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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.

This statement could be read as Dave Winer disavowing blogging and RSS. Which would be extraordinary.

I expect I’m misunderstanding him.

TSA issues apology to Native American woman who had braids pulled by agent

The federal Transportation Security Administration has apologized to a Native American woman who said an agent at Minneapolis-St Paul international airport “pulled her braids” and said “giddy up!” when she took a flight from there this week.

“The agent said she needed to pat down my braids,” tweeted Tara Houska, an indigenous rights advocate and attorney. “She pulled them behind my shoulders, laughed and said ‘giddyup!’ as she snapped my braids like reins. My hair is part of my spirit. I am a Native woman. I am angry, humiliated. Your ‘fun’ hurt.”

Houska, who is Ojibwe, added: “When I informed the middle-aged blonde woman who had casually used her authority to dehumanize and disrespect me, she said, ‘Well it was just in fun, I’m sorry. Your hair is lovely.’

“That is NOT an apology and it is NOT OK.”

TSA issues apology to Native American woman who had braids pulled by agent The Guardian

More pizza, fewer vegetables: Trump administration further undercuts Obama school-lunch rules The Washington Post

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has taken another whack at former first lady Michelle Obama’s signature achievement: Establishing stricter nutritional standards for school breakfasts and lunches. And on her birthday.

On Friday, USDA Deputy Under Secretary Brandon Lipps proposed new rules for the Food and Nutrition Service that would allow schools to cut the amount of vegetables and fruits required at lunch and breakfasts while giving them license to sell more pizza, burgers and fries to students.

Potato lobbyists applauded the decision.

Larry David: The Incredibly Happy Life of TV’s Favorite Grouch

Brett Martin:

It is almost reflexive—for reasons of temperament and ethnicity—to describe David as “neurotic.” Sitting there with him in what I had already begun to think of as Larry World, I start to believe maybe this is exactly wrong. It occurs to me that Larry David may be the most self-actualized person I have ever met.

Delightful profile. And I’m not even a fan of the show.

That moment when you’re sitting on the couch and you tilt your head back to get the last few drops of your delicious breakfast shake, but you forgot you had your glasses on top of your head and you feel them slip off and hear them hit the carpet behind the couch.

On the other hand, the dog’s reaction was most gratifying when I moved the couch while she was sitting on it.

I am enjoying Jack Ryan enough to watch one episode a night, but not enough for two.

I’m glad Jim found a new career; he seemed unhappy at Dunder Mifflin.

📺

Bankers Flooding JPMorgan Event Bemoan San Francisco Squalor www.bloomberg.com/news/arti…

My work takes me to San Francisco several times a year and I dislike it more and more. Downtown, where conferences happen, is a urinal.

Outside there, the city is still beautiful, but you can’t find a hotel room for less than $600/night unless you’re willing to commute a half hour and often stay in a walkup with no private bath.

Surprisingly, Las Vegas is a pleasant place for a conference, easily able to absorb tens of thousands of attendees.

Rep. Ayanna Pressley reveals she has alopecia: ‘It’s important I’m transparent about this new normal’ www.cnn.com/2020/01/1… Interesting. My nephew has alopecia, which leads to drastic hair loss – in his case, as a teen-ager. He’s a good-looking kid, just bald.

San Diego destroyer commander fired www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/mili…

Cmdr. John “Bob” Bowen was relieved of command due to a “loss of confidence in his ability to command,” according to a Navy statement. The term is a catch-all used by the military to justify commander firings without detailing a cause.

??!!

Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez Wants To Ban ‘Virginity Tests’ In California www.kpbs.org/news/2020…

“Virginity tests”? In America? In the 21st Century? Dafuq?

Also: “There is no scientific way to tell whether or not someone is a virgin. Hymens vary among girls and some are born without one.”

Micro.blog is making me better at social media in general. Instead of just mindlessly tapping “LIKE,” say something. “Beautiful photo – I love the reds.” etc.

Canceled micro.blog but then resubscribed. Oh, micro.blog, why can’t I quit you?

Our cat Sammy has far more confidence in my ability to avoid stepping on him when he’s sprawled out on the floor than I do.

It’s 84 degrees in my office, I just started drinking a blazing hot cup of strong coffee, and I can’t find the remote control to turn on the ceiling fan.

On the 50 Things That Made the Modern Economy podcast: Pornography: Examining claims that pornography helped develop the Internet, and every other form of new media for several centuries. (Photography was so expensive in the 19th Century that a pornographic image cost more than time with an actual prostitute.) The Internet initially made it possible for pornographers to make money, but now it’s making it more difficult. (I almost said “making it harder” there.)

On the Our Opinions Are Correct podcast: Science Fiction Explains Our Messed Up Economy. Economist Noah Smith discusses how different theories of economics show up in science fiction, and how economics is itself an exercise in speculative worldbuilding. Also, the economic theory of “rational actors” pervades classic midcentury space opera, and everybody’s obsessed with game theory. And discussion of the most influential science fiction writer of the past century: Ayn Rand.