I made a disparaging comment about Los Angeles to an angeleno on a team call, and the angeleno agreed. Angelenos are usually willing to agree heartily with any disparaging remark you make about Los Angeles. Makess needling them less fun.
I went on the San Diego subreddit to see if anyone can see the Northern Lights from here, and I fell down a rabbithole of reading a thread of people ranting about people who don’t pick up dog-poop on the sides of hiking trails. The original poster included photos to make their point. Why did you feel that was necessary, u/Adventurous_Yam_5?
I very nearly quit reading Lord of the Rings. I’m about 350 pages in and a third of that is description of forest. I don’t even like forest — we live very nearly in the desert. Another third of the book is description of food, and none of it is pizza or burritos. They just left Tom Bombadil’s cabin. Tom Bombadil is extremely annoying. He is the guy in “Animal House” who was playing the guitar and singing “I Gave My Love a Cherry” and John Belushi smashed his guitar.
But I will keep reading.
Hofstadter’s law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s law.
This has been much on my mind lately.
Sign of the changing seasons: Today is the first day since the spring that I’ve had to turn on the lights in my home office before dinner.
Chris Arnade: China is "the US, circa 1955 or so, but with the benefit of modern tech"
Chris Arnade walks the city of Zhengzhou, China, and shares his self-described “oversimplified take on all of China, which is that it’s the US, circa 1955 or so, but with the benefit of modern tech.”
The analogy isn’t perfect given the fundamental differences on the essential question of “what is a good life, and how do you obtain it but China has the energy, optimism, and trajectory that the US had then. This isn’t confined to only the narrow minority of the exceptionally fortunate, but rather is manifest across the whole economic bell curve, because the entire population is getting richer at velocities approaching ten percent a year, levels of growth that tend to make everyone giddy and forgiving of other issues. I’m not a rigid ideological materialist, but having your economy double roughly every decade absolves a lot of other sins, and tends to put smiles on people’s faces.
When I was doing my work in the US Rust Belt, talking to the elderly in decaying cities, one of the common laments I heard over and over was some variation of, “Back then, you could walk straight out of high school onto the factory floor, and build a good life. If you worked hard enough, played by the rules, you could get married, buy a house, raise a family, go on a few vacations a year, and see your kids and grandkids do better than you did. You can’t do that now, not without going away to get some fancy college degree that puts you so far in debt you might as well be chained to the bank.”
While the Chinese version differs–“playing by the rules” is more stringent, home is a tiny apartment in a forty-story tower, vacations are to Shanghai’s Disney World rather than Orlando–the trajectory remains intact. They can walk out of high school into the iPhone factory and build themselves a good life, certainly as measured against what their parents had, which is how optimism is forged, through comparison to local expectations.
Last night I felt awful about Senate Democrats capitulating to Republicans, but on further reflection, I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.
Perhaps they looked at the harm that would be caused by a shutdown and decided to just kick the problem down the road. There were never going to be any good outcomes to this particular standoff.
The only good outcome is going to be voting the Trump government out of office and prosecuting its leaders to the fullest extent of the law. No clemency “for the good of national unity.” We did that with the Confederacy, Nixon and after Trump’s first term, and it has brought us 150 years of misery.
“Low skilled” workers are a myth. “[Minimum-wage jobs are] not low-skill. They simply require different skills, ones that not just anyone possesses.” The author, Rachel Moody, is half-right here. I’m not convinced that minimum-wage jobs are not low-skilled. But Moody is right that these jobs are important, and the workers are entitled to dignity and a living wage.
“Once I returned home, I realised the only things that had kept their value were the relationships and conversations I had had. Everything else seemed perishable.” I visited every country in the world without flying. Here are eight things I learned.
Chris Arnade walks Taipei and other parts of China, and reflects on the temples, materialism and pigeon keepers. “Six flights higher is where I found Mr. Li, an especially kind man, who like all pigeon keepers around the world, was giddy to meet someone else who loves the rats with wings.”
The Edmund Fitzgerald sank 50 years ago.
Gordon Lightfoot’s ballad, “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” became one of the biggest hits of 1976, “less than a year after the disaster it commemorates.” writes Neda Ulaby for NPR:
The Canadian musician had agonized over writing the song in the first place.
“He feared being inaccurate, corny or worse, appearing to exploit a tragedy for profit,” writes John U. Bacon in his new bestseller, The Gales of November: The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald. “But more than that, as a fellow sailor and a child of the Great Lakes … this song – whatever it was – was deeply personal.”
…
“From 1875 to 1975, there were at least 6,000 commercial shipwrecks on the bottom of the Great Lakes,” Bacon told NPR. “So that is one shipwreck a week every week for a century. That is one casualty every day for a century.”
The Trump government says it will use the military against American civilians and is openly preparing to do it. They’re getting ready to steal the 2026 election. This is not some bullshit TikTok conspiracy theory; it’s happening in the open.
Trump’s domestic militia is growing. “The President repeatedly says he’ll use the military against American civilians and is creating special units to do so.”
Trump Administration Demands States ‘Undo’ Work to Send Full Food Stamps — “They would rather go door to door, taking away people’s food, than do the right thing and fully fund SNAP for November so that struggling veterans, seniors, and children can keep food on the table."
Today is, of course, not the end. It’s not even the beginning of the end. It’s even too soon to say it’s the end of the beginning.
But it’s a good day. The first day in more than a year that I’ve looked at the news and felt good. That’s enough for today.
Democrats sweep about every election they’re in, particularly Mamdani in New York. Prop 50 passes. And there’s going to be a fourth Mummy movie, with Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz. Today has been a good day.
AT&T’s grounded AI strategy defies bubble warnings. My latest on Fierce Network. With executive backing, cross-team collaboration, and a relentless ROI focus, AT&T is proving you don’t need to ride a hype wave to generate value.
Johnny Sheffield, the actor who played Boy in Tarzan movies opposite Johnny Weissmuller 1939-41, retired to San Diego
“Reflecting on their partnership, Weissmuller later said, ‘He was a natural on set, fearless in the water, and always ready to jump into a scene.'”
After Tarzan, Sheffield took the lead in “Bomba the Jungle Boy,” starring in 12 adventure films from 1949-55.
By his mid-twenties, Sheffield retired from acting. He earned a business degree from UCLA, married Patricia Berg in 1959, and raised three children: Patrick, Stuart, and Regina. He worked in real estate, construction, and even lobster importing, quietly shaping a life in Chula Vista far removed from Hollywood’s spotlight.
Son Stuart, his wife, Elaine Lancaster, and their son Draygon Wylde Sheffield-Cassan still live on the family property. “Draygon shares a striking resemblance to his grandfather, including the iconic curly, golden hair.”
Mexican immigrants to Los Angeles made stars of formerly humble tuba players
People long associated the instrument with polkas, elephants, clowns, and players at the back of the band, imprisoned by conductors' preconceived notions of what the horn, and those who play it, were capable of. But today, tuba players have found freedom and, through hard work and focus, they dazzle, unconstrained by others' views.