Mitch's Blog

Something I saw while walking the dog at the park this morning.

A young light-skinned, slender Black man with a thin beard, riding a skateboard, crouched and turned to the side, as skilled skateboarders can do.

A medium-sized dog ran joyously alongside the skateboarding man, mouth open and grinning.

The young man had the dog’s leash in one hand, and the other hand was outstretched, holding his phone.

I could see he was getting a perfect shot of the dog running.

The young man turned to look at me and dropped his jaw, as if to say, “This is amazing! Are you seeing this?!”

I dropped my own jaw in return as if to say, “I know! Amazing!”

This would have been a perfect shot for me too, of the young man on his skateboard with his phone and the joyously running dog. But by the time I thought of that, the moment had passed.

Are Americans losing their taste for Starbucks? “The whole concept got old,” one customer said. [cbsnews.com]

I rarely shop at Starbucks when I’m home, but it was a regular stop, sometimes multiple times daily, when I was traveling frequently on business in the teens.

This month, I had my first business trip since the pandemic—and I don’t think I stopped at Starbucks at all. I didn’t seem to be near a Starbucks when I was in the mood for coffee, not even at the airport.

Also, I don’t mind the coffee they serve at conferences. The coffee itself is bad, but I top it up with oat milk or soy milk and add a packet of Splenda, and it’s a tasty caffeinated beverage that contains coffee.

Jack Dorsey quits Bluesky board and urges users to stay on Elon Musk’s X [theguardian.com]

“Don’t depend on corporations to grant you rights,” Dorsey tweeted. “Defend them yourself using freedom technology. (you’re on one).”

What a load of bollocks. Musk pays lip service to free speech but he drops the ban-hammer on people who disagree with him, and when authoritarian governments ask him to do so.

Twitter and Musk are hardly underdog defenders of freedom against corporations. Twitter is a $41 billion corporation that practices censorship, and Musk is the third-wealthiest person in the world.

You’re not a sinner for gaining weight. You’re a typical product of a dysfunctional environment that makes it very hard to feel full. If you are angry about these drugs, remember the competition isn’t between you and your neighbor who’s on weight-loss drugs. It’s between you and a food industry constantly designing new ways to undermine your satiety. If anyone is the cheat here, it’s that industry. We should be united in a struggle against it and its products, not against desperate people trying to find a way out of this trap.

— Ozempic Is Repairing a Hole in Our Diets Created by Processed Foods [nytimes.com]

The “problematic punctuation point” messes up geographical databases. [bbc.com]

The writer Damon Knight said the apostrophe should simply be eliminated from the English language; it serves no purpose other than to make intelligent people look stupid.

You’re now going to tell me that the apostrophe denotes possession. No, it doesn’t.

My new favorite subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/OhNoConsequences/. For people shocked by the consequences of their words or actions.

We watched the first episode of Fallout. It has given me many excellent ideas for interior design and fashion.

The AI-Generated Population Is Here, and They’re Ready to Work. AI that can predict how specific humans will look, act and feel could do the jobs of fashion models, focus group members and clinical trial participants [wsj.com]

Romance writer K. Renee was locked out of Google Docs without warning or explanation, losing access to 10 works-in-progress comprising 222,000 words. [wired.com]

“Hazel,” a self-described “tab hoarder,” kept 7,500 tabs open for two years. Then Firefox refused to restore the session. [techspot.com]

NYC early 1900’s [reddit.com]

A Native American girl of the Kiowa tribe Oklahoma 1894 [reddit.com]