…you’ll get more of them.
Yup.
[Friday-morning update]
Meanwhile, after all the adulation of the Kavanaugh accusers, actual gang-rape survivor Lara Logan gets the cold shoulder from the media.
Category Archives: Popular Culture
Your Fifteen Minutes Of Hate
From recent experience, Nancy Rommelmann has a guide to surviving it.
Overrated Bands
I have to confess that I’m not even familiar with the music of many of these, but I’m glad to see Springsteen on the list.
Blazing Saddles
It’s 45 years old, and it couldn’t be made today.
We rewatched it a few weeks ago, and it is kind of amazing how politically incorrect it was.
Netflix
I am not into this kind of movie, so most of their offerings will be leaving me cold.
[Update Wednesday afternoon]
Netflix is doing a “wellness” series from (“Goop” loon) Gwyneth Paltrow.
[Bumped]
Hamilton
I’ve never heard anything about the show (including trailers) that have motivated me to want to see it at all, let alone pay big bucks for it. Now, it turns out that it’s historically BS. I know, I’m shocked, too.
Space Settlement Straw Man
I don’t know whether this guy’s ideas for carbon capture make economic sense or not, but this I see a lot of this sort of nonsense:
You quote the Jesuit philosopher Thomas Berry, who writes about our being inseparable from the Earth. That’s not trending in Silicon Valley the way, say, terraforming Mars is.
What the hell do we do when we’ve trashed the hell out of Earth? We escape to another planet! That appears to be the attitude from the tech-os. Well, I find that hugely irresponsible. Why waste billions on going to Mars when we should be putting that into nourishing Earth? It’s your classic mechanical mind gone to the extreme, and I find it abhorrent from people that are meant to be intelligent. We are an integral part of Earth and until we start nurturing her, we are going to go down the gurgler. Maybe a few of those tech-os will end up on a spaceship, but the rest of us won’t.
I don’t know anyone who wants to escape to another planet because we’ve trashed the earth.
To The “Book Community”
“Go f**k yourself.” A righteous rant from Larry Correia.
Book Collections
Thoughts on Marie Kondo from Lileks.
I have too many books, and I’d never have time in this life (barring breakthroughs in life extension) to read or reread them all. I have a twenty-volume encyclopedia of the Illustrated Science And Invention, which may come in handy after the apocalypse, when all knowledge of technology has been lost, and we have to rebuild civilization, so that definitely stays. But I really need to organize all of my books, and papers. My office is a godawful mess.
Sixteen Years Ago
Columbia was lost on this date in 2003, putting a final stake through the heart of the Space Shuttle program. We were staying at a Residence Inn in San Bruno (Patricia was working in Millbrae), when I was awoken by someone on the east coast with the news. Here were my immediate thoughts, which held up pretty well, I think. And if you go to this page, you’ll find that post at the bottom, but can scroll up to see my further reflections over the next few days (or click on “Next post” from the first blog link). I had only been blogging for a year and a half or so at the time.
Today, Ian Kluft had a thread on Twitter on his recollection of seeing the disaster live, though at the time he didn’t know exactly what was happening:
Thread.
We were staying at a Residence Inn in San Bruno. I was awoken by a call from a friend on the east coast to tell me that Columbia was missing. Drove back down to LA that day. https://t.co/l7nw2rpsYw
— SafeNotAnOption (@SafeNotAnOption) February 1, 2019
[Early-afternoon update]
Here is the archived version with comments. In that post, and this one, you can see the beginning of formulating my thoughts for the book, though it wouldn’t happen for another eight years or so.