Friday Notes (Apr 19, 2024)

Often, the hardest part of Friday Notes (and, in fact, most) posts is writing the lede. Very soon after I began back in 2011, I settled on a three-part opening structure consisting of (as my template puts it): Intro… More… Punchline… followed by the page break that divides the lede from the body of the post.

That page break comes into play when WordPress lists a bunch of posts as well as in the notification emails (except in the double-damned WordPress Reader, which corrupts everything in the name of sameness). And while I’m on the topic of WordPress, I’m getting really fed up with it.

But that’s a post for another day. For now, I’ve got Notes…

Usually, I try to write posts at least a day ahead of their intended publish date and then set them up to auto-publish in the morning (hoping to catch people early in the day). Any post published after, say, noon was written (or sometimes finished) that day. In which case I often end up having to correct all the errors that slip through on the first writing.

But, as has been scientifically tested and proven (no, not really), the number of proofreadings required to remove all errors is N+1 where N is the actual number of proofreadings done. This holds regardless of the size of N, so, in some sense, it hardly really matters.

Seeing as it’s already 2:40 PM here, I’m obviously writing this post today. You can check the publication date to see how long it took to read. (Add about five minutes for getting this far.)

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The reason I’m writing this today is that I’ve been hosting my pal Bentley since last Friday, and I’d much rather hang out with her than sit here at the computer. She’s a delightful guest and a very funny dog. Her mom came by around noon to pick her up, so, as the song goes, “Alone again, naturally.”

Bentley demonstrating the “downward dog” yoga position.

It’s always a little melancholy when she goes! As much as I’ve loved all the dogs I’ve known (especially my last dog, Sam), there is something especially adorable about Bentley. She’s sweet, easy-going, and often cracks me up.

This trip she had me laughing (my ass off) twice. So funny that I was chuckling for many minutes afterwards.

The first was when we were out for a walk earlier this week. The weather here has been pretty nice and ideal for walking. Not too hot, but not too cold (until today when the temperature sank to the mid-30s). What you need to know here is that Bentley loathes being rained on. She’ll generally refuse to go out if it’s even sprinkling. We got caught in a downpour last year and she was as miserable as I’ve ever seen her.

We had a rainy-day Tuesday (or maybe it was Wednesday; doesn’t matter), but there was a break in it that I took advantage of to drive to a local park for a walk. Which was fine, but as we walked back to the car, Bentley indicated (in that doggy way of hers) that she wasn’t quite ready to go home, so we wandered around a bit more.

Then we got hit by a few light raindrops. That was enough for her, so we headed back to the car. By the time we got there, it was definitely raining, and Bentley was bumming. Usually, I open the rear door of the car, she puts her front paws up on the seat, and I lift her butt in and onto the rear seat.

This time she scrambled into the car quick as lightening! She’s never done that before, but difficulty level be damned, she wasn’t spending one more second being rained on. I laughed all the way home.

Bentley sleeping in her own bed.

The second time she cracked me up was during our end-of-night routine. We go for a short last walk, I shower, and then we’re off to bed. I have a blanket I used to put on her side, but lately I’ve been bringing her bed in and putting that on her side of my bed. And while she’ll lay down on her blanket or bed at first, by the time I get out of the shower, she’s invariably somewhere else in the house. I’ve never been able to figure out why.

Wednesday night I thought I’d wait until I got out of the shower before I prepped the bed, just to see what she’d do. I figured I’d find her either on the living room couch or in her bed (which is usually by the couch).

I come out of the shower and find that she’s pulled down the counterpane and top sheet on my side of the bed and is sitting in there just in front of my pillow. Sitting, not laying down, so clearly waiting for my reaction. Which was prolonged laughter. I only wish the photo I tried to take turned out.

Damn! This was supposed to be one of the funniest pictures ever.

All I got was a blur. Not sure what happened, but damn, what a shot to miss. I repeated the new protocol last night hoping she’d do it again, but she was in her bed (by the couch) when I got out of the shower. Maybe she didn’t like being laughed at.

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[3:10 PM] I’m getting really tired of science fiction and comics authors who don’t understand (or don’t care about) the difference between the Solar system, star systems, galaxies, or the universe. Lately, I’ve noticed several casual misuses of these, and it bugs me.

Most notably, Invincible, both the comic and the animated series on Amazon Prime. Many authors seem to use “galaxy” when they mean “star system”, which bugs me as much as authors who think a light-year is a unit of time.

The Invincible comic is… okay, but superhero stories tend to be as inherently self-contradictory as time-travel stories. Very few authors get either right. (It’s basically impossible to get them right, because both notions are utter bunkum.)

Key to Invincible is the planet Viltrum, which the comic says is “billions of miles away”. So, it’s out near Pluto, which is about 4.6 billion miles away? Our closest neighbor star, Alpha Centauri, is about 25 trillion miles away. The animated series is even worse, saying it’s “millions of miles away”. Jupiter is about 500 million miles away.

That’s some serious stupidity for a science fiction show. (It has aliens as well as superheroes, so it’s science-fiction.)

A galaxy — with 100 billion stars.

Frankly, the whole show is pretty stupid, even for a superhero show. I’ve been re-watching it because I’m reading the comic, and once again, the adaptation is notably worse than its text. Not that the comic is that great, but it’s much better than the show. [I recently wrote about Resident Alien, where the comic was quite good, but the adaptation was crap.]

“Millions of miles away.” Ouch and damnit.

Worse, the series seems to revel in blood, gore, and mass death (while being coy about sex — America’s fucked up values). And the basic storyline is pretty stupid in itself. I may have to vent my spleen in a rant post once I finish them both.

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[3:28 PM] While I’m ranting about peeves, I’ve written about this one before but have noticed it again recently, so here (briefly) it is again.

I hate it when characters order food in a restaurant (or whatever) and then leave without eating it. Or finishing their drinks. Maybe it’s from being raised by depression-era parents who were poor-ish, but I was taught to not waste food. It really annoys me when I see it in a movie or TV show.

Like, really annoys me.

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[3:33 PM] Okay, one more peeve. In the last Friday Notes, I wrote about how people don’t push their shopping carts all the way into the corrals in the parking lot. That wasn’t a peeve, just one of those things that makes me wonder about people.

What is a peeve is this shit:

I guess it was just too much effort to walk over to the cart corral.

Not pushing the cart all the way into the corral is one thing, but this reflects a self-centered laziness that’s one reason humans can’t have good things. People who do this need a firm spanking. There’s no excuse.

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[3:43 PM] A quote from a (good) science fiction book caught my eye and is worth sharing:

“Kind is better than cruel — I’m sure of that. Loose is better than rigid. Love is better than indifference. So is hate. Laughing is the best. Not laughing will kill you. Alone is okay. Not alone is way better. That’s about it . . . and in my life so far there’s not a single one of them that’s always been true.” ~Spider Robinson, Very Bad Deaths, said by main character Russell Walker

Year ago, Spider Robinson was one of my favorite SF authors. I think I’ve matured away from him a bit (or maybe it was that I’d read — and bought — most of his books), but I did enjoy Very Bad Deaths and the sequel, Very Hard Choices.

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Do people actually still say “drop a dime”?

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[3:55 PM] I reported a while ago that email spam and robocalls had all but vanished at the beginning of the year. Supposedly because of a new law Congress had passed. Since then, I’m seeing a little bit more email spam, although nothing like I used to get (as many as two dozen per day). Spam here on WordPress remains near zero, too.

But lately, I’ve been getting a lot more robocalls. I never answer my landline (because no one I know calls it, so it’s always some bullshit), but I suspect these might be due to the coming election.

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[4:02 PM] Speaking of the election, we can thank modern AI for the coming onslaught of fake news, misinformation, and disinformation. It’s even a problem in the sciences, with fake papers.

And I saw a video recently (from the Legal Eagle channel) about some lawyers who got in serious legal trouble because they used ChatGPT to generate legal briefs. Problem: these AI generators hallucinate and make stuff up. The cases cited didn’t exist. Oops!

This seems to reflect a growing problem of incompetence and stupidity in modern culture — which almost seems to encourage lack of thought or excellence. I’ve seen some serious stupidity in Hollywood writers and directors, airline pilots and ATC controllers (which is terrifying), and even scientists. A fatal crash at an airshow in 2022 was due to the incompetence of the airboss running the show.

Even Apple and Google have annoyed me lately with stupid software, but I think in their case it’s because they don’t care about users.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran pastor hanged by Hitler, famously wrote:

Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force. Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease. Against stupidity we are defenseless. Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed — in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical — and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental.

I keep meaning to start posting more about stupid people but have been putting it off because I don’t want to seem mean. But damn it’s hard to put up with, and it seems to an epidemic.

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[4:18 PM] Speaking of stupid, the current political Right. Let me hasten to say that I believe a country needs both a progressive force and a conservative force, and I have many conservative values (but identify as libertarian). Without conservatives, the progressives tend to run off cliffs without looking, and without progressives a culture stagnates.

But, damn, the current political right be stupid beyond belief. You have to be seriously disconnected from facts, reality, or common sense to think Donald Trump is a good idea. The guy is an incompetent moron, it’s obvious every time he opens his mouth.

Recently, the Right worked up a lather because the International Transgender Day of Visibility, which started in 2009 (15 years ago), is on March 31st. Which this year happened to be Easter. So, lots of protesting by people this doesn’t affect in the slightest way.

World Backup Day is also March 31st, and so what? With only 365 days in the year, each day typically has a lot of associated events. If it doesn’t affect you directly, why do you care?

In any event, it got me wondering about Easter dates, so I downloaded a data file of the Easter dates from 1600 to 2099 — 500 years.

Easter dates histogram over a 500-year period. [Click for big’n]

And I’ll grant that March 31st is tied with April 16th for most occurrences, but April 5th and April 11th are close runners up. Bottom line, though, March 31st doesn’t in any way, shape, or form, “own” Easter, so once again the Right is trying to spin gold from straw.

It makes it very hard to have any regard or respect for the modern Right.

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[4:35 PM] As usual I’m running long, and I do have a lot more Notes, but I’ll wrap things up.

Long ago, early in the century, I was walking my dog, Sam, and wondered what kind of trees I was seeing. For some reason (and I can’t explain this), I decided they were linden trees. Not that I had any conscious idea what a linden tree was or any experience with them. But that’s what they turned out to be (per Wikipedia).

Recently, I’ve wondered what these little skinny and very fast bugs I sometimes see lurking on my bathroom floor are. I decided — without a clue — that they might be silverfish.

I’ve been wondering what these are! They’re very fast.

And once again, that turns out to be right. As with the linden trees, I’ve only heard the term, but have no experience with them and don’t have any memory of seeing them anywhere.

Makes me wonder about my brain! What dots is it connecting?

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[4:45 PM] I threw an equinox party for the gang (also celebrating the birthdays of two local friends and an old college friend in San Diego):

Goodies for the Equinox party!

The two square white bowls had baked beans in one and a rice dish in the other, the platters (lower right; there are two of them) I filled with sausages and cheeses. Not shown, and why I’m mentioning this, was the dip I made. Here’s the recipe:

• One can of Hormel Angus Beef Chili with Beans
• One can of frijoles refritos, either black or pinto beans.
• One 8-ounce brick of Philadelphia Cream Cheese.
• About 8 ounces of fresh (dairy case) salsa.
• 5 small bunches of chopped green onions.

Heat, stir, repeat until well mixed. Great on its own, but awesome with corn chips. Using cream cheese instead of a regular cheese prevents the stringiness like you usually get with melted cheese.

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[4:58 PM] Yes, I do know that, technically, a lede is a single paragraph, but the term seems to fit the 1, 2, 3 structure I use to kick off a post.

Stay delicious, my friends! Go forth and spread beauty and light.

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