My reaction immediately before watching “Hamilton:” “Nearly three hours? You’ve got to be kidding me!”
After one hour: “I sort of like it.”
After watching the whole thing: “I liked it, but did not love it.”
This afternoon I listened to the soundtrack. I guess I love it.
The 1776 drinking game: Take a drink — of rum — every time John Adams says “Good God!” or “Incredible!”
Saturday, July 4, 2020
A friend asked her Facebook friends what was the first movie that they remembered seeing in a theater. I dug through the IMDB to find some of the earliest movies I remember seeing in theaters and enjoying. They include Doctor Doolittle, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, the Love Bug and the Jungle Book. They came out in 1967-68. Also at about that time I remember a movie with Sammy Davis Jr. — I probably had no idea who he was when I first saw the movie, but I recognized him later, in memory.
I like that the instructions for Hot Pockets say I should “prep” it first. Like sticking a thing in a cardboard sleeve makes me a chef.
Minnie supervises my second Covid haircut, by Julie, who did an excellent job. 📷
I’ve had to teach myself how to read books again. When I was a kid and into my 20s I read books voraciously, but beginning in my 40s I transitioned to a diet of articles and status updates consumed on the Internet.
Listening to a recent Ezra Klein podcast yesterday, he talked about the need to spend an hour or more of uninterrupted reading – get into a deep reading state, to truly absorb information and make connections. I suppose I did that yesterday, got in a good hour of reading. But I switched between two books — a history and a science fiction novel. Does that count?
For most of my life, I’ve followed Theodore Roosevelt’s reading style. He read voraciously and widely, and just kept books with him at all times and read when he could, even if it was just for a minute. People who worked with him at the White House said that if he even had a minute or two between meetings in the Oval Office, he’d pull out a book and read for whatever seconds or minutes he had available.
When I was a kid, I read sitting on the couch when my family was around me watching TV. I can’t do that anymore. If the TV is on, it pulls me in.
Ghislaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein’s longtime associate, has been charged with enticement of minors.
This could get interesting. It seems likely she knows everything Epstein knew about the proclivities of powerful men.
“Trump’s gaffe seems all the more ironic given that in other parts of the interview, he talks about how he believes protestors taking down statues don’t understand the history behind the statues.”
I wish Trump put as much energy into protecting live Americans as he does for dead Confederates and Vladimir Putin.
The Decline of the American World
Other countries are used to loathing America, admiring America, and fearing America (sometimes all at once). But pitying America? That one is new.
Tom McTague looks at the US from Britain, with a view that’s harsh, but ultimately loving and optimistic.
That’s how I feel about the US these days as well.
As I’ve mentioned here before, I’ve been reading ancient history recently, and that tells me the US is still a very young country. I believe our best days are ahead of us. But we’re in a dark time now – maybe the darkest since the Civil War – and the worst may still be to come.
A volcanic eruption in the Aleutians triggered climate change that accelerated the fall of the Roman Republic.
The Roman Republic Was Teetering. Then a Volcano Erupted 6,000 Miles Away.
Doomscrolling Is Slowly Eroding Your Mental Health
Checking your phone for an extra two hours every night won’t stop the apocalypse.
Kellogg’s Mashups Cereal Combines Frosted Flakes and Froot Loops
Not enough sugar and artificial coloring.
Monday, June 29, 2020
Christopher Bonanos at New York Magazine: He wrote, too. Starting in our first issues, Glaser and his friend Jerome Snyder, the design director of Sports Illustrated, created “The Underground Gourmet,” becoming very possibly the world’s first columnists covering cheap ethnic restaurants in a sophisticated way. That sounds like no big deal now, but it was a minor revolution in 1968. As Glaser himself would explain when asked, nobody back then bothered to cover restaurants outside the white-tablecloth world, because they didn’t advertise.
Monday, June 29, 2020
Caroline Randall Williams says that as a light-skinned Black woman, her body is a monument to the Confederate legacy. I am a black, Southern woman, and of my immediate white male ancestors, all of them were rapists. My very existence is a relic of slavery and Jim Crow. According to the rule of hypodescent (the social and legal practice of assigning a genetically mixed-race person to the race with less social power) I am the daughter of two black people, the granddaughter of four black people, the great-granddaughter of eight black people.
Remastered silent movies from the 1890s look breathtakingly real and contemporary, like the people could just walk out of the frame. youtu.be/jN2E3s6Pk…
Matt Loughrey uses machine learning to add additional frames to smooth the motion. The films include Broadway in New York, in 1896, and “Buffalo” Bill Cody having a conversation with an Oglala Lakota leader.
Monday, June 29, 2020
June 21, 2019 - Yesterday was busy even by the standards of this trip. Up at 6 and out at 6:30 to the main tent for breakfast and coffee. The coffee is not bad here; it’s not great, but drinkable black. I chatted with Jordanna, an Asian woman with a posh English accent. I asked where she is from; she said London. If she had said Singapore, I would not have been surprised – Crazy Rich Asians.
Monday, June 29, 2020
Last night I woke up in the middle of the night unable to sleep – which I’m doing now at least two or three times a week, it’s just normal now – and I thought did Brexit happen? I remember it was a really big deal for a couple of years, and then it was imminent and then it was going to be days away and then … nothing. Did it happen?