch any primetime TV in that decade; I was a college student in the first part, and then a daily newspaper reporter, and spent my evenings doing other things. 1985, the year “Moonlighting” debuted, was a particularly big year in my life.

I’d never seen “Miami Vice” until relatively recently either. I thought that was fine. Watched one or a couple of episodes, but did not feel compelled to continue.

For a long time, I defined myself by my work

That was fine when I was in my 20s, but it became less and less useful. I stayed with it anyway, well past the point of uselessness.

I also defined myself more broadly as a writer. But that doesn’t work for me either. I still write—look, I’m writing right now!—but it’s not who I am.

I’m an American, Californian, Jewish, white, male, cis-gendered, heterosexual and Julie’s husband. Those things are characteristics. They’re not who I am.

Maybe we don’t need to define ourselves. Maybe it’s enough to just be and do.

Today I learned about the three types of fun, as categorized by outdoorsy folks:

  • Type 1 fun is just regular fun—fun while it’s happening.
  • Type 2 fun is miserable while it’s happening, but fun in retrospect, after you’ve forgotten that you nearly lost fingers to frostbite or gotten mauled by a bear.
  • Type 3 fun is just plain not fun, not now and not ever.

From comments on Reddit:

There should really be a type 4 fun. Things that are fun at the time but you regret later, like being mean on the internet

…

Type 3 fun is actually enjoyable for others when you share those stories.

…

As a Vet I can say that the army is an expert in providing Type 2 and Type 3 fun while advertising Type 1 fun.

Things I saw while walking the dog. We tried a new neighborhood today, Allied Gardens

I’ve passed this roadside shrine dozens of times over the years. I don’t think I’ve read the plaque before.

I’ve started reading Doonesbury from the very beginning, and I plann to keep going until I catch up to the present day. Here’s the very first strip, from October, 1970.

So far I’m up to December 1970. Over that time, you can see Garry Trudeau quickly improving as a writer and slowly improving as an artist. Within three or four years he’d be doing detailed drawings and sharp satire about Watergate.

The strip was initially published in the Yale student newspaper, when Trudeau was himself an undergrad there, and it’s about as sexist as you’d expect from an Ivy League college boy of the Animal House era. Trudeau evolved quickly on that front too.

I read the strip religiously in high school, then got out of the habit, though I picked it up intermittently over the subsequent decades. I haven’t seen it in years, and I’m keeping away from he current strips for now. I want to catch up with them.

A long thread of stories about people bombing job interviews, on Ask a Manager:

When asked a (completely stupid question) about how I would react if I woke up suddenly in a cage with a tiger, I asked if the tiger was alive.

This wasn’t the right line of questioning as per the interviewer’s surprised expression.

When asked to elaborate, I said “If it’s dead, cry but no real panic. It’s alive, cry and panic and die.”

Response:

I started thinking of further clarifying questions I would ask in this interview scenario and realized I was just Dungeons-and-Dragonsing my way through it:

“What is the condition of the tiger? Has the tiger noticed me yet? What can I perceive outside of the cage? Can I see the door to the cage from where I’m sitting? Can I hear or see the presence of anyone else outside the cage? Does the cage appear to be locked or only shut? Is the tiger between me and the door to the cage? Okay, given that knowledge and my Strength and Dexterity (not good), I…”

The myth of rural America: “ … the rural United States is, in fact, highly artificial. Its inhabitants are as much creatures of state power and industrial capitalism as their city-dwelling counterparts. But we rarely acknowledge this … because many of us – urban and rural, on the left and the right – ‘don’t quite want it to be true.’”

While walking the dog this morning, I saw this house. These guys own Halloween

Overheard: I don’t want to brag but I walked into a room and remembered why I walked in.

Can I list “speed grocery shopping” as a skill on my LinkedIn profile? Because I slay at that.

Last night we watched the first episode of “Lessons in Chemistry,” about Elizabeth Zott, a chemist in 1951 who is forced to take a humiliating job as a lab tech because of sexism and who ends up hosting a highly successful cooking show on TV. The show stars Brie Larson (who is not, I subsequently learned, the same person as Alison Brie).

Elizabeth is determined and humorless and takes up with Calvin Evans, a male chemist, who is also determined and humorless and is the only person who sees her for who she is. Both characters are endearing.

The costumes and period designs are beautifully done. Perhaps too perfect, but that’s typical of period shows. All the cars are clean and in mint condition; clothes are neat, clean, pressed, and tucked in. In real life, in 1951, you’d see a lot of wrinkles and untucked shirts and the occasional stain, just like today. Some cars would be nice; some would be beaters. But not in the world of “Lessons of Chemistry.” That’s fine.

I liked the show but did not love it. I was not hooked, but I’ll give it another episode, and I expect to enjoy it more over time. Julie loved it from the beginning—she just read the novel it’s based on and loved that.

One unbelievable note jumped out: Calvin is presented as having moderate-to-severe allergies. He becomes dramatically ill, simply smelling a woman’s perfume. He lives on saltine crackers and vending machine peanuts. (The vending machine, by the way, is a beautiful midcentury design.) He joins Elizabeth for lunch, and she insists he try the lasagna she made for herself. He plunges in a forkful and pronounces it delicious. As a person with allergies myself, I know that nobody with allergies will try a strange food off someone else’s plate without first inquiring about the ingredients.

“Lessons in Chemistry” has echoes of another recent series, last year’s “Julia,” about the origin story of Julia Child. Also a smart show set in post-WWII America with beautiful period costumes and designs about a strong, smart woman battling sexism to host a successful cooking show.

Ezra Klein: Israel is giving Hamas what it wants

Klein:

Israel’s 9/11 — that’s been the refrain. And I fear that analogy carries more truth than the people making it want it to. Because what was 9/11? It was an attack that drowned an entire country — our country, my country, America — in terror and in rage. It drove us mad with fear.

And in response, we shredded our own liberties. We invaded Afghanistan. We invaded Iraq. Our response to 9/11 led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people. It made us weaker. It made us poorer. It made us hated around the world. We didn’t pull our forces out of Afghanistan until 2021, 20 years later. And when we left, we did so in humiliation and catastrophe and defeat, abandoning the country to the Taliban.

Our politics still haven’t recovered from the ravages of that era. It was, in large part, the invasion of Iraq that discredited the Republican Party’s leadership class, leading directly to the rise of Donald Trump. 9/11 created a permission structure in American politics to do incredibly stupid brutal things, and we are still paying the costs. Perhaps we always will be.

…

I think vengeance is a legitimate and even necessary goal here. It cannot be safe to murder Israeli civilians. But vengeance cannot be the only goal. Israelis, no less than Palestinians, deserve peace and security. Those need to be considerations, too. And that requires considering things.

…

The brutal facts of the occupation, the architecture of control, and humiliation, and checkpoints and work permits and blockades that Palestinians live under, it does not justify Hamas’s murders. But it helps explain Hamas’s strength, its persistent appeal to at least some of the Palestinian people. Hamas is built on Palestinian despair. And if you radically increase Palestinian fury and despair, if you create a new wave, a new generation of fathers who lost their sons, and brothers who lost their sisters, and people now dedicated to revenge, have you actually made Israel safer, or have you made Hamas or something like it stronger?

Hardliners feed on each other. Hamas’s political strength has been an excellent excuse for Netanyahu’s government to abandon even the pretense of a real peace process. If Hamas is on the other side of the table, then there can be no peace process because there is no partner for peace. Israel is right that it cannot make peace with Hamas, that Hamas’s actual aim is Israel’s eradication.

…

Hamas and its backers in Iran want this war. They fear the normalization of Israel’s relations with the rest of the Middle East. The misery of the Gazans is and always has been their strength/

…

We’ve spent decades testing the proposition of whether inflicting more punishment on the Palestinians will strengthen the moderates or the extremists in their midst. The answer is known.

…

If you loathe Hamas, and you should loathe Hamas, you should assume that the place they’re trying to lead us is not where we should be trying to go. If you don’t think Netanyahu’s rule has made Israel safer, or more united, or closer to a resolution of the fundamental threats that face it — and it hasn’t — you should not yourself be cowed into trusting his instincts in this moment. That’s a lesson Americans learned, or should have learned, from 9/11, the one we have to pass on now.

Terrorists want you to act in a haze of fury and fear. The only antidote is to open yourself to criticism and second-guessing.

…

There is no country in the world that would not hunt Hamas’s leaders to the ends of the Earth right now if their savagery had been visited upon them. And that is to say nothing of the hostages Hamas is still holding captive. But the idea that you’ll destroy Hamas this way, I doubt it, particularly if this becomes not just a generational trauma for ordinary Israelis, but also for Gazans, with thousands dead and who knows how many maimed and homeless and displaced.

…

The hardliners make each other stronger. Is it possible for the peacemakers to do the same?

The youth are not slow-dancing anymore.

Decoder Ring: The Fast Decline of the Slow Dance. Rise and fall of an awkward rite of passage.

Includes a brief history of slow dancing, starting with the waltz, which was hugely scandalous 200+ years ago.

Let me read you a quote here. It’s from a July 1816 issue of the London Times about a ball given by the Prince Regent: “We remarked with pain that the indecent foreign dance called the waltz was introduced at the English court on Friday last. So long as this obscene display was confined to prostitutes and adulteresses, we did not think of it deserving of notice. But now that it is attempted to be forced on the respectable classes of society, we feel it a duty to warn every parent against exposing his daughter to so fatal a contagion.

Jacob Mikanowski, author of the book “Goodbye, Eastern Europe: An Intimate History of a Divided Land,” talks with Tyler Cowen about Eastern Europe, including “differences between Eastern and Western European humor, whether Poles are smiling more nowadays” and “why Stanisław Lem hasn’t gotten more attention in the West.”

Could Stanisław Lem be the most underrated sage of the AI age?

I remember Lem was celebrated in literary circles in the late 70s or 80s, but we haven’t heard much about him since. I read several of Lem’s books and stories, enjoyed them and found them thoughtful.

Just a couple of things I saw while I was walking the dog this morning.

I was having fun with a telemarking scammer and they hung up on me and I’m disappointed.

CALLER: “I’m calling from [mumble] about an order for an Apple MacBook Pro and Apple AirPods that you placed and that is being delivered to Houston, Texas.”

ME [slowly, confused]: “It’s for a … apple?”

CALLER: “Yes, an Apple MacBook Pro—a laptop computer—and Apple AirPods. You will be charged $1,667. Did you place that order.”

ME [slowly, still confused]: “… Apples don’t have ears?”

Then they hung up. Damn, I was just getting started.

I was having system problems several months ago, the solution for which was to reinstall the operating system. Now the problems are back, so I upgraded to Sonoma, which will either fix the problems or give me ALL NEW UPGRADED problems.

Where does the coyote get money to buy all that stuff from Acme? I don’t know how much a 25 foot tall slingshot costs but I bet it’s expensive.

RIP Mark Goddard, who played Major Don West on the 1960s “Lost in Space.”

Lovely statement from Goddard’s co-star Bill Mumy, who played Will Robinson. Variety:

R.I.P. to Mark Goddard. A truly beloved friend and brother to me for 59 years. I knew this was coming for the past few months. Shortly after a great phone chat he and I had on his 87th birthday in late July, I became aware that I would most likely never see or speak with him again. The last words we exchanged were “I love you.”

The show was initially more of a straight action-adventure, with Goddard’s Major West as a romantic lead opposite Judy Robinson, played by Marta Kristen. But when “Batman” took off in the ratings, “Lost in Space” went for camp and there wasn’t much for Major West to do other than yell at Doctor Smith.

The New York Times:

In his 2008 memoir, “To Space and Back,” [Goddard] referred to his space uniform, his wardrobe for the show, as “silver lamé pajamas and my pretty silver ski boots.”

Goddard left showbiz, went back to college, and became a teacher of special needs kids.

Goddard lived a life of service, bringing happiness to a lot of people (including me) and then as a teacher. A good life.

That was a bad idea. I’ve done it several times previously and it was a bad idea those times. I expect I’ll do it again because I want it to be a good idea.

The Most Iconic Vintage Dessert from Every Decade

1940s: Bread pudding.

I love bread pudding. I eat it several times a year.

Unfortunately, the last time we got bread pudding it wasn’t great. We got it take-out—a massive brick. I froze most of it, but made the mistake of not breaking it up into individual portions beforehand, further diminishing the likelihood that I will ever eat that bread pudding.

Future archeologists will no doubt wonder at the find.

Praying that Israel exercises compassion, clemency, pity, forbearance and love.

The Progressives Who Flunked the Hamas Test.

Helen Lewis at The Atlantic:

Fitting Israel into the intersectional framework has always been difficult, because its Jewish citizens are both historically oppressed—the survivors of an attempt to wipe them out entirely—and currently in a dominant position over the Palestinians, as demonstrated by the Netanyahu government’s decision to restrict power and water supplies to Gaza. The simplistic logic of pop intersectionality cannot reconcile this….

I donated to the United Jewish Appeal Israel Emergency Fund to support the people of Israel. The fund provides: “Emergency cash assistance for victims of terror. Critically needed trauma counseling. Care for children in shelters. Burial expenses. Funds to relocate people to safer areas.”

Tyler Cowen interviews the fascinating Ada Palmer, Hugo Award winning author of the “Terra Ignota” science fiction series, Renaissance historian at the University of Chicago, musical composer, consultant on anime and manga, and more.

She talks about:

  • Why living in the Renaissance was worse than living in the Middle Ages in Europe.
  • Why she doesn’t want to go back in time.
  • How censorship worked during the Inquisition, and why Enlightenment philosophy and pornography were closely related.
  • How sexism by historians gives us a warped vision of history, and why the recent involvement of women in studying history has led to breakthroughs.

and much more

This is a podcast I had to stop listening to frequently, just to think about what Palmer last said.

“I came to realize that my Woody was my impression of Tom yelling at his kids.”

On the Twenty Thousand Hertz podcast: Soundalikes, or voice doubles, “are voice actors who perform as characters that were originally played by someone else.” The soundalike replaces a big superstar like Robin Williams or Julia Roberts for video games, rides, toys, TV shows, etc.

This podcast features an interview with Jim Hanks, a successful character actor and soundalike who specializes in playing Woody from “Toy Story” when brother Tom Hanks is unavailable.

  • Go online to make a payment.
  • Apple Pay needs me to reenter my credit card
  • Go into the house to get my wallet
  • See Julie, talk with her
  • Remember that we were expecting a check—ask Julie about it.
  • Look where Julie says the check is. No check.
  • Decide not to bother Julie with it right now
  • Make a note to talk with her later
  • Notice my dirty lunch dishes in the sink
  • Wash them
  • Notice clean dishes from yesterday are still on the drying rack
  • Put them away
  • Pet dog
  • Return to my office
  • See the notification from Apple Pay on my desktop—I need to update my credit card
  • Check my pocket.
  • Still don’t have my wallet

Sometimes I want a nice turkey sandwich but I do not want the side order of doggy drama so I eat something else instead.

“Whatever calculation you make must begin with the premise that the deaths of innocent people are evil. I simply don’t know what the answer is. What I do know is that any ideology that is not bounded by a recognition of universal humanity is too dangerous to be let loose upon the world.”

Also:

“Your Moral Equation Must Have Human Beings on Both Sides. Ignoring universal humanity is the path to murder.”

Also:

“My basic bedrock assumption is that the fate of these two peoples are intertwined.”

I was already losing interest in Twitter when Musk took over. The constant arguing and anger were wearing me down. Musk said he saw Twitter as an arena for combatting ideas. The signal I got from that is that he wanted more arguing and anger. So I gradually started doing Twitter less and less until now I only check it a couple of times a week and I don’t post there. I do have a list of meme and comedy accounts on Twitter that I check regularly.

Hard-Core Sleepers Obsess Over Their Snoozing Stats

… for millions, chasing winks with the latest sleep-measuring technology has become a nighttime sport, complete with sleep scores and strategies on how to best sack the competition. … “I can see that on days when I tape my mouth during sleep, I have a 7% higher recovery score…. “

For more than 70 years, filmmakers have been reusing the sound of a particular scream. Many people even know it by name—the Wilhelm Scream.

“The scream is usually used when someone is shot, falls from a great height, or is thrown from an explosion.” It first appears in the 1951 Western “Distant Drums.” It appears in the 1954 “A Star Is Born,” “Star Wars,” “Toy Story” and on and on in many, many movies, TV shows and video games.

The actor who voiced the scream was likely Sheb Wooley, who also voiced the 1958 hit novelty song “The Purple People Eater.”

I listened to this podcast episode about the Wilhelm Scream Friday morning. That night, we watched the 1993 Sylverster Stallone movie “Cliffhanger” and I’m pretty sure I heard the Wilhelm Scream in it.

A reporter made sure a retired police chief’s death didn’t go uncovered. Then social media attacked her.

Sabrina Schnur, a reporter for the Las Vegas Review-Journal, faced death threats and anti-Semitic attacks from a bridade of right-wing boneheads who think that she downplayed the hit-and-run death of retired police chief Andreas Probst, when in fact she was the person who reported that it was a hit-and-run rather than an innocent accident.

Of course, billionaire bonehead Elon Musk joined the attacks.

smh when I think I used to feel obliged to have opinions about global crises based on a few hours of reading the news and to share that opinion with the world on the Internet.

Digital Equipment Corp. (1957-98) was a titan of the computing industry for decades, aid its technology legacy is still felt today. And it was influential in my personal life.. When Julie and I met, Julie was doing PR for DEC and I was covering the company as a journalist. Shocking conflict of interest—but she had stopped doing PR for them several weeks before we started dating.

For the lonely, a blurred line between real and fictional people

In lonely people, the boundary between real friends and favorite fictional characters gets blurred in the part of the brain that is active when thinking about others, a new study found.

Researchers scanned the brains of people who were fans of “Game of Thrones” while they thought about various characters in the show and about their real friends. All participants had taken a test measuring loneliness.

Who picked Petyr Baelish or Sandor Clegane as their imaginary bestie?

I Was a Pop-Tarts Taste Tester. Writer Laura Holson remembers her family regularly received mystery boxes when the product launched 60 years ago.

I did not like them,” said my sister Mary. They didn’t appeal either to my sister Gondie, but gave her bargaining power on the school playground. “You could eat one Pop-Tart and trade the other for a candy bar,” she said of the two-pack. For my part, I would eat them only if my mother cut the edges off, leaving a ravioli-size square of frosted raspberry jam.

Maybe it’s not surprising that none of us eat them now. “But it was a great memory,” said my brother Michael.

Stormtrooper Syndrome has seduced the West.

The West has a bad case of “Stormtrooper Syndrome”—utter faith and certainty that we are the Good Guys, the Good Guys always win, the Bad Guys are incompetent buffoons and we’ll just think our way out of crises like climate change at the last possible moment.

This syndrome is exacerbated by elites who never, ever suffer consequences of their actions.

Congressional Term Limits Might Break Congress. Jamelle Bouie makes a case against legislative term limits.

We have legislative term limits here in California and it’s not great. You end up with government by bureaucrats and lobbyists. The solution to legislative calcification is to make challengers more viable. Make incumbents have to work to get re-elected.

Fervently hoping friends and business associates in Israel remain safe.

The Long History of Jewface

A wonderful, playful look at more than a century of Jewish ethnic humor in Hollywood, triggered by the minor (and silly) controversy over Bradley Cooper, who is not Jewish, portraying Leonard Bernstein while wearing a prosthetic nose.

Author Jody Rosen, writing in The New Yorker notes that much Jewish ethnic humor, particularly at the turn of the 20th Century, gave gentiles an opportunity to ridicule Jewish immigrants, often cruelly. But this form of humor was different from other minstrelsy in that it was often performed by Jews, and Jews themselves loved it.

Rand = Buffy.
Moiraine = Giles.
Lanfear = Cordelia.
Mat = Xander.
Egwene = Willow.
Hopper = Oz.
Liandrin = Principal Skinner.