Kevin Roose @kevin@theforkiverse.com asked: “tell me the last thing you bought for under $50 that radically improved your life.”

I replied: “This $5 dog poop bag holder. After the dog does her business and you scoop it up, tie a knot in the top of the full bag, hang the knotted bag from the handle of the leash, continue the walk without having to hold the poop bag in your hands.”

The thread is fun to read.

Kevin is tech columnist for the New York Times and podcasts on Hard Fork.

Tom Homan: If Democrats Don’t Stop Calling Us Murderers, We’re Just Going To Be Forced To Keep Murdering You.

You can see how fragile and pathetic these men are. They are so desperate to subjugate and suppress people who disagree with them politically. They seemed to think that once they were in power, the public would love and admire them for their power. Instead, the vast majority of Americans see them for what they are: pathetic, insecure man-babies in way over their heads.

I loved the novel “The Ministry of Time” by Kaliane Bradley, which is a lighthearted workplace comedy and paranormal romance about colonialism and multigenerational trauma. You would not think those things go together but they do, splendidly well. 📚

“If one more person says ‘what if they medicated Van Gogh’ I think I’m permitted to set things on fire."

Greg Morris: “The weird part isn’t that the indie web exists. It’s that we ever thought centralised platforms were a better idea.” I’d like for this to be right. But people still like their centralized platforms — their Facebook, Threads, Instagram, YouTube and TikTok. The indie web is, unfortunately, still a rounding error compared with the numbers and influence of centralized platform users.

I finished reading “Entities: The Selected Novels of Eric Frank Russell,” an anthology of several novels and short stories. I read two of the novels: “Wasp” and “Sinister Barrier.” A few months ago I read one more by Russell: “Men, Martians and Machines.” Classic sci-fi from the 1930s-50s.

I’ve watched the rise of dictation tools for the Mac with some interest. I dictate more than half of what I write into the iPhone — which is a lot — email, text messages, notes to myself — but if I have a full-size keyboard, it’s easier for me to type than dictate.

Good’s last words to Ross were “That’s fine. I’m not mad at you,” while his to her, after he shot her in the face, were “Fcking btch!”

A team of experts evicted a 550-pound bear that was squatting in the basement of an Altadena, Calif., home for more than a month. A member of the team crawled into the basement and fired paintballs filled with vegetable oil at the bear’s butt. Watch this Facebook reel of the bear making its exit.

The Rewatchables podcast has never done Clerks or Mallrats. Shocking!

Republicans somehow managed to sprint from “we’re trying to protect women in sports” straight to defending a woman being shot in the head three times at point blank range for trying to drive away from a masked thug.

ICE is “a bunch of meatheads who are basically Biff’s sidekicks from Back to the Future running around with tear gas and handguns and a sense of impunity."

Mitchellaneous did not go out at the usual time yesterday morning. When I noticed this, I poked around for a few minutes looking for a technical reason for the problem. Eventually, I figured it out — I had scheduled it for 2025. D’oh! 🤦‍♂️It’s coming up in a few minutes.

Chris Arnade walks 45 miles in three days through New Jersey and Staten Island. “New Jersey has pockets of Manhattan’s density, but with LA’s reliance on cars… For people who like it, that reality contains the best of both (Manhattan’s localized variety with LA’s space and freedom), and for those who don’t, it contains the worst (Manhattan’s crowding, with LA’s traffic).”

Billy Crystal’s apartment in When Harry Met Sally is over the top even by NY movie apartment standards. That’s a billionaire apartment. Billy is clearly money-laundering. As is Hugh Grant in Notting Hill — no way he affords a flat in Notting Hill based on income from a failing travel bookstore.

“All of us, citizens and immigrants alike, are being ruled by people who think life is a privilege bestowed by authority, and death is a fair penalty for disobedience."

In the 80s, VHS video dating services were the future.

Everyone inside America’s most flailing destination city has a theory for what’s wrong. Now I have my own.

At a bar downstairs at the Luxor Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, I recently found myself next to a 67-year-old man who had come to town to get a tattoo on his shoulder. The tattoo in question was of Yosemite Falls, in California. As best I could understand it, he was getting branded with the landmark because he was enmeshed in a situationship that wasn’t working out. He and this woman had apparently taken a memorable trip to Yosemite earlier this year, and he hoped that—after he showed her the tattoo—a tarnished spark would be rekindled. I wished him all the luck in the world as he took his leave of me, and for a few minutes, I was alone among the chirping slot machines, nursing a gin and soda and pondering how no place on Earth can make you believe the impossible quite like Las Vegas.

I know more people who hate Las Vegas than love it, and I’ve never been able to construct a convincing argument for why they’re wrong. We are granted only so many vacations in this life, and it might seem ill-considered to spend one of them watching the Blue Man Group in an Egyptian-themed hotel in the Nevadan desert. But here I was, at the Luxor, on a quest to renew my love affair with this city.

A well-reported, well written article.

I love this dialogue from “Wake Up Dead Man."

Let’s Call a Murder a Murder. By John Gruber at Daring Fireball.