Mitch's Blog logo Mitch's Blog

I’m thinking about “Level 7,” an apocalyptic 1959 novel that had quite an effect on me when I read it as a boy 📚

”Level 7,” by a Ukrainian-born Israeli writer named Mordecai Roshwald, is written in the first person by a modern soldier whose name was taken away from him by the state, and is now designated only as X-127. He lives in an underground military complex, and his sole job is the push the buttons that launch the missiles in the event of nuclear war. X-127’s nation, and that nation’s enemy, are intentionally left unidentified.

The residents‘ lives are regimented and standardized, with the people reduced to little more than machines themselves. And yet I found X-127’s little world fascinating, and weirdly appealing.

Next paragraph is a spoiler—cut-and-paste it into Rot-13.com to read:

Va gur zvqqyr bs gur abiry, gur rarzl angvbaf unir gurve ahpyrne jne, naq rirelobql ba gur fhesnpr vf xvyyrq. Gura gur ahpyrne ernpgbe gung cbjref gur haqretebhaq pbzcyrk ortvaf gb yrnx enqvngvba, naq gur erfvqragf ortva gb qvr bar ol bar. K-127 vf gur ynfg fheivibe, naq ur qvrf ng gur raq bs gur abiry, fpenjyvat gur svany jbeqf vagb uvf wbheany. Gung ohttrq zr jura V jnf n obl—vs gur ynfg zna ba Rnegu vf qrnq, jub’f ernqvat guvf svefg-crefba obbx. Vaqrrq, V yrnea abj gung guvf cbvag obgurerq Ebfujnyq, gbb; gur bevtvany abiry unq na nccraqvk fhccbfrqyl jevggra ol Znegvna nepurbybtvfgf jub pnzr gb Rnegu naq sbhaq gur znahfpevcg.

Roshwald emigrated to America and died in Maryland in 2015.

Despite myriad potential distractions, it’s good to see Washington lawmakers focused on what really matters, which is whether John Fetterman looks nice.

A friend’s post on social media was too funny for the simple thumbs-up or smiley emoji, but not funny enough for the laughing-so-hard-I’m-crying emoji. I overthink things sometimes.

Our new mortgage company wants to have a closer emotional relationship with us than we are interested in having.

Quit: The Silo Series Collection by Hugh Howey 📚 Grinds to a halt 300-400 pages in with 1,200-1,300 pages to go. I’d rather seal myself and my descendants in an underground cylinder than continue reading.

I’m finishing up writing a networking product factsheet now. Grammarly suggested I change “packets” to “boxes.” Noooooo…..

I observed with interest the recent meme by young women who were amazed to find the young men in their lives thought about Rome often.

I certainly think about Rome often, though I am not a young man—I am a man in the period of life I like to call “early late middle age.” I never thought thinking about Rome was remarkable.

I’m not sure I should be considered part of the meme because I’m a history buff, and one of the historical periods that interests me is Rome. History is a hobby for me, and I think about history a lot.

On the other hand, maybe that makes me a big part of the meme.

Historian Patrick Wyman has a theory on why people (of every and all genders) are fascinated by Rome today. It’s a good theory and now I think I need to subscribe to his podcast and read his books.

And Ryan Broderick has a theory why this meme is becoming popular now:

Every 5-7 years, a whole bunch of people come of age online at the same time. Their dumb, usually playful freshman-dorm-icebreaker-level content and discourse is then pored over by media outlets and turned into these big news cycles that inevitably sour. But I think it’s just kids making sense of the world around them. It’s fun and sometimes reveals some interesting quirks about society, but it doesn’t always — and, I’d argue, rarely does — matter.

I have discovered Excalidraw and achieved nerdvana.

I, a complete design illiterate, was able to create a simple networking diagram for a marketing document in 25 minutes, having never used the tool before. Later, the client will be able to use Excalidraw’s built-in collaboration tools to make changes, and then hand off to a designer to polish.

Earlier I mentioned the movie “The Postman Always Rings Twice” but I brain-farted and called it “The Milkman Always Rings Twice” and now I want to see “The Milkman Always Rings Twice,” which would be about a milkman who’s seduced by a femme fatale who is lactose intolerant.

A note to my fellow Jews, particularly Jewish-Americans

Do you feel any connection to the place where your grandparents came from?

My grandparents came from Eastern Europe. Poland on my father’s side, and Lithuania on my mother’s. But I do not feel like a Polish-American or Lithuanian-American. I’m just plain American. Or a Jewish American.

I suspect this is because my grandparents left those countries to get away from anti-Semitism, and found a welcoming home here. I have had the good fortune to be born in one of the few places and times in history where Jews face very little anti-Semitism. No wonder I’ve never won the lottery—I used up all my luck when I was born.

New York occupies the place in my heart where other people put their ancestral affinity. I’m an expatriate New Yorker, the way some people are Italian-American or Irish-American.

We have seen “Double Indemnity” and I have thoughts

I have avoided nearly all noir movies until now because I like stories to have good guys, and my preconception about noir is that these films entirely feature variations on bad people along with the occasional victim.

I have seen “Double Indemnity” now and I see I was wrong. Not about the bad people—although there are one or two good people in this movie, they are not the main characters. However, “Double Indemnity” is not the least bit off-putting. It was compelling.

Fred MacMurray as the main character, Walter Neff (“two Fs, like in Philadelphia”) is a surprise. I knew him from the 1960s as the father in a TV show called “My Three Sons.” It was a wholesome family sitcom, and MacMurray played a wholesome sitcom Dad, which means he was an amiable eunuch. I knew he’d played other, darker roles when he was younger, and had seen a couple of them, but he blows the doors off Walter Neff. In one of the first scenes of the movie, where he first encounters Barbara Stanwyck as Phyllis Dietrichson, I’m thinking, “Wait, Fred MacMurray is …. sexy? … in this movie?”

And so he is. He is handsome, with a mellifluous baritone voice. He wears tailored suits. He leans nonchalantly against a doorjamb. He moves confidently. He talks in rapid-fire witty banter. He wants Phyllis and he takes her.

And yet it’s also apparent from the beginning that it’s all on the surface. He’s not as sexy, smart, or confident as he thinks he is. And Phyllis, not him, is the one in control of that relationship.

Lots of smoking in this movie. It’s not just that all the characters smoke. Smoking is a big deal. It’s like cigarettes and matches are one of the main characters.

Ebert loved the movie and he said Walter and Phyllis’s motivation was the central mystery. Walter doesn’t seem to really care all that much about the money or her, and vice-versa. I’m not sure I agree with Ebert here—but he has a point. As the movie got started, I was thinking, “Wait, he just met her and now he’s in love with her? Not just in love—obsessed?” And, later, “He’s been with her twice and now he’s willing to murder for her?”

And I wondered why Drake, the character played by Edward G. Robinson, was so motivated to root out fraud. It’s not his money—why does he care so much?

Thinking about it, it seems to me that all these characters are playing a game. People become obsessed with games, particularly when the games involve sex, money and death.

Also, Walter Neff seems like he’s alone. He has no family, no friends, not even a cohort of fellow salesbros. He loves his co-worker, Drake, like a brother, and that is the extent of his human connection. So, yeah, maybe attention from Phyllis Dietrichson was like a sip of water to a man dying of thirst, and he was immediately willing to do anything to get more.

“Double Indemnity” is possibly the least dated old movie I’ve ever seen. All the characters and their situations and motivations seem completely up-to-date. This is a movie that could easily be remade in 2023. But I hope it isn’t. It’s perfect as it is.

The only dated bits are the smoking. And the Dictafone. Walter Neff dictating his confession is part of what makes the movie still fresh, but the Dictafone itself is a weird gadget.

What does Lola see in her boyfriend? He seems to have no redeeming qualities whatsoever.

Now I want to see ”The Apartment” again. “Shut up and deal.” And also “The Postman1 Always Rings Twice,” which I guess along with “Double Indemnity” are the two pinnacles of noir movies.

  1. When I initially published this post, I wrote the title as “The Milkman Always Rings Twice.” I don’t know whether that movie exists, but I would like to see it. It would be a steamy romance about an amorous milkman and a femme fatale who’s lactose intolerant. ↩︎

A dog is a wondrous machine masterfully designed by billions of years of evolution to produce guilt.

The chest freezer in our kitchen is like the warehouse at the end of the first Indiana Jones movie.

Sandra Bullock and the Rise of Tech. Sandra Bullock movies reflect society’s changing attitude toward tech over her 30-year career.

Sometimes I think about how her super-hacker character in “The Net” orders pizza online, and how that was a big deal when the movie came out in 1995.

A Rachel can be either a sandwich or a haircut. And yet I think this is rarely a source of confusion.

Walking the dog, I saw a house with a five-foot “Christmas Story” leg lamp in the front window.

“The man who views the world at 50 the same as he did at 20 has wasted 30 years of his life.”

“For All Mankind” returns Nov. 10. Looks great! On the show, the year is 2003.

I was thinking last night that my brain is still broken from the pandemic. It exaggerated my normal introversion and homebody tendencies into something resembling agoraphobia. I go weeks without going anywhere but the grocery store, picking up take-out once a week, my daily walk and that’s about it.

Yesterday I was looking through some photos I took on business trips and thought: That was me. I used to do that. I used to be that guy.

The situation is complicated by our being at higher risk than most people. But not going anywhere has its own risks.

This one time I narrowly escaped being a clown for a children's party

Some years ago, a couple I was friends with pressured me to be a clown at the birthday party they were throwing for their little daughter. I firmly and repeatedly noped out on that, and they hired a professional clown, and later they said they were glad because the pro did a great job.

They told me they asked the clown what was the weirdest event he ever performed at. The clown replied that it was an adult party. The clown explained that doing an adult party was no big deal—he often did adult parties and mixed up the usual clown stuff with some dirty jokes and it was fine.

But this party of adults insisted on getting the children’s show, not the adult show, and when the clown arrived, he found a gathering of grown men and women dressed as children, the men wearing rompers and the women wearing jumper-dresses, and they stayed in character the whole time.

That was more than 30 years ago, and since then, every few months I think of that conversation and wonder WTF?

Historically, clowns go back thousands of years, and for that whole time, they were creepy, just as they are today. It’s only for a brief historical period in roughly the 1950s and 1960s that clowns were considered wholesome children’s entertainment.

The Half-Truth of America’s Past Greatness.

Esau McCaulley at The New York Times:

Where can African Americans find this lost golden age? Do we discover it during the first centuries of the Republic when slavery was the law of the land? Do we fast forward to the Red Summer, Jim Crow laws and “strange fruit” hanging from poplar trees?

I’m glad to see the release candidate iPhone and Watch OS betas are now available. Every year, I install the betas when the first public betas hit, and every year I regret it. I never encounter major problems, but the minor bugs are annoying.

This year's iPhone announcement is the least consequential iPhone announcement ever (and that's OK)

Pundits like to say that every Presidential election is the most consequential election in our lifetime. I recall a panel of historians discussing what the least consequential election of our lifetime was.

The consensus was rapid and unanimous: The 1996 election. Clinton was a good, but not great President. Bob Dole probably would have been a good, but not great President. The 90s would have proceeded exactly as it did.

This year’s iPhone announcement is the least consequential iPhone announcement ever. The 14 line was a good phone. This year’s phones are an upgrade. Better camera, lighter weight, improved battery life, and so on.

I have no plans to upgrade my aging ancient XS for a year, but if I need to, I’ll get an iPhone 15 Pro Max and I expect I’ll be happy with it.

While walking the dog this morning, I saw this car. Kermit looks like he is desperately trying to escape from a serial killer.

I’m busy with work and other aspects of life and don’t have a lot of time for social media right now, so here is a photo of a palm tree in our backyard, which just got a trim and a shave and is looking beautiful after its spa day.

When Moviegoers Started Watching Films From the Beginning.

Throughout the classical Hollywood era, moviegoers dropped in on a film screening whenever they felt like it, heedless of the progress of the narrative. In the usual formulation, a couple go to the movies, enter midway into the feature film, sit through to the end of the movie, watch the newsreel, cartoon, and comedy short at the top of the program, and then sit through the feature film until they recognize the scene they walked in on. At this point, one moviegoer whispers to their partner, “This is where we came in,” and they exit the theater.

This is how I remember watching when I was a little boy being brought to the movies by my parents in the 1960s.

Alfred Hitchcock changed the national moviegoing habits with the release of “Psycho” in 1960. Hitchcock was a brilliant publicist for his own products, and a big publicity gimmick for “Psycho” was the demand that movie theater owners bar the doors and refuse to allow new audience members in after the movie began. Guards were stationed at the door.

People & Blogs: Manuel Moreale is doing a series of interviews with bloggers. Here are Rachel K. Kwon and Micro.blog founder Manton Reece.

I like finding out about how other people do blogging. It gives me ideas.

And I like the layout of Kwon’s home page, separating different types of posts into sections. It’s bothered me for a while that my blogging is mixed-up and spread across Facebook, Micro.blog, Tumblr, Mastodon and Bluesky.

Things I saw walking the dog this morning. I wish I’d stood directly in front of that rattan couch and centered it in the photo.

Overheard: My kid throws such a fit any time his bread gets a little burnt, I’m starting to think he’s black toast intolerant.

Overheard: Sometimes a joke is a great way to break tension during an unpleasant situation, and lately, l’ve also been discovering all the other times when it absolutely is not.

Trash pick up is delayed by a day. Some of our neighbors will put the trash bins out tonight anyway, and we will feel superior.

Yesterday I accidentally made myself super-strong coffee and liked it. This morning, I attempted to reproduce the coffee strength I made by accident yesterday. I may have overcorrected.

Cory Doctorow reviews “Doppelganger,” Naomi Klein’s memoir about how she’s often confused with Naomi Wolf. From that gimmicky springboard, Klein explores the progressive-to-Qanon pipeline that Wolf traveled—folks who formerly considered themselves staunch liberals becoming Trump supporters and embracing right-wing conspiracy theories.

Doctorow:

Wolf once had a cluster of superficial political and personal similarities to Klein: a feminist author of real literary ability, a Jewish woman, and, of course, a Naomi. Klein grew accustomed to being mistaken for Wolf, but never fully comfortable. Wolf’s politics were always more Sheryl Sandberg than bell hooks (or Emma Goldman). While Klein talked about capitalism and class and solidarity, Wolf wanted to “empower” individual women to thrive in a market system that would always produce millions of losers for every winner.

Fundamentally: Klein is a leftist, Wolf was a liberal. The classic leftist distinction goes: leftists want to abolish a system where 150 white men run the world; liberals want to replace half of those 150 with women, queers and people of color.

By the way, I had not encountered the phrase “bell hooks” before seeing it in Cory’s post. Initially, I thought it might be an error of the sort that comes up when you’re thumb-typing or dictating into a phone. It’s not.

Late lunch with Julie at Shakespeare’s Pub, San Diego. Good food and spirits, comfortable interior, and many delightful posters and postcards on the walls

Overheard: me at 13: wow i can’t wait til we have immersive computers everywhere like Star Trek

me at 30: wow i can’t wait until we destroy all computers like in dune

The Story of Our Universe May Be Starting to Unravel.

Recent astronomical observations are shedding doubt on fundamental theories of cosmology and physics.

… a revolution may end up being the best path to progress. That has certainly been the case in the past with scientific breakthroughs like Copernicus’s heliocentrism, Darwin’s theory of evolution and Einstein’s relativity. All three of those theories also ended up having enormous cultural influence — threatening our sense of our special place in the cosmos, challenging our intuition that we were fundamentally different than other animals, upending our faith in common sense ideas about the flow of time. Any scientific revolution of the sort we’re imagining would presumably have comparable reverberations in our understanding of ourselves.

At Yale’s Long COVID Clinic, Lisa Sanders Is Trying It All

Long-COVID patients, generally speaking, have been very miserable for a very long time, and because the illness attacks their brains, their hearts, their lungs, their guts, their joints — sometimes simultaneously, sometimes intermittently, and sometimes in a chain reaction — they bounce from specialist to specialist, none of whom has the bandwidth to hear their whole frustrating ordeal together with the expertise to address all of their complaints: the nonspecific pain, the perpetual exhaustion, the bewildering test results, the one-off treatments. “These are people who have not been able to tell their story to anybody but their spouse and their mom — for years sometimes,” Sanders tells me. “And they are, in some ways, every doctor’s worst nightmare.” From the perspective of a time-pressed physician under ever-more-stringent productivity expectations, who has at most 30 minutes to do a new-patient intake and 15 for a follow-up, “someone who comes in with a very long story — it just sinks your day,” Sanders says.

In America, the Cheese Is Dead:

… in France the cheese is alive, which means that you can buy it young, mature or old, and that’s why you have to read the age of the cheese when you go to buy the cheese. So you smell, you touch, you poke. If you need cheese for today, you want to buy a mature cheese. If you want cheese for next week, you buy a young cheese. And when you buy young cheese for next week, you go home, [but] you never put the cheese in the refrigerator, because you don’t put your cat in the refrigerator. It’s the same; it’s alive.

I saw this sign while walking the dog. We did not see the bird. 😢🦜

Vivvy would like me to put down the phone and pay attention to her.

I loved the final scenes of “Justified: City Primeval” and I hope they’re setting up for a second season. The miniseries was enjoyable but lacked the punch of the original series. Those final scenes supplied the missing ingredient.

10 years ago this weekend we brought this little girl home.

Poor kid had a rough couple of days adjusting to the new environment. It was a tough couple of months for me and Julie too.

Minnie is the first dog I’ve ever owned. I had no idea what I was doing. I still don’t, but she’s a healthy dog and seems happy so we must be doing something right.

Horse- race journalism

Journalists need to stop covering elections like horse races. Don’t obsess over who’s winning—help us decide who to vote for.

Horse-race journalism perpetuates the image of journalists as detached observers.

The horse race fills the insatiable news hole. Every day, a new poll or gaffe. Candidates’ stands on the issues, their experience and competence don’t change much over the course of a campaign—they don’t make news—but they are more important.

It's Time to Talk About 'Pandemic Revisionism'

Epidemiologist Katelyn Jetelina discusses school closures, mask mandates and the pandemic response, on the Ezra Klein show, with guest host David Wallace-Wells, a New York Times science and public policy journalist

Political discussions today focus on school, shut-downs, lockdowns, masking, and whether the economic stimulus was too big. We’re not discussing the big question of whether we could have prevented 1.1 million deaths in the US alone.

Katelyn Jetelina is an epidemiologist and the author of the popular newsletter Your Local Epidemiologist. She argues that we’ve entered a new phase of the Covid-19 pandemic: “pandemic revisionism.” In her telling, the revisionist impulse seduces us into swapping cheap talking points for the thorny, difficult decisions we actually faced – and may face again with the next novel virus.

No maybe about it. We will face those questions again.

In the 2020 election, Biden rightly said that Trump was unfit for office because Trump’s handling of the Covid crisis resulted in 200,000 dead Americans. During the Biden administration, far more Americans have died than while Trump was in office, and many of those deaths were preventable

Biden’s Covid policy has been to pretend that the vaccine solved the problem. 900,000 dead Americans disagree.

My 20-year-old self-inking return-address stamp still works. That is some seriously well-made self-inking technology.

Continuing with decluttering my home office. Can all the drawers in all the furniture be junk drawers?

Hi, @mtt! Thank you for the nice work on the Tiny theme and plugins. Regarding the Summary Posts add-in: Would it be possible to configure the add-in so that titled posts are not truncated by default–only truncated when manually adding the relevant code to a post? Thanks!

How can we learn to speak alien? On Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman.

If we meet extraterrestrials someday, how will we figure out what they’re saying? We currently face this problem right here at home: we have 2 million species of animals on our planet… and we have no Google Translate for any of them. We’re not having conversations with (or listening to podcasts by) anyone but ourselves. Join Eagleman and his guest Aza Raskin to see the glimmer of a pathway that might get us to animal translation, and relatively soon.

As TikTok Ban Looms, ByteDance Battles Oracle For Control Of Its Algorithm

Emily Baker-White at Forbes:

The relationship between ByteDance and Oracle has become deeply untrusting and adversarial, according to five sources. One source with knowledge of the companies’ actions characterized Oracle’s stance toward ByteDance as a “counterintelligence operation,” rather than a normal customer relationship. Meanwhile, some ByteDance employees wonder if Oracle just wants to run up their bill. The TikTok contract, known internally at Oracle as Project Telesis, has made ByteDance one of Oracle’s most lucrative customers.

When was the first time a waiter asked someone whether they saved room for dessert? Is that guy getting royalties?

Wanted: A combined RSS/Mastodon client. Yes, Masto generates RSS feeds but that doesn’t give you everything a Mastodon client does.

Cory Doctorow: How the kleptocrats and oligarchs hunt civil society groups to the ends of the Earth:

It’s a great time to be an oligarch! If you have accumulated a great fortune and wish to put whatever great crime lies behind it behind you, there is an army of fixers, lickspittles, thugs, reputation-launderers, procurers, henchmen, and other enablers who have turnkey solutions for laundering your reputation and keeping the unwashed from building a guillotine outside the gates of your compound.