Insomnia is not so bad if you have something to do to pass the time. When I have trouble sleeping, I like to imagine every possible awful thing that might happen to me or Julie.
Things I saw while walking the dog đ¸
This yard decoration. Clever and patriotic!
These pretty, painted rocks
This house with a cozy looking sitting area on the roof.
This school. âGeckosâ does not seem like an inspiring team name.
This nice garden.
This Lambo parked in front of a house. It doesnât look like the kind of house that would have a Lambo in front.
These cars. WTF do these bumper stickers mean?
This tree.
These cars. Two different cars, not parked close together. I wonder whether the owners are friends.
Dead Santa hanging from the house with the âitty bitty titty committeeâ sign in front.
This flag. I thought it said âone nation under Gog.â Whoâs âGog?â I said.
San Diego Union-Tribune: âItâs cold, wet, exhausting.â Homeless people have few options when it rains.
San Diego homeless shelters are overwhelmed, leaving many people risking cold rain, flooding, and temperatures falling to the 40s. Staying dry is difficultâand essential to staying alive.
By Gary Warth.
Why the [expletive] canât we travel back in time? [Ars Technica/Paul Sutter]
No known law of physics forbids time travel to the past.
Either time travel to the past is possible, or thereâs some fundamental, basic physics we still donât understand.
Either possibility is exciting.
âItâs obvious that the Universe is telling us something important⌠we just donât know what itâs saying.â
Coolio talked about ancient aliens, and making big investments in the metaverse and crypto, in an impromptu podcast interview before his death. [Billboard/Gil Kaufman]
The Coolio interview was bonkersâand poignant. The rapper said he expected heâd be long dead before climate change became a concern. Then he died a month later.
I expect climate change to be a concern long before Iâm dead, and Iâm only a year older than Coolio. Itâs already a concern.
Iâve googled for more about the hidden continent occult belief that Coolio discusses. I havenât found anything.
The podcast series, Crypto Island, was excellent. Sadly for the host/creator, PJ Vogt, most of the work on the series seems to have been done before the FTX debacle, so series is now obsolete.
Apparently you can re-use 2017 calendars this year, which is funny to me because I have a 2017 calendar hanging up on the wall next to my bed. I stopped turning pages April of that year, and it’s been April, 2017 in the vicinity of my bed ever since.
The book Shift Happens tells the 150-year history of keyboards, from primitive typewriters to smartphones. Glenn Fleishmann @GlennF raved about this book on John Gruber’s @gruber@mastodon.social’s The Talk Show podcastâsounds interesting.
My car keys got hidden in a fold in the pocket of my rain jacket after I was done walking the dog this afternoon. I spent 15 minutes looking for themâon the ground, peering into the car window to see if Iâd locked them in, patting my pockets over and over.
It was past dusk, so I was losing the light fast. I didnât have a proper flashlight, just my phone. And it was raining. And I still had the dog with me, of course.
Also, as a middle aged man, I canât go more than two hours without peeing, and I was past my limit.
And thatâs Jan. 1. The year is going to get better, right?
I saw this house flying a Starfleet flag. I was tempted to ring the doorbell to express my approval.
Portland Startup to Mine Artisanal Bitcoin Using Only Slide Rules and Graph Paper
â⌠powered 100 percent by avocado toast, ethically sourced kombucha and acai bowls.â
By the time New Yearâs comes around, I have holiday exhaustion. New Yearâs needs to be in March. Not a lot of holidays between January and May.
Quintessence is a âbarebone Nuzzel cloneâ for Mastodon, in open beta.
Itâs pretty simple: if you follow the @quintsns@mastodon.uno bot account, each day at 23:00UTC it will send you a direct message containing 10 links that have been shared in the past 24 hours by the people you follow, ordered by the number of different people you follow that have tooted/boosted the link.
Brilliant! Iâve signed up.
The exiled chief rabbi of Moscow says Jews should get out while they can. [The Guardian/Stephen Burgen]
Pinchas Goldschmidt says that, historically in Russia and the USSR, when things go bad, the government scapegoats Jews.
Jews have been fleeing Russia for a century. In 1926, there were 2.7 million Jews in the USSR, 59% of whom were in Ukraine. âToday only about 165,000 Jews remain in the Russian Federation out of a total population of 145 million.â
My own grandparents bugged out of Eastern Europe around 1900. Poland on my fatherâs side, Lithuania on my motherâs.
Also:
Ukraine has a long history of antisemitism from pogroms at the end of the 19th century to facilitating Nazi massacres during the second world war. The most notorious of these was the murder of 33,000 Jews at Babi Yar in Kyiv in 1941.
Given this history, Goldschmidt said it was remarkable that Volodymyr Zelenskiy, who made no secret of his Jewishness, was elected Ukraineâs president with more 70% of the vote.
That fact made a nonsense of Vladimir Putinâs claim that Ukraine was being governed by neo-Nazis, the rabbi said. âShow me another country that is in the grip of Nazis where the Jewish community is thriving.
âHowever, I donât know how Jewish the president [Zelenskiy] feels. He plays the Jewish card to ask Israel for help.â
I imagine Zelenskyâs Jewishness is much the same as my own. I am not observant, nor do I have a religious preference in my associations. But am I Jewish? Hell, yeah.
Goldschmidt also noted that while Russiaâs Jews faced an uncertain future, antisemitism was on the rise in what had long been seen as a Jewish sanctuary, the US.
In 2018, a gunman killed 11 worshippers in a Pittsburgh synagogue. Last year the Anti-Defamation League recorded a record 2,717 antisemitic incidents in the US, ranging from assault and harassment to vandalism.
âFor many years, Jews in the US believed that it was an exception, that whatever happened in Europe and other countries could never happen there,â Goldschmidt said. âBut over the past three years there have been more attacks on Jews there than in Europe.
I have not been alarmed by the rise of anti-Semitism in the US. It still seems like a lunatic fringe. But perhaps I should be alarmed.
