Michael Bloomberg says 2015 stop and frisk comments were ‘five years ago’ and are ‘not the way that I think’ www.cnn.com/2020/02/1…
I saw these geese at Lake Murray. Ready to rumble!
Whenever cruise ships are in the news it’s never good.
I am prepared to call the 2020 presidential election: it’s going to be Amy Klobuchar.
The Democrats will be split between Sanders and Bloomberg going into the convention. Supporters of each will loathe and despise the other.
On the 60 gazillionth ballot, some desperate person will suggest Amy Klobuchar and everyone will look at each other and say actually, yes, I kind of like her.
And she will easily trounce Trump, who will prove to be too chickenshit to stage a coup d’état. Trump’s supporters will crawl back to their basements and conspiracy theories. And a new golden age for America will dawn.
Fresh Air: Michael Pollan Explains Caffeine Addiction & Withdrawal
As part of the research for a new audiobook about caffeine, author Michael “Omnivore’s Dilemma” Pollan gave up caffeine cold turkey for three months. Now that’s sacrificing for the craft!
‘Omnivore’s Dilemma’ author Michael Pollan talks about his new audiobook, ‘Caffeine: How Coffee and Tea Created the Modern World.’ He describes caffeine as the world’s most widely-used psychoactive drug. “Here’s a drug we use every day. … We never think about it as a drug or an addiction, but that’s exactly what it is,” Pollan says. “I thought, why not explore that relationship?”
Affluent parents are giving their children growth hormones, to keep the kids from growing up short.
Seems like a bad idea. There’s nothing medically wrong with the kids, and studies have shown that short people’s lives are no less satisfying and happy than anybody else.
Being short just isn’t a disability to be corrected. And we don’t know what the long-term effects of the treatments might be.
I’m 5'9" tall – precisely average.
Friend of Dorothy: How did Judy Garland become a gay icon? slate.com/podcasts/…
A new wave of national conservatives are gaining power and wealth by claiming to be persecuted minorities and spreading easily fact-checked lies about liberalism.
Like smartphone users today, medieval monks wrestled with distraction.
Merle Oberon, a star actress of Hollywood’s golden age, was biracial, passing as white, and the product of two generations of rape. She was born in Bombay to a 12-year-old girl who was raped by an Englishman. Oberon’s mother was herself the product of rape.
Teens are scrambling their identities on Instagram, so they can use the service without divulging personal information.
Reset: art19.com/shows/res…
A brief history of the Apple Newton: 20 years ahead of its time, and still has a small but loyal fan base who continue to use it.
Anybody tried posting automatically from Flickr to micro.blog? Should be do-able, right – last I checked, Flickr produces RSS feeds.
I’d like there to be some differentiation between Flickr and other images. I post a lot of found images from the Internet, as well as a few of my own photos, and I like differentiating the two.
Maybe pipe Flickr through IFTTT.com first? Hmmmmm……
Meet the Unlikely Hero Saving California’s Oldest Weekly Paper: I love this story so, so much
“High in the Sierra, Downieville, Calif., was about to become the latest American community to lose its newspaper. In stepped Carl Butz, a 71-year-old retiree.”
DOWNIEVILLE, Calif. — The night before his first deadline, Carl Butz, California’s newest newspaper owner, was digging into a bowl of beef stew at the Two Rivers Café, the only restaurant open in town.
“Tomorrow I have to fill the paper,” he said with only mild anxiety. “The question is, will it be a four-page paper or a six-page paper?”
At 71, Mr. Butz is trim, with wire-rimmed glasses and a close-cropped silver beard, and he dresses in flannel shirts and cargo pants. Since his retirement and his wife’s death in 2017, he considered traveling — to England or Latvia, or riding the Trans-Siberian Railway. But here he was, a freshly minted newspaper proprietor, having stepped in at the beginning of the year to save The Mountain Messenger, California’s oldest weekly newspaper, from extinction.
The Messenger was founded in 1853. Its most famous scribe was Mark Twain, who once wrote a few stories — with a hangover, the legend goes — while hiding out here from the law.
An Oklahoma University journalism professor likened the phrase "OK Boomer" to the N-word. This is such a weird story
An OU professor in the Gaylord College of Journalism and Mass Communication used a racial slur during a class Tuesday morning, according to multiple students present in the class….
Gade was discussing the changes in journalism related to technology and social media and made the point that journalism should stick to its more traditional roots, according to multiple students in the class.
Gade is right. With rumors and misinformation spreading like a pandemic, it’s more important than ever for journalism to get its facts right and tell the audience what’s actually going on.
Gade then called on a student who said journalists have to keep up with the younger generations as they continue to change
The student is right too! Journalism needs to report on younger people and the issues they care about. And journalism needs to deliver news through the channels that young people care about – Twitter, Instagram, TikTok and whatever comes next. (This does, however, present business challenges that journalism needs to address.)
Gade said the student’s comment was the equivalent of saying “OK, boomer” to him.
Wait, what? No it’s not.
Maybe the professor was kidding.
The class broke into light laughter….
OK, he was kidding.
… but was interrupted by Gade’s next comment.
“Calling someone a boomer is like calling someone a n—–,” Gade said.
Oh noooooooooo.
Calling someone a boomer is not the equivalent of using the N-word. “Boomer” is a neutral phrase used to describe an American born between 1946 and 1964.
MWC 2020 canceled over coronavirus health concerns
Mobile World Congress is the biggest telco conference of the year, worldwide. Maybe there’s a bigger one in China but if there is I don’t know about it.
This is a prudent measure in the face of a potential health crisis. It’s not a good idea for 100K+ people from all over the world to fly to a central location, spend a week sneezing on each other in an enclosed conference center, with their immune systems compromised due to short-sleeping, and then disperse to their homes all over the world again.
Shoot, half the time I go to MWC I come home with a bad cold or the flu, and that’s in years without coronavirus. (Not last year though. Last year I’m pretty sure it was food poisoning. 72 hours of not fun!).
The biggest telco vendors and their customers had already pulled out of the show so this next step is not surprising.
This morning I updated <mitchwagner.com> and my LinkedIn profile. They look snappy.
Matthew Yglesias: Mainstream Democrats shouldn't be freaking out about Sanders
Sanders' rhetoric is revolutionary but his record shows he’s willing to make deals for incremental change.
And some of the views he has that Washington castigates as crazy – like winding down American hegemony and being tougher on Israel – make sense and are downright mainstream once you get out of the Beltway bubble.
I saw this excellent collection of stickers on a car at Lake Murray
