Approximately 70% of all people who get cancer have eaten pickles.
Most people who have recently died in car accidents ate a pickle in the past year.
All Americans who ate pickles in 1901 have died.
Therefore, pickles obviously kill people.
(This is a post about Tylenol and autism. )
I just got a notification that my Tumblr blog turned 17 years old today. Tumblr has rarely been my primary social media platform, but it has always been easy to syndicate posts from whatever my favorite is to there, and I’ve come to be quite fond of Tumblr.
The Verge staff lists books that changed their lives. My friend Barbara Krasnoff adds class to the list by naming “Little Women,” by Louisa May Alcott. Nobody names “Lord of the Rings” or the Harry Potter books, which I would have expected to see on such a list. However, Harry Potter is now, as they say, problematic. Same for Neil Gaiman, another writer whose work I might have expected to see on a most-influential-books list not long ago.
If I were contributing to a list like this, and being honest, I would name “Red Planet” by Robert A. Heinlein. It was the first chapter book I read, at age 8, and awakened in me a lifelong love of reading, science fiction and Heinlein. It’s no longer one of my favorite Heinleins; I think that would be “Citizen of the Galaxy.”
If I wanted to impress people, I’d pick Mark Twain’s Autobiography, “Life on the Mississippi,” or “Roughing It.” I do love Mark Twain; I am currently reading Ron Chernow’s biography of the writer. Twain’s work has been influential in my life, but honestly, not as influential as the science fiction I read as a boy.
Why your next car should be an electric cargo bike. I am 100% ebike-curious, but I don’t feel like I can justify the expense in addition to the car, and an ebike doesn’t seem like it would be a car replacement. Also, riding an ebike seems like it would be dangerous on our local roads.
In search of Robert Redford’s most iconic jacket. It’s the herringbone tweed he wore in “Three Days of the Condor,” which we watched last night.
I migrated from Mastodon to Micro.blog, again. Great thing about both platforms is you can just do that, easily and without inconveniencing anybody. I may switch back in a bit because why not?
How Tim Cook sold out Steve Jobs. By Anil Dash. “The son of an immigrant, a child of the counterculture, a man offering an unmistakable fuck-you to Big Brother, and a person who, above all, would never kiss the ass of someone who had absolutely awful taste. This was Steve Jobs.”
Hate the player AND the game: But above all, hate the crooked ump.. By Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr. “The wellspring of enshittification isn’t poor consumption choices, it’s poor policy choices. The reason monsters are able to destroy our online lives isn’t their personal moral failings, it’s the system that rewards predatory, deceptive and unfair commercial practices and elevates their foremost practitioners to positions of power within firms:”