When you live in a semi-arid climate and you only drive a couple of times a week, you can go for years without driving in heavy rain, and then you find out your wiper blades have turned into ineffectual shoelaces.

We watched the first half of “Spirited” last night, because I thought I was in the mood for a lightweight Christmas movie, but it turned out I was not – or at least not that one. Julie wasn’t feeling it either.

So instead, we watched the first episode of “Three Pines,” which turned out to be very good and entertaining.

“Three Pines” is a murder mystery, like about three quarters of the shows we’ve been watching over the last few years. But this one is not British for a change. It’s set in Quebec, and stars Alfred “Doc Ock” Molina.

So far, it’s like “Northern Exposure” but French and with a murder.

Yesterday I mistakenly had coffee at four in the afternoon. I thought it was decaf. But I slept soundly last night anyway. Makes me wonder what other superpowers I have evolved.

The New Yorker: Cory Doctorow Wants You to Know What Computers Can and Can’t Do.

A conversation about the “mediocre monopolists” of Big Tech, the weirdness of crypto, and the real lessons of science fiction.

…

This will all be so great if we don’t screw it up.

By Christopher Byrd.

Cory also talks about the limitations of perfect productivity: Once you’ve pared away all the unimportant tasks in your life, everything left is important and there’s nothing left to pare.

Fortunately, this is not a problem for me. I waste plenty of time!

I’m very impressed that Cory was featured in the New Yorker.

The promise and the peril of ChatGPT. By Casey Newton.

Reading about the potential for abuse here, I found myself thinking about the classic science fiction story “A Logic Named Joe,” in which author Murray Leinster predicts the consumer internet in 1946. One of the computers on the network gets a little wonky and starts answering questions on how to commit murder.

People are already using ChatGPT to get answers to potentially lethal questions.

Less significantly, ChatGPT could potentially be the end of Google and industries that have grown around it—advertising and search engine optimization. Google gives search results, but ChatGPT provides answers.

Yes, It’s Censorship: Stop picking that nit, it’ll never heal. A few big companies, including Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Twitter, monopolize public discourse, setting the rules for what we’re allowed to talk about.

Cory Doctorow:

The decision to make our “digital public square,” into a privatized, monopoly-friendly corporate shopping mall whose owners can wield the power of the state against rivals who dare to compete with them may not violate the First Amendment, but it sure as hell isn’t good for free expression.

While walking, the dog and I saw these houses with the holiday spirit, and this car 🦮📷

Eugene from Wednesday is my role model. I’m going to wear a retainer and keep bees.

A new Indiana Jones movie, starring 80-year-old Harrison Ford? Sure, why not?

Here’s the trailer.

I’ve seen criticism of the trailer and of all the movies after “Raiders.” And much of that criticism is valid.

But the best reaction to the trailer was from Jason Kottke: “Ok fine I will watch one more Indy movie.”

I have enjoyed every Raiders movie, even “Temple of Doom” and “Crystal Skull.” I have no doubt we will watch this one and enjoy it.

The parts I enjoyed in “Temple of Doom” were the little kid and the girlfriend, who screamed very fetchingly.

Marion stole the movie in “Crystal Skull.” She had all the good scenes.

About that trailer: The bullwhip scene is classic Indiana Jones: “Look at me I am doing this swashbuckling thing… Oh shit that was a really bad idea.” All conveyed with his face and body language.

That scene is a visual response to the swordsman scene in the first movie, only this time it’s the other guys who have the guns.

South Dakota Bans Government Employees From Using TikTok. The Countless Other Apps And Services That Hoover Up And Sell Sensitive Data Are Fine, Though.

Karl Bode at Techdirt:

… policymakers freaking out about the Chinese potentially getting access to TikTok user data are the exact same people who’ve fought tooth and nail against the U.S. having even a baseline privacy law for the Internet era. These are the exact same folks that created a data broker privacy hellscape completely free of accountability, and advocated for the dismantling of most, if not all, regulatory oversight of the sector. The result: just an endless parade of scandals, hacks, and breaches.

Now those exact same folks are breathlessly concerned when just one of countless bad actors (China) abuse a zero-accountability privacy hellscape they themselves helped to create.

Dave Pell is on a roll on NextDraft today:

”At 8:10 p.m., more than nine hours after his family reported him missing, a passing tanker spotted the man near the mouth of the Mississippi River and alerted the Coast Guard." NYT (Gift Article): A Man Fell From a Cruise Ship. And Survived. “Mr. Grimes, whose family described him as an exceptional swimmer, had treaded in 65- to 70-degree water for hours, withstanding rain, 20-knot winds and three- to five-foot waves in the Gulf of Mexico, where bull sharks and blacktip sharks are common.” (That actually sounds better than how I imagine cruises.)

Also:

”To prepare for the depths of winter when food is scarce, many animals slow down, sleep through the cold or migrate to warmer locales. Not the common shrew. To survive the colder months, the animal eats away at its own brain, reducing the organ by as much as a fourth, only to regrow much of brain matter in the spring." This is not unlike my experience being on and then getting off Twitter.

Elon Musk gets mail. “Akiva Cohen, an attorney representing 22 laid-off Twitter employees, sent a letter to Twitter and Elon Musk (shared, of course, on Twitter): ‘If basic human decency and honor isn’t enough to make you want to keep your word, maybe this will…. ‘” By John Gruber on Daring Fireball.

Elon is getting to the “… and find out” bit.

“Robert Moses Is A Racist Whatever.”

Jason Kottke blogs about an interview with Robert Caro, author of “The Power Broker,” a definitive biography of urban planner Robert Moses.

Moses’ racist vision for New York transformed the city, literally paving over Black neighborhoods with highways.

Moses came along with his incredible vision, and vision not in a good sense. It’s like how he built the bridges too low.

I remember his aide, Sid Shapiro, who I spent a lot of time getting to talk to me, he finally talked to me. And he had this quote that I’ve never forgotten. He said Moses didn’t want poor people, particularly poor people of color, to use Jones Beach, so they had legislation passed forbidding the use of buses on parkways.

Then he had this quote, and I can still hear him saying it to me. “Legislation can always be changed. It’s very hard to tear down a bridge once it’s up.” So he built 180 or 170 bridges too low for buses.

…

Robert Moses had always displayed a genius for adorning his creations with little details that made them fit in with their setting, that made the people who used them feel at home in them. There was a little detail on the playhouse-comfort station in the Harlem section of Riverside Park that is found nowhere else in the park. The wrought-iron trellises of the park’s other playhouses and comfort stations are decorated with designs like curling waves.

The wrought-iron trellises of the Harlem playhouse-comfort station are decorated with monkeys.

One detail I remember from stories about Moses: When he died in 1981, nobody attended his funeral. Even white people hated him.

What weird food habits did you have in your family when you were a kid? If you’re a parent, how would your kids answer that question?

I’m remembering that one summer when I went to day camp where the kids brought their lunches. My mom made a big batch of hamburgers on Sunday, and froze them, and so I had a desiccated frozen hamburger for lunch every weekday.

On good days the hamburgers were fully thawed.

My mom was great, and she was a wonderful mother, but she was not a good cook most of the time.

This made me happy this morning

This morning while walking the dog I saw one of the neighbor men in front of his house, getting ready to take his three-year-old daughter to school. I shouted, “Good morning,” as we do, and he smiled a little and nodded back, distracted.

I saw the little girl. I shouted, “Good morning!” to her.

She struck a pose, facing me, standing up straight, with her arms stretched out at her sides and her head held high.

Then I saw that she was wearing red tights, and a green top with triangular notches along the bottom.

“You’re an ELF!” I shouted, and she grinned broadly and nodded.

I hope your day is as happy as hers.

How can the Democrats claim to be pro-union and pro-labor and also do this?

The bill that the House passed forcing railway workers back to work requires the workers to take a deal they voted to reject before, giving them only one sick day a year.

US House Passes Bill Forcing Railway Workers Not to Strike

Ian Welsh:

People’s backs are to the wall. Since about 1980, the predominant policy in the US has been to immiserate workers, especially wage workers. This was possible because the New Deal and post-war eras had made workers well enough off that they had some surplus which could then be stolen from them.

But now a lot of people are up against the wall. Many full-time workers, especially at places like Amazon, live in their cars or tents, for example. There is nothing left to give.

People with nothing to lose are dangerous.

I have become fastidious about washing my hands, maybe even OCD, but I have also decided the dog and cats are sanitary, and I am still entirely clean if I have been petting the animals and letting the dog lick my hands and face.

That’s how it works. It’s just science.

I have become fastidious about washing my hands, maybe even a little OCD, but I have also decided the dog and cats are sanitary, and I am still entirely clean if I have been petting the animals and letting the dog lick my hands and face.

That’s how it works. It’s just science.

“You’ve got to vaccinate people against the hate”

MetaFilter: In Russia, China, Iran, and the United States, autocracy is stumbling and liberal democracy is looking resilient. (But in the US at least, the far right isn’t taking no for an answer.)

Noah Smith: “… although liberal democracy is the GOAT, each generation is driven to fuck around and find out.”

Also Smith: “People love to think of themselves as the inheritors of a great civilization. But I’d rather think of myself as the ancestor of a great civilization yet to come!”

Also Smith: We’re entering another period of conflict between great world powers. In those conflicts, there are no good guys, only bad guys and less bad guys. Hopefully, we’ll be the less bad guys this time.

A friend reminds me that I started getting healthy and fit after I attended a science fiction convention in around 2007, and saw that a third of the fans in attendance were using mobility scooters. I saw that for my own not-too-distant future if I didn’t lose weight and start exercising.

And so I did.

A few years after that convention, I attended another and was satisfied when I climbed a short flight of stairs two at a time.

That’s not something I’d do today. My wind and muscles would be able to do it easily, but my knees would protest.

Hello again, micro.blog! It’s me, Mitch Wagner, getting a fresh start on a new blog.

If you follow me on atomicrobotlive you can keep right on doing that, or you can just follow me here. I’ll explain what I’m doing later. I’m still figuring it out myself.

27 years in California and sometimes I’m still amazed by palm trees. 📷

Would you like to see a one-minute video of Minnie running around the backyard and digging? Of course you would. 📷

My home office needs a name. I am choosing between:

  • The Room Where It Happens
  • The Cockpit
  • The Boom Boom Room
  • The Dangerous Exotic Bamboo Tiki Lounge and Bowling Alley

Robert A. Heinlein’s Red Planet was the gateway drug to books for me. My 3rd grade teacher, Miss Kaufman had a little area of bookshelves in the corner of her classroom. I read Red Planet and a biography of Helen Keller and was hooked.

I told that story on Facebook a few years ago and in 2018 I heard from Miss Kaufman. She said she remembered me well. Holy crap. Mind-blowing for me. I imagine it was for her too – she remembered an 8-year-old boy and now she was messaging with a 57-year-old man, who was typing to her from a hotel room in Florida. But I expect she’s used to that by now.

I think my Heinlein addiction finally subsided, within the last three years or so. The supply is exhausted – he’s not writing any more – and I’ve reread everything a million times. I still do love history though.

There was a new Heinlein published in the last year or two – a previously lost manuscript – “Pursuit of the Pankera.” Supposedly pretty good, but I’m just not highly motivated to read it. It’s an alternate version of “Number of the Beast,” one of my least favorite of his novels.

This house has a dinosaur in the yard. The dinosaur wears a nametag. His name is Burt. 📷

Out of curiosity, I rewatched “Dance of the Dwarfs,” a 1983 low-budget horror-adventure that was in heavy rotation on cable TV around the time it was released. Back then, cable TV didn’t have a lot of content to choose from, so you saw a lot of the same thing over and over. I ended up seeing this movie a few times then, and then not since.

It’s based loosely on “The African Queen.” And I mean, very loosely. A then-famous actress named Deborah Raffin plays an anthropologist, who hires drunk helicopter pilot Peter Fonda to fly into the jungle to investigate legends of a race of pygmies. The cast also features John Amos as a witch doctor. The location is unspecified, but I expect it’s Latin America based on the supporting cast of Latino stereotypes – bandits, street urchins, servants and a couple of hookers.

I don’t know if it’s a good movie, but I enjoyed seeing it again. Raffin is leggy and gorgeous. She does what the role requires of her. Fonda plays a down-on-his-luck drunk very well, in a stained luau shirt and tropical white pants; you can almost smell him. There are a couple of nice comedy bits, some decent action sequences. Raffin screams piercingly, but she is also an expert shot and thinks her way out of trouble. The monsters, when finally revealed, look cheap. Raffin and Fonda have no chemistry – you can understand why she comes to like and respect him, but not why she falls in love with him, other than that’s what the script requires.

The director, Gus Trikonis, did TV and exploitation movies. He started his career as a dancer in the movie “West Side Story,” and was Goldie Hawn’s first husband. His latest IMDB credit is 2001, on a TV series with the delightfully cheesy name. “18 Wheels of Justice.”He does a good job on this movie, there are some nice shots of the helicopter in flight with the jungle below. And the helicopter itself is gorgeously decrepit.

I watched the movie over several days. It goes well with lunch. I do not expect to watch this again; there are too many other options for entertainment today. But if it’s 1983 and you’re looking for something to watch, “Dance of the Dwarfs” is a good choice.

Earlier

📺

We’ve been living in this house more than 20 years and last night Julie showed me an extremely useful lightswitch which I had previously been ignorant of.

My brothers and me having a Tarantino moment at Niagara Falls around 1971. 📷

I think the white car was our car. Dad liked a muscle car. It was an era when you could get a family-size muscle car.

Even when I was a little boy, I understood the importance of personal style. Around 1964. 📷

Just look at this beautiful house we saw on a trip to Athens, Ohio, to visit family a few years ago. Just look at it. 📷

African safari journal: Homeward bound

June 2019 Our final Africa safari stop was Little Kulala Desert Lodge, in Sossusvlei, the Namib-Naukluft Park, Namibia. We took another small charter flight, from Hoanib Valley Camp – or, rather the nearest airstrip from that camp, which was about two hours’s drive away from the camp itself. Sossusvlei Geluk Airstrip is the usual empty airstrip, just a cleared length of land with one or two sheds. As at our other camps, one of the staff picked us up in a Toyota truck converted for passengers, enclosed but not air conditioned. The weather was another scorcher of a day with bright sunlight, even though it is the African winter. We were accompanied by the pilot of the plane, Graham, who was staying at the lodge overnight. About 15 minutes in, Graham conversed with the driver of the truck, Alfred, in Afrikaans, and then Alfred turned the truck around. Graham confessed that he was supposed to start a beacon on the plane to let his company know he’d arrived safely, and he’d forgotten to do that. When we returned to the airfield, Graham did that thing and then we turned the truck around back toward the camp.

I have to confess, we were road-weary at that point and ready to come home, but we still had four more nights in Africa ahead of us plus 28 hours on planes and in airports. And now as I write this a week after our return, I miss being in Africa.

There were only two things you could do in Sossusvlei that appealed to us: Seeing and climbing the majestic dunes, and visiting the Seasrim Canyon. That’s meant a two-night stay would have been ideal; we stayed for three and so we had some time on our hands. And because of the heat, Kulala Desert Lodge was not the ideal place to sit around and rest. There are other things to do in the area, but they did not appeal to us: Ride e-bikes and fat bikes, or go on a wine tasting. You can also take a balloon ride, but that would have cost $1,000, which seemed like a lot for a short experience. I’ve ridden on hot air balloons twice, once with Julie, it’s wonderful but we weren’t interested this time around.

Aside: I wrote all my other journal entries in Africa, with unreliable or no Internet access. Now I’m home with our lovely, home WiFi. And I can just look things up if I don’t know what they are. The name of the lodge we stayed at? The name of the canyon? Pow! Type in a few characters in a browser and there’s your answer. [Update from 2020: I wrote this journal entry in July 2019, a few weeks after returning home, based on notes on the trip.]

The lodge is laid out similarly to the other places we stayed, with a main building in the center, done up like a giant hut, containing the dining room, bar, outdoor seating, and offices and reception desk. The entrance is in front of that building. Spread out on either side were 23 cabins for guests, which are actually big, furnished canvas tents on platforms, as with Xakanaxa and other places we stayed. The lodge calls the cabins “kulalas,” from an African word for sleep. Because of the number of cabins, service was more hotel-like and impersonal; we enjoyed the family feeling at the smaller lodges we stayed at, such as Xakanaxa and Hoanib Valley, and liked Kulala Lodge less.

The dining room has big plate glass windows overlooking the flat desert plain, which seems to stretch off for miles to the distant mountains. We’d been to several African deserts by then, as well as the Anza-Borrego Desert at home, and each one seemed more austere and barren than the last. The shrubs at Sossusvlei are sparse and many tens of yards apart. There are few other animals there, just some birds and lonely impala and kudu.

The big draw at Sossusvlei, though, are the dunes. They are just piles of loose sand, hundreds of feet high and miles long, marching across the desert. One of the highlights of the visit is climbing one of the biggest dunes, called “Big Daddy.” 130 meters high. It’s strenuous, like walking on the beach but also climbing. The sand fights you on every step. And you’re standing on a relatively narrow path, with a steep slope on either side. The path is wide enough that I was only worried a little bit about falling. I was worried a little more about just getting down. I’d been assured by both tourists and guides that getting down is easy and fun, but I was skeptical; I have a lousy sense of balance and anything involving anything like climbing is tricky for me.

Climbing up the dune you have a long string of hikers both in front of and behind you. It isn’t crowded, but if you’re like me and you move slowly, you’ll be passed a couple of times. Like I said, it’s not crowded, but I got to thinking about the famous photos of climbers lined up to ascend to the summit of Mount Everest, like people waiting to get on a bus.

Despite the crowds, tourism isn’t a problem for the dunes, because every night the wind blows and cleans up the footsteps and repairs the damage. The dunes are like new every morning. That’s the theory at least.

I got about two thirds of the way up the dune and decided I had gone far enough. I wasn’t tired, but I’d spent enough time on the climb and didn’t have anything to prove. Also, I didn’t want to keep the other people on our bus waiting. So I turned to my right and went down the steep slope.

And it really was fun going down. I fell twice, but backwards, on my butt, and the sand is so soft it didn’t hurt a bit and I just popped back up. Both my feet were sunk in sand halfway up to my knees, so walking was more like wading and slow going. After I got about two thirds of the way down, I found a rhythm and the rest of the way down was like gliding slowly. Delightful!

We don’t intend to return to Sossusvlei – we feel like we’ve seen and done everything we want to there – but if we somehow do find our way back I want to do that climb again, and this time go all the way up to the summit and do the walk down properly.

In addition to Big Daddy, the attraction next to the dune is Deadvlei, a white clay pan that’s so dry that nothing lives there. Some trees are still standing, 800 years after they died. We were instructed not to touch the trees, lest they shattered.

After lunch, we decided to skip the afternoon activities, and just sat around the cabin in the heat.

The next morning, we were up early, and off to the Seasrim Canyon, which is about 100 feet deep and the third biggest canyon in the world.

We had the guide to ourselves that morning – and the entire canyon, too. Our guide said most people do the dunes in the morning and the canyon in the afternoon, when it can be excuse-me-pardon-me crowded. But we did not see another soul on the climb down and nearly the whole climb up, with just a lot of magnificent geology to ourselves. By that time we were overwhelmed by magnificent nature and a little burned out on it, but we still had enough awe left in our souls to be stirred, at least a little bit.

In the afternoon I began to get cabin fever, and decided to go for a walk along the dry riverbed that the lodge is built alongside of. It was perfectly safe, and a lodge-approved activity. I walk for exercise in a park at home, and this was similar, only dryer, and hotter, and instead of being accompanied by our dog, I had a fly following me much of the way and trying to land on my face. Festus, our guide previously, said flies there don’t bite; they’re trying to drink water from our faces. That must have been one thirsty fly. Along the route, I realize I did not have any solo selfies from the trip, which is like a violation of international law, so I took a couple. The fly photobombed one of them, landing on my face. A flyless African selfie from that afternoon is now my default online profile pic.

The next morning, we began the long journey home, which took two or three days. The nine-hour time difference and 28+ hour flight time from Johannesburg to San Diego make it confusing as to how much time has actually elapsed. The first step was back to the airfield, where we waited a half-hour in the truck for the “ground pilot” – the airfield’s one employee - to show up and open the gate. We didn’t mind; by then we were used to how things are done in Africa. Prior to our trip, I’d talked to a colleague who’d lived six months in South Africa; she said be prepared for things that should be easy to be difficult, and things you’d expect to be difficult to be easy. That stuck with me in incidents such as the wait for the ground pilot to show up. The plane wasn’t going anywhere; we were the only passengers.

We flew a bit more than an hour to the Windhoek Airport, and were met at the gate by our old pal Antone, who had driven us from Windhoek to Okonjima a week or so earlier. He waited with us to check in, poor bastard – there was a very long line and he had somewhere else to be.

The flight to Johannesburg was a commercial flight, and getting on the plane was the end of our safari adventures, because one-hour commercial flight in Africa is not too different from one in the US or Europe.

We arrived in Johannesburg, breezed through customs, and checked into the City Lodge. We were scheduled to get up the next morning for an 8 am private, guided city tour, but neither of us were excited for that. When we’d had Internet access, I’d checked Yelp and TripAdvisor and Google for things to do in Johannesburg and didn’t come up with much of anything. The Apartheid Museum got rave reviews, but it sounded depressing to me. I wanted to see Soweto, which had been the only place Blacks were allowed to live during apartheid, but Julie wasn’t enthusiastic about that. So we put off the tour until 10:30 am so we could pack at leisure.

The driver picked us up in a town car with leather seats, a far cry from the open, battered trucks we’d been bouncing around in for weeks. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of South Africa, Johannesburg, and its history. The one other place we wanted to see, other than Soweto, was Maboneng, which travel guides billed as a bohemian shopping district.

The driver, whose name was Seabo, offered to take us to Soweto in the morning and then to a native African place for lunch. I said hell yeah, because I was always on the lookout for native foods – nearly all the foods we’d eaten on this trip were European, although nearly all of it was delicious – but Julie said no. I thought for a moment and realized that it was not a great idea to sample street food in an unknown cuisine a few hours prior to getting on a plane for a 28-hour flight. So I passed too. Instead, we went to Maboneng, and Seabo dropped us off for lunch and a bit of walking round.

Maboneng was disappointing. It was crowded and a little threatening, like much of the rest of Johannesburg we’d seen, with a few cheap-looking shops and stands set up selling crafts that looked no different than the kind of thing you’d find at the airport. There were also a few Ethiopian and other African restaurants and a coffee cafe, which would have been tempting to me on another day, but like I said I didn’t want to try any strange cuisines just before a long flight. So we ate at an Italian restaurant/sports bar that was actually very good, and friendly. When we got out the neighborhood looked friendlier too; I even spotted one man who looked local, dangling a big camera from his hand. People don’t dangle big cameras in a dangerous neighborhood. Not for long at least.

Seabo returned shortly after lunch and took us to Soweto.

Soweto, he explained, is home to 1.2 million people, which makes it a respectable city within the city. It has neighborhoods of great poverty – shantytowns and slums made of scrap metal – which, Seabo noted, are all that you see in photos and video of Soweto. There are also middle class homes, and even affluent residences. Even the affluent residences seemed cheek-by-jowl close to each other, and small to me, though Julie said she thought some of them were larger. They had high fences around them, suggesting a high crime rate. And you’d see poverty and affluence very close – a shed or just open air tables selling a hodgepodge of merchandise, just a few steps from a scavenged home. Hand-painted advertisements adorned walls, touting businesses; I noted a lot of building contractors. Businesses mingled with housing. If there were any zoning laws in Soweto, I didn’t see evidence of it.

I saw livestock grazing in empty lots, cattle and goats. In the middle of the city!

Seabo lived in Soweto; he seemed to like it.

Seabo offered to stop to let us out at Nelson Mandela’s and Desmond Tutu’s homes, he seemed disappointed when we didn’t get out. But that street was dense with panhandlers, buskers, and other street people, who seemed aggressive; not violent, but not inclined to take no for an answer. Julie and I were not in the mood to run that kind of gauntlet.

We arrived back at the hotel at 3:30 pm, said goodbye to Seabo – who really was a good guide; we were just bad tourists – and made our way to airline check-in.

All in all I was not impressed with Johannesburg. It seemed to me the kind of place you’d only ever go to if you for financial reasons. Maybe, like Seabo, you were a poor villager looking to make a living. Maybe you’re a millionaire looking to be a billionaire. Or maybe you’re just somebody in the middle.

And then we were on our way home. I barely slept on the 28+-hour flights, watched something like five movies, two seasons of The Good Place, then slept most of the next 24 hours when we arrived home. Several days later I drove a car for the first time in a month; I did not hit anyone or go off the road.

We talk a lot about going back. We went to Africa really on a whim; it felt like a fun adventure. And it was, and we’ve fallen in love with it. Maybe in three years, if we can afford it financially. I’d like to see gorillas and chimpanzees, visit the Olduvai Gorge where the first people on Earth lived millions of years ago, see Cape Town, spend a day each in Windhoek and Swakopmund, spend more time in Botswana, get Festus to guide us around. Africa is a big, beautiful continent with so much to do! 🌍📓

"Dance of the Dwarfs"

In the early 1980s cable movie channels didn’t have much inventory and they’d play the same movie over and over, multiple times a day. And if you had the TV on for digital wallpaper, you’d sometimes end up watching the same movie a few times over the course of a few weeks.

One of those movies, for me, was called “Dance of the Dwarfs," and I quite liked it. It was a ripoff of “The African Queen,” about an uptight, beautiful woman anthropologist who hires a drunk, down-on-his-luck helicopter pilot for an expedition into the jungle to find a mythical race of monster dwarves. Or dwarfs. The helicopter pilot is played by Peter Fonda.

I have no idea if the movie was any good. I fear not, but I’d like to watch it again to find out – and oho, I see it is uncut and remastered on YouTube!

The co-star was an actress named Deborah Raffin, who I remember thinking at the time was a recognizable B-list star and I now don’t recognize much of anything she was in before this movie. Or afterward.

The movie also featured John Amos in a supporting role.

The preview DEFINITELY looks low-budget, with some cheesy acting and cringey dialogue … but kind of charming?

I remember the scene where she shoots all his liquor bottles. A woman who was adept with a gun was a novelty in movies at that time. To my uneducated eye, she seems to be using a proper shooting stance, not waving her gun around like most movie characters.

I’ll see if I can get Julie to watch the movie with me. I’m not hopeful.

Later: I rewatched it. Not bad.

🍿

I’m about halfway through reading the very first Perry Mason novel, “The Case of the Velvet Claws,” published 1932. Perry has virtually no inner life. The same for his supporting characters. Supposedly it’s this way throughout the series. We never learn Perry’s backstory, his hopes and dreams, his anxieties and fears. He just solves crimes and protects clients.

Perry Mason seems similar to Nero Wolfe. You get more backstory from Nero Wolfe. But as with Perry Mason, neither Nero, nor his little created family of employees and allies, suffers the kinds of doubts, fears and neuroses the rest of us do. They’re singularly focused on their work.

Today we’d consider that a terrible writing flaw. I’m enjoying it. If I want neurosis and anxiety my own brain keeps me in good supply.

In the Perry Mason novel, we’ve already had a scene where Perry’s femme fatale client throws herself at him. That’s mandatory in any noir novel. She’s gorgeous and sexy and lets it be known that she is fully available to him. I’ve seen that scene a few times in the Spenser novels, where Spenser was always tempted but able to muster the strength of will to resist. Perry isn’t tempted the least little bit. (Maybe he has a thing with Paul Drake. Heh.)

Perry Mason in the novels has little relationship with the recent HBO TV series and I’m OK with that.

A colleague on a Zoom meeting this morning shared his Mac screen with red numbers in the dock for App Store and operating system updates, and now I’m not going to be able to sleep tonight.

Thank goodness his battery was fully charged.

We are enjoying “Endeavour.” It gives me an idea for a Star Trek series: “Ensign Kirk.”

This is the story of a young Starfleet Ensign, fresh from the Academy, on his first assignment. He’s a rising star of Starfleet but that doesn’t mean he’s given special treatment; it just means expectations are higher for him. He’s just another junior officer, considered expendable, sent on dangerous missions to spare more valuable officers.

The first episode finds him on his first day of duty out of Starfleet Academy graduation, assigned to a new ship, where he meets and befriends an older doctor named Leonard McCoy.

Younger versions of other characters from the original series will put in occasional appearances, but mainly this is Kirk’s show, with support from McCoy.

This is not the Kirk of the 80s and 90s movies, who broke the law and disobeyed orders. And this is especially not the Kirk of the J.J. Abrams movies, who was a spoiled-rotten privileged fratboy.

This is the Kirk of the original series, where Starfleet is an egalitarian institution and you get ahead on merit, not connections. Jim Kirk is just a plain old farmboy from Iowa who got into Starfleet on talent and hard work, and who respects and obeys regulations and the chain of command (but doesn’t have to like it). He’s a model officer, able to act independently, improvise or obey orders when appropriate.

Like the young Endeavour Morse, Jim Kirk is hungry and ambitious. He yearns to become the youngest person to command a Constitution-class starship and hustles and throws himself into danger to fulfill that dream.

I got this idea from Endeavour and also from a novel I read when I was in my teens, “Ensign Flandry,” by Poul Anderson. Anderson was a prolific, popular and highly respected midcentury science fiction and fantasy writer. He wrote a series of novels in the 50s or so about an interstellar secret agent named Dominick Flandry – like James Bond, a thousand years in the future. This novel was about Flandry on his first assignment. Great fun!

In the 90s, Justin Hall was a rich kid with distant parents and a need for attention. He fell in love with the Internet and started sharing intimate details of his life on his website, links.net. He was, maybe, the very first personal blogger, and paved the way for legions of people to share their own intimate details on Facebook on YouTube. He produced an autobiographical documentary in 2015.

overshare: the links.net story

Today, he is apparently in a committed relationship, with young kids, and he’s a cannabis entrepreneur because of course he is.

Hall’s philosophy of radical personal exhibitionism was commonplace in the 90s and early 2000s. I admired it but never participated myself, and now I’m glad I stayed away. These days, I try to be extremely active online in ways that don’t compromise my, and other people’s privacy.

I never participated in the radical transparency internet culture when that idea was popular, and now I’m far more careful about privacy than I used to be.

For example, a few weeks ago, a cousin shared a photo of my mother as a young woman, dressed up and looking pretty for a wedding. My Mom was older when she started a family, so this is really a view into another life for her.

I thought for a moment about sharing the photo online, but then decided, no, that one’s just for me and friends and family.

I get relaxation from certain kinds of low-stakes digital activities, requiring little or no thought, like organizing email newsletters and suchlike.

In the past I’ve beaten myself up about that, considering it wasted time.

Now I think instead I need to make it work for me. Because sometimes you need to unwind.

People collect stamps, right?

What is a “digital garden?”

I encountered the idea of a “digital garden” Friday and was instantly enthusiastic and spent some time this weekend nerding out about it. Here is the result – the beginning of my digital garden: mitchwagner.com.

A digital garden is a personal website curated by its author, with essays and information about the subject or subjects they’re excited about. Some are wide-ranging and complex and cover a variety of subjects, while others cover a single subject, such as neurology or books,

Here’s a directory of digital gardens. It’s a digital garden of digital gardens!

Digital gardens provide an alternative to chronological streams such as blogs and social media. Streams are great for finding out what’s happening and whats new now. But they’re lousy for organizing information. Also, streams are terrible for longevity. Once stuff gets pushed down off the top of the stream, it disappears. Digital gardens are places where you can organize information and keeping information available over the long term.

Digital gardens can be very simple, just an index page or a Google Doc. Or you can use sophisticated software to create complex, Wikipedia-like documents.

After a while thinking about this idea, I realized that we’re talking here about the old, 90s “personal website.” People back then would create websites devoted to their favorite bands, or hobbies, or just their own lives and interests. Eventually these got swallowed up by Wikipedia, Google and the various social media silos.

Digital gardens are an extension of, and renaming of, personal websites. That doesn’t make the idea less powerful though.

Digital gardens are exciting to me, personally, because they solve a couple of problems that I’ve been noodling about for years. One problem is that I post a lot of stuff to my streams. Some days I post a dozen or two dozen items. Most are ephemeral – links to breaking news articles, some with comments, some without. Wisecracks. Memes. Old ads and photos from the mid-20th Century.

But some of what I post seems like it should be more long-lasting, whether it’s a book review or the journal of our 25th anniversary safari to Africa last year.

A digital garden solves that problem. I can just put up an index page of links to long-lived and notable content, and let that — rather than the blog or my biography — be my home page. I’ll continue with the blog and keep the bio. But the index page will be the main entrance to my site.

Again, this is not a new idea. Gina Trapani has been doing that a few years, and I don’t think she would say her idea is particularly original to her. But it’s still a great idea — and it’s new to me.

The second problem that digital gardens solve for me is that I’ve been noodling about ideas for projects for, well, several years now. Interviews with people I find interesting, software reviews and how-tos. Occasionally I have even acted on these ideas. But I don’t do it often because I don’t have a permanent home for them.

Resources

My digital garden: mitchwagner.com.

Here’s the article that got me excited, and introduced the idea of “digital gardening” to me: Digital gardens let you cultivate your own little bit of the internet

How the blog broke the web – Amy Hoy provides a brief history of blogs and social media, and discusses why they’re not great ways to organize information.

Hoy says there were only 23 blogs in 1999? Amazing. By late 2001 there seemed like a million of them.

Maggie Appleton: A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden – Apparently the term and idea has been around in various forms for more than 20 years. Not surprising. The internet is a tangled web. Streams and search engines are two great ways to find stuff, but stuff can still be hard to find. That’s not a new problem.

Maggie Appleton’s directory of digital gardeners and digital gardening tools

Maggie’s Digital Garden

Maggie again: A brief overview of digital gardens as a Twitter thread.

A list of artificial brain networked notebook apps – These include a couple of familiar names to me, such as Roam Research and Obsidian. They seem to be a mix of private note-taking apps, Internet publishing tools, and private apps that can also publish to the public web.

This is a take on “digital gardens” that borrows from the philosophy of “zettelkasten.” Put simply, a zettelkasten is a system of note-taking where you write down each idea separately — in its original vision decades ago, you wrote each idea on a slip of paper or index card, though now of course there are digital versions — and then link madly between related notes. Ideas can come from books, articles, thinking, observations, whatever. Zettelkasten advocates say they can come up with fresh insights simply by returning to their zettel and following the links. German sociologist Niklas Luhmann, who invented the idea, credited his zettelkasten as a collaborator on many papers and books.

You don’t have to use dedicated software for a digital garden. Mine is just an index page for my existing blog.

Second Brain – “A curated list of awesome “Public Zettelkastens 🗄️ / Second Brains 🧠 / Digital Gardens 🌱”

Digital Gardens – Another explainer with a couple of examples. The author says:

In basic terms, [a digital garden] is a different format for written content on the web. It’s about moving away from blog posts ordered by dates and categories, into more of an interlinked web of notes.

One of the main ingredients is bi-directional links between those notes, creating a network of notes, similar to Wikipedia.

I would not say that the notes have to be interlinked, Wikipedia-style. Though they can be.

gwern.net – A very nice example of a digital garden covering a broad range of subjects.

Article: My blog is a digital garden, not a blog by Joel Hooks.

Our Africa journal – Saying goodbye to a new friend

June 23, 2019 — Yesterday, we left the camp for our next stop. Festus drove us two hours over those rough desert roads to the same airstrip we’d flown in to. We arrived 40 minutes early so we had time to spend with our new friend. We sat in the same shelter where we’d had our first lunch together three days earlier, and talked.

Festus told us how he found his way when guiding people through through the bush. I thought maybe he’d memorized the features, the trees and rocks and hills and such, like Mark Twain memorized the Mississippi River. He said no, those things change, but the desert is surrounded by mountains and he looked for the relative position of the peaks to figure out where he is. I was reminded of how I found my way around by car when we lived in Boston; the Prudential and Hancock skyscrapers towered over the skyline and were visible miles around. I looked for those two towers and their positions relative to each other and that gave me a first approximation of my position and whether I was moving in the right direction.

The airstrip was just a cleared stretch of flat ground with a few sheds at one end of it, where we sat. The only other people were a young Himba man, wearing Western clothes, who worked as a sort of attendant, along with two of his buddies, keeping him company. I was reminded of a rural gas station in upstate New York that I visited for two minutes to get driving directions one night years ago when I got lost on the way to visit a friend. I thought at the time that I blew through that town in less the five minutes but those three friends had probably been at that gas station for years.

In addition to the three Himba men, the only other denizens of the airstrip were two emaciated, medium-sized dogs who walked slowly through. They didn’t belong to anyone; they were just passing. They came to the door of the restroom and watched with sad eyes while I did my business in there. I am usually leery of off-leash dogs but pair looked so sad I just wanted to give them a bath, take them home, feed them a nice supper of boiled chicken and rice, and then curl up on the couch and watch TV together. One of the Himba men attempted to chase the dogs off by throwing pebbles and shouting at them. The dogs looked like they had been ready to move on anyway. Three more dogs, equally skinny, forlorn and slow moving, came through a few minutes later.

We had a surprisingly moving goodbye with Festus, considering we’d only been together three days. Festus gave me a warm triple handclasp with both hands and looked me in the eye, a traditional greeting he’d taught us. I’m afraid I rushed it; Julie pointed out to me later that I’m just not an emotionally demonstrative person, other than with her. I’m working on that. I hope Festus will remember our conversations and my sincere respect and affection for him, and that he will forget my hurried goodbye.

And we got on the small plane to our next stop, which was actually two flights, one more than an hour to Swakopmund, a small city founded by Germans for mining and other industry, and then we switched planes while the first refueled, to go more than another hour to our current destination, Sossusvlei. Our planes on both legs were Cessna C210s, with two passenger seats for me and Julie, the only passengers, and a couple more seats temporarily removed for our luggage.

I’m getting to quite like small planes. The ride is more interesting, even if it is more likely to be scary sometimes. You chat with the pilot. They give the safety and orientation talk personally and always include the same joke: They show us the airsickness bag and tell us if we use it we should not return it; instead, keep it “as a souvenir” of the airline. For our our first leg, to Soussesvlei, I did the joke before the pilot did. He was chagrined; I’d stepped on his laugh line!

During our brief layover in Swakopmund, the airline parked us inside a small waiting room in a hangar. It was a bit of a transition after our time in the bush, a proper modern waiting room with a sign with the WiFi password. This was my first access to good WiFi in a week and I slurped up email and reviewed it on the plane. I had left an out-of-office message that said I would be out all June and NOT reading email, even when I get back, so anyone who needs anything should email my colleagues or message me again in early July. I am adhering to the spirit of that message; I only plan to read a few messages when I return. The only reason I’m even checking email is to see if anything cataclysmic or wonderful happens. So far there’s been neither, just work and my friends and family rolling on without me. Similarly, I glance at news headlines every few days and am surprised by how inconsequential it all is.

On the leg from Swakopmond to Soussevlei, we had a scenic flight, and the pilot pointed out landmarks from the air, including salt processing fields, two shipwrecks, one of which is now deep inland as the desert advances over the century since that disaster, and the dunes of Soussuslei.

Sossusvlei is a big, dry hot desert. Every time I say someplace in Africa is pretty dry and hot and desolate, we go someplace even more dry and hot and desolate. Geology is Sossusvlei’s big draw, including miles and miles of sand dunes, stretching up to hundreds of feed tall. Like our two previous destinations, Soussusvlei is blistering hot by day, even now, in African winter, though it gets cold at night. It can get up to 50 degrees C in summer.

🌍📓

In “Man of Steel” there’s a scene at the end where Superman and the big villain are having a fight flying around midtown Manhatttan, and they’re ripping apart skyscrapers and you see these shots of Superman and the villain getting thrown through a floor of cubicles and sending partitions and desks and office furniture flying.

And I kept thinking that there’s probably some poor bastard who finally got his cubicle JUST RIGHT — just the right desk chair, keyboard tray at the perfect height, little potted cactus, couple of inspirational posters, tiny corkboard in the perfect spot, two-cup USB-powered teakettle. And now it’s all smashed up. 🍿

The house 🎃 across the street ☠ is starting 👻 to decorate 🧛‍♀️ for Halloween. 🧙 Too soon!🦇

“Digital gardens” are personal spaces on the Internet that avoid the one-size-fits-all look and feel of social media. They’re not ephemeral and stream-of-consciousness, like blogs or social media. They’re curated (to use an overused word) websites about the creator’s interests and passions: Museums, books, philosophy, politics, etc. More permanent than either blogs or social media.

This is extremely intriguing to me.

Digital gardens let you cultivate your own little bit of the internet www.technologyreview.com/2020/09/0…

And here’s why they’re called “digital gardens:” My blog is a digital garden, not a blog joelhooks.com/digital-g…

You don’t have to use fancypants technology. This guy’s digital garden is just a Google Doc. docs.google.com/document/…

This is very much in the IndieWeb spirit.

Like I said about 10 hours ago, I thought I had insomnia licked because I got a good night’s sleep five nights in a row, but last night it was back and I got about three hours of sleep total.

I was pleased, however, because I got myself set up so I can work on my iPad in the living room until I’m tired.

Insomnia is no longer an occasional thing for me. It’s a lifestyle.

“I’ve got this insomnia thing licked,” I said. “I’ve slept well six nights in a row,” I said.

Note the timestamp on this post.

Oh, well, at least I got work done — good progress on an article I’ve been stuck on for a month or more.

I’ve learned that my resting face when I’m a zoom call looks like I’m drunk. Once I have my colleagues trained that I’m not drunk, I can start day-drinking.

If you want to see women walking while talking on the phone, most with dogs, some pushing strollers, get out of your house and walk around the neighborhood at 7 am.

I dropped a container of imported parmesan cheese flakes on the floor the other day and swept it up and put it back in the container and now the dog gets a little cheese with her food. She’s asking to see the wine list too.

I stopped briefly on my walk yesterday to fiddle with my iPhone, and this beautiful cat came out from behind some bushes to say hello. After pausing a moment to make sure I wasn’t going to do anything violent, she flopped at my feet. 📷

Epic Games' assertion that there's an iPhone market that Apple monopolizes, distinct from the smartphone market that includes Android, looks like bullshit to me.

Apple kicked Epic’s Fortnite out of the App Store for terms of service violations. Fortnite immediately sued.

Thomas Claburn at The Register:

Epic Games, the maker of Fortnite, filed a lawsuit against Apple on Thursday accusing the iGiant of illegally monopolizing iOS app distribution and app payments.

The game biz earlier in the day announced a promotional initiative called Fortnite Mega Drop to allow Fortnite players to purchase in-game virtual currency and in-game items directly from Epic, at a price 20 per cent below their iOS App Store in-app purchase price.

In doing so, Epic violated Section 3.11 of Apple’s App Store Guidelines, which states that iOS developers must use Apple’s payment mechanism.

If you start reading a book and it’s not grabbing you, how long do you give it until you give up? Or do you always read through to the end once you start?

Trump has had more nice things to say about a woman arrested for sex trafficking than he has about John Lewis.

How to spell “entrepreneur:” It’s got more Rs than you think.

Mirrors only became commonplace and inexpensive in the 19th Century. Until then, almost everybody had no idea what they looked like. They had never seen images of themselves.

Pessimists Archive: Mirrors

Drive-through communion at the church up the street from us. 📷

Communion was no longer running when I saw the sign while out walking yesterday. That’s a good thing because I would have hopped in my car, driven up and asked for a grilled cheese burrito and chalupa supreme with a pineapple twist freeze and then I would have gone straight to hell.

The church is Baptist but often hosts other denominations.

Too often I try to get just a couple more shaves out of an old blade. That’s a metaphor for something.

The good: I shaved with a new blade this morning and I’m wearing a new shirt.

The bad: I have a razor burn on my left cheek from the last time I shaved, and a blemish on my philtrum.

I resolved on Thursday to do less Facebook, because Facebook doesn’t make me feel good. I was on Facebook this weekend more than I would’ve liked, during which time I learned about three friends going through big life events.

Doing less Facebook is not easy. People who never joined made the right choice.

I’m unfollowing a lot of people I don’t feel strongly about, and leaving groups. I’m there to get updates from friends and family. That’s all.