Mitch's Blog

Something I saw while walking the dog: I have seen this Ford Pinto parked at the Lake Murray parking lot dozens of times over the 10+ years that I’ve been walking there. I finally saw it drive in, and a woman got out from behind the steering wheel, so I had an opportunity to talk with her and find out more about the car.

She and her husband have owned the car for 50 years. They bought it new in March 1974, and she says it is very easy to maintain.

I found it surprisingly easy to resist temptation to make the obvious Ford Pinto joke.

She also volunteered that she would never buy an electric car. The batteries need replacing after five years and are exorbitantly expensive, she said.

Crystal met Hugh Hefner when she was 21, and he was 81. They were married three years later and spent 10 years together at the Playboy Mansion before he died, and she became a widow. “I definitely was financially and emotionally abused by Hugh Hefner… I didn’t have the tools back then to even survive.”

Paraphrasing a line from “Batman: The Dark Knight:” You either die a glamorous playboy or you live long enough to become a weird, creepy old letch.

The Death, Sex & Money podcast: Life and Death Inside the Playboy Mansion

I’m looking for an app to set a reminder that repeats hourly after completion. Plenty of apps offer reminders that repeat daily, weekly or monthly after completion, but I haven’t been able to find even one that will repeat hourly. Anyone?

I was about 20 years old when I saw “All That Jazz” and I loved it. I wanted to be Roy Scheider’s character — I envied his commitment, passion and charisma.

For years I wondered whether I had missed the point of the movie, but it occurs to me now that I got the point of the movie. The life that Scheider’s character lives is seductive. A deal with the devil only works if the devil offers you something that is supremely alluring.

I’m starting to think I just don’t like the Twitter clones — Mastodon, Threads, Bluesky, X. Their length limits are arbitrary and not how my brain works.

I use Micro.blog to automatically syndicate posts to those platforms, and let Micro.blog and the platforms handle truncation however they want to.

Good tips for young people looking for work: Become a broadband installer. Work outside doing meaningful, physical work.

There is a huge demand for workers in the U.S. to help deploy broadband to all the homes and businesses that don’t yet have a good broadband connection. Much of this demand is being driven by a government program called Broadband, Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD), which is providing more than $42 billion in government grants to the states. Lots of companies will be applying for these grants, and they’ll need plenty of workers to deploy the broadband infrastructure.”

Some tips: Highlight relevant construction experience. Veterans are highly sought for their toughness.

And if you love heights, many of these jobs are great for you. Not for me—I get nervous on the kiddie rollercoaster.

Was Abraham Lincoln gay? A new documentary, “Lover of Men,” explores the question.

The 2012 book, “The Stories Soldiers Wouldn’t Tell: Sex in the Civil War,” by Thomas P. Lowry, looks at this and many other questions of sexuality during that period. From this distance, it’s hard to figure out what was going on — very few people were writing candidly about that kind of thing in the 19th Century, and 21st Century attitudes and definitions toward sexuality and gender don’t map well onto the past.

Men often shared beds back then; this is common knowledge. In a highly sexist society, they formed intense friendships. There was probably a lot of sex going on between men.

Ever since I heard about “influencers” and “content creators” as jobs, I thought they were ridiculous. Content creators and influencers are narcissistic, peanut-brained Millennials and Zoomers who spend their days giving cosmetics and fashion advice, making cringe hip-hop videos, peddling Hallmark affirmations and dispensing bro culture from the manosphere.

This morning I had a shocking realization: It’s me. I’m a content creator and influencer. I write reports and articles and host webinars and influence decisions about networking and cloud technology.

Do I need to start wearing a sideways baseball cap and gold chains?