Trump has been doing everything he can to distract the world away from the Epstein files, even starting a war, and Melania just put the spotlight back. That’s interesting.
No email is worth reading that contains the phrase “just wanted to follow up.”
Today I found myself thinking about a science fiction writer named Clifford D. Simak, popular in the 1930s-50s, although he continued publishing until his death in the 80s. He was best known for short stories.
Somebody said that the archetypal Simak story went like this: An old country coot is settin on his front porch, sippin moonshine and whittling a sharp stick. A flying saucer lands in the front yard and a scary purple alien comes out. The alien admires the old coot’s sharp stick and says he’ll give the old coot the design for an interstellar spaceship drive if the old coot will give the alien the stick in return. The old coot makes the trade and to seal the deal they set on the front porch and sip moonshine together.
To feed my RSS habit, I recent I recently switched from Inoreader to Newsblur, which turned out to be well-timed, because Samuel Clay, the developer who runs Newsblur, has had a sudden burst of activity implementing new features. Among these are daily AI-generated summaries that I find to be quite good, if a bit buggy — like news roundups delivered multiple times daily. He’s also implemented natural language filtering, which I haven’t been able to get working.
Fellow RSS addict Jason Snell has more thoughts. Like Jason, I want my newsletters and RSS feeds in the same place, which is a major reason I switched away from Inoreader, because Inoreader’s newsletter support just does not work for me. It’s otherwise a great app — worth trying for heavy RSS users.
Like other Founders, Thomas Jefferson was a contradiction on human rights: He dedicated his life to the United States and individual freedom, and often treated African-Americans with respect, while simultaneously owning 610 people as property. Historian Annette Gordon-Reed collected Jefferson’s own writings about race, both personal and public. “He wrote that all men are born free, but he also enslaved hundreds.”
Author Rachel Hartigan explores the life and disappearance of Amelia Earhart in a new book. “… the most likely thing to have happened, the simplest explanation that matches with most of what we know, it’s that she got lost, ran out of gas, and crashed.”
Here’s some of what I’ve been writing for Fierce Network lately:
Q-Day just got closer — you need to be ready by 2029, Cloudflare says.
Cisco is in the early stages of developing products for space data centers. “I wouldn’t bet against Elon," says CEO Chuck Robbins.
Akamai Technologies’s AI orchestrator puts inference at the network edge, where latency matters.
Telcos are picking up the pace to achieve Level 4 autonomous networks, according to a TM Forum study. Asian telcos are in the lead.
Give me ideas for getting more from my Apple Watch
How do you use your Apple Watch (or other smartwatch)? I use my Apple Watch heavily, but only for a few purposes:
- Silent notifications. That’s the big one. If I’m not already using my Mac or my phone, the Watch tells me when I have an incoming text message or phone call, and I can decide based on information on the Watch screen whether to answer immediately or dismiss it for later. The Apple Watch is also my silent alarm clock to wake me up in the morning.
- Workout tracker. I start it when I start walking the dog, turn around at the 1.6 mile mark, and when I hit 3.2 miles I know I’m done.
- Telling time and setting timers, of course, but I don’t need a smartwatch for that.
- Notifications of upcoming appointments.
- I use a brilliant app called Footpath to map turn-by-turn walking directions when I want to walk an unfamiliar route.
I don’t have a lot of interest in fitness trackers or health trackers, other than the simple workout tracker users I just described.
How do you use your Apple Watch (or other smartwatch)? Give me ideas
That moment when you regret buying a frozen food, so you put it in the big chest freezer for future generations of archaeologists to discover.
Today I learned that Gregg Phillips, the FEMA official in charge of responding to fires and floods, says the hand of God suddenly and mysteriously teleported him to a Waffle House in Rome, Georgia.
Phillips was named in December to head FEMA’s Office of Response and Recovery, overseeing more than 1,000 employees and a budget of $300 million. Before that, he advocated conspiracy theories about the 2020 election, and used violent language in connection with President Biden.
“On Wednesday, Mr. Phillips wrote on Truth Social, President Trump’s social media platform, that the incident took place while he was heavily medicated as part of a cancer treatment. But he also described it as a miracle performed by God,” writes Richard Fausset at the New York Times.
“‘The word “teleportation” was not mine,’ Mr. Phillips wrote. ‘It was used by someone else in the conversation reaching for language to describe something with no easy name. The more accurate biblical terms are “translated” or “transported” — not new ideas for people of faith.’”
Holy shit, Gregg, the word “teleportation” is not the problem here.
“Mr. Phillips’s claims are part of a growing trend among high-profile American conservatives to assert the physical presence of beings from the spiritual realm, or from provinces that are often reserved for science fiction novelists. In 2024, Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host, said that he was ‘mauled,’ while sleeping, by ‘a demon or by something unseen.’ Former Representative Matt Gaetz recently said that a U.S. Army official had told him about ‘hybrid breeding programs, where captured aliens were breeding with humans to create some hybrid race that could engage in intergalactic communication.’
“Representative Tim Burchett, a Republican from Tennessee, told Newsmax on Wednesday that he had been briefed by government officials about aliens, adding that the country ‘would’ve come unglued, I think, if they would’ve heard all that I’d heard.’”
The Times’s Fausset interviewed people at all three Waffle Houses in Rome, Georgia, and nobody there had ever seen Phillips. If he arrived by teleportation — or any other form of transportation — nobody saw him.
“At the Waffle Houses of Rome this week, Mr. Phillips’s assertion of supernatural travel was met with skepticism. At the branch on U.S. Route 411, close to a Quality Inn and a pest control company, Estelle Mandeville, 27, was finishing up breakfast. Ms. Mandeville, a North Carolinian who was traveling for work, described herself as ‘uncomfortably atheist,’ and noted that she, personally, had come to Rome in a 2018 Kia Niro.
“Grant Sikes, 20, a student at nearby Berry College who hopes to attend an Episcopal seminary one day, said that divine power, from his experience, expressed itself in more subtle ways. He said he felt the presence of God at that moment, as he wrapped up a late, mellow breakfast with his grandfather, Larry Kellogg, 83.”
Grant is normal! Feeling the presence of God when you’re having breakfast with your grandpa is normal!
“Austin Spears, 29, a land surveyor, also found Mr. Phillips’s story to be dubious. But he also acknowledged that all human lives are studded with little mysteries.
“‘I can say I’ve been drunk and ended up in a Waffle House,’ Mr. Spears said. ‘Don’t know how I got there. But I was there.’”
I always suspected that science fiction would come true. But until Trump, I didn’t think it would be “Idiocracy.”