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.

I brilliantly deleted all the subscribers to my newsletter without having a current backup. Fortunately, I had a backup from late May, so I restored from that.

If you unsubscribed since late May, please accept my apologies and I’m afraid you’re gong to have to unsubscribe again.

If you subscribed since May, well, you’re not seeing this so I’ll just try to beam telepathic apologies in your direction.

The government is very upset that people are criticizing it for shooting innocent mothers to death in the street. DHS stalked and intimidated a man who protested against state-sponsored killing, issuing him a “WARNING NOTICE” as flimsy as the nonjudicial “warrants” it uses now to bust into people’s homes…. It’s both deadly serious and deeply unserious. What are they afraid of? Well, we already know. Accountability in any form."

— ICE are heavily armed killers. They’re also huge losers

NYTimes writer Jessica Grose visits an unusual conference. Near-death experiencers are the best dancers. I could identify which attendees at the annual conference of the International Association for Near-Death Studies have been to the brink, because they moved their bodies...

How Markdown took over the world.

By Anil Dash:

Nearly every bit of the high-tech world, from the most cutting-edge AI systems at the biggest companies, to the casual scraps of code cobbled together by college students, is annotated and described by the same, simple plain text format. Whether you’re trying to give complex instructions to ChatGPT, or you want to be able to exchange a grocery list in Apple Notes or copy someone’s homework in Google Docs, that same format will do the trick. The wild part is, the format wasn’t created by a conglomerate of tech tycoons, it was created by a curmudgeonly guy with a kind heart who right this minute is probably rewatching a Kubrick film while cheering for an absolutely indefensible sports team."

A look at the history behind the musical “1776.” It’s surprisingly accurate. youtu.be/ZAHEUe7UV…

The Ringer’s Rewatchables podcast discusses “48 HRS," starring Eddie Murphy and Nick Nolte. “This is my favorite movie ever. It’s indefensibly racist and got more racist every year.” Me too — I love this movie and yeah it is, as the young people say nowadays, problematic.

We finally got Minnie eating again over the weekend. At first, 90% of her diet was sandwich turkey. It’s pretty good sandwich turkey — Julie and I eat it ourselves. But it’s a lousy diet for a dog. Still, the priority was to to get her to eat anything. Since Minnie’s health ...

The End of Reading Is Here. Optimists once believed that universal literacy was inevitable. Now it seems that the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history.

19th Century etiquette manuals were woke. www.tumblr.com/atomic-tw… Small otter thinks it’s a cat but nobody minds and everybody has a good time (video) www.threads.com/@darren.p…_?xmt=AQG0I7nBgZHe4a6AMc5_r-pcNWV2MgMzeyKO6drF-DDyaw