1849 guide to the brothels and prostitutes of Philadelphia.
A Vintage Guide to the ‘Gay Houses’, Brothels, and ‘Ladies of Pleasure’ in 1840’s Philadelphia
“I, Claudius” rewatch, episode 2: I really appreciate the subtle, restrained acting.
40% of my home office.
If you’re going to take the dog for a random 3 mile walk around a nearby neighborhood, just to see the area you live in and for a change of routine, you should definitely carefully mark where you parked.
I know that now.
Not for the first time, my barber was unfamiliar with men with copious body hair. Dude, just clipping a little below the collar line is fine – I’m not here for the full “40-year-old Virgin.”
Sometime after I turned 40 I stopped enjoying fiction as much as I used to. I think it’s been a bit more than a year since I read a novel I really LOVED.
Do you find that’s true for you?
This defense of Bloomberg’s appalling defense of redlining is bullshit. Redlining isn’t denying credit on the basis of financial risk. It’s denying credit to black people, regardless of their ability to repay the loan.
There are two generations of Mexican luchador wrestlers named “Dr. Wagner.” How did I not know this?
The Age of Decadence. The real story of the West in the 21st century is one of stalemate and stagnation.
Holiday-Travel Twitter Is the Best Form of Social Media. Play-by-plays from airports and bus rides offer random, unpolished personal moments.
“One might suppose that the popular prejudice against vaccination had died out by this time,” one writer complains. It sounds like a lament from today, but in fact, it’s from 1875."
The story about how Mike "The Monkees" Nesmith's mother invented liquid paper is surprisingly interesting.
She was a secretary. She saw a need and saw that the market would be women, because secretaries were women.
She priced the product low enough so that secretaries could buy it out of the discretionary fund they had for office supplies, without needing approval from a man.
And she marketed the product in a bottle that looked like nail polish, so her customers would already be familiar with using it before they even tried it.
Smart!
Who let “Who Let the Dogs Out” Out?
99% Invisible: The world’s greatest expert on the song “Who Let the Dogs Out” finds it surprisingly difficult to answer the question of who wrote the song.
San Diego freelance writer Beth Demmon says California Assembly Bill 5, which regulates contract workers, threatens her livelihood. She says she’s taken an immediate income hit upwards of 25% due to the law.
Tinder's Most Notorious Men
The users who reappear after countless left swipes have become modern urban legends.
Like mayors and famous bodega cats, they are both hyper-local and larger than life."
The Doc nails it. The sole issue for Democratic voters in the Presidential election is “make the bad man go away.” Everything else is a distraction.
However, things get complicated because for many Democrats, Bloomberg and/or Sanders are as bad as the Bad Man.
And Warren, Mayor Pete and Uncle Joe are, for many voters, ALMOST as toxic as the Bad Man. Those voters will hold their noses and vote for any of those three candidates if they have to. But that speaks to low voter turnout – toxic for Dems.
Overall, I like the Democrats' odds. But we’re going to have to work hard to win.
Good to know the ‘doomsday asteroid’ is not going to destroy the Earth Saturday, because I’m not going to be done reading Mary Robinette Kowal’s “Calculating Stars” by then.
Dave Winer makes the case for Bloomberg: More than a candidate for president.
I’m reserving judgment. I expect I’ll vote for Warren in the primary, assuming she’s still in the race, but other than that I don’t expect to support a candidate until the convention. And then I’ll support whichever Democrat wins.
Until a month ago I would have said “except maybe Bloomberg.” But I like the way he’s going after Trump. I still have strong reservations about Bloomberg, though.
Molly Ringwald revisits “The Breakfast Club” and the other 80s teen movies that made her a star. The films were often homophobic, misogynistic and racist but they inspired women, LGBTQ people and African-Americans with their depictions of kids who were estranged from the world they lived in.
The US is charging Huawei with racketeering
The DoJ alleges that Huawei and a number of its affiliates used confidential agreements with American companies over the past two decades to access the trade secrets of those companies, only to then misappropriate that intellectual property and use it to fund Huawei’s business.
As part of his research into Trump’s $1+B disinformation campaign, journalist McKay Coppins “tried to live in the same information world as Trump supporters so that he’d receive the same disinformation supporters did.”
He said he ended up believing everything and nothing. Rumors, lies and reported journalism ended up seeming roughly equal in credibility, even though he was following the impeachment hearings closely and could see for himself that Trump supporters were lying about what transpired there.
This is exactly how censorship works in autocratic regimes nowadays, Coppins notes – no need to shut down opposition journalism; better to just flood the information channels with bullshit.
Journalist Details ‘Brazen Ways’ Trump Will Use His Power To Get Reelected - Fresh Air
A brief history of the "I, Claudius" TV series
The TV production had a lot of problems, but Robert Graves, who wrote the 1930s novels on which the series is based, had faith:
“I’ve communed with Claudius,” he said at the time, “and he reassured me that this would be a great success.”
The series launched Derek Jacobi’s career.
“I owe ‘Claudius’ so much on both sides of the Atlantic,” Mr. Jacobi said in a telephone interview. “If he has haunted me, it’s been a beneficent ghost.”…
The durability of “I, Claudius” began with Graves’s books. Cast as the secret memoirs of Claudius himself, they were grounded in exhaustive scholarship but imbued with a novelist’s imagination. They had plenty of skulduggery, perversion and other delectable malfeasance, set against the marble majesty of Roman antiquity.
The TV version, however, came close to missing the mark. “It was so badly received in its first two weeks,” recalled Sian Phillips, who played the empress Livia, “because it was so different.”
That difference lay in the series’s down-to-earth treatment of epic material. Despite its imperial setting “I, Claudius” was a small studio effort devoid of huge sets and sprawling battle scenes.
In whittling down Graves’s tomes (which total some 1,000 pages in paperback) to a little over 11 hours of television, the scriptwriter Jack Pulman, who died in 1979, effectively rendered them as a soap opera, emphasizing the dysfunctional relations inherent in any extended clan. At various points he called his teleplay a Jewish family comedy and a treatment of a Mafia dynasty.
The TV show used natural language, rather than the high prose that was common in previous Roman stories. Scenes were small. The action encompassed huge battles and riots sweeping the city, but we don’t see those. We just see and hear a few people talking about them.
Phillips, who played the ruthless villain Livia, had difficulty finding her character, but finally, director Herbert Wise told her to just ham it up.
‘Just be evil. The more evil you are, the funnier it is, and the more terrifying it is.’ ”
In the TV series and books, Rome is portrayed as being in decay, due to its transition from republican government to monarchy. But this is a bit of authorial fudging.
In reality, Rome peaked long after the action of the stories.
The Emperor Claudius died in AD 54. The land area of the empire peaked around 100 AD.
Prior to the empire, Rome wasn’t a republic as we think of it today. Only a very small aristocracy participated in government, and millions of people were slaves. Many historians say that the life of a Roman citizen was best in the period 100-200 AD., and Rome extended citizenship broadly to the people who lived within its borders.
Rome finally fell in 476 AD, four centuries after the action of I, Claudius. And that’s only the Western Empire. The Eastern Empire, which we now call Byzantium, continued on until it fell to the Ottomans in 1453 AD.
I Claudius seemingly influenced The Sopranos – though Sopranos creator David Chase doesn’t acknowledge it. They’re both stories about men who build empires despite being undermined by toxic, maternal women named “Livia.”
Hulu is doing gender-flipped miniseries based on “High Fidelity,” the excellent Nick Hornby novel and John Cusack movie.
If I can get used to a woman Doctor Who, I can give this miniseries a try.
“It’s a strange existence, being an autistic adult in a profession overflowing with autism mommy-ism and misinformation.” theaspergian.com/2020/01/3…
We’ve started rewatching “I Claudius.”
“I Claudius” is the story of a great empire that decays as its chief executive seizes dictatorial power while the Senate flatters him and otherwise stands idly by.
It’s nice to escape from the news into a TV fantasy now and then.
Oracle founder Larry Ellison is hosting a fundraiser for Donald Trump www.vox.com/recode/20…
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
I saw this shortcut between two streets while walking yesterday.
Former CNBC anchor Michelle Caruso-Cabrera will challenge Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in House Democratic primary
Two Latinas going head to head.
Actor Jussie Smollett is being indicted for allegedly falsifying claims he was assaulted by Trump supporters. www.fox32chicago.com/news/juss…
Trump cannot go a day without committing an impeachable offense, and his lies are becoming more blatant and obviously untrue.
His Republican defenders are half-right: Trump has learned his lesson from the impeachment trial. The lesson he’s learned is that the Constitution and law don’t apply to him.
The latest:
All 4 federal prosecutors quit Stone case after DOJ overrules prosecutors on sentencing request www.cnn.com/2020/02/1…
The tricky economics of all-you-can-eat buffets
They put the cheap, filling stuff first. They charge for extras. They save money on personnel, of course.
One thing I would not have guessed: Preparing foods in bulk, as you do for a buffet, is far less expensive than one meal at a time. Much less food waste. And you can re-use stuff. Today’s fresh vegetable side-dish is tomorrow’s vegetable soup.
I’ve never cared for buffet dining. If I’m eating out, I want somebody to bring me my food.
My work takes me to a lot of professional conferences, where I eat a lot of buffet hot lunches. Two tips:
Skip the leafy salad. It had nearly zero nutritional value. It isn’t even filling, and it just takes up room on your plate. You may not have a chance to go back for seconds.
Also, there’s usually some kind of roasted green veggie. Fill at least half your plate with that.
The making of “2001: A Space Odyssey”
www.imaginaryworldspodcast.org/2001–a-f…
Stanley Kubrick didn’t know what he wanted, but he knew what he didn’t want. Which means his production staff had to give him a lot of choices, and he shot a lot of scenes that were never used – expensive!
In a sense, Kubrick’s process matched Arthur C. Clarke’s vision of the evolution of humanity. Clarke’s vision was it was that we didn’t just invent tools. Instead, we invented tools and then the tools changed us, and we changed the tools to match our new needs, in a continuous feedback loop and cycle.
Kubrick was originally going to have a score for the movie, but ended up dumping it at the last minute and just using the classical music that he had left on the soundtrack as a placeholder.
Kubrick’s perfectionism continued throughout his career. In “The Shining,” he did 127 takes of a single scene, which made the Guinness Book of World Records and drove actress Shelley Duvall mad.
2001 originally had a voice-over, which, like the original soundtrack, was scrapped. The movie is designed to be enigmatic, to ask questions that don’t necessarily have answers. That’s a contrast to science fiction movies and TV today, where every detail needs to be explained and contradictions are considered by fans to be deep flaws.
Actor Steve Buscemi (“Fargo,” “Boardwalk Empire,” etc.) is interviewed by Gilbert Gottfried and Frank Santopadre. www.gilbertpodcast.com/steve-bus…
This is one of the filthiest podcast I’ve ever heard. I loved it
Entertaining interview of comedian Lewis Black by Gilbert Gottfried and Frank Santopadre. Many F-bombs were dropped that day.
“Captain” Jack McCarthy hosted the New York St. Patrick’s Day parade for 41 years, as well as Popeye cartoons on children’s TV in the 1960s and 70s. Another fixture of my childhood
“Officer” Joe Bolton hosted The Little Rascals and the Three Stooges for children’s TV in New York 1955-75. A fixture of my childhood afternoons after school.
Comparing the relative sizes of fictional buildings. Fun.
Margarine vs. butter is a case study of naked, corrupt regulatory capture. The dairy industry spent more than a half-century getting laws to block competition from margarine.
This magnificent, green condo is for sale - in Ramona, California, which is just a short drive from us here in San Diego.
Nice, but not enough green.
Adam Sandler rips the Oscars for snubbing him. Funny.
“A few, you know, a few weeks back, when I was quote-unquote snubbed by the Academy, it reminded of when I briefly attended high school and was overlooked for the coveted yearbook superlative category Best Looking. That accolade was given to a jean jacket–wearing featherhead douchebag by the name of Skipper Jenkins.”
In leaked audio, Michael Bloomberg defends racial profiling: “throw them up against the wall” boingboing.net/2020/02/1…
Leaked audio captures Bloomberg defending racial profiling and stop-and-frisk policing.
Bloomberg: “Ninety-five percent of murders- murderers and murder victims fit one M.O. You can just take the description, Xerox it, and pass it out to all the cops. They are male, minorities, 16-25.”
Whoops. And just when I was starting to warm up to Mike.
I saw this school walking today.
I wear flip up sunglasses. Flip ups are cool now.
The theme to the "Paul Winchell and Jerry Mahoney Show." I loved this show when I was a little boy. If my mother had to listen to it every day on the living room TV, I'm surprised she let me live.
Better audio quality here but no video.
Gilbert Gottfried and Frank Santopadre interview not one but TWO Catwomen: Lee Meriwether and Julie Newmar! I feel a stirring beneath my utility belt! gilbertpodcast.com
Amazon pulled out of this month’s Mobile World Congress because of the coronavirus outbreak, in another blow to one of the telecom industry’s biggest gatherings, which attracts over 100,000 visitors to Barcelona. reuters.com
The GSMA is putting restrictions on Mobile World Congress attendees from China as big companies, including Ericsson and – reportedly – Amazon, pull out. - lightreading.com
I’ve switched my podcast player from Castro.fm back to Overcast on the iPhone. Castro has advantages in its user interface – it’s much easier to decide on which order you’re going to listen to podcast episodes – but the audio clarity on Overcast is just plain clearer, particularly at the 2X+ speeds I listen to podcasts at. That means I can get through my massive podcast queue faster.
However, when you have 260+ unlistened podcast episodes, as I do, switching between podcast players is tedious. Fortunately, there is some part of my brain that finds that kind of fussywork soothing.
Zappos has quietly backed away from holacracy.
Aimee Groth at Quartz:
Six years ago, Amazon-owned Zappos began upending its traditional management structure. In lieu of a typical corporate structure, with power concentrated at the top, the online shoe retailer would adopt a decentralized system with “no job titles, no managers, no hierarchy.”…
But in the last few years, Zappos has been quietly moving away from holacracy. It has done away with its at-times rigidly (and ironically) bureaucratic meetings and brought back managers, while retaining its circular hierarchy, a key artifact of holacracy.
Reagan and Gorbachev Agreed to Pause the Cold War in Case of an Alien Invasion. The Gipper was a bigtime science fiction fan. [Danny Lewis/Smithsonian Magazine]
Amid Layoffs, Xilinx Warns of Pause in 5G Activities - Mike Dano/Light Reading
Xilinx, once a darling of 5G bulls on Wall Street, has hit hard times. The company said it will cut 7% of its workforce partly due to an unexpected slowdown in its critical 5G business.
Canary in a coal mine?
Forget self-driving cars. We already have technology that can transform cities and help save the planet: Buses
Missing the Bus on 99% Invisible:
If you heard that there was a piece of technology that could do away with traffic jams, make cities more equitable, and help us solve climate change, you might think about driverless cars, or hyperloops or any of the other new transportation technologies that get lots of hype these days. But there is a much older, much less sexy piece of machinery that could be the key to making our cities more sustainable, more liveable, and more fair: the humble bus. Steven Higashide is a transit expert, bus champion, and author of a new book called Better Buses Better Cities. And the central thesis of the book is that buses have the power to remake our cities for the better. But he says that if we want the bus to reach its potential, we’re going to have to make the experience riding one, a lot more pleasant.
These days when I hear about proposals for light rail or trains, I ask, “What about buses?”
Why the wrong movies win Oscars - Today, Explained
Amazon wants to depose the President and Secretary of Defense as part of its lawsuit to fight losing the lucrative government JEDI contract.
The Justice Department indicted four members of the Chinese military for the Equifax breach.
This will be a buzzkill for making relations between the two countries more friendly.
Advice from Medieval Monks on Avoiding Digital Distraction
Bloomberg plans to go after Trump’s business record
Others have tried this tactic without success — remember Hillary Clinton? — but Mike Bloomberg plans to attack President Trump on his business record.
One difference: Trump’s pre-White House career can now be linked with his decisions as president. Another difference: Bloomberg will be making this argument as a multibillionaire who built a multinational company.
How women left the GOP and became Democratic partisans: Blame the Gipper
None of the movies nominated for an Oscar deserved to win, because none of them has Luis giving exposition or an ant playing drums.
I’ve been on a nostalgia kick the past couple of days. This morning, I hit YouTube and found and listened to the theme song to a kiddie TV show I adored when I was 5: Winchell Mahoney.
The good news is it drove the F Troop earworm out of my brain. Hooray, hooraw!
Person who offered $500 for lost cat gets mad when cat finder wants the reward
WTF? If you offer a $500 reward for whoever finds your lost cat you should not be surprised and offended if the person who finds your cat asks for the reward.