Mitch's Blog

1958: The San Diego Evening Tribune interviews 18-year-old local beauty pageant winner Raquel Tejada, and finds her intelligent and vivacious, as well as beautiful.

Tejada later became famous as “Raquel Welch.”

The author of this article makes it pretty obvious he doesn’t think highly of beauty pageant winners, but is impressed with young Raquel’s brains and charm, as well as her beauty.

Note the sidebar explaining how to pronounce the beauty pageant winner’s name. Did people really need to be told how to pronounce “Raquel?” That surprised me at first—but I guess the name is well known now because this Raquel made it famous.

I am also surprised that the Tribune in 1958 thought its readers needed to be told how to pronounce “Tejada.” San Diego was just as close to Mexico then as it is now; neither San Diego nor Mexico has moved.

And it’s sweet that her friends called her “Rocky.” I wonder if that continued in later life.

PS. Rereading the article, I see I was pronouncing “Tejada” wrong. I had the “J” sound right, because I’m not a bumpkin, but I was pronouncing the first syllable “tay,” rather than the correct “tuh.”

My Favorite Times to Use Incognito Mode (The New Yorker / Jade Orlando) A fun one-minute read.

Watching RoboCop on the Spanish language channel while getting a haircut. You really lose out on the emotional subtlety and nuance when you can’t understand the dialogue.

How to Win at Monopoly and Lose All Your Friends.

Monopoly starts as a fun exciting romp, only to turn into a bitter cesspool of despair.

…

A little-known rule of Monopoly is that the game has exactly 32 houses and 12 hotels. Once you run out of houses, no more can be purchased until they re-enter the supply by being sold or upgraded to hotels. … The core of this strategy is to buy up as many houses as possible before anyone realizes what you’re doing, and DO NOT UPGRADE TO HOTELS to prevent people from improving their own properties.

…

If losing a normal game of monopoly is frustrating, losing to this strategy is excruciating, as a losing opponent essentially has no path to victory, even with lucky rolls. Your goal is to play conservatively, lock up more resources, and let the other players lose by attrition. If you want to see these people again, I recommend not gloating, but simply state that you’re playing to win, and that it wasn’t your idea to play Monopoly in the first place.

The Onion: It Is Journalism’s Sacred Duty To Endanger The Lives Of As Many Trans People As Possible “It’s about asking the tough questions and ignoring the answers you don’t like…. “

I asked ChatGPT for my bio. The result has a staggering number of errors packed into a small space. I never wrote for CIO Mag or Network Computing. I am not now and never was EiC of LR, which is not best described as an IT and cloud computing website. I did not write those books. And so on.

TurboTax parent Intuit is stepping up lobbyist spending to stop Washington from simplifying taxes. (OpenSecrets.org / Anna Massoglia)

Simplified taxes would hurt Intuit’s bottom line.

Picard rummages through a trunk, searching for the source of the sound of an Enterprise-D commbadge chirp. He tosses the contents one at a time over his shoulder: Tennis racket, bowling shoes, harmonica, clown nose, groucho glasses, rubber bulb horn (which he squeezes twice: honk! honk!), feather boa. He unscrews the lid from a canister labeled “cocktail peanuts” and rubber snakes spring out…..

On Lake Murray: This metal platform is usually attached to the concrete walkway, and people fish from it. It came loose in the storms this week.

Lake Murray from Baltimore Dr., first clear day after this week’s storms.