Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for August 30, 1971. Nixon goes to China.
Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for August 17, 1971. Meanwhile, here in 2023, there’s a dispensary on every corner.
I’m attending an event in a few days for which I’ll be wearing a suit and tie, which means I had to bring my suits in to be cleaned and pressed.
The last time I wore a suit was on my last business trip, December 2019. I figured then that I had no travel scheduled until February, so I the suits in a pile in my closet to be brought to the cleaners.
And they’ve been sitting in that pile for nearly four years.
Telling Julie “I’m bringing my suits to the cleaners” and then doing so was weird and retro, like using a rotary phone.
The dry cleaner hasn’t changed. They still give out a paper claim ticket, rather than using a fancypants app.
Ron Rosenbaum is from Long Island. The Long Islandest part of Long Island—South Shore. And yet he hates Billy Joel. Is that allowed?
Enjoying giving office supplies and travel size toiletries to trick or treaters.
Jinkies! Today’s oddly satisfying and mildly interesting things I saw on the internet
The beauty of finished software: Finished software is software that’s done—it doesn’t need updates.
I missed a message from a client yesterday morning because Slack moved everything around for no apparent reason at all.
“I started reading Ed McBain when I was probably 11 or 12,” [Stephen] King said, looking at his row of several novels by the prolific author of crime procedurals. “The bookmobile would come by. We lived out in the country. The first thing I remember is, I’m reading one of these books, and [detectives] Carella and Kling go to interview a woman about some crime. And she’s sitting there in her slip and she’s drunk, and she grabs her breast and squeezes and says, ‘In your eye, copper.’ And I thought to myself: This is not the Hardy Boys. Okay? It made an impression. It felt more real.”
Also, King about why he doesn’t think about his legacy:
“There are very few popular novelists who have a life after death. Agatha Christie, for one. I can’t think of anybody else who’s a popular novelist, really. People like John D. MacDonald, he was a terrifically popular novelist in his day, but when he died, his books disappeared off the racks. They were ultimately disposable. I think that a couple of the horror novels might last. They might be read 50 or a hundred years from now, ‘The Shining’ and ‘Salem’s Lot’ and ‘It.’ If you ask people, ‘What vampire do you know?,’ they’d say, ‘Dracula.’ ‘Well, who invented Dracula?’ ‘I don’t [expletive] know.’ So, 50 or a hundred years from now, people will say: ‘Oh, Pennywise, the clown. Yeah, sure.’ ‘Who is Stephen King?’ They won’t know.”
— Book Tour: A tour of Stephen King’s personal library
Now I’m thinking about deceased popular novelists who are still bringing in new readers in large numbers. Asimov? Bradbury? Is Hemingway widely read by anybody younger than Boomers?
Either CAPTCHAs are becoming harder or I’m becoming less human.
When I was 11 years old, I wanted to be Barnard Hughes when I grew up. I’m behind schedule.