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If you subscribe to this blog as a newsletter, you received two updates Sunday evening and nothing Saturday or Sunday morning. Or something like that; reading a calendar is hard. What happened is that the newsletters got stuck in the pipes and the support team at Micro.blog had to go down there with chainsaws and dynamite and get them unstuck. And then I had to give the mechanism a kick to get it started again. Metaphorically speaking. Anyway, newsletter production should continue as normal.

My Bluesky timeline is all politics, all the time. Is that a representative picture of Bluesky?

I have reached the ear-embiggening stage of the male aging process.

I haven’t accomplished enough to have imposter syndrome.

Overheard: “Every marriage has one person who reports whenever a celebrity dies and one person who says, ‘Oh.'” via

Here’s something I saw one day in 2012, at a neighbor’s house a few doors down from ours — a pet pot-bellied pig.

I ran into the woman who owns the pig this morning — I think it was the first time we’ve seen each other in all the intervening years — and she seems to be doing fine. She did not have the pig with her but she says the pig is fine too.

Overheard: “the white supremacists and misogynists who froth at the mouth about replacement theory don’t make a good case for why they shouldn’t be replaced”

Here’s my view when walking the dog past Lake Murray one morning late last month.

I’ve been relatively quiet on political issues lately, but don’t mistake that for apathy. Trump is a vile toad and he and his gang of thieves, pedophiles and morons are the greatest threat to the United States since the Revolution.

But I don’t feel like my ranting about it online does any good. So I don’t do it much anymore.

However, sometimes I feel the need to speak out, even though I know speaking out doesn’t accomplish much.

Now is one of those times.

Donald Trump is a rapist who is now using police authority to bully his 82-year-old victim.

Heather Cox Richardson: “Yesterday, federal agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement pepper-sprayed Senator Andy Kim (D-NJ) along with demonstrators outside Delaney Hall, a 1,000-bed detention center in Newark, New Jersey.” Inmates at Delaney Hall have complied with US laws, but they have been denied due justice, and are kept in filth; denied medical care, including to the elderly and medically vulnerable; and denied due process.

“Kim posted on social media that the detainees had accurately represented conditions there. He said he found an eighteen-year-old high school student crying and saying she just wanted to graduate; a pregnant woman without full OBGYN care; a woman who had suffered a miscarriage and had no medical care; a mother who was largely separated from her four-month-old baby, the husband of an American citizen wife and child; spoiled food; a court docket showing one judge with 74 cases to handle in one day, allowing the judge about five minutes per case; a man from South America being threatened with deportation to Congo, where there is an active Ebola outbreak; and so on.

“Kim concluded: ‘Spending tens of billions of dollars from American families to perpetrate cruelty against people who aren’t violent criminals or felons is a waste of money and wrong…. Our government should focus on helping Americans afford their lives, not lock people up in for-profit detention centers where corporations like GeoGroup and CoreCivic make billions. No profiting off of human misery.'”

Here’s something I saw while walking the dog yesterday: I’ve posted photos of this fairy village occasionally over the years, but I like to check on its progress now and then.

It’s growing. The Fairy Planning and Zoning Department is hard at work.

Here’s something I saw while walking with Julie a few weeks ago: This car, parked just around the corner from our house.

The bumper sticker on the right reads in full: “When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace.”

My keen deductive powers tell me that the owner of this car is a practitioner of sapphic love.

We watched “Logan” last night, a movie in which an estranged father and daughter go on a road trip and learn they have much in common, including adamantium claws and anger management issues. Wholesome family fun. Watch it with your Dad on Father’s Day.

“When they divide up the pie in Washington, do you ever wonder who gets the biggest slice?” This 1971 anti-Vietnam ad still hits hard. Via

There are plenty of reasons to hate the 1963 John Wayne romcom "McLintock." But instead I liked it.

“McLintock” is a retelling of “Taming of the Shrew” in the Arizona Territory in 1895, starring Wayne and Maureen O’Hara in a celebration of sexism, ethnic stereotypes, domestic violence and right-wing politics. And yet I enjoyed the movie for its performances of Wayne, O’Hara and an ensemble of talented comedic character actors, as well as the look of the film and its joyful energy.

“McLintock” features Yvonne DeCarlo, aka Lily Munster; Stefanie Powers, before she had red hair and did “Hart to Hart;” Edgar Buchanan as the town drunk; Jerry Van Dyke; Patrick Wayne and Strother Martin, who later became famous for saying “What we’ve got here is failure to communicate.”

I don’t plan to ever watch this again but it was enjoyable for one go-round.

"Clue" review: Sitthroughable

We watched Clue, a 1985 mystery-comedy based on a board game in which a half-dozen people are summoned to a creepy Gothic mansion. Murder happens. More than one. The movie has three endings — the idea when it was released was that people would go to theaters three times to see each of the three endings. The movie bombed at the box office but it became a cult classic at home where people could see all three endings back-to-back.

Tim Curry chews the scenery as only Tim Curry can; Lesley Ann Warren is gorgeous and sexy and tough; Madeline Kahn is wasted except for one brief monologue where she is allowed to be maximally weird; Martin Mull, Eileen Brennan, Howard Hesseman and Christopher Lloyd are themselves, which are fine things to be; Michael McKean is maybe homophobic idk; and Colleen Camp is a French maid in a dress that is a marvel of engineering.

People love this movie. I guess I liked it. It was sitthroughable (AFAIK that word was coined by Newsday’s movie reviewer in the 1970s.)

Half-assed Internet research:

  • Carrie Fisher was originally supposed to play Miss Scarlet, but she went to rehab for drug addiction four days before filming started. Fisher wanted to appear in the film anyway on work-release, but the movie’s production insurance company vetoed her and Lesley Ann Warren was cast as a last-minute replacement.
  • Between takes, some of the actors played pool in the billiards-room set. But not Lesley Ann Warren, who was stuffed into a tight corset and used her break times to lean on things.
  • The secret passages in the movie lead between the same rooms as in the board game.
  • The singing telegram girl was played by Jane Wiedlin, rhythm guitarist for the Go-Gos.
  • Lee Ving, who played Mr. Boddy, is (or was) frontman for the punk band Fear.

Meanwhile, on Letterboxd

“My dad got in so much trouble for showing me this as a kid because I started saying ‘I’m gonna go home and sleep with my wife’ at school.”

“colleen camp doing that french accent is me after one duolingo lesson” 🍿

Gentleman unintentionally crashes a beach fashion show and usurps the spot of lead model. “I wouldn’t have had double dessert the night before — or the lunch before that — if I was going to be baring my belly to the world,” he said.

The lead photo on this article isn’t the show-crasher — it’s a model. Bad choice, NYTimes.

The Democrats finally released the 2024 election autopsy

Party chair Ken Martin saying the report is rubbish and he only released it to shut people up. That’s basically the upshot of this write-upby Alex Thompson and Holly Otterbein on Axios.

The report doesn’t actually conclude what went wrong for the Democrats, and does not interview Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Tim Walz and many of their top aides.

Meanwhile, the Republican Party has $124 million cash on hand and the DNC has negative $3 million with $17 million in debt.

Ironically, the election autopsy report, by its very incompetency, demonstrates how the Democrats lost the 2024 election — the DNC is a bunch of buffoons who couldn’t even manage to win an election against the soft-handed depo-baby Nazis that constitute the national GOP, and the Democrats also proved incompetent to produce a report about their failure.

Here’s something I saw while walking the dog: These stickers on the back window of a minivan at the park. The operator of this vehicle was nowhere in the vicinity but using my keen deductive powers, I deduce they are a woman, attorney, Mexican-American and a Pedro Pascal fan.

Finished reading: The Winds of Gath by E.C. Tubb 📚1967 space opera about an interstellar drifter searching for the lost world he was born on, a mythical planet called “Earth.” A light, easy read with clever gimmicks. I guess I’ll read the next book in the series one day.

The hero’s full name is Earl Dumarest, which is a funny name for a two-fisted noir space opera adventurer.

Here’s something I saw while walking the dog one afternoon in February 2019.

I don’t use dictation on my desktop. I have spent a lot of time typing every day for my entire adult life and much of my teens. I am as comfortable typing as I am speaking — maybe more comfortable.

But that’s only when I have a full-size keyboard and a flat surface to put it on. On my iPhone, I dictate, rather than type, half the time or more. I use Siri for that; I haven’t tried any other voice-to-text apps.

In the 1970s, writer John Varley wrote a series of science fiction stories where the characters communicate with their wearable computers using “subvocalization” — whispering inaudibly. Sensors at the throat detect throat and mouth movements and convert that to speech for the computer to read. That still seems workable, and would solve the problem of making offices sound like call-centers.

“I was on a call with investors who asked why there are so many protests about data centers. I told them something they didn’t want to hear. The public looks at what hyperscalers are doing and sees this: tech gets rich; you pay more for water and electricity; your kids may not have jobs. And you’re surprised that 85% of the public doesn’t like that deal? They’re not wrong.”

My colleague Steve Saunders interviews Blair Levin, policy analyst with New Street Research and chief architect of the 2010 National Broadband Plan on AI, infrastructure and why the U.S. is falling behind.

Truth, Consequences, Climate, and Demand Destruction — The Iran war is reducing demand for fossil fuels and driving the world toward renewables for everybody but the US, writes Rebecca Solnit. “This is how the attack by one petro-state (ours) on another (Iran’s) may be turning out to be very bad for petroleum, because the only thing history loves more than a surprise party is irony.” (Via Cory)

My old friend Dr. Marc Gorelick, who is a respected elder statesman of pediatric medicine, writes about the skewed incentives in medical care that make a hair transplant more valuable than resuscitating a newborn infant.

According to the metrics used by the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services and the American Medical Association, the hair transplant is 31-84% more valuable than resuscitating a newborn.

Marc mentions circumcision without making any jokes about it, which shows greater willpower than I’m capable of, and which explains why he is a respected elder statesman of pediatric medicine and I type for a living.

Nathan Lane on Fresh Air: “Nathan Lane says Broadway actors sometimes joke that their job is to keep 1,600 audience members from coughing.” He’s appearing on Broadway as Willy Loman in “Death of a Salesman.”

Why are the Artemis II photos on Flickr? Anil Dash: “The beautiful thing about communities and platforms like Flickr is that they remind us that not everything on the internet has to be ephemeral, not everything on the web has to be hyper-commercial. Sometimes a bunch of decent people can do a good thing for the right reasons, and the result of that work can persevere for decades.”

I like Florida very much every time I visit, which surprises me, because the news makes it look like they’re setting up the Republic of Gilead. My one complaint is the flagrant air conditioning abuse. It’s 86 degrees out, heading to 92, and I’m sitting here getting frostbite in my fingers and toes.

This mini brownie was tasty, and its resemblance to the poop emoji made it even more delicious. #enshittification

I’m here at the Extreme Connect conference in Orlando, where the company unveiled its full-stack vision for AI networking, a new Wi-Fi 7 lineup, and more. My latest on Fierce Network.

Extreme bets on simplifying networks. CEO Ed Meyercord says simplicity and supply-chain savvy are driving share gains as Extreme posts its fifth straight double-digit revenue quarter, on the eve of the big annual Extreme Connect conference this week. My latest on Fierce Network.

I am having a grande Starbucks cappuccino and it is 5:15 PM and I am three hours east of my normal time zone and I need to be awake at 6 am. I see no potential problem here.

Name your top 15 TV shows ever, gut instincts only:

Deadwood
Star Trek:TOS
The Odd Couple
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
MASH
Hill Street Blues
ER
The Pitt
Doctor Who
Bob Newhart Show
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Angel
Firefly
The Sopranos
Mad Men

This list is biased toward shows I loved when I was a child, teen and early 20s because shows hit harder then.

It sucks about Joss doesn’t it?

Normalize paywalled websites offering day passes for $1, payable easily through services such as Apple Pay and Google Pay. The day passes would not automatically renew by default. This would be the online equivalent of going into a newsstand and buying a single issue of a magazine because the cover looks interesting. It would be great for readers, a great source of revenue for publishers and help push back misinformation (because journalism costs money to produce, but bullshit’s free).

I went for a medium-length walk downtown, starting in the Gaslamp, up through Little Italy and back down the Embarcadero, during which I found myself passing through an art street fair in Little Italy. I pushed through, because the agenda of the day was walking rather than browsing. But I couldn’t resist stopping at this one booth of outstanding scrap sculptures. The artist is Adam Homan.

We have started watching Grimm, a TV program about Portland police who fight monsters while wearing fabulous leather jackets.

When Automattic bought Tumblr, I hoped that Automattic would turn Tumblr into a universal platform for personal blogging. Instead, it remains the niche product that it’s been for many years.

I think the only reason Automattic keeps it going is the same reason I remain active there – I just plain like it. I like reading the weird posts (I’m a weirdo too!) and seeing the memes and GIFsets and vintage photos. I browse it at bedtime and other periods of downtime.

Matt Mullenwegg has a gajillion dollars, so he can afford to keep the whole site going for his own amusement the same way I, a middle-class guy who types for a living, can afford $69.99/year for Tumblr Premium.

Just once in my life I want to:

  • Enter a meeting room where middle-aged men and women, wearing business suits and military uniforms, are sitting around a long table, talking animatedly.
  • They grow silent when I enter the room and stand to attention.
  • I tell them “be seated” as a take a seat myself, at the head of the table.
  • Once everyone is seated and giving me their full attention, I bark: “Give me options, people!”

I talked with James White, VP of AI for F5, about the state of AI post-Mythos. We talked about how Mythos proves AI is grown up and can do real work.

Mythos, he said, is on the leading edge of a new class of AI models specialized for specific tasks.

My latest on Fierce Network.

I was raised to the sublime degree of Master Mason this month.