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Dune is a rational space opera, as logical and geometrical as a Sherlock Holmes story, with an irrational occult spirit journey built on top. It needs both parts to succeed. The David Lynch movie attempted the occult part, and was completely uninterested in the rational genre story. 🍿📚

🍿I watched the end of the Coen Brothers comedy “Hail Caesar” yesterday. We’d watched the first part weeks ago but Julie lost interest and I finally had a chance to catch up. I quite enjoyed the movie.

George Clooney does a great job playing cheerful idiots. He makes a lot of stupid faces. He seems to enjoy it and he is very good at it.

Who’s watching Lawrence Welk anymore? My grandparents watched it in the 70s. They were in their 80s then. That’s always seemed like the target demographic. Are there enough 120-year-olds around now to keep the show on the air?

I stopped in at Mystic Grill & Bakery last night to pick up a takeout dinner for myself and Julie. The chairs were down off the tables, indicating that dining service was available. But I only saw one person sitting at a table, and he may have been an employee. On a normal Saturday night at that time there would have been a couple of families there.

Several people came out for takeout, which was good to see. Staff and customers were all masked.

The TV was playing Lawrence Welk. I don’t think that’s significant from an epidemiological perspective

Julie and I watched “Dune” again not long ago. The only other time I’d seen it was in the theatrical release in the 80s. It was fine. I enjoyed it. I had zero expectations, and the movie met them.

A friend said she loved it because it visualized all the settings and characters of the novel. I said it was a terrible movie and the settings and characters looked different from the way I visualized them when reading. She said she didn’t care. Her perspective is valid.

On the It’s the Pictures That Got Small podcast: Dune, with Karina Longworth, Nate DiMeo and Natasha Lyonne.

David Lynch had no interest in the mythology of Dune. He just loved the imagery. It is the ultimate movie do to use for GIFs, or to project on the wall of a bar on the Lower East Side. Or watch in any public place with the sound off.

Karina Longworth: “It only doesn’t work if you it expect to be a movie.”

Lynch’s cut of the movie was five hours. The final cut was a little over two hours. Maybe the director’s cut would have been better?

đŸ“· Two ducks 🩆 🩆 hanging out in the pond, a third duck 🩆 joins them. A brisk discussion of etiquette ensues.

LEEEROY JENKINS!!!!!

đŸ“œLast night we watched “Saving Mr. Banks,” about the making of Mary Poppins. The movie stars Emma Thompson, Tom Hanks, Bradley Whitford, etc. — excellent cast.

“Saving Mr. Banks” takes great liberties with historical reality. In reality, PL Travers, the author of the series of Mary Poppins novels, never cared for the movie “Mary Poppins,” and wouldn’t permit another adaptation for 30 years. When she finally relented, for a stage production in London, she stipulated no Americans could be involved. And she had a much more interesting life than “Saving Mr. Banks” portrays. She was a successful actress and dancer and poet and studied philosophy and lived with Native Americans for a time and studied their philosophy and folklore. She adopted a boy, from whom she was later estranged.

Walt Disney, in real life, was kind of a bastard.

The movie is bullshit and propaganda and I loved it anyway and would gladly watch it again.

Much of the movie focuses on Travers’ childhood in Allora, Australia, in the early 1900s. It was a small town then and it’s no metropolis today, with a population of 1,223.

Patton Oswalt: Joey Pants is the real hero of “The Matrix,” and the computers are trying to be nice.

“There’s a very strong case to be made for [Joey Pantoliano’s character, Cypher], like, ‘No. Plug me the fuck back into this,’ Oswalt said. [Cypher is] one of the freed humans who regrets the decision to take the red reality pill, since the simulation was so much more warm and satisfying than reality.

“‘I’m nude with atrophied muscles, hairless in a jagged wasteland of radioactive slag, or I can be in this world where I have a nice job, where I eat a steak and marry someone,'” Oswalt ranted. “‘Can I just live in this — I am fine with it. Morpheus, who the fuck are you helping?! Why are you dragging us out?! The machines aren’t trying to kill us.'”

He continued from the point of view of the machines: “‘And by the way, you guys fucked up the Earth. We’re doing the best we can for you guys. We could have just let you all die in the wasteland, but instead, we found a way so that you can live.'”

Back speaking for himself, Oswalt added, “People always miss that line where [Agent] Smith (Hugo Weaving) says, ‘You know, when we first did the Matrix, it was just flat-out paradise, and you guys couldn’t handle that and you rejected it.’… Probably the first version of the Matrix, everybody could fly and orgasms lasted three months and you could just eat all the chocolate you wanted. And people were like, ‘No! I want a goddamn cubicle job!’ And the machines went, ‘OK. I guess they want cubicles. Give ‘em that. We tried to be nice.'”

The last typist was kicked out of the Writers Room in New York’s Greenwich Village 10 years ago.

The ribbon has run out on the last typewriter at a Manhattan writers' den.

Skye Ferrante has spent six years at the Writers Room in Greenwich Village, blissfully banging away on his grandmother’s 1929 Royal typewriter.

The 37-year-old writer represented a bygone era, the last typewriter-user in a special room devoted to typists.

“In the event that there are no desks available, laptop users must make room for typists,” read a sign posted in the “Typing Room” for years.

When Ferrante returned to the Writers Room in April after an eight-month break, the sign was gone and his noisy typewriter was no longer welcome.

“I was told I was the unintended beneficiary of a policy to placate the elderly members who have all since died off,” said Ferrante, a Manhattan native who’s writing children’s books. “They offered me a choice to switch to a laptop or refund my money, which to me is no choice at all.”

Ten years later, Ferrante is still around, doing wire sculptures, which he shares on Instagram. The Writers Room is still around too, and looks lovely, though I expect it’s on pandemic hiatus.

Did the Black Death lead to the Renaissance?

What does that history teach us about what to expect in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic?

It’s complicated, says Professor Ada Palmer.

Palmer, a historian and science fiction writer and all-around genius, appears in a wide-ranging interview on the Singularity Podcast:

Prof. Ada Palmer on Pandemics, Progress, History, Teleology and the Singularity

The Renaissance was in many ways a terrible time to be alive; Europeans fought many fierce wars and lifespans were drastically shorter than the preceding Middle Ages. Other parts of the world, particularly China, were far more advanced than Europe, and Europeans knew it.

But the Renaissance also produced great art and scientific breakthroughs. Then as now, it was the best and worst of times.

Francis Bacon invented the idea of progress in 1620. There was plenty of progress before then, of course, but until Bacon, people viewed history as more or less the same. They were some places and times that were better to be alive than others. Empires rose and fell. But our ancestors lives were the same as ours and our children’s would be the same as well.

Bacon had the idea of using science to cumulatively improve all peoples lives today and in the future into the future. For that reason, he said science was the best form of Christian charity.

We didn’t see the first breakthrough from Bacon’s insight for 150 years, until Benjamin Franklin invented the lightning rod. But since then he’s been proven right. Refrigeration, the rule of law, medicine and other advances have improved life for everyone, and will continue to do so.

Accepted wisdom today for many people is that one of the advances of the Renaissance was the break with religion and move to secularism. But great scientists like Isaac Newton and Descartes were devout Christians. Newton was deeply immersed in beliefs that we would consider occult.

People today sometimes say that figures like Newton were actually closet atheists, and could not share their beliefs because of censorship and fear of the Inquisition. And it’s true that censorship makes it very hard for later historians to find out what was actually going on. But we can deduce people’s actual beliefs by looking at other things they did say that they believe. And Renaissance intellectuals espoused beliefs that were far more dangerous than atheism. The Inquisition was far more concerned with heresy than atheism. If people like Newton and Descartes were atheists, they would have said so.

Atheism developed as a by-product of publishers making hyped claims in trying to flog translations of the work of the Greek philosopher Epictetus.

People calling themselves “transhumanists” today look forward to the Singularity, when artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence. But we’ve already been through a kind of Singularity, in the 17th Century, when for the first time it became impossible for an educated person to familiarize himself with every book ever written. With the invention of the printing press, books were being published faster than they could be catalogued, let alone read and understood! Until then, an educated person was considered to be one familiar with the total of all human knowledge. After that, we get the idea of specialization.

Poverty is a tax on intelligence. If you’re spending a lot of time worrying about paying bills, you don’t have that intelligence to think about other things. Palmer estimates that if we lift a person out of poverty, we raise their intelligence 25%.

All knowledge is useful, if for no other reason than it’s satisfying to learn things. Even finding out whether giraffes can swim is satisfying.

Humanity is a very young species, and we will get our act together eventually. Until a few centuries ago, it was considered fine and ok for people with powerful patrons to go around murdering people and bragging about it. Now, we believe all people should be subject to the law. That’s a big deal!

Progress comes from everyday people doing small things, more than from geniuses and great men and women doing great things:

The small things that we are achieving that feel small are the way that the civilization-wide big things happen. The more I look at history and zoom in the less it is the geniuses and the people whose names we know that made the world shift and the more it is, in fact, the microscopic – from a historical standpoint – teamwork of everybody. So never feel that the stuff you’re doing isn’t important.

Coronavirus: The Mask Wars – Science Vs

Scientific studies suggest no conclusive evidence that cloth masks help slow the spread of coronavirus. N95 masks are definitely helpful, but we’re not sure whether the same is true for surgical masks, or homemade cloth masks, or bandanas.

I’m going to keep wearing a mask anyway, when I go out in public, because the difficulty is low and potential payoff is high. Also, social signaling matters.

“Shoe-leather” contact tracing works – Cory Doctorow

The only effective way to do contact tracing is by paying an army of people to do it – the “shoe leather” approach. Contact-tracing apps are at best helpful in automating record-keeping.

It appears that the countries that have done best at containing coronavirus are those where the people trust their government, and that government is worthy of trust. These are two conditions that do not exist on a national level in the US.

I do trust our local, county and state governments in matters like this. Although I may not agree with them, they seem to me to be competent people who are acting in good faith to serve their constituents. The same is not true on a federal level, and has not been for a long time, predating Trump.

HP Lovecraft warned readers to stay away from pulp magazines – Cory Doctorow.

Readers should turn to the Bible and Lord Dunsany instead, said Lovecraft in a 1920 letter to the editor of the Omaha Bee.

I interviewed the science fiction writer Robert Charles Wilson, who said he read a letter or essay from some 19th Century person who was denouncing the “boys books” of the time, with their preposterous, ridiculous stories of little boys who run away from home to become sea captains. T

These sorts of books (said the 19th Century literary person) were awful stuff, to be avoided.

Wilson said they sounded awesome to him, and he sought out and read a few, and that became his own excellent novel, “Julian Comstock: A Story of the 22nd Century.”

Department of Justice Reopens Spat With Apple Over iPhone Encryption

Daring Fireball:

Saying you want technology companies to make a backdoor that only “good guys” can use is like saying you want guns that only “good guys” can fire. It’s not possible, and no credible cryptographer would say that it is. You might as well say that you want Apple to come up with a way for 1 + 1 to equal 3….

The DOJ is not asking for Apple’s cooperation unlocking existing iPhones — they’re asking Apple to make future iPhones insecure.

On Cory Doctorow’s Pluralistic

++ This is the first pandemic ever experienced by a society that understands how pandemics work, and other insights from Renaissance historian and science fiction writer Ada Palmer.

++ You can raise a person’s IQ 25% by getting that person out of poverty, as that person no longer has to devote attention to jugging bills all day, Palmer says.

++ Gig economy companies are massive Ponzi schemes. A restaurateur fights back by arbitraging pizza.

++ England’s storks have returned for the first time since 1416.

++ The case for universal broadband.

++ “Platform coops” are gig economy services where the workers own the platform.

If Not 10,000, How Many Steps Should We Be Walking Each Day?

The 10,000-step rule is completely arbitrary, writes journalist Tanner Garrity at InsideHook. There is zero science behind it. The figure was plucked from the air by a Japanese electronics company trying to sell a new pedometer in the 1960s.

In the mid-1960s, a a Japanese watch company called Yamasa Clock debuted the figure that has been associated with daily step-counts, activity meters and modern wearables like Fitbit and Apple Watch ever since. The young brand’s marketing team named their pedometer Manpo-kei, which translates to “10,000 steps meter.” Something about the number sounded right: it was large enough to feel like a goal, but small enough to feel like an achievable one for the average adult. But Yamasa’s motive was even less scientific than that. The Japanese character for 10,000 somewhat a resembles a gentleman out for a brisk stroll: 侇.

5,000-8,000 steps a day seems to be a more scientifically justified goal.

Even knowing all this, I try to do 10,000 steps a day because why not. Often I do not hit that goal. My hard goal is 7,500 steps a day. I’ve done at least that every day since we got back from Africa 11 months ago.

Says Garrity:

Most of all, remember to enjoy the steps you do take. Last week, The New York Times asked New Yorkers to share “the things they achingly miss” during quarantine. I long for my daily constitutional from InsideHook’s office in Midtown to the lower reaches of Central Park. The Heckscher Ballfields are down there and I like to stop and watch the midday games, which are inexplicably comprised of coeds in their mid-20s and guys who look like they taught at NYU in the ’90s. It was going to be my job this spring to find out how they all know each other. I miss scrambling over the schist, knowing the bench that gets the most sun, dodging selfies. It’s admirable to try to improve your physical conditioning each day with thousands of steps — just remember to leave a few hundred or so for the soul.

What We Might Learn From The 1918 Flu Pandemic – Fresh Air – In broad outlines, public reaction to the the 1918 flu pandemic and covid epidemic follow the same course, says historian John Barry – “the outbreak was trivialized for a long time.”

Also, Woodrow Wilson was almost certainly sick with the 1918 flu during the Geneva peace talks. He wanted to argue against punitive settlement with Germany, but was too sick to do so. So, while it’s a stretch to say the 1918 pandemic led to the Nazis, it’s not a HUGE stretch.

Knockoffs – 99% Invisible – Dapper Dan went from street hustler to fashion impresario and has spent time on both sides of American trademark law. In the world of fashion trademarks and knockoff merchandise, it’s hard to tell the legitimate merchants from the outlaws. They’re often the same guys.

Inside Trump’s coronavirus meltdown

Edward Luce delivers a fast but deep read on the Financial Times, about how Trump and his henchmen have bungled pandemic response, unnecessarily killing tens of thousands of Americans — so far! — and destroying America’s world leadership.

“America is first in the world in deaths, first in the world in infections and we stand out as an emblem of global incompetence. The damage to America’s influence and reputation will be very hard to undo.”

A pandemic is no walk in the park, except yesterday that's exactly what it was

Yesterday, Lake Murray was open for the first or second day since the social distancing order became law in California (which was March 20, by the way, so that’s nearly two months now). I went there on my daily walk.

Too many people! Social distancing was difficult, too easy to slip inside the six-foot distance. Only about half of the people were wearing masks. Maybe less than half. You could walk in and out freely but they had park workers set up on the entrance road to keep the parking lot from filling up. According to what I read, they were allowing only 50% capacity in the parking lot, to keep the park from getting crowded.

The photo here doesn’t look crowded but it was tricky trying to maintain a brisk walking pace AND social distancing. Pedestrian traffic on that trail is tricky even under normal conditions because you’re basically trying to manage four or five groups of people, all moving at different velocities: You’ve got people out strolling, often with small children in strollers, who are moving very slowly and not paying attention to their surroundings; there are brisk walkers like me; there are runners; there are adults riding bicycles and other wheeled human-powered transportation; and there are also preteens on bicycles, who rocket along at a million miles an hour not paying attention to their surroundings and occasionally colliding with other objects and people.

I was feeling nervous when I got home, and did not get close to Julie until I’d showered and changed my clothes. I plan to not go back to the park, to resume my daily routine of walking there, for a while, until it feels safer.

In other pandemic news: We got a shipment of paper towels yesterday. We are also stocked up on toilet paper. We are ready to face the apocalypse with clean countertops and butts. 📓

Jughead, 1970. It doesn’t require much individuality to be viewed as an eccentric iconoclast in Riverdale.

via

Why Is Facebook So Afraid of Checking Facts? – Facebook refuses to factcheck fake news, based on the discredited social theory of “backfire effects,” which claims that people dig in to false views when faced with contradictory evidence.

Facebook’s belief is based on a 2008 study, since discredited. In reality, when faced with contradictory evidence, people change their beliefs, just as you would like them to do.

So Facebook’s fake news policy is based on fake news.

Qanon is so popular because there are so many real-life conspiracies

Cory Doctorow: Social media isn’t particularly great at persuasion. But it is excellent at finding small, diffuse groups that are receptive to a message, and targeting those groups.

That’s great if you’re a refrigerator business looking to find people who are shopping for a refrigerator. It’s even better if you’re an LGBTQ kid in a small town, looking to find community.

It’s not so great for society if you’re looking to organize people who might be inclined to believe that a Presidential candidate is operating a child rape ring out of the basement of a popular Washington, D.C., pizza restaurant.

The reason people are inclined to believe in conspiracy theories is that so many of the trends destroying the US and planet are, in fact, conspiracies:

The opioid epidemic was a conspiracy between rich families like the Sacklers and regulators who rotate in and out of industry. The 737 crisis was caused by Boeing’s conspiracy to cut corners and aviation regulators' conspiracy to allow aerospace to regulate itself.

Senators conspire to liquidate their positions ahead of coronavirus lockdown, well-heeled multinationals conspire to get 94.5% of the “small business” PPP fund, Big Tech conspires to fix wages with illegal collusion while fast food franchises do the same with noncompetes.

And how different is Pizzagate from the real life of Richard Epstein? Also, Donald Trump may not technically be a serial rapist, but he’s certainly a serial sex abuser.

Additionally, conspiracies often make people feel at home, and provide them with status.

And now two points that are mine and by me:

The people profiled in the recent Atlantic piece about Qanon seem lovely. I don’t want any of them making public policy because Qanon is bonkers. But I’d be happy to have any of them as my neighbors and friends.

Also, as I’ve mentioned previously, I’m deeply immersed in ancient Rome now, and Qanon reminds me of the mystery cults that thrived in the first century One of those cults became Christianity. So maybe Qanon will go away soon, but don’t bet too much on it.

Also on Cory Doctorow’s Pluralistic: Dr. Seuss coronavirus parodies, including “Oh, the Places You Won’t Go.”

And a Hong Kong ice cream shop is selling tear-gas flavored ice cream, which one customer says is far too tear-gas-like, which reminds me of the Monty Python “Crunchy Frog” sketch.

Former newspaper editor is now a homeless blogger

The New York Times: Rick Jackson, 54, was top editor of The Herald-Times, Bloomington, Indiana. He got laid off “in the parking lot next to the paper’s headquarters. He was also told he would have to vacate the apartment in the same building, where he had been living for 10 months.”

Unable to go to the newsroom, Mr. Jackson started a blog. He called it The Homeless Editor….

He’s living in a Motel 6 now.

Mr. Jackson, who has covered homelessness, said on his blog that most homeless people are not those “who sit on the streets of all our major cities.” Rather, he wrote, “the homeless crowd are much more like me — a person who doesn’t have a single address to call home.”

Jackson is now looking for work. He hopes to stay in journalism.

“There’s something about being in a newsroom where I feel like I’m wrapped in a warm quilt,” he said. “It’s where my home is.”

New Christopher Pike "Trek" series in the pipeline. SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY!!

Hollywood Reporter : CBS All Access is doing a new Star Trek series, based on the adventures of the Enterprise under Captain Christopher Pike, with Anson Mount returning as Pike, Ethan Peck as Spock and Rebecca Romjin as Number One.

Also in the pipeline: New seasons of Discovery and Picard, an animated series, “Lower Decks” – I think I read elsewhere that will be a comedy – another Discovery spinoff, Section 31, starting Michelle Yeoh, and a younger-skewing CG-animated series for Nickelodeon.

With all that and The Orville, it’s a good time to be a Trekkie

Losers who use “loose” when they mean “lose.” Makes me lose my shit.

Excitement during the pandemic.

I like that it’s a professional model. Don’t want to use the AMATEUR equipment.

The Saga of Michael Flynn – Politics doesn’t permit nuance. Either Michael Flynn is a hero or a traitor. Either the Justice Department investigation was entirely justified or it was a witchhunt.

Rumors that some horror movies are cursed become their own kind of curse for the people who make those movies

The Curse of The Curse – Great episode of the Imaginary Worlds podcast: filmmaker Jay Cheel talks about his new documentary series “Cursed Films,” which explores why people think movies like The Exorcist, The Omen, and other horror films were cursed – targeted by demonic forces. Also, special effects artist Craig Reardon and director Gary Sherman separate fact from fiction with the alleged Poltergeist curse. And theologian Brandon Grafius, author of “Reading the Bible with Horror,” describes horror’s Biblical connections.

Thoughts following my my first-ever at-home haircut

  1. I had long, thick hair when I was a young man and I miss it. For years I’ve wondered if I would look good with long hair today, even though my hair is extremely thin now.

Social distancing gave me an opportunity to find out; I went far longer than usual between haircuts.

The answer is that I look terrible with long hair. I am back to number two clippers all over, for good.

  1. For years I have thought that I could just give myself a haircut, or have Julie do it for me, and save us some money. How hard can it be to cut my hair with number 2 clippers, all over?

Turns out it’s actually pretty hard and I will be going back to a professional barber as soon as it is healthy to do so.

  1. I have long luxurious ear hair and Julie did not want to trim it out of concern for injuring my ears. It looks awful. But on the other hand it helps keep my AirPods securely in place. 📓

Help Garry Armacost, a Vietnam vet, fight cancer and VA bureaucracy

Garry Armacost, was wounded fighting for his country in Vietnam. Now he’s in the fight of his life, against cancer and the bureaucracy of the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Garry is a big, cheerful, quiet 75-year-old who lives in San Diego. He needs cancer surgery for his survival. The surgery is complicated, long, done robotically, and requires sophisticated post-operative care.

Garry has had bad experience with post-operative care at the VA, which proved nearly fatal in 2012. Fortunately, Garry’s son, Chris, is a doctor, and arranged for the head of urology at Sharp Memorial to do the surgery.

But the VA has refused the transfer because they don’t want to cover the cost.

“What price do they put on Garry’s life? Apparently not much,” Garry’s wife, Linda, writes in a Facebook post. “We have called, argued, pleaded, tried to talk with the Director, to no avail. We’re wondering if these will be our last days together. It didn’t need to come to this.”

Garry was wounded in Vietnam, and earned a purple heart. He came home, raised a family, and worked a long career for various railroads in the Northeast. He is now retired and lives with his wife, Linda, in San Diego. Linda is active in local Democratic Party politics, which is where I met her.

Please help Garry and his family. If you have any ideas on who to contact and otherwise how to influence the VA to give him the treatment he needs, let me know and I’ll pass the word. You can contact me directly at mitch@mitchwagner.com.

If you work for the VA or know someone who does, please put in a word to get Garry’s transfer approved. Contact your Congressional representative and apply pressure.

Share this post far and wide on social media.

The VA needs to be held accountable to provide care, not just for Garry, but for every veteran. They were there when we needed them – now we need to be there for them, when they need us.

“It may not work for me," says Garry, “but hopefully another vet will have a better outcome.”

🌕📓

Julie gave me my first rona haircut. Fine job and I still have all my ears!

Little Richard, Rock Pioneer Who Broke Musical Barriers, Dead at 87 – He pioneered rock and roll’s gender-bending flamboyance, throat-shredding vocals, and piano-pounding rhythm.

In the years before his death, Little Richard, who was by then based in Nashville, still performed periodically. Onstage, though, the physicality of old was gone: Thanks to hip replacement surgery in 2009, he could only perform sitting down at his piano. But his rock & roll spirit never left him. “I’m sorry I can’t do it like it’s supposed to be done,” he told one audience in 2012. After the audience screamed back in encouragement, he said — with a very Little Richard squeal — “Oh, you gonna make me scream like a white girl!”

My Facebook profile recently got upgraded to support formatting text: Bold, italic, blockquotes and hyperlinks. I haven’t seen an announcement or news on this. Dave Winer has been — rightly — insisting on the importance of this for years. Makes Facebook ever so slightly more usable and less Internet-hostile.

Today (and yesterday) on Cory Doctorow’s Pluralistic –

Armed Michigan voters are escorting their state reps to work to protect them from swastika-brandishing white terrorists.

A good-guy hacker wrote a script to flood Ohio’s snitchline where employers are supposed to report workers who refused to come in over coronavirus fears, so those workers can be denied unemployment benefits. Ohio doesn’t have vaccines. effective therapeutics, sufficient ventilators, or adequate PPE/disinfectant, but it has a snitchline.

In a real incident very similar to Lord of the Flies, the kids were very nice to each other and built a lovely little village in the 15 months they were stranded.

By the time we arrived, the boys had set up a small commune with food garden, hollowed-out tree trunks to store rainwater, a gymnasium with curious weights, a badminton court, chicken pens and a permanent fire, all from handiwork, an old knife blade and much determination."

The kids agreed to work in teams of two, drawing up a strict roster for garden, kitchen and guard duty. Sometimes they quarrelled, but whenever that happened they solved it by imposing a time-out. Their days began and ended with song and prayer.

Kolo fashioned a makeshift guitar from a piece of driftwood, half a coconut shell and six steel wires salvaged from their wrecked boat – an instrument Peter has kept all these years – and played it to help lift their spirits.

US public health officials are unenthusiastic about contact-tracing apps. Contact-tracing is extremely effective, but it requires an army of people and lots of shoe leather.

Volcano gods demand workers:

“Re-opening” isn’t about saving ordinary workers and earners. You can’t save someone by infecting them with a deadly disease. In a world without contact-tracing, therapeutics, tests, PPE, santizing products, etc, more contact means more risk of illness and death.

“Re-opening” is about saving investors: the 1% who constitute the major shareholders in large firms whose calculus goes like this: “30% unemployment means that for every worker who dies on the job, ten more will apply to take their place.”

I think I will suggest to Julie that we should watch “The Andromeda Strain” tonight.

Not the 2008 remake. I hear that was fine. But it lacks the glorious microfilm-and-mainframe futurism of the 1971 original.

Wilford Brimley was only 48 when he appeared in “The Thing” and 51 in “Cocoon.”

I learned about Brimley’s age in “The Thing” when I myself was 48. That freaked me out a bit. “I’m as old as Wilford Brimley?!”

Roaming ‘robodog’ politely tells Singapore park goers to keep apart – A roaming robot dog built by Boston Dynamics is politely telling people in Singapore parks to enforce social distancing.

“Let’s keep Singapore healthy,” the yellow and black robodog named SPOT said in English as it roamed around. “For your own safety and for those around you, please stand at least one metre apart.

“Thank you,” it added, in a softly-spoken female voice.

Google unifies all of its messaging and communication apps into a single team – A good move. Google has multiple redundant messaging apps. I don’t use any of them because (1) I don’t have time to sit down and figure out what’s what and (2) I’m not going to invest in yet another Google service that Google will then turn around and kill.

I was burned by Google+ and Google Reader, and I saw what happened to Buzz and Wave. So, not going to try to kick that football again.

Now I’m curious which book it was and what was the so-called virtue signaling?

Today on Cory Doctorow’s Pluralistic

The TSA is being sued for hoarding 1.3 million N95 masks: The agency isn’t even using them, while other federal agencies. like the VA, “go begging for PPE for high-risk workers….

Use of America’s airports have fallen by 95% and the TSA has asked most of its screeners to stay home. Those screeners that are working are wearing surgical masks, as they have not been trained to fit N95 masks.

One Minnesota TSA manager tried to donate his mask to that state’s department of health but was unable to do so.

America is united in favor of keeping quarantines going: “The tiny minority who’d benefit from the premature re-opening of businesses (large shareholders in large corporations that might survive such a blunder) want the rest of us to throw ourselves in the volcano to appease the economy gods.”

Strong antitrust enforcement begat Unix, which is the basis for “almost every computer you use today.”

Wechat spies on non-Chinese users.

Hidden doors disguised as bookshelves I thought about doing that for my home office and one day I just might. I’d make it look like the entrance to the Batcave in the 1966 Batman, complete with the door-opening switch hidden in the bust of Shakespeare.

The first Google account you sign in to is set as the default account. This was driving me nuts until I figured it out.

Everybody alive today will be somewhat germophobic the rest of their lives. Like the way my parents' generation, who grew up in the Depression, were always frugal in at least some ways.

[Several years ago]
JULIE: “What is ‘mansplaining?'”
ME:
ME: “This is a trick, isn’t it?”

Today on Cory Doctorow’s Pluralistic

++ Alvim CorrĂȘa’s beautiful, bleak illustrations from the 1900 French edition of HG Wells' “War of the Worlds.”

++ Lobbyists are lobbying for big financial bailouts for … themselves. After ensuring that the bulk of previous bailouts went to fat-cat businesses who don’t need the money, lobbyists want their turn at the trough.

++ Either we sacrifice landlords and banks to save businesses and jobs, or we lose the businesses and jobs and take the landlords and banks with them.

++ Chef Itsuo Kobayashi has done beautiful paintings of every meal he’s eaten for 32 years.

++ An appeals court says Miami jail doesn’t need to provide soap, making waiting for a hearing into a possible death sentence, and encouraging the spread of coronavirus, not just in prison, but to the population at large.

++ Ohio has a snitchline for bosses whose employees won’t go back to work, so those workers can be denied unemployment benefits. Great way to increase the death toll, Ohio!

â€ȘI am hosting a video conference for dozens or hundreds of people this evening so of course today seemed like a good day for me to get my first shaving cut in years. And it was a big one. My bathroom this morning looked like the Texas chainsaw massacre.‬

The grocery store was nearly out of our favorite brand of cookies, Tate’s.

Lots of gluten-free cookies left, though.

I guess people are all if I’m gonna be dead in month fuck it I’m having gluten.

We watched the first episode of “Rome” last night. Polly Walker is va va va voom. I am attracted to smart, sexy auburn-haired women who can have me put to death.

We may be dramatically overestimating China’s capabilities – David Ignatius on The Washington Post – We may be making China seem more capable than it actually is, as we did with the supposedly unstoppable Japanese economy of the 1980s and the US/USSR “missile gap” decades earlier.

The Washington establishment needs an existential foreign threat.

Over on Twitter, I’m suggesting to @MikeElgan that he might want to consider moving to micro.blog.

I did some research in the autumn and concluded that micro.blog is the ONLY blog platform out there that doesn’t require significant fiddling and configuration. Which is sad for the blogosphere.

I mean, you can do a great deal of fiddling and configuration on micro.blog if you want to do that. But if you just want to type stuff and post photos, then micro.blog is your only option.

That is an awful lot of Rome

Yesterday I read some of “Storm before the Storm” a history of the fall of the Roman Republic, by Mike Duncan, and “Silver Pigs,” the first in the mystery series by Lindsey Davis about Marcus Didius Falco, a private detective in Imperial Rome. I’ve read that series before but I’ve forgotten most of it so it’s nearly new to me.

I finished re-watching “I, Claudius” Sunday — that’s the fourth time I’ve seen that. Maybe give it another go in ten years?

I listened to the “I, Podius” podcast, which is about “I, Claudius” — possibly the final episode of that, although there seems to be some unfinished business, so there may be at least one more episode.

I bookmarked a few articles about the historical accuracy of “I, Claudius,” for later reading.

Julie expressed some interest in rewatching “Rome,” the mid-2000s HBO series about the rise of Julius Caesar and the Roman Civil Wars.

Also, a few weeks ago, Julie and I watched “Hail, Caesar,” a Coen Brothers comedy about the making of a Golden Age Hollywood movie about Julius Caesar, featuring George Clooney. Julie didn’t care for it but I loved it; I still have 37 minutes to watch.

“Storm Before the Storm” is the earliest chronologically, covering events in the second century BCE. Then comes “Rome,” 1st Century BCE. Then comes “I, Claudius,” later in the 1st Century BCE through the early and mid 1st Century CE. Then comes “Silver Pigs,” a couple of decades after “I, Claudius,” in the late 1st Century CE. Finally, “Hail Caesar” comes along almost 1900 years later, around the time the books “I, Claudius” and “Claudius the God” were published, with the movie-within-the-movie covering the events of the early part of “Rome.”

It’s all the same universe, like the Marvel superhero movies. 📚đŸ“șđŸ“œđŸ““

One year ago today I saw possibly the most ridiculous example of security theater I have ever witnessed

A young woman ahead of me at airport security was walking with a cane and had a “boot” on her foot – a removable enclosure to immobilize an injured foot.

The security guy asked her if she could walk without the cane, and take off the boot, and put them through the security scanner. The security guy was nice about it; he said if taking off the boot and walking without the cane caused any discomfort at all, she should just leave them on.

The woman said no no no that’s all right and she sat down in a chair and wrestled the boot off, and then hopped through the scanner.

It occurred to me, watching, that this was security theater in the purest form. This exercise was completely unnecessary. I bet if you asked this woman why she was going through this exercise, she would have looked surprised and said, why, it’s the rules. And you have to follow the rules, right?

This woman was given a choice of whether she had to send her stuff through the scanner, and she chose to do it , even though the purpose of this exercise is not supposed to be empty obedience. It’s supposed to be catching terrorists. And this woman knew better than anybody else that she was not a terrorist, and therefore would have been perfectly safe strolling through security without any screening at all!

I don’t say this to criticize the young woman, who seemed perfectly nice and just trying to be accommodating, or the security guy, who was also very nice and just trying to do his job.

I wrote the preceding in my journal a year ago. Re-reading it now, I see that I was wrong then. The purpose of security theater isn’t security. It is empty obedience.

You may well ask, holy crap, Mitch, when did you become such a paranoid conspiracy theorist? I ask myself that sometimes. 📓

đŸ“ș I have finished watching I Claudius, for the fourth time. I now realize why I didn’t have any memory of the last episode. It is because the episode is weak, bleak and uncomfortably incesty.

I just want a professional haircut. I realize this is literally the smallest problem in the universe compared with the sacrifice others are making, often unwillingly.

I’ve discussed the matter with my wife, who is going to have to do the deed, and we’ve mutually agreed that I should have 100% of my pre-existing ears when the process is done.

The Hollywood Vigilante

Actress Marisol Nichols, star of the TV series “Riverdale,” is a real-life vigilante, hunting down sex predators.

Erika Hayasaki on Marie Claire:

Nichols dresses the part in case a perp glimpses her through the window. She’s 46 but, waif-like and five foot four with a hoodie over her head and a bedsheet draped across her shoulders, can pass for a teenager. Or she might wear her long, dark hair matted and put on a beer-soaked Mötley CrĂŒe T-shirt, and suddenly she’s a young junkie mom prostituting her kid. She can play madam or victim.

On this morning, she wears a black baseball cap backwards, a black V-neck T-shirt, and bell-bottom jeans. She carries a pack of American Spirit cigarettes. She could be anyone. Most of these guys, she says, are “wimps.” Cowards. Sick men who want to take advantage of a girl. She remembers one sting in which she played a trafficker who sets up child sex parties. The target was 38, looked like a real estate agent or something, probably in a fraternity in college. “Looking the guy in the face,” she says, got her in her gut. “These guys look like normal people. And you’re pretending that you just happily and eagerly set up children for them to have sex with.” Nichols kept her cool throughout the interaction, but she adds: “To watch his eyes”—the way they lit up at the mention of an underage kid—“you want to kick him in the balls and beat the hell out of him.”

Jesus.

“Having no plan is the plan! … Plans are for commies and the Danish. Here we do it fast and loose and dumb and wrong, and occasionally we have a man who manufactures pillows come to the White House to show the president encouraging texts. It all works!” – Dave Eggers: Flattening the Truth on Coronavirus

As a newly self-employed person, I’m learning that the weekend is a thing you schedule. My most recent weekend was Tuesday and Wednesday. I’m planning my next one for Friday and Saturday.