We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
Sometimes I think that the impression the newspaper is trying to give you is the opposite of reality. There's all this stuff right out front in the news, but the shadow of reality is visible if you squint really hard. The newspaper is what they want you to think. Well, it's Tuesday, and I don't feel like thinking much at all, which is fine. All the bad news that they don't want you to talk about is released on Friday afternoon, late-ish, and all the made up news they wanted to gull you with is released on Monday in the AM, so we're all clear today. We can talk about trivial stuff, like popular music or vice-presidents. The Guardian is cooperating nicely with our Tuesday timetable with their listicle The 30 best films about music, chosen by musicians.
Hmm. The Guardian isn't shy about putting scare quotes on regular nouns used by their political opponents, but they missed an opportunity to put them around the word "musicians." I assume their longer, first-draft title, Crabby Opinions About Pop Culture from the Only "Musicians" Who Were Awake Before 4 PM and Replied To My Last-Minute HARO Bleg, was too long for proper search engine optimization. The author of this list seems to think we've entered "an uncommonly busy period, if not a flat-out golden age" of "movies about musicians, whether biopics, fictions or documentaries." I don't think so, and their list backs up my opinion, not theirs. It's a bad list, and they should feel bad.
The good news: This Is Spinal Tap is on the list. The bad news: So is a documentary about Wham! I guess even a blind squirrel finds a nut from time to time. The rest of the list is awful, and incoherent, in a very particular, modern way. Any pop culture list is bound to linger on recent things, but the list isn't limited to the last decade. If you say "best," you should know a little history. To the target audience, history began when they were in Pampers. Everything before that was a dark time, when everyone's behavior was suitable only for apologies and reparations. One hardy soul takes a stab at history by mentioning the Woodstock movie, but that's likely because they've heard there's a Woodstock movie, not because they've seen it. Sha Na Na played at Woodstock. That's all you need to know about the event.
Right off the top of my head, why wouldn't someone mention:
A Hard Day's Night
Coal Miner's Daughter
The Harder They Come
Standing in the Shadows of Motown
Muscle Shoals
The Blues Brothers
Love and Mercy
Gimme Shelter
Bah, I'm arguing with fools. Feel free to add any I've forgotten to comments section. On to the news!
“What makes a solid tech stock?” may be one of the most important questions an investor can answer. Over the last decade, tech companies started to penetrate the top ten list of global companies by market cap. Today, tech dominates this list with Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook and Alibaba. Not all tech stocks are winners, of course, with IBM and Yahoo flatlining over the past decade and Cisco unable to reclaim its valuation from nearly twenty years ago.
IBM and Yahoo had something in common besides dismal performance. We're not allowed to notice it, however, so we won't.
Between 1975 and 1995, the National Liberation Front of Corsica struck Corsica’s electrical system on multiple occasions, according to a report issued by the Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies. In the Philippines, the Communist New People’s Army, the Moro National Liberation Front, and the Abu Sayyaf group all attacked the electrical grid. And in South Africa, a military wing of the African National Congress carried out multiple attacks on electrical stations during the apartheid regime.
The National Liberation Front of Corsica? Corsica had terrorists? Corsica has electricity?
Carmakers are now hoping to use the same subscription service model that tech firms use. They supply you with access to a new car, and take care of insurance, maintenance, and mileage. Some services will let you swap one car for another on a regular basis. These subscription deals may appeal to a new generation of drivers who aren’t used to owning much of anything. They’re accustomed to paying for lots of things like housing, transportation, communication, and entertainment on a subscription basis. Why not cars?
Seem more like the subscription service model used by Rent-a-Center for crack house couches than SaaS for useless chat apps. Anyway, for some reason, I'm reminded of Johnny Cash's song One Piece at a Time.
WeWork, which says in the offering document that its corporate mission is no less than to "to elevate the world's consciousness," is on track to lose $2.7 billion this year from its operations, up from nearly $1.7 billion last year. The company's revenue in the first six months of the year nearly doubled from last year's first half, to $1.5 billion. The company said its losses rose just 10% from a year ago, but that includes a $470 million non-operating, and likely non-recurring, gain. Exclude that, and losses from the We Company, which says it will trade under the ticker symbol "WE," rose 60%.
All tech IPOs are now Ponzi schemes being palmed off on the stock market before the music stops. This one is especially silly. And stop comparing them to Amazon, article writers. Amazon made a profit right away, but dumped the money back into expansion continually, mostly to avoid taxation. Borrowing money over and over isn't the same thing.
Washington University paleoanthropologist Erik Trinkaus and his colleagues studied fossils, digital scans, photographs, and other archaeologists' reports from 77 Neanderthals and Homo sapiens who lived in Europe and Asia during the Pleistocene. Based on this sampling of remains with preserved inner ear bones, a surprising number of Neanderthals were running around Pleistocene Eurasia with swimmer's ear.
This is a question that's been on my mind for a long time, said no one ever.
Le Mans is one of those races that people who have never seen an auto race know about. It’s been immortalized in a bunch of movies. It’s always nifty to see the cars pass through the Dunlop rubber rainbow, and dodge the regular traffic and bicycles on the road on a non-race day. Driver Mike Hawthorne strapped on about a hundred pounds of microphone to give us some idea of what it’s like to buzz around the track.
It was my first time living in America, and like many people who move to a new country, I found that my perception of the United States didn't exactly line up with reality. As it turned out, several aspects of US culture, from food to transportation to nightlife, were different than I had imagined. And in some cases, those differences left me disappointed.
Oh dear, we've disappointed an aesthete from an prisoner-organ-harvesting paradise. A more even-handed appraisal than the headline sounds. And of course even patriotic souls like me have to acknowledge that the United States is the worst country in the world, except for all the others.
Few men in America are as popular among American men as Joe Rogan. It’s a massive group congregating in plain sight, and it’s made up of people you know from high school, guys who work three cubicles down, who are still paying off student loans, who forward jealous-girlfriend memes, who spot you at the gym. Single guys. Married guys. White guys, black guys, Dominican guys. Two South Asian friends of mine swear by him. My college roommate. My little brother. Normal guys. American guys.
I can explain it. He's just a Rush Limbaugh who votes straight Democrat on the way home from the Crossfit gym.
The Bugatti Centodieci goes from 0 to 62 mph in 2.4 seconds. It can reach 186 mph in 13.1 seconds. That’s thanks to a W16 engine (basically two V8s) that produces a chest-thumping, spine-bruising 1,600 horsepower. Bugatti electronically limits its top speed to 236 mph, because it doesn’t want you going too crazy. After all, this car costs $8.9 million—before taxes.
Russia to establish naval base in Venezuela : Since December 2017, Russia has had a similar agreement with Syria, which allowed Russia to deploy as many as 10 ships and two submarines in the Mediterranean Sea at the peak of its campaign to support Bashar al-Assad.
In July 2019, Russia reached an even more significant agreement with Iran. Two Iranian ports – Bushehr in the south and Chabahar in the south-east – will become forward bases for Russia’s Navy that can even be used by nuclear submarines.
Bushehr will also serve as a base for the Russian Aerospace Forces, with Su-37 and Su-57 fighters deployed there. There are also plans to station a contingent of Russian troops there, primarily special forces, under the same pretext that has been used in Syria and in Lebanon: on paper, they will be there as “advisors” to the Iranian military.
Producer/star Ian Ziering reunites with his Sharknado director Anthony C. Ferrante to bring you ... Zombie Tidal Wave.We've come a long way from genre trailblazer Night Of The Living Dead in 1968.
"“We do not face the challenge of a population bomb but a population bust—a relentless, generation-after-generation culling of the human herd.” ...The underlying drivers of capitalism, the sense that resource competition and scarcity determine the nature of international relations and domestic tensions, and the fear that climate change and environmental degradation are almost at a doomsday point—all have been shaped by the persistently ballooning population of the past two centuries. If the human population is about to decline as quickly as it increased, then all those systems and assumptions are in jeopardy."
88 Project supports and encourages freedom of expression in Vietnam by sharing the stories of and advocating for Vietnamese activists who are persecuted because of their peaceful dissent.
Bulgakov died before completing his final revisions, but he worked on the book for 20 years. A NYT reviewer says "Every time I read, it, it's a different book." Like Moby Dick in that way.
Well, it's a bad day all around. For you, I mean. I'm swell. You have to face the work and worry that Monday brings with it, and you have to face it without Bird Dog. He's at the vet again, so you're stuck with me, Roger de Hauteville. We get Bird Dog de-wormed every year, because we love him so, and love to take care of him. Of course we don't bring him to be de-wormed until after fishing season is over, because worms are expensive. We're not made of stone, but we're not made of money, either. On to today's links.
In the early twentieth century, a horse named Clever Hans was believed to be capable of counting and other mental tasks. The psychologist Oskar Pfungst confirmed that Clever Hans was in fact recognizing and responding to minute, unintentional postural and facial cues of his trainer or individuals in the crowd.
Do tell. File this one under: Educated persons discovering common sense by accident. Hasn't anyone in academia ever heard of the effect of a shill before? They seem to understand the concept just fine when they're disrupting televised town hall meetings. Hi, I'm just a concerned citizen...
So I designed an elaborate, weeklong wedding proposal that included a writing class, rock climbing and a party at an urban winery. After Ilse said yes, she moved into what is now our condo, bringing her cat, Dori, who became fast friends with Dusty, napping together and sharing food. My goal was to marry in June so Ilse could reclaim that month with a fond memory. I asked Dusty to be in my wedding party. “Maybe he can tie my tie,” I thought. Ilse and I registered for small appliances and dishes. Everything changed.
In case you're wondering, Dusty is a dog. The New York Times new slogan should be: All the solipsism that's fit to print.
Archaeologists have uncovered a trunk at Pompeii containing a vast variety of fascinating objects that may have been part of a 'sorcerer's treasure trove'. The objects include crystals, amber and amethyst stones, buttons made of bones, beetles from the orient, amulets, dolls, bells, fists, a tiny skull - and even miniature penises. Experts say the objects may have been used in rituals for fertility, seduction, or to seek good omens for a birth or pregnancy, although they stress that this is just a theory.
Ah, the Daily Mail. The newspaper put that last word in their headline in all caps, not me. Like a good fisherman, they know how to jiggle the bait. But I doubt that the miniature trouser snake angle will prove out in the body of the article. I've read Under the Tuscan Sun, and several other books about women with turkey necks moving to Italy, and it's not the miniature kind they're looking for, or discovering there. Try farther east.
Scientists are still analysing the data to confirm the exact size of the two objects, but initial findings indicate the very strong likelihood of a black hole enveloping a neutron star. The final results are expected to be published in scientific journals. "Scientists have never detected a black hole smaller than five solar masses or a neutron star larger than about 2.5 times the mass of our Sun," Professor Scott said. "Based on this experience, we're very confident that we've just detected a black hole gobbling up a neutron star.
I knew a man who liked to tell people that they weren't really sitting on a chair, when they sat on a chair. He'd exclaim that the matter in their body and the matter in the chair repelled each other at the atomic level, so in reality, they were actually hovering above the chair, not sitting on it. I threw an apple at his head once, to remind him that only Isaac Newton matters to regular people. I wonder if I want to throw an apple at Professor Scott?
Adding to an already ridiculously long list of complaints, now Facebook’s content moderators say a higher-up asked company-appointed counselors to share information from their sessions, according to a new report from the Intercept. Numerous investigations have described this workforce as notoriously underpaid and overworked in crappy working conditions that require them to scan through some of the most disturbing posts the internet can offer. You know, all the things it might behoove someone to see a therapist about.
At the bottom of this article, you'll find a handy Facebook tracking beacon, er, I mean share button. You know, for your convenience.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX also plans to launch a constellation of internet-beaming satellites, as does Amazon. There may eventually be more than one satellite network competing to offer broadband internet around the world this way. The impact this could have on employment is staggering.
The author is an Elon Musketeer, so I have my doubts. Especially since I understand that the intent and effect of the internet, however delivered, is to turn ten good jobs into one crappy one. Or one good job into ten crappy ones, if you're Uber. It's a fair tradeoff though, because instead of any silly benefits like a retirement fund or health insurance, there's foosball and smoothie bars in the WeWork office for the winners.
SoftBank Group is leaning on its employees, including Chief Executive Masayoshi Son, for cash as the firm rushes to raise an ambitious technology fund amid volatile markets. The Japanese company plans to lend up to $20 billion to its employees to buy stakes in its second giant venture-capital fund, people familiar with the matter said. Son may account for as much as $15 billion of that amount, some of the people said.
Hmm. This is quite the development. Why back in my day, you whippersnappers, we kept our money laundering to ourselves. Now they issue a press release.
Family members have previously revealed to DailyMail.com that Griffin has a history of drug abuse and drug addiction, and had recently been panhandling in New York to survive. Jason Griffin, his brother, explained to DailyMail.com that the 26-year-old had been homeless and mentally ill and believes his actions may have been 'a cry for help'.
When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro. And the going is most definitely getting weird.
A majority of economists predict that the economy will lapse into a recession either next year or in 2021. In a survey set to be released Monday by the National Association for Business Economics, 38% respondents said they believe the country will face a recession in 2020 and 34% said they think the start date for a recession will be a bit later, in 2021, the Associated Press reported.
For some reason, this reminds me of the signs you once saw painted on the walls in tawdry barrooms: Free Beer Tomorrow
Twitter has caught itself in a propaganda war after it was found running ads from China’s state-backed media outlet Xinhua News attacking the Hong Kong protesters. The promoted tweets (aka ads) — which were captured on social bookmarking site Pinboard — talk about how the escalating violence in the territory has “taken a heavy toll on social order,” while some others were about Hong Kong citizens allegedly calling China is “our motherland.”
When will people learn that social media is only for fake viral propaganda, not paid propaganda. The ads are strictly reserved for selling T shirts with anti-Trump slogans. Sheesh.
Well, that's the news roundup for Monday. Don't let current events get you down. Go about your business, and have a nice day. But if I were you, I wouldn't bring any rice cookers onto the NYC subway today. The bomb sniffing dogs are bound to be getting unintentional postural and facial cues from just about everyone, not just their handlers today.
Our pal Assistant Village Idiot sounded inverse-snobbery about this fine lunch, but I still love it. I grew up with this thing, yes, at the Club. It was always turkey, not chicken. Always served with a little cup of extra mayo, and with kitchen-made chips and not french fries. My club still makes their own chips - heavenly.
At home, we had five basic sandwiches: Baloney with mustard and lettuce, the excellent BLT, Fluffernutter, BB&J, and Tuna Salad. That was Mom's sandwich repertoire.
12:49 "I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled!
12:50 I have a baptism with which to be baptized, and what stress I am under until it is completed!
12:51 Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division!
12:52 From now on five in one household will be divided, three against two and two against three;
12:53 they will be divided: father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law."
12:54 He also said to the crowds, "When you see a cloud rising in the west, you immediately say, 'It is going to rain'; and so it happens.
12:55 And when you see the south wind blowing, you say, 'There will be scorching heat'; and it happens.
12:56 You hypocrites! You know how to interpret the appearance of earth and sky, but why do you not know how to interpret the present time?
Heading to Cape Cod (Wellfleet) soon for family reunion week and my birthday party (25 of us, plus with some of our high-energy outdoorsy pals joining us). We do indeed take over the village when we are out there.
Roger de Hauteville, that illustrious Norman King of Sicily, will provide the morning entertainment here. Bless his Viking heart.
Our plans are dawn runs, morning calisthenics or Yoga, kayaking, hiking, body surfing, jumping in the pond loop, and some baseball and tennis. And lots of seafood and beer. Sitting on beaches is not our thing, but we have a big porch overlooking the harbor. No TV, no wifi. Good Boston classical music radio though. Best thing of all - getting salty and sunny and perfumed by the piney woods - and no bugs.
Plus we have an outdoor shower. I will not tolerate an indoor shower on Cape Cod. Just feels good to shower in the sunshine.
Speaking of seafood, maybe my favorite Cape Cod seafood is steamed Steamers. Drinking the broth might be the best part. As much as I love mussels, or a raw bar with Wellfleet oysters, I can never tire of Steamers. They are fun to harvest too, if you don't mind lots of mud.
One of the most fun places to eat or to buy food in NYC: Eataly, in the Flatiron District (5th and 23rd). In warm weather, the Beer Garden on the roof is good fun. You can stay all day and munch on charcuterie and cheese.
In the southern USA, "tea" means Sweet Tea. People usually make a couple of quarts at a time. Delicious.
I have been a fan of Sun Tea since I first had it in Montana. It's usually made a gallon jar at a time. Keep the top on or ants will come, and keep in direct sunlight for 5-6 hours.
I never anticipated spending so much of my clinical time in bathrooms. But drug overdose is the leading cause of death among the homeless individuals I take care of at a health center in Boston—and without homes or access to supervised consumption sites, people who are homeless frequently inject drugs behind the closed doors of public bathrooms, including ours...
Some time ago, I noted the irreconcilable difference between the Left and the rest of America: the majority of our fellow citizens believe America is an inherently good nation that continues its pursuit of a more perfect union; the Left believes America is an inherently evil nation that must be transformed fundamentally into an oppressive socialist state—at best.
For the Left to win this existential argument, it must distort and revile America’s history to destroy the truth of American Exceptionalism. If the past is evil, the present has no choice but to reject America’s history and its defenders; and to embrace the dishonest leftist ideology and the agenda of those who loathe America.
Always a treat to listen to very high IQ people talk. This is a Wow of a conversation. It's not about Creationism, but about Darwin's likely errors (he didn't have the info we have now). The discussion about the emergence of new proteins is especially interesting.
At this very moment. Chunks of Black Cherry wood from the woodpile, with a pot of water in there. 
Our pal Assistant Village Idiot 
Heading to Cape Cod (Wellfleet) soon for family reunion week and my birthday party (25 of us, plus with some of our high-energy outdoorsy pals joining us). We do indeed take over the village when we are out there.
