The Last Days of the Southern Drawl. “Young people are losing their southern accents. By the end of my life, there may be no one left who speaks like my father outside the hollers and the one-horse towns.” By Annie Joy Williams at The Atlantic.

Measles Cases Hit New Record in U.S., as Stupid-Americans Reject Vaccines. Via John Gruber on Daring Fireball, who quotes Isaac Asimov: “There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”

ME (leaving offsite meeting): “Where can I wait for an Uber?”
HER: “Where did you park?”
ME: “What?”
HER: “What?”
Then we talked about insomnia. I knew I’d found another member of the tribe.

I’m currently running a test of whether I can work in back of a moving uber without getting nauseous. I can’t read while in a moving car but so far working on a laptop seems to be ok

I know that business etiquette has grown more relaxed over the years but I think starting meeting by puking is still a faux pas.

Travel is great but when you are home you don’t have to deal with automated soap dispensers so that’s a plus.

Cirion deploys agentic AI across its Latin America network to predict outages and cut alarm noise up to 92%. Find out how Cirion Technologies put Grokstream’s Grok AIOps into production across 105,000 km of Latin American fiber. My latest on Fierce Network.

I went to the Brew Coffee Spot this weekend to pick up a bag of beans and a zucchini walnut muffin for the missus. The parking lot was set up in a little bazaar with booths for various local shops. There was one place that had all manner of weird freeze-dried foods, including grilled cheese sandwich bites. I think this was just a guy who got a freeze dry machine for his birthday and then him and a buddy went around the house freeze-drying random foods and I love that for them.

The missus tells me she only learned I bought a new computer bag by reading my previous post. Please pray for me at this difficult time.

Bag habit: mitchwagner.com

Mitch Wagner https://mitchwagner.com/2026/07/19/some-people-collect-shoes-some.html



Currently re-reading: Fer-de-Lance (Crime Line) by Rex Stout 📚

Currently reading: Washington by Ron Chernow 📚

Finished reading: Project Hail Mary: A Novel by Andy Weir 📚

Or, I should say, a recovering collector of those things. My purchasing habits have slowed drastically over the years. However, I bought a new computer bag for an upcoming trip. It’s a Timbuk2 Authority Laptop Backpack Deluxe. I have a peculiar relationship with computer bag...

Community grocery store owner, Harlem, New York, 1940. [www.facebook.com/HistoricP...](https://www.facebook.com/HistoricPhotographs/posts/pfbid02q6Uxsx8VyJBiTsMPzZNiTWm2pNRdKuF4E9kbPhdHpfaHTo5fHMG9aXsZt1CvwcZpl) Mood Mood

The Army Veteran Killed Outside His ‘Trump House’. Kerry Sheron, who was brutally murdered outside his home in Escondido (not far from where we live), was a 69-year-old Army veteran who worked as a cook at a senior living center in town. “Neighbors knew him to be affable and generous with the kitchen’s leftovers, knocking on doors to offer up packages of cookies, often with a Bud Light in his hand.”

His family, friends and neighbors, quoted in this article, have only kind words and praise for him, regardless of politics.

A San Diego woman is one of seven rear admirals to have their promotions nixed by Rambozo Hegseth.

Rear Adm. Amy Bauernschmidt commanded a nuclear aircraft carrier and now commands a carrier strike group. Hegseth, on the other hand, is a former Fox & Friends weekend host whose mother and sister have denounced him publicly

Five of the seven people denied promotion were women or people of color. Hegseth has said publicly that the philosophy “our diversity is our strength” is an “insane fallacy.”

Truth Social will sell fast access to its market-moving posts.. Those posts are by Trump, of course, who owns Truth Social.

This is the golden age of grifting.

The word “blog” has a branding problem. It sounds old-fashioned and fuddy-duddyish. But there really is no other word for what I do here, and what other people like me do on their websites.

Remembering the time when we were first married and I went into work on a Monday morning and I popped into the breakroom to get my first cup of coffee, and one of the women who worked in the office asked me how my weekend was and I said, “Good. My wife left — "

And the woman I worked with gasped and turned white and stammered, “I’m s-s-so sorry.”

And I rewound the conversation 60 seconds and I realized what I had just said and I clarified: “She left to visit her family. For a week. She’s coming back.”

Nine minutes of Det. Sgt. Arthur Dietrich youtu.be/eeLaRzF0W…

It is amazing to me when I think that my grandparents on my mother’s side came from Lithuania and Latvia and I know virtually nothing about those places.

I know more about Botswana and Namibia than I know about Lithuania and Latvia.

This came up because I noticed that I seem to be on a mailing list for PR people pitching stories about Lithuanian startups.

So I guess I know something about Lithuania now – they have a startup culture.

My ancestors also came from Poland. I know a little bit about Poland, but not a lot.

No one wants to see the evidence of their own AI usage. “Everyone’s freaked out about AI and also using it more than ever.” By Ryan Broderick at Garbage Day.

By

Whiskey Pete wants annual testosterone screening for service members. Shared by a friend, who says, “I’d be a lot happier if we could get annual brain function screenings for Cabinet secretaries.”

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Cisco bets on Wi-Fi–5G convergence. Cisco wireless CTO Matthew MacPherson settled the debate over whether Wi-Fi or 5G is the better networking technoloyg. He says they’re complementary, with Wi-Fi’s traffic lead widening even as 5G remains “strategically important to digitizing a country.” My latest on Fierce Network.

I’m ready for a lodge meeting last night, dressed in the solemn dignity befitting a Master Mason.

And yes that is a toilet off to one side. Grow up.

Kenmei builds the data foundation for autonomous telecom networks on Microsoft Fabric. Kenmei is developing an intent-based agentic AI solution for network operations. The emerging player is backed by operators Telefónica, MasOrange and Andorra Telecom and partners with Microsoft. It faces competition from … well, everyone. My latest on Fierce Network.

Bonus: In this article, I reveal yet another of many vast, gaping holes in my pop culture knowledge.

A friend points out that I have “journalist” and #DEI in my Bluesky profile, which could explain why I’m getting blocked. I also have he/him in there. I had completely forgotten — it’s been a while since I edited or looked at my profile. Mystery solved. and no I’m not going to edit my profile to remove the offending phrases. Sensitive snowflakes who might be triggered by those words and phrases will be punished by being deprived of my dad jokes and stupid memes.

Every few weeks I get a Bluesky notification that someone has blocked me. There is no reason for anyone to block me on Bluesky; I seldom reply or @-mention anybody and when I do I don’t criticize or even disagree.

I think I’m on a shared blocklist — but, again, why?

The only thing I can think of is maybe somebody’s distributing blocklists of leftists. But my political influence is slight.

This is puzzling.