Mitch's Blog logo Mitch's Blog

It saddens me that it’s too late in my life for me to get a cool nickname, like “Ace.”

Boston-area natives Chris Evans, John Krasinski, Rachel Dratch and David “Big Papi” Ortiz in a wicked good commercial for Smart Park for the Hyundai Sonata.

PR pitch of the day: “Parents find sex education conversations easier than technology conversations.”

Because unlike USB connectors, with sex it’s easy to figure out which direction it should be facing when you stick it in.

This trailer for "Spenser Confidential" looks great!

The Netflix movie coming March 6 stars Mark Wahlberg, Winston “Black Panther” Duke, and Alan Arkin.

I wasn’t sure about the movie after reading on Wikipedia that it’s only very loosely based on one of the Spenser books and merely “uses the names of characters created by Robert B. Parker.” I’m a huge fan of the novels, and I was afraid this would be travesty.

But the preview looks great. It has some hints of the novels and the Parker characters, and that’s all – but that’s enough. It looks like it’s going to be its own thing.

A few months ago we re-watched Beverly Hills Cop I and II, and I rewatched Midnight Run. And I’ve seen 48 HRS many times, also Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid. I was commenting a few weeks ago that they don’t make action-buddy movies like that anymore. Well, looks like they did this time.

Juniper Returns to Growth – No Thanks to Service Providers lightreading.com My latest on Light Reading: Juniper returned to growth in its fourth financial quarter, but cloud and enterprise had to carry the stumbling service provider sector.

The agony of weekend loneliness: ‘I won’t speak to another human until Monday’ theguardian.com

Paula Cocozza: “For growing numbers of people the weekend is an emotional wilderness where interaction is minimal and social life non-existent.”

Business Fashion, Australia, Summer, 1975.

The socks make the outfit. via

The iPad is fantastic but also disappointing daringfireball.net

Great short essay by John Gruber. Among other things, he perfectly captures why iPad split screen, slideover and multitasking confuse the jeebers out of me and I almost always don’t bother.

Ivanka tells donors she got her moral compass from her dad politico.com

Only Monday and we already have the headline of the week.

Trump Impeachment: A Ukraine Smoking Gun Exposes Republicans bloomberg.com The White House knew Bolton’s book was coming, but they let it blindside their Republican Congressional allies anyway.

Washington Post reporter Felicia Sonmez was suspended after tweeting a link to an article about Kobe Bryant’s rape case, following up with screenshots of the hate mail and death threats she received. vox.com

Seeing reports about a woman physicist who developed a theory of gravity that, if proven, would fundamentally change our understanding of the universe.

If only there were a song to commemorate this event, a Broadway type anthem about female empowerment and defying gravity.

"Spenser Confidential," a movie based on the Robert B. Parker novels, hits Netfllix March 6.

It stars Mark Wahlberg as Spenser and Winston “Black Panther” Duke as Hawk. “It is very loosely based on the novel Wonderland by Ace Atkins, and uses the names of characters created by Robert B. Parker.” Spenser is an ex-cop and ex-con and Hawk is an MMA fighter. wikipedia.org

Okaaaaay. What the hell, I’ll watch. I loved the early novels and the later ones are fun.

It’s an action-comedy directed by Peter Berg.

Also: Appreciating Robert B. Parker’s Spenser thrillingdetective.com

Quiz: Which of these 2020 Democrats agrees with you most? I came out Mayor Pete and Yang, which wow. [washingtonpost.com]

20 questions on the issues.

I do not support Mayor Pete – the best thing I’ll say for him is he’s inexperienced; other days I just hate him.

I don’t know much about Yang.

On many of these issues, I picked a side but really I don’t know. For example, on health insurance I strongly support a public option. Should we then outlaw private insurance? Don’t know. Let’s see how the public option works first.

Should the US expand nuclear power? Let prisoners vote while they are still in prison? Limit or better regulate fracking? Don’t know.

I support Sanders and Warren. But I don’t have a strong investment in the primary. I’ll vote for and support whichever Democrat wins. The only ones I actively dislike are Pete and Bloomberg. And I’d vote for, and support, them too.

Until recently I was anti-Biden too. But the recent Times interview, and discussion of his philosophy on Vox, causes me to think twice about that. Biden’s philosophy is that in American governance, sometimes to get what you dearly want you have to vote for something you hate. He may be right.

I treat elections like a job interview. I am often uninterested in the candidate’s positions, but interested instead in how they arrived at their positions.

How is the most unpopular and divisive president on his way to a second term? – theguardian.com

It’s the economy, says David Smith. Also, unlike 2016, Trump is running a highly organized, well-funded campaign. And Trump’s opposition is split.

On that last point: The Republicans are a minority party and, paradoxically, that is their strength. Every Republican is signed on to their agenda of white supremacy, xenophobia, gun fetishization, sex policing, preserving property rights, and their version of Christianity, which conveniently leaves out the bits about loving the stranger and least fortunate.

Whereas the Democrats are an unruly coalition of white moderates, second- and third-generation Eastern and Southern European immigrants, first-generation immigrants, Jews, African-Americans, minorities, socialists, LGBTQs, feminists and I’m probably missing some. Some of those groups disagree. For example, immigrants and African-Americans tend to be socially conservative, which puts them at odds with the LGBTQs and feminists. Those white moderates can’t stand the socialists, and vice versa. And yet they’re all supposedly one party.

Ode to San Rafael: my unremarkable hometown [Carolyn Jones/SFChronicle.com]

I had a vision recently: I’m at a little market buying cream soda and Ding Dongs. Bathed in luscious, late-afternoon amber light, I head out to the levee and perch on some rocks. Seagulls soar overhead. Somewhere in the distance, a Camaro blasts “Frampton Comes Alive.”

Now and then, I have the same nostalgia for Long Island. Hearing “Frampton Comes Alive” does it.

The head of ICE says he will deport DREAMers if the Supreme Court ends DACA - vox.com

To Trump and his supporters, cruelty is not an unfortunate by product of his policies. They are the point. These are people who believe government should be putting children in cages.

We’re All in the Bathroom Filming Ourselves

Taylor Lorenz/nytimes.com

Bathrooms are “the perfect stage set” for TikTok videos. “Most home bathrooms are well lit and have nice, bright acoustics. Unlike the kitchen, living room or even bedroom, bathrooms are private spaces, where parents and siblings are trained to not barge in.” Also, that big mirror is great for filming selfies.

“Spending a lot of time on TikTok, and it seems that knowing how to film yourself speaking with a cellphone in a bathroom mirror is a new skill to be mastered,” Jon-Stephen Stansel, a digital marketer, tweeted. “It’s like a stand-up learning to work a microphone, it’s part of the craft.”

DirecTV Satellite at Risk of Exploding in Orbit — Jeff Baumgartner/Light Reading

AT&T and Boeing need to move the DirecTV Spaceway-1 satellite to a new orbit, over fears that a crippling battery malfunction could cause the bird to explode and threaten other satellites.

Podcast: Don’t Call Us an SD-WAN Provider – Cato Networks – Me/Light Reading

Cato Networks would rather you didn’t call them an SD-WAN provider anymore. Instead, Cato is delivering a new kind of service – Secure Access Service Edge – or SASE (pronounced “sassy”).

I talked with Cato’s David Greenfield about what the heck SASE is anyway, the shifting needs of the market formerly known as SD-WAN, and the relative virtues of gelato vs. Ben & Jerry’s on the Light Reading podcast.

Automating cross-posts to Tumblr, using duct tape and rubber cement

I’ve been having a lot of trouble over the years posting to Tumblr. The native Tumblr apps and web page for creating new posts have gotten more and more difficult to use. I suspect the software has been redesigned over and over again by people who do not actually use Tumblr, and think Tumblr users are semi-literate idiots and perverts.

We are not semi-literate idiots.

There are several automated channels for posting to Tumblr, but they all result in ugly, ugly formatting errors, or duplicate posts.

I think I may have hit on a solution: For years now I’ve been automatically generating a daily email newsletter of my blog posts, using RSS and MailChimp. I realized this evening that MailChimp automatically generates its own RSS feeds. I wired the RSS to Tumblr using IFTTT and voila – a daily post on my Tumblr. Hopefully. If it works.

You can subscribe to the newsletter here, by the way, if that’s your thing: Subscribe.

And this is me on Tumblr: Mitch’s Tumblr.

For the past couple of weeks, my blog home has been on micro.blog: mitchwagner.micro.blog. So far I am very happy with it and not inclined to go anywhere.

I have seen this car parked at Lake Murray occasionally for years. It’s always been beat up and decaying, but I used to think it looked beautiful, like a well worn leather jacket. Now it looks like it wants to die.

On my walk today. Hello, Lake Murray, you’re looking fine.

An earlier product name, “Gee, Your Hair Smells Like a Cheesesteak,” was rejected by focus groups. 1982 ad via

Clocks change in six weeks in most of the US (March 3). Are you ready?

La Mesa Shop Owner Arrested After Attack on San Diego Media (I have a slight personal connection to this story)

NBC 7 San Diego

A La Mesa shop owner – already the subject of a sexual harassment investigation – was arrested on battery and vandalism charges Tuesday following a physical altercation between him and local media members recorded on video.

Peter Carzis, 76, was being investigated for reports of alleged harassment on female customers when members of the news media appeared at his shop, Peter’s Men’s Apparel on La Mesa Boulevard, Monday afternoon.

We live in La Mesa, and I have several jackets I’ve bought at this store. I’ve seen reports about Carzis on the La Mesa Happenings Facebook group over the past few months. He was always fine with me when I went in.

Last week I saw a video on the group of someone who appeared to be Carzis, engaging in lewd behavior with a woman while seated on a chair on the sidewalk.

Monday I was meeting a friend for for lunch in La Mesa Village and arrived early, so I decided to walk past Carzis’s shop to see what there was to see. There were two media trucks on the sidewalk; they looked like they were breaking down and getting ready to go.

The La Mesa Happenings group has more than 1,500 new signups since this story broke two days ago.

UPDATE: The store may have had different ownership when I shopped there.

Clearly we should not elect people President just because they are celebrities, but if we’re going around electing people President just because they are celebrities, why couldn’t we have elected Dolly Parton?

We’ve started watching The Morning Show, which I am pleased to see continues an unbroken record of TV characters named Mitch being jerks.

Every time I read up about IndieWeb I get a headache. So confusing!

I get that regular people may never be interested in IndieWeb but the technology is downright hostile to people who don’t already understand it.

Martin Luther King: Blacks and poor people get "welfare" but whites and rich people get "subsidies"

kottke.org quotes King:

Whenever the government provides opportunities and privileges for white people and rich people they call it “subsidized” when they do it for Negro and poor people they call it “welfare.” The fact that is the everybody in this country lives on welfare. Suburbia was built with federally subsidized credit. And highways that take our white brothers out to the suburbs were built with federally subsidized money to the tune of 90 percent. Everybody is on welfare in this country. The problem is that we all too often have socialism for the rich and rugged free enterprise capitalism for the poor. That’s the problem."

It is absolutely fine to rip your books in half

Constance Grady/vox.com:

On Monday morning, an apparently innocuous tweet summoned a storm of controversy on Twitter.

“Yesterday my colleague called me a ‘book murderer’ because I cut long books in half to make them more portable,” said the novelist and editor Alex Christofi. “Does anyone else do this? Is it just me?”…

There is something deeply romantic about the idea of holding a physical book in your hands: feeling the weight of it, the smoothness of the pages, and above all else the smell. The smell of books is a particular obsession in popular culture; you can buy candles or perfumes that try to approximate it, and on TV, characters who love books are always demonstrating their bookishness by waxing poetic about the smell….

The codex — the printed paper book that we hold in our hands, which took over for the scroll as our dominant reading format in the West in the fourth century AD — is an old, old technology. We’re still working out the kinks with e-books, but at this point, the codex is out of beta testing. Most of its bugs have been fixed over the past 17 centuries. It’s been streamlined and optimized into an incredibly simple, intuitive system.

And part of what makes the codex so valuable is that it is a malleable technology. It is easy for individual users to reshape it in whatever way best suits their own individual needs.

Fetishizing books, says Grady, started in the 18 Century, by the paper industry.

I still read a lot of books. I have been a compulsive reader since I was 8 years old. I went through one or two books a week as a teen-ager. I read fewer books than I used to – today, I read a lot of articles on the web – but, still, I read a lot of books. About a dozen a year.

And I have never fetishized the books themselves. They have always been text delivery objects. I’ve dog-eared the pages, broken the spines, left them on the bathroom floor, and spilled stuff on them. Once, when I was still smoking, I accidentally set one on fire.

And now I don’t even read print books anymore. I’ve been virtually ebook only for nearly 10 years, since I got my first iPad in spring of 2010.

Also, same deal for sockpuppetknifefight.com. If you want that domain for a real project – not to squat on – it’s yours.

My blog used to be called Monkeys in my Pants. Explanation. I own the domain monkeysinmypants.com. It expires Feb. 19. You can have it at cost.

Just promise to put a real website there – no domainers.

On Reddit: “My great uncle Charley Brock. Played football at Nebraska then the Green Bay Packers. Pic taken ~1936.”

That young gentleman knew how to wear a hat.

Via

Brooklyn, 1945. Students protesting the “no pants to school” rule via

Silicon Valley Abandons the Culture That Made It the Envy of the World theatlantic.com

Alexis Madrigal: Silicon Valley is killing startup culture. Now, executives from Facebook and Google are facing antitrust action and argue they need to be big to compete with China.

Opening shot of one of my favorite movies, “Almost Famous,” then and now. Ocean Beach, San Diego – about 12 miles from our house. Via

The lost neighborhood under New York’s Central Park

The land that is now Central Park was site of a village of 1,600 people, “many of whom were escaping the crowded and increasingly dangerous conditions of lower Manhattan.”

Ranjani Chakraborty, vox.com:

Among them was a predominantly black community that bought up affordable plots to build homes, churches, and a school. The area became known as Seneca Village. And when Irish and German immigrants moved in, it became a rare example of racial harmony in an integrated neighborhood during this period.

Everything changed on July 21, 1853. Through eminent domain, New York City took control of the land to create what would become the first major landscaped park in the US. They called it “the Central Park.”

Ranjani Chakraborty, vox.com

Nototo note taking software organizes notes on a literal map, with islands, flowers, trees, etc. Nifty, but practical?

A dentist was convicted on 46 felony and misdemeanor counts after filming himself performing a dental extraction while riding a hoverboard – cnn.com

Oddly, this did not happen in Florida.

Isaac Asimov's roaming hands

Asimov’s Empire, Asimov’s Wall – daily.jstor.org

Alec Nevala-Lee reflects on Asimov’s twin legacies: As a prolific and talented writer who made strides for science fiction, science and reason; and as a serial groper and sexual harasser who made science fiction and the scientific community more hostile to women – even as Asimov declared himself to be a feminist and spoke out loudly in favor of women’s rights.

Thanks to @manton for responding to a help request from me on Friday night, within minutes, and without pointing out that the problem was my own fault in the first place.

Within minutes, he responded. On a Friday night.

Dave Winer: I'm re-thinking RSS now

RSS forces “blogging into the title-description-body model of journalism. But blog posts are more free-form, they don’t all fit into that structure,” Dave says.

One major reason I’m taking a break from WordPress now and trying micro.blog full time is that micro.blog is more graceful in how it handles untitled posts. For most blog posts, I dislike titles intensely. It’s a big deal for me.

Somewhere in the mid-2000s, there evolved a consensus opinion that blog posts needed to be at least a few hundred words long, with a title. Blog posts needed to be carefully composed and ideally with at least one image, according to this school of thought.

This is dead wrong. Blogging can be those things, but it should be freeform. Just write what you want, for however long you want, organized or disorganized, with or without an image. A blog post can be a single sentence, casually tossed off while waiting at the grocery cashier. Or it can be a long article, composed and revised carefully over several days.