Sonya Massey’s mother called 911 and asked police not to hurt daughter before shooting death. “Donna Massey told a dispatcher: ‘Please don’t send no combative policemen that are prejudiced.’” Heartbreaking.
A conspicuously dressed-down shooter won Olympic silver. Then he went viral.
Rachel Treisman at KPBS.org: While other Olympic shooters showed up wearing “cyberpunk-looking gear … large ear protectors, visors and sci fi-esque shooting glasses, [Turkey’s Yusuf Didek] played it a different kind of cool with regular eyeglasses and barely visible ear plugs.” He wore “a jersey that looked like an ordinary T-shirt, and [shot] with his free hand tucked in his pants pocket,” giving off “a noticeably casual vibe. So casual, in fact, that scores of social media users jokingly wondered whether Turkey had sent a hitman to the Olympics.”
Perry's Cafe, a San Diego landmark for 39 years, will close
I’ve seen this place, with its vintage space-age Googie architecture, from the highway near Old Town often. I’ve never been inside, though I’ve always meant to. Inside, it’s a classic diner of a type that seems to be a dying breed — my favorite kind of restaurant. RIP.
According to Roxana Popescu at the San Diego Union-Tribune, Perry’s will be replaced by a 223-unit residential complex, preserving some of the original building.
Former San Diego Democratic Party chair Will Rodriguez-Kennedy announced his exoneration from a sexual assault accusation. He stepped down when the accusation surfaced two years ago. His successor was killed in a motor vehicle accident recently.
Trying to move folders around in bookmarks on Safari is a dreadful experience. I have sometimes wondered why The Youngs today don’t use browser bookmarks — it’s because browser bookmarks are stuck in the 90s, so people don’t use them, and therefore browser developers don’t pay them any attention, and it’s a vicious cycle.
“The political parties are more divided by their views on gender than they are divided by gender itself”
Derek Thompson at The Atlantic, What Is America’s Gender War Actually About?
The left has become more adept at shaming toxic masculinity than at showcasing a positive masculinity that is distinct from femininity. Progressive readers of the previous sentence might roll their eyes at the notion that it is the job of any left-wing political movement to coddle men’s feelings. But if a large shift rightward among young male voters helps Trump eke out a victory in November, Democrats will have little choice but to think up a new message to stop the young-male exodus.
Much truth here I think. I have never been bothered by this because I do not feel at all targeted by progressive denunciations of toxic masculinity, and I don’t look to politicians and political pundits to tell me how a man ought to act.
Then again, I am not young.
The Republican vision of masculinity is not only toxic, but it is also false. Donald Trump is a draft dodger and a coward who hides behind his inherited money, and his lickspittle lackeys are no better. I’m not seeing a lot of astronauts, athletes, military combat veterans or other true adherents of machismo in that crowd. Republican President Theodore Roosevelt would have been disgusted with what his party has become.
My latest on Fierce Network: We need a new internet The internet as we know it is old and worn out, as are the ways that we think about it.
Training AI using synthetic data seems like a lot of bullshit to me. It’s like learning to cook by reading cookbooks, watching YouTube videos and talking to other people who are doing the same thing, but never actually cooking. All of those things are useful, but the only way to learn to cook is to cook.
Am I missing something?
I’m pleased to see the Goodlinks read-later app has added support for highlights and notes. My Readwise Reader annual subscription runs out in a few days, and I’ve been looking for alternatives. Readwise Reader is a great product, but it is overpowered and overpriced for my purposes.
Meta’s idiot moderation AI strikes again, this time deleting a meme I posted to Threads weeks ago for allegedly violating Meta’s terms of service prohibiting drug sales. Of course, I was not selling drugs — it was stoner humor. I used to run into this kind of thing several times a month on Facebook before I stopped posting there about two weeks ago.
This incident was particularly annoying because I was unable to dismiss the warning notification to click through to the timeline.
A 70-year-old hiker was found alive and well after spending five days alone and lost in the wilderness. Warren Elliott “ate berries and drank from the river to sustain himself. He was found ‘in good spirits’ and uninjured.” Score one for the geezers.
Ryan Broderick at Garbage Day: Conservatives are struggling to get ahead of this whole “weird” thing. (My two cents: That’s cuz they’re weird.)
I’m not thrilled with the ageism in the Democrats' new slogan: “Donald Trump is old and weird.” But I’m happy to see it seems to be working. I’ll deal with my issues after President Harris is sworn in.
Also from Broderick: Musk Is Violating His Own Terms Of Service (And Likely Election Law) If You Even Care.
Open standards make podcasting work
A Few Blockbuster Podcasts Are Making All the Money. I listen to about 90 minutes of podcasts daily, but I only listen to one of the listed top ten podcasts. I haven’t even heard of most of these (though some of the hosts are familiar names — they’re real-life celebrities). That’s a testimony to the excellent richness of the podcast landscape, and that richness is, to a large degree, attributable to open standards.
“Nearly 100 million Americans age 12 and older listen to podcasts every week,” according to this article in the Wall Street Journal.
I started listening near the beginning, 20 years ago, when podcasts were very much a nerd affair. It amazes me that they are now mainstream like TV and radio are used to be.
Anchorage [Alaska] will one day be the port of exchange between Asia, North America, and Europe…. I don’t think you all are considering how much an ice free Arctic Ocean will change international trade routes. It will become the very northwest passage explorers had been looking for since like 1500.
“Bob Newhart holds up”
An insightful essay on what made Newhart’s work genius, by Jason Zinoman at The New York Times:
Before basically inventing the hit stand-up special, with the 1960 Grammy-winning album “The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart” — that doesn’t even count his pay-per-view event broadcast on Canadian television that some cite as the first filmed special — he was a soft-spoken accountant who had never done a set in a nightclub. That he made a classic with so little preparation is one of the great miracles in the history of comedy.
Newhart was a master of the slow build and used silence and his stammer as power tools.
Also: Marc Maron interviews Newhart from 2014 and 2018.
Newhart went straight to the top. Unlike other comics, he didn’t have years of playing small gigs to refine his act before hitting it big. He went from nowhere to a #1 album and had to learn his craft in the spotlight.
Newhart repeats the hilarious story about how his wife met Don Rickles. The Newharts and Rickles became lifelong friends. Rickles was an insult comic who spewed racist jokes at a time when a person could do those things, and it was clear they were demonstrating how racism was stupid. But offstage, Don Rickles was, by all accounts, a kind and gracious man—the opposite of his onstage persona.
Newhart shrugs and does not explain how he and Rickles became close friends. But I think a big part of it is that they were both good men who played Rat Pack shows but were not interested in the boozing, philandering lifestyle. They were family men.