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Clarence Thomas has secretly accepted millions of dollars in luxury trips from a conservative Republican donor over more than 20 years, according to a ProPublica investigation.

For more than two decades, Thomas has accepted luxury trips virtually every year from [Dallas businessman Harlan Crow] without disclosing them, documents and interviews show. A public servant who has a salary of $285,000, he has vacationed on Crow’s superyacht around the globe. He flies on Crow’s Bombardier Global 5000 jet. He has gone with Crow to the Bohemian Grove, the exclusive California all-male retreat, and to Crow’s sprawling ranch in East Texas. And Thomas typically spends about a week every summer at Crow’s private resort in the Adirondacks.

The extent and frequency of Crow’s apparent gifts to Thomas have no known precedent in the modern history of the U.S. Supreme Court.

The luxury trips contrast starkly with the public reputation Thomas has cultivated.

In Thomas’ public appearances over the years, he has presented himself as an everyman with modest tastes.

“I don’t have any problem with going to Europe, but I prefer the United States, and I prefer seeing the regular parts of the United States,” Thomas said in a recent interview for a documentary about his life, which Crow helped finance.

“I prefer the RV parks. I prefer the Walmart parking lots to the beaches and things like that. There’s something normal to me about it,” Thomas said. “I come from regular stock, and I prefer that — I prefer being around that.”

— Joshua Kaplan, Justin Elliott and Alex Mierjeski at ProPublica

Cory Doctorow reviews Thomas’s ignominous career. “… the elevation of the unrepentant rapist Brett Kavanaugh to the bench could never have occurred but for the trail blazed by Thomas as a sexually harassing, pubic-hair distributing creep boss.”

Thomas wants to ban same-sex marriage again, Cory notes. “And of course, he’s set precedent by hearing cases related to the attempted overthrow of the US government, despite the role his wife played in the affair.”

Thomas is not alone in furthering the right’s mission to destroy the morale of constitutional law scholars by systematically delegitimizing the court and showing it to be a vehicle for partisan politics and dark money policy laundering, but he is certainly at the vanguard.

Today I learned “Fiddler on the Roof” is a smash hit in Japan.

Since 1967, the musical’s seen hundreds of Japanese revivals. Joseph Stein, who penned the book to Fiddler, was once approached by a Japanese producer who asked, “Do they understand this show in America?”

“Yes, of course,” replied Stein, “we wrote it for America. Why do you ask?”

“Because,” the producer said, “it’s so Japanese.”

— 12 Things You Might Not Know About ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ (Mental Floss / Mark Mancini)

We watched “Murder Mystery,” a 2019 comedy-mystery starring Adam Sandler and Jennifer Aniston as married couple Nick and Audrey Spitz, a New York cop, and a hairdresser. On a flight to Europe for a bus-tour vacation, she strikes up a friendship with a dapper gentleman on the plane. The dapper gentleman spontaneously invites the New Yorkers to join him for a celebration on his billionaire uncle’s yacht. On the yacht, someone is murdered, and the Spitzes are the prime suspects.

It is an oddly old-fashioned movie. The gags all depend on the premise that the Spitzes are amiable lower-class shmos in a world of elegant toffs. We’re at an Agatha Christie murder mystery on a yacht, but instead of Hercule Poirot, our heroes are Oscar Madison and Laverne from Laverne & Shirley. Even the names Nick and Audrey Spitz seem to echo Nick and Nora Charles. I particularly liked the wardrobes—Sandler in baggy cargo shorts surrounded by men and women in tailored evening wear, Aniston in her outfits from Target (not Marshalls—she’s very clear on that point!).

The movie clocks in at 97 minutes, the ideal length for a movie, and ends in a lovely car chase through European streets.

You will like this movie very much if this sounds like the kind of movie you’d like. It is, and we did. 🎥

📷 My Bar Mitzvah photo. That jacket was kickin in 1974.

We’ve been watching “Shadow and Bone.” I’m not into it but Julie is, so I guess I’ll give it another episode or two. jwz is really not into it, and he gave it both seasons.

… the villain in this show looked like he wandered in from a different sound stage. He looked like the kind of guy who would be trying to shut down the rec center to build a condo, not an evil wizard. Everyone else had their Tolkien costume on, and this guy just looked like some douche you’d have met at a goth club in the 90s who called himself “Vlad” and carried a wolf-head cane. Maybe there was a casting mix-up and some lawyer show ended up with a prosecutor with a giant Gandalf beard.

I’ve been thinking lately that I read too much national political news and post too much about national politics.

I may have more to say on this subject, but until then here is an excellent related article by Ryan Broderick at Garbage Day:

Yesterday, in a lull between the release of the Barbie movie trailer and the second Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse trailer, former President Donald Trump was arrested and arraigned. I do not have cable because it’s 2023 and I am under the age of 55, but according to the clips that made it to Twitter, it seemed like a fun time for America’s news anchors. For instance, CNN gave us some valuable insight into how many doors and hallways the Manhattan courthouse has.

Also, None of This Garbage Is Important. Hamilton Nolan at In These Times:

NEW YORK CITY — At the criminal court in downtown Manhattan today, nothing important happened. Believe me. I was there. There were no meaningful occurrences of true consequence. Certainly nothing worthy of a claim on your limited attention. I wouldn’t bring it up at all, except that I fear that my friends and I in the media may be about to gleefully poison this nation, one more time.

One thing about New York City is that it is home to a large population of reporters, of which I am one, that will reliably turn up at any spectacle. Not out of any nefarious motives. We do this for the same reason that residents of small towns turn up at the county fair: It’s something to do.

New research shows even moderate drinkers have poorer health and live shorter lives than teetotalers, contradicting a century of previous science.

For decades, scientific studies suggested moderate drinking was better for most people’s health than not drinking at all, and could even help them live longer.

A new analysis of more than 40 years of research has concluded that many of those studies were flawed and that the opposite is true.

— New York Times / Roni Caryn Rabin

That kind of bad news will drive a person to drink

I’m supposed to go for a blood test tomorrow morning for life insurance, but the address they gave me on the phone is one number off from the address on Apple Maps, and Apple Maps shows the clinic as permanently closed, and the operator on the phone said the name on the sign is different from the name of the clinic. So now I’m wondering whether I’m going to get my blood taken by a couple of meth-heads in back of a 7-Eleven parking lot.

A bit of family history, from my father’s service in Word War II

My father received these humorous fake orders when he was discharged from the army in 1945, the end of the war.

I found this document while doing some decluttering in my home office yesterday. The paper is brown with age and fragile to the touch. It’s apparently typed and mimeographed.

The document is written in the style of a military memo, instructing the men how to behave when they get back home to civilian life.

In America there are a remarkable number of beautiful girls. These young ladies have not been liberated and many are gainfully employed as stenographers, sales girls, beauty specialists, and welders. Contrary to current practices, they should not be approached with, “How much?” A proper greeting is, “Isn’t it a lovely day!” or “Have you ever been to Chicago?” Then ask, “How much?”

My father served in Burma, which is now Myanmar. I think he also did some time in Taiwan. When he was discharged, he was 21 years old. I think he served several years. A kid from Brooklyn. My father’s native habitat was the New York suburbs; I cannot imagine him in tropical Asia.

I found this document when I was a teenager in the 1970s, investigating the garage of our house on Long Island. I found it again while going through my Dad‘s papers after he passed in 2004. After that, the document disappeared into the clutter of my home office for nearly 20 years until I was decluttering this week, and the papers turned up again.

I’m giving Readwise Reader another try as a read-it-later service after using Matter for several months. Matter is great, but I’m hoping for better search capabilities. I’m starting to do tech news again, on a freelance basis, for Silverlinings, and I want to start building a clippings library.

I have friends who used to go see movies at random. They caught movies the first days the movies were released before they saw trailers or ads or reviews. They would go to a theater, buy a ticket, and see whatever was playing. One of these friends based decisions on movie posters, and solely the posters. Another would drive to the multiplex and see the next movie that was playing after he got out of the car.

Having just seen “John Wick” and “Everything Everywhere All At Once,” I get the appeal of that system. The first half hour of both of those movies are very different from what comes later, and it would have been a delightful surprise to see all that spool out without expectations.

The first half hour of “Everything Everywhere” looks like an arty family drama about a middle-aged woman who’s estranged from her daughter and husband and struggling to save the family business. No science fiction or fantastic elements at all.

In the first half hour or so of “John Wick,” you don’t know he’s a super-hitman. You first get an idea when John Leguizamo recognizes the car. We’ve already seen those Russian young men are extremely dangerous, but John Leguizamo is more afraid of John Wick than of the Russians. We don’t discover John Wick’s full story until Viggo confronts his son.

Back to “Everything Everywhere:” A great thing about that movie is that it really is primarily an arty family drama about a middle-aged woman who’s estranged from her daughter and husband and who is struggling to save the family business. The science fiction serves that story. Saving the multiple universes is the B-plot. 🎥

Today I learned that Fletcher Previn, CIO of $52 billion networking company Cisco Systems, is the son of actress Mia Farrow and composer-conductor Andre Previn. (Computerworld / Lucas Mearian)

Also, while many companies are mandating a return to the office, Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins said in April 2021 that the company is committed to remote work indefinitely, and they’re standing by that. “Our policy around hybrid work is that we want the office to be a magnet and not a mandate,” says Previn.

I can spell “sovereignty” as long as I don’t think about it.

Jackson Heights: The neighbourhood that epitomises New Yorkl. “Travellers may go to Central Park or Times Square to see New York City, but there’s no better place to feel the city’s DNA and understand how it started than here.” (BBC Travel / Sebastian Modak). I love New York. I grew up on Long Island, about 50 miles from Jackson Heights. haven’t been back in far too long.

I finally got a decent photo of this osprey at Lake Murray.

I’ve seen it a few times a month for a couple of years. The nest is at the top of a utility pole that looks to be about 50 feet tall—far too distant for my iPhone XS to get a good shot.

I’ve been putting off carrying my Nikon with the long lens on my daily long walk with the dog, because it seems like a lot to carry. But I did it yesterday, and it turns out to be very comfortable, so I’ll be doing more walks with the Nikon. Good timing too—spring is when the daisies bloom at the park, which is already starting. And in a few weeks—goslings!

Apple Photos has a feature where you can enter a word in a search box and images matching that word come up. It’s like Google Images search for your own photo library.

I searched Apple Photos for the word “bird,” and this photo from 2014 came up.

We started watching a movie called John Wick tonight. We only had a chance to watch the first half hour, so I don’t know what it’s about. It stars Keanu Reeves and it looks like he’s a widower who learns to love life again with the help of his puppy and a new friend, a young Russian immigrant who shares a love of classic cars.

I’m sure this movie will be heartwarming and in no way violent.

In March 2020, Emily Yang Liu spent hours each day in virtual meeting…. To keep herself engaged, she pinned her work crush, Jacob Michael Klinker, to her screen.

One day in April 2020, the product manager on the team, Ronald Ho, pinged her during the meeting and said, “Why do you have Jake pinned to your screen?” It turns out that Ms. Liu, 36, had a large mirror behind her, and people in the meetings could see the reflection of her laptop – and Mr. Klinker, 29, on her screen as a large square with everyone else in miniature.

Spoiler warning: A wedding photo tops this article.

A Secret Crush Goes Public in a Work Meeting (NYTimes / Sadiba Hasan)

People now living could break previous longevity records, and keep on going and going. But not in America, where lifespans are declining. (Brandon Vigliarolo / The Register)

Interestingly, while average longevity has steadily increased for centuries, the maximum lifespan has been relatively unchanged since the 1700s. In other words, most people are living longer, but the longest-lived people today are about the same age as the longest-lived people 200+ years ago. That leads some scientists to believe there’s a hard, biological limit to human lifespan.

Not so, according to new research.

Related: The last living person who was born in the 19th Century in the US was Susannah Mushatt Jones. She was 116 years old when she died in 2016.

Ian Welsh predicts dire outcomes for the US as a result of the Trump indictment.

America and most nations let their elites slide on crimes that don’t harm other elites. This has allowed a whole lot of evil acts to occur unpunished and for elites to act knowing they will never be held responsible for their actions. This goes beyond political acts, notice how somehow almost none of the people who took advantage of Jeffrey Epstein’s smorgasboard of underaged teenaged girls has been charged with a crime.

…. almost every powerful politician and every CEO of an important company has done things which are criminal acts: violations of red-letter law.”

This change to political norms opens the hunting season on politicians and will lead to political instability. Politicians will be charged, based not on their guilt, but based on political experience.

This is a further step towards America becoming ungovernable, and potentially a step towards a break-up of the Union, since red-state elites will be persecuted by blue state elites and vice-versa. With no norm of what laws elites are immune to, no member of the elite will feel safe. Either one side or the other must win and set a new norm, or the country must divide.

Trump could instead have been charged for crimes he did before he was President, but the crimes he was doing then “were the acceptable sort of crimes that real-estate moguls commit and aren’t charged for and if they had gone after him then, they would have made many other important people vulnerable.”

This is the consequence of having a two-tier justice system where some crimes are only crimes when committed by little people and then weaponizing that.

What Trump should have been charged with, if elites were smart, was his actual crime against elites, where he broke a norm: trying to stage a coup. By charging him with something lesser, they have shattered a consensus norm and a great price will be paid for it.

A Google VP says Microsoft is abusing its dominance in on-premises software and Office 365 to give it an unfair advantage in the cloud (Foo Yun Chee / Reuters).

“Microsoft definitely has a very anti-competitive posture in cloud. They are leveraging a lot of their dominance in the on-premise business as well as Office 365 and Windows to tie Azure and the rest of cloud services and make it hard for customers to have a choice,” Vice President Amit Zavery told Reuters.

I covered the 2001 US v. Microsoft antitrust lawsuit closely, so this is very familiar to me. Then it was about Internet Explorer and Windows, and now it’s about different technologies, but the same strategy.

Zavery says Microsoft is cutting sweetheart deals with European cloud providers to make those cloud providers’ antitrust complaints disappear.

Microsoft, of course, denies all.

A Maryland court reinstated Adnan Syed’s conviction and ordered a new hearing. (NPR).

This seems deeply wrong to me. Syed’s conviction was vacated after the court essentially found both his defense and the prosecution were incompetent. Nothing in the appellate court’s ruling changes or disputes that.

Hae Min Lee’s family’s rights were violated—but how does reversing the vacation of Syed’s conviction fix that? It just adds another wrong to the previous litany of abuse.

I had been thinking the Stormy Daniels case was bullshit, but Judd Legum makes the case why it matters.

Elections are supposed to be about information and transparency. Daniels’ statements could have changed enough voters’ minds to swing the election the other way.

Trump schemed to conceal relevant information from the voting public in the days before the election, engaged in an elaborate coverup, and then lied about his involvement.

This deceit may have changed the course of history.

AI and the American Smile

A writer signing their name as “Jenka” on Medium describes a Midjourney experiment to envision selfie photos throughout history, which gave the subjects big smiles, making them all look American.

Smiling is not a universal language; the big, confident grin is uniquely American, Jenka says. Eastern Europeans see someone who smiles all the time as foolish or dishonest.

Jenka quotes French-American journalist Camille Baker, who writes about a woman Baker calls “Sofiya:”

“The expectation was, you have to smile eight hours a day,” [Sofiya says]. A 41-year-old Russian émigré who had been living in the United States for the past decade, Sofiya “was a proficient English speaker,” Baker writes, but it was in her job as a bank teller that she “came face-to-face with her deficiency in speaking ‘American.’ This other English language, made up of not just words but also facial expressions and habits of conversation subtle enough to feel imagined. Smiling almost constantly was at the core of her duties as a teller. As she smiled at one customer after another, she would wince inwardly at how silly it felt. There was no reason to smile at her clients, she thought, since there was nothing particularly funny or heartwarming about their interactions. And her face hurt.”

I wonder whether the new Wordpress version handles untitled blog posts better than previous versions. Such a simple thing, but it’s what eventually drove me off the platform.

Five years ago today: I got hungry for a sweet before bedtime so I ventured out of my hotel at about 11 pm and found this Starbucks. It was closed.

Minnie and I saw this display at a house we walked past yesterday.

Police raided the home of rapper “Afroman,” found nothing illegal, and then sued him for using footage of the raid in music videos.

Police had a warrant for drug trafficking and kidnapping. They destroyed his front door and driveway gate, “lost” $400 of cash they took, and ogled a lemon pound cake, according to a report by Ashley Belanger on Ars Technica.

Afroman later released songs and music videos about the incident, entitled “Lemon Pound Cake” and “Will You Help Me Repair My Door.” The videos went viral. The officers allege they face embarrassment, ridicule, humiliation, and loss of reputation.

Afroman was never charged with a crime. The officers should be charged with criminal ignorance of the Streisand Effect.

I tried Grammarly yesterday and I like it a lot

I published two posts here yesterday and noticed copyediting errors after publication. This troubled me partly because I had a whitepaper due later that day, and I was concerned about sloppy mistakes in paying copy.

So I decided, “I’ve heard good things about Grammarly. I’ll give that a try.”

Holy cow! It’s fantastic!

Also, humbling.

Grammarly flagged 95 suggestions in a 2,200-word whitepaper. It suggested replacing the first three words of the whitepaper with a single word. Most of the changes it recommended were along those lines; tightening up the text by eliminating unnecessary words.

However, some of Grammarly’s recommended changes would have introduced errors in my work, and I had to dismiss those. Grammarly doesn’t run on autopilot.

Overall, I’m delighted with Grammarly, and I’m signing up for a one-year subscription now.

And yes, Grammarly reviewed this post. It recommended seven changes. I accepted most of them.

Shower thought: What’s the deal with Velcro, anyway? How long has it been around?

The hook-and-loop fastener Velcro was conceived in 1951 by Swiss engineer George de Mestral. Ten years later, he founded the Velcro company in 1951.

Wikipedia: Hook-and-loop fastener:

Columnist Sylvia Porter made the first mention of the product in her column Your Money’s Worth of August 25, 1958, writing, “It is with understandable enthusiasm that I give you today an exclusive report on this news: A ‘zipperless zipper’ has been invented – finally. The new fastening device is in many ways potentially more revolutionary than was the zipper a quarter-century ago.”

…

A number of Velcro Corporation products were displayed at a fashion show at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel in New York in 1959, and the fabric got its first break when it was used in the aerospace industry to help astronauts maneuver in and out of bulky space suits. However, this reinforced the view among the populace that hook-and-loop was something with very limited utilitarian uses. The next major use hook-and-loop saw was with skiers, who saw the similarities between their outerwear and that of the astronauts, and thus saw the advantages of a suit that was easier to don and doff. Scuba and marine gear followed soon after. Having seen astronauts storing food pouches on walls, children’s clothing makers came on board. As hook-and-loop fasteners only became widely used after NASA’s adoption of it, NASA is popularly – and incorrectly – credited with its invention.

The patent expired in 1978, which is why we have hook-and-loop fasteners from many companies today.

Each Space Shuttle flew equipped with ten thousand inches of a special fastener made of Teflon loops, polyester hooks, and glass backing. Hook-and-loop fasteners are widely used, from the astronauts' suits, to anchoring equipment. In the near weightless conditions in orbit, hook-and-loop fasteners are used to temporarily hold objects and keep them from floating away. A patch is used inside astronauts' helmets where it serves as a nose scratcher. During mealtimes astronauts use trays that attach to their thighs using springs and fasteners. Hook-and-loop fasteners are also used aboard the International Space Station.

Also:

Velcro jumping is a game where people wearing hook-covered suits take a running jump and hurl themselves as high as possible at a loop-covered wall.

David Letterman popularized the game in 1984, and it’s still widely played where alcohol is served.

Pop culture references to Velcro are amusing.

The zipper was patented in 1892.

Wikipedia:

The zipper gets its name from a brand of rubber boots (or galoshes) it was used on in 1923. The galoshes could be fastened with a single zip of the hand, and soon the hookless fasteners came to be called “Zippers”.

Logseq vs. Obsidian: First impressions

I played with Logseq a bit as an alternative to Obsidian, or complement for it.

Logseq seems like a simplified version of Obsidian that does less. For many people that will be a plus. Fewer options equals fewer things to fiddle with and potentially break.

Logseq is an extreme outliner. It wants everything you do to be an outline. Obsidian supports outlining, but Logseq is more opinionated and more powerful as an outliner. That’s a minus for me; I do use outlines but mainly I just write prose.

Logseq wants you to limit yourself to store everything in just four folders, and organize all your data using links instead. My brain doesn’t work that way. I make heavy use of folders.

Logseq is open source, which makes it—possibly—more futureproof and secure than Obsidian.

I don’t think I’m going to stay with Logseq. It doesn’t seem to be different enough from Obsidian to be worth the hassle of switching.

Still, Logseq seems to be a great app for people who are looking for an extremely powerful outliner. And I may come back to it.

And playing with Logseq gave me some ideas for doing a better job of organizing and using my Obsidian vault. I need to use the Daily Note more, and move blocks of text between notes using the Text Transporter plugin

I just pledged $53 to the Kickstarter for Cory Doctorow’s upcoming novel, “Red Team Blues.” In pledging, I’m supporting the excellent work Cory (who is on Mastodon as @pluralistic@mamot.fr) does on his blog and podcast, which are free.

The $53 pledge gets me a nice hardcover, which I might donate to the local library, because I’m an ebook guy. Backers at that level also get an audiobook, and an ebook too. The audiobook and ebook are DRM-free, which will surprise nobody who follows Cory.

A pledge of $1,000 or more lets you name a character in the sequel, and $3,000 or more gets you—check this out!—a deluxe hardcover with a secret compartment.

Kickstarter link.

More info from Cory: Kickstarting the Red Team Blues audiobook, which Amazon won’t sell

I’ve read an advance copy of the novel. It’s terrific. Very suspenseful!

What does a Mandalorian like to eat with curds? This is the whey.

How do Jewish Mandalorians expresses dismay? They say “Oy vey.”

How do Spanish Mandalorians express strong approval: “¡Olé! ¡olé!”

How does a Mandalorian respond to being kicked off social media for telling too many bad jokes? “I could do this all day.”

A Journalist Believes He Was Banned From Midjourney After His AI Images Of Donald Trump Getting Arrested Went Viral.

Eliot Higgins, who founded Bellingcat, an investigative journalism organization, said he intended the sequence of 50 images as satire. The sequence included a chain of images that showed Trump breaking out of prison and going to McDonald’s, writes Chris Stokel-Walker for Buzzfeed News

Seems to me to be a bad idea for a journalist to do anything to jeopardize their credibility. Journalists shouldn’t intentionally create deepfakes–not even as a joke, which this seems to have been–or do April Fool’s Day practical jokes, or appear in fictional movies as themselves.

People trust celebrities, politicians, and social media personalities, and discount scientists as corrupt.

Scientists are often wrong, their work should be scrutinized and debated vigorously. But over the past three years, people with journalistic status and little training and influence on infectious disease are shaping public debate.

And “scientists and public health experts are often cast as not to be trusted, captured by vested interests, lacking common sense, and out of touch with what most Americans think and believe.”

Recent headlines are wrong: Masks work to protect against Covid, and strong evidence points to a Wuhan market origin, not a lab leak.

The Self-Appointed Covid Experts Are At It Again. By Gregg Gonsalves at The Nation

Daniel Lavery has a third dog, named Mr. Wilson, “a brief loan from a friend on vacation, and not a permanent addition.” Neighborhood adults are dubious.

Small children have been more enthusiastic, as the addition of Mr. Wilson has united some of the most beloved of childhood pastimes: counting to three, noticing a new thing, more dog, informing their parents that something about the daily environment is now different than it was yesterday, and pointing.

This essay is delightful.

A message for folks who follow me from Mastodon

Micro.blog, the outstanding service I use to post here, just implemented a feature that lets users migrate their Mastodon followers to follow a Mastodon account. I plan to do that with all my ActivityPub followers here—move y’all to @mitchw@mastodon.social—unless I hear a great outcry of “no no please no!”

If you’re following me from Mastodon, you’ll see longer and better formatted post excerpts, and you’ll see my boosts, which you currently do not see here. And I will see when you boost or favorite one of my posts.

Why am I doing this? When I launched this blog late last year, I saw the Mastodon integration, I thought, “Great! I’ll just use mitchw.blog as my primary Mastodon account.” But almost as soon as I did that, I decided it was a bad idea. Mastodon is Mastodon and blogging is blogging and the two should be mixed carefully.

And now I have a chance to reverse that error, and I plan to do so ASAP.

Unless, like I said, I hear a groundswell of protest.

To be honest, I don’t think y’all will notice a difference. Unless you’ve added me to a Mastodon list, in which case you should add @mitchw@mastodon.social to that list instead.

And let me put in a plug here for micro.blog, which is an excellent, inexpensive service for lightweight blogging.

Minnie at bedtime. She wants details about our planetary defenses.

I enjoyed the first episode of “Lucky Hank,” a dark comedy starring Bob Odenkirk as the chair of the English Department of a mediocre and minuscule northeastern college. He is going through a midlife crisis. It’s based on a novel I thoroughly enjoyed by one of my favorite writers, “Straight Man,” by Richard Russo.

Julie hated the episode. We are negotiating whether she is required by our marriage bylaws to give the show one episode more or two before she nopes out.

We saw a bobcat on the paved trail while I was out walking the dog at Lake Murray this afternoon.

It was about 50 feet away and moving perpendicular across the trail at a fast trot, so I only saw it for a second or two. It wanted very little to do with us. The feeling was mutual.

It was at the end of our walk. Minnie was very alert until we got to the car a few minutes later. So was I.

“Toilet meal” is the Japanese practice of eating meals in “toilet rooms”—public bathrooms—to get a little valuable alone time, or because they don’t have anybody to eat with and they don’t want to be seen eating alone. wikipedia.org

“The Mariko Aoki phenomenon (青木まりこ現象, Aoki Mariko genshō) is a Japanese expression referring to a sudden urge to defecate that is felt upon entering bookstores.” wikipedia.org

If I was a Mandalorian, I would wait until the other Mandalorians were eating, and then I would say “this is the way” to them, so they would have to say “this is the way” back with a mouth full of food.

If I was a Mandalorian, I would wait until the other Mandalorians had their helmets off, and then fill their helmets with cottage cheese.

I would be an unpopular Mandalorian.

Now, guys with zero game can try their luck with CupidBots. For $15 a month, an AI algorithm will pick out women for them on their dating app of choice, based on their previous swipes…. The AI then masquerades as the man behind the dating profile, and continues to talk and flirt with its unsuspecting target, until the woman agrees to a date or to share their number. At that point, the app sends a notification to the user telling them about the date it just secured for them. And no, at no point does the bot disclose its nonhuman nature.

futurism.com

Margaret Atwood: What I Read

I like to feel that I can tell an apple from a pear, and I don’t expect from the pear what I might expect from the apple. In other words, if I’m reading Conan the Conqueror I’m not demanding that it be Middlemarch.

We had our bathrooms remodeled in 2017, and I have finally figured out how to work the light switches in my bathroom.

I was a gifted child.

I saw these two tiny girls while walking Minnie yesterday. We literally died from the cute.

The turmoil at Sarasota Memorial, one of Florida’s largest public hospitals, began last year after three candidates running on a platform of “health freedom” won seats on the nine-member board that oversees the hospital. Board meetings, once sleepy, started drawing hundreds of angry people who, like the new members, denounced the hospital’s treatment protocols for Covid-19.

An internal review last month found that Sarasota Memorial did far better than some of its competitors in saving Covid patients’ lives. But that did little to quell detractors, whose campaign against the hospital has not relented. By then, the hospital had become the latest public institution under siege by an increasingly large and vocal right-wing contingent in one of Florida’s most affluent counties, where a backlash to pandemic policies has started reshaping local government.

— Patricia Mazzei, nytimes.com

Who Is Still Inside the Metaverse? Searching for friends in Mark Zuckerberg’s deserted fantasyland.

In September, my family and I move from our home in Dublin to a fancy East Coast college town, where I’ll be teaching for the semester. I grew up in Dublin, which means I have a wide circle of friends to draw on whenever I’m let out of the house. The street where I live is friendly: If I want to borrow a spatula or I need someone to look after my cat, I have only to ask.

Life is different for us in the U.S. We have, for the first time, a basement. But we have no friends. It seems as if none of the permanent faculty can afford to live in the suburb where the university has placed us. We technically have neighbors, but we never see them; they manifest only in the form of their gardeners, who are at work every day with their leaf blowers.

It’s in this strange scenario — alone on a continent, cut off from everyone I know — that I decide to try the metaverse for the first time. A whole galaxy of pals brought right to your living room? I think. Why not?

Funny, insightful, and moving.

By Paul Murray. nymag.com

Margaret Atwood: “The bathroom is a place where you can go in and pretend to be doing one thing while actually you’re reading. Nobody can interrupt you. Compendiums of this and that are very useful for bathroom reading: small reading packages within a larger book. You wouldn’t want to read War and Peace in there. You’d never come out. They’d probably call the police and get the door broken down.” wikipedia.org

“Horny bro conservatism:” Republicans are trying to win over a new generation of sexually libertine young men. “What if some conservatives aren’t longing for Ronald Reagan’s heyday but for the time when women were hotter, you could put up a topless calendar in your cubicle at the office without fear of reprisal from some mean H.R. lady, and nobody told you what to do?”

— Jane Coaston: The Debate Hugh Hefner Won and William Buckley Lost nytimes.com

Jamelle Bouie: “The people who blame wokeness for the collapse of a bank do not want you to understand or even think about the political economy of banking in the United States. They want to deflect your attention from the real questions toward a manufactured cultural conflict. And the reason they want to do this is to obscure the extent to which they and their allies are complicit in — or responsible for — creating an environment in which banks collapse for lack of appropriate regulation.” nytimes.com

Democrats contribute to this environment as well. They rush to make SVB’s depositors whole, but when the poor and middle class are struggling, Democrats sigh and say they wish they could do more.

A court will decide whether antifa is a political movement or criminal conspiracy. usatoday.com

I’m skeptical whether antifa even exists. It’s a right-wing fantasy, like wokism and LGBTQ groomers.

MSNBC viewers seem mostly interested in which books his supporters want removed from elementary school libraries, how he’s treating The Walt Disney Company, and which Miami venues might lose their liquor licenses from having drag performances in spaces open to children. And certainly, DeSantis has put a lot of energy into stirring up those and other culture wars. But he’s also raised teacher pay, cut tolls on highways, and spent money on Everglades restoration. He has demonstrated a broad awareness that voters care about the basic operations of government and how those affect their daily lives, and he’s focused on getting them to feel satisfied with the way he’s overseeing the actual government.

— Is Ron DeSantis Savvy Or Not? www.joshbarro.com

Amusing myself with a phone fraudster earlier today.

Every time I play with FeedLand I come away thinking it’s a basic web-based RSS reader, of which there are already quite a few. Other than all of your subscriptions being public, how is Feedland different from Feedly, Feedbin, Inoreader, NewsBlur, etc.?

It does far less than those other guys, which means it’s simpler. And sometimes simplicity is itself a feature. Is that the appeal?

45 minutes to try to create a COBRA account and it turned out the problem was my password needed a special character.

Isn’t that special?

That, and reviewing COBRA paperwork has been my morning so far.

Title for a proposed spinoff series starring Captain Shaw and the Titan: “Star Trek: Just a Dipshit From Chicago.”

What is “wuthering”? As in, “Wuthering Heights”? What are the heights doing?

This season of Picard is some of the most enjoyable Star Trek ever.

We need a spinoff series featuring Captain Shaw and the Titan. I love him. His motto: “To boldly go where no one has gone before … kvetching the whole time.”

Todd Stashwick, who plays Shaw, is a terrific character actor; I’ve had my eye on him since he played the villain on a series called “The Riches,” that aired briefly 2007-8, starring Eddie Izzard and Minnie Driver. (They played Americans and the series was set in the US, oddly.)

Michelle Forbes is another great character actor. More of Commander Ro Laren, please.

I love the chemistry between Raffi and Worf.

Michael Dorn has appeared on more Trek episodes than any other actor. More than William Shatner, more than Patrick Stewart, more than anyone. Worf is the Detective Munch of the 24th Century.

This morning I learned what the name is for the genre of music that the cantina band plays in “Star Wars,” and now I want to go back to bed and start the day over.

My process for getting ready to walk in the rain, and getting myself and the dog dry when we get back, has become so elaborate that I think I can now refer to it as a “workflow,” and describe all my rain gear as a “tech stack.”

I saw a big fat squirrel sitting on the steel fence just outside my office window, licking rainwater off the top of the railing. It stayed there a good long time.

I keep a Nikon with a moderately long lens on my desk next to me for just such wildlife encounters as these. Critters like our backyard. But I had put stuff in front of the camera since the last time I used it, and couldn’t get the camera free before the squirrel scampered off.

Lately when I see something striking, it’s a struggle for me: Take the photo? Or just be in the moment and appreciate the thing I’m looking at?

That’s a false distinction though. Whatever you do, you’re in the moment. Knowing that can make the choice more clear. What do you want to be doing? Looking at the thing? Maybe the thing is an activity you could be participating in–do you want to do that? Or do you want to take the photo?

Whoah, I didn’t realize this was going to get philosophical. Bringing it back to the main point: I saw a squirrel up close.

I’ve heard great things about “Children of Time,” by Adrian Tchaikovsky, and I’ve started reading it, but I’m finding it tough to get into.

The book is science fiction, set on a planet that was terraformed by ancient humans and is now dominated by intelligent spiders.

So far, the book focuses on a bunch of uninspiring humans doing uninteresting things.

Where are the spiders, Adrian? I’m here for the spiders!

The Silicon Valley Bank bailout is yet another example of the old adage, attributed to Martin Luther King, that we have socialism for the rich and rugged individualism for everyone else.

If you’re rich and you’re at risk of going broke, the US government comes running with its checkbook wide open.

If you’re struggling with medical debt, or you’re homeless because you can’t afford to pay for housing, or you’re a college grad who’s struggling to pay off their student loan: Fuck you.

Cory Doctorow: Learning from Silicon Valley Bank’s apologists

Staunchly anti-LGBTQ+ Tennessee Lt. Gov. Randy McNally is pausing his social media use after he was caught leaving bawdy, flirty comments on the Instagram posts of a gay man who poses nude.

Tennessee has been a leader in passing anti-LGBTQ legislation and laws banning drag shows. (You know who else led the world in that kind of thing? The Nazis.)

McNally told ABC affiliate WKRN in a statement that he has “long been active on social media” and engaged with constituents via posts, comments and messages. He said the comments on these posts “are no different.”

“While I see now that I should have been more careful about how my comments and activity would be perceived, my intent was always engagement and encouragement,” he said in the statement

It’s nothing new for anti-LGBTQ Republican wannabe Nazis to get caught doing gay shit, but it’s new for them to simply flat-out deny that it’s gay, and Tennessee is leading that trend. Gov. Bill Lee has been a leader in passing idiotic and persecutory anti-drag legislation. After Lee’s own teen drag exploits were discovered, he claimed they were absolutely not the same thing, and scolded reporters for drawing equivalents, when in fact they are exactly the same.

I’m trying Orion, a third-party web browser for Macs, iPhones, and iPads.

It’s based on Safari, and very Safari-like.

It runs many Chrome and Firefox extensions, supposedly even on the iPhone and iPad.

Orion supports vertical tree-style tabs, which I tried with Microsoft Edge and like quite a lot, even though they can be a little confusing.

Very nice!

It Took Me Nearly 40 Years To Stop Resenting Ke Huy Quan

A terrific and thoughtful essay by Walter Chaw about internalized racism and why Ke Huy Quan is a great role model. As a Jewish man, I find this very relatable.

Given the choice of playing along or protesting, I played along. I’m great at the Asian accent as minstrelry. When I do it for my white friends even today, it never fails to bring a laugh. Assimilation was the goal, and even though I could never hide my physical difference, I could at least laugh along with their enthusiastic recognition of my perpetual alienness. I think I wouldn’t be a writer at all if I hadn’t dedicated all of my energy into being very good at English, my second language. If I couldn’t pass the sight test, perhaps I could pass the reading one. Humor branded me as not one of those “sensitive” Asians, as a guy who wouldn’t make you feel uncomfortable about asking where I was really from, and where I’m really from is Golden, Colorado. Golden is a mining town, and to this day and despite its profound gentrification, it still has a giant wooden banner spanning its main street that says “Howdy Folks!” I have spent most of my life trying to divorce myself from my parents’ culture. They’re both dead now and they went before I was strong and stable enough to repair any of the damage I did. Honestly, none of us ever had the emotional language to do the work.