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Scenery-chewing is an under-appreciated form of acting, and Tim Curry was the best at it. In life, he seemed to be a person of character. A mensch.
I loved the 1993 “Three Musketeers,” co-starring Curry as Cardinal Richelieu I think it’s my favorite version. And yes I have seen the Richard Lester version and did not care for it.
I was not a huge fan of “Rocky Horror,” not even as a teenager. I saw it once at a midnight showing and enoyed it. I went a second time and fell asleep.
A PR person asked me how I was “envisioning the piece” after interviewing her client. I replied, “I’m envisioning black text on a white background.” I try to always be helpful.
One of my nicknames for the dog is “Princess Prancy Prancy.” I’m man enough to admit that.
Overheard: “May we all live so that, if we die at 80, the entire world thinks you’ve gone too soon.”
Today’s irrelevant email pitch: “We create custom wardrobes for executives who value fit, quality, and efficiency.” Gotta admit I’m tempted but I don’t have a bajillion dollars and also 99% of the time I’m wearing some variety of cargo pants/shorts and T-Shirt. I dress it up with a polo shirt when I have an Important Video Meeting.
Google Just Made It Easier for Campaigns to Send You Fund-Raising Emails. Oh good more spam. Though the text messages are worse than the email nowadays.
A drone guided entirely by AI killed three Ukranians. By Andrew E. Kramer with visuals by Nicole Tung at The New York Times.
It hit 96 degrees today here. I am grateful for air conditioning and that I hardly had to go outside after about 10:30 am.
I just posted the following to LinkedIn and I am inordinately pleased with myself about it: “Questex, the company where I have happily worked for the past two years, is now Forge, and ‘Forge’ is now my second-favorite F-word.”
“On his deathbed, President Chester Arthur ordered that all of his personal and professional papers be burned. Three barrels of documents went up in flames. But 23 letters survived, initialed only ‘J.I.S.'”
Arthur was a prince of the spoils system of government — institutionalized corruption and bribery — that was standard through most of the 19th Century. But as President he led dismantling that system and replacing it with professional civil service that drove many of the great advances of the U.S. in the 20th Century.
Arthur was turned around, to a large extent, by those 23 letters, from Julia Isabella Sand, a woman who lived an obscure life in New York. Though she exerted great influence on Arthur, she and the President never met.
Comedian and amateur historian Elliot Kalan and 99% Invisible host Roman Mars tell the story.
Use an LLM to build a personal wiki for areas of research
At the beginning of April, the prominent AI researcher Andrej Karpathy tweeted (https://x.com/karpathy/status/2039805659525644595) out an idea that was, for a certain kind of productivity nerd, an infohazard. He described the idea this way: ‘Something I’m finding very useful recently: using LLMs to build personal knowledge bases for various topics of research interest.’ He proceeded to describe his process: adding source documents to a local folder and using an LLM to extract and organize their contents into a Markdown wiki that gets updated as he adds new material."
I don’t know whether I will do this but it sure is intriguing.
Anthony Bourdain in 2005: Direct from cassette. “Two hours turned into a highly personal conversation, recorded on a cassette that sat untouched for twenty years. This week, that tape gets its first public airing, and we discuss Tony’s preferred sucker-punch etiquette, his loyalty to cigarettes and the Chateau Marmont, ayahuasca in Peru, and the talk show he dreamed up with Christopher Walken in mind.”
“You can’t predict fire. But you can trade on it." California senators Alex Padilla and Adam Schiff want financial regulators to restrict people from using prediction markets to bet on how wildfires will spread, citing concerns that bettors could resort to arson to secure outcomes.
The Rest is History looks at the Irish Troubles. There are strong parallels to Israel and the Palestinians. The violence in Northern Ireland eventually ended, which is a cause for cautious hope in Israel/Palestine.
I admired Anthony Bourdain. I consumed his interviews and read as many articles by him as I could find. I found “Kitchen Confidential” among the most inspiring books I’ve read.
When he killed himself, I came to think of his public persona as a lie, and stopped watching, listening to or reading him.
But now I think the public Bourdain was a character he created, played and tried to live, and I should resume appreciating his life and work.
“Short sleepers, who make up less than one per cent of the population, spend significantly less time snoozing without any apparent health consequences.” By Shayla Love at The New Yorker.
I envy these people — I need 8-9 hours. I get less than that most days, often as little as five, and that’s no fun.
Short sleepers are often lonesome, awake at night when there’s nobody around. Is that true for short sleepers who are also introverts? Or is that a combination that does not exist?
Maybe one day science will figure out a way to drastically reduce or even eliminate our need for sleep. But it’s a hairy problem — science doesn’t even know why we sleep, not really. So I’m not hopeful that’ll come in my lifetime.
Watched: Lanterns S1E1, Pilot 📺 I’ll stay with it, see where it goes.
Harrison’s administration had been “beyond question the best business administration the country has ever seen,” one businessmen’s club declared, and losing that administration would be a calamity, especially since, according to Republicans, Democrats were socialists and anarchists who wanted to destroy America. The Chicago Tribune told readers that a lower tariff would destroy industries and throw people out of work, but it seemed fine with the prospect: “The working classes of the country need such a lesson.
Not mentioned by Richardson in this article: An immigrant named Frederick Trump made a fortune during the Gold Rush running a restaurant and brothel for miners. His grandson is, of course, the President today.
Derek Thompson interviews Agnes Callard, the University of Chicago professor, about her new theory called “the uni-context.":
A context is a set of circumstances that tell you how you should act. For most of human history, contexts were local and multiple. If you wanted to know how you should act, you would look around. Am I in a field? Am I inside my home? Am I in the church? Am I in a bar? You would immediately get guidance by looking both at your physical environment and at the people around you and how they were acting.
The uni-context is a scenario in which the ways you should act become the same across all different contexts. There’s just one set of norms you should follow all times, irrespective of context.
G.P.S. has also led us to outsource existential skills: locating yourself in space, parsing out your surroundings, staying calm when you don’t know where you are. Do we lose something when we no longer get lost?
— Shayla Love at The New Yorker
I use GPS to get to places within ten miles of my house that I have been to dozens of times.
I’m frustrated by the way the fediverse seems to be floundering because I prefer it to Bluesky as technology. And yet Bluesky is more and more where the interesting people are. Which is not to say there are no interesting people on Masto — but they are fewer.
