- Another Odd Lots, sure. And the oddest thing I learned today was that there is a website called foodpoisoningnews.com, which has some factual material, but appears to be a site for people who want to sue and need a lawyer after getting food poisoning somewhere.
- Great piece by Jamie Wilson about why AI-created fiction is, well, slop. NY publishers are not doing well, and yet they insist on imposing their culture on authors, from copy editing all the way down to outrageous contract provisions that pretty much amount to author slavery. Indie publishers are popping up and appear to be at least surviving.
- The US Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the IP industry may not hold internet service providers responsible for IP piracy committed on their networks. This is big, and I wonder if the IP industry is now going to focus on going after individuals doing the file sharing. And what about Usenet? I let my Usenet subscription expire 9 years ago, in part because the forums were mostly dead and file downloads were the bulk of what was left.
- Could AI cause software-as-a-service (SaaS) to implode? This article thinks so. I’m not as sure, but the piece makes a few points I hadn’t thought of before, mostly because I don’t contribute to open-source projects.
- Web publishers are having a hard time paying their bills, and are amping up their “reader as product” strategy. I’m pretty sure part of that is the growing use of AI in web searches, in which the AI presents the answers to the user without ads or anything else that the publishers can monetize.
- Supplementing B vitamins may help slow or prevent the progression of Parkinson’s disease. We take B-50s every morning, and this is yet another reason to continue them.
- I’m not sure why I never learned about Amazon’s Send to Kindle page until a friend told me about it, but it’s a simple way to sideload epub ebooks onto your Kindle readers or apps.
- While looking up a pop song based on Bach’s “Minuet in G” I happened upon a large list of pop songs based on classical melodies. I don’t listen much to pop radio anymore, so the items after the 1980s are mostly unknown to me.
health
Odd Lots
Why I Am a Skeptic
Years’n’years ago somebody asked me if contrarianism were just another word for skepticism. My answer was No—but I couldn’t explain why at the time and said I would think about it. I did the promised thinking, though I don’t think I’ve ever explored the issue at length here on Contra or anywhere else. Well, it’s time.
My first insight on the question was that contrarianism is broad, whereas skepticism is narrow. Fleshed out a little, that insight became this: Skepticism is targeted; we’re skeptical about something, not simply skeptical, period. I’ve since refined that insight to its current form:
Contrarianism is a mindset; skepticism is its mechanism.
Contrarianism welcomes (and sometimes celebrates) doubts. Skepticism examines those doubts to determine if they have any value. I explored the notion of contrarianism here on Contra in my entry of January 1, 2009. I didn’t get into skepticism in that piece since people so easily confuse the two.
The scientific method is essentially systematic and disciplined skepticism. The example I often cite is that of the supposed Law of Parity. Some physicists had doubts about the Law of Conservation of Parity as observed in nuclear physics. They did some new experiments in the 1950s, and demonstrated that parity was not always conserved.
I take a little heat from some people over my skepticism of dark matter. We don’t know what true dark matter is made of, but I’m pretty sure it’s not subatomic particles as we understand them. For once, the Grok AI answered my question “What is dark matter made of?” by admitting that we don’t know: “Dark matter’s composition remains unknown.” I have a (personal) hypothesis, since we only know dark matter by the shape of space, and the shape of space is affected by gravity: Dark matter is gravitational distortion of space caused by mass existing in a higher dimension. I don’t claim it’s true, but until more and better research answers the question, that hypothesis remains my best guess. (And I’ll bet there’s a story or three in it!)
Skepticism operates in many other realms than that of science. My skepticism is most active when I confront conventional wisdom, those often bogus things that “everybody knows.” Back in 1970 or so, “everybody” knew that we were about to enter a new ice age. A few years later, when winters didn’t get any worse, the coin flipped and then it was global warming. This sounded fishy to me, and my skepticism kicked into high gear. There are loads of lists online of apocalyptic scare stories about climate that never came even close to being true. I continue to research climate, but as climate research has now become utterly political, I won’t discuss it further here.
Skepticism goads the skeptic into learning new (and often useful) things. I heard the tired old saw, “Fat makes you fat” a great deal in my early life. I went largely low-carb in 1997 by not drinking sugar-sweetened iced tea because I threw a kidney stone. I lost 5 or 6 pounds in a few months. This startled the hell out of me. Over the next several years I researched diet, and when I happened on Gary Taubes’ book Good Calories, Bad Calories, I began to understand. I am now 20 pounds lighter than I was in 1997 because I only rarely have carb dishes like pasta or rice, I rarely drink sodas, and mostly adhere to our diet of meat, fish, eggs, dairy, and salad. Skepticism of conventional wisdom (“Fat makes you fat”) drove me to do that research, and I’ve learned a lot in the process.
It’s important to remember that good skepticism is to some extent skeptical of itself. I overrode my skepticism of the government’s declarations on COVID, and got the Pfizer vacc and its booster. Mercifully, I stopped there, but I remained skeptical enough to get a supply of HCQ and Zinc Sulfate via a telemed MD just in case. When we finally caught COVID in ‘23, the HCQ/Zinc protocol knocked the damned thing out in 5 days. Well, the Powers finally admitted that the Pfizer vacc won’t keep you from getting it or spreading it. It is thus not a vaccine at all, but a form of pre-treatment that carries side effects we’re only now pinning down. Like climate, the side effects issue has become completely political, and I won’t discuss it further here. The lesson is just this: Keep your skepticism on a short leash, and pay attention to its sidebands; i.e., issues to either side of the core object of your skepticism.
Skepticism has other benefits. Skepticism fosters an open mind. Skeptics are scammed a lot less often. Skeptics don’t get swept up into fads and tribal tarpits as easily. Skeptics readily admit when they’re wrong about something, largely because skepticism causes them to be wrong less often.
In short, skepticism has made my life better and taught me a great deal. More than that, in conjunction with my contrarianism, it’s kept me a free man. And that’s why I am a skeptic now and always will be.
Creatine
Carol and I have done weight training almost continuously since 2004. (We dropped it during the turbulent couple of years we were moving from Colorado Springs down here to Scottsdale.) About a month or so ago, my trainer at the gym recommended a supplement called creatine, which I’d never heard of. He said it helps build muscle. That’s what we pay him for, so if there’s something that supports that goal, I’m willing to try it.
Creatine is yet another chemical that the body manufactures for its own use in keeping muscles and skeletal infrastructure healthy. And like so much else, as people get older they produce less internally. So given that we’re now in our 70s, well, like I said before: I’m willing to try it. Creatine is widely used by bodybuilders. Carol and I are not bodybuilders. We’re mostly trying to keep what muscle we have and maybe put on a little more. Some research suggests creatine improves brain health and may put off or reduce the effects of disorders like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. Good if true, but evidence there is thin.
In truth, what sold me on creatine is its role in providing energy to the body. Creatine increases the body’s supply of adenosine triphosphate (ATP) which is part of a complicated system for delivering chemical energy to cells. Across the last five years or so, my personal energy levels have fallen. I’m an old guy; that happens. But supplementing creatine provides more of the body’s “energy currency,” as explained in the NIH paper linked above. (Yeah, it’s a slog, but read it!) More on this shortly.
As a supplement, creatine monohydrate is a white powder that you can buy in both flavored and unflavored forms. I bought a jar of the unflavored Sunwarrior brand at the Natural Grocer store nearby. It dissolves readily in water or almost any water-based liquid. The jar comes with a scoop to measure out 5 grams. We take 5 grams daily. Carol puts it in her daily protein shake. I currently put it in sugar-free Activia liquid probiotic yogurt. (I recently had an infected tooth and had to take a course of strong antibiotics. The doc said eat probiotic yogurt for awhile to counteract whatever havoc the pills may have committed on my gut biome.)
What I’d really prefer (and will probably switch to soon) is putting my 5 grams of creatine into my daily iced coffee, which I drink about 10 AM. Many people put it in tea, but since I’m prone to kidney stones (which tea can cause) I’m going with coffee.
But…some online articles suggest that caffeine partially inhibits the effects of creatine. That bothered me until I found another Healthline article citing some solid 2017 research putting that rumor to rest. So once I run out of those cute little Activia Dailies, my creatine is going in my coffee.
As with any change in diet or meds, placebo may have something to do with it, but I <i>do</i> feel a little more energetic than in previous years. We’ll see if that continues as time goes on.
There’s one more thing about creatine that you need to be aware of, and it does bother me a little: Creatine promotes water retention in the body. In the month that I’ve been taking creatine, I’ve gained a little over four pounds. Our diet here is low-carb and I’ve hovered close to 150 for some years. Our diet hasn’t changed, so what’s with those four new pounds? Water. It makes me wonder if I’ve been a little bit dehydrated ever since we moved back to single-digit-humidity Arizona in 2015. Possible; hard to know. As with any significant supplement, it would be worth asking your doc about it. I’m just telling you that it seems to work and does not appear to have a downside if you don’t overdo it. Let me know of current or future results if you’re taking it too.
Odd Lots
- That’ll leave a mark, Mark: Unsealed emails indicate that Meta downloaded 81.7 terabytes of pirated books from sites like Anna’s Archive and LibGen. Why? To train their AIs. Most people would consider that a violation of copyright law all by itself apart from seeding the monster files while torrenting them.
- After hearing how bad eggs are for your cardiovascular health for literally decades, new research on the over-70 set finds that people in that age bracket who eat eggs six or seven days a week see a 29% reduction in heart disease. I have an extra-large egg every morning (I used to have two, until I realized one would carry me to lunch) and am much relieved. Carbs are the enemy. Eggs are your allies.
- Warner Brothers has dropped more than 30 of its feature-length films on YouTube without charge, including Waiting for Guffman and Oh, God! Note that this isn’t the YouTube paid service, but just plain, ordinary free YouTube. People wonder why, though I’d guess that WB is trying to establish itself as “the good guy” vis-a-vis old content, unlike The Mouse House, which cannot let anything go no matter how old or bad it is.
- As my regular readers know, I’m not much of a fan of AI—but I am a huge fan of nuclear power. What AI seems best at right now is persuading power utilities to put unused (“zombie”) nuclear plants back online, or even—egad!—building new ones. TechCrunch has a decent story. Me? More AI! More AI!
- I remember reading about this, um, eccentric—who claimed alien visitation and is now being sued by investors who were persuaded that he had invented an antigravity machine. Here’s the whole long-form story, from Bloomberg.
- Lazarus 3.8, a bugfix release, is now available. Worth it. Really. Pascal isn’t dead.
- From robocop to rolocop: Spherical Chinese robots are hitting Chinese streets to assist police in chasing crooks and breaking up riots. One plus: They’re pretty rugged. I can think of some minuses, and I’ll bet you can too.
- Here’s a world map showing what the commonest last name is in every country on Earth. Here? Smith. Same in Canada, Australia, and the UK. Who could have guessed?
- In the first cut of Google’s AI Super Bowl ad, the ad claimed that Gouda cheese represents from 50 to 60 percent of all cheese consumed here on Earth. They fixed it with a little non-artificial intelligence, heh. Ok, one could argue the point, since a lot of stuff labeled “cheese” isn’t really cheese as I understand the term—but even Velveeta doesn’t have numbers like that. Come for the football, stay for the Super Bowl AI hallucination about…cheese.
Odd Lots
- It’s a little late but there’s still time to see it: Tonight will be the full Moon, and also a partial lunar eclipse. 7:45 PM makes it about ideal for the Pacific and Arizona time zone, with all the usual adjustments for Mountain, Central and Eastern.
- Scott Pinsker posted an article on PJMedia back on September 9th, about dogs allowing humans to out-compete Neanderthals. I wrote about that back in 2010: Dogs were alarm systems that made dawn raids ineffective. Lacking dogs, Neanderthals may have simply dawn-raided themselves into extinction.
- I’m looking for a book that defines terms and instruments used in classical music. Andante, allegro non troppo, adagio, the viola, the celesta, and that instrument consisting of a series of pieces of metal tubing hung from strings under a bar, whose name I just cannot recall. A lot of that stuff can be found online, but, well, I’m just partial to books. If you have one that you like, please mention it in a comment.
- The blinking cursor on our computer screens is now 54 years old. Here’s a short history of how it came about.
- It’s been a pretty sparse hurricane season, with the single exception of Beryl. Right now on NOAA’s hurricane map there is a dying hurricane in Arkansas, one named tropical storm, Gordon, and two disturbances with less than 40% chance of becoming cyclonic. We’re halfway through hurricane season, and not much has been happening. My take: predicting a hurricane season’s severity is a fool’s model. Too much chaos and butterfly effect. It could get worse any time. Or it might not. We won’t know until we get there.
- Who had this on their 2024 bingo cards? Good ‘ol Yellow #5 dye, in large quantities, makes living tissue temporarily transparent. Scientists have created temporarily transparent mice. No human trials have happened as yet. So go easy on those Cheetos, ok?
- This is boggling but perhaps inevitable, assuming it’s true—and I’m skeptical: A chemhacker group is creating software and desktop labware allowing people to synthesize expensive prescription medications at home. An $800 pill becomes a $1 pill. Yes, there are risks, but if you’re dying for lack of an expensive drug, well…
- Over on City Journal Michael Totten has a long-form meditation on Liu Cixin’s SF trilogy Remembrance of Earth’s Past that bears on the Fermi Paradox and the question of whether we should actively seek out alien life–or hide from it. A little outside what I see in City Journal, but well-worth reading.
Junewander
Hey, I’m still alive, but I haven’t posted since May 27th and people are starting to ask. A lot of my writing energy is being sucked up into the final pieces of The Everything Machine, which is a full-length drumlins novel where I (finally) spill the beans about what the drumlins are and where they came from. Carol and I have been “going to church” online since COVID, and a couple of weeks ago we decided to attend in person. Four days later, I came down with the worst cold I’ve had in years.
Wait. It was the only cold I’ve had in years: specifically, since I began taking quercetin and zinc in the spring of 2020. Now, we both got COVID some time back, but we knocked it out with a 5-day course of HCQ and zinc. What this means is that we now have reliable natural immunity and I’m not worrying about catching the damned thing again. And just in case we do, I got a telemed firm to prescribe some ivermectin for us.
But this cold hit me in spite of the quercetin and zinc. I’ve begun to wonder if taking quercetin for four years has developed a tolerance for the drug in my system, rendering it less effective. This has happened a number of times in the past with other drugs. My response to drugs has peculiarities: A root canal procedure years ago showed that I do not respond at all to nitrous oxide. Nothing. I asked the dental tech if the gas was flowing. She took a whiff from the cannula and said, Yup, it’s flowing. Regardless, I ended up as tense as always, watching some movie in the TV mounted on the ceiling while they excavated a bad tooth.
After Colorado legalized RMJ in 2014, I bought a vape and tried it. Nothing. And I do mean nothing. I sometimes wonder if (as the first girl I ever dated said) I’m too weird for words. Shortly after Coriolis imploded, I got an acupuncture treatment to make me feel better. It worked! I felt better for…a week. I went back for another go. Nothing. Placebo effect? Probably. I’ve never entirely understood how sticking a bunch of needles in people acts against depression—or anything else.
As June wound down, we were delighted to have my sister’s family stay with us for a few days. They drove down from Chicago, visited some relatives in Texas, and stopped along the way to see the Painted Desert, Meteor Crater, and us. Gretchen stayed with us while my BIL Bill took their kids to VidCon in Anaheim. She’ll be here until next Sunday or Monday, when the rest of her gang heads back from Anaheim. In the interim I have some high-quality sister time, something that’s been scarce for the past few years.
I do have a couple of entries planned, but one of them has been in the works for months and I have yet to put a single word down on it. I have enough bullet points for an Odd Lots, which I intend to post today or tomorrow. June hasn’t been empty offline, which is why Contra’s been empty online. Time to get that particular train back on its track and steamed up.
Odd Lots
- Happy New Year, gang! My prediction: 2024’s gonna to be a wild ride across the board. If popcorn weren’t so fattening I’d buy a pile of it.
- The Quadrantids meteor shower is tonight. The shower’s characteristic behavior is having a brief peak but an intense one. The predicted time of the peak is 7:53 AM EST, which would be 6:53 CST and 5:53 MST on 1/4/2024. That may sound awfully early to some of my night-owl readers, but Dash typically wakes us up by that time. I intend to be out watching for it, even though we have a first-quarter Moon—and it might rain. Hey, if you don’t play you can’t win.
- The JWST has begun showing us how many odd chunks of stuff are drifting around the galaxy without actually orbiting stars. Some of these rogue planets are in pairs, orbiting one another. Fascinating long-form piece on the phenom if astrophysics—or writing science fiction—is your thing.
- Here’s a dazzling video of a volcano erupting in Iceland. It’s unique because it shows the very beginning of the eruption, which almost resembles a sunrise. But then, boom! It gets spectacular!
- Sports Illustrated was buying articles generated by AI, with authors also invented by AI, right down to the author headshots. Futurism called them on it, and all questionable articles vanished. That doesn’t mean a few weren’t so ridiculous as to stand out and may still be there.
- Old timers like me will recall text user interfaces (TUIs) which, when we got started in computing, were what was on the menu. (It was a one-line menu.) Here’s a fun Substack piece about TUIs, and how in truth, modern GUI programming editors in IDEs don’t really give us much that we didn’t already have back then. Hell, when I was at Xerox in the early 80s somebody was passing around a Pac-Man game written in text mode for a 24X80 display.
- Alas, Bill Gladstone, who founded Waterside Productions, passed on to higher realms on 12/27. Waterside is the agency that represents my book-length nonfiction via agent Carole Jelen. We acquired a fair number of books through him during the Coriolis years. He knew what he was doing, and the world could use a few more agents with his savvy.
- New research suggests that red meat is not fatal. Body weight, not meat consumption, appears to cause the inflammation behind much cardiovascular disease. It’s carbs that put the weight on, as I’ve found over my past 25 years eating low-carb.
- Back before Christmas I was over at Total Wine buying vino to honor the Bambino, and was standing in the (long) line for the checkout beside a spinrack of hard liquor shooters. Most were things I’d heard of. But there…does that little bottle say it’s peanut butter and jelly sandwich whiskey? Yes, it did—so I bought one. Hey, 99c is cheap thrills. Carol and I tasted it when I got home. I expected to spit it out, but…it wasn’t half bad. From Skatterbrain, though Total Wine tells me it’s no longer available. Maybe the shooters were market research, and it flunked. So it goes. Alcohol is a volatile business…
- Cheap thrills? There’s a cheap ($10) red blend called Sheep Thrills, which was vinted in Italy but bottled here in the US. I bought some. Like PB&J whiskey, it wasn’t awful, but I still don’t recommend it. Too thin, too dry.
- I assumed that Skatterbrain’s PB&J whiskey had to be the weirdest whiskey in America. Silly boy. Have a look at this. Sorry, I’ll pass.
- If you’ve ever wondered what shallots were, well, here’s how to tell a shallot from an onion. I like the notion of shallots as heirloom onions (imaginary band name alert!) and Carol and I are going to try a few recipes that might tempt Tennyson’s Lady of Shallott. Ok, sure, it’s the Lady of Shalott. Maybe that’s the British spelling. Or Tennyson’s spellchecker wasn’t working. Yes, ok, I’ll shut up now.
Odd Lots
- A Tesla EV caught fire here in Scottsdale after it hit a building. (No explanation yet why it crashed.) The cops closed off half a mile of Scottsdale Road (the big street down the middle of the long, narrow city) for most of yesterday, essentially cutting the city in half. Later the same day, while a towing firm was towing what was left of the car away, it caught fire yet again. This is not a good look, and won’t help popularize EVs.
- Clarkesworld, a respected SFF magazine, closed for submissions after receiving a lot of crappy stories written by AIs like ChatGPT. Having messed a little with ChatGPT, I don’t blame them one iota.
- Venus and Jupiter will be only a full-Moon’s width apart just after sunset the night of March 1. Take it in if your skies are clear. This sort of thing doesn’t happn very often.
- Swiss Scientists having been playing music in the rooms used for aging cheese, hoping to create interesting new flavors. Hip-hop, Mozart, and Led Zeppelin each had a cheese wheel. After aging, flavors were tested and the Mozart had a milder flavor than Led Zeppelin and Hip-hop. Good; now let’s see if this trick works for wine.
- NASA satellite data says that there’s been no global warming for eight years, five months. It’s been a chilly winter here, but back in the summer of 1990 we were in the pool in March, after a hot snap took the daytime temps up to 120F.
- This is disturbing: Dr. Fauci evidently knew all along that injected intramuscular vaccines would prevent neither infection nor transmission. He was co-author of a peer-reviewed paper in Cell, a respected journal. The paper explains why: COVID and other respiratory viruses enter through the mucosa, and do not infect the body systemically. Vaccines injected into muscle don’t get out to where the viruses replicate until the infection is well underway and contagious.
- This is the weirdest and (unintentionally) funniest article I’ve ever read in the Grauniad, er, Guardian. According to the author, owning quantities of books is a cultish thing, all very smug and (ewwww!) middle-class. I’m pretty sure a certain somebody is trying to write her way into the elites, and I’m even surer that pieces like this will not do the trick.
- A large-scale study published in the highly respected peer-reviewed Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews found that masks provide little or no protection against aerosol viruses. The study itself is here. It’s a serious slog to read, but several news sources are highlighting it, to the mask cult’s incandescent fury. Here’s something from Real Clear Science. Again, if high-quality masks are worn absolutely perfectly they may have…some…effect, but my own experiments with masks show that such perfection is impossible. Exhaling blew air jets around the edges of every mask I tried, not only releasing viruses, but sending them on a joyride that could have gone six or eight feet or more.
- Another new study published in Nature finds that cholesterol is not the killer we’ve been warned against all our lives. The results showed that cholesterol levels from 210-249 were not only harmless, but protective, in both men and women. The report is surprisingly readable as such things go, with good graphs.
Odd Lots
- My Christmas story “The Camel’s Question” has done pretty well for its first two days on the market, considering how narrow the market for Christmas fiction is and how short the window for selling it into that market. I’m particularly pleased with the cover image, which was inexpensive ($8) and yet startlingly good in context.
- There are currently 47 active volcanoes around the world, and volcanic activity is in fact increasing.
- This is scary as hell: A wheelchair-bound Candian military veteran asked Canada’s national helth service for a wheelchair lift. They offered her euthanasia instead. Canada is performing Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) on about 10,000 people per year. In 2023 MAID will become available to people who suffer mental illness.
- The snow extent in the northern hemisphere this past November was trending toward the highest in 56 years. Several weather models suggest that the entire eastern half of the US is looking at blizzards and very cold temps between now and Christmas. I’ve never been gladder that I live in Arizona, heh.
- This article from Issues & Insights pokes a serious hole in this business of “misinformation” and “disinformation,” neither of which are what they claim to be. People who know nothing of medical science tag any suggestion that Ivermectin is effective against COVID-19 as “misinformation” and do whatever they can to silence MDs who argue that it’s cheap, safe, and needs to be studied in more depth–and could well have saved hundreds of thousands of lives. Calling something “misinformation” and then deplatforming those who disagree is the way censorship is done these days.
- Elon Musk and Apple have buried the hatchet, and Twitter’s biggest advertiser is returning to the platform. The grownups in the room realize that ad boycotts simply hand customers to your competitors.
- Evidence is piling up (has been for awhile, actually) that even N95 masks have little or no protective power against COVID aerosols. I posted this link on Twitter some time back–and I wasn’t banned. Elon Musk has made a huge difference in freedom of what I will call “polite conversation;” that is, posting informational links and analysis rather than getting in shouting matches.
- Musk, yeah. He still has a lot of work to do, but the data shows that Twitter is by no means dying.
- Everybody blames too much salt for hypertension. In truth, the science is a lot more nuanced than conventional wisdom would suggest. I did the science on myself regarding salt and blood pressure: I gave up salt for three months. My blood pressure did not go down. I went back to my usual level of added salt, and my blood pressure did not go up. My godmother gave up salt when she was 77. She was dead a year later. Something doesn’t add up here.
- It looks like we are finally doing hard research on bacteriophage therapy against antibiotic-resistant pathogens. Why wasn’t this done twenty years ago?
Odd Lots
- Here’s a longish research paper from the NIH National Library of Medicine exploring studies of the effects of light at night (LAN) on various body functions. One of the most startling is the degree to which night work correlates to obesity and Type II diabetes. Less clear but more concerning are links between LAN and certain cancers. The message appears to be: Sleep at night, in the dark. Carol and I do that, and have all our lives.
- Hating the Other evidently heightens activity in our reward centers. The late Colin Wilson explored the issue, and claimed that in modern society we have to give ourselves permission to hate the Other…but once we do, hating the Other is delicious and hard to stop. This explains a lot about tribalism in modern politics, 90% of which is about hating the Other–and an important reason why I don’t write about politics.
- Virginia Postrel has a related article on her Substack, about the role of what she calls “purity” and its relation to cancel culture. She mentions Gavin Haynes’ notion of a “purity spiral,” which I think nails the whole purity business. It’s an effort to outbid others in pursuit of an unattainable ideal. It is thus more evidence supporting my notion that idealism is evil.
- I’ve always wondered why music in a minor key sounds sad, spooky, or creepy. Here’s one of the better online essays on the subject.
- I include this (slightly) related item because it asks a question I’ve never heard asked before: What is the most evil chord in music? I would guess it’s the chord that runs around with a chainsaw, cutting treble clefs in thirds, and playing hob in a minor key.
- I wonder how I got to be 70 without ever hearing about raccoon dogs, which are neither raccoons nor dogs. They’re an interesting, albeit invasive, species of canid found in the Far East. The Japanese call them Tanuki, though I don’t recall them coming up in conversation when I was in Japan in 1981.
- Speaking of my 70th birthday, my writer friend and collaborator Jim Strickland brought a Cabernet Sauvignon to our dual birthday party on July 16. I tried it and found it…not bitter. That was a first in my wine experience, granting that once I tasted a few bitter specimens, I basically stopped trying them. The wine in question is from Daou, vintage 2020. About $20 at our Kroger-affiliate supermarket. Quite dry, but no oak, which spoils all the other flavors for me..
- Well. Ever heard “Bohemian Rhapsody” played on several disemboweled scanners and piles of 5″ floppy drives, plus the occasional phone modem? Here’s your chance.
- In case you don’t yet have enough interesting things to read, here’s the Smithsonian’s history of the hard hat.
- Back in June, people in San Francisco reported that anchovies were falling from the sky. People did not report anyone running around the city’s streets holding a pizza and hoping for free fish.
- Hey, this was evidently a banner year for Pacific Coast anchovies. My guess is that with no one putting them on pizzas anymore, their depleted populations have rebounded.
- After using it since 2005, LiveJournal has canceled my account there. I don’t think anybody was reading it anyway. It was a mirror, and I have better backup schemes now.
