Look, we all have the right to protest, but that doesn’t mean you can just rush in and destroy any business without gathering a group of clandestine investors to purchase it at a severely reduced price and slowly bleed it to death…. It’s disgusting to put workers at risk by looting. You do it by chipping away at their health benefits and eventually laying them off.
www.theonion.com/protestor…
Gali Beeri is 37 and works as an executive assistant. Joshua Boliver is 42 and creates visual effects for movies. They both live in New York City and met at a dance class in March, as the city was preparing to lock down. At the time, they made the unlikely decision to quarantine together — after their first date.
www.npr.org/sections/…
What a lovely story.
US anti-vaxxers aim to spread fear over future coronavirus vaccine. A dangerously large numbers of Americans are already reluctant to take an anti-covid vaccine. www.theguardian.com/world/202…
David Pell on NextDraft:
Remember, this is a guy who ran on Birtherism and walls, and has led with Muslim bans, kids in cages, very fine people on both sides, shithole countries, and political enemies described as human scum. When the looting starts, the shooting starts is the brand he ran on and won on in 2016.
nextdraft.com/archives/…
I don’t have any useful judgment to share for or against the rioters in Minneapolis. I understand why they are doing it. George Floyd seems to be only the spark that ignited the fire.
I’ve seen discussion that you needed both Martin Luther King AND race riots to achieve the gains of the 60s. King said, look, black people just want equality. They want to live in the suburbs and mow the lawn and have barbecues on weekends and complain about work and how lousy the home team is playing and bring cookies to PTA meetings and do all those other things white people do.
And the riots said: You can have that, America … or you can have this.
On May 26, 1986, millions of Americans across America joined hands for 15 minutes to form a line stretching from the East Coast to the West Coast because reasons.
On the This Day in Esoteric Political History podcast: radiopublic.com/this-day-…
I was a daily newspaper reporter and covered the event. I remember I joined up with a group that piled into a school bus and drove a couple of hours to the shore, where the designated line-up point was.
📚I found myself thinking about the novel “A Canticle for Leibowitz,” by Walter M. Miller Jr., occasionally for the last week or two. It’s always been one of my favorites. It tells the story about a Roman Catholic monastery that work to preserve knowledge for a thousand years after a 20th Century nuclear war. A major theme is the tension between faith and science.
Two days ago I saw a tweet praising my appearance on the Hugos There podcast, where I talked about the novel, and about Miller, with host Seth Heasley.
I saw these books in the neighborhood Little Free Library. I read and enjoyed them in the 80s when they came out, and haven’t thought of them since.
Piers Anthony is hugely prolific and I read a lot of his work. He fell off my radar in the late 80s but he still seems to be going strong.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piers_Anthony_bibliography
I spent some time yesterday fooling around with Agenda, an app for taking time-sensitive notes, such as notes on meetings or notes on projects with deadlines or timelines.
agenda.com
In addition to organizing notes by date, you can group notes together into projects and categories, and add tags to organize them further. It looks like a great app, but I do not have a place for it.
Likewise, I took another look at Ulysses, which I used for years.
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.
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?
