On our walk today, the dog and I got caught in a surprise and intense hailstorm
We were at Lake Murray, about a mile from home. It came on in seconds, and hit hard, a barrage of pellets the size of BBs. Uncomfortable for us both. We took shelter in the lee of the snack bar adjacent to the Kiowa Street parking lot.
The storm passed in 10-15 minutes and we moved on, both pretty wet. I hadn’t worn rain gear, because the forecast called for rain in the morning but not the afternoon.
I’m continually impressed by what a tough little dog Minnie is. She can’t have been happy being hammered by ice BBs—I know I wasn’t—but her attitude was, “All right, we’re doing this now I guess.”
I was taking this photo of the lake at the precise moment the storm hit. When I took my phone out of my pocket, no precipitation. Seconds later: heavy hail.
That white stuff on the ground in the second photo is hail.
Father of cellphone sees dark side but also hope in new tech (AP / Kelvin Chan)
94-year-old Marty Cooper, credited with inventing the mobile phone in 1973, sees dark sides but also hope in new technology
Cooper talks with the Associated Press about the mobile industry’s current and future directions and challenges.
As for his own phone use, Cooper says he checks email and does online searches for information to settle dinner table arguments. > However, “there are many things that I have not yet learned,” he said. “I still don’t know what TikTok is.”
Cooper received a lifetime achievement award this week at the international Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the industry’s biggest conference.
MWC attracts 120,000+ people. Imagine going to an event like that and knowing all those people are there because of you.
Micro.blog does not show follower counts. It doesn’t tell you when somebody follows you. It has no concept of a like or favorite.
There are definite benefits to this system.
But there is one big drawback: Because I get very few replies to my mb posts, it feels like I’m talking to myself. On Facebook and Tumblr, I get a lot of likes. On Mastodon, I get fewer, but I get ‘em. This interaction lets me know that somebody’s listening.
Soon you’ll be able to see a restoration of one of the most infamous movies ever made: Guccione’s 1980 “Caligula.” (Boing Boing / Mark Frauenfelder)
Thomas Negovan, a musician and songwriter, has been working on the project for three years, based on the original camera negatives and location audio. He wants to create a movie that conforms to the original vision and Gore Vidal script.
“Caligula” was filmed in 1976 as a big-budget indy movie, with an impressive cast including Malcomlm McDowell, Peter O’Toole, and Helen Mirren, and budget twice the size of Star Wars.
But then Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione took over, threw out the original script, and added explicit sex scenes without the consent of the other creators. Guccione filmed the sex scenes secretly on the movie sets.
Negovan is using the original camera negatives and location audio, enhanced with AI. He created a five-minute video explaining his work—it looks great and I’m looking forward to seeing this movie, which may be a lost masterpiece.
Here’s the teaser trailer:
How donkeys changed the course of human history (BBC / Dhananjay Khadilkar)
From bearing the burdens of the Roman Empire to enabling trade over long distances, the humble donkey has been surprisingly influential.
Nazis openly harass Jewish people in Desantis Land (Boing Boing)
Native advocacy group to retire ‘Crying Indian’ anti-pollution ad (AP)
The Keep American Beautiful nonprofit is retiring the iconic “crying Indian” ad by transferring ownership of the rights to the National Congress of American Indians. Native Americans criticized and ridiculed the ad for perpetuating stereotypes.
The actor in the ad, Iron Eyes Cody, wasn’t even an Indian. He was Italian-American.
MAGA cultists advocate for Marxism to stop communist agenda (Boing Boing)
Prankster Walter Masterson easily gets MAGA and Qanon cultists to call for workers to collectivize and seize the means of production to stop socialism and communism.
The Horror of Realizing Everyone Can See Your Work Calendar Entries Naptime. Call Mom. Some employees are shocked to discover how much they are revealing; is this your first colonoscopy? (WSJ)
An enjoyable and informative article–but an odd one.
When I’ve been employed at companies with shared calendar servers, I have always assumed the details of my corporate calendar were open to my colleagues. If there’s an event I don’t want my colleagues to know the details about, I don’t put it on the calendar.
I keep a personal calendar for personal events. When I have to take time off work in the middle of the day for a personal reason, I just put a calendar event called “BLOCKED” on my corporate calendar, and put the details on my personal calendar.
How ‘The Last of Us’ Cherishes a Bygone World. (By Shirley Li at The Atlantic)
The characters of “The Last of Us” are mourning for the world we live in, and the show helps us appreciate that we’re still living here.
You and I may think of shopping malls as suburban eyesores and monuments to kitsch, but that’s because we take them for granted.
Fans were over the moon for the third episode, featuring Nick Offerman. I thought it was good but not great. But this episode lived up to the hype.
The Case for a Primary Challenge to Joe Biden (By Mark Leibovich at The Atlantic)
Yes. Biden has been an excellent President—but that’s not good enough. The US needs better than excellence. We need a great President, a transformative President, a Roosevelt or Lincoln.
And Biden has failed in several ways as President. He has done a terrible job at Covid.
And has not done enough to break up the domination of big business in our national lives. Ask the people of East Palestine about that. Yeah, sure, Trump set the policy that allowed that disaster to happen—but the Biden administration has had plenty of time to fix that policy, and they didn’t. Indeed, during a showdown between labor and the railroad companies, Biden came down for the railroad companies.
And there’s the matter of his age. I’m staunchly anti-ageist—but Biden will be 82 when he’s sworn in for his next term. That’s old.
So let’s have a good primary competition and see if Biden is up for the rigors of a rough-and-tumble election, and his second term.
I’ll support whichever Democrat gets the nomination.
How old are you in your head?
According to research, most adults feel 20% younger than their actual age.
This past Thanksgiving, I asked my mother how old she was in her head. She didn’t pause, didn’t look up, didn’t even ask me to repeat the question, which would have been natural, given that it was both syntactically awkward and a little odd. We were in my brother’s dining room, setting the table. My mother folded another napkin. “Forty-five,” she said.
She is 76.
— The Puzzling Gap Between How Old You Are and How Old You Think You Are, by Jennifer Senior at The Atlantic.
I’m conflicted about the premise of this article. It makes sense, but it also seems possibly ageist. Like being old is bad so we are in denial about our age and think we’re younger than we really are.
I’m 61. I don’t have a precise number for how old I am in my head, but 80% of 61 is 48, and that feels about right. I feel like I’m somewhere in the 36-52-year-old range. It helps that I’m healthy and fit.1
As a number, 61 seems elderly to me, but I think that’s just my internal conditioning growing up. Internalized ageism. Rather than think of myself as being younger than I am, I try to redefine what my age means. It means whatever I want it to mean, and whatever my mind and body are capable of making it mean.
But that will only work for a while. Twenty-five years ago, I was about the same as I am today, only with a crappier phone. In 25 years, I will be an old man, and no amount of positive thinking will change that.
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That’s weird for me to say, because I used to be a fat, sedentary, junk-food-eating chainsmoker. I am not intending here to disparage fat, sedentary, junk-food-eating chainsmokers, except to say they tend not to be healthy when they are 61 years old. ↩︎
I’m trying to avoid having opinions about the Scott Adams news, or even thinking about it. I’m not doing too well with that.