Instagram video: British comedian loves Fahrenheit.
Fahrenheit is the best. Celsius is for losers.
Is Micromanaging Your Life With an App Really a Good Idea?. I’ll add a reminder to myself to look into that.
An unofficial list of the most influential science fiction works ever. The science fiction that strongly influenced real life spaceflight pioneers. By Eric Adelson at the Washington Post.
“I’m a man who appreciates it when food dares you to eat it.”
I am quite enjoying the AwkwardSD newsletter, from fellow San Diegan Ryan Bradford, who shares a review of a spaghetti dinner from By The Bucket, a chain of restaurants that serves spaghetti by the bucket.
My 11-year-old nephew declares it’s “not bad!” and I agree. I’ve spent more money on grosser things in my life…. Overall, we’re vaguely satisfied with the food and lowkey happy that it didn’t kill us.
Saahil Desai at The Atlantic:
A pizza box has one job—keeping a pie warm and crispy during its trip from the shop to your house—and it can’t really do it. The fancier the pizza, the worse the results: A slab of overbaked Domino’s will probably be at least semi-close to whatever its version of perfect is by the time it reaches your door, but a pizza with fresh mozzarella cooked at upwards of 900 degrees? Forget it. Sliding a $40 pie into a pizza box is the packaging equivalent of parking a Lamborghini in a wooden shed before a hurricane.
Joseph Bernstein at The New York Times:
ANN ARBOR, Mich. — Every Friday night from September to May, at an off-campus nightclub in this thriving college town, a group of die-hard music fans gathers to dance to some of the most devoted live bands in southeast Michigan. There are women in skintight red dresses, long-haired men sucking down bottles of beer and couples flirting in the alcove outside the bathrooms.
In fact, just one thing distinguishes the crowd from nearly any other rock ’n’ roll show in a small city in America: Almost everyone is over 65.
OK, two things: The show always starts at 6:30 p.m. and ends at 9 p.m., in time to get to bed at a reasonable hour.
… the most horrible thing about being locked up is that you are being dehumanized on a daily basis. They practically stamp a number on you. In order to navigate the experience, you have to normalize the dehumanization. You have to buy into it in order to survive. That is the most horrible thing about being locked up. You’re never the same person again. Once you internalize it, you project it outward. If you are being dehumanized, that’s how you treat other people. That, to me, is the essence of incarceration: having to buy into the dehumanization.
— Graham Rayman and Reuven Blau at Esquire
If you ever connected to the Internet before the 2000s, you probably remember that it made a peculiar sound. But despite becoming so familiar, it remained a mystery for most of us. What do these sounds mean?
9 years ago today
- High temperature was 91 degrees.
- I was in talks for a job at Light Reading.
- I was in the midst of a long and extraordinarily difficult process of trying to get Minnie housebroken. I attached her leash to my belt and kept her with me at all times when we were home.
Notes from 2023:
Even here in San Diego, a high of 91 is noteworthy. Here in 2023, we’re in the middle of days of chilly weather and heavy rain.
The Light Reading job was great – in some respects, the high point of my career – most of the time.
Even extreme dog lovers say that raising a puppy is hell, and they forget how bad it is from one time to the next. I felt low and worthless from my inability to do a simple thing like housebreak the dog. If we adopt another dog, it will be an adult.
Minnie was having occasional accidents until she was nearly 3 years old, but now she is extraordinarily self controlled. I have occasionally brought her directly from my office, where she sleeps, into the house, without letting her run around outside first, and discovered that hours later she still had no urgency to go out.
Political labeling considered harmful
Journalist Mike Masnick at Techdirt avoids naming politicians' party affiliation unless it’s essential to the story, because, he says, everybody then starts arguing on the basis of team rather than issues.
Maybe it makes sense for all of us to do the same in political discussions: avoid labels like Democrat, Republican, liberal, conservative, progressive, MAGA, lefist, and so on. It’s just a lot of tribalism and name-calling.
Clearly, you often have to use labels. For example, right now, there’s already a lot of talk about the 2024 Presidential election, and if you’re talking about a particular candidate, you often need to say which party nomination he’s seeking, especially if the candidate is not well known on the national stage.
But much of the time, the labeling is just alienating–especially when you’re not talking about a politician or influencer, and you’re just regular citizens interacting.
I think about this kind of thing a bit. I think two existential threats facing the US today are the Republican Party and partisanship, and I am very aware of the inherent contradiction in that belief. Maybe taking a minimalist approach to labeling is a good step toward reconciling that contradiction.
Microsoft is offering unlimited time off for US staff.
Not always a great deal for employees, who might feel precarious about taking time off, and also don’t get paid for unused time off if they get laid off, fired, or leave of their own volition.