2020 archive
These Viral Times 0
Headline: Wawa donates 53-foot refrigerated truck to New Jersey for use as temporary morgue
I have no words.
Overfill 2
Brad Stennerson argues that there’s such a thing as too much television news and offers advice on how to dial it back.
A snippet; follow the link for the rest:
Shoot for the minimum necessary news. Not a second more.
Obviously, that’s not what the networks want. They want you transfixed by the screen, eyes wide with terror, heart fluttering with every overly-Midwestern pronunciation of every unnerving word.
My own opinion is that any television news is too much television news (unless there are nice pictures of a snow storm to look at). Television reporting manages to be both overblown and superficial at the same time.
Why spend half an hour watching someone talk about something when you learn more in greater depth in five minutes of reading?
Health Care in a Health Scare 0
Thom discusses how the “for profit” health care model is breaking down at a time when health care is sorely needed.
Kludge 0
Someone not at all techy asked me to define “kludge” today in connection with a conversation about a kludge.
The best I could come up with was this: “It’s like prose by Dickens. You know there’s meaning in there somewhere, but you have to work very hard to find it.”
Aside:
I tried to read The Pickwick Papers multiple times and never got past chapter five.
“An Armed Society Is a Polite Society” 0
A responsible gun owner (sic) gets pantsed by his own politeness.
One cannot help wondering just precisely to which item of anatomy the euphemism, “lower extremity,” refers.
Guns and stupid, guns and stupid.
They go together like love and Cupid.
Let me tell you brother,
You can’t have one without the other.
Under Cover of Coronavirus 0
While news of the coronavirus is grabbing everyone else’s attention, Will Bunch takes the time to look at what’s going on elsewhere. Here’s bit:
Follow the link to read why he wrote that passage.
Geeking Out 0
Ubuntu MATE with the Fluxbox window manager using the “mussel” style running the QMMP media player (playing The Bishop’s Secret by Fergus Hume), GKrellM, and Xclock. The wallpaper is from my collection.
The Wall-Eyed Piker, behind Closed Doors 0
At The Japan Times, Brad Glosserman makes a convincing case that Donald Trump’s “American First” impulse and its related policies whims, such as his farcical trade wars, represent the resurfacing of a recurrent American theme: “isolationism,” the notion that the country–one founded, ironically, on exports such as tobacco and cotton–could somehow exist in a vacuum alone from the rest of the world.
He goes on to argue that the coronavirus pandemic has showed nor only the practical fallacies of this notion, but also its moral and intellectual bankruptcy. Here’s a snippet:
Follow the link for the rest.