June 2025 – Sippican Cottage

Save the Basement, Get Rid of the Bookmarks: Tuesday Trash Day

June 24, 2025 1 Comment

There was a fire drill at our apartment today.

Well, it added up to a drill. I imagine someone was sneaking a doobie somewhere in our non-smoking building, and the alarm went off. Instead of the blattering klaxon I was expecting, the alarm system started hectoring me like an ex-wife about where to go and what to do when I got there. Brave new world we live in.

Anyway, my wife and I, a couple of neighbors, and the four hundred or so dogs our neighbors own, stood on the curb for a spell. The fire station is within shouting distance. They sent all kinds of vehicles. A Fire Rescue truck rolled up. Out popped two little girls. They put on the entire firefighting getup, including masks and breathing tanks. They looked like they were wearing their dad’s clothes. If they fell over, I doubt they could have stood up under their own power. They carried Halligan Bars, which is the greatest demolition tool ever, but looked too heavy for their slight frames. They went in the front door, wandered around a bit, and wandered back out a while later. We wandered back in, and never did figure out exactly what set off the alarms.

My, how things have changed. Several of my relatives are/were firemen. They are robust fellows. They had to pass a very rigorous physical and mental examination to become firemen back in the day. As I recall, they had to be able to lift and carry a 200-pound (ostensibly unconscious) person to pass. I’m a fairly large, fairly robust man. I would have had a very hard time passing that fireman’s examination. But I guess Save the Basement is now the official policy of fire departments everywhere.

On to this week’s browser bookmark cleanout!

A federal judge sides with Anthropic in lawsuit over training AI on books without authors’ permission

Federal judge William Alsup ruled that it was legal for Anthropic to train its AI models on published books without the authors’ permission. This marks the first time that the courts have given credence to AI companies’ claim that fair use doctrine can absolve AI companies from fault when they use copyrighted materials to train large language models (LLMs).

At this point, I trust judges as much as Quija Boards. But reading and remembering things is not plagiarism, no matter how thinly you slice the silicon wafers.

World’s Largest Wildlife Bridge Spanning 10 Lanes of 101 Freeway Is Nearly Complete

Mountain lions are the main conservation focus of this wildlife bridge. The big cats are territorial, and being locked in by freeways limits their roaming range and biodiversity. Without the crossing to expand their habitat, SoCal cougars could be extinct within 50 years. They also continue to be killed by vehicles.

I predict fewer poodles in Agoura Hills.

Fossil found in Texas may be one of the most complete yet

The genus name Eryops means “drawn-out face,” and megacephalus translates to “large-headed,” referencing the animal’s broad skull. Its wide jaws and palatal teeth suggest it could not chew and instead swallowed prey by tossing its head back, similar to modern alligators and crocodiles.

Click on the link to see the happiest dinosaur ever.

Deloitte’s US employees can now buy $1,000 of Lego on the company’s dime to boost their well-being

The Big Four professional services firm has updated its long-running well-being subsidy program to include “Legos and puzzles” on a list of items that Deloitte will reimburse, internal policy documents seen by Business Insider show. The firm has long offered eligible US staff an annual subsidy to spend on one or a combination of subscriptions, equipment, and experiences. In 2021, the firm doubled the allowance from $500 to $1,000, an internal webpage shows.

Before I could even shave, I remember wanting a driver’s license, a car, a house, a wife, some kids, a boat, and several bartenders who knew me by name. These supposed adults want legos, and want their new mommy, Deloitte, to pay for them.

Greek man sentenced to prison for running a private torrent site 10 years ago

A 59-year-old living in the Greek city of Piraeus was recently sentenced by a local court to five years in prison, a €10,000 fine, and an additional €1,800 in legal costs. According to reports, the man was involved with a popular Greek BitTorrent site more than a decade ago. The website is long defunct and does not appear to have provided him with significant financial gain.

I’m of the opinion that basically no non-violent crimes should be punished with jail time. At the top of the list of things no one should ever go to jail for, torrenting movies has to be right up there.

London’s Largest Ancient Roman Fresco Makes for the ‘World’s Most Difficult Jigsaw Puzzle’

Han Li, MOLA’s Senior Building Material Specialist, spent three months reconfiguring the artwork with the help of a team of researchers. He explained that pieces had been jumbled together when the building was demolished, so figuring out how the fresco was originally composed took a lot of tinkering and patience. “It was like assembling the world’s most difficult jigsaw puzzle,” he says.

I’d love that job.

The No. 1 AI Jigsaw Puzzle Generator

JigsawCat is an innovative online platform that combines AI art generation with jigsaw puzzles. Our service allows you to create beautiful, unique puzzles using various AI art models, or challenge yourself with puzzles created by users from around the world. It’s a creative way to blend traditional puzzle experiences with modern technology.

You can practice up before you take a crack at any Roman ruins.

Better an Absence of Men Than Imperfect Men

Later, after the communist takeover in Cambodia, Pol Pot and his boys would line suspected class enemies up against a wall and speak French to them. If they reacted (indicating they understood and were therefore rich/educated) he’d have them shot.

I wonder if anyone in France would understand French at this point.

Amazon aims to reach ‘tens of millions’ more small town and rural customers with same-day delivery

Amazon is also using machine learning algorithms to predict which items will resonate with Prime members based on their unique needs in a given area. This includes stocking a mix of the most-popular and frequently purchased items and “products curated to fit local preferences like wild bird food in Dubuque, Iowa, travel backpacks in Findlay, Ohio, and after sun body butter in Sharptown, Maryland,” Amazon said.

I don’t shop online much. Is “body butter” used by cannibals?

Bezos vs Venice: Will the billionaire’s wedding sink in the Italian city of love?

One of the richest men on the planet is holding their home “hostage”, they say – to the Venetians, this isn’t so much of a destination wedding but an occupation. Residents and activists say that the nuptials – and the pure extravagance planned for the celebration – are set to turn their home into a “playground for the wealthy”.

I wonder how long it will be until Jeff takes his second gondola ride under Venice’s famous Bridge of Sighzable Divorce Settlements.

Well, that’s it for today, folks. Feel free to kvetch about the selection in the comments.

We Just. Found Out. They Have. The Bomb

June 23, 2025 1 Comment

We watched Wag the Dog again last night. It’s a blast.

There are only a few people extant who can write dialog like David Mamet. He was kinda alone up there for a while, but then guys like the Coen brothers came along and passed him in the breakdown lane. I think you have to wander back to Coppola to find writers who write this kind of drama, or comedy, or whatever you want to call it. It still sounds like real people talking, almost endlessly, without being boring.

Mamet got stiffed on the credit for writing the screenplay for Wag the Dog, an amusing twist considering the way the movie plot ends up. Some talentless woman got hired to adapt the original book, and the script ended up in the round file. Director Barry Levenson hired Mamet to fix things, and he wrote the whole thing. Levenson wanted to give him the credit. The people who decide such things insisted that the woman not only had to share writing credit, she had to be listed first. Levenson pitched a fit over it with the writer’s guild, but ultimately backed down.

If you’ve seen the movie, you can verify that David Mamet wrote 100% percent of the dialog. You’d know it without being told. Since the movie has no action (it’s a movie about talking about things that don’t happen), dialog represents 100% of the movie. Mamet comes to Hollywood via the New York Stage, so he was the perfect guy to write a movie script about people jabbering at each other in conference rooms, back seats, living rooms, bedrooms, and planes. The movie covers about 7,500 miles as the crow flies, from D.C. to Los Angeles to Nashville and back, and still feels manages to feel claustrophobic. But then again, it’s a movie about people who have never been outdoors during the daytime, and never miss it.

Mamet invented the character of Stanley Motss, who is the whole movie when you get right down to it. How Dustin Hoffman didn’t win and Oscar for it is beyond me, although the Academy is famous for picking the only hair in a wedding cake most years.

Mamet invented Sargent Schumann, too. He invented all the stuff that happens in Nashville, and almost everything that happens in Hollywood. In short, he has more right to claim credit for the whole story than Larry Beinhart, the author of the book the movie is supposedly based on, never mind Hilary Whatshername.

If you look up the synopsis of the book, Beinhart’s American Hero, it’s a convoluted muddle, a short bus Bourne movie crossed with a Mexican wrestling match. The only kernel of an idea was faking a war to distract from a political problem. In the good old days of real Hollywood, a hack like Beinhart would have gotten a check for $1,000 for the idea, never be heard from again. But Beinhart was grinding an ax over Bush senior’s possible re-election, so he was in with the in crowd.

The movie as it turned out was far more prescient than that. Bush was long gone and Slick Willie made the new plot not only plausible, but on the nose. Hewing too close to actual current events made a lot of people in the punditry mines nervous, so the movie was praised pretty cautiously, and basically ignored at the Oscars. Mamet and Hoffman were robbed. But it’s always better for people to wonder why there is no statue of you, instead of why there is.

The premise of the movie is that if you’re not cynical, you’re not paying attention. And no matter how absurd the Washington/News/Hollywood cabal gets, the stakes are very real.

So watch Wag the Dog, and laugh because something funny is going on, in every sense of the word. And also remember: Skepticism is only the first step on the long road to cynicism, padawan. So bring a change of clothes, and plenty of benzedrine and grappa.

Beware Jupiter in a Hockey Goalie Oufit

June 19, 2025 2 Comments

In 1962, a British scientist named P.S.M. Blackett published a think-tanky treatise called Studies of War, Nuclear and Conventional. It was a revised compilation of assorted articles he wrote going back to the 1940s. Blackett was an interesting fellow, if somewhat obscure. I’m not sure you can call a Nobel Prize winner obscure, but I just did. He was another one of those fellows that thought that being good at math made him good at politics, and everything else for that matter. It’s a common affliction, especially these days. Truly smart people know that Mr. Spock is a fictional character, and the world runs like a carnival, not a Swiss watch.

Blackett coined a somewhat obscure term that’s quite useful. He called it the Jupiter Complex. He warned against imagining yourself as righteous gods, raining down thunderbolts on your evil enemies. It’s a practical as much as a moralistic warning.

“If a scientist may be forgiven for mixing his classical
metaphors, one might think of the earth-bound soldiers as
becoming beguiled by the sirens’ song of then airmen col-
leagues, who, spiritually intoxicated by flight at 50,000 feet
in a jet bomber with an H-bomb in the bomb bay, sang of the
ease with which they could keep erring mankind in order by
threatening them (as if they were Jove himself) with atomic
thunderbolts. This Jupiter complex of the airmen came to
dominate disastrously the military thinking of much of the
Western world and was an important factor in bringing
about the present Western inferiority in conventional
weapons.”

Blackett warned that on top of the kinds of destruction involved, especially with atomic weapons in the mix, the real problem was that it wouldn’t work. At first, the air force was just a part of the army. My father was in the USAAF, for instance. Army Air Force. But the air force fought for primacy, and what with rockets and bombs and missiles becoming so powerful, politicians stated to look on them as the primary source of military power.

“The rise in the West of the doctrine of winning wars
quickly and cheaply by air attack on the enemy’s war-making
capacity rather than against his armed forces arose out of the
long struggle of the early military airmen to break through
the military conservatism of the soldiers and sailors. This
struggle convinced them, probably at this time rightly, that
the air arm would remain backward technically if left under
the control of the army and navy. Air attack on the enemy’s
war-making capacity rather than his armed forces provided
a military role for air power which could be exercised in-
dependently of the two older services.”

It’s useful to crack a history book once in a while and look at the effectiveness of Jupiter Complex bombardments of military and civilian targets since the Second World War. Japan tried it at Pearl Harbor. It didn’t turn out the way they planned. Another example is the firebombing of Dresden, still remembered mostly because of Vonnegut’s high-school required reading book about it. Dresden was only one of many such raids which heaped destruction on Germany, but were essentially worthless to stop German war production, or even affect their will to fight on. America dropped atom bombs on Japan to close out the war, but Japan still had to be occupied. The firebombing raids that preceded Fat Man and Little Boy were just as devastating, but didn’t force a surrender. The US dropped a lot of ordnance while island-hopping in the Pacific, but they still needed amphibious landings with lots of casualties to win the war. Bombing alone couldn’t do it.

MacArthur surrendered to the siren song of the Jupiter Complex. He wanted to nuke North Korea to break their back in a single stroke. It wouldn’t have worked, and cooler heads prevailed. Vietnam was a textbook example of the Jupiter Complex. Lyndon Johnson was famous for micromanaging the targets, and even the total bomb weights for America’s bombing runs on the north. He literally wanted to be Jupiter. You can make similar comparisons to the soviet, and then the American adventures in Afghanistan. Throw in Black Hawk Down for good measure. The Ukraine keeps trying it on Russia, to little effect.

Blackett thought the Jupiter Complex was a simple case of not thinking a military exercise through. If you look at an attack, especially a pre-emptive attack, what happens tomorrow is never figured in to the equation. It’s just:

Step 1. Bomb

Step 2. ??????

Step 3. They surrender

He didn’t think that would happen, and explained at some length why that was the case. And unlike others, he wondered what would happen on Day 2:

“In my view, no real military theory of the ” exercise of
true air power,” as it later come to be called by some British
writers, was ever achieved: in effect, what passed for one
was a theory of the exercise of air superiority, that is, how
best to destroy the enemy’s war-making capacity when the
enemy could not destroy yours. No complete theory of such
an independent strategy was ever formulated because it could
not be kept within the air force’s own province : for it would
have been necessary to include in it the passive defence of
one’s own civilian population. This is so because it soon
became clear that air attack on the enemy’s war-making
capacity generally led to attack on cities and so on the civilian
population. If the usual military principle had been adopted,
that of preparing to be attacked with the same weapons with
which one is preparing to attack an enemy, then the huge
cost of an adequate civil defence system would have had to
be incurred.”

Of course, in today’s world, the “adequate civil defence system” is just a bunch of anti-missile missiles, of very dubious effectiveness, with astonishing price tags, followed by telling everyone to duck. It’s the Jupiter Syndrome, only Jupiter is wearing a hockey goalie outfit.

Good luck with that.

So You Can’t Afford a House: Siete

June 18, 2025 6 Comments

Well, we’ve got a doozy for today’s version of So You Can’t Afford a House. This one’s in Millinocket, Maine. Take a peek:

There’s a 4-bed, 2.5-bath bungalow in there somewhere, behind the sumac and the aluminum siding. I’ll bet you it was a snug, pleasant little place 100 years ago when it was built. It used to have a pleasant porch, I’ll bet, before someone enclosed it to make one more room to watch television in. The jerkinhead roof is kinda neat design touch that was almost popular back then.

Let’s go inside:

These are the only two pictures of this, ahem, gem. So we’re not flying blind, exactly, but we are flying with coke-bottle glasses and a light bulb out. Let’s look at what little evidence is on offer. The exterior shot indicates the building is not currently on fire. That’s one for the plus column, there.

The interior information, while scant, is invaluable. There’s my favorite light fixture, the “landlord’s halo.” The pull chain assures you that you’re getting the real McCoy. The later reproductions have light switches. And this one is the coveted “double halo,” with two, hard to find fluorescent rings that buzz a bit and whisper, “rental property” forevermore. So far, so good. There’s a harvest gold range, in the Les Paul sunburst finish. Very nice. I can picture Carol Merrill standing next to it right now. Of course there are two reefers in there. Another good sign. One for food, the other for eight cases of Natty Ice, with a few sixpacks of White Claw on the door shelves. I don’t want to disappoint any potential buyers, but I have a sneaking suspicion that the walls are not actually covered with solid furniture-grade wood boards. Just a hunch really. And the Congoleum might need a little more than some Mop & Glo.

There’s scant additional information about the property. It appears to have been turned into a duplex somewhere along the line. You could roll with that, or turn it back into a single family pretty readily, I’ll bet. I would, because finding two sets of people who want to live in Millinocket is a tough ask, as the realtors say. The joint has public water and sewer, so no problems hiding under the lawn to haunt you, but lord knows what you’d find in the basement.

So how much does it cost? Go ahead, guess. I’ll bet you miss. For fun, I plugged the number into LLM Chad and asked it to make a list of things that cost the same amount as this Millinocket marvel. The list was long and amusing, but one entry took the cake. I was so surprised by it, I asked Chad if he was fooling, and to break it down for me:

Yes, a top-tier gaming setup could easily cost around $12,000, depending on the level of customization, brand, and peripherals you choose. Here’s a breakdown of what a high-end, professional gaming setup might include at that price point:

Total Estimate Breakdown:

PC: $5,000 – $6,000

Monitor(s): $1,000 – $2,000

Chair: $500 – $1,000

Keyboard & Mouse: $300 – $500

Audio Gear: $800 – $1,500

VR Setup: $1,000 – $2,000

Streaming Gear: $1,000 – $1,500

Desk & Accessories: $500 – $1,000

Total: Around $12,000 (with some variation depending on brand, features, and customizations).

So I guess the cartoonish diss that you’d rather stay in your mother’s basement in your underwear in a gaming chair covered with Cheeto dust playing Half-Life, than live in your own house could become a real life meme, because this house is only $12,000.

What’s wrong with Millinocket? Well, how much time do you have? It was one of the many towns in Maine that relied on the local paper mill for sustenance, and the paper mill closed in 2008. The town has been hemorrhaging population pretty steadily since 1970, down to its current 4,104 souls. You can find out something about Millinocket by watching American Loggers on Discovery if you want to. I have somehow resisted the urge to do so. I even resisted the urge to have the urge.

If you’re a single guy who is willing to pawn his gaming setup and head off to Penobscot County, you’ll be glad to know the local environment is salubrious enough to produce a Miss Maine winner. Unfortunately, that was in 1966. She may still be around, although she may wear her hair differently nowadays, and be hard to spot.

There’s not much crime in Millinocket. The latest year I could find stats for, 2019, reported 0 murders, 0 rapes, 0 robberies, and 1 assault in the town during the year. People shoplift and break into houses occasionally, so I’d keep an eye on that range in the kitchen if you move there.

So there you go. A house for less than a used car. 18 Birch Street, Millinocket.

Good luck. We’re all counting on you.

Moderately Cranky Tuesday Trash Day Roundup

June 17, 2025 2 Comments

Well, it’s Tuesday. Time for our weekly browser bookmarks cleanup. It’s only moderately cranky this week. Must be because there’s not a lot of things going on in the world to talk about right now. All quiet on the western front, as the saying goes.

Why, no, I don’t watch television. Why do you ask?

Money-Market Funds & CDs: Americans and their Piles of Interest-Earning Cash

The three-month Treasury yield is still at 4.36% currently, and has been in this range since the last rate cut in December. Yields of money-market funds (MMFs) closely track the three-month Treasury yield and remain in the 4.2% range, give or take, and are well above the current inflation rates, with CPI inflation at 2.4% in May. This puts the “real” yield on liquid ultra-low-risk cash at just under 2%, which seems to be an attractive proposition, and households keep pouring their extra cash into them.

This phenomenon is poorly understood. Regular people try to accumulate and save some of their money, and things like CDs just insulate them from the effects of inflation. Any increase is gravy. The stock market is a casino. This is dollars in a sugar bowl.

Microsoft locks Windows 11 user out, shows how easy losing data from forced encryption is

“Microsoft randomly locked my account after I moved 30 years’ worth of irreplaceable photos and work to OneDrive. I was consolidating data from multiple old drives before a major move—drives I had to discard due to space and relocation constraints. The plan was simple: upload to OneDrive, then transfer to a new drive later.

The sooner you learn that The Cloud is just someone else’s computer, the better.

For the first time, social media overtakes TV as Americans’ top news source

For the first time, social media has displaced television as the top way Americans get news. “The proportion accessing news via social media and video networks in the United States (54%) is sharply up,” the report’s authors write, “overtaking both TV news (50%) and news websites/apps (48%) for the first time.”

If the people who pass me as I walk down the street are any indication, a solid minority are now getting their news from the voices in their heads.

Intel will lay off 15% to 20% of its factory workers, memo says

“These are difficult actions but essential to meet our affordability challenges and current financial position of the company. It drives pain to every individual,” Intel manufacturing Vice President Naga Chandrasekaran wrote to employees Saturday. He said the company is targeting job reductions between 15% and 20%, with most of the cuts taking place in July.

I’ve read plenty of corporate-speak in my day, but “It drives pain to every individual” sounds like something Conan the Barbarian would say before mentioning the lamentation of the women.

The $50 Trillion Prize: AI’s Real Stakes Exposed

Here’s what every AI company has admitted at some point:

They don’t fully understand how their models work
They can’t predict what capabilities will emerge
They don’t know how to solve alignment problems
They’re building systems they can’t fully control

And yet they want your trust, your money, and control over increasingly important parts of society. Would you trust a pilot who said, “I don’t really understand how this plane works, but hop in”? Would you trust a surgeon who said, “I’m not sure what this procedure will do, but let’s try it”? Then why are we trusting AI companies with civilization?

Says the guy with four booster shots.

The video calls section in cafes is the new smoking section

Then laptops were only allowed at specific 4 or 5 stools by the window. You felt distinctly unwelcome (but went anyway, it’s nice to be out of the house). Then, I was in a couple weeks back, they’ve surrendered. The window stool area is now dense nest of stools and counters and a new wedged-in shared table in the middle. You can probably jam 10 people in there now, shoulder to shoulder and back to back. This area is made for laptops, and people sit there all day yelling video calls on their head-mics, battery farmed knowledge work.

More like a pissing section in a pool.

Scientists detect light passing through entire human head, opening new doors for brain imaging

To achieve this, the team used powerful lasers and highly sensitive detectors in a carefully controlled experiment. They directed a pulsed laser beam at one side of a volunteer’s head and placed a detector on the opposite side. The setup was designed to block out all other light and maximize the chances of catching the few photons that made the full journey through the skull and brain.

Last time I went to the doctors he looked in my ear with his otoscope and clucked his tongue. “Is it bad? What do you see, doctor?” He said, “My diploma.”

Should Wyoming Ranchers Paint Zebra Stripes On Their Cows? Science Says Yes

Specifically, the scientists hypothesized that painting a zebra-striped pattern on domestic cattle would reduce the number of biting flies plaguing livestock. Biting flies are a more-than-annoying scourge for ranchers worldwide, including in Wyoming. Their findings were that the frequency of biting flies landing on the painted cattle decreased by over 50%. Furthermore, the cattle were more relaxed since they weren’t reflexively fighting off so many flies.

I’d do it strictly for the Lulz.

Cabinet to advise parents to ban social media before age of 15

Deputy health minister Vincent Karremans is expected to publish official guidance on the use of smartphones, which also includes a recommendation not to buy phones for children until they enter the final year of primary school, aged 11 or 12. Two weeks ago Karremans dismissed the idea of an outright ban on phones for under-14s, arguing it would be unenforceable.

Smart cabinet, there. I wonder what a credenza would say.

Amazon is reportedly training humanoid robots to deliver packages

Citing an anonymous source “involved in the effort,” The Information says that Amazon has almost finished constructing an indoor “humanoid park” at one of the retail giant’s San Francisco offices that’s roughly the size of a coffee shop. The obstacle course reportedly contains one Rivian van for training purposes, with Amazon aiming to have humanoid robots “hitch a ride in the back of Amazon’s electric Rivian vans and spring out to deliver packages.”

If they deliver a heavy package inside my apartment on a hot day, would it be good manners to offer them a nice cold glass of vaseline or something?

Well, there’s the bookmarks mulch pile for this Tuesday. Weigh in down there in the comments if your cabinet has any opinions it shared with you.

Watching the Congress of Vienna Sausage Get Made

June 16, 2025 11 Comments

[Editor’s Note: Originally from 2017. Republished with comments intact. Also, there is no editor]

When I was a kid, we lived in a neighborhood.

Well, I thought it was a neighborhood. That term has fallen out of favor with the nattering nabobs of negativity. They heap scorn on developments now. They reserve the word neighborhood for where they live. Their neighborhoods are defined by constantly shifting imaginary lines in a featureless desert of concrete spangled with chewing gum and crime. It was a lot simpler for us back in the day. If you weren’t in the woods, you were in the neighborhood.

I had deer under my window from time to time, instead of a dumpster morning, noon, and night, but the world has spoken. They aver that I was raised in a exurban hellscape, a cultureless wasteland, and I’d identify myself as a troglodyte to say otherwise.

Who would want to live in Smalltown Sprawltown USA? Well, a lot of people did. My parents sure did. They didn’t know any better. They thought they lived in a neighborhood. They made the mistake of getting along with their neighbors, and they called it a neighborhood, and they thought that made it a neighborhood.

It seemed like the whole wide world to me, that little warren of splits and capes. In a way, it was. At first, there were only a couple dozen houses. After a while, they punched through the curb cuts and added several more neighborhoods, er, developments. It got so a kid couldn’t play street hockey without having to drag the net to the curb every ten minutes to let a car pass.

It was a polyglot place, no matter what you’ve heard from people who live in concrete dovecotes and write for the Gnew Yourk Toimes. In our neighborhood, Irishmen lived right next door to Englishmen. One side skipped car bombing his neighbors. His counterpart eschewed channeling the Earl of Essex. There was a French family right next door, too. I can still picture their little doe-eyed girl named Suzanne, forever frozen in my mind’s amber, immortal and fey and unchanging. Unlike on the continent, they required only a privet hedge instead of a foggy channel to keep from falling on each other with misericordes and getting busy.

There were Germans living next to Poles. The crabgrass invaded the neighbor’s yard looking for lebensraum, but that was about it. There were Scots living next to people I thought were sorta German, but were really Swiss, I think. If they didn’t care enough to explain to me what they were, why should I bother to figure it out?

The whole town was lousy with Italians. Italian is a funny word to a real Italian. A lot of Eyetalians got unshod of the Italian boot with firsthand memories of the Risorgimento. It wasn’t smart to assume they were all the same. A Calabrian had no use for an Abrusseze. A Venetian had no use for a Neapolitan. No one had any use for Sicilians, and still don’t.

A block away from me, a Lebanese dad pulled his Ford into his carport, waved to a French-Canadian family on one side, a Portuguese guy on the other, and a neighbor with a name out of Charles Dickens across the street. The Lebanese family had a girl that broke several thousand hearts, no doubt, besides mine, without uttering a sound. She had eyes like dishes of used motor oil, skin like two days at the beach, and a head of hair like a mink.

My school was topped off with Armenians, with a couple of Jewish kids thrown in. They seemed about as exotic as a pothole. Though we lived in New England, we had truck with real live rednecks, too. I remember Calvin, fresh from below the Waffle House/IHOP line, slouching in class and drawling like a goober. I’ll say he sounded like a goober now. No one said he sounded like a goober back then, at least out loud, because Calvin was six-two in eighth grade, and he shaved.

There were black families. In high school, my ignant bogtrotter friend from across the street went out with an Ashanti princess from the newer development a mile away. She pulled her afro into a pony tail that formed a perfect sphere that followed her like a satellite, wore tube tops, and pretended to like his Bachmann-Turner Overdrive records. He pretended to like her Earth Wind and Fire records while actually liking her tube top. The only person to disapprove of the whole affair was her father. He was moderately well-to-do by our standards, because he ate in restaurants and had a brand new car. The one-toilet Irish kid was one step from feral. Dad looked the other way a little, and wondered if maybe his daughters would mind if they moved away. Like, to Venus.

When I got a little older, I slept on a Syrian lady’s couch when I was stuck in a snowstorm. She was immensely old, forty at least, wore too much jewelry and makeup, smoked like a film noir plot, and was missing a portion of one middle finger. I don’t remember what the couch looked like.

Anyway, for a couple of decades, I’ve watched a continent full of fools and knaves trying to ram themselves into a political, social, and monetary union while they royally screwed the pooch nine ways from Sunday in the attempt. I suppose it would be unkind of me to point out that we managed it, all on our own, completely by accident, back before disco, simply because there was no corrupt, contemptible government trying to make us do it.

I Start To Cry Each Time We Meet

June 13, 2025 10 Comments

I have an older brother. He was a musician before I was a person, I think. He can play all kinds of things on all kinds of things. He could play the Stones or Segovia and everything in between, or so it seemed to me. I could never keep up with him. I wanted to, but the calendar always made him disappear. When I finally went to school, he disappeared into high school. When I got to junior high, he was long gone to college. He left a bass behind, and an ancient amplifier that said HOT COTTAGE in M*A*S*H letters on the back. I tried to play it without knowing how. Musical prodigies can do that. I’m not one of those.

I had a piano bench in my room. We had no piano, just the bench. Most everyone used to have a piano in their house, but that was ancient history to me. My mother could play one. My brother can play one. My older son once stunned me by playing The Turkish March by Mozart at breakneck speed, even though he’d never had a piano lesson. He did have a crummy plastic keyboard in his room, though, and kids get up to things. My younger son can play piano music on the computer keyboard, because of course he can. But when I was a kid all I had was the bench in my room in the basement, living my little horizontal life between the sleepers and the drop ceiling and the pegboard walls. The piano bench seat was a lid. When I lifted it up, it was filled with sheet music. Walk On By was in there.

Musical notation is scary when you first see it. It’s runes on a stele. Cuneiform. Later you learn it’s just another language, like Spanish or COBOL or Pig Latin. It’s a bland set of instructions. Burt Bacharach and Hal David wrote the instructions to perform Walk on By in 1963. Dionne Warwick, 24 years old in that video, recorded in the ’27 Club’ in Knokke, Belgium, on New Year’s Eve in 1964, got the same instructions as everybody else, I guess.

Sheet music is usually piano music, with lyrics under the bars. There are two staffs, one for each hand. The treble is the G clef on the top, and the F clef is the left hand (bass) on the bottom. After a while, the publishers started putting the chord shapes for guitar accompaniment over the piano music, because Beatles.

So all alone in that drop ceiling dungeon, I dutifully worked out the damn dots on the bass line, and tried to play Walk On By, even though it was a decade or more since it had stopped showing up on the radio, humming the tune in my head for company. Because, like Everest, it was there.

I realized right then that those notations on the page are always missing something important. Dionne Warwick, for instance. Without her, the same damn dots end up like this:

The Golf Nazi

June 12, 2025 No Comments

Sometimes, there’s a man…

Very few people are truly memorable. Lots of people try to be memorable these days, but fail miserably. If you dye your hair purple and put the contents of your tackle box into your face and stretch your earlobes and have more scribbles than a men’s room stall on your body, you just sort of blend in at this point. Most times, somewhat nondescript people are much more memorable.

It’s hard to define exactly what makes people truly memorable. For instance, way back when, a fellow student walked up behind me and sucker punched me in the face, because he mistook me for somebody else. Since I had nothing but a bloody nose entered into evidence, your honor, I might be forgiven for mistaking him for someone punching me in the face deliberately, and I decked him. But for the life of me, I can’t remember his name, or even a rough approximation of his face. You’d think a pop in the beezer would make a person memorable, but it didn’t.

But there was this one guy. I can’t remember his name, but that’s understandable. I never knew it. I would have been afraid to ask him what it was, and it was never offered. He was the Golf Nazi.

When in lived in SouthCoast Massachusetts, there was this little golf course a few miles from my house. It started out as nine holes, just a modest rolling pasture with some holes drilled in it with flags stuck in them. It was really well-run. I don’t mean well-run as a golf course, although of course it was certainly that. I mean it was well-run compared to any enterprise, public or private, that I’ve ever encountered. How well? I really think the whole world would be better off if it was run the way this place was run.

Unlike more elaborate golf courses, this place had a modest “clubhouse.” I feel a bit silly even calling it that. It was a small, one-room shack with a shed roof. It was, like everything there, orderly and sensible and neat as a pin. There was a man behind a counter inside. He sold a few items besides handing out Lilliputian pencils and scorecards to fib on. A refrigerator with cold water and soda. Golf balls. Little packages of snacks. The place was set up to do one thing, basically, and not only do it well, but do it relentlessly. You went there to play golf, and they’d get you out on the links doing it (badly) quite efficiently. Unless they didn’t.

You see, there was only one way to go golfing there. You had to present yourself to the man behind the counter. The man behind the counter was memorable, hooboy was he. He wasn’t young then, so I assume he’s dead now. I know his worldview is, because I never encounter it anymore. Even though decades have intervened, and I only saw him a handful of times, I’ll remember him forever. I could pick him out of a lineup. I might be able to mimic his voice. I think I could paint him in oils.

It wasn’t that he had any distinguishing physical characteristics, or anything like that. No goiters or humps or anything else to hang your hat on. Medium height. Medium build. A senior citizen, but one of those people who just look like a young person who got older, not someone that had gone to seed.

You always had to deal with this guy, because he was the only person who was ever behind the counter. He owned the golf course. Think of that. When was the last time you dealt with a business with the owner standing behind the counter? It used to be almost universal in places like sandwich shops or butchers or dry cleaners or whatever. Now it’s all franchises and moody minimum wage workers behind the formica firewall between you and what you want.

So this guy owned the golf course, and he ran the golf course. Hell, he lived there. He had a nice-looking house at the edge of the property, near the road. It was as immaculately cared for as the golf course. His only help were his children, that I ever saw. His daughter was pretty, and a very talented landscaper. The place started out sort of barren, just lots of grass and a few sand traps. But she worked tirelessly to put little oases of plants and ornamental trees all over the place. The gardens were laid out in a fashion I’m familiar with. There was always something to look at. When one plant finished blooming and went by, another plant would take up the slack, right up until the late fall. The place got really nice after a while. He had a son or son-in-law, I can’t remember which, doing the heavier work, mowing and seeding and mucking out the retention ponds and so forth. The place ran like a Swiss watch.

So you’d go into the (snicker) clubhouse, and present yourself at the counter, and tell the man behind the counter that you wanted to play golf, and that you had moolah enough to do it, which wasn’t much as rounds of golf go. Then that man would look at you, wordlessly, a blank expression on his face, no hint of what he was thinking. And more than occasionally, he’d simply shake his head and say, “No.”

I witnessed it more than a few times, so I know it’s not an urban legend. He would just say, “No,” nothing more, and that was that. He didn’t feel the need to explain himself, or argue, or listen to any argument. He’d just say no, and when they inevitable flummoxed reply came his way, he’d say nothing more than, “Because I said so.”

Few people understood the whole concept of a firm no. They’d try to start arguing or cajoling or threatening the guy. He always looked impassive, but more than once I heard him tell people that they couldn’t play today because he said so, but if they didn’t close their trap and leave, he’d ban them forever. Occasionally he’d explain that he owned the place, so he didn’t need to offer an explanation, which was a kind of snake eating its own tail explanation in and of itself.

It was always obvious to me why he said no to people, although they never seemed to figure it out on their own. If you were a male wearing a shirt with no sleeves, you had no chance. People wearing sneakers tried to sneak past the golfing gorgon, but never made it. If you looked disreputable in any way, or inebriated, acted unruly, or had unsalubrious slogans on your clothing, you had no shot. He told people to leave, and they did. He never had to threaten to call the cops or anything. Somehow or another he projected the inner force he possessed that made him so memorable. You left because he told you to.

What that man was demonstrating was freedom of association, and an iron backbone. The concept of freedom of association is a little fuzzy, at least legally. It’s never explicitly mentioned in America’s founding documents. The First Amendment talks about the right of people “peaceably to assemble.” In a way, that’s a positive concept. Peaceably refusing to assemble is a little further down the line from that. Who you’re not required to hang out with is as important as who you are, I guess. The stern man at the golf club certainly thought so.

As a practical matter, the cranky man behind the counter didn’t relish the downstream effects of being forced to welcome anyone clutching money. He knew by experience, I’m sure, who would replace the divots we all hack out of life’s golf course, to stretch a metaphor. Instead of enforcing the rules of his little empire after the fact, he preferred to avoid problems before they got a chance to be a problem.

We could use more men like the golf nazi. We could use a government that allows you to be a golf nazi. I won’t hold my breath while waiting for it to happen.

Tuesday Morning Link Roundabout. It Comes Out of the Sky and It Stands There

June 10, 2025 2 Comments

The internet seems to settle on a kind of unanimity after a while. It’s not a sentient being, but it gets opinions somehow. I’m not talking about chatbots here. A chatbot will find most any old thing you’re looking for, and because it’s programmed to be obsequious, it’ll tell you what you want to hear, at least eventually. You have to notice things on your own on the internet to really trust any observation.

I’ll give an example. There are certain bands from the 70s that the intertunnel likes. You see them everywhere. Internauts really like Queen, for instance. The Bee Gees. Various metal bands. Stuff like that. But I’ve noticed that the internet has big blind spots for various other combos. Here’s one: No one even mentions Yes on the interwebs, including this song, a sorta Stairway to Heaven to Middle Earth.

No, honestly, back in the seventies, this was probably as popular as any Queen deep cut. It was about seventeen minutes long or something, but they played it on the radio anyway. It’s like the Moody Blues for people who had more music lessons, or Deep Purple for guys with digital watches and photochromic coke-bottle glasses. The YorubaTube page says this video has 4.6 million views, but they must all be bots or Chinese people or something. If you go by their work habits, they’re more or less the same thing anyway.

The internet does love to rank things, however, and Mountains come out of the sky and they stand there is right up there in the inane lyric department, isn’t it? Its a close second to In the desert, you can remember your name, for there ain’t no one for to give you no pain, or Neil Diamond’s, “I am,” I said, to no one there, and no one heard at all, not even the chair.

So I’m here to give Yes a little boost. I’m mentioning them on the internet. That should help. And in their honor, I’m going to type today’s bookmark roundup on two computer keyboards simultaneously while wearing a cape. It’s the least I can do. And I always try to do the least I can do.

Collapse of the Once High-Flying Solar Stocks: Another Bankruptcy among our 8 Imploded Solar Stocks

Sunnova Energy International, which booked huge losses every single year selling residential solar energy equipment and services – $1.61 billion in total losses since 2017 – said on Sunday that it and its subsidiaries Sunnova Energy Corporation and Sunnova Intermediate Holdings, LLC, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in Texas. Its subsidiary Sunnova TEP Developer had already filed for bankruptcy on June 1. In the filing, it said that it would continue operating as “debtor in possession” while trying to sell some of its assets under court supervision.

I’m pretty sure I saw Debtor in Possession open up for Yes at the Odeon in 1973.

Tricks to write clearer

I’ve written a lot. And I’ve regretted most of it. So much of what I’ve said was too long and boring. Most of it was probably obvious to readers anyway. A lot of the rest was either redundant or implied. If anyone read it, they probably skimmed it a lot.

Here’s a hint. It’s: Tricks to Write More Clearly. You’re welcome.

Botnets account for 25% of all Internet traffic

In mid-2025, total bot activity, including good bots, bad bots, and botnets, exceeded human traffic on the Internet. As this trend continues, the Dead Internet Theory is likely to become a reality within the next decade.

I think I saw Dead Internet Theory open for Yes at the Palladium in 1991.

Disney to pay almost $439 million to take full control of streaming service Hulu

Hulu began in 2007 and quickly evolved into as a service backed by entertainment conglomerates who hoped to stave off the internet with an online platform for their own TV shows. Disney joined in 2009, planning to offer shows from ABC, ESPN and the Disney Channel. A decade later, Disney gained majority control of the business when it acquired 21st Century Fox.

“Evolved” is not the word I’d use to describe the timeline. “Went full retard” might fit the bill.

How Engineers Built the World’s Largest Spherical Structure: The Las Vegas MSG Sphere

Announced in February 2018, the MSG Sphere stands as a monumental achievement in civil engineering and architectural design. It is also the world’s largest spherical structure. The building was conceived as a revolutionary entertainment venue by the Madison Square Garden Company. The project aimed to create an unparalleled immersive experience for audiences.

If you fine folks were wondering what web scraped, AI slop looks like, read that article.

Rolls-Royce SMR selected to build small modular nuclear reactors

As part of the government’s modern Industrial Strategy to revive Britain’s industrial heartlands, the government is pledging over £2.5 billion for the overall small modular reactor programme in this Spending Review period – with this project potentially supporting up to 3,000 new skilled jobs and powering the equivalent of around 3 million homes with clean, secure homegrown energy.

If a British motor car company builds it, I guarantee it won’t start, and will leak oil.

Frederick Forsyth, Author of Thrillers Made Into Movies Like ‘The Day of the Jackal,’ Dies at 86

Frederick Forsyth, a British author of thrillers who frequently made the bestseller lists, sold 70 million books and saw his novels “The Day of the Jackal,” “The Odessa File” and “The Dogs of War,” among others, adapted into films, died on Monday at his home in Jordans, England. He was 86 years old. The New York Times confirmed Forsyth’s death, which his literary representative, Jonathan Lloyd, said “followed a short illness.”

We watched The Day of the Jackal last night. It shouldn’t be a good movie. Very dry. But it is.

Ireland’s data centres now consume more than a fifth of national electricity

New figures from the Central Statistics Office (CSO) show that data centre electricity use is rising far more rapidly than any other sector, with homes and other business customers increasing by only 3% in the same period.

Everyone had to suffer through curlicue lightbulbs and washing machines that take four hours to get through a cycle so chatbots would have enough power to write SEO articles about green energy.

IBM aims to build the world’s first large-scale, error-corrected quantum computer by 2028

Still, it’s unclear whether Starling will be able to solve practical problems. Some experts think that you need a billion error-corrected logical operations to execute any useful algorithm. Starling represents “an interesting stepping-stone regime,” says Wolfgang Pfaff, a physicist at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. “But it’s unlikely that this will generate economic value.”

Unlikely to generate economic value is right in IBM’s wheelhouse.

Google Search is Dead

In many ways, it’s no more than it deserves. The company took one of the most useful tools of the Internet, twisted it into an ad platform and data harvesting machine, and did everything in its power to shut down competition in an attempt to force us to use it. They became greedy and, in doing so, destroyed their product, piece by piece.

You just figured that out, poindexter? You’re about ten years late to the party.

Well, there’s the bookmarks roundup for this Tuesday. If you’re an owner of a lonely heart, feel free to leave a comment for some instant cyber-camaraderie.

Forget Reachin’ Me by Phone

June 9, 2025 1 Comment

So Sly Stone died. I had no idea he was 82 years old. He always had a child-like face and demeanor. I’m surprised he lasted as long as he did. Drugs are bad, m’kay?

If You Want Me To Stay was my favorite song of his. I think it might have been his favorite, too. He seemed to perform it at the drop of an enormous, sequinned hat. There are many versions of it on these here intertunnels.

Lots of people have tried to be like him. Prince is (was) a wan example. Wasn’t his fault. Sly was sui generis. I don’t think it was an act. He was what he was. That’s rare in this world. He seemed friendly to everyone. I remember being home sick from school, propped up in bed and watching a little TV at the end of my bed. There’s Sly hanging with Mike Douglas, perhaps the squarest person extant at the time, and they’re thick as thieves. Sly changed from his On the Corner Suit into a Reynold’s Wrap ensemble, and got Richard Pryor, the other guest, to play drums along with him.

Sly was friendly with Terry Melcher, the record producer, for instance. So they were hanging out at Melcher’s house with Charles Manson one time. Later they went over to Melcher’s mom’s house. Melcher’s mom was Doris Day. So Sly sat at the piano with Doris and sang Que Sera, Sera together. Man, the sun shines on fewer people than Sly Stone did.

He seemed completely unable, or perhaps more accurately, unwilling to live in any sort of grown-up world. He was famously unable to show up for much of anything. I have a very white-bread musical friend who went to see Sly and the Family Stone at the Cape Cod Coliseum back in the day. He struck me as the last person on earth who would want to see a funk show, but Sly was universal. He said Sly showed up hours late, and the crowd resembled a lynch mob after a while. Then Sly came out and had them eating out of his hand in half a song, and demonstrated why people called him The Riotmaster. When a Jimmy Buffet fan like him tells you Sly Stone was the best show he ever saw, take it to the bank.

Being airy fairy was part and parcel of Stone’s lifestyle. I read once that Sly once lived in a gigantic Beverly Hillbillies type mansion, but couldn’t keep the lights on or the water running. Then again, there’s a reason why toddlers are more fun than tax collectors.

Somehow or another, he was a philosopher king anyway:

If you want me to stay
I’ll be around today
to be available for you to see.
But I am about to go
and then you’ll know
for me to stay here I got to be me.

You’ll never be in doubt
that’s what it’s all about
you can’t take me for granted and smile.
Count the days I’m gone
forget reachin’ me by phone
because I promise I’ll be gone for a while.

Sippican Cottage

Save the Basement, Get Rid of the Bookmarks: Tuesday Trash Day

We Just. Found Out. They Have. The Bomb

Beware Jupiter in a Hockey Goalie Oufit

So You Can’t Afford a House: Siete

Moderately Cranky Tuesday Trash Day Roundup

Watching the Congress of Vienna Sausage Get Made

I Start To Cry Each Time We Meet

The Golf Nazi

Tuesday Morning Link Roundabout. It Comes Out of the Sky and It Stands There

Forget Reachin’ Me by Phone

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