Mitch's Blog

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

I saw this regal gentleman at Lake Murray. 📷

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.

Vacation photo, Borrego Springs, California, 2013 📷

A photo essay of classic Japanese ads

A photo essay of classic Japanese movie monsters.

Where Western movies used animated clay figures, the Japanese used men in costumes on miniature cityscapes. Some of those cityscapes were elaborate and beautiful.

Godzilla is drawn from Japan’s lived experience at the receiving end of a nuclear bomb attack. The texture of his skin is based on the scars carried by Hiroshima survivors. Godzilla is also based on the Shinto god of destruction, “which Godzilla B-movie maker Shogo Tomiyama says operates not in service of humankind, but rather the laws of nature. ‘He totally destroys everything and then there is a rebirth,’ he says, ‘Something new and fresh can begin.” Godzilla isn’t good or bad. It just exists.

“The line of troopers walked forward, billy clubs out. They knocked Lewis to the ground and struck him on his head. He tried to get up; they hit him again with the billy club. His skull was fractured.” John Lewis Crosses Selma Bridge One Last Time

“Aggravation is an art form in his hands.” RIP Regis, my friend and companion on many a business travel hotel room morning in the 90s and 2000s.

I have an idea for a movie. An action-comedy about two cops who are partners and best friends and who bicker a lot. They are out to take down a wealthy drug dealer. There are car chases and gunfights. Their captain shouts at them.

We watched Bad Boys tonight, which we had never seen. It was the least enjoyable film I have watched all the way through.

This is a good look for me. In no way does it make me look threatening or mentally unbalanced. 📷

meet my new BFF https://t.co/4WDhx3BpZo

— Michelle 🍵💻 (@tinymwriter) July 24, 2020

More than half the people born in 1980 are over 40. My brain cannot process this information.

Velveeta vs. Microsoft.

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols at ZDNet: The 5 most over-hyped tech devices.

Don’t be a hater – CueCat will make a comeback!

David Roth at The New Yorker: How “Starship Troopers” Aligns with Our Moment of American Defeat: Verhoeven’ s Starship Troopers depicts “a society whose fixation on force has left it preening, idiotic, and paradoxically weak. This state manifests as endless columns of cultishly revered and supremely well-equipped violence workers who know how to do only one thing, and a culture that exists exclusively to celebrate their efforts….”

Eli Reiter at OneZero: My Bizarre Stint As an Amazon Reviewer for Hire

I saw this lost dog sign on my walk yesterday. I hope they find the little guy. He looks sad. 📷

Lake Murray from Cowles Mountain, five miles from home, 2018. Maybe I’ll do the climb again this weekend. 📷

Two years ago today I was at the Google Next conference in San Francisco. I mistook another editor for a waiter at a stand-up cocktail reception and tried to take food off his plate.

Julie got me this cunning hat for my birthday yesterday, which I will wear with pride on my next trip back east in winter. I think it’s a great look for me. 📷

Such a shayna punim! 📷

The least likely scenario for the 2020 election is that Trump both loses and accepts defeat graciously.

What Could Happen If Donald Trump Rejects Electoral Defeat?. By Masha Gessen at The New Yorker.

“Hurting people at scale: Facebook’s employees reckon with the social network they’ve built. Ryan Mac and Craig Silverman go in-depth for BuzzFeed News.

The most charitable interpretation of Facebook’s behavior is that it’s trying to remain neutral in a fight against racism and autocracy.

I don’t know how how to spell “entrepreneur” but I know there’s an extra R in there somewhere.

“Delicious, but too messy to handle,” was how Ruth Burt described the new ice cream treat her father, Harry Burt, concocted in 1920—a brick of vanilla ice cream encased in chocolate. So her brother, Harry Jr., offered a suggestion: Why not give it a handle?”

A brief history of the Good Humor ice cream truck: How the Ice Cream Truck Made Summer Cool, by Colin Dickey at Smithsonian Magazine.

That was, indeed, unexpected.

Zoom and Enhance! from r/Unexpected

Ladies and gents, I present my husband who did not want a cat from r/aww

In his biography of Benjamin Franklin, Walter Isaacson makes a case that Franklin was one of the greatest people who ever lived, anywhere at any time.

Franklin rose from poverty to become a successful businessman, writer, publisher, journalist, diplomat, statesman, politician, and political philosopher. Success in any one of those fields could get him a couple of statues. Franklin succeeded in all.

Franklin was a leader in building a government that has lasted longer than any other extant today. No other major nation today is still using the government it had in the 18th Century.

Franklin was also a legitimate scientific genius.

And as a friend points out, Franklin invented technology that is still in use today: his stove, lightning rod and bifocals.

Also, Franklin invented swim fins, the urinary catheter and a musical instrument called the armonica. The last invention is not still in use much today, but it’s lovely.

Venice is reducing the number of people allowed on individual gondolas, as tourists have gotten fatter. “Going forward with over half a ton of meat on board is dangerous.”

Previously, “Greece banned hefty tourists from riding donkeys on the popular island of Santorini, after activists complained that the animals were suffering spinal injuries.”

Biden went into this campaign with his chief credential being that he was a nonentity who would do nothing. With Biden as President, Americans could go back to ignoring politics.

Instead, Biden is turning into a fire-breathing radical – and I love it.

He appears to be building an FDR-style transformative Presidency, which is what the US and the world need right now.

The fate of civilization and billions of lives literally depend on it.

Although now that I think of it, to call Biden a “radical” is wrong. When the house is on fire, it’s not radical to shout, “The house is on fire!”

Biden’s $2 trillion climate plan.

Country-themed sitcoms ruled the TV airwaves for a decade, but in the early 1970s, CBS axed them. The Beverly Hillbillies, Green Acres, and Petticoat Junction were just three of the shows that bought the farm.

The Rural Purge: Death of the Country Broadcasting System, on Mobituaries by My Rocca.

I had not planned to spend quite so much time this morning updating my Mac but here we are.

When did we stop having “problems” and starting having “issues”? Because I have a problem with that.

That’s sorted.

Moon vs. Sun utilization question answered The Monroeville Breeze, Indiana, September 20, 1934. pic.twitter.com/tU4FGC1rqX

— Brian Roemmele (@BrianRoemmele) July 23, 2020

James Hamblin MD, writing at The Atlantic:

Have several masks, made to fit well around your nose and mouth. Make them as heavily layered as you can tolerate. After wearing them for a day or so, or in a high-contact scenario, let them sit for a few days in a sunny, out-of-the-way place. Between the effects of time and light, there should be little need for running a washing machine or going through the hassle of hand-washing your masks….

If it sounds like I’m making this up based on best guesses, I am. Everyone is. We would ideally all be wearing surgical masks, and disposing of them frequently, but we didn’t prepare accordingly. So for all their flaws, cloth masks are important: Making them effective enough for use in daily pandemic life means we’re freeing up medical-grade masks for people who really need them, especially in places where they are still in short supply, such as the United States. Health-care workers around the world still need proper personal protective equipment more than a random guy named Gene who wants to go to the store to buy snacks.

Good news for me. I haven’t washed my masks in … well … ever.

Bray walked away from $1 million because he couldn’t stand Amazon’s labor and business practices anymore. Now he’s an outspoken advocate for breaking the company up.

Karen Weise writing at The New York Times:

SEATTLE — Tim Bray, an internet pioneer and a former vice president at Amazon, sent shock waves through the tech giant in early May when he resigned for what he called “a vein of toxicity” running through its culture.

Within a few hours, his blog post about the resignation drew hundreds of thousands of views, and his inbox filled up with requests from journalists, recruiters and techies. Soon, lawmakers on Capitol Hill cited the post. It all made Mr. Bray, 65, Amazon’s highest-profile defector.

But there was more he wanted to say.

In the weeks since, he has aimed his brain power not at fixing a coding problem but at framing a broader critique of the company. In talks and blog posts that have drawn attention inside the company, he has called for unionization and antitrust regulation. Amid “the beating of the antitrust drums,” Mr. Bray wrote in one post, he would like to see Amazon separate its retail business from its lucrative cloud computing unit.

“And I’m pretty sure I’m not alone,” he said.

Mexican cave relics suggest humans were populating the Americas up to 17,000 years earlier than thought

This is a photo of a kitten

Honestly trying to work here.

I was looking through my wallet for a particular document, which I did not find, but I did find random credit card receipts dating back to 2017.

from Seinfeld GIFs via Gfycat

Facebook is adding security and privacy protections to Messenger. That’s like Ghislaine Maxwell taking first aid classes so she can be a better babysitter for your teen-age girls.

We ordered a new couch which was supposed to arrive today but which seems to have disappeared in transit. I am haunted by the vision of it being sat on by people with poor personal hygiene who are eating Cheetos and wiping their fingers on the upholstery.

America can become the country claims to be, starting by telling the truth about its history of slavery, genocide and oppression. “Until we tell the truth we deny ourselves the opportunity for beauty.”

The Ezra Klein Show: Bryan Stevenson on how America can heal

Tempted

Tucker Carlson, the most popular host in the history of cable news, returned from a week-long vacation after his head writer was exposed as a raging bigot. The scandal won’t stick.

Financially, it will cost some advertisers but Fox gets most of its revenue from subscribers, who love this kind of controversy.

Tucker Carlson’s America

I walked a different route than I usually do today, and saw several noteworthy vehicles. Two were classics, all had character. 📷

📷

Cruising the Past & Future of the Retro Shopping Mall

I loved to go to the mall in my 20s. I’d go alone, during the day, get a fast food lunch, see what was new on the science fiction shelves at B. Dalton and Waldenbooks — anything by Asimov, Heinlein, Niven or Zelazny? A new Robert B. Parker? In that era before the mainstream internet and before I got plugged into science fiction fandom, the only way to find out if a favorite author had a new book out was to check in stores.

Then I’d catch a movie matinee. I’d find a spot directly under a light in the theater and read from one of my new books until the movie started.

That was a good afternoon.

From my journal two years ago: My Apple Watch alarm went off while I was watching the dishes, and without thinking about it I tapped the watch face with my nose to switch the alarm off. I believe I have hit on a breakthrough in nasal user interface design.

I was feeling down and blue so I spent a lot of time on social media and now I feel ever so much better and more cheerful, said nobody never.

📚I finished reading “Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic," by Tom “insert Spider-Man Joke Here” Holland. It’s a history of the rise to power of Julius Caesar and then a quick overview of the reign of Augustus. It’s one of the most readable histories I’ve read, very novelistic, which is not surprising, because Holland got his start as a novelist.

The Romans had a republic that lasted 500 years and was quickly replaced by a monarchy. That’s something that’s been on my mind based on the news of the past few years.

Next, I think I’ll read Holland’s follow-up: “Dynasty,” which covers the reigns of Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius and Nero.

But first I’ll finish reading “The Annihilation Score,” a novel by Charles Stross, in his Laundry series.

Man, It’s Boss! Monogram’s Red Baron model kit, the Groovy Custom Show Rod Now at Your Favorite Store! (1968) via

Hula hoop ad, 1963 via

I am continuing to fiddle with handwriting recognition (aka Scribble) on the iPad. I’m getting better at it but I don’t know if it will ever replace the onscreen keyboard.

I read multiple reviews that say Scribble is amazing even with the reviewers' awful handwriting. My awful handwriting is Scribble’s Waterloo.

Was Orwell an anti-Semite?

Orwell struggled with anti-Semitism — others' and his own.

Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow: “Trump’s decisions to politicize voting and wearing masks means that his base have been convinced not to vote and to commit mass suicide.” Also, Trump is paying grifters millions for masks.

Americans saw the story they wanted to see. Some saw respected professionals fearing for their safety, reasonably exercising their Second Amendment rights to defend their home from violent trespassers. Others saw an overwrought, older affluent couple, recklessly pointing their weapons and asserting their white privilege.

Portland Place couple who confronted protesters have a long history of not backing down - Metro - stltoday.com

The Republicans Who Want to Destroy Trump

The Lincoln Project is headed by people who are just now realizing that the Republican Party has been toxic since before Trump.

A 13-Year-Old Will Be Tried As An Adult For Shooting And Killing His Brother While Playing Cops And Robbers.

The father, who kept a loaded gun unsecured in a house with children, seems like the criminal here, not a boy too young to understand what he was doing.

Your mask feels uncomfortable? Get over it. As a surgeon, I know how vital they are.

The World Is Drinking Less Coffee While Office Workers Stay Home. More for me!

not all heroes wear capes. pic.twitter.com/KEG2P2Qbz2

— Love Yo Self ✨ (@MichellCClark) July 11, 2020

How old is your dog? New equation shows how to calculate its age in human years

Dogs age quickly their first years, more slowly later.

Minnie is 62.

📷

David Frumat the Atlantic, about Roger Stone: The Most Conspicuous Scandal in American History.

Trump and his cronies commit their treasonous crimes in plain sight, and that helps them get away with it.

David Gerrold’s 1983 novel “A Matter for Men” features the Earth facing a biological menace which many people believe is a hoax, and the US in decline but still powerful and threatening.

Oh, that old-time science fiction! So unrealistic!

Very Hungry Caterpillar

Hello, again, Lake Murray. 📷

This may sound like Trump’s wackiest conspiracy theory. But it’s actually true. Republicans have been peddling insane conspiracy theories for decades, and now it is coming back to destroy them, as rank-and-file Republicans are refusing to vote using mail in ballots or to take precautions to protect themselves against coronavirus.

Scientists thought they found evidence of a new planet at the edge of the solar system. Now they think it might be a black hole.

If the Solar System’s ‘Planet Nine’ is actually a small black hole, here’s how we could detect it… wait, what?

On Cory Doctorow’s Pluralistic: Hospitals are using homebrew dongles with code from a Polish hacker to repair ventilators, getting around thieving licensing by manufacturer Medtronic. Datamir helps cops spy on protesters with Twitter. How arms dealers make billions on police militarization. local California businesses used clamshells as currency during the Depression. And France’s Macron demands a national database of porn preferences

For me, texting is a full-duplex conversation. I think possibly most people think of texting as half-duplex, like speech, and consider my approach rude.

I did not know this: Ghislaine Maxwell is the daughter of the late media mogul Robert Maxwell, briefly famous as a rival to Rupert Murdoch. Robert Maxwell’s body was found floating near his yacht in 1991.

Maybe his death was an accident. Maybe it was suicide. Maybe he was murdered to cover up … something.

The yacht was named the Lady Ghislaine, for his daughter.

The elder Maxwell and Richard Epstein had a lot in common. They were both parvenus who bought their way into high society and respectability, and who fell to disgrace.

Ghislaine Maxwell idolized both men.

Mark Seal reports at Vanity Fair:

To Ghislaine, her mother, three brothers, and three sisters, Robert Maxwell was Samson, tearing down the gates of Gaza, as he was depicted in a stained-glass window in their 51-room Oxford mansion: a titan of luck, impossible achievement, and unlimited wealth. “If Bob Maxwell didn’t exist, no one could invent him,” Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock would say. Born Jan Ludvik Hoch into a Hasidic family in a tiny village in Czechoslovakia, he was so poor that he and his six siblings had to wear shoes in shifts. He evolved into a warrior, surviving the Holocaust, in which 300 of his immediate and extended family members perished, to join the Czech resistance. When his country fell to the Nazis, he fled to France and joined the British Army, fighting in bloody battles from Normandy to Germany. After the war, he married the daughter of a prosperous British silk merchant, christened himself Robert Maxwell, and bought Pergamon Press, a publisher of scientific journals. It became the anchor of an empire that would, at the time of his death, include hundreds of companies, among them the publishing giant Macmillan and newspapers from The Mirror in London to the New York Daily News. As big as or maybe even big-ger than his rival, Rupert Murdoch, Maxwell was a bombastic, demanding patriarch who dined with kings and presidents and exhibited a bottomless appetite for family, food, fortune, and fame.

Now he was dead, and it wasn’t long before the mighty house of Maxwell was exposed as a house of cards. Maxwell, it turned out, had pledged millions from his company’s pension funds to shore up his tottering empire, exposing his 32,000 employees to retirement ruin and racking up debts of nearly $5 billion. The conspiracy theories multiplied: He committed suicide rather than face his financial crimes; he died aboard his yacht while engaged in sex with a mistress; he fell overboard during his regular postmidnight piss over the railings; he was murdered by British security agents panicked that he had taken possession of tapes that could incriminate the MI6 intelligence service in crime and espionage; he was injected with a poisonous syringe by frogmen sent by his Mossad spymasters to silence him from revealing their secret arms deals.

Bill Murray dances with Gilda Radner at Studio 54. via

In the 70s, overalls and high heels were considered perfectly acceptable ladies' wear for a night on the town. The 70s were a very strange decade.

Gilda’s rocking it. She looks fantastic.

How AI makes policing more racist: AI is biased as the people who program it.

I like writing things by hand … in theory.

I like the idea of being the guy who carries around a notebook, like Indiana Jones’s father, and writes down all my brilliant thoughts. In my mind, it’s a simple but beautiful notebook, and I write in it using a fountain pen.

In reality, I type everything on my MacBook and if I’m not at my MacBook I use my phone. On the phone, I’m using voice transcription more and more.

Al Pacino with his parents, Salvatore and Rose, in 1940. via

He’s just a few months old and he already looks like Al Pacino.

I often see this bus parked around the corner. I keep expecting 11-year old Danny Bonaduce to emerge. 📷

I installed the new iPad beta and I think I like the scribbling feature it takes getting Used to. I don’t handwrite anything anymore

Incoherent Conspiracy Suggests Ghislaine Maxwell Is a Powerful Redditor: Because a supercriminal setting up pseudonymous social media account to rule the Internet would absolutely use a variation on their real name.

Cory Doctorow: Cops are buying breach data. Why get a warrant when the crooks can do the work for you?

A Twitter Account Is Tracking the Cringiest Misuses Of Black Language

I configured a new MacBook Pro a month ago. Usually I use Migration Assistant for that kind of thing but this time I started from scratch and moved data and apps over manually.

Three apps that still haven’t made the transition.

• Alfred
• Keyboard Maestro
• TextExpander

All three are apps I previously used daily and would have sworn were essential to my workflow. Apparently not.

I do have an idea for a thing I want to do with Keyboard Maestro – set up a series of palettes to remind me of keyboard shortcuts. But I’m in no rush on that.

Spies, Lies, and Stonewalling: What It’s Like to Report on Facebook: “… operating with the secrecy of an intelligence agency and the authority of a state government, Facebook has arrogated to itself vast powers while enjoying, until recently, limited journalistic scrutiny.“

The Militarization Of Police: Journalist Radley Balko, author of ‘Rise Of The Warrior Cop,’ says police departments across America are increasingly using equipment designed for use on a battlefield, including tanks, bayonets and grenades, and using them against peaceful protestors.

Study finds asteroid impact, not volcanoes, made the Earth uninhabitable for dinosaurs: ‘Only plausible explanation’.

I thought this was settled science years ago.

Two racist cops threw me in jail 13 years ago. Let me tell you what needs to happen now.

Searing commentary from Ty Smith, a retired, decorated Navy SEAL and founder of a San Diego security company.

Brian X. Chen at the New York Times:

When we buy a gadget these days, we rarely assume that it will endure.

We expect to play a video game console only for as long as companies make games for it. We expect to use a smartphone or a laptop for just as long as the battery has juice or until it can no longer run important software.

At some point, we feel that we must upgrade. We must have the latest and greatest camera. We must have apps that run faster. We must have brighter screens.

Here’s the thing: This is all the doing of marketing professionals, seared into our subconscious. The reality is that consumer electronics, such as your phone, computer or tablet, can last for many years. It just takes some research to obtain tech that will endure. This exercise will be increasingly important in a pandemic-induced recession, which has forced many of us to tighten our spending.

“It’s a matter of buying what you need, not what the company is telling you that you need…. ”

Look for tech that’s easy to repair, particularly replacing the battery. And consider spending more to get the best.

Sheboygan toilet clogger sentenced to probation, 150 days in jail

Headline of the week.

via

via

You get an avatar that sits at a table or – for bigger meetings – in a virtual lecture hall, with your own video-captured face on it.

I’m skeptical.

https://www.theregister.com/2020/07/08/microsoft_together_mode/

I got the new Facebook layout yesterday evening. That’s late – many people were getting it months ago, weren’t they?

I like it. It reminds me of Google+.

I like the new notifications layout.

I’ve lost the ability to format text in posts, which I had for a couple of months. No big deal.

But the Facebook News Feed is still a cluttered mess and inconvenient to use. And the News Feed is the only part of Facebook that interests me.

I want to be able to get notifications for comments separately from likes and reactions.

Also, I want to be able to create lists of friends, groups and pages where I see EVERY post made by members of that list, sorted reverse-chronologically by the time of the post.

Neither of these things is possible.

Generation Jones is the younger cohort of boomers. We are a separate generation, raised in the recession of the 70s in very early 80s, rather than the prosperous decades following World War II.

We have a different attitude and different pop-culture icons than our older peers.

Jeffrey I Williams writes at the Chronicle of Higher Education in 2014:

Generation Jones is an actual thing. It refers to the second half of the baby boom, to a group of people born roughly from 1954 to 1965.

We might be grouped with the baby boomers, but our formative experiences were profoundly different. If the zeitgeist of the boomers was optimism and revolution, the vibe of Gen Jones was cynicism and disappointment. Our formative years came in the wake of the 1973 oil shock, Watergate, the malaise of the Carter years and the Reagan recession of 1982. Above all, we resented the older boomers themselves — who we were convinced had things so much easier, and in whose shadow we’d been forced to spend our entire lives.

The fact that most people have never even heard of Generation Jones is the most Generation Jones thing about Generation Jones.

Not My Generation www.chronicle.com/article/G…

Also, from Jennifer Finney Boylan, at the New York Times last month:

Donald Trump (who is, it should be noted, an older boomer) has been a fraud on so many levels, but if there’s anything authentic about him, it’s his air of grievance. It may have been this, Mr. Pontell says, that made Jonesers vote for him in 2016. Hillary Clinton, to them, was the epitome of older baby boomer entitlement, and if Mr. Trump stood for anything, it was for the very things Gen Jones most identifies with: jealousy, resentment, self-pity.

There’s a word in Ireland, “begrudgery.” Padraig O’Morain, writing in The Irish Times, says: “Behind a lot of this begrudgery lies the unexamined and unspoken assumption that there is only so much happiness to go around. And guess what? The others have too much and I have too little.”

Mr. Jones and Me: Younger Baby Boomers Swing Left www.nytimes.com/2020/06/2…