There is good cause for me to eye outdoor power tools with suspicion and fear. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, my first battle with a lawnmower ended in my defeat. (No, that’s not a pun — my left foot was sewn back together and remains an important part of me to this day.)
Does this make me sound old? I don’t really care. The U.S. TikTok ban is spot on and the Brazilian X ban is not. No “back in my day” speech required.
The time has come. The inevitable can be postponed no more. I’m switching my desktop computer to Debian Linux. I should have embraced Debian from the beginning. Please allow me to offer my excuse for not having done so 26 years ago.
After the long holiday weekend, the cable news talking heads returned to their flashy sets. One led with an impassioned speech about the horrors of the October 7 attack on Israel and the tragedy of the hostages killed this weekend — and didn’t immediately pivot to score a partisan point. That encapsulates upstart network NewsNation’s approach.
It was such a cute gadget. A tiny computer, brushed aluminum on the outside, with a decent keyboard (albeit with chicklet keys), a Thinkpad-ish pointing stick that would even take a grippy Thinkpad “cat’s tongue” insert. A fairly fast X86 Intel processor, enough storage, and 8 gigs of memory. And now it was on sale at a low price.
In Vice President Harris’s nomination speech, she labeled President Trump an “unserious man.” She was right, but she should know: she could wear the “unserious” label just fine herself.
Alvin Lee was a rock-and-roll singer, guitarist, and songwriter of some note. Anyone who has seen the “Woodstock” movie surely remembers him and his band, Ten Years After, performing “I’m Going Home.” It didn’t impart the sense that Lee was high in the intellectual hit parade. But he was at least a talented predictor of future events, as I was reminded this week.
Last week, Vice President Harris chose Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota to be her running mate for the fall presidential election. He’s an interesting person with many fine qualities, and perhaps even some compelling issue positions, depending upon your perspective. It must be said, however, that the Vice President and Governor Walz continue to uphold their national party’s extreme views on abortion, and the right to life.
WCBS Radio in New York, the originator of all-news broadcasting, will cease to exist before the month is out. Its famous call letters will disappear, replaced by something else. Rather than 24-hour live news, it will become round-the-clock sports discussion of interest primarily to gamblers. Also, there will be many ads for places where gamblers can lose their money. And other vices as well.
This will be a weird election, but not in the sense of uniqueness. If anything, 2024 is a race to find out who can best ignore recent history and doom the rest of us to repeat the weirdest aspects of it.