Mitch's Blog

🦍 Mitchellaneous 6.8.2026

Mon, 08 Jun 2026 19:25:29 -0700

“April 1943. ‘Dallas, Texas. Proofreading desk of the Dallas Morning News.’ Medium format acetate negative by John Vachon for the Office of War Information.” Via https://www.shorpy.com/node/27900

Relatable.

She seems nice.

Mon, 08 Jun 2026 13:43:14 -0700

We are living in the Clear Channel internet, writes Ryan Broderick at Garbage Day…

… where everything has been so thoroughly corporatized that nothing ends up in our feeds by accident anymore. At least, not when it comes to the truly viral content. … And there are really on two outcomes here. One possibility is we just slowly accept that nothing we see online anymore is genuine and accept that social media is just a new worse version of TV now. The other, much more interesting possibility, is that people realize the internet is infinitely big and you can always just make a new version of it.

I see this most prominently on Facebook, where 90% of my feed seems to be AI slop and ads for male incontinence products.

Also: Ryan and Panic World producer Grant Irving are going to the UFC White House fight. That should be insane and fun to read.

Sitthroughable

Mon, 08 Jun 2026 11:06:47 -0700

Growing up on Long Island in the 1970s, I loved reading the capsule movie reviews that ran in the television guide for the daily newspaper, Newsday. The reviewer, who worked anonymously for much of his career, wrote little jewels, often deliciously snarky, just a few words or a couple of sentences long, that summed up the movie and his opinions of it.

His trademark was the word “sitthroughable,” which is self-explanatory. He also had other catchphrases, including: “Buy the premise, buy the flick,” to describe horror movies and other genre oddities.

Examples of his reviews:

⁠The Americanization of Emily (1964) “The political ethics of the military are stomped in this wartime morality story written by Paddy Chayefsky. It concerns some Navy brass maneuvers and a running love/hate affair between James Garner and Julie Andrews. Cynical, witty and wise.”

⁠⁠Blood on the Arrow (1964) “If you don’t think an attempt to rescue a small child from a band of Apaches can be dull, try this.”

⁠⁠Cleopatra (1963) “The best and the worst that can be said about this celebrated expenditure of money, time, effort and talent is that it is dull. And, despite what you’ve heard, it’s Rex Harrison’s picture, if he wants it. Elizabeth Taylor is beautiful. Richard Burton too often acts like a man who can’t find the men’s room. The pomp and circumstance is there, but for the other two hours it drags.”

⁠Creatures of Destruction (1968) “A hypnotist seems to have mystic powers. There is no doubt that he can put you to sleep.“⁠

The Dark Angel (1935) “Merle Oberon loves both Herbert Marshall and Fredric March, who both love her. WWI arrives to further complicate things. Top grade soap.“⁠⁠

The Devil’s Rain (1975) “Concerns a group of devil worshipers (Ernest Borgnine plays the head devil’s disciple) somewhere in the Southwest who have traded their souls for wax bodies and tar-filled eye sockets, which melt and gurgle at the slightest provocation. The best that can be said is that it is not quite the worst movie ever made.”

And so on and so on.

A blogger has painstakingly assembled more than 900 of these reviews, along with a few scans of the actual TV guides in which they appeared, and I have read and enjoyed every one. The blog is called, appropriately enough, “Sitthroughable.”

The author of the Sitthroughable blog is apparently anonymous — if he gives his name, I can’t find it.

And like the blogger, the Newsday movie reviewer worked in anonymity for much of his career. But he eventually de-cloaked and revealed himself to be John Cashman, who previously worked for Newsday as Nassau County day editor, wrote four books, had written more than 4,000 reviews for the TV Book as of 1974, and kept going for years after that. He was nominated for a Pulitzer in 1964 for a piece titled “Negroes Without Schools,” owned a bookstore, taught school and died in 1985.

The artist who illustrated many of these reviews was named Gary A. Viskupic, and he did a fantastic job.

The author of the Sitthroughable blog notes correctly that these reviews are evocative of a bygone era in mass media, where you had a half-dozen channels of TV (fewer than that in smaller markets), no streaming, no movie rentals, so if you wanted to watch TV, you turned on the box and took your pick of the meager offerings available. Sometimes you found a jewel like “The Maltese Falcon.” Sometimes it was a mediocre, sitthroughable bit of cinema that passed the time and maybe had one or two great scenes or snatches of dialogue.

In addition to the Cashman blog, the Sitthroughable author hosts another blog, with the excellent name “Don’t Parade on My Rain,”where he posts scans from his collection of Newsday TV Books from 1974-83. The design of those books was outstanding, evocative of the 70s without being kitschy. He has a Facebook page too.

The two blogs are are artifacts of the good old web — still surviving and going strong but easily lost in the shadow of Facebook, YouTube, TikTok and the other big social silos — where you could build a website, maybe about some weird niche interest, and that site would not get buried in the constantly updated feed, but would instead hang in there for 20 years until somebody like me came along to appreciate it.

And Chapman’s career is an artifact of the good old days of newspaper journalism, when a writer could master an idiosyncratic form of short-form writing comparable to haiku, sonnets — or today’s microblogging — and share it with local readers.

Mon, 08 Jun 2026 10:23:41 -0700

The cuck Internet theory asserts that social media is built on bots spewing algorithmically generated content for the consumption of algorithms, with flesh-and-blood people as incidental bystanders.

Mon, 08 Jun 2026 09:54:15 -0700

“Billionaires poured trillions into AI because they are obsessed with the fantasy of a world without people." — Cory Doctorow

Sun, 07 Jun 2026 19:43:32 -0700

Facebook is now showing me frequent ads for male incontinence underwear and pull-up cargo pants for seniors.

Fri, 05 Jun 2026 13:21:53 -0700

Anthony Head brought gravitas to Buffy and everything else he touched. He was a charming and funny father figure, and sometime singer, in “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” one of his many roles that showed just how much he could do

Fri, 05 Jun 2026 11:57:52 -0700

RIP Anthony Stewart Head, who played Rupert Giles on “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and Rupert Mannion, the villainous ex-husband of Hannah Waddingham’s character Rebecca, in “Ted Lasso.”

Head said that his rise to global fame taught him “not to get caught up in the hype. [Co-stars] Alyson Hannigan and Sarah Michelle Gellar would talk about magazine covers, and I’d think: where’s mine? They were competing, but ultimately it’s a game that only lasts so long. It’s better to just get on with the job.”

Fri, 05 Jun 2026 11:24:44 -0700

Cisco seeks to be ‘the core AI stack for enterprises and hyperscalers’ — analyst. Cisco full-stack AI strategy integrates compute, storage, networking, security and software in a unified AI factory, analyst Jack Gold said in an emailed research bulletin. My latest on Fierce Network.

🦍 Mitchellaneous 6.5.2026

Thu, 04 Jun 2026 22:44:37 -0700

Wed, 03 Jun 2026 22:10:45 -0700

Ted Danson apologized for his 1993 blackface roast of Whoopi Goldberg.

🦍 Mitchellaneous 6.3.2026

Wed, 03 Jun 2026 08:55:00 -0700

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 22:14:04 -0700

Mister Rogers speaks wisdom about making things.

🐿️ Mitchellaneous 5.31.2026

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 08:55:00 -0700

Galaxy Magazine Number 2. 1972. Cover art by Gaughan.

reddit.com/r/CoolSci…

www.tumblr.com/mitchiped…

Newsletter stickage

Sun, 31 May 2026 20:18:36 -0700

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.

Sun, 31 May 2026 17:01:38 -0700

“a whole theory about abstraction levels in Chinese food names”

Sun, 31 May 2026 14:00:18 -0700

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

Sun, 31 May 2026 12:32:30 -0700

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

Sat, 30 May 2026 14:47:24 -0700

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Fri, 29 May 2026 22:49:25 -0700