2023
Want to read: This Bird Has Flown by Susanna Hoffs 📚Good interview with Hoffs, formerly of The Bangles, on Debbie Millman’s podcast. Hoffs is surprisingly smart. She’s written a novel and it sounds good.
Finished reading: Persian Fire by Tom Holland 📚 Fascinating story, a non-fiction history of the Persian-Greek war 2500 years ago. But a challenging read. The author uses ornate sentences that I had to read two or three times to get the gist of. I’ve read other Holland history books and enjoyed them, and did not find them quite so difficult.
Yesterday at the supermarket, I saw a man with a dog. The dog wasn’t wearing a service dog vest. It was just a dog, but inside the supermarket. It looked like a chocolate lab, but with a wiry tail.
I happened to be buying treats for Minnie at the dog treats shelf at the moment I saw the dog. The supermarket dog sniffed the shelves with great interest, then turned away.
Later, I saw a teen-age girl with an e-bike in the supermarket. She wasn’t riding it in the supermarket. She was just pushing it. Still, it was odd.
After that, I decided we were just bringing any dang thing we wanted into the supermarket, so I brought in the car and drove it up and down the aisles rather than walking, throwing my purchases from the shelves over my shoulder onto the back seat. I knocked a lot of things over, but it was otherwise very convenient.
I deleted Meta Threads from my phone. I may come back to the service, but I’m not feeling urgency, and I don’t like app’s privacy policies.
Threads grabs a great deal of user information, including text messages.
Text messages?! Are you kidding?!
I’ve got Facebook on my phone. That’s bad enough.
Has anybody found a news alerts service for the phone that only alerts you for world-changing news? All the news alert services I’ve tried are too noisy.
I want an alert if Biden or Trump drops dead, or if Ukraine boils over into World War III. I don’t need an alert to let me know somebody got murdered 15 miles away, or the Walmart killer got sentenced or—true alert I got from CNN yesterday—how to not get bedbugs from hotel beds.
Basically, I only want to get a news alert once every few months. All the news alerts I’ve subscribed to send alerts every few hours.
I fear the service I’m looking for may not exist.
Dolly Parton does not want to be an AI hologram, thank you very much: ‘I don’t want to leave my soul here on Earth’ (Boing Boing / Rusty Blazenhoff)
Jo Walton writes about Heinlein’s Worst Novel. I 98% agree.
My favorite Heinleins are his early books, particularly “Citizen of the Galaxy.”
I loved “The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress” and “Starship Troopers,” but I’d love them even more without the lectures.
I loved “Stranger in a Strange Land” when I was 13 years old, but it ages badly.
And “The Cat Who Walks Through Walls” and “To Sail Beyond the Sunset” are just plain bad.
I often think about the failed US Heinlein describes in “I Will Fear No Evil” and “Friday.”