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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?”

www.npr.org/2020/02/1…

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.

www.thisamericanlife.org/687/small…

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.

omny.fm/shows/you…

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.

www.nytimes.com/2020/02/1…

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.

www.oudaily.com/news/ou-g…

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.

www.theverge.com/2020/2/12…

I saw this excellent collection of stickers on a car at Lake Murray

I saw this shortcut between two streets while walking yesterday.

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.

thehustle.co/the-econo…

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.

“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

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack…

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.

pessimists.co/margarine…

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.

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?”

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.

www.axios.com/equifax-b…

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

boingboing.net/2020/01/2…

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.

Ericsson Shareholder Urges Firm to Explore Sale to US - Report

Shares in Ericsson and Nokia received a boost on Friday after an Ericsson shareholder responded positively to US comments about taking ownership of one of the companies to counter Huawei. www.lightreading.com/5g/ericss…

College essay writing services – contract cheaters –are using aggressive email marketing and on-campus parties to attract customers, many of whom are unaware of the shadiness of the business. www.edsurge.com/news/2020…

ME: I have very important financial documents I need to review today.
ALSO ME: Helllooooooo, social media!

After a vote in Iowa that reeked of third-world treachery – from monolithic TV propaganda against the challenger to rumors of foreign intrusion to, finally, a “botched” vote count that felt as legitimate as a Supreme Soviet election – the Democrats have become the reactionaries they once replaced.

The Iowa Caucus Was Waterloo for Democrats - Matt Taibbi/Rolling Stone

Tyler Cowen coins the phrase “state capacity libertarianism” as an evolution of libertarianism that recognizes that a big, muscular, strong state is necessary to preserve and extend markets and individual freedom.

(1) This is just plain silly. The defining characteristic of libertarianism is that governments should be tiny, ideally only providing police, military and contract enforcement. To call yourself a “state capacity libertarian” is like being a “meat eating vegetarian.”

(2) I have always considered myself a liberal or progressive but I may in fact be a “state capacity libertarian.”

Fortunately, this is perfectly compatible with being a Democrat. The Democratic Party is the natural home in the US for every political philosophy other than moron racist kleptocrats.

“Now we’re going to hear more suggestions from the failed mayor of Chicago and New Jersey’s corrupt ex-governor, who should be in prison.”

Marie Dressler was the biggest female star of American movies in 1933. She wasn’t a sex symbol like Jean Harlow or Marlene Dietrich. Dressler was homely, overweight, in her 60s – and moviegoers adored her.

You Must Remember This:

The public loved nothing better than to see their Marie play a drunk or a dowager and steal every scene from the glamour girls less than half her age. Dressler had been down and out for most of the 1920s. That she became a star at age 60 was an achievement that told Depression-battered audiences it was never too late.

The Ukraine was part of a broad pattern of behavior that makes Trump manifestly unfit to be President. Why didn’t Congress go after all of it rather than just one, very narrow incident?

On Impeachment: A Daily Podcast with Preet Bharara, former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and host Brian Lehrer.

Ezra Klein: America is a better country today than it has ever been: More inclusive and more prosperous. There has been no better time to be alive and be American. But the trend is going in the wrong direction. Things are not getting better. They’re declining rapidly.

Acquitted [Today, Explained]

Gilbert Gottfried and Frank Sontopadre interview the delightful Ken Berry, star of “F Troop” and “Mama’s Family.” Berry discusses working alongside George Burns, Don Rickles, and Carol Burnett, as well as a brief variety series he did in 1972, “The Wow Show,” featuring then unknown Steve Martin, Teri Garr, and Cheryl Ladd, then known as Cheryl Jean Stoppelmoor. I was 11 when “The Wow Show” aired, and I remember I loved it.

Berry also avoids answering whether Forrest Tucker and Milton Berle, respectively co-star and guest star of “F Troop,” were really massively hung.

I love this podcast. I’ve already listened to about a dozen episodes and I’ve got about 80 queued up.

Ken Berry [Gilbert Gottfried’s Amazing Colossal Podcast!]

Nat Eliason: How to take notes on what you’re reading.

I never did highlights or took book notes in school. I just did the reading (or didn’t – I was a slacker student), crammed everything into my brain and hoped it stuck there.

Likewise, I tried to highlight text, but I didn’t really see the point. I ended up highlighting more than half the book … or nothing.

Eliason proposes a simple rule: Only highlight passages that give you an idea. Then make a note of that idea. What does the passage make you think of? If the passage simply conveys information or opinion, and doesn’t spark further thought, just read it and move on.

And here’s a tool for note-taking, for those of us who read electronically: Readwise archives your ebook and article highlights from Kindle, Instapaper and iBooks.

I can think of a couple of theories why the Republicans might want to do this. But it’s weird:

GOP-affiliated group intervenes in Democratic primary for US Senate seat in North Carolina [CNN]

The first significant ad buy for state Sen. Erica Smith, a Democratic candidate for US Senate in North Carolina, appears to be backed by Republicans.

Faith and Power, a new political action committee with ties to Republicans, formally launched on January 29 and spent more than $1.9 million to influence the Democratic primary, according to filings with the Federal Election Commission and the Kantar Media’s Campaign Media Analysis Group. The television and radio ads aims to boost Smith over Cal Cunningham, who has been endorsed by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and has raised significantly more money. “Who’s the Democrat for US Senate endorsed by progressives and unions? Erica Smith,” says the ad’s narrator. “Who’s got the courage to vote for ‘Medicare for All’? Erica Smith. The number one supporter of the Green New Deal? Erica Smith again.”

Dave Winer says we need a candidate who a Republican who believes in the rule of law will vote for. Respectfully to Dave, but this is dead wrong. No Republican will vote for a Democrat in 2020. Trump has 90+% approval rating in his party.

The winning candidate in 2020 will be the one who gets their own party most excited. We don’t need a candidate who will appeal to Republicans. We need a candidate who gets out Democratic votes, and win even though Trump has his thumb on the scale, in the form of Republican election chicanery.

Like a wise man said: Given a choice between a fake Republican and the real article, the voters will choose the real thing every time.