2026 July❮❮prevnext❯❯

4 star:
* Dopamine (Madelline)
There's actually a "split brain" version of this that has the English and French version in different stereo channels but I prefer the original
* Simply the Best (From "Schitt's Creek") (Noah Reid)
Really sweet "in show" cover
* Joy. (RAYE, Absolutely & Amma)
Recommendation for a song for JP Honk to play... good song but I don't think it has wide recognizability.
* A Little Bit Alexis (From Schitt's Creek) (Annie Murphy)
I sometimes love fictional pop songs from shows more than most pop songs... this was supposedly the theme to a failed reality show.

3 star:
* Sloppy Drunk Blues (Lucille Bogan)
* The Ripper (Pow-Wow Song) (Northern Cree)
* Bury Me in Georgia (Single Edit) (Kane Brown)
Some pitcher's theme song on the Red Sox
* Dopamine (Robyn)
Found this while googling up the other dopamine song.
* Sexistential (Robyn)
* Fishin' In the Dark (Nitty Gritty Dirt Band)
We saw these guys on their farewell tour - I never fished at night but I miss hanging out on the Erie shore looking at shooting stars.
* Wagon Wheel (Sara Shansky & The Titanic Dance Band)
RIP Sara Kaye, I'm glad I got to sing with you.

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Six Flags Hurricane Harbor with Lynette and Myles

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25 Times The Smartest Solution Was Also The Silliest One - some clever hacks (also ones I know are problematic, like "NASA spent millions on a pen for space, Russians used pencil" -- those little graphite bits in zero-G are not good for sensitive systems and air quality!)

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At Area 53 in Brooklyn, and then catching some fireworks.

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I'll summarize this: Mamdani asked NYers to keep air conditioning at 78 degrees. A wave criticism hit online. A MSNBC broadcast pointed out the US Department of Energy recommends that 78 degree figure.
Immediately after, the US Department of Energy deleted 6,000 web pages related to energy saving.

LOL. Why are MAGA conservatives like that? Coney Island!

Worry is but undernourished enthusiasm.

Just finished watching the whole series. Great stuff! A few episodes clanked (in a klutzy sitcom wacky events kind of way) but overall it was lovely, and I loved watching the actors enjoy their characters.

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This video just told me "Tears of the Kingdom" is a bit of a pun - tiers, as in there's a sky-ish realm above and an underground realm below. I'm annoyed I never even thought in those terms before.

We had 111 missiles shot by the Islamic Republic of Japan

US Cyclospora cases mount as CDC lags on tracking - your tax dollars not at work. Thanks DOGE! Good job Trump. Never been a finer time for explosive diarrhea.

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Saw a bunch of fireflies at Cooper Park in Brooklyn last week. Bioluminescence feels like magic.

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For a hot minute, and for the first time in months, I'm at inbox zero, and same for instant messaging. (Procrastinating on some light interview prep is a helluva drug)

I gotta decide if it's worth trying to keep up as a daily discipline or not. Like, I really don't want to think about most of this crap over the weekend, but even a weekend's worth of pileup is the snowball that starts rolling...

Lindsey Graham is dead at 71. In 2016, he dared America on camera: "Use my words against me." This is his obituary. These are his words.
The facts first, plainly. Graham died Saturday night at his Washington home of what his office calls a brief and sudden illness. He served four terms, chaired the Judiciary and Budget committees, and spent decades as one of the loudest voices in American foreign policy.
By sunrise the whitewash had begun. Trump declared him a "true American Patriot." Netanyahu called him a beloved friend. The eulogies will tell you about his service.
They will not tell you about the ledger. So we will.
In December 2015, Graham looked into a camera and called Donald Trump a "race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot." By February 2016: "I think he's a kook. I think he's crazy." That May he wrote: "If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed... and we will deserve it." He refused to vote for him.
Then Trump won, and Lindsey Graham discovered golf.
By late 2017 he was scolding the media for calling the president, yes, really, a kook.
His best friend was John McCain, a man Trump mocked for being captured in Vietnam and kept mocking after he was dead. Graham wept for McCain on the Senate floor, then deepened his devotion to the man who spat on his grave.
The words he wanted used came in 2016, when he swore that if a Supreme Court seat opened in an election year, the next president should fill it. In 2018 he repeated the promise and added: "hold the tape."
In October 2020, as Judiciary chairman, he rammed Amy Coney Barrett onto the Court eight days before the election.
In November 2020, Georgia's Republican secretary of state said Graham had called him asking about tossing legally cast mail ballots. Graham denied it, fought the grand jury subpoena all the way to the Supreme Court, and lost.
On January 6th, with the glass still on the Capitol floor, he announced: "Count me out. Enough is enough." He was back at Mar-a-Lago within months.
He cheered the country into Iraq. Three weeks ago he was on television promising that if diplomacy failed, Trump was "going to take the Strait of Hormuz."
Honesty requires one more line: he was, to the end, one of Ukraine's most reliable champions in the Senate, and he died the day after standing beside Zelensky in Kyiv. Even a ledger this dark has an entry in the other column.
But the ledger is the legacy. A man who saw exactly what Trump was, said so in the plainest English of his era, and then spent nine years kneeling to it for relevance.
He asked us to use his words against him.
Consider them used.

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We're all living in a prequel. We're all going to die, and we're all in a prequel

Reminds me of Triumph the Insult Comic Dog "I've got some spoilers... who wants to hear a spoiler? It's a spoiler: You Will Die Alone" 50 funniest tweets ranked...

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a trophy for trump - but is it gold enough?

Repetition is the only form of permanence that nature can achieve.

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$1 Trump Coins Being made what a blatant disregard for widely known and accepted law.

Oh it's a "commemorative coin"? Yeah, that's like Vanilla Ice saying he didn't steal from Under Pressure, see, it goes "bump bum bump badda BUM bump" not "bum bum bump badda bum BUMP"

And then his bullshit response "very unusual but I was honored by it," and "its very cute they gave me a coin."

Right. "Cute". And not your idea and/or tailored to his idiot predilection for putting golden something on everything, like a dog talking its walk

I got to thinking about the design language of Star Wars' "second tier" of droids, and some of their possible influences...

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airnow.gov - this seems like a good resource to know about if you're near or downwind of the forest fires. purpleair is considered much better

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Saw Nolan's "The Odyssey" last night... it was - Epic (pun intended but regretted) - catching in a sorta historically respectful way the feelings of being literally lost at sea, encountering weird and gruesome and horrifying things - the movie really got into the visceral nature of things. And then a lot of themes of Odysseus feeling responsible for the deaths of this men but also regret for what happened to Troy (a modern lens interpretation, but still)

I've seen a fair bit of The Odyssey in the past year or so - this movie, Kate Hamill's stage production, and the musical "Penelope" ... also the Orpheus reinterpretation "Eurydice".

I always think of this poem:

Ithaka
By C. P. Cavafy

As you set out for Ithaka
hope your road is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
angry Poseidon--don't be afraid of them:
you'll never find things like that on your way
as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,
as long as a rare excitement
stirs your spirit and your body.
Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
wild Poseidon--you won't encounter them
unless you bring them along inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up in front of you.

Hope your road is a long one.
May there be many summer mornings when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you enter harbors you're seeing for the first time;
may you stop at Phoenician trading stations
to buy fine things,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
sensual perfume of every kind--
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
and may you visit many Egyptian cities
to learn and go on learning from their scholars.

Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you're destined for.
But don't hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you're old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you've gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.

Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you wouldn't have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.

And if you find her poor, Ithaka won't have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you'll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.

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best worse joke pickupline I came up with - "are you on a perilous journey from troy to ithica? 'cause you're the only Odd-I-See 😃 "

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I assure you that joke is not as bad as Lynette thinks.

"Lameth, you must know," continued the chancellor, pontifically, "pwesents a new and most intwesting addition to my pwevious knowledge of the 'Owigin Question."'

"Which question?" asked Hardin.

"The 'Owigin Question.' The place of the owigin of the human species, y'know. Suahly you must know that it is thought that owiginally the human wace occupied only one planetawy system."

"Well, yes, I know that."

"Of cohse, no one knows exactly which system it is – lost in the mists of antiquity. Theah ah theawies, howevah. Siwius, some say. Othahs insist on Alpha Centauwi, oah on Sol, oah on 61 Cygni – all in the Siwius sectah, you see."

"And what does Lameth say?"

"Well, he goes off along a new twail completely. He twies to show that ahchaeological wemains on the thuhd planet of the Ahctuwian System show that humanity existed theah befoah theah wah any indications of space-twavel."

"And that means it was humanity's birth planet?"

"P'haps. I must wead it closely and weigh the evidence befoah I can say foah cuhtain. One must see just how weliable his obsuhvations ah."

Hardin remained silent for a short while. Then he said, "When did Lameth write his book?"

"Oh – I should say about eight hundwed yeahs ago. Of cohse, he has based it lahgely on the pwevious wuhk of Gleen."

"Then why rely on him? Why not go to Arcturus and study the remains for yourself?"

Lord Dorwin raised his eyebrows and took a pinch of snuff hurriedly. "Why, whatevah foah, my deah fellow?"

"To get the information firsthand, of course."

"But wheah's the necessity? It seems an uncommonly woundabout and hopelessly wigmawolish method of getting anywheahs. Look heah, now, I've got the wuhks of all the old mastahs – the gweat ahchaeologists of the past. I wigh them against each othah – balance the disagweements – analyze the conflicting statements – decide which is pwobably cowwect – and come to a conclusion. That is the scientific method. At least" – patronizingly –"as I see it. How insuffewably cwude it would be to go to Ahctuwus, oah to Sol, foah instance, and blundah about, when the old mastahs have covahed the gwound so much moah effectually than we could possibly hope to do."

Hardin murmured politely, "I see."

I have a friend who, in my opinion, is way too slow to present arguments we can debate, and tends to lapse into either into "Appeal to Authority" - citing who believes someone, or even worse "everyone knows" - or Ad Hominem.

I was trying to locate this passage that I was half remembering - thought it might have been George R R Martin's "Tuf Voyaging" (recommended!) but it was Asimov writing in this terrible aristocratic parody form.

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The opposite of "the elephant in the room" is "the centipede in the room": something that's not actually an issue but everyone is freaking out aboutz

Some AI slop, scenes from the Museum Of Natural History and other parts of NYC, 2 bandshots and the Museum of Science moose. world cup halftime had muppets doing Seven Nation Army (JP HOnk does a swingy version of that) and BTS' Dynamite, which is a song School of Honk does.

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Spain Humiliates Trump After He Refuses to Get Out of Victory Photos what a joke our president is.

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listen to me, this is so so important: you've gotta get used to really giving it your 60% as a default. like don't half-ass it necessarily but try not to go over 70% or so of an ass. you'll feel better and live a happier more fulfilled life, and on the rare occasions where you do need to lock the fuck in you'll be able to pull off bullshit that the sad miserable wretches giving it their 100% can never dream off, because they're busy draining themselves dry and you have energy reserves to spare.

FBI head Patel - October before an election, what fine time for a trip to visit Russia. ("Although Republicans on the panel concluded that Russia mounted an influence operation to "undermine the U.S. liberal democratic order," they rejected the intelligence community's conclusion that Russia aspired to help Trump win the 2016 election." -- I guess you only have to worry about election tampering when you worry it goes against your side?)

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... if there is a terror attack between now and November, please bring at least the possibility it was a fake into account. Posting this now... Jokes that make you feel smart if you get them.

I think 33 was the only one I had to reverse figure out from similar jokes.

And for 11, it's funnier if the mathematician finds the extinguished remnants, than relights the stuff, then goes to bed - since he was reduced it to a previously solved problem.

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Lynette sent me for some cabbage, 2.5 lbs...

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I used davinci.ai and seedream 5.0 and the "Retro Pop Graphic" style Since the Lincoln assassination, every president alive has lived during Hoover's lifetime.

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I finished "The Second Fredric Brown Megapack: 27 Classic Science Fiction Stories". He really was a great pulp writer.

Anyway, there was this cube, invisible to terrestrials, a mile over Philadelphia (and don't ask me why they picked Philadelphia--I don't know why anyone would pick Philadelphia for anything).

But let's drink to all men who work to put themselves out of work. Doctors work toward the day when the race will be so healthy it won't need doctors; lawyers work toward the day when litigation will no longer be necessary. And policemen, detectives, and criminologists work toward the day when they will no longer be needed because there will be no more crime.

there's so much fun zeerust with this, like

Orpheus hesitated beside the black river.
With so much to look forward to he looked back.
We think he sang then, but the song is lost.
At least he had seen once more the beloved back.
    I say the song went this way: *O prolong
    Now the sorrow if that is all there is to prolong.*

We watched the movie "Hadestown: The Musical" (recorded live on stage, ala "Hamilton" and "Suffs") - a retelling of Orpheus. (and oddly this year we saw Sarah Ruhl's "Eurydice", another retelling and angle change of the Eurydice/Orpheus story.)

Worth catching "Hadestown" in its limited theatrical release! LOL.

A. this is nuttily big brother looking, with angry Trump blocking the Constitution.
B. small blessings it's limited-ish run bullshit (25-30K to be done, from the Washington passport agency)
C. "Welcome, but be good"??? So... Trump doesn't know what passports are or who US passports are used by? Jack Gilbert is probably my favorite poet. This page from him and his great love Michiko has some poems of his I hadn't seen.

But anything worth doing is worth doing badly.

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Every wise man I met in Asia warned me against caring.
Explained how everything I loved would get old,
or be taken away and I would suffer.
I tried to explain what a bargain it is.

I started doing a simple diary on May 29, 2000. It started on my PalmPilot, then that September I made a little private webpage for it. (This is all distinct from my blogging, which started as a "quote journal" also on the Palm a few years earlier.)

According to the TimeToy webapp I made, I was 9556 days old when I started the diary, and am 19112 days old today. So I have half of the days of my life loosely documented, and half not.

I think I started making a diary because even at 26 I was aware at how much I'd already forgotten, that there were entire seasons or years when I didn't have a good summary of what I had been up to.

(Just today I unconsciously coined a new word, while bouncing some of these ideas off of ChatGPT: "forgettal". If a memory is the unit of something we recall, a "forgettal" is the unit of something we've forgotten.)

I use ChatGPT as a discussion partner; sure it lacks much of a true human dialog, but also it doesn't have the agenda a human has (well, arguably it might be imbued a different agenda) It can be a powerful, proactice mirror, and it will tolerate my meandering and repetition at lengths I can't expect my human buddies to match. (In a way it's kind of like... "what if my blog could talk back?")

I was talking about my frustration with finding the most useful metaphor for consciousness and subconscious parts; Freudian Id/Ego/Superego, Internal Family Systems, inner children (or soemtimes even inner dog), McGilchristian hemispheres, multitasking computer systems, etc. ChatGPT came up with this: (in that LLM telltale "short sentence" style)

Here's a metaphor I've never quite heard anyone use.

Imagine a modern nation.

There are millions of citizens (the low-level processes).

There are institutions (habit systems, emotional systems, perception).

Then there's the press.

The press isn't the government.

It isn't the citizens.

But it absolutely shapes what everyone thinks is happening.

It decides what is news.

It constructs narratives.

It remembers history selectively.

It has incentives.

It develops biases.

Sometimes it uncovers genuine truth.

Sometimes it spins.

Sometimes it believes its own headlines.

Your inner narrator might be something like that.

It's an emergent institution.

Not reducible to one neuron.

Not the whole country either.

And because it's built on language, once it exists it develops its own dynamics.

That's really good! And based on a little googling, pretty original.

(It does bring to mind if that metaphorical nation's government has a king, a president or what - I think I see it as a fairly direct democracy with a lot of ballot measures. Also a bureaucracy with a lot of systems that keeps things moving.)

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It brings to mind another thing ChatGPT agreed with, like a new metaphor. People who say LLMs are "just a glorified autocomplete" undersell what they can do but are kind of right about the mechanism. The fact that "what word sounds likely next" is SO powerful really says something about the power of words. Like "In the beginning was the Word" level stuff.

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I did more rambling of the above won a "pondering the nature of being" tip ("what is self", "what is consciousness?" etc) - usually ending up with the Buddhist truth (and Descartes concern) that on some level all we really have is this moment.

That all makes me think of this quote from Ted Chiang's "The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling" (SPOILERS AHEAD) - the story is a world where continuous video lifelogging is common, and the main character confronts footage of an event he misremembers:

And while I wasn't that man anymore, I couldn't deny that I was continuous with him.

Love that idea. You can't step in the same river twice... but... it's still that river.

(some of that came from thinking about that Star Trek TNG episode where an old "clone" of Riker - caught as a teleporter pattern, shows up. I need to rewatch (or mayne just watch?) that episode, but the idea that that clone would wake up and is just as much the Real Riker as the one the audience knows... it's intriguing.)

How much Americans wagered on sports betting in 2025 and how it's more than they spent on movies, art, museums and music combined.

So, I'm not sure if I think of gambling as absolutely daft because A. the church I grew up in was against it, B. my mom telling me that you're either losing or if you're winning it's based on the suffering of others, C. being wired to not feel the thrill of a win as much as other folks seem to, so the cold calculus of "the house always wins" is that much more obvious.

Like with sports betting, I just don't get. I already know its stupid how much emotional energy I put into some Boston teams, but at least there's a connection... getting all riled up on teams you don't really care about, or because you assume you're smarter than everyone else?

Of course it's "only" $166 billion. Compared to numbers I hear tossed around in national budget discussions, it's almost weird how small that is.

And also, it's interesting that the movie industry punches above its weight culture wise relative to the money involved. Like I remember a weird factoid where the video game industry makes a lot more than the movie industry - in fact was doing so in the old arcade days, a quarter at a time...

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That's the problem with time, it just keeps going... even if you don't.

I feel like I touched so many penises in the shopper's world movie theater.

toys.alienbill.com/sherbert - I don't make as many virtual toys as I used. And I admit I let an LLM do the heavy lifting - I got one of those cheap LCD boards and was wondering if a virtual version could be even more colorful and dynamic.

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