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I love the show “Rooster,” starring Steve Carrell as a novelist, but it has the flaw of all shows and movies about writers in that you never, ever see him writing. Only once do we see him reading a book. That’s not how writers are built. We are compulsive.

I can’t get over J.D. Vance correcting the Pope on Christian ethics. That’s some grandmaster-level mansplaining there, J.D.

Foods I ate when I was a child

Bagels and pizza were common when I grew up on Long Island in the very late 60s and early/mid 70s. That’s not surprising — it was a heavily Italian and Jewish immigrant neighborhood.

Chinese food was plentiful and easy to find too.

We considered ourselves connoisseurs of all three cuisines and had strong opinions.

Pita bread was common, and I thought it looked nifty — bread! with a pocket! But my parents gave me the idea that only Gentiles ate pita bread. I think my Mom just made that kind of thing up when she wanted to shut us up. I don’t blame her for that. As a Mom raising three Jewish boys, she had to learn to defend herself verbally.

I was 14 years old when I first had Mexican food. I saw characters on TV eating “tacos” and thought they looked tasty, and the characters seemed cosmopolitan. Jim Rockford had a taco shack he favored. The very first Mexican restaurant in our Long Island suburb opened when I was 14, and our Spanish teacher took us to lunch there on a field trip. We got combo plates: A taco, I guess an enchilada, and refried beans. All of us kids, mostly Jewish-American, Italian-American and Irish-American, pronounced the food gross, particularly the refried beans.

We had Taco Bell and Jack in the Box tacos when I was in college, and I loved those.

By the time I was in my 30s I loved Mexican food, particularly Mission burritos of the type you get in San Francisco and San Jose. Big and fat and loaded with guacamole and Spanish rice and stuff. But I’ll eat a hard taco or twelve and enjoy it if you invite me to. I don’t have Mexican food often, alas, because of the calories.

When I was a preteen, I got it into my head that chili sounded great, I think in part because Heinlein mentioned that Lazarus Long loved it. I first had chili when I was 16 years old on a family trip to California. I thought chili was fine. I still do like chili, but do not love it. I occasionally make a pot of chili, though I have not done so in years.

Elswehwere on the internet, a friend observed that his blog is “scattershot” and I think he wished his blog was more organized.

However, a scattershot blog is a perfectly reasonable kind of blog. I’m very, very old school when it comes to blogging. It’s a weblog – a log of things you saw on the web – and also an online diary, where you can publish any thought that you want to share with the world.

At some point in the 2010s I started hearing people saying that a blog post had to be a structured essay and I responded no no no no no. I mean, a blog can be comprised solely of structured essays but it can also be whatever you want it to be.

Cory Doctorow compares living in the present to early 2020, when Covid was approaching. It’s a throwaway comment in his blog post yesterday, and it has stayed with me since. Julie and I are fortunate enough to be spectators to the news — it does not touch us personally yet — but I can see in the headlines that something bad is coming, it’s going to hit hard and I don’t know what to do to prepare for it.

I learned yesterday about the death of Scot Finnie, my editor and friend. We worked together for a few years in the 2000s. He and I and Brad Shimmin launched blogging for CMP Media back when CMP was a big company in the trade press and blogging was new.

Scot was a good editor, good friend and championed my career. We shared a common interest in productivity tools and could nerd out about that kind of software for a while — for a few years, he ran a newsletter about Windows productivity, Scot’s Newsletter, and he and I switched to Mac at about the same time.

We only talked a couple of times in the 2010s, and I think not at all since Covid. I am sad to lose him.

The Democrats have a shot at taking the House and Senate this year. Will they have the courage to launch hearings and pursue criminal prosecution to its end-point — even if that means throwing DJT in prison?

Or will they wimp out, as the US has done since the Reconstruction after the Civil War, and give oligarchs a pass?

In the United States today there is no penalty for flagrant corruption and attempting the overthrow of the US government — if you’re a billionaire.

If you steal $1,000, they throw you in prison, but if you take hundreds of millions of dollars in bribes, they put you in the White House.