Mitchellaneous: Nude Interracial Love Dance
It Was the Day of the Robot by Frank Belknap Long
Coney Island, 1961, Diane Arbus
Nude Interracial Love Dance. via
After reading this explanation of Hookmark, I am thinking of giving the app another try. I like the idea of being able to easily access all documents related to whatever document I’m looking at or working on. “Documents,” in this context, refers to any object on my Mac — documents, web pages, emails, etc.
I’m glad to see Rusty Foster is back writing “Today in Tabs” and I hope it doesn’t consume him.
It turns out that if you look at social media for a few minutes a couple times a day you don’t miss anything and it doesn’t destroy your soul. No one’s gonna do that, I know, I’m just saying.
Simon Wiilson: “You should start a blog. Having your own little corner of the internet is good for the soul!" Two relatively low-effort categories of things to write about on your blog: “write about things you’ve learned, and write about things you’ve built!” And a third: Write about things you found aka linkblogging.
"The evidence is not flawless." Scientists investigate claims of life after death
The University of Virginia school of medicine’s Division of Perceptual Studies (DOPS) searches for scientific evidence of reincarnation or other life after death. They do a lot of interviews of small children who seem to have memories of past lives.
Former DOPS founder Dr. Ian Stevenson devised a simple test: He closed a padlock and put it in a box in the researchers' office. Only he knew the combination. He died in 2007.
Do You Believe in Life After Death? These Scientists Study It. By Saskia Solomon at the New York Times.
I’m a skeptic, but I love that groups like DOPS exist, studying low-probability but revolutionary phenomena like life after death, reincarnation, magic, time travel, UFOs, etc.
This article reminds me of one of my favorite novels: “Summerland,” by Hannu Rajamieni. The premise is that scientists discovered definitive proof of life after death in the late 19th Century and invented a device to communicate with the dead. The novel’s action takes place in the 1930s, among British spies fighting the Cold War against the Soviet Union in both this life and the next.
“I have been saying ‘What?’ every single sentence.” Rereading “Encycopedia Brown” as an adult is bonkers..
Today I learned Chevy Chase played drums in a college band that later became Steely Dan.
“He could have been famous,” a Redditor joked, according to Carolyn Wazer at Snopes.
The band included Donald Fagen and Walter Becker and was called the Leather Canary.
According to an authorized biography of Chase, “Chevy didn’t think he was good enough and left the band, advising them to find a better drummer.”
Chase was born Cornelius Crane Chase; the nickname comes from the medieval English “Ballad of Chevy Chase,” according to Wikipedia.
I’m about to start reading: The Lincoln Lawyer, by Michael Connelly. I’m reading all off Connelly’s books in order. This is number 16.
Hamilton Nolan:Here’s a New Year’s resolution for Trump’s America: no snitching. “If you saw something, no you didn’t.”
Also:
What’s giving me hope right now
Trump’s election in 2016 produced widespread shock, followed by a fruitless four years of quasi-religious belief that our precious norms would save us from his ravages. This time around, we have that experience to teach us all that those norms are utterly illusory. Resisting a slide into fascism means building institutions powerful enough to counter Trump on his own terms.
Nolan puts his hope in resurgent labor.
This is how nations decline. You don’t always turn into Nazi Germany. You turn into Russia, or Hungary, or other creaky and corrupt strongman states where everything is kind of a scam and everyone is hustling to please the gangster in charge. That, my friends, is the path we are on here.
America’s basic problem is that we have an economic system that concentrates great wealth in few hands and we have a political system in which money is allowed to buy political power in a straightforward way and now, on top of that, we have a President who fully embraces—who lives for—the opportunity to make the world bow to him by exploiting those systems. It’s a bit surreal watching this all unfold right in front of us. This is the script of imperial downfall, of a mighty nation that has been teeing itself up to crumble by having no moral scruples finally jumping onto the garbage chute with both feet. Watching all of the highly respected CEOs of America’s most powerful and respectable and, according to a widespread characterization, “liberal” companies donate millions of dollars to the Trump inauguration, unalloyed bribes paid for political protection, is just—it’s not subtle. Detecting the grand direction of America has never required less insight.
…
This is the final form of unregulated capitalism, where fantastically rich and often childlike titans run the world’s most powerful nation for their own pleasure, and what was once thought of as “civil society” cowers in the corner in an effort to avoid provoking the beast.
UCSD plans to use AI cameras in hospital rooms, but says privacy will be protected. This seems like a valid use of surveillance — if it works, about which I am skeptical.
The flu is surging in San Diego. “It went from pretty quiet to busy all of a sudden.” Yet vaccinations are down significantly. [Paul Sisson at the San Diego Union-Tribune.]
America’s self-destructive streak is discouraging.
Celeste Davis: Why male college enrollment is dropping. As more women attended college, men started perceiving universities as feminine spaces. And men flee feminine spaces.
At my job, I mostly work with women now. Same for the local Democratic Club, where I volunteer. Somehow, I have managed to avoid catching girl cooties.
My favorite movies of 2024 (third try posting, trying to correct egregious formatting errors)
Home for the Holidays (1996). Holly Hunter, a mid-30s single mother and museum curator, flies home to visit her family on Thanksgiving and finds her family is painfully weird, and she doesn’t fit in. But then everything clicks for her.
I saw this movie when it first came out and once or twice more in the late 90s, but not since then. This time, I had the insight that this is a coming-of-age movie about Holly Hunter’s character leaving her young adulthood behind her. By the end of the movie, she is no longer an adult trying to fit into her childhood home. She’s just an adult visiting her family.
The movie has great writing, direction by Jodie Foster, and is well-acted by a wonderful cast: In addition to Hunter, we have Anne Bancroft, Charles Durning, pre-rehab Robert Downey Jr., Dylan McDermott, Geraldine Chaplin and middle-aged Steve Guttenberg.
I could do a scene-by-scene discussion of this movie. But I’ll stop here.
Tombstone (1993). Val Kilmer gets praise as Doc Holliday, and he deserves it, but also spare some praise for the late great Powers Boothe, who chews the scenery magnificently as the villainous Curly Bill Brocius.
Another main villain of the movie, Johnny Ringo, played by Michael Biehn, is a nihilist. Ringo hates himself and the world. Curly Bill loves the world and loves life and takes joy in cruelty.
In that way, Curly Bill is a lot like Spike from “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”
Wolfs (2024) George Clooney and Brad Pitt are two mob fixers called to cover up a crime scene. They are lone wolves, forced to work together. The ending is confusing at first, but I gathered later that this movie was intended as the first of two parts. And now, the second part will never be made because of a dispute with Apple. Still worth watching.
The Big Sleep (1946). Bogey, as detective Philip Marlowe, solves crimes and sparks with Lauren Bacall. The storyline of this movie is legendarily complicated and confusing; at one point, the director called author Raymond Chandler from the set to find out who committed one of the murders and Chandler responded lol idk.
The Fabelmans (2022). Supposedly a fictionalized autobiography by Stephen Spielberg, but he later said everything in it is true.
Interstellar (2014). Matthew McConaughey in spaaaaaaace. A rare movie where he does not say “alright alright alright.” Now I know where this meme comes from.
Fall Guy. Comedy-drama starring Ryan Gosling as a stuntman called on to do something involving solving a crime. I don’t remember the specifics, but I remember the movie was fun.
Batman Begins. I saw this one on a plane years ago and hated it. We watched it on the big TV in the living room in 2024, and I liked it. It turns out that watching a movie on a six-inch screen while slightly nauseated is not the best way to appreciate cinema.
White House Down. Die Hard in the White House starring Channing Tatum.
The Accountant. Ben Affleck is a forensic accountant and lethal mercenary. Ridiculous premise, but surprisingly good and occasionally even heartwarming.
Which reminds me: I forgot a book on my 2024 favorite books list: The Bezzle, by Cory Doctorow, the second in his Marty Hench series, which also features a hardboiled forensic accountant.
It turns out that “hardboiled forensic accountant” is a genre.
Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F. 2024 Sequel to the popular Eddie Murphy movies of the 80s. It does what it says on the tin.
Farewell, My Lovely Robert Mitchum is Philip Marlowe in this 1975 movie with Charlotte Rampling, Sylvia Miles, Harry Dean Stanton, and Jack O’Halloran (most famous for Superman II) as Moose Malloy.
Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes and War for the Planet of the Apes. But not Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, which didn’t click for me.
Road House. Jake Gyllenhaal beats people. Fun, great music and scenic Florida locations. You did not think remaking the bad 80s Patrick Swayze original would be a good idea, but you were wrong.
American Fiction. Comedy-drama about a Black, button-down professor fed up with woke culture who uses a pen name to write a super-woke fraudulent memoir and is caught up in a maelstrom when the book becomes a runaway bestseller.
I hate saying “woke,” but I can’t think of anything else here.
The trailer does a good job of capturing the movie’s intelligence and humor but does not capture the story’s surprising heart.
This is not an anti-woke movie, despite the premise. I would not recommend an anti-woke movie.
Mr. Holmes. Ian McKellen plays an aged Sherlock Holmes, struggling with dementia, living in the country, tending his bees and reconstructing the specifics of a case that drove him away from London and into retirement three decades before.
The Emperor’s New Clothes. What if Napoleon escaped from exile on St. Helena and returned to France to raise an army and reclaim his throne, but instead failed to contact his underground network of supporters and had to go undercover as a common grocer?
American Fiction and The Emperor’s New Clothes are testimonies to the value of committing to the bit. You take a slight premise — something that by rights should be nothing more than a Saturday Night Live skit — take it seriously, follow it through to its conclusion, and it can come out great.
Stage Door. 1937 comedy-drama starring Katharine Hepburn, Ginger Rogers, Adolphe Menjou and, in a small role, Lucille Ball, about young struggling actresses living in a boarding house in New York.
The Maltese Falcon. Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade. I think I saw this only once before, on a little kitchen-table black-and-white TV around 1980. I missed so much. Much of the action is in the characters' faces and body language.
The Six Triple Eight. A Black Women’s Air Corps battalion during World War II is called on to sort millions of pieces of personal mail for soldiers. The mail has been stored in warehouses since the beginning of the war. The movie makes it clear that personal mail is not a luxury; it is essential to keeping up morale for soldiers and their families.
As one of the heroes notes, these women are fighting two wars, one against Hitler and another against flagrant white racism.
Kerry Washington gives a great performance as Captain Charity Adams, who commands the platoon with an erect spine and stentorian voice. Her goals are two-fold: To deliver on the mission of delivering the mail, and prove that Black women are up to the task. Her nemesis is General Halt, a fat, bald racist Southerner who seems to despise Adams and her battalion more than he hates Hitler. Halt is portrayed with delicious awfulness by Dean Norris from Breaking Bad. I could barely stand to look at him by the end of the movie.
Desk Set. Katharine Hepburn heads up the research department of a TV network and is threatened by Spencer Tracy, a consultant hired to bring in a computer. I was delighted to see that the computer in this 1952 movie behaved exactly like a 2024 LLM: give it a question in plain English and you get an answer that’s clear, credible and likely to be wrong. Spoiler for a 73-year-old movie: Tracy’s character explains at the end that the computer is not there to replace the researchers but to free the researchers up for more valuable work. This is exactly what AI companies tell us here in 2024.
The set for the computer is brilliant — so many blinkenlights! The pieces of the computer, including the blinkenlights panel, were later used in the movie and TV show Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. This computer is my mental ideal of how computers ought to look.
Woman of the Year. Hepburn and Tracy again. There were a couple of moderately racist gags in the beginning that threw me off for a bit, and I never quite recovered because Tracy’s character is a dishrag. Still, it makes my favorites list because of the snappy dialogue and cinematography and because it’s Hepburn and Tracy.
His Girl Friday. Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell in a heartwarming romcom about two awful people who find true love with each other.
"Trump is a little guy, and Musk is a big guy when it actually comes to having money." A historian predicts trouble for Trump.
The Guardian, quoting Yale historian and author Timothy Snyder:
“I think we overestimate Trump and we underestimate Musk,” Snyder said. “People can’t help but think that Trump has money, but he doesn’t. He’s never really had money. He’s never even really claimed to have money. His whole notion is that you have to believe that he has money. But he’s never been able to pay his own debts. He’s never been able to finance his own campaigns.
“Musk, with an amount of money that was meaningless to him, was able to finance Trump’s campaign, essentially.”
As Trump tries to control Congressional Republicans, he threatens lawsuits and primary challenges, and Musk will fund all that, making Trump increasingly dependent on Musk, Snyder says.
"A lot of the current hype around LLMs revolves around one core idea, which I blame on Star Trek: Wouldn't it be cool if we could use natural language to control things?"
The problem is that this is, at the fundamental level, a terrible idea.
There’s a reason that mathematics doesn’t use English. There’s a reason that every professional field comes with its own flavour of jargon. There’s a reason that contracts are written in legalese, not plain natural language. Natural language is really bad at being unambiguous.
In 2025, San Diego Can't Look Away from the Screaming
Scott Lewis at Voice of San Diego:
A few weeks ago, a man in the alley behind our house began screaming. Screaming is not unusual around us, unfortunately. But usually it comes and goes – less frequent than the airplanes, more frequent than the helicopters.
One man walks around screaming all the time. Long beard, bike. Sometimes he begs on the corner. Sometimes he disappears for weeks. But he’s always back and almost always screaming.
This wasn’t him. We know him. This was deeper, closer and more disturbed. And it wasn’t going away. It scared my daughter. I went back there with the flashlight and found the man. He was ensconced in a combination of blankets and garbage. He was ranting incoherently, unaware of me even as I tried to get his attention.
I finally yelled “Hey!” He turned and looked right at me. “You’re freaking people out.”
He snapped out of it. “I’m so sorry. I know, I know. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know where to go.”
The way he snapped out of it turned my anger and fear immediately into pity and wonder. It was like he was two people. The one made mad, screaming at the cold, fueled by the drugs, the trauma. And the one below the surface almost watching himself.
It was cold. San Diego is more comfortable than most places to be homeless but try sleeping in 45 degrees. It is bone-chilling cold. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t last more than a night or two before … well, before I did things that would probably lead to screaming.
We are now entering the eighth year of the homeless crisis…. We are numb to so much of it. The suffering and poverty. The disorder and chaos.
…
San Diego is facing a catastrophe. The city is teeming with suffering. Its infrastructure is crumbling. Its cost of living is extreme and escalating rapidly. People are leaving. The region’s growth projections, for the first time in decades, show a peak and downturn not because people don’t want to be here but because they can’t afford to be. Public school enrollment is down.
San Diego’s history, however, is full of moments when it seemed irredeemable. Every city has a similar story – moments of prosperity followed by recessions, public health crises, disasters, despair but then great leaps in design, construction and innovation followed by growth and prosperity.
We can, once again, meet the moment. But in 2025, it will take something we did not see in 2024: creativity and leadership.
Ian Welsh: Well That Was Hell: 2024 In Review. tl;dr America and Europe are in decline, Russia is doing well and China is doing *very* well.
Welsh continues to be a lone voice saying the war in Ukraine is going very badly for Ukraine, and he predicts victory for Russia in 2025. The major news media are pointing the other way — that Russia is getting clobbered.
That doesn’t make Welsh wrong. In 2003 everybody knew the US invasion of Iraq was a great idea, the Iraqis would welcome us with flowers and we’d be out in a jiffy.