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đŸ“ș I have finished watching I Claudius, for the fourth time. I now realize why I didn’t have any memory of the last episode. It is because the episode is weak, bleak and uncomfortably incesty.

I just want a professional haircut. I realize this is literally the smallest problem in the universe compared with the sacrifice others are making, often unwillingly.

I’ve discussed the matter with my wife, who is going to have to do the deed, and we’ve mutually agreed that I should have 100% of my pre-existing ears when the process is done.

The Hollywood Vigilante

Actress Marisol Nichols, star of the TV series “Riverdale,” is a real-life vigilante, hunting down sex predators.

Erika Hayasaki on Marie Claire:

Nichols dresses the part in case a perp glimpses her through the window. She’s 46 but, waif-like and five foot four with a hoodie over her head and a bedsheet draped across her shoulders, can pass for a teenager. Or she might wear her long, dark hair matted and put on a beer-soaked Mötley CrĂŒe T-shirt, and suddenly she’s a young junkie mom prostituting her kid. She can play madam or victim.

On this morning, she wears a black baseball cap backwards, a black V-neck T-shirt, and bell-bottom jeans. She carries a pack of American Spirit cigarettes. She could be anyone. Most of these guys, she says, are “wimps.” Cowards. Sick men who want to take advantage of a girl. She remembers one sting in which she played a trafficker who sets up child sex parties. The target was 38, looked like a real estate agent or something, probably in a fraternity in college. “Looking the guy in the face,” she says, got her in her gut. “These guys look like normal people. And you’re pretending that you just happily and eagerly set up children for them to have sex with.” Nichols kept her cool throughout the interaction, but she adds: “To watch his eyes”—the way they lit up at the mention of an underage kid—“you want to kick him in the balls and beat the hell out of him.”

Jesus.

“Having no plan is the plan! … Plans are for commies and the Danish. Here we do it fast and loose and dumb and wrong, and occasionally we have a man who manufactures pillows come to the White House to show the president encouraging texts. It all works!” – Dave Eggers: Flattening the Truth on Coronavirus

As a newly self-employed person, I’m learning that the weekend is a thing you schedule. My most recent weekend was Tuesday and Wednesday. I’m planning my next one for Friday and Saturday.

Today on Cory Doctorow’s Pluralistic

++ The pandemic could make Big Tech our permanent overlords

++ Hospital CEOs are making millions while slashing health care worker salaries and hours, announcing layoffs and furloughs. “The average hospital CEO gets $3.1m/year. The average nurse gets $75k.”

++ Workers at Wired Magazine are forming a union.

++ How open source has failed: The focus should be “on protocol documentation … in a cloud-based era, real software freedom comes from being able to make compatible clients for existing servers, and compatible servers for existing clients.” That’s in addition to legal protections against monopoly practices.

The traditional antitrust world did not permit firms to attain dominance through mergers with major competitors, catch-and-kill buyouts of nascent startups, or vertical monopolies where companies that owned platforms competed with the companies that used them. [But these] rules were heavily nerfed by Reagan, then further eroded by every administration since."

Larry Ellison Reveals His Big Data Battle Plan To Fight Coronavirus In Partnership With Trump White House

Billionaire Larry Ellison has turned the Hawaiian island of Lanai into a luxury health resort, and plans to use it to save the world. Philanthropy, he said, is the definition of unsustainable. Profit is sustainable.

He “is tackling three sets of complex issues on the island: the global food-supply chain, nutrition and the transition from fossil fuels to sustainable energy sources.”

Ellison also distances himself from Trump, saying he has worked with every President.

AWS engineer Tim Bray resigns from Amazon following worker firings – Bray quit Amazon in protest over the company firing vocally critical employees. Bray was an Amazon Web Services VP and distinguished engineer, who previously did stints at Google and Sun.

“… remaining an Amazon VP would have meant, in effect, signing off on actions I despised,” he said. “The victims weren’t abstract entities but real people…. "

He adds: “I’m sure it’s a coincidence that every one of them is a person of color, a woman, or both. Right?”

Inspired by a conversation with Mike Elgan yesterday, I’m going to do Facebook a lot less for a while.

The Scientists Who Won’t Give Up on the Warp Drive — Dozens of engineers and physicists are trying to do the impossible, develop a means of moving faster than the speed of light. They see it as an interesting thought experiment that could shed light on the boundaries of physics — and maybe more.

The Coronavirus Is Rewriting Our Imaginations

Science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson went off the grid in mid-March, rafting down the Colorado River. He returned into a new world. He sees Covid-19 as a precursor into crises yet to come – chiefly global warming – and finds reason for hope.

Possibly, in a few months, we’ll return to some version of the old normal. But this spring won’t be forgotten. When later shocks strike global civilization, we’ll remember how we behaved this time, and how it worked. It’s not that the coronavirus is a dress rehearsal—it’s too deadly for that. But it is the first of many calamities that will likely unfold throughout this century. Now, when they come, we’ll be familiar with how they feel.

What’s coming? Droughts, food shortages, electrical outages, storms, floods.

Imagine what a food scare would do. Imagine a heat wave hot enough to kill anyone not in an air-conditioned space, then imagine power failures happening during such a heat wave…. Imagine pandemics deadlier than the coronavirus. These events, and others like them, are easier to imagine now than they were back in January, when they were the stuff of dystopian science fiction. But science fiction is the realism of our time. The sense that we are all now stuck in a science-fiction novel that we’re writing together—that’s another sign of the emerging structure of feeling…

Right now we’re hearing two statements being made. One, from the President and his circle: we have to save money even if it costs lives. The other, from the Centers for Disease Control and similar organizations: we have to save lives even if it costs money. Which is more important, money or lives? Money, of course! says capital and its spokespersons. Really? people reply, uncertainly. Seems like that’s maybe going too far?”…

Even though our economic system ignores reality, we can act when we have to. At the very least, we are all freaking out together. To my mind, this new sense of solidarity is one of the few reassuring things to have happened in this century. If we can find it in this crisis, to save ourselves, then maybe we can find it in the big crisis, to save our children and theirs.”

What The U.S. Might Learn From China’s Approach To COVID-19 – New York Times health and science reporter Donald G. McNeil Jr. points to China as a model of how to stop a fast moving pandemic in its tracks.

China is not to blame for this virus. They didn’t release it on purpose, or accidentally from a lab. And they didn’t cover it up. The mayor of Wuhan covered it up and when Beijing found out about it they chastised him hard, forced him to apologize on national TV, and took swift, decisive action.

Chinese people were required to take mandatory testing and if they were positive, they were immediately taken away, separated from their families, and put in gymnasium-style hospitals where they slept on beds separate from each other, were tended by workers in PPE and – when they recovered – set free and home. It’s harsh but not cruel and it got the pandemic under control.

China has committed numerous awful crimes against its own people, but this was not one of those cases, McNeil notes. Quite the opposite; the Chinese government is demonstrating leadership and doing the right thing.

The US’s more wishy-washy approach is going to stretch out for years and cost many, many unnecessary deaths. This doesn’t mean autocracy wins; World War II teaches us that free societies can beat autocracies when those free societies have a national will and strong, intelligent leadership (rather than the current Republican Party).

Boy raises a hammer during a solidarity rally for the 42,000 miners on strike in the Zonguldak coal fields in Turkey, November 1990. via

Wearing a mask is for smug liberals. Refusing to is for reckless Republicans. – Mask-wearing and other pandemic protections have become political virtue-signaling.

Good article, but I think it overstates the polarization. Most Americans recognize that the current situation is both unsustainable and necessary.

The people ranting about rights and Communism are lunatics. A tornado doesn’t care about your property rights when it knocks down your house.

The U.S. Needs Way More Than a Bailout to Recover From Covid-19 – We need a new New Deal to fix structural problems with the US economy that long predate the current crisis.

If we want to restart the engine that made this nation a superpower, we need to do something big. I mean really, really big: defeat-the-Nazis, land-a-man-on-the-moon, invent-the-internet big.

By my college pal Barry Ritholtz (and by “pal” I mean we talked a few times and said hello).

Funniest work videoconferencing misadventures

When videoconferencing meetings go wrong, you get to see flossing, naked husbands and more.

… I could tell both his dogs were barking frantically but couldn’t figure out what the rest of the noise was, and I was concerned. “Are you OK?” Deep sigh. “We have a parrot, and the parrot has learned to call the dogs. He waits until the dogs come in the room and then imitates my wife. When the dogs can’t find her, they lose their minds.”

Today on Cory Doctorow's Pluralistic

Pluralistic: 02 May 2020 – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

++ The mistrust epidemic

The pandemic isn’t the only disease that’s annihilating our society: alongside of it, there is an epidemic of mistrust in institutions and a growth in conspiricism, a panic to save yourself and let everyone else fend on their own.

Blaming Big Tech for the collapse in trust and commonly held truth is backwards: Big Tech’s bigness is en effect, not a cause, of the corruption that made our institutions so untrustworthy.

++ Prisons, meat packing plants and nursing homes

Coronavirus outbreaks are concentrated in three places: Prisons, meat packing plants and nursing homes – industries that are built on treating people cruelly, like disposable components.

“Public health has always known the truth. The care of the most margnialized members of society is important for fighting infectious diseases.”…

… the GOP’s emphasis has been on shielding employers whose employers or customers die of coronavirus due to unsafe conditions. These industries are designed to run in unsafe ways and can’t conceive of operating safely.

++ Contact tracing apps could be worse than useless.

Too many false positives and false negatives. It’s like those security warnings you see on websites that are so noisy that everybody just clicks past them and ignores them.

An exposure-notification app that forgets to notify you when you’re at risk AND often notifies you when you are not at risk becomes a worse-than-useless frippery, as well an expensive boondoggle and distraction.

And security defects in those apps could literally increase a population’s exposure to terrorism, crime, election fraud and authoritarian governments.

However, contact tracing can be useful and safe, with the right precautions.

++ Ticketmaster sold a $500M stake to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, who ordered the murder, torture and dismemberment of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

++ And a hopeful note from Kim Stanley Robinson.

ME (1 month ago today): “How is it April already? This situation has been going on a long time!”

ME (seemingly minutes later): “How is it May already…. ?”

We watched the latest episode of “The Good Fight” last night. I liked it. I would’ve liked it more if the stinkers hadn’t given away a major plot point in the previews.

The main storyline of this season seems to be about a mysterious Memo 618. However, the previews told us what Memo 618 is. Feh. đŸ“ș

Cover art for the Erber Science Fiction series, Germany, 1976-1977. via

The Invisible Man – Today, Explained podcast: Where in the world is Kim Jong Un? Vox Journalist AlexWard says the rotund North Korean leader is probably not dead, might be very sick, and that North Korea’s leaders are watching the US, West and Western news media carefully to see how we react when we think he might be dead.

Also, Kim Jong Un is EXTREMELY obese. He merely looks chubby on TV – testimony to the power of loose-fitting dark clothes. And he’s a chain-smoker. Kim Jong Un was huffing and puffing to keep up with Trump.

URL for the micro meetup? I did not see that advance registration was required!

In the Republican solution to the Trolley Problem, the top priority is saving the trolley.

Ernest Hemingway supposedly wrote a six-word short story: “For Sale: Baby Shoes. Never Worn.”

Didn’t happen. The story about Hemingway is apocryphal, appearing first in “Papa,” a one-many play about Hemingway by John deGroot, which debuted in 1996.

However, something very like that ad appeared in real life in a Tucson newspaper in 1945.

I’m hosting a “town hall” style Zoom meeting next week and I’m looking for a guide to doing such a thing. Anybody with experience willing to walk me through the process? We’re talking about seven or 8 speakers and maybe 100 attendees or more.

Today on Cory Doctorow’s Pluralistic

++ “Swedish covid death rates soar above neighbors': “Do nothing” is not doing something.”

++ “Financial services workers dying for junk mail: Broadridge workers denied PPE, sick leave.”

++ AMC: “We will never show another Universal movie”: The feds are dismantling the monopoly regulations that broke up the Hollywood studio system. Soon we will have a few companies owning all the cable companies, movie studios and movie theaters. That’l be financially disastrous for anybody who works on or consumes Hollywood products.

They died for junk mail: Six workers died of COVID-19 at a Long Island, New York, warehouse for a company that prints and mails financial documents.

The company, Bainbridge Financial Solutions, pressured employees to avoid taking sick days, and delayed distributing PPE.

Coronavirus Kills Six Workers at Broadridge Warehouse

Thanks, Cory!

Last night, Julie and I watched the first episode of “Tales from the Loop,” an anthology series on Amazon Prime about the people in an Ohio smalltown where everybody works at some kind of paranormal research facility.

The episode was long on visual style and mood, short on actual story.

I’m not inclined to watch it again.

On the other hand, Julie likes it and I don’t dislike it enough to not watch another episode with her. So I’ll give the show at least one more try.

Even the fact that the show is apparently set in the 70s or early 80s was not enough to pull me in. đŸ“ș

Today on Cory Doctorow’s Pluralistic

++ Cigna health insurers are telling investors they’re looking ahead to a great year, even while the health insurance lobby group is begging for a handout from Washington.

++ Damien Patton, co-founder of Banjo, a “grifty” AI surveillance startup that works with police, is a convicted Ku Klux Klan terrorist.

As a 17-year-old, Patton “was a Nazi skinhead who once helped a KKK leader stage a drive-by shooting that ‘sprayed bullets’ into a synagogue.” He was active in the Dixie Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.

Patton was the wheelman for a Klansman who fired a TEC-9 into a Nashville synagogue, and then was smuggled out of state by another Klansman….

His testimony included this phrase: “We believe that the Blacks and the Jews are taking over America, and it’s our job to take America back for the White race.”

Patton says he no longer believes those things to be true, and he sincerely regrets his youthful actions and beliefs.

Banjo “has conned the state of Utah into giving it access to state’s surveillance feeds with the promise of fighting crime using secret methods that Utahans (and independent reviewers) aren’t allowed to understand.”

++ In other surveillance news: NSO Group is a cyber-arms dealer that helps “the world’s most despicable dictators” commit crimes against humanity – including the Saudi murder and dismemberment of Jamal Khashoggi.

At least one NSO employee used National Security Agency tools to stalk a woman he knew personally. He broke into NSA offices in the United Arab Emirates. This practice is so common that the NSA has a cute nickname for it, LOVEINT.

++ After the British Empire conquered the world and looted cultural artifacts, the British Museum, is claiming copyright over images of those artifacts. I’m planning to steal my next-door neighbor’s lawnmower and then claim copyright on pictures of it.

++ The medical debt collection industry is going strong during the pandemic. Victims include a nurse who is borrowing gas money to get to work because all of her pay is being garnisheed.

++ 68 pieces of advice from Kevin Kelly on his 68th birthday. Includes:

  • Always demand a deadline,
  • “Being able to listen well is a superpower” (I’m working on listening and am getting better at it. Previously I was just “waiting to talk.")

Also:

Friends are better than money. Almost anything money can do, friends can do better. In so many ways a friend with a boat is better than owning a boat.

And:

Before you are old, attend as many funerals as you can bear, and listen. Nobody talks about the departed’s achievements. The only thing people will remember is what kind of person you were while you were achieving.

I seem to be on a Rome kick lately

I watched Britannia, with Julie, and am rewatching I, Claudius.

I just started reading “Silver Pigs,” the first book of the historical mystery series by Lindsey Davis about Marcus Didius Falco, a private investigator in 1st Century Rome. I read many of those books years ago but I have essentially forgotten them so I’m quite enjoying “Silver Pigs.” I did not get through the whole series then, and plan to do so now. I expect it’ll take me a couple of years but that’s OK.

And I just started reading Mike Duncan’s “Storm Before the Storm,” a history of the events that led up to the fall of the Roman Republic.

The Roman Republic rose from an obscure village to the first megacity, conquering Italy and beyond. It lasted 500 years. Think of how long that is – that’s the equivalent of the early 1500s to today. The Republic must have seemed immutable, a permanent fixture of the world, like the land and sky. And then it went away. Potential parallels to today are obvious.

I think of Roman TV shows as being set in the same universe as I, Claudius, like Marvel superhero movies or Star Trek shows. The Claudiverse – or Clavdiverse! Britannia is a series about events that take place entirely offstage during the 11th episode of I, Claudius, “A God inColchester.” One of the main characters of Britannia gets namechecked twice in that “I, Claudius” episode. “Rome” is a prequel to “I, Claudius.” And so on.

Reportedly, when David Milch pitched “Deadwood” to HBO, he went into the meeting with a series in mind that would have been set in ancient Rome. Milch was obsessed with the concept of civil society rising up out of disorder – you can see that in “Deadwood” and his earlier show, “NYPD Blue.” So his idea for a series would have followed two ordinary soldiers in the Vigiles Urbani, the police and firefighters of imperial Rome. According to the story, when Milch took the meeting the HBO executives said they already had a Roman series, which become “Rome,” and so Milch thought fast on his feet and the series became “Deadwood.”

“Deadwood” was fantastic but I want to see that other series. I even have a made-up title for it: “SPQR Blue.” 📓📚đŸ“ș

I’m thinking of trying Amethyst, a tiling window manager for the Mac, even though I have a mental block against adding keyboard shortcuts to my brain.

I wonder if I have any Post-It notes around the office?

How to pitch an editor – Great tips from Esther Schindler, who knows, for freelance writers on how to get an editor to buy an article.

I’m looking to broaden my portfolio into general-interest, tech journalism, which is an area where I have zero reputation. So I’ll be (metaphorically speaking) pinning this article prominently to my bulletin board.

(I actually don’t have a bulletin board and don’t print things out. But you know what I mean.)

Six years ago today, a girl in the park wanted me and Minnie to participate in a science experiment about handedness in dogs. She said Minnie had to be able to to sit and give paw on command. I said Minnie wasn’t reliable on that — truth is, we have never done it. The girl said we couldn’t participate. Minnie’s self-esteem was severely damaged (by which I mean Minnie had no idea what was going on and continued cheerfully on her way).

Feels like the news has been the same every day for a couple of weeks, but something big will reach a tipping point any day now.

Doctor Who: McGann, Eccleston & Tennant Doctors Unite For New Story — New Doctor Who miniseries will feature the Christopher Eccleston, Paul McGann, and David Tennant Doctors, as well as Billie Piper’s character, Rose Tyler, on “every possible media platform apart from the main Doctor Who television series,” including “novels, comics, audio, video games, VR games and even a new series of Doctor Who themed escape rooms.”

Sounds exhausting.

I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter was out of stock last time I was at the supermarket. I expected the same when I went to the supermarket yesterday. But I was pleasantly surprised to see they had a good quantity on the shelves.

I exclaimed joyously, “I can’t believe it’s I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter!”

Today on Cory Doctorow’s Pluralistic

++ Indie booksellers are doing pretty well in the pandemic, including Barnes & Noble, which is rebooting as an indie chain;

++ Listen to the podcast of “Someone Comes To Town, Someone Leaves Town,” one of my favorites of Cory’s novels;

++ Billionaires are making big money on the pandemic, while their employees go broke and risk death;

++ The pandemic proves ISP data-caps were always a pretense;

++ And Denver Health Medical Center cuts healthcare workers' pay while giving executives five- and six-figure bonuses.

Six years ago today was a weekend day and I went to the mall. Out and around people, not wearing a mask or gloves!

From my journal:

Shopped for sandals, stopped in at Apple Store, looked in at Microsoft store (an eerie clone of the Apple store but none of the computers on display connect to anything other than the Microsoft Store demo website and one of the computers was broken). I had a dirty soy chai latte, which a friend regularly drinks. It was very tasty.

While leaving the Apple store I walked into a glass wall, thinking it was a passageway, and bumped my head. Smooth!

I went grocery shopping yesterday. Plastic bag reuse has been suspended in California for the crisis. The cashier said she was glad about that. People bring in some disgusting bags for re-use, she said.

When all this handwashing began I was using a harsh soap that gave me a small rash on my left wrist. That means I have to wear my Apple Watch on my right wrist. That was weeks ago and I still haven’t gotten used to operating the Watch that way.

Completely unrelated: I’ve just learned I’ve been nominated for the Whiny Little Pandemic Bitch Award.

John Ritter guest starred on the last episode of Mannix in 1975. They used “The Brady Bunch” set for the interiors.

Screen grab and caption courtesy of Ashley Nevius

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