Everybody alive today will be somewhat germophobic the rest of their lives. Like the way my parents' generation, who grew up in the Depression, were always frugal in at least some ways.
Today on Cory Doctorow’s Pluralistic
++ Alvim Corrêa’s beautiful, bleak illustrations from the 1900 French edition of HG Wells' “War of the Worlds.”
++ Lobbyists are lobbying for big financial bailouts for … themselves. After ensuring that the bulk of previous bailouts went to fat-cat businesses who don’t need the money, lobbyists want their turn at the trough.
++ Either we sacrifice landlords and banks to save businesses and jobs, or we lose the businesses and jobs and take the landlords and banks with them.
++ Chef Itsuo Kobayashi has done beautiful paintings of every meal he’s eaten for 32 years.
++ An appeals court says Miami jail doesn’t need to provide soap, making waiting for a hearing into a possible death sentence, and encouraging the spread of coronavirus, not just in prison, but to the population at large.
++ Ohio has a snitchline for bosses whose employees won’t go back to work, so those workers can be denied unemployment benefits. Great way to increase the death toll, Ohio!
I am hosting a video conference for dozens or hundreds of people this evening so of course today seemed like a good day for me to get my first shaving cut in years. And it was a big one. My bathroom this morning looked like the Texas chainsaw massacre.
The grocery store was nearly out of our favorite brand of cookies, Tate’s.
Lots of gluten-free cookies left, though.
I guess people are all if I’m gonna be dead in month fuck it I’m having gluten.
We watched the first episode of “Rome” last night. Polly Walker is va va va voom. I am attracted to smart, sexy auburn-haired women who can have me put to death.
We may be dramatically overestimating China’s capabilities – David Ignatius on The Washington Post – We may be making China seem more capable than it actually is, as we did with the supposedly unstoppable Japanese economy of the 1980s and the US/USSR “missile gap” decades earlier.
The Washington establishment needs an existential foreign threat.
Parking Lots Have Become a Digital Lifeline — Without home internet access and with libraries and cafes closed, people are driving to parking lots to get on Wi-Fi.
Over on Twitter, I’m suggesting to @MikeElgan that he might want to consider moving to micro.blog.
I did some research in the autumn and concluded that micro.blog is the ONLY blog platform out there that doesn’t require significant fiddling and configuration. Which is sad for the blogosphere.
I mean, you can do a great deal of fiddling and configuration on micro.blog if you want to do that. But if you just want to type stuff and post photos, then micro.blog is your only option.
On Twitter, @mat asks: “With the benefit of a couple of months of hindsight, what was your best preparing for a pandemic move?"
I replied:
Stocking up on toilet paper. It wasn’t forethought – we routinely buy that kind of thing in bulk and prior to lockdown was when we were due to replenish.
OTOH, I needed a haircut even BEFORE we went into lockdown.
Interesting thread.
That is an awful lot of Rome
Yesterday I read some of “Storm before the Storm” a history of the fall of the Roman Republic, by Mike Duncan, and “Silver Pigs,” the first in the mystery series by Lindsey Davis about Marcus Didius Falco, a private detective in Imperial Rome. I’ve read that series before but I’ve forgotten most of it so it’s nearly new to me.
I finished re-watching “I, Claudius” Sunday — that’s the fourth time I’ve seen that. Maybe give it another go in ten years?
I listened to the “I, Podius” podcast, which is about “I, Claudius” — possibly the final episode of that, although there seems to be some unfinished business, so there may be at least one more episode.
I bookmarked a few articles about the historical accuracy of “I, Claudius,” for later reading.
Julie expressed some interest in rewatching “Rome,” the mid-2000s HBO series about the rise of Julius Caesar and the Roman Civil Wars.
Also, a few weeks ago, Julie and I watched “Hail, Caesar,” a Coen Brothers comedy about the making of a Golden Age Hollywood movie about Julius Caesar, featuring George Clooney. Julie didn’t care for it but I loved it; I still have 37 minutes to watch.
“Storm Before the Storm” is the earliest chronologically, covering events in the second century BCE. Then comes “Rome,” 1st Century BCE. Then comes “I, Claudius,” later in the 1st Century BCE through the early and mid 1st Century CE. Then comes “Silver Pigs,” a couple of decades after “I, Claudius,” in the late 1st Century CE. Finally, “Hail Caesar” comes along almost 1900 years later, around the time the books “I, Claudius” and “Claudius the God” were published, with the movie-within-the-movie covering the events of the early part of “Rome.”
It’s all the same universe, like the Marvel superhero movies. 📚📺📽📓
One year ago today I saw possibly the most ridiculous example of security theater I have ever witnessed
A young woman ahead of me at airport security was walking with a cane and had a “boot” on her foot – a removable enclosure to immobilize an injured foot.
The security guy asked her if she could walk without the cane, and take off the boot, and put them through the security scanner. The security guy was nice about it; he said if taking off the boot and walking without the cane caused any discomfort at all, she should just leave them on.
The woman said no no no that’s all right and she sat down in a chair and wrestled the boot off, and then hopped through the scanner.
It occurred to me, watching, that this was security theater in the purest form. This exercise was completely unnecessary. I bet if you asked this woman why she was going through this exercise, she would have looked surprised and said, why, it’s the rules. And you have to follow the rules, right?
This woman was given a choice of whether she had to send her stuff through the scanner, and she chose to do it , even though the purpose of this exercise is not supposed to be empty obedience. It’s supposed to be catching terrorists. And this woman knew better than anybody else that she was not a terrorist, and therefore would have been perfectly safe strolling through security without any screening at all!
I don’t say this to criticize the young woman, who seemed perfectly nice and just trying to be accommodating, or the security guy, who was also very nice and just trying to do his job.
I wrote the preceding in my journal a year ago. Re-reading it now, I see that I was wrong then. The purpose of security theater isn’t security. It is empty obedience.
You may well ask, holy crap, Mitch, when did you become such a paranoid conspiracy theorist? I ask myself that sometimes. 📓