Thanks to Dave Delaney for this one.
How’s This for Dark Thoughts?
Once again, on the subject of why we can’t have the keys to the Cosmic Ferrari… I am preparing a presentation for a conference in North Carolina in June. Consider this the...
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My Family Thinks I’m Crazy
As you all know by now, it has been my privilege to be interviewed on several podcasts over the past few months, finally fulfilling my lifelong delusion that someday, somebody might think I have...
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‘Tis The (new) Season (2)
Just a few days later… This morning, the Bradford Pears are fully bloomed. In fact, on some of the trees in the neighborhood, the blossoms had already fallen and been replaced by their green...
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Joe and Nick and… Me!
Thanks to Jesse Michels (@AlchemyAmerican) for my first “joint appearance” with @joerogan and @iamnickcook as we all speculate about the deployment of the Biefeld-Brown effect in the B2 Stealth...
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‘Tis the (new) Season ?
Winter: it’s the season that goes on as long as you can possibly endure it* … and then it goes on a while longer. Apparently the Bradford Pear trees up the street from me have not gotten...
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My 15 Minutes Is Has Arrived
OK, this might actually be some kind of big deal. A few months ago, I wrote about going out to Los Angeles to spend an afternoon with Jesse Michels about the Townsend Brown bio. This evening, Jesse...
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Hey Kids, That’s Me Up On the Pod-Box (Again)
Well kids, I’m at it again. It’s actually been a couple of months since I recorded this. The producers took their time adding some visual effects to the YouTube version above, and it was...
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…as neatly crystalized in the title of a podcast that showed up in my RSS feed last week.
Commentary Magazine is a tolerable source of conservative perspective on current affairs – which is to say, a useful alternative to the MAGA/QAnon/Tucker Looney Tunes that passes for ‘conservative’ in some circles these days. This episode offered a recap of the recent primary elections in Ohio and Nebraska and a preview of the primary in Pennsylvania.
F. Scott Fitzgerald said:
The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.
I keep sources like ‘Commentary’ and Andrew Sullivan in my daily infostream – along with the usual left-leaning sources like the NYTimes and Wonkette – just to keep the Fitzgerald Quadrant of my cerebral cortex in reasonable working order.
In the 1980s, when I was living in Hawaii, Ted Turner’s WTBS cable superstation was our only live TeeVee and I started watching Atlanta Braves games My new-found fandom was eventually rewarded with tickets to the first World Series game ever played in the former Confederacy, Game 3 of the 1991 Series between Atlanta and the Minnesota Twins.
Sometime during those years I went to San Diego to see the Braves play the Padres. I was rooting for the visiting team. What surprised me was the derision and verbal abuse directed at me (and my then first future ex-wife Georja) just because we had come to San Diego to root for the Braves.
How absurd, I thought. Show some respect for the opposition: If there was no opposing team there would be no game for fucksake*.
I think that’s why I found this story so heartwarming:
Watch Blue Jays fan’s gesture after Aaron Judge
home run bring young Yankees fan to tears
(I originally saw this story in an online publication called The Athletic, but that site is behind paywall so I found another source with similar footage)
I hope to read in tomorrow’s sportsball news that Aaron Judge found Derek Rodriquez before today’s game and signed that ball for him.
Baseball: possible evidence that there is a loving God. Even in San Diego.
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*This rule does not apply in Boston. If you go to a Yankees/Red Sox game at Fenway Park, you root for the Red Sox, I don’t care what team you grew up with.
Back in May of 2020 – during the pandemic – I got a kitten.
The woman who gave me the kitten told it was a male, and for some reason now lost to posterity I started calling him “Buster.”
When I took Buster to the vet, they informed me that the kitten was actually female. I was relieved because snuggling a male cat seemed oddly gay to me (yeah, I know, #homophobic).
However, In the interest of gender neutrality I kept the name (does that mean I have to declare her pronouns?).
Buster is now a full grown cat, but for the sake of those who are new to the list or missed the original posts, I think I’ll go back and use photos from the first year in the banner for the weekly(ish) ‘Buster Sez Hey!’ emails.
The one that I’m using this month (May, 2022) is from the first weekend I had her. She’s pretty much ‘fresh outta the box’ I brought her home with in this one.
Fall is my favorite season, but the middle of April is my favorite time of the year.
That’s when the foliage begins to return, when the grey landscape of winter takes on a fringe of green.
I see it everywhere – on my morning walks, when I’m driving around and see a hill in the distance that has begun to show hints of the green to come.
It’s the fringe, and its suggestion of renewal (another winter survived!) that appeals to me.
But, boy, is that fringe hard to capture in a photo.
Here are a few attempts.
Not my best work ever, but, well… you get the idea.
In another week or two, the foliage will be filled in, summer will near, and the scene won’t change much util October.
These photos were shot with an iPhone 13 Pro and edited in Adobe Lightroom and Luminar Neo.
And if you have any doubt as to the fleeting quality of the weeks just past, well, this is what my neighborhood looks like now (May 2, 2022):
Every morning for the past several years now (thanks, Jerry), the first thing I do once I hoist myself out of bed is put on my sneakers and go for a two-or-three mile walk before I re-plant myself in a chair with my coffee and laptop.
Over the past week or so (late April) it seems this year’s crop of dandelions have all come and gone. Mostly they look like this now:
…which is to say, they have scattered their seed to the wind and what remains will return to the earth for another year.
But a couple of mornings ago, I found one that was nestled in among some bushes, still completely intact in its ‘just before it all gets blown away’ phase. It made a nice image with the macro lens on my iPhone 13 Pro.
I was not familiar with the author Emily St. John Mandel until earlier this year when I tuned into the HBO Limited Series Station Eleven – the ‘show about a pandemic created in the middle of a pandemic.’ That series was simply one of the most compelling things I’ve watched on the TeeVee in the past year, at least.
This past week I learned – via Ezra Klein’s podcast – that Mandel (St. John Mandel?) has a released a new novel, Sea of Tranquility.
I found this quotation in the in the first few pages. Kinda reminds me of myself… I go through life with the pin in one had and the grenade in the other, wondering where I’m gonna toss it….
Also, it’s a perfectly sublime Sunday afternoon here in the Treehouse with Buster. I am not missing working in the mall on weekends. 
Just read this.
If you have been getting the old Cohesion Arts Weekly Digest, you’re already subscribed to the new version, “Buster Sez Hey!” But the Dunbar List will have a slightly different purpose, so if you want to be on that sub-set of the master list, please let me know.
It’s been almost a year since I deactivated my Facebook account (in June, 2021) – so I guess this is long overdue, but now that I have embarked on “My Dunbar Project“ I suppose a bit of retro-perspective is in order.
I stopped using Facebook for three reasons:
1. Vanquishing the ‘Poke and Scroll.’ Anybody who has ever used social media recognizes the impulse: you poke at the screen and scroll to the next thing, and the next thing, and all the things after that. Surely the next thing will satisfy the craving. Sound familiar? This compulsive behavior is not a bug, it’s the whole fucking point of social media: to keep you on the platform. Maybe others have better self-control, but it’s not a safe temptation for anybody who is even slightly OCD (and in the digital era, who is not?) – or recovering alcoholic types.
2. The environment is a toxic swamp. Yes, services like Facebook have their merits, even if it’s often just an illusion of connection more than the real thing. But much what passes for ‘conversation’ on Facebook quickly descends in to chaos and rage. What’s the slogan, “if it enrages, it engages” (which brings us back to point #1 above). The stated mission of Facebook is “a more open and connected world.” But it’s actual purpose, it’s business model, is to keep people using the site and hoovering up as much personal data as possible and then capitalizing on that data. Which brings us to reason #3:
3. In the digital economy, we are all vassals and peasants: I’ve written about this before, and others have expressed it more eloquently than I ever will:
“when the service is free – then you are the product”
Every minute that we spend uploading ‘content’ – photos, posts, comments, replies – to social media, we are supplying our labor for free while unimaginable wealth rises to the top of the pyramid. I suppose it was ever thus, wealth has always ascends in one form or another. And sure, there are some who make their living plowing the digital fields of social media. But as long as I’m one of the unpaid peasants, I’ll toil in my own non-remunerative fields, thank you very much.
That’s it in a nutshell. And while I can say that I don’t miss the whole poke-and-scroll-enragement-feudal-environment, I do miss the occasional brush with people I actually care about.
If you might be one of those people, then please check out My Dunbar Project and fill out the form.
And if you have any doubt about how pernicious this Neo Feudal Digital State is, then watch the entirety of this expose by John Oliver (April 10, 2022). By all means keep posting and commenting, but don’t kid yourself what’s really going on:
*