That’s Three Dog Night performing for The Spirit of America Spectacular on July 5th, 1981. I say that’s the real birth of Yacht Rock.
Of course “Yacht Rock” was a web series, a kind of unmoored cable TV show starting in 2005. No one knows who first used the term, but that made it popular. The original musical term for mostly saccharine, overproduced, mellow music was soft rock, or the California Sound, or maybe adult-oriented rock (AOR). Music critics mostly use yacht rock as a pejorative, but that’s falling by the wayside more and more. It might be because people like it more than they like critics, so critics find ways to like it publicly and hate it in private.
This concert was part of The Spirit of America Spectacular, a nationally televised and radio broadcasted patriotic extravaganza. America used to have more than mostly peaceful arsonists roaming the land. Some people used to like it here. George Bush the elder was VP back then, and even sent in a telegram to express his approval. It’s a good format for messages from George. You could never tell what that guy was saying just by listening to him.
Anyway, that’s the permanently docked Queen Mary in Long Beach in the background, and about eleventy-zillion yachts. The lineup was The Beach Boys, Rick Springfield, Three Dog Night, and Pablo Cruise.
Now according to the intertunnel, the key nodule of Yacht Rock is something like Michael McDonald, Kenny Loggins, Steely Dan, Christopher Cross, Toto, and Ambrosia. I’m at a loss to explain how anyone could think Christopher Cross and Steely Dan have anything in common. When you get caught between the moon and New York City vs. I crawl like a viper through the suburban streets. If you think Don’t Take Me Alive is comparable to the theme from Arthur, there’s no hope for you. But I do get the drift.
Let’s run it down my idea of Yacht Rock’s adumbration. In 1981, the Beach Boys had long since morphed into the Beach Men. They were wandering aimlessly in the soft rock wilderness, until they ran aground with Kokomo, a song that makes Jimmy Buffet look like the Sex Pistols. I say they’re exhibit A in Yacht Rock pantheon.
I’ve got no beef with Three Dog Night. They can all sing and play their instruments. Shambala was a damn fine song. But they eventually hooked up with Paul Williams to write songs for them. He also wrote songs for the Carpenters, Streisand, Helen Reddy, and egad, The Sandpipers. If your yacht was big enough to have an elevator in it, he was your man. They belong.
Next. Rick Springfield is rock music for girls, I guess. I could never tell him and Bryan Adams apart, so I’m not the guy to judge his total Sloop John B-ishness. We don’t need him, anyway, to prove our point. Because the last band on the docket, and the dock, was Pablo Cruise:
Case closed. July 5th, 1981. It’s the real birth of Yacht Rock. Fight me.
Tora! Tora! Tora! is a pain in the ass to type. I’m not one of those eleventy!1111!1!11!1 guys from the internet from ten years ago. I like to think I’m a competent male writer, so exclamation points are rarer than honest congressmen in my text. I have to go looking for the exclamation point, and hunting for it three times in a row makes me peevish. It also makes me peevish to be unable to tell you if, you know, the movie is any good. If I was getting paid, I could write either side of the equation for you. But I’m doing this for free, so all I can rely on is my opinion. I’m not sure I have one.
Let’s go to the trailer, shall we, while I try to make up my mind one more time:
Of course trailers like these were designed to get you to drag your carcass to the theater or drive-in the next time you had five bucks burning a hole in your pocket. You couldn’t tell if a movie from the 1970s was going to be good by relying on the trailer. You had to go see it to figure it out. The TV, VCR, and the internet took all the mystery out of movies. You could just flip the channel or pop in another tape or whatever, or fold your laundry while Freebie and the Bean plays unwatched in the background.
Well, I saw, you know, this movie in the theater when I was a little kid. It used to be on TV a lot. You could rent it ten ways from Sunday after a while. Hell, at this point, you can watch the whole thing, or download it, straight from the Internet Archive.
I watch this movie every once in a while. I have no idea why. I think it’s sorta like the reason people eat Kraft Macaroni and Cheese. It’s no good, but they like it anyway. I have a hunch that, you know, the movie isn’t any good, but I wouldn’t swear to it. I wouldn’t swear at it, either, so maybe it’s not that bad. The movie didn’t make any money back in the day, and the critics weren’t kind to it. But here we are, talking about it, and maybe watching it once a year. I’m really not sure why.
The internet will tell you that Richard Fleischer and Akira Kurosawa directed this movie. Akira was hired to do it, but he bugged out before it started. But the internet loves Kurosawa for more or less the same reason it likes Mac and Cheese, so he gets mentioned when the movie gets mentioned at all. At any rate, Fleischer, and some guys with unpronounceable names made of little pictures made the thing back in 1970. Richard Fleischer’s whole career was Mac and Cheese, now that I think of it. He directed plenty of profitable pictures, but you mostly watch them ironically, or not at all. Stuff like Fantastic Voyage or The Vikings. Why do I watch them, too? I don’t know, but I do.
When you get right down to it, Tora… you know, the movie is dry as dust. In a way, it’s duller than a documentary would be. The events plod along and you get the impression that someone had a clipboard with a long list of things that had to be included, and checked them off one by one. It has an enormous cast of That Guys on the American side, and a bunch of Some Japanese Guys playing the villains.
Except they aren’t, really. Its funny, but the Japanese characters are portrayed as either fairly noble or completely clueless. If it wasn’t for Tojo, you wouldn’t find anyone to dislike enough to call a villain. And the Americans are so clueless in their own right, finding heroes is harder than you’d think. But then again, the American soldier’s vibe in World War II was mostly just farmboys and guys from Brooklyn who shrug and spit on their hands and get on with it. Americans are not a traditionally warlike people, I don’t think. We don’t have a bushido class that I’ve seen, anyway, or a Prussian officer class. Even the uniforms are drab.
Maybe the most interesting part of the movie was all the model ships they constructed to film it. Those were great. I’m sure it’s evident with me mentioning it, but I sniffed a lot of model airplane glue as a kid. It was a big thing back in the 60s and 70s, and we built plastic battleships in between P-51 Mustangs and funny cars. Check out these from the movie:
That’s from the Model Ships in the Cinema website. It’s one of those wonderful websites that used to be common on the intertunnel but is very rare these days. People used to post things on the internet simply for the love of it. The movie spent a lot of time, money, and effort into building an American and a Japanese fleet. And these things aren’t tiny things floating in a glorified bathtub. Some were forty feet long, and were powered by golf cart motors. They were big enough to climb on:
So, you can watch Tor… you know, the movie. I have, and will again. If you can determine if it’s any good at all, I wish you wouldn’t tell me. I’m not sure if I’d like it less if you told me it was terrific, or it stunk, but either way, I’d rather just enjoy it in peace. If enjoyment is the correct word. Beats me.
Let’s consult the dictionary first. It’s dry as dust, but we’ll go with it for now:
Harmony /här′mə-nē/
noun
An orderly or pleasing combination of elements in a whole.
“color harmony; the order and harmony of the universe.”
True dat. But it’s only a good start. Let’s keep going. It has a more cogent definition in music:
In music, harmony is the concept of combining different sounds in order to create new, distinct musical ideas. Theories of harmony seek to describe or explain the effects created by distinct pitches or tones coinciding with one another; harmonic objects such as chords, textures and tonalities are identified, defined, and categorized in the development of these theories. Harmony is broadly understood to involve both a “vertical” dimension and a “horizontal” dimension, and often overlaps with related musical concepts such as melody, timbre, and form.
Yikes. That’s like Health Class in high school, trying to explain getting jiggy wid it. Doesn’t do justice to the topic.,
Well, it’s Tuesday. Time to clean out the bookmarks again, and maybe read some of them.
My wife and I went to the Planet Fatness gym this morning. You have to be careful what you look at in there. The patrons and staff are a hot mess, but I don’t mind that so much. Unfortunately, there are teevee screens on every surface, and the people who appear on cable shows and commercials are terrifying looking now. On top of that, the place has signs on every surface that declaim that it’s a “No Judgement Zone,” which makes my eye twitch every time. I was going to inform them that they spelled judgment wrong, but I didn’t want to sound judgmental.
Welcome to Garbage In/Garbage Out (GIGO). Formally, in AI circles, this is known as AI model collapse. In an AI model collapse, AI systems, which are trained on their own outputs, gradually lose accuracy, diversity, and reliability. This occurs because errors compound across successive model generations, leading to distorted data distributions and “irreversible defects” in performance. The final result? A Nature 2024 paper stated, “The model becomes poisoned with its own projection of reality.”
All these analyses are written by rubes. Google results have been a ridiculous sewer of SEO-optimized drivel for at least 10 years, each inexpertly copied from other sources written by people who can’t write. AI just automated it. Nothing has changed, except all the words are spelled right by chatbots.
The numbers are eye-opening: hiring of new grads by the 15 largest tech companies has plummeted over 50% since 2019, according to a report released this month by the venture firm SignalFire, which found that before the pandemic, graduates comprised 15% of Big Tech hires, a figure that has dropped to just 7%.
This has nothing to do with the industry. The “human resources” industry has been entirely captured by indolent women who can’t make up their mind to hire anyone, and whose only amusement in life is saying no to men. Tinder for personnel is the new normal.
About a month ago, Duolingo decided that it would gradually fire all contractors and instead, use AI in a bid to become an AI-first company. Beyond firing contractors, Duolingo planned to make AI a requirement for every aspect of its business. Now Luis von Ahn is trying to do damage control, and failing.
Duolingo is a lousy, childish, ineffective way to attempt to learn a foreign language. How they generate the slop is irrelevant. Try Pimsleur. You know; like an adult would.
Denmark will raise its retirement age to 70 by 2040, the highest in Europe, after a controversial vote in parliament. The increase in retirement age was approved in the country’s legislature, with 81 votes in favour and 21 against.
People who have never worked a day in their lives vote to make people work every day of their lives.
When Alexander Hamilton became the nation’s first Secretary of the Treasury, he immediately began to prepare a schedule of tariffs, along with excise taxes on such commodities as alcohol and tobacco. The Constitution forbids taxing the exports of any state, and so American tariffs have always been laid only on imports. Collectors were named for each port, and these were considered plum jobs because the collector got to keep the money, earning interest on it, until it was forwarded to the federal government a few times a year. Hamilton’s tariffs, along with the refunding of the national debt and the establishment of a central bank, transformed the American financial situation. By the end of the 1790s, the U.S. had the best credit rating in Europe, its bonds selling over par. By 1800, federal revenues, a mere $3.7 million in 1792, had nearly tripled to $10.8 million. About 90 percent of that revenue came from tariffs—a ratio that wouldn’t change much, except during the Civil War, for more than a century.
In a way, there were only two really important figures in America’s founding: Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson. They had diametrically opposed worldviews. More or less, Hamilton’s ideas won out. But the most important figure in world history to date, not just American history, sat at the head of the table and told both of them to STFU from time to time, and they did. Old Muttonhead sure was something.
A Google search that surfaced Three Rings CIC’s “Google Business Profile” now featured… my personal mobile number. And a convenient “Call” button that connects you directly to it. Some years ago, I provided my phone number to Google as part of an identity verification process, but didn’t consent to it being shared publicly. And, indeed, they didn’t share it publicly, until – seemingly at random – they started doing so, presumably within the last few weeks.
Way, way more information at the link. Remember all those movies where the CIA is filled with hypercompetent computer soopergeniuses and ninja-like assassins? Yeah, they’re movies.
Wilson frames Goethe’s life through the prism of his greatest work, his “life-masterpiece”: the dramatic poem Faust. It is the story of a sixteenth-century mage and his blood pact with demonic powers, which enables a life lived in the constant pursuit of knowledge, power, and explosive fun. Goethe began it in his twenties when he was still a law student; he finished it shortly before his death at the age of eighty-two. It is a unique phenomenon in world literature––the truest species of magnum opus, made by the author from the living stuff of his life just as he sought to make his life into a work of art.
Goethe can be heavy sledding for today’s iPhone intellects. You could always watch The Devil and Daniel Webster to get the drift. Or maybe if that’s too challenging, you could just watch The Sorcerer’s Apprentice from Fantasia again. Or if that’s too much work, you could get a coloring book or something. Make sure you stay between the lines.
According to poet John Taylor’s 1635 verse biography of The Old, Old, Very Old Man, Parr was raised in the Shropshire village of Winnington. Born in 1483, the son of a tenant farmer, he worked as a servant until he inherited his father’s role in his mid-thirties. Something of a late developer in his personal life, he married for the first time at 80, and for the second at 122; he also did public penance at 105, when he “frailly, foully, fell into a Crime / Which richer, poorer, older men, and younger” were prone: he committed adultery.
He died when he was 152? I’m reminded of a gibe: He was so old he had God’s phone number.
The proliferation of AI-assisted schoolwork is worrying academic leaders. 66% think generative AI will cut into students’ attention spans, according to a survey of university presidents, chancellors, deans and more from the American Association of Colleges & Universities (AAC&U) and Elon University’s Imagining the Digital Future Center.
I went to school a long time ago. It was plenty chaotic long before spellcheck arrived, never mind Chad. Chicken Littles just like characterizing any change as “chaos.”
When I was little my father took me to the graves on Memorial Day.
He was a younger man than I am now. He’d drag any of us he could catch all over the Boston landscape to one boneyard after another. Memorial Day wasn’t just for the military dead for him. It was some sort of druidical day. Touch the stone. Pull the weeds. Say the words. Explain to your son who that person was and what they meant to him. Then off to look for the next stone marker by the next oak in the next town. I never understood it. To me it seemed like the stone was all there was to them.
He was a veteran. Everyone was, once. Army Air Force in World War II. He hung below a B24 in a little glass ball and watched the Pacific and the Zeros pass by. He never spoke of it, really, until he was dying in front of me.
I don’t know if he knew he was dying. I don’t know if you look that visitor in the face, ever. Humans don’t seem capable of dealing with the idea. If you’re 114, I imagine you figure you’ll die tomorrow. But not today. Never today. You know you’re dying when you’re 10, too. You file that knowledge away with the things that live in the back of the closet and out by the woodpile on a moonless night.
Towards the end, I took him to the doctors a lot. His body wasn’t sick. It was a villain, an enemy at that point. It didn’t let him down; it turned on him. But I’d take him to the doctor just the same — who seemed more in tune with the wraith of endless malady that shared my father’s body than my father himself. They took turns working on him like a heavy bag. I’m not sure which showed more mercy. Doctors have precious little mercy in them, in my experience. It’s not in their job description, anyway. I don’t understand why people look for it from them.
I had almost nothing to do with my father for about 15 years or so. He was lost to me, or I was lost to him, or something. I got the feeling towards the end there that I was of some small use to him, and I liked it. I took him and sat with him while we waited on chairs that would make you feeble if you weren’t already, then afterwards we ate a donut and drank coffee at the Dunkin’ Donuts while gaping like shut-ins at the traffic passing by. He lost all his teeth when he was a child, and had a soft spot, always, for a jelly donut.
It’s hard to describe what came out of his mouth while we lingered there on those afternoons. I’m not sure he was talking to me. He was unraveling a long string, and allowed me to sit with him as he did it. The string wasn’t coherent. It was all one skein, but it was bits and pieces of things, knotted together roughly, all out of order, but all of immense interest to me. I think the Rosetta Stone has mundane things written on it, doesn’t it? What’s mundane… depends.
All these people appeared among the clatter of the cash registers and the muffled sound of the traffic outside, suspended in fleeting words in the air in front of his eyes, eyes gone the color of dishwater from their blue beginnings. He produced laundry lists of my flesh and blood; himself when he was younger, described like any other stranger; far-flung relatives; friends gone but not forgotten. They assembled as he called them up in an imaginary mob behind him until there were too many to count. He was their priest, or maybe their Ouija board, their lawyer, their mourner, raiding their tombs like Carnarvon.
And nothing passed their lips but a terrible murmur that my father could not hear: Why the world would give them a stone when all they asked for was bread.
Can we say a word about the real estate agent fandango?
That’s my term for the interminable balderdash stemwinders that real estate agents vomit on their victims over every property, no matter how fair or foul the structure is. I’ve been subjected to it now and then in the flesh, and literally tens of thousands of times on real estate listings. It’s my considered opinion that the accuracy and the honesty demonstrated by real estate agents would make a used car salesman blush.
The reason I call it the fandango, is because while it’s often offered to the public in writing, the plan of all real estate agents is to get you trapped in their car, being squired (dragged all over the landscape) to a series of inappropriate structures that they think they can sell to you by waving their arms around and saying things like the following, from a listing for a house for sale in Perry, Maine:
It’s important to note that many real estate listing are written by chatbots. It’s possible that this one is at least partially written by Chad, as we call him. Um her. Er, it. Well, anyway, there are several telltale signs that this listing was written at least partially by a female human. First, there is mystery capitalization. “Its” in the middle of a sentence. A comma or a space has been elided between “roomideal.” “Plus a generously sized living room” is a sentence fragment. If I had a gun to my head, I’d say Chad wrote it, and then the agent decided to work her magic on it while cutting and pasting it into the listing.
Now if you’re unfamiliar with Maine (who isn’t? I live here and I am), I’ll fill you in on Perry. It is literally the ass end of nowhere. You can throw a rock in Perry and brain a Canadian if you’ve got a strong arm. It’s north of Lubec and Eastport, places I’ve visited during a Donner Party-worthy journey. Eastport is the easternmost city in the continental United States, if you can imagine that. You could swim to New Brunswick, Canada from Eastport. Well, you could if you were a very strong swimmer, and you wouldn’t die after four minutes in that water, which you would. I suppose someone in Chocolate Cove, N.B. could stamp your passport when they fished your body out. At any rate, calling Eastport a city is generous. The population is less than 1,300 people. The appellation of “city” is a vestige of days gone by. Eastport has lost population in every census since 1910, sometimes as much as 24% in a single decade. And Perry is less popular than Eastport, so do the math that the real estate agent won’t.
So in keeping with our suspicion that Chad is involved here, let’s ask Chat AI to produce images of the house in question simply from the description that is offered. Here’s the prompt I gave it:
Here is the description of a house for sale in Maine. Based on the description, can you produce an image that shows a generic picture of what is being described? The image should be photographic, and horizontally oriented:
Here’s how Chad pictures the exterior of a house in Maine that might fit that description:
So far, so good. That’s a five-bay Adam colonial with a console hood over the front door. You can find thousands of those in Maine. I kept going:
Can you make another one, based on the same description, that shows an interior view, of say, a kitchen and dining area?
Say, that’s pretty good. It’s got old sheet vinyl on the floor. There are built-in china closets, like an old house might have. The cabinets have 50s-70s-era hardware, and look like built in place plywood stuff that’s been painted over, very typical of a fixer-upper. The furniture looks like abandoned grandma stuff. We’re on a roll. Let’s press on!
Can you make me a third one, that shows a bedroom on the second floor?
Aw, man, you gotta love the boob light. Chad’s nailed that, and the six over six sashes, the backband trim, and the six-panel doors. Let’s tempt fate, and ask for another exterior shot:
The house has a single car garage, attached to the house by a shed addition on the back of the house. Using the description that began this chat as a guide, can you make a picture, using your impression of the state of the house?
Great stuff, Chad. You are rolling, brother. Peeling paint, lower on the sidewalls where rain splashes, end of useful life asphalt shingles on the roof, a modestly punky fascia, and a dirt driveway.
So now that we’ve got Chad in our corner, using the property’s description to guess what we’re in for, let’s look at the property itself. Ladies and germs, I give you Perry in the flesh:
Exterior:
Ah, asbestos shingles. Before vinyl siding there was aluminum siding. Before that, there was asbestos. It’s fairly harmless as siding, although it’s awful compared to the wood bevel siding it covers. Your house is an instant Superfund site if you ever want to remove it, or even cut a hole in it. And unlike the real estate fandango in the listing, no one has ever used the word “charming” within mortar-shot range of asbestos shingles.
Well, let’s be fair. Maybe the charm is on the inside, like a tubby girl your friend is trying to fix you up with. Let’s check out the kitchen:
Oh, this is definitely a “gem in the rough,” ain’t it. Very, very rough. Like, a lump of coal kinda rough compared to the gem of the description. Perhaps the charm is hiding in the next room. I know I would.
Well, there’s nothing more charming than that light fixture. We used to call that the landlord’s halo. It’s the only halo you’ll ever encounter hanging over a landlord’s head. But let’s be fair. Maybe if we go upstairs, the bedroom “off the bright and open hallway” will have some of that charm we’ve been promised:
Well, this bedroom is, ahem, commodius, but not in the usual sense. And by “bright and open,” I guess they mean open to the elements. But the “welcoming and functional design” is here in abundance. Even bodily functions are included over there in the corner.
The garage is our last hope. Let’s see:
Hmm. I wonder if this garage was originally designed as a trapezoid, instead of a rectangle. Hard to say.
Well, if you’re the real estate agent, and you’re reading this, I’d like to remind you that taking people to places under false pretenses and holding them against their will is considered kidnapping. It’s probably against the law even in Perry. In the unlikely event that they can afford a police department, you might even get into trouble. Other than that, start dancing.
I recently moved from the hinterlands to the metrop. It has taken me some time to make the transition. Our bustling citadel, Ogguster, has enough people in it to fill the bleachers at Fenway, or maybe start a statewide insurrection if the constabulary is sleeping. But Johnny Law only sleeps in the daytime, because that’s when they’re on the clock, and sedition traditionally happens after the sun goes down, so there’s not much danger of that.
I’ve had to make new friends. My old friends were reliable, but somewhat uncultured. They were generous to a fault, though. They didn’t seem to mind it when I’d take an armload of firewood from their pile, as long as it was in the middle of the night while they were sleeping. I knew their habits well, and discerned that asking during the day would have been an additional imposition on their time, so I avoided that as well. I hate bothering people.
It took me a while to find a new tabernacle to worship at in Ogguster. I had to hunt around for my particular denomination, but I eventually found one by following the neon signs. This particular bethel has perhaps more beer taps than yours. I’ve been instructed by everyone from the pope to that Clinton woman to socialize, and worship the redeemer, in my own way, so I do. It takes a village to fill the stools at our local mission house, or at least an army base nearby, so maybe she had a point. I’m not sure I should trust her opinions other than that. She’s rich, but she splits her time between Arkansas and upstate New York. That smacks of bouncing your head off the Scylla and Charybdis over and over, without even trying to navigate the water in between. And as far as the pope goes, we do have something like communion wafers, although they’re much larger, and they have logos all over them, and you set your chalice on them. They taste about the same at the Catholic variety, so I assume they’re valid tickets to the Glory Land anyway.
So my new friend in the city, Norman Rockwall, asked me if I wanted to see a local feller play Two Gentlemen of Verona in Monmouth. I remarked that I didn’t really care for soccer, and two against one seemed a trifle unfair, even if the Verona squad was unranked. He explained that he was talking about going to see Shakespeare. I admitted I didn’t care who was holding the tickets, I still wasn’t interested. Eventually I got the drift, though, that it was a night at the theater he was touting. That sounded classy. I never miss a chance to put on my best bib and tucker, so I said sure.
We ended up outside a building big enough to be a reform school, but less charming. We got our ducats and went inside and climbed two or three hundred flights of stairs, or so it seemed to me, and sat with our backs to the wall up among the cobwebs. From our vantage point, it was a flea circus, but my friend assured me that the actors were bound to have good elocution. I professed indifference on what kind of tradesmen they might be during the day, I just wanted to make sure they yelled loud enough so we’d know who was the villain, so I’d know who to root for.
Just then, way down front, I spotted some guys dressed for a funeral. They were generally molesting some form of fiddle. They had all kinds. They tucked some under their chins, with a hanky in between, so I knew they must have been rented, but not cleaned every time, like a rental car. Some had bigger ones that sat between their knees. Other fellas had some too big to ride like a gentleman, and they sorta stood next to it and tried to play is side saddle. They were making a terrible racket, each playing something else, and I wondered aloud why they they’d get dressed up and pay for primo seats like that and then cause such a commotion. Norman explained that they were just tuning up, and that they were the orchestra. This flummoxed me. I tune up my snowmobile in the garage, not on the trail. Don’t musicians have a garage?
The theatrical bill of fare had shifted, and Norman informed me that the Two Gentlemen of Verona had the night off, probably to go home and guard their woodpiles. Tonight’s menu was going to be something along the lines of Julius Caesar vs. All Comers, sorta like a wrestling match at a county fair. I wasn’t too “up” on Julius, but Norman filled me in some. Julio was some form of garlic eater back in the day, and he bivouacked in Gaul several times, at least until he got tired of being so far from his woodpile all the time. Then he went one last time and turned the Gaullians into regular Frenchmen, who couldn’t do no harm, and became sort of military speed bumps forevermore. I covered my ears and yelled, “Spoilers!”, but Norman assured me that the play was about a totally different kettle of fish. Caesar was a busy dude and had all sorts of adventures, I gathered. No idea when he had time left over to invent salads and Orange Julius.
Then the curtain went up and the show was purdy good. Julius came rolling into town like it was the circus. Some carpenters and cobblers and assorted other people who lost their jobs to the Chinese started in with dost thous and beseechings, and various other incomprehensible blather, and then started going on and on about the Ides of March, which if you ask me isn’t half as scary as April 15th, but no one in Hollywood ever listens to me.
So Caesar’s wife California wanted him to call in sick to work but she’s not as good looking as Cleopatra so he went anyway. His friends are throwing one of those Animal House parties where everyone’s wearing bedsheets and partying hearty and he doesn’t want to miss it. So he goes, and get this, his friends stab him at the foot of Pompeii, which wasn’t erupting just then, I guess. Brutus was involved somehow, but I didn’t see Popeye or Wimpy or anyone amusing. The proceedings were kind of depressing, truth be told.
Then Caesar’s friend Mark Anthony threw one of those Iranian funerals where the crowd kinda tosses the interested party around like a ragdoll and generally act like they’re at a rave instead of a requiem. This was all followed up by some battle scenes that wouldn’t fit on the stage. Then everyone except Ogguster Caesar commits suicide. I guess Ogguster was vice-Caesar or something, but I gather not many people voted for him, or even knew he was on the ballot, just like our elections.
Well, it was a pretty good show, all around, but they should probably spring for more fake blood if they want to keep people interested in the cheap seats. And George Lucas coulda told them that it was a mistake to massacre Julius in the first play, right out of the gate. It makes sequels pretty difficult, and being back before Christ, the opportunities for time travel or clones were few and far between. But still, two thumbs up from this reviewer. No Christians were harmed in the making of the play, and the horses were killed off-stage.
I think this will place an upwards pressure on originality and novelty. Now that both the technical barrier to entry and the cost of producing unoriginal work is so low, society will start to value original ideas more than ever–doubly so if we reduce the rewards of the journey towards becoming original and skilled. If the world becomes flooded with less original, less technical users of AI, the value of technical competence and originality will skyrocket.
You’d think wrong. Original thinkers will give up and do something else. Have you seen the best seller list lately?
Siemiatkowski had publicly celebrated AI’s ability to handle tasks typically managed by humans. However, that optimism has not aged well. After the AI-driven revolution, Klarna went through a series of operational and reputational issues. Complaints from customers skyrocketed as users complained about robotic and frequently unresponsive interactions with AI interfaces, particularly in customer support. Although automation helped cut short-term costs, it seems to have impacted user satisfaction and loyalty, two major factors for any consumer-facing company.
In the real world, a loan shark that loses money by the billion would end up behind a dumpster with a .38 caliber headache. On the internet, he’s a captain of industry.
Japan, which now has substantially more inflation than the US – 3.6% overall CPI and 3.2% core CPI – is watching in astonishment as its very-long-term bond yields spike in a dramatic manner, while the Bank of Japan has accelerated QT this year, which it started in mid-2024.
In this specific interaction, ChatGPT warned Riehl that it could not access the internet or access the link to the Ferguson complaint that Riehl provided to it, and that it did not have information about the period of time in which the complaint was filed, which was after its “knowledge cutoff date.” Before Riehl provided the link to the complaint, ChatGPT accurately summarized the Ferguson complaint based on text Riehl inputted. After Riehl provided the link, and after ChatGPT initially warned that it could not access the link, ChatGPT provided a completely different and inaccurate summary.
You know, if ChatGPT says it can’t access the internet, the guy is using the free service they offer, instead of paying $20/month for better answers. On top of that, he kept on asking the same question, over and over, until he got the wrong answer. Chad is like that. Chad is like the internet. You have to know more than the internet does to pick any useful information out of the dross.
The problem apparently came from a major glitch in Telefónica’s system, which is the operator for most of Spain’s mobile networks. The multinational is the second largest company in Spain, and runs telecom operations in 18 countries, making it one of the largest telephone operators and mobile network providers in the world. The telecom giant reportedly ran a network update that didn’t go to plan, and ended up causing a country-wide blackout for millions of Spanish residents.
Ah, cowboy coding strikes again. Or should I say, caballero coding?
A photograph of Joshlin smiling and with her hair tied in pigtails was broadcast by news stations across South Africa, as police launched a nationwide hunt. Smith said she had left Joshlin with her boyfriend on the day she disappeared, but the case took a shocking twist when Smith was arrested. A woman gave evidence during the trial that Smith had told her she and the two men had sold Joshlin for about £750 to a traditional healer who wanted the child for her body parts.
Kinda buried the lede in the headline, there. South Africa sounds delightful. I can’t imagine why anyone would ever leave.
Using an employer-issued computer comes with its own specific set of privacy risks. The struggle to avoid even accidentally clicking on NSFW material as we go about our busy office lives is, for many, all too familiar. And yet, the true threat often lurks undetected behind the scenes: keyloggers recording your every keystroke and sending them away for upper management review.
I’m self-employed, so I’m fairly certain that since I’m barely paying attention to what I’m currently doing, I’m also barely paying attention to what I was doing.
The 26-year-old pleaded guilty in February to conspiracy to commit aggravated identity theft and access device fraud after he and others took over the SEC’s X account in January 2024. The crew used the compromised account to post a message that purported to come from then-SEC chair Gary Gensler and falsely announced that the government had approved Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs).
Well, for one, handcuffs are a dead giveaway sign that the FBI is after you. Man, bitcoins are the chicken and the egg conundrum for this century. Does buying them make you silly, or does being silly make you buy them?
The Iris, by tech startup Bzigo, sits on a tabletop and scans your room with an infrared sensor. When its AI-based vision algorithms detect mosquito-like movements (as opposed to moths or other bugs), it fires a laser to mark the mosquito’s location, like a sniper’s spotter. It’s then up to you to swat the thing, which should be easy with the target “painted.”
Just beef up the laser, and throw away the flyswatter. At any rate, it’s $200, so I’ll probably keep using my existing mosquito device: my dermis.
Switzerland is considering amending its surveillance law, with experts warning against the risk to secure encryption and online anonymity in the country. Specifically, the amendment could require all VPN services, messaging apps, and social networks to identify and retain user data – an obligation that is now limited to mobile networks and internet service providers.
And go where, exactly? Not to worry. Whoever proposed this law will no doubt get pimp-slapped shortly.
Well, that’s it for this Tuesday. Weigh in on these weighty topics in the comments, if you like.
I’m not exactly sure what this video demonstrates. There’s work ethic, of course. It’s an excellent example of the reduce, re-use, recycle ethos. It’s a testament to curiosity. The clerk studies about tools constantly because it’s interesting, and important for his job. There’s customer service. The battery tester from around the 12:00 minute mark, used to measure how many cycles of recharging batteries had already endured in order to price the tools fairly, is a primer on honesty and fairness. Networking enters into it. There’s a bootstrap lesson at around 13:00 minutes. The owner of this shop explains it started as a different kind of business, and they tried used tools as a sideline, and eventually it became so popular that it superseded the original theme of the shop.
Ultimately, it’s just a slice of life from somewhere I’ve never been, and know little about. I’m always grateful for stuff like that. Way to go, Paolo from Tokyo. Regular news outlets and broadcast media never have any useful information, never mind interesting stuff to look at. ZooTube has become a fetid swamp of robot-generated slop. Finding something like this is getting pretty difficult these days.
The closest similar business in the US I can think of is the tool rental house, the kind of place I’m pretty familiar with. A jolly clerk is pretty rare in one of those, though. They tend to be fairly snooty in my experience, and for no reason. They care for their tools about as well as you see in the video, and at least know how to turn them on. They generally rent more robust tools than you see in the Japanese video. It’s doesn’t look like Harbor Fraught exploded in a good rental house.
No, truth be told, for the last couple of decades, in the US it was Craigslist that performed the same service you see in the video, without any semblance of service, of course. The market has now almost entirely been purloined by FriendFace Marketplace. If you’re in the market for a broken tool, sold to you in a parking lot in a sketchy section of town, Zuckerberg is your man. Stolen, broken tools, in many cases.
The United States is trying to make everything as impersonal as possible. We went from shopping in stores to supermarkets to warehouses to mouse clicks. Even the delivery drivers run away so they don’t have to talk to you. Your only chance at human interaction is interrupting porch pirates while they’re stealing your packages, and they’re famously introverted.
I don’t know if there’s anything that can be gained from watching that video. But I certainly noticed things that have been lost.
Ah, Squeeze. In ’82, they still might have been called UK Squeeze. There was another band in the US called Squeeze, (looks it up: Tight Squeeze) and they altered their name to avoid lawyer trouble and so forth. The suits got braver after a while and they dropped the “UK” eventually.
They were calling this sort of thing New Wave at the time. It’s the unholy love child of the Beatles and The Ramones. Like a lot of New Wave bands, Squeeze eventually didn’t feel like they had to thrash quite so hard to get over, and adopted a more sophisticated style of songwriting and performing. Lotsa New Wave bands morphed seamlessly into to the New Romantic movement. Squeeze’s contemporaries The Police and Elvis Costello kinda took the same approach, but ended up in Tin Pan Alley somewhere.
I used to play this song on the bass and sing the lead vocal. It’s got more chord changes than I generally wanna deal with while I’m pretending I know what I’m doing. It’s got more words than a Harold Robbins paperback, too, and until just now watching this video with the subtitles, I had no idea that one of the lines was “A panda for sweet little niece.” God only knows what I sang in there instead. No one ever called me out on it, though. I can mumble with the best of them.
A guy once ran up to the stage when we finished playing Pulling Mussels from The Shell, and shook my hand like a pump handle. He said, “That wasn’t any good, but I can’t believe you had the nerve to try it.”
Etch that on my tombstone.
Month: May 2025
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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