Mel Brooks is still raising hell at 99
Hadley Freeman at Jewish News:
“Some days I’m not feeling as great as I want to. But other days I don’t even notice that I’m not 37 anymore.” He keeps ‘showbiz hours’, staying up late, sleeping late, starting his day in the afternoon with a breakfast omelette. “Then I take a walk in front of the house, up and down the steps to stay limber. I talk on the phone and I write – every day. Always writing, always correcting, always questioning.”
Brooks on his World War II experience:
Enlisting at 18, he fought in France and Germany as a combat engineer. What does he remember about it? “I remember thinking there’s nothing better than a ham and cheese baguette on the Champs-Élysées. Delicious, but very treif.”
Kevin Roose @kevin@theforkiverse.com asked: “tell me the last thing you bought for under $50 that radically improved your life.”
I replied: “This $5 dog poop bag holder. After the dog does her business and you scoop it up, tie a knot in the top of the full bag, hang the knotted bag from the handle of the leash, continue the walk without having to hold the poop bag in your hands.”
The thread is fun to read.
Kevin is tech columnist for the New York Times and podcasts on Hard Fork.
Many people set goals for a number of books to read each year. I don't think that's a good idea.
Feeling like you have a target number looming over you discourages you from abandoning books if you’re not enjoying them. How can you abandon a book when you’ve already read 100 pages?! You’ll fall behind on your goal! Starting a new book feels like a commitment, so you’re careful about which books you start.
Whereas if you feel free to quit reading, then you’re more likely to try new authors, genres and themes. Expanding your reading is more important than hitting an arbitrary number.
Another reason I don’t hold with setting a target number for books to read each year is that it discourages you from tackling a big giant enormous book. I read Ron Chernow’s massive, 1,200-page biography of Mark Twain last year and loved it. I would not have been so eager to jump into that book it if I felt like it would put me behind on a target goal.
I try to set myself a target of reading a certain number of pages every day. And if I miss my goal, I try not to sweat it too much. Last week I barely read any books at all, just from adjusting to being back at work after the holiday break. But I picked it up this weekend.
You can see how fragile and pathetic these men are. They are so desperate to subjugate and suppress people who disagree with them politically. They seemed to think that once they were in power, the public would love and admire them for their power. Instead, the vast majority of Americans see them for what they are: pathetic, insecure man-babies in way over their heads.
I loved the novel “The Ministry of Time” by Kaliane Bradley, which is a lighthearted workplace comedy and paranormal romance about colonialism and multigenerational trauma. You would not think those things go together but they do, splendidly well. 📚
Greg Morris: “The weird part isn’t that the indie web exists. It’s that we ever thought centralised platforms were a better idea.” I’d like for this to be right. But people still like their centralized platforms — their Facebook, Threads, Instagram, YouTube and TikTok. The indie web is, unfortunately, still a rounding error compared with the numbers and influence of centralized platform users.
I finished reading “Entities: The Selected Novels of Eric Frank Russell,” an anthology of several novels and short stories. I read two of the novels: “Wasp” and “Sinister Barrier.” A few months ago I read one more by Russell: “Men, Martians and Machines.” Classic sci-fi from the 1930s-50s.
I’ve watched the rise of dictation tools for the Mac with some interest. I dictate more than half of what I write into the iPhone — which is a lot — email, text messages, notes to myself — but if I have a full-size keyboard, it’s easier for me to type than dictate.
"American exercising their constitutional rights must submit, without question, to a white man holding a gun."
Heather Cox Richardson compares the murders of Renee Good and Ahmad Arbery, the jogger gunned down by white supremacists in 2021. In both cases, defenders of the shooters released video of the incident which those defenders claimed would exonerate the shooters. But in fact the videos showed the killings for what they were — murder.
In the case of the murder of Renee Good, the shooter and his protectors are clearly so isolated in their own authoritarian bubble they cannot see how regular Americans would react to the video of a woman smiling at a masked agent and saying: “That’s fine, dude. I’m not mad at you,” only to have him shoot her in the face and then spit out “Fucking btch” after he killed her.
The thread that runs through both is the assumption that an American exercising their constitutional rights must submit, without question, to a white man holding a gun.
A team of experts evicted a 550-pound bear that was squatting in the basement of an Altadena, Calif., home for more than a month. A member of the team crawled into the basement and fired paintballs filled with vegetable oil at the bear’s butt. Watch this Facebook reel of the bear making its exit.
The Rewatchables podcast has never done Clerks or Mallrats. Shocking!
Republicans somehow managed to sprint from “we’re trying to protect women in sports” straight to defending a woman being shot in the head three times at point blank range for trying to drive away from a masked thug.
Mitchellaneous did not go out at the usual time yesterday morning. When I noticed this, I poked around for a few minutes looking for a technical reason for the problem. Eventually, I figured it out — I had scheduled it for 2025. D’oh! 🤦♂️It’s coming up in a few minutes.
Chris Arnade walks 45 miles in three days through New Jersey and Staten Island. “New Jersey has pockets of Manhattan’s density, but with LA’s reliance on cars… For people who like it, that reality contains the best of both (Manhattan’s localized variety with LA’s space and freedom), and for those who don’t, it contains the worst (Manhattan’s crowding, with LA’s traffic).”