Sometime in the distant past, I upgraded from the best bike I could afford when I was in college (Suntour, downtube shifters, Reynolds aluminum, etc.) to a pretty modern CF with 9 gears and brifters! [1] [2] I thought that was pretty sweet, and didn’t ever really see the point in upgrading. Until, after probably […]
Tagged bicycle, bike, old bikeI’ve had noise cancelling headphones for years now, mainly for use when flying [1]. I don’t particularly like in-ear buds though, as I have what are called ‘convoluted’ ear canals; in-ear buds tend to be painful after a while. And I also like to be able to hear a car about to run me down […]
I don’t believe that personal morality and character should be grounded on hope. … We need people who are grounded in the belief that there is a single humanity, and that battles are fought whether or not you can calculate that they’ll be successes. The struggle must be our very existence and we […]
Tagged QotDNow that half the cars are going to kill me because I can’t hear them [1], the other half have gotten even noisier [2]. We’ve gone from a gaussian distribution to bi-modal, and it’s not good. As though the leaf blowers got quieter by setting off small dynamite explosions. In between, it’s really quiet. Then […]
I just read a post with 166 comments at one of the sites [1] with better comments [2] that talked about how drinking and fighting and drugs were the ground on which the era happened, and the article and comments both remark on how kids today don’t seem to do that anymore. Control-F ‘lead’, and […]
“The purpose of a system is what it does.” —Stafford Beer, 2001
Tagged QotDI’m glad to see this blog post comment has caught on a little bit. It stunned me when I first read it, and now I’ve seen it in such disparate places as LGM, Jalopnik, and Charlies’s Diary [1] [2]. Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law […]
Tagged QotDI was raised on The Jetsons. I was promised flying cars, robot house cleaners, and jetpacks. As a splinter GenX/Boomer [1], the color of sky in my youth was that of a television, tuned to a dead channel. The streets of LA were wet, and it rained and the buildings rotted and dripped. I didn’t […]
Tagged ok boomer, rantI killed my first Aedes mosquito today, around noon. It was full of blood, probably mine. I look forward to the return of yellow fever and dengue. Between contested elections, occasional insurrections, half the country taking dog heartworm medicine instead of a vaccine, the roads falling apart because no one wants to pay any taxes, […]
And now Apple, and HBOMax, both have autoplay-with-sound previews while you’re looking through their channels. Did they learn nothing from Netflix?
Reagan said that the scariest words in the English language were “I’m here from the government, and I’m here to help”, but I have to figure that “Your employer just got bought by Bain Capital” are scarier, and a lot more immediate.
Is it too old-man-yelling-at-clouds to point out that just obvious stupid errors completely pull me out of the movie you are trying to get me to watch? Maybe Netflix doesn’t care, because it happens 15 minutes in, so it’s already counted as a view for their made-up numbers. To wit: “Outside the Wire”: “How […]
I started the madness about a year behind on my NYer subscription, stacked up on my nightstand. Home for every shit, I’m catching up now. It’s a relief, in some sense, to be that far behind, pre-whatever-this-is. I don’t have to read a 20,000 word piece on Pete Buttagieg (whatever). Saved myself that brainspace. […]
Generations
One of the things that strikes me at work is the number of folks [1] who have second homes in the mountains – Big Bear, Yosemite, Arrowhead, etc. Not too many ocean, that was always unaffordable for working joes. In my cohort [2], the unmarried of us own small houses, and the married and divorced […]
Tagged boomer, Gen X, home prices, OWS, tuition