Mitch's Blog logo Mitch's Blog

Something I saw while walking the dog: This sticker on the side window of a car.

When you’re watching TV show set in or around 1970 and Doors music comes on, something bad is gonna happen. When the Doors song is “People Are Strange,” somebody’s gonna OD.

Tokyo University graduate student Takatsugu Kuriyama built an accurate three-dimensional model of Tokyo’s incredibly complex subway system “using multi-colored tubes strung with wire. Different color liquids pulsate throughout all 18 lines, creating a staggering picture of what goes on below the streets of Tokyo every day.”

Looking at this diagram, I realized that I visualize subway systems (like Tokyo’s, New York’s or London’s) operating on a single plane. Flat. But Tokyo’s, at least, is tall as well as broad. It’s like an anthill or termite’s nest.

Cory Doctorow: The web is bearable with RSS. Also, a brief history of Google Reader, Google+ (which Cory doesn’t think much of but which I loved and still mourn), and tips for customizing Firefox for avoiding nag screens and other annoyances. I’m using a Chrome-based browser; hopefully the plugins he recommends have parallels in the Chrome universe.

I am a die-hard RSS user and have been for more than 20 years. I have a love-hate relationship with Inoreader — I am perpetually looking for alternatives and keep coming back to it. Right now, I’m actually looking to use RSS less, and unsubscribe from high-volume feeds, viewing those websites in the browser instead.

Regarding breaking news, I used to say that if I don’t hear the helicopters circling over the house, I can wait to find out about it.

Meet your new phone away from phone

A roundup of phones designed to be used as second phones, to minimize distraction. By Allison Johnson at The Verge.

This is an idea that seems stupid to me at first, but now I find it intriguing.

I do not see something like this as a solution to the distraction problem. If you’re distracted by your phone, the problem is not with the phone, it’s between your ears. (Says the guy who is 100% too distracted by his phone.)

But maybe we’d be better off with something limited-purpose but elegant, like these devices, to use as phones, and something like an iPad mini for video, gaming, apps, etc.?

It would be better for my mental health if I did not check the news as often as I do. Surely I am the first person ever to have had this insight.

What do you use for breaking news? I check in with a few sources a few times a day to see what the latest crisis is. I check Google News, Apple News and my RSS reader. How about you?

I stopped using Grammarly on the desktop earlier this week. It’s too intrusive with popups and insists I add Oxford commas, which violates my employer’s style guidelines and annoys my editors. I’m using a Claude project for proofreading instead, and it seems to work better while being less annoying.

A Complimentary Profile Of Jason Lee That Was Surprisingly Difficult To Publish

Jason Lee threatened a national publication that planned to publish a profile of him that included his involvement in Scientology, even though the profile was highly complimentary, the bits about Scientology didn’t make him look bad, and he cooperated in the whole interview process, including talking at some length about Scientology.

The national publication spiked the article, which now appears on Defector.com: A Complimentary Profile Of Jason Lee That Was Surprisingly Difficult To Publish

But why does writer Nate Rogers suppress the names of the national publication and the editor who spiked the story? That seems tribal — journalists protecting each other — and maybe like Rogers doesn’t want to threaten future paychecks.

Also, it’s tempting to think what Lee did is an example of the Streisand effect, but it could work to Lee’s benefit by intimidating future publications from bringing up his Scientology connections. And also intimidate publications from bringing up Scientology in profiles of other celebrities linked with the church. So a win for Lee and for Scientology.

They Haven’t Even Started Spending Yet. Hundreds of millions of dollars spent on buying elections represent unnoticeable amounts of money to oligarchs like Musk, writes Hamilton Nolan. For oligarchs, hundreds of millions of dollars is like a normal person spending $75.

‘The Epstein files won’t knock him out’: what Anthony Scaramucci learned in Trump’s inner circle

Like Trump, Scaramucci was from the outer boroughs of New York and found himself among the privileged elites of Manhattan. That makes their backgrounds similar, even though Trump was born to wealth and Scaramucci’s parents were working class.

Steve Rose at The Guardian:

Early on, it seems, Scaramucci realised that the privileged elites were really no smarter than he was. “You have to get comfortable with being an outsider. Trump is an outsider, but he’s an uncomfortable outsider, and so he has a chip on his shoulder. He’s angry that he can’t get into the salons of the uber-wealthy, the establishment. So now he’s trying to lord over them. He couldn’t get into certain golf clubs that the blue bloods were members of, so he built himself golf courses.”

Psychopathy is a zombie idea. Why does it cling on?

Zombie ideas are social science theories that have been thoroughly debunked, but which are still widely believed, even by social scientists, writes Rasmus Rosenberg Larsen at Aeon. Race science is an extremely toxic example.

Psychopaths are widely believed to have no emotions or empathy, yet research shows they have both.

Doesn’t explain why some people are serial killers and otherwise monsters.

People want to believe that psychopaths are broken people — not like us — but they are just people who made bad choices.

They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.

That’s from “The Great Gatsby,” published 101 years ago, and perfectly describing the Epstein White House and its sexual predation and wars.

Ars Technica Fires Reporter Over AI-Generated Quotes.

My reaction on reading the headline: “Hell yeah! Kick that sad bastard to the curb!”

But the article provides details that make the situation more complicated:

  • The reporter was working while sick in bed with Covid and a fever.
  • The quotes were paraphrases, not complete fabrications

Yes, what that reporter did was wrong and unprofessional and he has acknowledged that publicly and apologized on social media.

Where was his manager to tell him that he was impaired and should just stay in bed and watch YouTube?

I’m glad we stuck with “Starfleet Academy,” because the most recent two episodes, which we watched Saturday, were brilliant. The most recent episode may have been the only time I’ve been deeply emotionally moved watching “Star Trek.”

And now I want to see “Our Town” again. I love that play and haven’t seen it since 2003, when the Paul Newman production aired.

Jay-den has seemed to be a delicate, hesitant character, but when his shipmate is threatened, Jay-den goes full Klingon. No hesitation there!

Caleb can be a dick a lot of the time, but he understands consent in his bones. And he and Nahla have great bantering repartee.

On the Democratic Party Style:

I don’t think I’ve ever encountered, outside academia, people with such a bottomless appetite for mountainous piles of meaningless, unnecessary, empty words and phrases, each genetically engineered, in whole or in part, to make any sentient being stop paying attention. Reading this speech, that is the only conclusion I can come to: that the sole purpose of this speech is to make people stop paying attention.

Posted privately by a friend, shared with his permission:

Lost in the Trump regime’s ongoing disinformation campaign is the fact that not one member of the Trump family has served in the military.

Ever.

And I suspect no one in his administration has a child who is in harm’s way. This is also true of all the chicken hawks cheering them on. It’s always someone else’s family who will pay the Butcher’s Bill.

Elsewhere, a friend praised the TV series “Monsieur Spade.” I replied:

I loved “Monsieur Spade.” It has flaws that would have made another series unwatchable, but in this case the show’s many strong virtues made the flaws inconsequential. It hits the notes of noir hard, but it has characteristics that make it definitely not noir.

The showrunner for “Monsieur Spade” is Scott Frank, who was also behind “The Queen’s Gambit,” “Department Q” and “Godless.”

Because he’s a behind-the-scenes guy, I did not become aware of him until last year, when he did one or two interviews. But his IMDB page shows he was behind some of my all-time favorite movies and TV shows.

A private post by a friend, shared with his permission:

Another stupid fucking war in the Middle East.

Just say no. No more wars in the Middle East, ever, for any reason. Stay the hell away from that black hole. Over the course of my life the amount of blood and treasure we have poured into this black hole is staggering, and for what. What’s it good for? Absolutely nothing.

I especially resent the USA becoming Netanyahu’s bitch. Bibi has wanted to drag the USA into war with Iran for a very long time. He finally found a sucker to buy into that. A divorce from Israel cannot come soon enough. I am done with them. Israel is a liability. Get it off the national balance sheet, please. What is the USA getting out of this relationship? More wars? Hard pass.

There is nothing in the Middle East worth the bones of a single American GI, to paraphrase Bismarck.

The only regime change I am interested in is here in the USA.

Maybe this war helps that along, so there is that. Trump’s casus belli? Because fuck you, that’s why. The public was not prepped for this. It is of course a massively illegal power grab, but that is par for the course for Trump.

I very much doubt this helps the GOP in the midterms. Especially the higher oil prices.

I would have phrased the comments about Israel less harshly. As an American Jew of a certain generation I feel a strong bond to Israel, and over the course of my lifetime I have had many positive and warm interactions with Israelis — as recently as last week.

But Israel has gone to a dark place since 2023, perhaps much longer than that, and as an American I say we need to stop letting them drag us behind them.

Heather Cox Richardson: The US DEA was running an investigation of Jeffrey Epstein and fourteen other people for drug trafficking, prostitution and money laundering. It started in 2010 under Obama. The task force running the investigation was dismantled under Trump.

“The basic question here is whether a bunch of rich pedophiles and Epstein accomplices are going to face any consequences for their crimes,” [Sen. Ron] Wyden said, “and Scott Bessent is doing his best to make sure they won’t. My head just about exploded when I heard Bessent say it wasn’t his department’s job to investigate these Epstein bank records…. From the beginning, my view has been that following the money is the key to identifying Epstein’s clients as well as the henchmen and banks that enabled his sex trafficking network. It’s past time for Bessent to quit running interference for pedophiles and give us the Epstein files he’s sitting on.”

Kansas and Scouting America’s anti-trans bigotry are disgraceful.

The airport background music is “Wish You Were Here” by Pink Floyd, which I love. I remember when the only background music you heard in public was old people music, so this is a nice change.

I’m on my way to Salt Lake City, where there is winter, from home in mild San Diego. I put on my topcoat this morning, reached in my pocket, and discovered a badge from Mobile World Congress 2025, almost exactly a year ago, which shows you the last time I wore that coat.

I remember this is an annual ritual in temperate climates in October or November. You put on your coat for the first time in a half a year and discover some little time capsule from the last time you wore it — a movie ticket, a couple of dollars, a half-crumpled cigarette pack with three remaining smokes.

The "textcasting" idea is great but it's backwards

I love Dave Winer’s vision of textcasting (as discussed here by Kottke) but I think he’s mistaken putting the writer first. We need to put the reader first. I’m active on Facebook, Tumblr, BlueSky, LinkedIn Reddit and Micro.blog and a newsletter and I hate it because it’s too much fussing and cutting-and-pasting. I just want to post my things and have it reach my friends and family and everybody who’s interested in seeing it.

I think I’ll replace my smartphone with a dumb phone. Or maybe start smoking again. Carry around a pack of cigarettes and a lighter.

I’m losing interest in “Starfleet Acadeny.” I don’t dislike it. I like it. But I forget to watch it.

An unpopular opinion about making coffee with the AeroPress

You should only use the AeroPress to make one cup of coffee at a time. Don’t weigh anything, don’t use external measures. One scoop of beans, grind, fill with water to the 4, stir, press and drink.

Aeropress is an excellent, convenient way to make one cup of great coffee. That is its virtue. It is a single-purpose device and it is fantastic at performing that purpose. If you’re making more than one cup, use another method.

If you’re weighing, measuring, taking precise temperatures and timing precisely, you need to rethink your life choices and go outside and touch grass.

Also, the AeroPress XL is an abomination.

Overheard: “90 percent of being married is yelling WHAT?! from other rooms.”

I follow the river of news approach for RSS feeds. I have done for twenty-plus years. I ignore unread counts. On the other hand, there are few RSS feeds where I do want to read every one that comes in. I use folders to separate the must-read streams from the high-volume, read-whenever feeds.

Voter ID isn't designed to protect voting. It's designed to steal elections.

Voter ID is a scam to disenfranchise millions of voters. The conservative Heritage Foundation, one of the biggest backers of the SAVE Act, which requires proof of citizenship to vote, claims voter fraud is a major issue. But in the groups own records, there have been 68 documented cases of residents casting a ballot in a US election since the 1980s.

That’s just 68 over the past 40 years — a fraud rate of 0.0001%.

The SAVE Act would require a passport or Real ID to vote, both of which cost money. It’s a poll tax, meant to punish people who can’t afford to pay.

I’ve been doing a lot of chopping lately. I like to have an apple nearly every day with lunch. My teeth have been bothering me for a couple of months — not enough to schedule an emergency dentist visit — but it’s uncomfortable for me to bite into an apple. So I’ve been cutting the apple into bite-sized pieces. And even though I don’t cook, I’ve gotten great at chopping, and also pretty good at not slicing open a finger.

Last weekend I decided to once again migrate my Mastodon usage to my blog at mitchwagner.com, hosted by Micro.blog, as my only outpost on the Fediverse. Micro.blog seems to work pretty well for me as a Mastodon client, though it has not in the past.

However, I’d still like to be able to see other people’s boosts from Micro.blog — that is a feature that @manton has steadfastly resisted implementing.

I have been a professional writer for more than 40 years and I still can’t figure out affect vs. effect. I have to look them up every single time I use one of those words. It’s affecting my mental health. Or effecting.

“There is nothing Christian about Christian nationalism”

Talarico is a Texas state lawmaker studying to be a minister, who criticizes the Republican use of Christianity as a political weapon. Such politicization of Christianity both distorts politics and cheapens faith, he says. The true way to practice Christianity is simple but not easy, he says: it is to love your neighbor. Political positions should grow out of that to feed the hungry, welcome the stranger, and heal the sick. “[T]here is nothing Christian about Christian nationalism,” he told Colbert. “It is the worship of power in the name of Christ, and it is a betrayal of Jesus of Nazareth.”

— Heather Cox Richardson

I was the first one on a Teams meeting this morning and for a few minutes it was just me and three note-taking and transcription AI bots.

I’m having a busy day so here is a recent photo of Minnie demanding her supper.