I read a lot of history when I was a kid. I can’t remember most of it at this point. I’m pretty sure that William the Conqueror invaded Australia in 1923, but was driven back by the kangaroos, but I might be misremembering the details. And I couldn’t tell you the exact date when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor. So I appreciate an opportunity to brush up on non-current events.
I’ve been reading a biography of Hannibal recently for some reason. It’s kinda interesting to wonder what would have happened if he had finished off the Romans when he had the chance. He kicked their ass plenty, but the Roman Empire was one of those societies that only had to win once. You could beat them ten straight times, but Jove help you if they won the eleventh bout. Just ask anyone from Carthage, Hannibal’s hometown, how that worked out. Bring a shovel.
Anyway, I’ve read lots about the Romans. This video has more information in it than any ten books I’ve read. And the video game illustrations are wonderful.
Well, David Sanborn won’t be down for breakfast. He died of cancer a couple of days ago. He was an interesting, and very influential musician. Even if you don’t know his name, you’d recognize his saxophone playing on any number of pop, R&B, and jazz recordings. Like this one:
Sanborn was playing for money with Albert King when he was only fourteen years old. He did lots of session work, anonymous except for other musicians. For about twenty years after Young Americans, everybody making a record wanted someone who sounded like David Sanborn. In many cases, the quickest way to get someone who sounded like David Sanborn was to simply get David Sanborn. Here’s an in incomplete list of sessions from the Wikiup:
James Brown, Bryan Ferry, Michael Stanley, Eric Clapton, Bobby Charles, Cat Stevens, Roger Daltrey, Stevie Wonder, Paul Simon, Jaco Pastorius, the Brecker Brothers, Michael Franks, Kenny Loggins, Casiopea, Players Association, David Bowie, Todd Rundgren, Bruce Springsteen, Little Feat, Tommy Bolin, Bob James, James Taylor, Al Jarreau, Pure Prairie League, Kenny G, Loudon Wainwright III, George Benson, Joe Beck, Donny Hathaway, Elton John, Gil Evans, Carly Simon, Guru, Linda Ronstadt, Billy Joel, Kenny Garrett, Roger Waters, Steely Dan, Ween, the Eagles, Grateful Dead, Nena, Hikaru Utada, The Rolling Stones, Ian Hunter, and Toto.
I remember him very kindly. I was a working musician in the late 1980s, and I was often awake at odd hours. Or more accurately, I was rarely asleep. Sanborn was the co-host and house band impresario of an after hours teevee show called Night Music that was about the only show I’d ever watch. The show was always jam-packed with interesting, often offbeat musicians, and sometimes assembled in unusual groupings. They had Conway Twitty, Miles Davis, and everybody in between.
Eclectic? How’s this for one night’s lineup: Stevie Ray Vaughan, Pharoah Sanders, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, The Platters on video tape from 1955, Van Dyke Parks, and Maria McKee. That’s out there, man.
Speaking of crosstown traffic and six degrees of separation, Stevie Ray Vaughn was friends with Albert King, who was friends with David Sanborn. Stevie also played on a David Bowie record. The music world is like that, sometimes. I remember Stevie doing that interstellar take on Albert King’s playing style when the show was first broadcast.
Sanborn got a rep as a smooth jazz dude, but he didn’t like it. He was good at it, but he was good at everything. He didn’t like the pigeonhole. He had plenty of heavy jazz dudes on the show, and he held his own with all of them, include guys like Wayne Shorter.
Sanborn had a serious bout of polio when he was a kid. One of his arms was kind of withered, and he had trouble breathing properly. A doctor suggested that he should take up a wind instrument, instead of playing the piano, to build up his lungs.
Well, you know what they say: One man’s trash is another man’s poison. No, wait, that’s not it. A bird in the hand isn’t worth much, and it’s messier than one in the bush. Hmm. I don’t think that’s it either. Waste not, why not? That also seems off-kilter somehow. I know, don’t judge a man until you’ve walked a mile in his shoes. You’ll be a mile away, and you’ve got his shoes. What a sucker that guy was.
At any rate, it’s Tuesday. Trash day. It’s the day I clean out the bookmarks I’ve been saving for later, which never comes. So in the bin it goes.
Well, it can terminate walnuts and breakfast and soda and stuff. I’m not sure about Sarah Connor just yet. Note to the guy kicking and punching the robot: The time to start being nice to these things is long since passed. You don’t want your face scan floating around in this thing’s RAM when it gets its hand on a club, never mind a gun.
Of course we’re supposed to be enemies of the Chinese all of a sudden. They’re recently uncool, I hear. Luckily, we’re way ahead of them in this sort of tech.
“If social media and Internet and mobile-phone use is really such a devastating force in our society, we should see it on this bird’s-eye view [study] — but we don’t.” Such concerns are typically related to behaviours linked to social-media use, such as cyberbullying, social-media addiction and body-image issues. But the best studies have so far shown small negative effects, if any2,3, of Internet use on well-being
They’re being slightly obtuse here. Sure, I guess the internet is fine. I mean, If you’re using a desktop computer, which no one is. It’s the Pocket Pandora’s Portal that’s the problem, and always has been, from the minute girls started clutching it:
So it appears Francis Ford Coppola couldn’t get a movie studio to pony up the bucks for his Megalopolis movie, an idea he’s been tinkering with on and off since the ’70s. So he sold his winery and put up the $120 million himself. It’ll be screened in Cannes in a couple of days, and be released later in the year. And it’s really, really weird. I guess Francis will find out if weird sells these days:
It kinda looks like Metropolis, boned for weak teeth. But what do I know? The trailer got 308,000 views in about 9 hours after it was posted, so I gather the general public is at least interested. Maybe Francis won’t end up eating dogfood in a second floor walkup on Skid Row after all.
Researchers at ETH Zurich have developed a protein-based gel that breaks down alcohol in the gastrointestinal tract without harming the body. In the future, people who take the gel could reduce the harmful and intoxicating effects of alcohol.
So you eat like a trencherman and shoot yourself full of Wegovy, and then binge drink like an Irish poet without getting drunk. This just sounds like dieting and sobriety with extra steps to my ear. Then again, I drink to forget. I can’t remember what I’m trying to forget, so I’ll pass on the gel, thanks. When something’s working, you stick with it.
Website builder Squarespace is being taken private by U.K.-based private equity firm Permira in an all-cash deal that gives the company an enterprise valuation of $6.9 billion. Founded in 2004 by CEO Anthony Casalena, Squarespace is best known for its no-code platform designed to help SMEs and freelancers build websites, blogs and online stores. It includes customizable templates and a “what you see is what you get” (WYSIWYG) interface that users can configure by dragging and dropping different elements.
So Google Domains sold all their customers down the river to Squarespace a few short months ago. Now some faceless vulture capitalist fund owns the whole shebang. As far as their WYSIWYG interface is concerned, I have two customers who hired me to get their websites the hell out of Squarespace. It’s actually become rather complicated to host a website, and simplifying it with a no-code WYSIWYG only seems to make it more complicated.
Dominated by a handful of big owners and operators — including Americold Industries and Lineage Logistics, who together corner roughly 70% of the market — the industry has state-of-the-art facilities that can run $350 a square foot to build, four times the national average for warehouse space. Another significant room-temperature real-estate player, Related, which traditionally focuses on commercial spaces and housing, launched a $1 billion affiliate business, RealCold, last fall. In March 2023, Newmark estimated there were 9.8 million square feet of new cold storage under construction in the US.
There’s even expansive demand for new space to store the incredible amount of beef, pork, and chicken industrialized US agriculture sends around the world (we grow a quarter of the world’s poultry). The GCCA has recently been lobbying for the Fortifying Refrigeration Infrastructure and Developing Global Exports Act, or FRIDGE Act, which would give the US Department of Agriculture funds to help train staff and build out cold-storage capacity in emerging markets.
File that under stuff the news media isn’t likely to be interested in, but maybe should be. The world is being divided into two camps, and the United States owns one of the two tents. We make natural gas and food and weapons and pretty little oblong pieces of greenish paper, and business is good all over. Or else, generally.
The purpose of our paper is to present experimental evidence which partly resolves this disagreement. Our evidence resulted from the functional analysis of a drilled granite lid from an Old Kingdom sarcophagus ca. 2500 B.C., now in the Brooklyn Museum (Fig. 2). It probably belonged to Prince Akhet-Hotep of Dynasty IV. The sarcophagus weighs about four tons, the lid two tons. The lid has two holes on each end that were (probably) used to raise and lower it. The holes are 24 cm. long; their diameter on the outside is 5.3 cm. and tapers to 4.3 cm. on the inside.
One guy thinks the Egyptians used a kind of of slurry paste of quartz sand to abrade a hole. The other dude thinks they had cylindrical bores with teeth covered with something pretty hard. There’s no written record of how they did it, so they’re both guessing. If guessing is allowed, I’m going to say aliens did it. You know they just love probing of any kind.
“Because people are reading a summary paragraph generated by AI, they think they’re getting unbiased, fact-based answers,” said lead author Ziang Xiao, an assistant professor of computer science in the Whiting School of Engineering at Johns Hopkins who studies human-AI interactions. “Even if a chatbot isn’t designed to be biased, its answers reflect the biases or leanings of the person asking the questions. So really, people are getting the answers they want to hear.”
This assistant sooper genius with the eyechart name seems to have discovered the answer to that eternal riddle: Why are my eyeglasses always in the last place I look? Shhh. No one tell poindexter that when you find what you’re looking for, you stop looking. Of course it’s in the last place you looked.
Well, there you have it. My bookmarks toolbar has gone from 12,781 items to 12,773, and I owe it all to you, my fine readers. Whittling it down under 10,000 is going to feel like cutting holes in granite, but I’ll keep trying.
Well, we’re back again with a roundup of interesting things from Maine real estate listings. I’m using the word “interesting” in the same way your psychiatrist does when you tell them some weird thing you dreamed. “That’s interesting, ” they’ll say, and up your prescription for Lithium.
Maine is getting less interesting since I moved here. The landscape used to be adorned with many more abandoned houses, chock-a-block full of interesting things. Now the whole state has been flipped, just about. Every floor is gray, every wall is gray, every exterior is gray plastic. It’s a form of mental illness, but it ain’t interesting.
On to today’s batch of Maine architectural wonderments:
You know, duct tape is pretty handy stuff. And Lincoln Logs are fun to play with.But I’m not sure I’d trust a combination of the two materials to hold up the first floor. The electrical wiring is interesting, though, ain’t it?
If you’ve ever been a landlord, you know that one constant with all tenants is they love to paint the walls in their apartments, and they always select something interesting. However, few achieve the coveted Mondrian corner.
Nothing says romance like a spray of plastic flowers on a bar table with a couple of stools tucked in the corner of a basement on a concrete floor under an unfinished drywall ceiling, with the wall painted arctic blue-gray. That’s a pellet stove, by the way, and the top doesn’t even get warm, so putting a cast iron kettle on top to humidify the room is an interesting idea.
I had to do a bit of a double take there. Is that Hondo hisself in the corner? I’ve watched a lot of movies with the Duke in ’em, but I don’t remember any where he encouraged anyone to play frisbee golf. Maybe they only have that one on Tubi.
This is what happens when you hire Charlotte Bronte to decorate your house instead of Martha Stewart. Instead of quartz countertops and luxury vinyl flooring, she spends the whole budget on an impromtu calaboose in the attic to hide away your crazy first wife. You know, instead of putting her on reality TV like everybody does now. The crutches tucked into the rafters are an interesting touch.
There’s no ambiance like “bare light bulb” ambiance, is there? I call this decorating motif “Sleep here now, interrogation later.”
Well, everybody, that’s it for this batch of Great Moments in Maine Real Estate. Feel free to vote for your favorite in the comments, but please: no wagering. And don’t forget to have an interesting day!
Aw yeah. That’s 1964. Dobie Gray on Shindig, one of the many musical variety shows on TV back then. It was only broadcast for a couple of years, but managed to showcase lots of good artists. The first show had Sam Cooke, The Everly Brothers, and The Righteous Brothers, for instance.
The In Crowd had several popular iterations. Dobie’s was the first. A little later, jazz pianist Ramsey Lewis decided it would make a fun jazz cover.
Jazz was very big in the fifties, but rock ‘n roll steamrolled it in the sixties. Despite that, The Ramsey Lewis Trio had a big hit with it, sold a million copies, and got a Grammy for their trouble. The song has more or less become a jazz standard on the back of Lewis’ version. In the seventies, Bryan Ferry from Roxy Music took a run at it, and made the hind end of the charts again with a… a… well, a Bryan Ferry sort of version of it.
The three versions couldn’t sound more different. Dobie sounded playful singing the song. Ramsey sounded sophisticated. And Bryan sounded like he had a pocket full of rohypnol, and was cruising a louche bar in Marseille.
Month: May 2024
sippicancottage
A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.
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