I am not a sentimental man who cries at rainbows and flowers, but when I saw this in the supermarket today I bawled.
For 40 years, journalists chronicled the eccentric royal family of Oudh, deposed aristocrats who lived in a ruined palace in the Indian capital. It was a tragic, astonishing story. But was it true?
Ellen Barry unravels the mystery at the New York Times
If TP shortages continue there’s always the three shells youtu.be/n7nFEnFtv…
James Nicoll reviews Isaac Asimov’s 1950s time-travel novel, “The End of Eternity,” and finds it still holds up.
Interestingly, Nicoll notes, the premise of Eternity is similar to the Foundation series — a secret cabal manipulating human history — but this novel takes the story in the opposite direction.
Earlier I said the premise of Foundation is sinister when you think about it: The two forms of government we see are empire and rule by a secret, unaccountable conspiracy of technocrats. Both of these states are presented as utopian, when in reality the first has been shown to be pretty awful, and the second looks a lot like Communism, which has not proven to be swell either.
Nonetheless, I cut Asimov slack. He was a VERY young man when he initially wrote Foundation, reading headlines about the Nazis seemingly unstoppably conquering the world and wanted assurance that everything was going to be OK. Asimov’s fictional science of psychohistory could have provided that assurance, had it existed. That observation is not original to me; Alec Nevala Lee said it in his terrific history of science fiction, “Astounding.”
I think it’s also true that in both the Foundation series and later in End of Eternity, Asimov was exploring the desire to be assured that the grownups are in charge of the world, as presidents and prime ministers and heads of billion-dollar companies and vast government bureaucracies, and that these grownups had matters under control. The 21-year-old Asimov who wrote Foundation had very diffferent ideas about that premise than the 34-year-old who wrote The End of Eternity.
Asimov wrote more Foundation stories in the 1980s. By that time he was in his 60s, written hundreds of books, including bestsellers. He appeared many times on national TV and had been published in the New York Times. He was an American public intellectual, and was himself one of the supposed grownups running the world. He had a different perspective on those issues once again.
Passover was a really big deal when I was a kid
We had the second seder at our house, with upwards of 20 aunts, uncles and cousins swarming over the place. Our cousins Janet and Barry even brought their dog; Mom couldn’t stand dogs but she made an exception for Dusty.
Dusty is still one of my alltime favorite dogs, although I believe Janet and Barry prefer Custer, their next dog. And now that I think of it, Custer is a weird name for a dog.
Jimmy Fallon said in an interview once that when he was growing up, his parents didn’t have friends. They had brothers and sisters and cousins. Says I to myself on hearing that: Holy crap. I thought that was just us. My parents socialized frequently, but it was almost always with people genetically related. Though my Dad did have one or two old friends he grew up with, whom he saw once or twice a year.
Mom was usually not a great cook, but she did a great job with the seder, working for days and putting on the full spread. Mom and Dad seldom drank, but they had a little wine with dinner – Manischewitz and Mogen David, of course! – and laughed a lot. My uncle Nat and Aunt Harriet were the only real drinkers in the family; my parents kept a bottle of vodka in the house for when they came to visit. We told the same jokes every year and never got tired of them.
To this day I am only a social drinker. I like beer and wine and Jameson’s and I went on a martini kick for a few years. But I don’t drink when I’m at home and I can go for weeks and months without having alcohol, and I do not miss it. 🌕
We kept kosher for Passover for the full eight days. The rest of the year we were lax. I like to say that we were pizza-and-chinese-food-on-paper-plates kosher – the foods we kept in the house were kosher, and we kept the proper two sets of plates, one for meat and one for dairy. But we brought in pizza and Chinese food regularly, and when we did, we ate it on paper plates. When I was an adult, it took me some time to get used to eating pizza on regular dishes.
I loved matzoh during Passover, and gobbled it up plain, or with margarine, rendered chicken fat or cream cheese. I never got tired of matzoh during Passover, but I stopped eating it and switched back to bread the moment I could, and never had matzoh, or wanted it, the rest of the year.
Happy Easter!
He is risen!
But do not talk to Him until He has had coffee because seriously he’s just plain grouchy til then.
One of the crazy things about this pandemic is that it’s all going to be over in a year or a few years at most. Done. History. Past tense.
Everybody who was going to get it will have gotten it, many will die, the rest of us will just get on with our lives. The disease itself might continue in the population, but it will be like the flu. Just part of normal life. No social distancing or special measures required.
And if the 1918 pandemic is a guide, we will not talk about it much and it will be all but forgotten in a generation.
A generation from now we will STILL be talking about the 1970s because that was such a crazy decade. But the “coronavirus pandemic?” What was that? Never heard of it.
Last night I was getting ready for bed and looked at my pedometer app and saw it was at 9,800 steps and said to myself, welp, guess I’m not making it to 10,000 today.
And then I got into bed and pulled the covers up and was all set up and cozy and ready to go to sleep and I looked at the pedometer app again and it was over 9,900.
And I got out of bed and walked around the house for about 5 minutes until I was over 10,000.
Today on Cory Doctorow’s Pluralistic.net
[Private equity] companies that “looted healthcare want billions in bailout.”
Corporations that went to binding arbitration to stiff consumers are screaming now that automation is threatening to make the playing field fair
E-voting is a nonstarter for secret elections but it’ll work for public votes by elected officials such as legislators
Republicans plan squads of ex-military and ex-police to intimidate black and Latino voters
“‘Job creators’ are job annihilators”
Eric Snowden warns that pandemic surveillance will become permanent. If you liked the PATRIOT Act, you’ll love pandemic surveillance!
Also: “RIP MAD’s Mort Drucker: One of ‘the usual gang of idiots:”
His daughter, Laurie Bachner, told the AP: “I think my father had the best life anyone could hope for. He was married to the only woman he ever loved and got to make a living out of what he loved to do.”
Drucker worked at MAD from the mid-50s on, helping to define the magazine’s caricature house-style.
I just cancelled my $119 annual Dropbox account, which expires in 10 days. I’m pretty sure I can get everything I need from iCloud plus the free Dropbox tier.
As a test, I moved everything out of the Dropbox sync folder except for one small folder that I still want to use with Dropbox. We’ll see if anything breaks!
I’ve been using Dropbox for at least 10 years, so this feels like more of a big deal than it probably actually is.
The vet gave us parking lot service: when I arrived, I called from the parking lot, a vet tech came out to the car, checked us in, and brought Minnie inside. I never entered the vet building.
Out of old habit I almost ordered a burger, fries and chocolate shake from the vet tech. But I stopped myself in time. Still, would’ve been nice if she’s cruised up on roller skates.
The vet phoned me while I was in the car trying to figure out how to get the iPad hooked up to the Verizon network (which I never did succeed in doing). She said Minnie has basically blown out her right rear knee. Minnie probably did the left one too at some point a while ago (the vet said), but recovered and has been compensating.
I’m thinking Minnie probably did the left one in September when we took her into the vet because she could barely stand up after zoomies.
The prognosis: Rest for two weeks, anti-inflammatories, and then we’ll see.
If that doesn’t work: Surgery. Which costs $4,000. So yeah, permanently disabled dog vs. spending $4K on surgery is a choice between unacceptable options. Let’s just say she’s going to recover fine after two weeks of rest.
The vet said Minnie will probably eventually need the surgery, when she is an old dog. But “eventually” is a long way away, and may never come, so I’m not going to worry about that now.
When I dropped Minnie at the vet initially, I asked how long it would take. They said a half-hour to an hour. I said OK we live a short way away so I’ll just turn around and go home and then come back to get her when I get the call that she’s ready. I figured it’d probably be more like two or three hours, just because things usually take longer than people say they will .
But nope, the vet called just as I was pulling up the road to the house. I finished the call in our driveway, went upstairs, had lunch, then went back downstairs and picked up the dog.
Julie took this photo of Minnie recovering from her ordeal.
I filed a bug report with Flexibits about a Fantastical 3 problem I had in February. I’m just getting a response now.
Um, yay?
Manischewitz wine is popular in Caribbean communities. [Nadege Green/WLRN] This story makes me happy.
Minnie was still hopping along on three legs this morning and looking pretty miserable. I called the vet and they’re doing parking-lot check-ins. So I’m off to the vet later this morning.
It’s pouring rain out. I know that’s no big deal to the real world, but we Southern Californians are big babies when it comes to any kind of foul weather.
A friend says dogs just do that sometimes, and she’ll get over it in a week. Maybe so. But Minnie is seven years old and she has never done it. She frequently strains herself after zoomies, but never like this and never this badly. And she seems pretty miserable, so anything we can do to make her more comfortable seems like a good idea.
Also, it seems prudent to have her checked out.