Maggie's Farm

I need a funny quote about Saturday. I have to paste something in here. You fine readers deserve more than just a few links to digital fishwrap. You merit inspiration. You're worthy of something stimulating. The day itself warrants an attaboy. 

Quotes about Saturday are thin on the ground, however. It's the day of rest of days. Saturday is for putting on go to hell pants and painting the fence. Mucking out plugged gutters off rickety stepladders. Going to the dump. Wags and deep thinkers alike have given Saturday a pass. The Saturday sojourn of sol across the firmament just doesn't move the apothegmatic meter.

I say no! Saturday must get its due. Let's see what we can find to tickle our Saturday intellect, and send us to the transfer station with a spring in our step:

Most of the time you're too busy to think about it. But every now and then you say, "I work at 'Saturday Night Live,' and that is so cool. -- Tina Fey

No, it isn't.

Satire is what closes on Saturday night. -- George S. Kaufman

See: Fey, Tina.

I'm blessed by the fact I only need five hours of sleep on a daily basis. I do tend to regard Saturday and Sunday as work days. -- David Rubinstein

David strikes me as the kind of person who mentions his SAT scores to everyone he meets, even though he's 54. I don't know about you, but I'm not inspired by this quote. I don't want to add any weekend toil to the good, solid, fourteen hours of work I perform during the week. Let's move on.

Every man has a right to a Saturday night bath. -- Lyndon Johnson

Oh, dear. Old Lyndon Baines wasn't exactly Cicero, was he? I get the impression that this quote is an adulteration of a quote from Lady Bird Johnson, "Lyndon, every man has a need for a Saturday night bath, whether he's president or not."

I enjoy Saturday night racing. -- Dale Earnhardt

Sorry Dale, but by Friday afternoon, I feel as though I've hit a wall.

Wait, that came out wrong. Never mind. Forget the whole thing. Here are the Saturday links. You're on your own for inspiration:

Dad Takes Hilarious Pics With His Baby Girl In Costumes And They’re Just Too Adorable

File that headline under: Girl with access to social media accounts who used to work at Buzzfeed. Charming dad and daughter, nonetheless.

Dad Can't Afford to Take His Daughter to Disney World, So He Improvises With an Awesome Virtual Reality Roller Coaster Ride

More good dad goodness. Now that I think of it, Saturday is a dad kind of day. I can guarantee that this dad gets comped at Disney five times over. The video is more viral than the doorknob at an Ebola clinic.

Move over millennials, members of Generation Z are ready to work

A worthy topic, and the article isn't entirely fanciful or stupid. There's no way the surveys aren't skewed to the boneheaded side of the ledger. This fellow seems to think Generation Z are all Bernie supporters, face painters, and sign holders. Not hardly. Let me sum up the generational divide from my personal experience. Millennials have wasted their useful working and reproductive lives with childish agitation and untenable social and work situations. They're already toast if they haven't cashed out their failed startup stock options. Generation Z has learned to be circumspect, won't answer surveys, don't like Millennials, and will make Eisenhower look leftist.

Do you know who these people are?

One of those pleasant pieces of internet sea glass that washes up from time to time.

Samsung set to surpass Apple as the world’s most profitable tech company

Anecdata: I was in the phone store on Wednesday. I had to choose a phone to go along with my new plan. I said, "Anything but Apple." Clerk said, "Everyone says that now."

US nonfarm payrolls total 222,000 in June vs 179,000 expected

By gad that webpage is a nightmare. Self-playing video that follows you around. Sidebar picture of a woman who got her makeup done at a funeral parlor hectoring you to change three sentences on your LinkedIn page to go from dumpster diving to six figures, and Jeff Bezos smiling or having a stroke, I can't tell the difference with him. You have to wade ten paragraphs in to find out anything important:

Those considered out of the labor force declined by 170,000 to 94.8 million while the labor force increased by 361,000 to 160.1 million.

People who have been shut out of the labor market since Nancy Pelosi hove into view are getting jobs again. It makes me happy to hear of it.

FBI: Flight attendant broke wine bottle over man's head

Everyone pretends to be angry at the airlines, but it's the TSA they hate, but don't have the nerve to confront. Making people who fight with flight crews and police into celebrities encourages more of that sort of thing. This guy probably thinks he'll be on Oprah next week, sitting next to Gloria Allred, and clutching big checks from the airline and the company that makes Ambien. I have my doubts.

Trump’s leaks crackdown sends chills through national security world. Agency officials say measures have been taken to isolate leakers, creating a culture of fear.

Oh noes! Not a culture of fear! Way to clutch those pearls, Politico. My tiny violin is working overtime.

173,000 DeVry University students will share in $49 million settlement

DeVry University has agreed to a $100 million settlement in connection to ads federal officials said misled students about their job and earning prospects.

That description only fits about 10,000 colleges.

Fight over Star Wars and Star Trek led to assault, Oklahoma police say

Oklahoma City Police Department reports show that Whyte and another man were in the living room of an apartment in the 1400 block of NW 16 Street when they began arguing if Star Wars or Star Trek was better. The victim told police he became frustrated and stated "You're just a trick" before walking back to his room.

Surprisingly, the combatants weren't pasty, obese neckbeards wearing trilbys and My Little Pony tee shirts.

Woman finds strangers living in home, and now she can't get them out

Sigh. I miss college.

Have a great Saturday, everyone!

The Maggie's Farm editor ate my homework. It does that once out of every five tries or so. It keeps me guessing in the most piquant fashion. The Maggie's Farm computer console is hooked up by a leather strop to the hub of Bird Dog's Farmall, and sometimes, if the humidity is high, the belt slips. Oh well. You'll have to skip my scintillating insights for today, and just read the boring old newspapers:

Why Algorithms Suck and Analog Computers are the Future

But aren’t there any supercomputers that don’t require this much energy to run? Indeed there are: The human brain is a great example – its processing power is estimated at about 38 petaflops, about two-fifths of that of TaihuLight. But all it needs to operate is about 20 watts of energy. Watts, not megawatts! And yet it performs tasks that – at least up until now – no machine has ever been able to execute.

Your brain is 2/5ths as powerful as the most powerful computer ever built. It's not your brain's fault you use it to watch pro wrestling and worry about vaccines and autism. You could be doing something useful with it.

The European Court of Justice’s Invitation to Fraud

This is an instance not of judicial activism, but of judicial populism. It is, albeit in clotted legal language, a pandering to popular, or at least very common, notions of causation, such that where two notable events take place in close temporal proximity, it stands to reason that the first must have caused the second. We are not far from the Azande belief that no death is natural, and each death is caused by malign witchcraft.

Theodore Dalrymple is one of maybe five intelligent persons currently writing for the internet.

Satellites reveal melting of rocks under volcanic zone, deep in Earth's mantle

The GPS measurements in the Taupo volcanic zone reveal that it is widening east-west at a rate of 6-15 millimetres per year - in other words, the region, overall, is expanding, as we anticipated from our previous geological understanding. But it was surprising to discover that, at least for the past 15 years, a roughly 70-kilometre stretch is undergoing strong horizontal contraction and is also rapidly subsiding, quite the opposite of what one might anticipate.

Real scientists observe things and ask questions. Fake scientists make pronouncements and ask for edicts. This is real science.

How Brian Eno managed to piss in Marcel Duchamp’s famous urinal, 1990

In the interview Eno confesses that “Roxy Music was an aberration in my life” and also intriguingly asserts that he has never owned a copy of the Velvet Underground’s third album because he does not want to spoil it by overplaying it. But the most startling portion of the interview comes towards the end, when he describes an illicit art adventure he experienced three years earlier, in 1990, when he decided to pee in Marcel Duchamp’s famous “ready-made” from 1917, a urinal with the title “Fountain” bestowed upon it.

I'd have left an upper decker.

The Story Behind the World’s Most Famous Desktop Background

So he stopped his car, pulled out his medium-format camera, and took a few photos using color Fujifilm. Those brilliant greens and pure blues were totally unedited when O’Rear uploaded them to Corbis, a stock photo and image licensing site founded by Bill Gates. A few years later, he got a call from Microsoft asking to use his shot of Sonoma County as the default background for its newest operating system.

How a grape blight resulted in the most famous photograph of all time.

So Long, Hamburger Helper: America’s Venerable Food Brands Are Struggling

High-end consumers are shifting toward fresher items with fewer processed ingredients while cost-conscious shoppers are buying inexpensive store brands. The makers of staples including Chef Boyardee canned pasta and Hamburger Helper meal kits failed to spot the threat and didn’t innovate in time.

Got that? Hamburger Helper is too hoity toity for poor people now.

'Welcome to hell': G20 protesters start fires after riot police hit them with water cannons and pepper sprays in clashes ahead of Hamburg summit

Dramatic photos showed helmeted officers battling to keep order after 100,000 protesters poured into the city for their 'Welcome To Hell' protest against the meeting of world leaders. Police say they repeatedly asked a group of demonstrators to remove their masks and hoods but instead officers were hit with bottles and bricks - breaking the window of a riot van.

It's agitprop. Posing. The police pretend to police while the rioters wreck stuff. The world has raised an entire generation of Wild Ones: What are you protesting? What have you got?

US judge in Hawaii leaves Trump's travel ban rules in place

The Hawaii Attorney General's Office noted after the ruling that the district court did not address the substance of either party's arguments and instead focused on the procedural question about which court is the appropriate forum to decide the issue.

The nonsensical rulings are over. Not because the judges have gotten religion. They just know they'll be overturned and they'll look like fools. To paraphrase Jennifer Cavalleri, Gorsuch means never having to say you're sorry.

China just built a 250-acre solar farm shaped like a giant panda

Called the Panda Power Plant, it will be able to produce 3.2 billion kilowatt-hours of solar energy in 25 years, according to the company. That will eliminate approximately million tons of coal that would have been used to produce electricity, reducing carbon emissions by 2.74 million tons.

Goofy projects deserve a goofy design, I guess. If arithmetic isn't your strong suit, coal costs maybe $40 a ton. It cost 55 million dollars to build a solar array to avoid buying 40 million dollars-worth of coal.

Oral sex spreading unstoppable bacteria

She said: "When you use antibiotics to treat infections like a normal sore throat, this mixes with the Neisseria species in your throat and this results in resistance." Thrusting gonorrhoea bacteria into this environment through oral sex can lead to super-gonorrhoea. 

Super Gonorrhoea? They'll probably make him into a Marvel superhero in the next edition.

76-year-old woman takes mobility scooter down I-75 after trip to Walmart

After making contact with the woman, Devine loaded the scooter in his patrol car and gave her a ride home. Vehicles such as Amigos cannot operate on the expressway safely since they are unable to maintain the minimum speed limit of 45 mph.  Most mobility scooters cannot travel faster than 5 miles per hour.

It was kind to help her out instead of citing her.

Teens arrested in Massachusetts for allegedly having sex on beach while crowd watched, cheered on

The four teenagers “will not be arraigned for at least six months,” Judge Robert Welsh III said on Wednesday. He agreed to delay the arraignments while the four attend a program for first-time offenders.

First-time offenders? What does that mean? They were all virgins? There's a program? Back in my day my friends just slapped me on the back and said attaboy.

Have a great Friday, everyone!

The world is moving strongly into a period of hostile takeovers.

For the purposes of our discussion, a hostile takeover is the subversion of an existing power structure from its current owners without shooting. I'll skip questions of merit. Deserve's got nothing to do with it, according to William Munny, the famous philosopher. Of course that line is a hostile takeover itself, from Lawrence of Arabia:

Lawrence: Tell the politicians to burn their paper now.                 

Allenby: Fair enough.                 

Lawrence: Fair? What's fair got to do with it? It's going to happen.

Sexual harassment lawsuits in the tech industry are a minor form of hostile takeover, for instance. Tech businesses were founded on circumventing established laws and customs by simply putting an http in front of your name. It worked for a while. They created nothing. They were hostile takeovers of existing power structures. They ignored laws and customs to get between the customer and the providers of goods and services they desire, as surely as Paulie in Goodfellas did to the restaurant and the patrons. Tech titans don't understand business much. That's why they're in charge of great affairs, but still sitting through TED talks about the productivity gains they'll enjoy by sorting their intellectual crayons by color. Their businesses are now big and established enough to be pillaged in turn, however, and the lady lawyers will have them, easy. They looked at my client funny, your honor. Make her CEO. You wouldn't look at Joe Pesci funny, and he's a walk in the park compared to any given woman in an office setting. I don't care. Uber run by Yahoo management doesn't bother me.

On a larger scale, shooting wars don't accomplish much anymore. Assad fights because he's weak, not because he's strong, for instance. If you order your affairs correctly, opportunities for plunder fall in your lap. People who are fighting are generally proxies of obscure power syndicates. For the most part, the world is a being ruled by syndicates. Gangster states. China is a syndicate. Russia is a syndicate. Their outward forms do not reveal their inner power structure. You simply watch what they do to identify what they're driving at. Russia wants a port on the Black Sea. They will keep the Crimea. That's not fair, say the Ukrainians. Fair? What's fair got to do with it? It's going to happen.

It appears that America is being run by a syndicate. There was a hostile takeover by an outsider who understood a proxy battle. The in crowd is attempting to put humpty dumpty back together again by any means they can muster. Looking for a head for this hydra is a waste of time. They do not need marching orders. They simply understand, as a group, that power is slipping away from them, so they might as well go all in, because if they don't, they'll be on the outside. You know, in the dreaded private sector.

They believe they deserve to run the United States, and signal their merit to rule by a series of categorical blandishments they swap with each other. They're a fraternity without Greek letters on the front. They don't think it's fair that they devoted their lives to the nomenklatura career track, only to have their skillset made superfluous by an outsider.

What's fair got to do with it? It's either going to happen, or it isn't.

On to the links.

U.S. president landed Wednesday night in Warsaw for meetings with Poland and other nations engaged in a new trading bloc that weakens Russia

The article's author inexpertly tries to flip the script back to: No one went to Trump's inauguration. He's not popular. There's 2500 words of foot stamping, and then a very interesting item I'd missed:

A White House official confirmed on Tuesday that part of Trump's globally televised speech will focus on energy issues, a reference to the Three SeAs Initiative meant to unite a dozen central European countries in a north-south economic alliance that will weaken Russia's regional power.

If that map at the top of this page looks like a nothingburger to you, you're not paying attention. I have found myself, completely by accident, doing business with businesses in three of the green countries, and the Ukraine, too. That's where the action is. Trump knows where the action is. His wife is Slovenian, after all, and she looks like she's still ready for action.

First stunning photographic portraits of Britain: Incredible archive of pictures by Victorian pioneer Francis Frith reveals the changing face of the nation

Literally fascinating photos. I couldn't stop looking at them.

Blue Apron falls 9% on fourth day as a public company

They lose money on every sale, but they'll make it up on volume.

It is as if you were doing work v1.0

If you need a laugh, just sign in with any old words and play along with what you find. It would be hilarious if it wasn't so painfully accurate.

Impossibly Hungry Judges

I think it is telling that most psychologists don’t seem to be able to recognize data patterns that are too large to be caused by psychological mechanisms. There are simply no plausible psychological effects that are strong enough to cause the data pattern in the hungry judges study. Implausibility is not a reason to completely dismiss empirical findings, but impossibility is.

Ah, statistics. Did you know that 94.73 percent of statistics are made up on the spot?

How to Murder a Byzantine Emperor

An empire like Byzantium does not last for a thousand years without its own share of political intrigue. Here are three accounts of murder told by medieval chroniclers in vivid detail, in which the plot did not go as smoothly as the conspirators hoped, but in end resulted with a new emperor on the throne.

Kathy Griffin and James Comey seen furiously taking notes.

Amelia Earhart May Have Survived Crash-Landing, Newly Discovered Photo Suggests

Independent analysts told History the photo appears legitimate and undoctored. Shawn Henry, former executive assistant director for the FBI and an NBC News analyst, has studied the photo and feels confident it shows the famed pilot and her navigator. 

Ooh. Independent analysts. I love those. They're better than anonymous sources. Did they prove that Amelia refused to show up for her physical in the Texas Air National Guard, too? I'm asking for a friend. Alright, alright, I'm asking for Dan Rather.

Facebook can track your browsing even after you've logged out, judge says

Davila said that plaintiffs could have taken steps to keep their browsing histories private, for example by using the Digital Advertising Alliance’s opt-out tool or using “incognito mode”, and failed to show that Facebook illegally “intercepted” or eavesdropped on their communications. “Facebook’s intrusion could have easily been blocked, but plaintiffs chose not to do so,” said Davila, who dismissed an earlier version of the five-year-old case in October 2015.

"Can" is not le mot juste. Does, and will be allowed to continue to do so, is more like it. The judge's reasoning is piquant: Did you see the way the plaintiff was dressed online? They were asking for it.

Volvo steers toward electrified future. CEO signals 'end of the solely combustion engine-powered car'

Volvo will only offer electrified powertrains in models that it launches starting in 2019, a move that signals its intention to phase out the internal combustion engine from its lineup, the automaker said Wednesday.

Farming subsidies pay better than farming.

Japan's population is falling faster than it ever has before

Younger people increasingly want more egalitarian relationships in which men and women can both pursue their careers and share household duties. But career pursuits have won the battle for the last decade or so, while starting or growing families has taken a backseat on a mass scale.

I see the kamikaze ethos is alive and well in the land of the rising sun.

Fire May Be the Only Remedy for a Plague Killing Deer and Elk

“They’re not hard to pick out at the end stage,” Dr. Zabel said. “They have a vacant stare, they have a stumbling gait, their heads are drooping, their ears are down, you can see thick saliva dripping from their mouths. It’s like a true zombie disease.”

Deer and elk work at CNN?

Have a pleasant pre-Friday, everyone!

I could never figure out if Christopher Plummer was any good. He's been a fixture in movies I like to watch for a long time. He wouldn't get carved into any cinematic Mount Rushmores or anything, but he was always hanging around. He's more important than a That Guy in the movies, but I have trouble picturing people plunking down the shekels because his name was above the fine print on the poster.

He was Kipling and Arthur Wellesley and Rommel to good effect. He flounced around as Commodus pretty well in The Fall of the Roman Empire. The Sound of Music was approximately the most successful movie ever made, so it looks good on a resume, but he was just a bright moon in Julie Andrews' orbit in that one. The Battle of Britain is movie worth rewatching, but he's hardly the star of it. And no one pays any attention to anyone else when Peter Sellers is eating the scenery, so his turn in the Pink Panther series is also a secondary one. He and Cato have to fight it out for second place.

I got the impression he takes himself pretty seriously. Or, perhaps, wants us to take him seriously. That can be deadly. It leads to Charlton Heston trying to do Julius Caesar (shudder). Plummer has also declaims Shakespeare, but only in places where Canadian pigeons act as critics, so I have no idea to what effect. He's Canadian himself, and they ladle awards and titles all over him, but I don't know if that matters. They give statues out at random these days, based on a virtue-signalling order I can't bother to figure out.

So I get this movie Barrymore. It's a more-or-less one-man-play set to celluloid. Plummer is John Barrymore, a famous actor you never heard of if you're under the age of 93. Anyway, it's Barrymore ten minutes before his liver became an insuperable sea anchor. Washed up, bank account hoovered by Hoover and alimony. A man who made a bundle in bad movies, got serious about his work, and became a formidable Shakespearean stage actor. The movie is just Barrymore, wandering an empty stage with a reader offstage to give him cues. He wants to do Richard III, one last time, but he has to prove to some backers that he can still find the lines in the fog of his alcoholism. He still needs the work, every which way.

So Plummer plays Barrymore, a man born to a stage family, who works in Hollywood for dough and entree to the high life, but who wants to be taken seriously. Plummer has a chair or two, a drinks cart, a rack of costumes, and a basket of swords and flyswatters to work with, and a man in the canyon of the curtains to yell something back when he yells LINE! That's it. Plummer has to conjure up a man, bigger than life, then make him small, and somehow resurrect the greatness in fits and starts. He has to cook envy and pity for the audience on a hobo stove while they wait. 

I now know if Christopher Plummer is any good.

On to the links!

What Happens Just Before Show Tme at the Met Opera, in 12 Rooms You'll Never See

People who have never been backstage think show business is glamorous.

The Dark Side of the British Seaside

Hmm. I was unaware that the British Seaside had a bright side.

The Medicare machine: patient details of 'any Australian' for sale on darknet

Identity thieves don't honor HIPAA rules? And an obese clerk with Mary Tyler Moore clothes and Post-It notes all over her monitor isn't good at safeguarding your medical records? I'm shocked. This is my shocked face.

How To Kayak on the L.A. River

Whoah. Back up. There's a river in Los Angeles? Who knew?

New studies of ancient concrete could teach us to do as the Romans did

The Romans could teach us a lot of stuff about a lot of stuff. I'm up for a Carthaginian peace, for instance.

How much damage could North Korea unleash even without nuclear weapons?

Speaking of Carthage...

Tillerson calls for 'global action' to stop North Korea nuclear program

I'm trying to picture the deal that China will demand to smother little Kimmie with a pillow.

Dropbox Is Getting Ready for the Biggest Tech IPO Since Snapchat

I think Dropbox flummoxes the modern tech investor, because it appears to make money.

Mark Pincus and Reid Hoffman are launching a new group to rethink the Democratic Party

Proof positive the Democrats are in the wilderness. Oh, and a mobile phone video game designer is their Natty Bumppo. Good luck with that.

Germany must brace for more attacks by radicalized Muslims: officials

Hmm. That sounds like an order.

Austria to send troops and armoured vehicles to border with Italy to block migrants

Sorry, Germany, Austria didn't get the memo.

Meet the First Family of Molossia, a nation within Nevada

I'm a snob. I figure nations really should be larger than bowling teams.

Survival of the smallest: the contested history of the English short story

I don't know about how popular short stories are right now. I do know the covers of a Harry Potter book are too far apart.

Have a lovely Monday again today.