I am sitting in a room. It’s November 2nd, 2020, the day before the United States presidential election, half past eight in the evening, Greenwich Mean Time. The room is small, cluttered and only lit by cool dim LED fairy lights and the glow of my iPad. The only sound I hear is the whirrrrring […]
Author Archives: admin
James Randi
This BoingBoing piece conveys what always made me deeply uneasy about James Randi. He was very good at proving that a lot of people are scam artists and a lot of other people are gullible, but he was actively detrimental to actual scientific investigation of unexplained phenomena and claims of the paranormal – which I […]
The center cannot hold.
So here we are, a week away from the 2020 US election, which will almost certainly decide whether or not the United States has a future as a viable nation-state. If that seems like an exaggeration, you probably don’t really understand the scale of the mess America is in. There is, for only maybe the […]
The Trick Is That There Is No Trick.
Now I’m not all I thought I’d be I always stayed around I’ve been as far as Mercy and Grand Frozen to the ground I can’t stay here, and I’m scared to leave So kiss me once, and then I’ll go to hell, I might as well Be whistlin’ down the wind. — Tom Waits […]
A response to Zoë Keating’s post about YouTube
[I don’t post comments on other people’s blog posts much these days, because as we all know the comments section is usually the equivalent of the pit underneath the blog’s outhouse. But I did post a response to Zoë Keating’s What Should I Do About YouTube, which has been making the rounds, and I thought it […]
Roasted Mango And Cheese Stuffed Bacon Wrapped Mini-Bell Peppers
As far as I know, this is my own invention, a sort of king-hell mashup of stuffed peppers and Sonoran hot dogs, which are perhaps the finest thing ever invented by our friends south of the border. Ingredients Roughly 1/2 bag, mini-bell peppers. These have been popping up in stores for the last couple of years, […]
Downbound Project
[Update: an official statement from the DTP says that 30 employees, or 10% of its staff, are being laid off, not 30%. However, it also gives the impression that many of its projects are being shut down or defunded, which means that the people employed by those projects – and therefore not technically DTP employees […]
Help Me Get To Ferguson
[thermometer raised=2005 target=2000] I want to go to Ferguson, MO to cover the unfolding story there. But I can’t do it without money — I need expense money and, quite frankly, I need to cover my own bills while I’m down there, as I won’t be able to do the contract work and part-time editing […]
Everyone I know is brokenhearted.
All the genuinely smart, talented, funny people I know seem to be miserable these days. You feel it on Twitter more than Facebook, because Facebook is where you go to do your performance art where you pretend to be a hip, urbane person with the most awesomest friends and the best relationships and the very […]
Untitled Notes Towards An Understanding.
Here’s one thing we know, and know for sure: dumb matter and energy can become self-aware. How do we know? Because we know; because we are dumb matter and energy, and we are self-aware. Si cogitationem mundo: if we can think, the world can. The only question — but boy, it’s a doozy — is how. Is consciousness […]