It is coincidence, not design, that makes my small contributions so far this year into what seem like an endless reminiscence. Even so, I am forced by circumstance to write about water heaters then and now.
Screaming “coup” doesn’t make it so, though it might help someone perform one in the future. These disproportionate reactions, even from ordinarily reasonable folks, will not help stop the real or imagined problems of the new American administration.
Saturday will mark 20 years since the chilly day I arrived at this peculiar little house on a peculiar little farm in the Appalachian foothills. When you meet people they always ask what brought you here, and in my case, there’s no particular answer. The currents of life, I suppose. It was a gamble, as life tends to be.
KiiBoom isn’t exactly a name that rolls off the tongue. The company’s Phantom 81 is what their name is not: smooth, with glossy acrylic keys and custom lubricated switches.
In the early part of this century there was an imaginative musical ensemble, the Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players.
Through an exclusive breakthrough in quantum journalism, Open for Business has obtained a classified Soviet Union memorandum from an alternate timeline. The document from 1956 in that reality describes a service we never enjoyed, Tick Tock Radio (TTR), an initiative apparently key to that reality’s starkly divergent present day from our own.
In addition to its other attributes, winter is a time of low humidity. That gives static electricity opportunity to romp in its annoying way. It does dangerous things, too, such as making it easy for your city to burn down. We’ve joked for decades how January and February are the months of computer malfunctions, but it’s true: Static electricity caused by low humidity causes all kinds of otherwise inexplicable gremlins to invade our electronic devices.
Last week, I praised Meta’s move from censoring information to using Community Notes to provide transparent, crowdsourced accountability. This swift reversal is encouraging, but its speed and decisiveness warn of the dangers of centralized social media like Facebook, X and even Bluesky.
We’re 12 days away from being rid of Bugout Joe Biden and his technocratic though dimwitted minions. As the coming months unfold and more and more institutions come to realize that backing the Biden organized crime family was not the smart play, we are likely to give thanks that Biden and his monkeys, well, bidened everything up. Their incompetence has been the country’s salvation.
Meta’s decision to roll back its Big Brother approach to censoring speech will help the battle against misinformation far more than its more Orwellian efforts ever could. Counterintuitively as it may seem, this is the way to cultivate a culture of truth.