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There are plenty of reasons to hate the 1963 John Wayne romcom "McLintock." But instead I liked it.

“McLintock” is a retelling of “Taming of the Shrew” in the Arizona Territory in 1895, starring Wayne and Maureen O’Hara in a celebration of sexism, ethnic stereotypes, domestic violence and right-wing politics. And yet I enjoyed the movie for its performances of Wayne, O’Hara and an ensemble of talented comedic character actors, as well as the look of the film and its joyful energy.

“McLintock” features Yvonne DeCarlo, aka Lily Munster; Stefanie Powers, before she had red hair and did “Hart to Hart;” Edgar Buchanan as the town drunk; Jerry Van Dyke; Patrick Wayne and Strother Martin, who later became famous for saying “What we’ve got here is failure to communicate.”

I don’t plan to ever watch this again but it was enjoyable for one go-round.

"Clue" review: Sitthroughable

We watched Clue, a 1985 mystery-comedy based on a board game in which a half-dozen people are summoned to a creepy Gothic mansion. Murder happens. More than one. The movie has three endings — the idea when it was released was that people would go to theaters three times to see each of the three endings. The movie bombed at the box office but it became a cult classic at home where people could see all three endings back-to-back.

Tim Curry chews the scenery as only Tim Curry can; Lesley Ann Warren is gorgeous and sexy and tough; Madeline Kahn is wasted except for one brief monologue where she is allowed to be maximally weird; Martin Mull, Eileen Brennan, Howard Hesseman and Christopher Lloyd are themselves, which are fine things to be; Michael McKean is maybe homophobic idk; and Colleen Camp is a French maid in a dress that is a marvel of engineering.

People love this movie. I guess I liked it. It was sitthroughable (AFAIK that word was coined by Newsday’s movie reviewer in the 1970s.)

Half-assed Internet research:

  • Carrie Fisher was originally supposed to play Miss Scarlet, but she went to rehab for drug addiction four days before filming started. Fisher wanted to appear in the film anyway on work-release, but the movie’s production insurance company vetoed her and Lesley Ann Warren was cast as a last-minute replacement.
  • Between takes, some of the actors played pool in the billiards-room set. But not Lesley Ann Warren, who was stuffed into a tight corset and used her break times to lean on things.
  • The secret passages in the movie lead between the same rooms as in the board game.
  • The singing telegram girl was played by Jane Wiedlin, rhythm guitarist for the Go-Gos.
  • Lee Ving, who played Mr. Boddy, is (or was) frontman for the punk band Fear.

Meanwhile, on Letterboxd

“My dad got in so much trouble for showing me this as a kid because I started saying ‘I’m gonna go home and sleep with my wife’ at school.”

“colleen camp doing that french accent is me after one duolingo lesson” 🍿

Gentleman unintentionally crashes a beach fashion show and usurps the spot of lead model. “I wouldn’t have had double dessert the night before — or the lunch before that — if I was going to be baring my belly to the world,” he said.

The lead photo on this article isn’t the show-crasher — it’s a model. Bad choice, NYTimes.

The Democrats finally released the 2024 election autopsy

Party chair Ken Martin saying the report is rubbish and he only released it to shut people up. That’s basically the upshot of this write-upby Alex Thompson and Holly Otterbein on Axios.

The report doesn’t actually conclude what went wrong for the Democrats, and does not interview Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Tim Walz and many of their top aides.

Meanwhile, the Republican Party has $124 million cash on hand and the DNC has negative $3 million with $17 million in debt.

Ironically, the election autopsy report, by its very incompetency, demonstrates how the Democrats lost the 2024 election — the DNC is a bunch of buffoons who couldn’t even manage to win an election against the soft-handed depo-baby Nazis that constitute the national GOP, and the Democrats also proved incompetent to produce a report about their failure.

Here’s something I saw while walking the dog: These stickers on the back window of a minivan at the park. The operator of this vehicle was nowhere in the vicinity but using my keen deductive powers, I deduce they are a woman, attorney, Mexican-American and a Pedro Pascal fan.

Finished reading: The Winds of Gath by E.C. Tubb 📚1967 space opera about an interstellar drifter searching for the lost world he was born on, a mythical planet called “Earth.” A light, easy read with clever gimmicks. I guess I’ll read the next book in the series one day.

The hero’s full name is Earl Dumarest, which is a funny name for a two-fisted noir space opera adventurer.

Here’s something I saw while walking the dog one afternoon in February 2019.

I don’t use dictation on my desktop. I have spent a lot of time typing every day for my entire adult life and much of my teens. I am as comfortable typing as I am speaking — maybe more comfortable.

But that’s only when I have a full-size keyboard and a flat surface to put it on. On my iPhone, I dictate, rather than type, half the time or more. I use Siri for that; I haven’t tried any other voice-to-text apps.

In the 1970s, writer John Varley wrote a series of science fiction stories where the characters communicate with their wearable computers using “subvocalization” — whispering inaudibly. Sensors at the throat detect throat and mouth movements and convert that to speech for the computer to read. That still seems workable, and would solve the problem of making offices sound like call-centers.

“I was on a call with investors who asked why there are so many protests about data centers. I told them something they didn’t want to hear. The public looks at what hyperscalers are doing and sees this: tech gets rich; you pay more for water and electricity; your kids may not have jobs. And you’re surprised that 85% of the public doesn’t like that deal? They’re not wrong.”

My colleague Steve Saunders interviews Blair Levin, policy analyst with New Street Research and chief architect of the 2010 National Broadband Plan on AI, infrastructure and why the U.S. is falling behind.

Truth, Consequences, Climate, and Demand Destruction — The Iran war is reducing demand for fossil fuels and driving the world toward renewables for everybody but the US, writes Rebecca Solnit. “This is how the attack by one petro-state (ours) on another (Iran’s) may be turning out to be very bad for petroleum, because the only thing history loves more than a surprise party is irony.” (Via Cory)

My old friend Dr. Marc Gorelick, who is a respected elder statesman of pediatric medicine, writes about the skewed incentives in medical care that make a hair transplant more valuable than resuscitating a newborn infant.

According to the metrics used by the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services and the American Medical Association, the hair transplant is 31-84% more valuable than resuscitating a newborn.

Marc mentions circumcision without making any jokes about it, which shows greater willpower than I’m capable of, and which explains why he is a respected elder statesman of pediatric medicine and I type for a living.

Nathan Lane on Fresh Air: “Nathan Lane says Broadway actors sometimes joke that their job is to keep 1,600 audience members from coughing.” He’s appearing on Broadway as Willy Loman in “Death of a Salesman.”

Why are the Artemis II photos on Flickr? Anil Dash: “The beautiful thing about communities and platforms like Flickr is that they remind us that not everything on the internet has to be ephemeral, not everything on the web has to be hyper-commercial. Sometimes a bunch of decent people can do a good thing for the right reasons, and the result of that work can persevere for decades.”

I like Florida very much every time I visit, which surprises me, because the news makes it look like they’re setting up the Republic of Gilead. My one complaint is the flagrant air conditioning abuse. It’s 86 degrees out, heading to 92, and I’m sitting here getting frostbite in my fingers and toes.

This mini brownie was tasty, and its resemblance to the poop emoji made it even more delicious. #enshittification

I’m here at the Extreme Connect conference in Orlando, where the company unveiled its full-stack vision for AI networking, a new Wi-Fi 7 lineup, and more. My latest on Fierce Network.

Extreme bets on simplifying networks. CEO Ed Meyercord says simplicity and supply-chain savvy are driving share gains as Extreme posts its fifth straight double-digit revenue quarter, on the eve of the big annual Extreme Connect conference this week. My latest on Fierce Network.

I am having a grande Starbucks cappuccino and it is 5:15 PM and I am three hours east of my normal time zone and I need to be awake at 6 am. I see no potential problem here.

Name your top 15 TV shows ever, gut instincts only:

Deadwood
Star Trek:TOS
The Odd Couple
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
MASH
Hill Street Blues
ER
The Pitt
Doctor Who
Bob Newhart Show
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Angel
Firefly
The Sopranos
Mad Men

This list is biased toward shows I loved when I was a child, teen and early 20s because shows hit harder then.

It sucks about Joss doesn’t it?

Normalize paywalled websites offering day passes for $1, payable easily through services such as Apple Pay and Google Pay. The day passes would not automatically renew by default. This would be the online equivalent of going into a newsstand and buying a single issue of a magazine because the cover looks interesting. It would be great for readers, a great source of revenue for publishers and help push back misinformation (because journalism costs money to produce, but bullshit’s free).

I went for a medium-length walk downtown, starting in the Gaslamp, up through Little Italy and back down the Embarcadero, during which I found myself passing through an art street fair in Little Italy. I pushed through, because the agenda of the day was walking rather than browsing. But I couldn’t resist stopping at this one booth of outstanding scrap sculptures. The artist is Adam Homan.

We have started watching Grimm, a TV program about Portland police who fight monsters while wearing fabulous leather jackets.

When Automattic bought Tumblr, I hoped that Automattic would turn Tumblr into a universal platform for personal blogging. Instead, it remains the niche product that it’s been for many years.

I think the only reason Automattic keeps it going is the same reason I remain active there – I just plain like it. I like reading the weird posts (I’m a weirdo too!) and seeing the memes and GIFsets and vintage photos. I browse it at bedtime and other periods of downtime.

Matt Mullenwegg has a gajillion dollars, so he can afford to keep the whole site going for his own amusement the same way I, a middle-class guy who types for a living, can afford $69.99/year for Tumblr Premium.

Just once in my life I want to:

  • Enter a meeting room where middle-aged men and women, wearing business suits and military uniforms, are sitting around a long table, talking animatedly.
  • They grow silent when I enter the room and stand to attention.
  • I tell them “be seated” as a take a seat myself, at the head of the table.
  • Once everyone is seated and giving me their full attention, I bark: “Give me options, people!”

I talked with James White, VP of AI for F5, about the state of AI post-Mythos. We talked about how Mythos proves AI is grown up and can do real work.

Mythos, he said, is on the leading edge of a new class of AI models specialized for specific tasks.

My latest on Fierce Network.

I was raised to the sublime degree of Master Mason this month.

Things you should not think about if you want to enjoy “It Happened One Night,” a classic 1934 romcom starring Clark Gable as Peter Warne, a streetsmart newspaperman, and Claudette Colbert as Ellie Andrews, an heiress:

  • That time Ellie’s father slaps her in the face.
  • That time Peter spanks her (without permission or a safeword).
  • At least two references to men having to hit women to keep them from getting out of line.
  • No Asian or Black characters, except for one Black man who has two or three lines, which is actually a lot for a Golden Age Hollywood movie.
  • The oligarchy.

I did enjoy the movie, which we watched again Saturday. I enjoyed it a great deal. I’m just sayin.

Social media and other apps glue people to the screens using features derived from video slot machines in casinos, writes Michaeleen Doucleff at NPR.org.

“People struggling with gambling addiction often cite video slots as their game of choice, studies have found. Some people gamble on these machines for extraordinary periods of time, [NY anthropologist Natasha Dow Schüll] found in her ethnographic fieldwork. They can play for 24 hours, even 48 hours straight. Some people even told Schüll that they wear adult diapers to the casino so they don’t have to stop gambling to use the restroom.”

Three of the features are solitude; bottomlessness, or the never-ending feed; speed — new content keeps coming at you fast; and teasing, where the feed never gives you quite what you’re looking for, but it comes close.

Another conflict roils the Middle East. A Marine warns that the war will come home

Travis Veillon at the Times of San Diego:

We just closed more than 20 years of fighting under the banner of the Global War on Terrorism. Nearly 7,000 American service members were killed. More than 50,000 were wounded in action. Those are the clean stats, the ones that fit nicely on a quick-moving chyron. They don’t capture the moments that stay with you.

I saw men in the dirt, covered in blood, watched friends die, and knew in real time that nothing about that moment would ever leave me. The news shows don’t capture the blown knees and backs that ache every winter, the blast-induced traumatic brain injuries that never fully heal, or the marriages that shattered under the strain

And they don’t tally the deaths that happen long after the war is supposed to be over.

At least 30,000 GWOT veterans have taken their own lives since 2001. I don’t see a number, I see people I knew. More than one from my own unit. That number dwarfs battlefield deaths, but barely registers in the conversation about starting the next campaign.

I’ve been a trade journalist for decades but I only have a vague idea what “go-to-market” strategy is. Whenever I hear the phrase, I visualize an anthropomorphic goose in a gingham dress with a wicker basket over her arm, going off to market to buy groceries.

I accidentally kicked the dog — we were in the kitchen and I did not see she was underfoot — so now I need to find a tall building and throw myself off it.

For me, Micro.blog is a good, but not great, hosting platform. I see Manton Reece, the proprietor of Micro.blog, focused on making the platform into a suite of products — RSS reader, note taker, book tracker, podcast platform, etc. — and I am not the customer for those products.

Micro.blog is a very small, gated community. I like the broader community of Mastodon and Bluesky.

And Micro.blog has a steady stream of trivial bugs and quirks that can sometimes make it difficult to post.

To use a syntactical trick that was popular recently in the internet: I’m not planning to migrate off Micro.blog, but I’m not not planning on it.

Unfortunately, there does not seem to be an alternative to Micro.blog for easy personal blogging.

Nursing and other healthcare jobs are becoming gig work — like driving or delivering food for Uber — making the jobs more miserable and low-paying, writes Cory Doctorow.

The platforms collude with lawmakers and regulators who are in the pockets of investors.

It’s part of a larger economic trend: “From fintech to price-fixing to gig-work, the entire industry runs on the very stupid proposition that ‘it’s not a crime if we do it with an app.'”

Cory: “Sometime in this century, our political class and our financial class arrived at a consensus that Douglas Rushkoff describes as ‘go meta,’ in his 2022 book _Survival of the Richest_:

pluralistic.net/2022/09/1…

“The ‘go meta’ ethos insists that the most important, smartest and most valuable move is always _away_ from productive labor. Don’t drive a cab: go meta and own a medallion that you rent to a cab driver. Don’t own a medallion, go meta and start a gig-work ride-hailing company. Don’t start a gig-work ride-hailing company, go meta and _invest_ in a gig-work ride-hailing company. Don’t invest in a gig-work ride-hailing company, go meta and buy _options_ in a gig-work ride-hailing company – and so on and so on, into ever more abstracted forms of gambling and rent-collection.”

I’ve been saying this for years: It often seems that the only way to succeed is not to do work that produces value, like a nurse. It’s not even to own property, like a 19th Century robber-baron that owned factories and railroads that produced value. The only way to succeed is to move money around. That’s a bad way to run a society, and it results in riots and blood in the streets when the workers get desperate enough.

Yes, I am once again migrating my fedi followers and the folks I am following from micro.blog to Mastodon. Please be sure your seatbacks are vertical and your trays are upright and in the locked position.

Here’s something I saw while walking the dog one day in early March. The sticker in the back window says, “I identify as fully restored.”

Cory Doctorow reviews “Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed," by Quinn Slobodian Ben Tarnoff, about “the ideology that gave rise to Elon Musk, the social forces that gave rise to that ideology, and the terrible future that ideology seeks to bring about.”

“It’s a chilling vision, a Torment Nexus dystopia run by someone who thinks cyberpunk was a suggestion, not a warning.”

Musk hails from apartheid South Africa, where a dictatorship resulted in luxury for the white minority, brutal dictatorship for the Black minority, fascist control over speech for all, and a “meat-grinder draft that saw young men of Musk’s age being called up to suppress liberation uprisings.” Musk’s grandfather was “a grandiose and vicious white supremacist who moved to South Africa from Canada because of his love for apartheid and racial hierarchy” and his father was “a violent and abusive fool.”

Heather Cox Richardson’s most recent newsletter is a parade of Trump greatest hits.

Trump has called public attention to his ballroom about a third of the days this year, more frequently than he’s talked about healthcare insurance or affordability. And the focus on the ballroom increases as the year progresses.

Regarding the Iran war, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) posted: “We are spending billions to keep our entire navy in the Strait to fecklessly fail to open a waterway that wasn’t closed until Trump’s pointless war of choice closed it. He’s just burning your tax money.”

Evidence of insider trading over Trump’s war announcements, with “a consistent pattern of spikes” in market activity “just hours, or sometimes minutes, before a social media post or media interview was made public.” And there’s a similar pattern of insider trading over Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariff announcement a year ago.

A Saudi sovereign wealth fund invested $2 billion in Jared Kushner’s private equity firm. Sen. Jon Osoff (D-GA) said Kushner is “on the Saudi payroll for $2 billion…. And now he’s leading American diplomacy in the Middle East…. The rules are for us, not for them.”

Meanwhile, the other Trump boys and Whiskey Pete Hegseth are getting rich selling weapons for the war. “I tell you what, never before have we seen so little effort to hide so much corruption. The Mar-a-Lago Mafia has taken American corruption to spectacular new heights,” Osoff said.

I haven’t been closely following Katie Porter’s campaign, or the California Gubernatorial race in general. None of her behavior outlined in this Washington Post article seems very bad — it’s merely rude. I suspect she’s being held to a different standard because she is a woman. For a man, her behavior would be seen by many voters as strength.

One of the many spots that FBI Director Kash Patel liked to get hammered is an exclusive club in Las Vegas called the Poodle Room.

The Poodle Room is associated with the Fontainebleau Hotel, and I walked past the discreet entrance in the lobby. when I stayed there last month.

Unfortunately, the Poodle Room is not a place where there are lots of poodles and you can play with them.

Comrade Trump: Burning down the American empire to save it. By Cory Doctorow. Trump’s bonehead maneuvers are driving the world toward solar power, away from dependence on American technology companies and putting spine into the Democratic Party. “Look, all things being equal, I would have preferred that Trump had keeled over from a mid-burger stroke on the campaign trail in 2016. But when life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla. This is a deeply shitty timeline, but Comrade Trump keeps tripping over his red tie. Let’s take the wins.”

Here’s a nice view I saw while walking the dog one morning a few weeks ago.

Heather Cox Richardson: “And, just like that, President Donald J. Trump’s triumphant boasting that the Strait of Hormuz had been permanently reopened has unraveled in less than 24 hours.” Read to the end for a moving speech by Pete Buttigieg.

I love the show “Rooster,” starring Steve Carrell as a novelist, but it has the flaw of all shows and movies about writers in that you never, ever see him writing. Only once do we see him reading a book. That’s not how writers are built. We are compulsive.

I can’t get over J.D. Vance correcting the Pope on Christian ethics. That’s some grandmaster-level mansplaining there, J.D.

Foods I ate when I was a child

Bagels and pizza were common when I grew up on Long Island in the very late 60s and early/mid 70s. That’s not surprising — it was a heavily Italian and Jewish immigrant neighborhood.

Chinese food was plentiful and easy to find too.

We considered ourselves connoisseurs of all three cuisines and had strong opinions.

Pita bread was common, and I thought it looked nifty — bread! with a pocket! But my parents gave me the idea that only Gentiles ate pita bread. I think my Mom just made that kind of thing up when she wanted to shut us up. I don’t blame her for that. As a Mom raising three Jewish boys, she had to learn to defend herself verbally.

I was 14 years old when I first had Mexican food. I saw characters on TV eating “tacos” and thought they looked tasty, and the characters seemed cosmopolitan. Jim Rockford had a taco shack he favored. The very first Mexican restaurant in our Long Island suburb opened when I was 14, and our Spanish teacher took us to lunch there on a field trip. We got combo plates: A taco, I guess an enchilada, and refried beans. All of us kids, mostly Jewish-American, Italian-American and Irish-American, pronounced the food gross, particularly the refried beans.

We had Taco Bell and Jack in the Box tacos when I was in college, and I loved those.

By the time I was in my 30s I loved Mexican food, particularly Mission burritos of the type you get in San Francisco and San Jose. Big and fat and loaded with guacamole and Spanish rice and stuff. But I’ll eat a hard taco or twelve and enjoy it if you invite me to. I don’t have Mexican food often, alas, because of the calories.

When I was a preteen, I got it into my head that chili sounded great, I think in part because Heinlein mentioned that Lazarus Long loved it. I first had chili when I was 16 years old on a family trip to California. I thought chili was fine. I still do like chili, but do not love it. I occasionally make a pot of chili, though I have not done so in years.

Elswehwere on the internet, a friend observed that his blog is “scattershot” and I think he wished his blog was more organized.

However, a scattershot blog is a perfectly reasonable kind of blog. I’m very, very old school when it comes to blogging. It’s a weblog – a log of things you saw on the web – and also an online diary, where you can publish any thought that you want to share with the world.

At some point in the 2010s I started hearing people saying that a blog post had to be a structured essay and I responded no no no no no. I mean, a blog can be comprised solely of structured essays but it can also be whatever you want it to be.

Cory Doctorow compares living in the present to early 2020, when Covid was approaching. It’s a throwaway comment in his blog post yesterday, and it has stayed with me since. Julie and I are fortunate enough to be spectators to the news — it does not touch us personally yet — but I can see in the headlines that something bad is coming, it’s going to hit hard and I don’t know what to do to prepare for it.

I learned yesterday about the death of Scot Finnie, my editor and friend. We worked together for a few years in the 2000s. He and I and Brad Shimmin launched blogging for CMP Media back when CMP was a big company in the trade press and blogging was new.

Scot was a good editor, good friend and championed my career. We shared a common interest in productivity tools and could nerd out about that kind of software for a while — for a few years, he ran a newsletter about Windows productivity, Scot’s Newsletter, and he and I switched to Mac at about the same time.

We only talked a couple of times in the 2010s, and I think not at all since Covid. I am sad to lose him.

The Democrats have a shot at taking the House and Senate this year. Will they have the courage to launch hearings and pursue criminal prosecution to its end-point — even if that means throwing DJT in prison?

Or will they wimp out, as the US has done since the Reconstruction after the Civil War, and give oligarchs a pass?

In the United States today there is no penalty for flagrant corruption and attempting the overthrow of the US government — if you’re a billionaire.

If you steal $1,000, they throw you in prison, but if you take hundreds of millions of dollars in bribes, they put you in the White House.

No email containing the phrase “bumping this to the top of your inbox” is worth reading.

A grandmother of ten went to work for Doordash after burning through her life savings to pay for her husband’s cancer treatments and Trump thinks this is a flex.