Thursday, September 19, 2024
[U.S. Admiral David Farragut. He began his naval career as a nine-year-old boy in 1810. He remained on active duty until his death in 1870. "Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!"](https://www.reddit.com/r/HistoryPorn/comments/t5816p/us_admiral_david_farragut_he_began_his_naval/)
Wednesday, September 18, 2024 →
In 2017, Robbie Tripp posted an over-the-top message on Instagram about how much he loves his “curvy wife,” Sarah. “There is nothing sexier than this woman right here. Thick thighs, big booty, cute little side roll, et cetera,” he wrote.
Podcaster Jamie Loftus tells the story of the post and the wave of Internet discourse that followed.
Loftus explains that Robbie is an example of an Internet character called “the wife guy”—someone who doesn’t just proclaim his love for his wife online, but someone for whom “telling people how much he loves his wife appeared to be part of his job.”
The Tripps are both Internet influencers and content creators, and Robbie, at least, has built a little media business on the “curvy wife” meme.
My thoughts about this are complicated. It’s very hard for me to avoid judging the Tripps harshly — which is wrong of me. Loftus sums it up: “Pathologizing someone else’s marriage is 10 miles of none of your fucking business.”
Loftus does wonderful podcasts on odd corners of culture. This episode is part of a series about people who become Internet-famous — the “main character” of social media — for a short time, and lived with the repercussions for years, for better or worse. Loftus tells their human stories. The series is called “Sixteenth Minute of Fame.”
Another Loftus podcast, “The Lolita Podcast,” looks at the Nabokov novel, which she describes as basically a horror novel about a pedophile who destroys a young girl’s life. But the novel lives on as creepy erotica, with the girl portrayed as predator rather than victim, turning us all into Humbert Humbert.
Another great podcast by Loftus: “My Year in Mensa.”
Wednesday, September 18, 2024 →
The awful reign of the Red Delicious apple
It lurks in desolation. Bumped around the bottom of lunch bags as schoolchildren rummage for chips or shrink-wrapped Rice Krispies treats. Waiting by the last bruised banana in a roadside gas station, the only produce for miles. Left untouched on hospital trays, forlorn in the fruit bowl at hotel breakfast buffets, bereft in nests of gift-basket raffia.
— Sarah Yager at The Atlantic
Wednesday, September 18, 2024 →
Something I saw while walking the dog: I have seen this Ford Pinto parked at the Lake Murray parking lot dozens of times over the 10+ years that I’ve been walking there. I finally saw it drive in, and a woman got out from behind the steering wheel, so I had an opportunity to talk with her and find out more about the car.
She and her husband have owned the car for 50 years. They bought it new in March 1974, and she says it is very easy to maintain.
I found it surprisingly easy to resist temptation to make the obvious Ford Pinto joke.
She also volunteered that she would never buy an electric car. The batteries need replacing after five years and are exorbitantly expensive, she said.
Wednesday, September 18, 2024 →
Crystal met Hugh Hefner when she was 21, and he was 81. They were married three years later and spent 10 years together at the Playboy Mansion before he died, and she became a widow. “I definitely was financially and emotionally abused by Hugh Hefner… I didn’t have the tools back then to even survive.”
Paraphrasing a line from “Batman: The Dark Knight:” You either die a glamorous playboy or you live long enough to become a weird, creepy old letch.
The Death, Sex & Money podcast: Life and Death Inside the Playboy Mansion
Wednesday, September 18, 2024
[Baby hippo Moo Deng photoshopped into movies](https://x.com/kkopzoo/status/1835529429810078049?utm_source=www.garbageday.email&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=a-big-night-for-shows-no-one-saw)
[c. 1950](https://www.reddit.com/r/vintageads/comments/zcb2o0/rj_reynolds_camel_prince_albert_tobacco_c_1950/)
I’m looking for an app to set a reminder that repeats hourly after completion. Plenty of apps offer reminders that repeat daily, weekly or monthly after completion, but I haven’t been able to find even one that will repeat hourly. Anyone?
I was about 20 years old when I saw “All That Jazz” and I loved it. I wanted to be Roy Scheider’s character — I envied his commitment, passion and charisma.
For years I wondered whether I had missed the point of the movie, but it occurs to me now that I got the point of the movie. The life that Scheider’s character lives is seductive. A deal with the devil only works if the devil offers you something that is supremely alluring.
I’m starting to think I just don’t like the Twitter clones — Mastodon, Threads, Bluesky, X. Their length limits are arbitrary and not how my brain works.
I use Micro.blog to automatically syndicate posts to those platforms, and let Micro.blog and the platforms handle truncation however they want to.
Good tips for young people looking for work: Become a broadband installer. Work outside doing meaningful, physical work.
There is a huge demand for workers in the U.S. to help deploy broadband to all the homes and businesses that don’t yet have a good broadband connection. Much of this demand is being driven by a government program called Broadband, Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD), which is providing more than $42 billion in government grants to the states. Lots of companies will be applying for these grants, and they’ll need plenty of workers to deploy the broadband infrastructure.”
Some tips: Highlight relevant construction experience. Veterans are highly sought for their toughness.
And if you love heights, many of these jobs are great for you. Not for me—I get nervous on the kiddie rollercoaster.
Monday, September 16, 2024
[Traveling first class in a Japan Airlines 747, 1970](https://www.reddit.com/r/TheWayWeWere/comments/1f46kpl/traveling_first_class_in_a_747_with_japan/)
[1957 - Sears Catalogue](https://danismm.tumblr.com/post/169942954544/1957-sears-catalogue-via-wishbook)
[1963 Concept for the Cadillac Eldorado](https://www.reddit.com/r/RetroFuturism/comments/djdxqb/1963_concept_for_the_cadillac_eldorado/)
[via](https://www.facebook.com/groups/591276324883101/?multi_permalinks=1419059218771470&hoisted_section_header_type=recently_seen)
[Meet Sparko, the robot dog (1940)](https://scifiseries.tumblr.com/post/157647351294/meet-sparko-the-robot-dog-1940)
[via](https://www.tumblr.com/allhailthe70shousewife/760170303455461376)
[1965](https://misforgotten2.tumblr.com/post/759914139647950848/a-book-you-very-likely-dont-have-on-your-shelf)
[Twins holding twins in 1987 vs. the same twins holding the same twins in 2017.](https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/7rtrmt/twins_holding_twins_in_1987_vs_the_same_twins/)
[Queen Margherita of Italy](https://www.tumblr.com/antique-royals/153533838508/queen-margherita-of-italy)
[The Mad Ghoul (1943) - Argentinean poster](https://weirdlookindog.tumblr.com/post/730590065153245184/the-mad-ghoul-1943-argentinean-poster)
[via](https://www.tumblr.com/allhailthe70shousewife/759009770881548288)
Was Abraham Lincoln gay? A new documentary, “Lover of Men,” explores the question.
The 2012 book, “The Stories Soldiers Wouldn’t Tell: Sex in the Civil War,” by Thomas P. Lowry, looks at this and many other questions of sexuality during that period. From this distance, it’s hard to figure out what was going on — very few people were writing candidly about that kind of thing in the 19th Century, and 21st Century attitudes and definitions toward sexuality and gender don’t map well onto the past.
Men often shared beds back then; this is common knowledge. In a highly sexist society, they formed intense friendships. There was probably a lot of sex going on between men.
Ever since I heard about “influencers” and “content creators” as jobs, I thought they were ridiculous. Content creators and influencers are narcissistic, peanut-brained Millennials and Zoomers who spend their days giving cosmetics and fashion advice, making cringe hip-hop videos, peddling Hallmark affirmations and dispensing bro culture from the manosphere.
This morning I had a shocking realization: It’s me. I’m a content creator and influencer. I write reports and articles and host webinars and influence decisions about networking and cloud technology.
Do I need to start wearing a sideways baseball cap and gold chains?
“An AI bot named James has taken my old job,” writes journalist Guthrie Scrimgeour.
A local newspaper in Hawaii is using AI bots to generate a video feed of the news. The bots pretend to be journalists discussing stories with each other.
If young people getting news from TikTok is a problem, the young people and TikTok aren’t to blame.
A new report examines how TikTok users decide what to believe. They’re not just mindlessly believing everything they see. They fact-check — but they do it on TikTok. Given the decline of journalism in 2024, is that awful?
The Godmother of AI Wants Everyone to Be a World Builder
Stanford computer scientist Fei-Fei Li is unveiling a startup that aims to teach AI systems deep knowledge of physical reality. Investors are throwing money at it.
…
[Li is] on a part-time leave from Stanford University to cofound a company called World Labs. While current generative AI is language-based, she sees a frontier where systems construct complete worlds with the physics, logic, and rich detail of our physical reality.
… [About ten years ago, Li created] ImageNet, a bespoke database of digital images that allowed neural nets to get significantly smarter. She feels that today’s deep-learning models need a similar boost if AI is to create actual worlds, whether they’re realistic simulations or totally imagined universes. Future George R.R. Martins might compose their dreamed-up worlds as prompts instead of prose, which you might then render and wander around in…. World Labs calls itself a spatial intelligence company, and its fate will help determine whether that term becomes a revolution or a punch line.
— Steven Levy at Wired
Investors are pitching this as an entertainment play but the real value here seems to be in business, governmeng and research, including city planning, training and industrial applications.
A profile of Mick Herron, author of the “Slow Horses” spy novel series. “I was only ever a hair’s breadth away from being exactly as much of a failure as the people I write about.”
Herron’s characters are bad spies and MI5 screw-ups exiled to a stable of misfits called Slough House, where they are desperate to escape life as so-called slow horses.
…
When they were first published, his books were read by roughly the same number of people as his articles for a trade journal on U.K. employment law.
“I wrote about people who were having a bad time at work, essentially,” said Herron, who was an editor at the Employment Law Brief. “And yes, you can certainly draw a lot of conclusions about how that influenced the books that I started writing when I was working there.”
Back then, he was commuting every day from Oxford to London. He came to work early so he could leave early. When he got home around 6 p.m., he had the energy to write for an hour. By aiming for 350 words a night, he pumped out five well-reviewed detective novels. But they “hadn’t set the world alight,” as he puts it, and they weren’t nearly successful enough for him to write full time. So he kept commuting.
When he started his job, Herron had an office on a floor with only a few people. By the time he left 15 years later, he was reserving a different hot desk every day on a floor with a few hundred people. Which taught him a valuable lesson that would animate his spy fiction.
“The larger the organization was that I worked for,” he said, “the less concern it had for the people working for it.”
…
His literary interests shifted after July 7, 2005, when being in London for the suicide bombings made him want to write about the security services. The problem was that he knew precisely nothing about the security services. What he did know was that the bigger an organization gets, the more dysfunctional it becomes.
“This was a truth that surely applied as much to the intelligence services as to any other place of work,” Herron later wrote. “And if every organization has its failures—its second-raters—wouldn’t that be well inside my comfort zone?”
…
[Herron’s success after years of struggling] was so improbable and wildly unexpected that when other writers ask him for advice, he offers two words.
“Be lucky,” he says. “You can have everything else going for you. But without a stroke of luck along the way, you might never really make it.”
— “Nobody Was Reading Him. Now He’s the World’s Best Spy Writer. By Ben Cohen at The Guardian
Trump and Vance are inciting terrorist attacks against Haitians who are in this country legally and just trying to work and live peacefully. Vance, at least, is knowingly spreading lies about the Haitians. (I think Trump is incapable of distinguishing between truth and lies.)
Trump and Vance are evil Nazis and the people who support them are supporting Nazis.
I’m an American Jew whose ancestors fled Eastern Europe to get away from terrorist attacks — called “pogroms” — of the type Trump and Vance are inciting now.
Sunday, September 15, 2024
Animated GIFs from the movie “Grease."
Photo taken near Allentown, Pa.
Shaggin-wagon van interiors of the 70’s and 80’s
The man who drives one of these has a luxurious mustache and sideburns.
21-year-old Bernie Sanders is arrested for protesting racial segregation, Chicago, 1963.
Ummmm…..
Beatrice Roberts was Miss New York 1925, but lost the Miss America Pageant. She was married to Robert Ripley of Ripley’s Believe it or Not for three months, then went to Hollywood and made nearly sixty films.
Saturday, September 14, 2024 →
Capacities does not support inline editing of Word documents — or any other attachments — and because that is a primary reason I was considering it as an Obsidian replacement, I am far less enthusiastic about Capacities.