mitchellaneous.net, aka Mitch’s Other Blog, is where I’m posting memes, vintage ads and photos, and other found media. I don’t imagine many people will bookmark mitchellaneous.net and return to it. It exists primarily as a publishing platform to share posts to a newsletter and several social media services, powered by Micro.blog, the great service that hosts both this blog and that one.
I’m thinking of changing the domain of this blog as well, to mitchipedia.org. It’s now mitchw.blog, of course, but I soured on that domain a while ago. One reason is because “MitchW” isn’t one of the names I use in life. I use “Mitch” or “Mitch Wagner.” People who knew me when I was a child call me “Mitchell.”
Also, I love blogging but I don’t like the word “blog.”
On the other hand, is “mitchipedia” too cute?
I own mitchwagner.com, and formerly blogged there, but I decided a few years ago to put a slight distance between my professional identity, which is tied to that name (my real name) and the stuff I post here. Now mitchwagner.com is just a placeholder site.
Another option would be to give this blog a domain tied to a catchy name, like Daring Fireball or Scripting News or Pluralistic. But all the names I could think of seemed to be either too bombastic or too cute. And so many of the good domains are taken now.
Dave’s blog, Scripting News, is one of my favorite blogs, and it’s the blog I’ve been reading daily for longest.
Naughton:
“Some people were born to play country music,” [Winer] wrote at one stage. “I was born to blog. At the beginning of blogging I thought everyone would be a blogger. I was wrong. Most people don’t have the impulse to say what they think.” Dave was the exact opposite. He was (and remains) articulate and forthright. His formidable record as a tech innovator meant that he couldn’t be written off as a crank. The fact that he was financially secure meant that he didn’t have to suck up to anyone: he could speak his mind. And he did. So from the moment he launched Scripting News in October 1994 he was a distinctive presence on the web.
The scariest possible outcome of the 2024 presidential contest is a Trump victory. The second scariest outcome, however, is a scenario in which center-right, anti-Trump voters pour into the Democratic Party and elect Kamala Harris and then proceed to pull the Democratic Party to the right.
Nolan makes these points:
#NeverTrump Republicans like the Cheneys are supporting Harris and may stick around in the Democratic party after 2024, pulling the party to the right.
Joe Biden’s leftward swing was due to pressure from Sanders, his allies, and their supporters. The Democratic Party became afraid of the Left.
But now Harris is afraid of Trump, his supporters and conservatives.
Primaries are the right time to challenge party leadership and force change in direction.
I eventually stopped arguing with him when I realized that good-faith bloggers criticizing journalists were angry at journalists for not acting like journalists should. It’s fine for random people on the Internet to say random things, but journalists should be reporting what’s actually happening, not just repeating the random things that random people say on the Internet.
Dave also discusses WordPress’s potential as an infrastructure for the social web: “… underneath the cluttered user interface is a strong foundation that you could build any kind of writing software on.” The cluttered interface eventually drove me away from WordPress, and I now describe it as an Internet publishing and commerce platform that incidentally does a mediocre job of supporting blogging.
On this morning’s walk, I saw my first Trump signs of the season. There were many campaign signs for both parties, including one house with many Harris/Walz signs, topped by a Harris/Walz flag on a flagpole, which I have not seen before.
Directly across the street was a house with a lot of Trump/Vance signs. That’s gotta be awkward.
I found myself this weekend thinking of a friend, sadly deceased for a few years, who frequently told fantastic stories, usually about his sexual exploits. After a time, I began to wonder if my friend was fabulating. After more time, I decided I didn’t care — his stories were great.
I started thinking about my friend yesterday after reading this obituary of Jay J. Armes, a flamboyant private investigator with hooks for hands, accused of lying about many aspects of his colorful life history.
Jay J. Armes, a flamboyant private investigator who lived on an estate with miniature Tibetan horses, traveled in a bulletproof Cadillac limousine with rotating license plates and had steel hooks for hands, including one fitted to fire a .22 caliber revolver, died on Sept. 18 in El Paso.
Franz Lidz at the New York Times: “Scientists recently found the planet’s longest continuously occupied termite colony in an arid region of South Africa. It dates to the time of the Neanderthals.”
Termites are masterful soil engineers capable of erecting cathedral-like edifices out of dirt, saliva and feces. To create and maintain their homes, they become miners, masons, scaffolders, plasterers and roofers. Working together, they don’t just build simple nests; they install air-conditioning, central heating and even security devices.
…
Termites eat, process and excrete organic matter, enriching the quality of the surrounding soil. “Their mounds increase the depth, nutrient and moisture status of the soils, which results in the mounds often supporting more vegetation than the soils surrounding the mounds,” said Catherine Clarke, a soil scientist at Stellenbosch University who collaborated on the new study. “So they increase the productivity of semiarid landscapes and likely make these landscapes more resilient to climate change.”
A New Jersey couple sued Uber after a crash left them severely injured. An appeals court ruled that they had agreed to settle disputes out of court when their 12-year-old daughter used the Uber Eats app to order a pizza.
A New Jersey couple was heading home from dinner in an Uber in March 2022 when their driver T-boned another car, leaving them with serious injuries, including spine and rib fractures.
The couple, Georgia and John McGinty, of Princeton, N.J., sued Uber nearly a year later. Now, their effort to bring the case to court could be hampered by a terms-of-service agreement that they say their 12-year-old daughter signed while ordering pizza using Ms. McGinty’s Uber Eats account.
A New Jersey appeals court found last month that the agreement’s arbitration provision – which says that most disputes between Uber and its customers must be litigated privately – was “valid and enforceable,” reversing a lower court’s decision that would have allowed the couple’s personal-injury lawsuit to be heard by a jury.
The Harris father and daughter live just two miles apart, but rarely speak. NYTimes:
Interviews with more than a dozen friends and former colleagues of Dr. Harris reveal two notable themes. First, Ms. Harris’s father, a Jamaican-born emeritus professor of economics at Stanford University, has been a critic of mainstream economic theory from the left but is hardly a Marxist.
Second, Dr. Harris has been a mostly absent figure from his daughter’s life but not an irrelevant one. Well before she set out on her political trajectory, her father was racking up achievements and, like her mother, setting a high standard that in retrospect helps explain Ms. Harris’s own ascent.
Trump accuses the elder Harris of being a Marxist, which is bullshit, like everything Trump says. But his policies are most definitely leftist and helped shape a decade-long economic boom in his native Jamaica. So if Harris did learn economics at his knee, that’s a plus for her.
I love the idea of the Surfed app, which records and organizes your entire browsing history and bookmarks. I haven’t found a use for it. And according to this review, it’s buggy as heck.
Dave Winer: WordPress has a greater destiny. I loved Radio Userland. One of those great old history-making apps like WordStar, Lotus 1-2-3, or the Mosaic Web browser.
The 2010 novel, which foresaw Trump by five years, is the story of a small town in Maine that gets cut off from the rest of the world when a supernatural dome is dropped on top of it. In the tradition of political fiction, the town is a microcosm of America. The primary action of the novel isn’t supernatural; it’s about the town’s most successful businessman, a car dealer, who “does what strongmen always do when crisis strikes” and uses the crisis to become a bloodthirsty, brutal dictator.
I love how Grammarly improves my writing, but I hate how intrusive the desktop app is. It gets in my face, overlaying my writing and app controls. It’s worse than Clippy. Is there an alternative?
There are strong moral and ideological reasons for everyone to join a union. But I would be satisfied if everyone joined a union for a much more pragmatic reason: Your money, that you made with your work, is right there on the table in front of you. Do you want to pick it up? You need a union. Or the rich people get it. That’s it. The people telling you that you don’t need a union are the same ones who will take that money off the table, and put it into their own pockets.
Yesterday, I went to the La Mesa-Foothills Democratic Club meeting and wrote postcards for Democrats in swing states. If Harris loses, blame my lousy handwriting. I also picked up a few lawn signs to add to our curbside display and received instructions and door hangers for door-to-door canvassing.