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European nations were at war for a thousand years, culminating in two of the bloodiest wars ever fought. But those nations have been at peace for 80 years. This is a magnificent achievement. The Trump administration thinks it’s “pathetic."

Make Person-To-Person Email a Thing Again

Inspired by Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr, I’m trying to Make Person-to-Person Email a Thing again. If your message does not require immediate attention, don’t send a text message, WhatsApp, iMessage, Facebook Messenger, or other direct-message. Just send an email. That way, the recipient reads and responds to it it at their leisure.

Things you should send in email:

  • “Happy birthday!”
  • “Here is a funny meme.”
  • “Let’s get together in a couple of weeks.”

Things that are OK to send in text message:

  • “I’m running 15 minutes late - sorry!”
  • “You’re on fire. Literally. You might want to look into that.”
  • “There is pie.”

Cory wrote about this on his blog recently, but I can’t find the link.

I’m having a lot of difficulty focusing on work today. Fortunately, my work requires me to operate a computer that is connected to the whole Internet oh shit I’m fucked.

Here’s something I saw while walking the dog: The Canada geese are back hanging around at the park. The goslings are not far behind!

Two Canada geese relaxing on a patch of green grass near a tree.

"But her emails!" is back in the news again

When Clinton used her email for official business, it was completely normal behavior, even at her level of government. Small professional services businesses (like the Clinton Foundation) ran their own email servers, and people used their personal email for work.

It was utterly innocent behavior that the Republicans just pretended was shady. Republicans like to do that.

We’re seeing the same strategy today with transphobia and hysteria over immigration and migrants. Trans people, immigrants and migrants threaten no one, but Republicans are just making shit up and getting their supporters worked up over nothing. Jumping at shadows — but there aren’t even any shadows. It’s jumping at nothing.

71-year-old Donald Gorske has eaten two McDonald’s Big Macs every day since 1972. That’s 35,000 Big Macs. He’s saved the receipts and cartons, stacked in his basement.

I still sometimes think about something John Gruber said on Daring Fireball when Gorske was in the news for eating his 25,000th Big Mac in 2011:

My first thought when I heard about him was that he must be either an idiot or an asshole. But now I think not. I think maybe he’s a lucky man — someone who found the perfect food to suit his taste, an obsessive who never tires of it, and it happens to be cheap and readily available almost everywhere in the world.

The life and death of artist Thomas Kinkade

“Painter of Light” Thomas Kinkade, who died from an overdose of alcohol and Valium 13 years ago, is the subject of a new documentary, “Art for Everybody,” by Miranda Yousef.

Kinkade’s fans adore him, made him a ubiquitous cultural icon and built him a financial empire. But he was an alcoholic, accused of multiple instances of sexua harassment, and lost a $3 million court case for defrauding gallery owners, writes Veronica Esposito at The Guardian

“One of my guiding lights is that you have to love your subject,” Yousef told Esposito. “You can see in the film if a film-maker is contemptuous of the subject, and that gets in the way of telling a good and true story.”

Kinkade’s story engages questions about “what is art and who gets to decide, the politicization of taste, and the cost of turning yourself into a brand,” Esposito writes.

Arguably Kinkade’s most prescient stroke was how he turned himself into a brand, obtaining a kind of quasi-influencer status years before there were social media networks capable of delivering fame and fortune. He reached his ubiquity the old fashioned way, through brick-and-mortar stores, a PBS TV show à la Bob Ross, endless merchandising opportunities, and an unbelievable hustle ethic. He even trademarked the “Painter of Light” moniker for himself. (Yousef does point out that the British Romantic artist JMW Turner beat him to that nickname by a good 150 years.)