I was out walking the dog when I got in a nice chat with a neighbor. When the chat was done, the woman noted the full poop bag I was carrying, and offered to take it from me and put it in her trash. “No thanks!” I replied, chipperly. “I’m good.”
That was years ago. I still think about it now and then and wonder what kind of message I was sending.
A woke map
The US voted against a UN resolution to replace the standard Mercator Projection map of the world with a new design that accurately shows the size of land masses in relation to each other.
1969 interview with Don Rickles by WMAR-TV reporter Susan White. “Rickles had a reparation for not letting reporters get a word in edgeways, so Susan decided to hilariously turn the tables…”
Rickles has a reputation for being kind, gracious and charming in his personal life and that shines through in this video.
Rebuilding is brutally expensive in Los Angeles’s burnt-out neighborhoods, so instead homeowners are reviving the lost art of house-moving, transporting historic homes across town to be installed on lots that were recently made vacant by wildfires.
Nicola Twilley at The New Yorker:
In his prime, [George] Kress was a kind of P. T. Barnum figure, dazzling the city with his ambition and showmanship. He moved greenhouses without breaking a pane, entire high schools in one piece, and office buildings while workers remained at their desks. In 1924, his clients hosted a party–with the mayor in attendance–inside a nine-bedroom Queen Anne-style building while Kress moved it more than two miles west, on Wilshire Boulevard, from the newly commercial neighborhood of Westlake to the upscale Windsor Square.
If I had a time machine, that party would be one of the first places I’d go.
Marco Arment: “If I learn today that my neighbors have political views that my ‘side’ considers unacceptable and unforgivable, should I be able to have dinner at their house, shovel their snow, or even greet them outside?”
Columbia House: The First 12 Cost A Penny, But … Columbia House was a great way to get 12 CDs, tapes or records for a penny. But its business model set the stage for a lot of bad e-commerce.
We Are Living in the Fantasy World of 13-Year-Old Boys
Many of the tech billionaires who built our world have taken the wrong lessons from their favorite science fiction. They regard “humanness, and Earth itself … as a burden to be sloughed off.” Gal Beckerman contemplates the new book “The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State” by Jill Lepore.
Like Musk, Thiel and Sam Altman, I grew up reading Heinlein, Asimov and Adams. I found the writing inspiring. But I stopped taking it literally a long time ago.
Romani-inspired “boho” and medieval European styles merged in 1960s hippie culture, with rock stars like Stevie Nicks, Mama Cass and Janis Joplin leading. “American youth were reading Tolkien, wearing their grandmother’s silk scarves, and dipping their toes in metaphysical philosophies.” By Avery Trufelman on Articles of Interest.
Chris Arnade rides the 22-hour bus trip from Darwin, Australia, to Alice Springs.
Like “spotting a firefly buzzing around a powerful searchlight from thousands of miles away." How the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope searches for planets in other star systems.
Watched: Star Trek: Strange New Worlds S4E7, Like Chronitons Through the Hourglass . I do not expect to have adult emotions watching Star Trek, particularly not during a gimmick episode. 📺
The original “Star Trek” often told morality tales about the Cold War, with the Klingons standing in for the USSR.
Tom Nichols, writing at The Atlantic:
I retired from a long teaching career a few years ago, but during my later years in the classroom, I offered a course on the Cold War and American pop culture, to try to help younger students understand the fears that dominated so much of American life in the 20th century. When my students saw how many times images of nuclear devastation (and references to Ronald Reagan) popped up on MTV back in the day, they started to get it. We also discussed The Twilight Zone, a series full of barely disguised allegories about the Cold War; the series’ head writer and creator, Rod Serling, a World War II veteran, explored traumas from his past and his worries about the future in many of the episodes he wrote.
But the students were surprised—as you might be—to find that Star Trek, one of my childhood favorites, was an ongoing and intentional commentary about the Cold War during its three original seasons from 1966 to 1969.
This was not subtle — it was obvious even to me and my fellow 13-year-old Trekkies in the early 1970s.
We also thought the Romulans were stand-ins for the Communist Chinese. I don’t know whether that holds up.
New research shows sleeping in an extra hour and a half on weekends is good for you. Previous research said you shouldn’t do that. Either way, it’s nothing to lose sleep over.
“A gallant knight”: The Renaissance charm of Robert B. Parker’s Spenser
Robert B. Parker tapped into his own academic literary background to write his brilliant Spenser detective novels.
Parker was a doctorate in English literature, wrote his dissertation in part on Raymond Chandler and taught for several years at Northeastern University. He tapped into that background when writing the classic Spenser private eye series, giving the gumshoe a deep autodidact knowledge of literature and the humanities, in addition to being quick with a gun or his fists.
Austin Tichenor writes at the Folger Shakespeare Library:
Spenser considers himself a modern “knight errant,” a medieval figure who helps those in need and embodies chivalric ideals…. Edmund Spenser, the detective’s namesake, wrote The Faerie Queene in 1590, which chronicles the adventures of several such knights….
A key aspect of the wandering knight is the freedom to be guided by his own moral compass. Fired from the police for insubordination (“one of my best things,” he says), Spenser explains, “I handle the problems I choose to; that’s why I’m freelance. It gives me the luxury to worry about justice. The cops can’t.” Spenser is tenacious, unstoppable, very good at what he does, and extremely loyal, reassuring one victim, “You are in trouble enough to pull up over your head and tie a knot in. But you’re not in it alone. I’ll help you. It’s my line of work.”
Parker tapped into his own academic background for the first Spenser novel, “The Godwulf Manuscript,” in which Spenser is is hired by a university to recover a stolen 14th Century manuscript:
Spenser’s very first sentence in The Godwulf Manuscript–“The office of the university president looked like the front parlor of a successful Victorian whorehouse”–tells you right away his attitude towards authority and institutional pretension, as well as his appreciation of an elegant turn of phrase.
I’ve reread many Spenser novels several times, but only read “The Godwulf Manuscript” once — Parker himself was unimpressed by it; he had yet to find Spenser’s true voice. I may have to give the book another try.
I’m remembering a time in the 2000s when Julie and I did the Universal Studios tour in Los Angeles and went to the Terminator attraction.
In many of these types of attractions, including the Terminator one, the plot is that the audience is a group of VIP visitors taking a tour or seeing a presentation, and Something Goes Terribly Wrong. In the case of the Terminator attraction, the plot was that the audience was attending a media presentation for the new line of Terminator robots, which of course run amok.
The emcee of the attraction was a character who introduced herself as Cyberdyne Corporation’s Director of Community Relations and Media Control, and she wore a red dress suitable for a major corporation’s communications director.
This was hilarious to me because I was, and am, a trade press editor and have attended about a million news conferences of just that very type, where a big tech company unveils major new product. However, on no occasion in my real professional life has the product run amok and started killing people from the audience.
I just spent an hour shredding cardboard boxes that I was saving because they could be useful for something. Perfectly good boxes, destroyed like garbage.
This is a very difficult moment for me and I ask for your emotional support.
I preordered a Clicks Power Keyboard at the beginning of the year and it arrived a few weeks ago. It’s a BlackBerry style thumb keyboard that attaches to your phone using the phone’s built-in MagSafe or Qi2 magnet.
So far, I’m not finding it to be practical — it’s uncomfortable to use with my Pro Max iPhone. Typing on the screen keyboard is faster and more comfortable than using Clicks.
But it’s a fun little gadget and maybe I’ll get faster and more comfortable with practice.
After first trying it, I decided to send it back but i kept putting it off and now I’m glad I hung on to it.