While walking, the dog and I saw these houses with the holiday spirit, and this car 🦮📷
Eugene from Wednesday is my role model. I’m going to wear a retainer and keep bees.
A new Indiana Jones movie, starring 80-year-old Harrison Ford? Sure, why not?
Sunday, December 4, 2022
Here’s the trailer. I’ve seen criticism of the trailer and of all the movies after “Raiders.” And much of that criticism is valid. But the best reaction to the trailer was from Jason Kottke: “Ok fine I will watch one more Indy movie.” I have enjoyed every Raiders movie, even “Temple of Doom” and “Crystal Skull.” I have no doubt we will watch this one and enjoy it. The parts I enjoyed in “Temple of Doom” were the little kid and the girlfriend, who screamed very fetchingly.
Proud Boy terrorists threaten Columbus, Ohio, drag queen story hour, school asks for protection, police nope out.. On MetaFilter.
Far more children have been molested by youth pastors than by drag queens, as Dan Savage points out.
MetaFilter: “Television news is about consistency and companionship."
jwz: Like Zoinks
Seth Godin: Confidence doesn’t help win the lottery. There are lots of lotteries in our lives. Always have a Plan B.
One of the best blogs on the Internet. is back. I’m glad to see Jason Kottke has returned to blogging. But I’m sorry to learn he’s experiencing chronic pain. That’s hard.
Karl Bode at Techdirt:
… policymakers freaking out about the Chinese potentially getting access to TikTok user data are the exact same people who’ve fought tooth and nail against the U.S. having even a baseline privacy law for the Internet era. These are the exact same folks that created a data broker privacy hellscape completely free of accountability, and advocated for the dismantling of most, if not all, regulatory oversight of the sector. The result: just an endless parade of scandals, hacks, and breaches.
Now those exact same folks are breathlessly concerned when just one of countless bad actors (China) abuse a zero-accountability privacy hellscape they themselves helped to create.
Dave Pell is on a roll on NextDraft today:
”At 8:10 p.m., more than nine hours after his family reported him missing, a passing tanker spotted the man near the mouth of the Mississippi River and alerted the Coast Guard." NYT (Gift Article): A Man Fell From a Cruise Ship. And Survived. “Mr. Grimes, whose family described him as an exceptional swimmer, had treaded in 65- to 70-degree water for hours, withstanding rain, 20-knot winds and three- to five-foot waves in the Gulf of Mexico, where bull sharks and blacktip sharks are common.” (That actually sounds better than how I imagine cruises.)
Also:
”To prepare for the depths of winter when food is scarce, many animals slow down, sleep through the cold or migrate to warmer locales. Not the common shrew. To survive the colder months, the animal eats away at its own brain, reducing the organ by as much as a fourth, only to regrow much of brain matter in the spring." This is not unlike my experience being on and then getting off Twitter.
Elon Musk gets mail. “Akiva Cohen, an attorney representing 22 laid-off Twitter employees, sent a letter to Twitter and Elon Musk (shared, of course, on Twitter): ‘If basic human decency and honor isn’t enough to make you want to keep your word, maybe this will…. ‘” By John Gruber on Daring Fireball.
Elon is getting to the “… and find out” bit.
“Robert Moses Is A Racist Whatever.”
Jason Kottke blogs about an interview with Robert Caro, author of “The Power Broker,” a definitive biography of urban planner Robert Moses.
Moses’ racist vision for New York transformed the city, literally paving over Black neighborhoods with highways.
Moses came along with his incredible vision, and vision not in a good sense. It’s like how he built the bridges too low.
I remember his aide, Sid Shapiro, who I spent a lot of time getting to talk to me, he finally talked to me. And he had this quote that I’ve never forgotten. He said Moses didn’t want poor people, particularly poor people of color, to use Jones Beach, so they had legislation passed forbidding the use of buses on parkways.
Then he had this quote, and I can still hear him saying it to me. “Legislation can always be changed. It’s very hard to tear down a bridge once it’s up.” So he built 180 or 170 bridges too low for buses.
…
Robert Moses had always displayed a genius for adorning his creations with little details that made them fit in with their setting, that made the people who used them feel at home in them. There was a little detail on the playhouse-comfort station in the Harlem section of Riverside Park that is found nowhere else in the park. The wrought-iron trellises of the park’s other playhouses and comfort stations are decorated with designs like curling waves.
The wrought-iron trellises of the Harlem playhouse-comfort station are decorated with monkeys.
One detail I remember from stories about Moses: When he died in 1981, nobody attended his funeral. Even white people hated him.
What weird food habits did you have in your family when you were a kid? If you’re a parent, how would your kids answer that question?
Friday, December 2, 2022
I’m remembering that one summer when I went to day camp where the kids brought their lunches. My mom made a big batch of hamburgers on Sunday, and froze them, and so I had a desiccated frozen hamburger for lunch every weekday. On good days the hamburgers were fully thawed. My mom was great, and she was a wonderful mother, but she was not a good cook most of the time.
Alexandra Petri: “Free speech is when you pay me money for goods or services. That’s free speech. When you do not give me money, that is censorship."
Disney’s new neural network can change an actor’s age with ease. The “production ready” neural net makes actors younger or older for film or TV. By Benj Edwards at Ars Technica
This made me happy this morning
Thursday, December 1, 2022
This morning while walking the dog I saw one of the neighbor men in front of his house, getting ready to take his three-year-old daughter to school. I shouted, “Good morning,” as we do, and he smiled a little and nodded back, distracted. I saw the little girl. I shouted, “Good morning!” to her. She struck a pose, facing me, standing up straight, with her arms stretched out at her sides and her head held high.
How can the Democrats claim to be pro-union and pro-labor and also do this?
Thursday, December 1, 2022
The bill that the House passed forcing railway workers back to work requires the workers to take a deal they voted to reject before, giving them only one sick day a year. US House Passes Bill Forcing Railway Workers Not to Strike Ian Welsh: People’s backs are to the wall. Since about 1980, the predominant policy in the US has been to immiserate workers, especially wage workers. This was possible because the New Deal and post-war eras had made workers well enough off that they had some surplus which could then be stolen from them.
Wednesday, November 30, 2022 →
I have become fastidious about washing my hands, maybe even OCD, but I have also decided the dog and cats are sanitary, and I am still entirely clean if I have been petting the animals and letting the dog lick my hands and face.
That’s how it works. It’s just science.