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Remember I said I wasn’t going to post links here? Forget it. I like posting links here. You can still follow me on all those other social media places if that’s your thing.

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Vicki Greene is the current owner of Flossie, age 28, the world’s oldest living cat. “I think she’s lived so long primarily due to luck, and because she was loved by her previous owners.” Aww.

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“You’ve got me? Who’s got you?!” Rewatching Christopher Reeve’s “Superman”

The 1978 “Superman,” starring Christopher Reeve, launched the superhero film genre as it exists today. We rewatched it recently, enjoyed it, and I recommend it. However, the movie takes a painfully long time to get going. ”Superman” starts with pages turning on the 1938 Action Comics issue that launched the Superman character, narrated by a child’s voice-over. We did not remember this from seeing the movie previously. We wondered whether we had accidentally rented the wrong version of “Superman.

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I’ve decided to take a break posting links here. By nature, they’re ephemeral. And they’re not by me. Also, many of the links I post are political, which sets the wrong tone for my blog.

If you like the links, you can find me on other social media:

Facebook.com (I don’t do politics there much)
Tumblr
Mastodon
Threads
Bluesky (invitation only—let me know if you need an invitation)
Newsletter

I post a lot of memes, vintage photos and other found media on those other platforms. You may enjoy them.

I also sometimes post about business matters on LinkedIn.

At some point in the future, I may change my mind about posting links here. I frequently try new things on blogging and social media.

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I was just reminded of New Year’s 2000. I was an editor on a tech newspaper. We searched desperately for someone—anyone!—that got bit by the Y2K bug.

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For years, our cat Lulu has pestered Julie at night and left me alone. I was OK with this situation. I did not feel neglected.

But recently, Lulu decided that my side of the bed makes an excellent staging area for pestering Julie.

Note the timestamp on this post.

I’m going to see if Lulu will let me get a little more sleep now.

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Writing a datasheet for a networking product, I typoed “brogrammable” instead of “programmable” and now I’m visualizing a networking product that is programmable but only by dudes who smell like Axe body spray.

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I walk Minnie every day for an hour and a half. We go 3.2 miles in that time. If we went at her pace, we would take the same amount of time to go 10 feet and every millimeter of that distance would be thoroughly sniffed.

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I was going to get a tattoo on my 50th birthday, but I would’ve needed to decide what pattern to get, decide what part of my body to put it on, and research and find a good tattoo artist and that seemed like an awful lot of work.

An alternative would’ve been to join the Navy, get drunk, and get a tattoo in Manila done by a drunken tattoo artist with a dirty needle that would give me hepatitis. That is still an option.

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The cashier asked me how I was doing and I said I’m good how are you and he said I’m good how are you and I said I’m good how are you and that was almost a Groundhog Day type situation.

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“Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves” is “Guardians of the Galaxy” meets “The Princess Bride.” It stars Chris Pine, Michelle Rodriguez, and Hugh Grant. Fun.

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Of all the great mysteries of the universe, I would like to know just one thing: When I’m walking the dog, how does she decide where the perfect spot to pee is?

It seems to be a rigorous selection process.

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Thinking about a time I was sitting with a small group of people, and one of the women in that group invited us to a party at her house and said we would be free to use her backyard pool.

She added: “Swimsuits. Are. Not. Optional.”

And I thought, “But I do not want to go swimming.”

And that was when I realized that I had become a boring person.

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My 15 minutes of badass literary scholarship

In another online community, somebody asked for the title and author of a story about humans encountering another race that seemes to live a simple agrarian life. When asked how they generate electricity, or other questions about advanced technology, the agrarian person responds that they don’t know. Later, it becomes clear this other race is far advanced of humans, with great psychic powers. Asking them about electricity and such is like asking us about the best kind of wood to rub together to start a fire—something our distant ancestors knew but almost nobody today does.

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I remember when I finally laid my hands on a reproduction of a 1939 Astounding Stories magazine. I had read so many essays by Isaac Asimov and others that talked about how the 1939-45 era of Astounding was the Golden Age of science fiction. At last! I thought. I have found a precious document!

And I opened the magazine, and my eye fell on the face of a shocked-looking, open-mouthed boy with the headline, “Did you say JOCK ITCH?!”

Also: Ads for anthropological studies of Polynesian sexual rituals. I suspect those studies did not appear in proper peer-reviewed scientific journals.

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I’m beginning to think that carrying a distraction machine in my pocket might not be a great idea.

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‘Screams Without Words’: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7: A Times investigation uncovered new details showing a pattern of rape, mutilation and extreme brutality against women in the attacks on Israel.

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Eddie Murphy is making a fourth Beverly Hills Cop movie, with Judge Reinhold and John Ashton. Looks good! Here’s the trailer.

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On a private community, someone said they’ve just started watching “Babylon 5” on Season 2, and they want to know whether the show stays good.

I replied:

My memory of B5 is that the first season was wooden but there was something about it that made me stay with it. Seasons two through four were excellent.

As for the fifth season: As I recall, the series was initially supposed to go five seasons, but the showrunner, J. Michael Straczynski, got the word that the show would be canceled after four seasons. So he rushed Season 5 to an ending a half-season early.

Then JMS was told whoops, never mind, you get another half-season.

And that’s the way it looked to me onscreen—the first half of the first season was rushed and talky, as JMS was telling viewers information he would have shown if he had the proper amount of time.

Then the second half was just padding and bloviation. A main storyline involved a beautiful woman telepath falling in love with a male cult leader. He had Fabio hair. It just didn’t work for me.

For me, a lot of the fun of Babylon 5 was going on the Lurker’s Guide to Babylon 5 website the morning after each episode aired to see what little easter eggs and plot tricks were hidden in each episode. The website is still online, so somebody just watching the show can have the same fun.

We started a rewatch not long ago, but it didn’t work for either of us. Maybe if we’d started with the second season we would have liked it more?

A spinoff series, “Crusade,” had Gary Cole, which is a plus in any TV show or movie. He played a heroic starship captain. It would have been EVEN BETTER if he’d done the whole thing as Lundberg, his character from “Office Space,” with the contrasting-collar shirt, suspenders, coffee cup, glasses and “Yeah, I’m going to need you to go ahead and… “

I did not love the series but I liked the mix of epic fantasy and space opera. Which I guess is a common trope but not one I’ve encountered before or since.

I do remember one gag I quite liked from that series: a character is a member of the secret Thieves Guild, and this becomes important to the story. Gary Cole confronts her and demands to know why she never told him this. And she rolls her eyes and says, “What’s the point of being a member of secret society if you go around TELLING people about it?” As I recall, the character who was a member of the thieves guild wore a sexy catsuit but her manner was pure Gen X slacker, like Daria Morgendorffer in spaaaaaaace.

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‘The Gilded Age’ Shows the Virtues of Inauthenticity: John McWhorter discusses how the characters in “The Gilded Age” would have really sounded and why it’s better that they talk like modern, 21st-century people.