The dog and I walked part of Junipero Serra Trail yesterday at the Old Mission Dam.
Greatest Hits
Shakshuka is better than winning the Darwin Award
Tuesday, February 6, 2024
I had a meeting at 11 am at a local coffee shop. It’s been raining hard nonstop since Monday morning. This is not unusual back east, but it is unusual here, and because the drainage infrastructure isn’t built for it, it’s a cause for concern. We’ve had a lot of flooding. Not in my neighborhood—we’re fine—but elsewhere in San Diego, during another round of storms last week, cars were swept away and people had to be rescued.
On the futility of blocking spammers on social media
Thursday, January 25, 2024
People who spend a lot of time posting to social media often spend time going through their follower list and getting rid of the spammers and bots. I’ve never seen the point of that. As long as the bots aren’t interacting with my account, or otherwise getting in my face, I say let ‘em be. I have other things to do with my time. No doubt many or perhaps most of my social media followers are bots.
The secret history of Napoleon Bonaparte: Watching “The Emperor’s New Clothes” (2002) starring Ian Holm
Tuesday, January 16, 2024
We saw “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” an idiosyncratic and charming historical romantic-comedy that starred Ian Holm and came out in 2002. I liked the movie a lot. It exceeded my expectations. I thought it would be more broad and farcical than it actually was. It had a big heart, which I did not expect. The premise: Napoleon, in exile on the island of St. Helena after his defeat at Waterloo, executes a scheme to escape and be replaced on the island by a double, a common seaman who looks exactly like Napoleon, whose name is Eugene Lenormand.
For a long time, I defined myself by my work
Monday, October 23, 2023
That was fine when I was in my 20s, but it became less and less useful. I stayed with it anyway, well past the point of uselessness. I also defined myself more broadly as a writer. But that doesn’t work for me either. I still write—look, I’m writing right now!—but it’s not who I am. I’m an American, Californian, Jewish, white, male, cis-gendered, heterosexual and Julie’s husband. Those things are characteristics.
Wednesday, September 20, 2023 →
I observed with interest the recent meme by young women who were amazed to find the young men in their lives thought about Rome often.
I certainly think about Rome often, though I am not a young man—I am a man in the period of life I like to call “early late middle age.” I never thought thinking about Rome was remarkable.
I’m not sure I should be considered part of the meme because I’m a history buff, and one of the historical periods that interests me is Rome. History is a hobby for me, and I think about history a lot.
On the other hand, maybe that makes me a big part of the meme.
Historian Patrick Wyman has a theory on why people (of every and all genders) are fascinated by Rome today. It’s a good theory and now I think I need to subscribe to his podcast and read his books.
And Ryan Broderick has a theory why this meme is becoming popular now:
Every 5-7 years, a whole bunch of people come of age online at the same time. Their dumb, usually playful freshman-dorm-icebreaker-level content and discourse is then pored over by media outlets and turned into these big news cycles that inevitably sour. But I think it’s just kids making sense of the world around them. It’s fun and sometimes reveals some interesting quirks about society, but it doesn’t always — and, I’d argue, rarely does — matter.
A note to my fellow Jews, particularly Jewish-Americans
Tuesday, September 19, 2023
Do you feel any connection to the place where your grandparents came from? My grandparents came from Eastern Europe. Poland on my father’s side, and Lithuania on my mother’s. But I do not feel like a Polish-American or Lithuanian-American. I’m just plain American. Or a Jewish American. I suspect this is because my grandparents left those countries to get away from anti-Semitism, and found a welcoming home here. I have had the good fortune to be born in one of the few places and times in history where Jews face very little anti-Semitism.
We have seen “Double Indemnity” and I have thoughts
Monday, September 18, 2023
I have avoided nearly all noir movies until now because I like stories to have good guys, and my preconception about noir is that these films entirely feature variations on bad people along with the occasional victim. I have seen “Double Indemnity” now and I see I was wrong. Not about the bad people—although there are one or two good people in this movie, they are not the main characters. However, “Double Indemnity” is not the least bit off-putting.
Idea for the beginning of a horror story: A friend mentioned recently that he works in a six-story building. His job takes him up and down from floor to floor all day. He likes to use the stairs instead of the elevator. To clear his mind, he counts the stairs as he goes.
Here’s the story idea: One day, the count changes.
Stephen King, if you’re reading this—no charge.
📺 We watched the final two episodes of "Succession." I have thoughts. SPOILERS
Saturday, June 3, 2023
I’m seeing some talk that Tom isn’t the winner because he’s just Matsson’s puppet. But Tom is definitely the winner. All he ever cared about was the money, buying luxuries, and the appearance of power and he got all those things. He doesn’t care about the reality of power. Tom will remain perfectly loyal to Matsson—until the moment Tom sees it as advantageous to throw his loyalty to someone else.
The threat of human extinction by AI is only scary for billionaires and centimillionaires
Wednesday, May 31, 2023
I see now that tech executives are once again warning about risk of human extinction caused by AI. I think it’s adorable when the plutes worry about that kind of thing, while the rest of us worry about paying for healthcare, food, and housing. More than 30 million Americans are living below the poverty line. And 40% of Americans were having difficulty paying for normal household expenses.. That’s scary. AI is only scary to the extent that it will be an excuse to put more people out of work.
What novel should I read next? 📚
Monday, May 29, 2023
I woke up this morning and decided to break up with the novel I’m currently reading. This is a new thing for me; I recently decided to start more books and quit reading more books when they’re not working for me. I’m not finding that resolution easy. A part of me feels compelled to finish a book once I start, as if failure to complete was wasteful, like not eating all the food on my plate.
Jealous of other people's excellent videoconferencing backgrounds
Wednesday, May 24, 2023
I have an expanse of blank white wall behind my desk, which always bugs me when I see myself on Zoom calls. This has been a stone in my shoe for three years since videoconferencing became commonplace. I’m jealous when I see other people have excellent backgrounds for their Zoom calls. A friend suggested I just get a couple of guitars and put them behind me. “But I don’t play guitar,” I said.
Mimestream is a Mac Gmail client that’s worth paying for
Monday, May 22, 2023
Mimestream is a native Mac app for accessing Gmail. It gives you Gmail’s advanced capabilities, including Priority Inbox, categories, and labels, in an app that looks and works like a native Mac app. The alternatives to Mimestream are Gmail’s web interface, which I find cluttered, or native Mac mail apps, which look and work like Mac apps should but don’t give you all of Gmail’s capabilities. Mimestream has been in beta and free to use for years.
I used ChatGPT to do background research for an article
Thursday, May 4, 2023
I’ve got an interview with a VP at a major vendor that I followed closely while at Light Reading but haven’t paid much attention to since. It’s for an article I’m doing on that company’s overall strategy. I’m diving into some background to prepare for the interview, and I decided to start my research with ChatGPT. I asked: “What are some questions I can ask COMPANY-NAME about its overall strategy.” (I used the company name, which I’m redacting here.
I wonder whether the 12.9” iPad has a future.
Tuesday, April 18, 2023
Seems like almost anybody thinking about buying one of the big iPads would be better off with a MacBook Air. For most people, the 12.9” iPad is an ungainly platypus, neither mammal nor bird. The only people who seem like they’d want the 12.9” iPad would be graphic artists and other people who really, really need that big display and touchscreen and Pencil support. The 12.9” iPad is too big and heavy to be as portable as the smaller iPads.
Ever since I was a little kid, I have thought men’s suits from the 1930s-50s looked great.
Tuesday, April 18, 2023
When I was a little kid, I watched old black-and-white reruns of Superman, Abbott & Costello, and particularly John Astin in The Addams Family, and thought to myself, damn, those guys looked sharp. Particularly the double-breasted suits. Well, Lou Costello didn’t look sharp. But Bud Abbot? Sure. A good suit made even Abbott look good. That feeling continues to this day. We’ve been watching a few 1930s-50s movies, including the first couple of Thin Man movies (1930s), “My Man Godfrey” (1936), and just this weekend, “Executive Suite” (1954).
We watched “Murder Mystery,” a 2019 comedy-mystery starring Adam Sandler and Jennifer Aniston as married couple Nick and Audrey Spitz, a New York cop, and a hairdresser. On a flight to Europe for a bus-tour vacation, she strikes up a friendship with a dapper gentleman on the plane. The dapper gentleman spontaneously invites the New Yorkers to join him for a celebration on his billionaire uncle’s yacht. On the yacht, someone is murdered, and the Spitzes are the prime suspects.
It is an oddly old-fashioned movie. The gags all depend on the premise that the Spitzes are amiable lower-class shmos in a world of elegant toffs. We’re at an Agatha Christie murder mystery on a yacht, but instead of Hercule Poirot, our heroes are Oscar Madison and Laverne from Laverne & Shirley. Even the names Nick and Audrey Spitz seem to echo Nick and Nora Charles. I particularly liked the wardrobes—Sandler in baggy cargo shorts surrounded by men and women in tailored evening wear, Aniston in her outfits from Target (not Marshalls—she’s very clear on that point!).
The movie clocks in at 97 minutes, the ideal length for a movie, and ends in a lovely car chase through European streets.
You will like this movie very much if this sounds like the kind of movie you’d like. It is, and we did. 🎥
A bit of family history, from my father’s service in Word War II
Tuesday, April 4, 2023
My father received these humorous fake orders when he was discharged from the army in 1945, the end of the war. I found this document while doing some decluttering in my home office yesterday. The paper is brown with age and fragile to the touch. It’s apparently typed and mimeographed. The document is written in the style of a military memo, instructing the men how to behave when they get back home to civilian life.
I have friends who used to go see movies at random. They caught movies the first days the movies were released before they saw trailers or ads or reviews. They would go to a theater, buy a ticket, and see whatever was playing. One of these friends based decisions on movie posters, and solely the posters. Another would drive to the multiplex and see the next movie that was playing after he got out of the car.
Having just seen “John Wick” and “Everything Everywhere All At Once,” I get the appeal of that system. The first half hour of both of those movies are very different from what comes later, and it would have been a delightful surprise to see all that spool out without expectations.
The first half hour of “Everything Everywhere” looks like an arty family drama about a middle-aged woman who’s estranged from her daughter and husband and struggling to save the family business. No science fiction or fantastic elements at all.
In the first half hour or so of “John Wick,” you don’t know he’s a super-hitman. You first get an idea when John Leguizamo recognizes the car. We’ve already seen those Russian young men are extremely dangerous, but John Leguizamo is more afraid of John Wick than of the Russians. We don’t discover John Wick’s full story until Viggo confronts his son.
Back to “Everything Everywhere:” A great thing about that movie is that it really is primarily an arty family drama about a middle-aged woman who’s estranged from her daughter and husband and who is struggling to save the family business. The science fiction serves that story. Saving the multiple universes is the B-plot. 🎥
Minnie and I saw this display at a house we walked past yesterday.
I tried Grammarly yesterday and I like it a lot
Friday, March 24, 2023
I published two posts here yesterday and noticed copyediting errors after publication. This troubled me partly because I had a whitepaper due later that day, and I was concerned about sloppy mistakes in paying copy. So I decided, “I’ve heard good things about Grammarly. I’ll give that a try.” Holy cow! It’s fantastic! Also, humbling. Grammarly flagged 95 suggestions in a 2,200-word whitepaper. It suggested replacing the first three words of the whitepaper with a single word.
Logseq vs. Obsidian: First impressions
Thursday, March 23, 2023
I played with Logseq a bit as an alternative to Obsidian, or complement for it. Logseq seems like a simplified version of Obsidian that does less. For many people that will be a plus. Fewer options equals fewer things to fiddle with and potentially break. Logseq is an extreme outliner. It wants everything you do to be an outline. Obsidian supports outlining, but Logseq is more opinionated and more powerful as an outliner.
I just pledged $53 to the Kickstarter for Cory Doctorow’s upcoming novel, “Red Team Blues.” In pledging, I’m supporting the excellent work Cory (who is on Mastodon as @pluralistic@mamot.fr) does on his blog and podcast, which are free.
The $53 pledge gets me a nice hardcover, which I might donate to the local library, because I’m an ebook guy. Backers at that level also get an audiobook, and an ebook too. The audiobook and ebook are DRM-free, which will surprise nobody who follows Cory.
A pledge of $1,000 or more lets you name a character in the sequel, and $3,000 or more gets you—check this out!—a deluxe hardcover with a secret compartment.
More info from Cory: Kickstarting the Red Team Blues audiobook, which Amazon won’t sell
I’ve read an advance copy of the novel. It’s terrific. Very suspenseful!
What is a “digital garden?”
Tuesday, September 8, 2020
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,
I don’t use ad-blockers because I hate ads
Monday, May 25, 2020
I’m a journalist. I’m fine with ads. They pay my income. I don’t use ad-blockers to protect my privacy. When it comes to the Internet, I’m just a typical shmo — I complain about privacy invasion but I do very little to protect my privacy. I use ad-blockers because ad-tech makes the web unusable. Ads and pop-ups obscure the articles I’m trying to read. Which is nuts; it’s like websites are inviting hackers to come in and break their own sites.
Help Garry Armacost, a Vietnam vet, fight cancer and VA bureaucracy
Monday, May 11, 2020
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.
Passover was a really big deal when I was a kid
Sunday, April 12, 2020
We had the second seder at our house, with upwards of 20 aunts, uncles and cousins swarming over the place. Our cousins Janet and Barry even brought their dog; Mom couldn’t stand dogs but she made an exception for Dusty. Dusty is still one of my alltime favorite dogs, although I believe Janet and Barry prefer Custer, their next dog. And now that I think of it, Custer is a weird name for a dog.
I've been drinking a meal replacement shake called Huel for breakfast for months
Thursday, April 9, 2020
For several months, my daily breakfast has been about a pint of a thick “nutritionally complete” liquid, called Huel. Huel is a powder you mix with water to make a milky liquid, like a thin milkshake. You can add more water to make it thinner, or less to make it thicker. You can use vegetable milk, or mix it with fruit or peanut butter for added flavor. The powder itself can be unflavored, or vanilla, chocolate or berry flavored.
Automating micro.blog categories using emoji. Nerdy fun!
Thursday, April 9, 2020
Listening to the Monday microcast with @macgenie and @manton yesterday, I learned that you can use filters on micro.blog to search for text in a post you write, and automatically include that post in a category. So you can automate micro.blog to search for any post containing the word “beer,” or the beer emoji 🍺, and put that in a “beer” category. Instructions are here. Additionally, micro.blog uses emoji in lieu of hashtags, which I like.