Open thread 10/21/21
Drew Barrymore, age 7, on the Johnny Carson show, discoursing on the subject of teeth:
The New Neo
A blog about political change, among other things
Drew Barrymore, age 7, on the Johnny Carson show, discoursing on the subject of teeth:
At one time, she seemed like one of the world’s hopeless cases, and some of that has been manifest not just in her youth but throughout her life (e.g. three marriages ending in divorce not to mention a 5-year long shack up). On the other hand, she’s been continuously employed as an actress, producer, and performer for over forty years; she must have some skills.
Little Drew is delightful and smart, natural charmer and Johnny Carson knew how to be kind and gentle and draw funny stuff out of his guests. He was great for letting the guest be the main attraction most of the time instead of alway being on just for himself at the expense of the person sitting next to him.
You say “F’libuster”, I say, “NO! CLOTURE!!”
Let’s call the whole thing off…
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/republicans-filibuster-democrats-election-bill
(With Chuck Schumer in another cameo role as B***s*****r-in-Chief….)
I wonder if this is a legit story and a high integrity site.
Still. Would you be completely surprised to learn that devices listen too much? Or you may have inadvertently enabled info gathering for “quality/debugging purposes”? Or that govt agencies can remotely turn on a “listening mode” if they get a warrant?
https://100percentfedup.com/shocked-woman-finds-amazon-folder-with-thousands-of-audio-recordings-from-her-home-gadgets-video/
Shocked Woman Finds Amazon Folder with Thousands of Audio Recordings from Her Home Gadgets
More non-surprises from our lamentably corrupt media:
“Nets Censor Devastating Poll Numbers for Collapsing Biden Presidency”
https://newsbusters.org/blogs/nb/scott-whitlock/2021/10/20/nets-censor-devastating-poll-numbers-collapsing-biden-presidency
Marvelous. Either she was charmingly ingenuous, or was already an accomplished actress. I choose to believe the former.
I didn’t really appreciate Johnny Carson for a long time because I did not understand. Old Texan is spot on.
Johnny Carson knew how to be kind and gentle and draw funny stuff out of his guests
Agreed. He did an interview with Quinn Cummings ca. 1978 that might be worth posting if one can locate it. Cummings quit acting 30 years ago, but she does blog now and again and has had some videos up.
A new Grinnell College national poll is out. My take is that are a couple hopeful items in it, but more of the opposite.
That clip is charming. Comedy TV used to be funny.
A new Grinnell College national poll is out. My take is that are a couple hopeful items in it, but more of the opposite.
Are you expecting an 80% turnout the next presidential election? If not, you get a sense of the limits of the validity of some of the answers.
Petition to Pope Francis to formally discipline Joe Biden over abortion at Rome meeting: https://lifepetitions.com/petition/call-on-pope-francis-to-reprimand-joe-biden-on-abortion
Art Deco on Grinnell poll: the first 4 items sound right in valence and amount to me.
But #9? God, I hope not!
But I’m sure that these are not what most people think about much. Or maybe I hope they don’t.
For sentimental reasons I’ve been comparing the Hayley Mills “Parent Trap” (1961) with the Lindsey Lohan remake (1998).
I loved the original movie as a kid, so I expected to have some trouble liking the new one. But after a bad summer camp scene in which the twins are playing p o k e r with George Thorogood singing “Bad to the Bone” on the soundtrack, the film recovered more of the previous sweetness I remembered.
“Parent Trap” was Lohan’s breakout film and she is quite good, though not as innocently adorable as Hayley Mills.
I gather Lohan has had a dificult personal life since. I generally don’t admire film stars, but I sure don’t assume I would handle stardom any better.
Zaphod:
My Ghost Canyon has arrived and is now running. Great so far.
Very quiet, although I’ve no graphics card, which would seem to be the acid test for the fans.
Amazingly small — about the size of child’s school lunch box.
I’m not stressing it yet. I’ll have to see if those extra cores make a difference in transcoding video.
I’ll have to figure out what to do with the Thunderbolt ports. New to me.
@Art Deco:
She’s descended from a line of showbiz royalty. That helps. I guess, too, that these days there are so many porky paying female consumers of streamed crap that it makes sense to cater to their self esteem by ladling out generous regular servings of Drew Barrymore.
TJ,
Yes, #9 is a little surprising. I believe that part of the reason only 30% thinks the SCOTUS follows the Constitution and the law is because many Dems and leftists have bought into the idea that the problem are those pesky hyper-political conservatives who legislate from the bench.
@Huxley:
That’s great. There’s a lot of satisfaction in jumping a few generations in PCs. I never tire of the perceived snappiness of the new box.
What to do with TB ports? Why, it’s obvious: spend more on expensive TB peripherals than you did on the NUC itself!
When you get a graphics card, you might feel tempted to daisy chain two TB 4K displays.
TB is great for people who capture lots of video and need to get it into their editing machine or NAS quick fast. For my boring old regular backups, I just buy cheapo 5GB USB 3.0 spinning drives off Amazon.
Zaphod:
I had never heard of daisy chaining monitors until now! I only remember chaining SCSI drives together.
The Intel 630 onboard graphics will handle three monitors — two via Thunderbolts — but I’m not sure about daisy chaining. One web source says you can although one is limited to 1920×1080.
I do want to explore some new tech. Plus I confess I was still running Windows 7 on my main desktop and increasingly more stuff wouldn’t run there. Rather than upgrade, just buy a new machine. What the heck!
@Huxley:
An argument against buying TB Only Monitors is that when you come to put a graphics card in that machine, you’re likely to find that it it only supports HDMI (cannot daisy chain) and DisplayPort (can daisy chain) — this because not so many cards can fit in that size box. This being one:
https://www.asus.com/Motherboards-Components/Graphics-Cards/Dual-Mini/DUAL-RTX2070-8G-MINI/techspec/
I read somewhere that Zotac also make a card can fit.
My goodness, I have no idea what you all are talk’n bout.
I started showing my with this clip and ended getting the whole long 18 min thingy and it was a lot of fun.. What a great time to see an innocent, delightful, intelligent, young lady carrying on her conversation, Kind of reminds me of my most delightful, intelligent, young grand children today.
What a wonderful bit Johnny Carson TV when you see the whole long bit and thank you Neo. I really miss the old time TV of yesteryear.
Old Texan:
Yes, the changes between Carson and the sort of talk show hosts (and popular entertainment) we have now have been immense.
You can see it in TV, movies, books, art – just about every part of our culture.
Yes, and that change began a while back. I’ll never forget tuning in to Letterman one night because Lucy Lawless was going to be on and I was a fan of her show Xena. Letterman asked her where she was from and she told him, New Zealand. He then spent the rest of the segment telling her what little he knew about Australia. I’m sure he felt good, but it was neither informative nor entertaining for anybody else.
Zaphod:
O brave new world! There is much I have to learn.
Thanks for the advice.
Aside from the PDP-11 at college, my first computer was a TRS-80 16K, then I moved up to an Apple II, which I eventually outfitted to 64K with two 512K floppies and a Z80 card plus CP/M so I could learn C. All that cost me close to $4000 in 1980 dollars.
That was my entry fee. I studied and gigged until I was an official professional programmer on the Mac.
We’ve come so far. I reflected the other day that I came into the industry when it was in its biplane stage and now I’ve got a jet on my desk.
@OldTexan:
Don’t be taken in by all the big tech words. More often than not I’m reduced to plugging stuff into other stuff until I get something which works. And then I try not to change anything! Good way to acquire an impressive-looking spare parts bin, too.
@Huxley:
Nearest I got to a PDP-11 and its simple, beautiful architecture was 68000 assembler as a student. Didn’t own a PC of my own until 1988. It had a beefy 20MB hard drive and it could run Turbo C Version 1. Luxury! When writing plotting routines, had to scale for pixels being longer than they were tall…and emit HP Pen Plotter language if wanted decent hard copy of measurement plots. As you say, it’s amazing how far things have come.
Also amazing what hooking them all up to each other has done to my attention span… never all upside.
Rather good and short podcast by Morgoth:
Britain: A Land Without Truth
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRWet-RQUnE
Only 14 minutes. In it he discusses the recent killing by a Somali of David Amess MP whilst meeting with his constituents inside a church. He looks at how the UK Establishment quickly turned this killing by a Muslim foreigner who in a sane world should never have been wandering free range in country into an attack on Legacy Britons and fodder for a campaign to abolish online anonymity.
It also offers an interesting insight into the political apathy of Normies who just want to be left alone and not have to keep up with the ever-changing ‘Truths’ they are forced to acquiesce to.
US Readers might enjoy this because it’s the same but different. Think of it as an aid to taking a step backwards and viewing things perhaps more clearly at a remove.
Zaphod:
I fell in love with 68000 assembler because in the early days of the Mac you sometimes had drop down to that level to debug your C code. When I moved to the PC and looked at 8088, it was the dog’s breakfast.
I recall being horrified that Windows NT required 16MB RAM and 100 MB of free hard disk to run. Unheard of for PCs then. Today I have 2000x as much of both.
And NT was so horrible to install. I spent over 100 hours installing and reinstalling NT on different machines.
Yet NT was still a beautiful thing, so when it reached perfection of a sort with Windows 7 in 2009, I stood pat until the past year.
BTW, did you ever read any Ted Nelson? It was his “Computer Lib/Dream Machines” book that hooked me in the 70s.
@Huxley:
Right about 8086 family architecture / assembler: it just felt Ugly. Pirsig would not have approved.
Had not heard at all of Ted Nelson. Turns out he was editor of Creative Computing Magazine ca. 1980 for about a year.. which is a bit weird because that was first computer magazine I ever paid any attention to ca. 7th/8th grade and the editor’s name I can still remember: David H Ahl. And they’re both still alive and kicking.
A bit later discovered Byte and Jerry Pournelle.
@ Zaphod > “Good way to acquire an impressive-looking spare parts bin, too.”
https://babylonbee.com/news/wife-throws-away-incredibly-specific-adapter-cable-youve-held-on-to-for-7-years-day-before-you-suddenly-find-a-use-for-it
@AesopFan:
I don’t even need a wife to manage that feat of self-defeat!
It gets better when you need it real soon now and you know you still have it somewhere but can’t remember where you put it and figure out that it will be quicker to order another one on Amazon from the other side of the planet because you know that it’ll be delivered faster than you have any realistic hope of finding the damn thing.
Some glorious day there will be One Connector to Rule Them All.
Zaphod:
Ted Nelson was the Computer Pied Piper of that era and a visionary who saw much of what was to come. He coined the term “hypertext” and made plans for a global computer network called Xanadu. A very engaging fellow and writer as well. I met him at the first Hacker’s Conference. (Pournelle too.)
Ah…Xanadu. I tracked that dream for years. I hadn’t yet learned that Big Talk =/= Big Results. Turned out that while Nelson was brilliant, he was afflicted with an extreme ADD. For the full saga:
https://www.wired.com/1995/06/xanadu/
So Nelson survives in his writings, which sadly are becoming more difficult to find. Here’s Alan Kay’s tribute to Ted:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AnrlSqtpOkw (skip to 13:00)
More recently Nelson has popped up with his speculation as to the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin creator — a Japanese mathematician, Shinichi Mochizuki.
A toast to dear old Ted.
@ Zaphod > “you know that it’ll be delivered faster than you have any realistic hope of finding the damn thing.”
One of my organization books (I need to get all of those organized some day…) specifically recommends NOT keeping “spare parts and things you know you will need someday” because you usually can’t find them.
However, I kind of hedge my bets on that, because I grew up when Amazon didn’t deliver to your door the next day, and sometimes I need it RIGHT NOW and have no idea what local stores will sell that (if there even is one; see “Amazon kills small retailers” on the internet screen near you).
The best scheme I’ve come up with is Zoning, based on the mantra “Put everything in its place” and adding “or at least don’t put it in the wrong place.”
Some things don’t necessarily have a particular place to be (usually one-of-a-kind gadgets), but I make sure not to put them in a place with other things that are of a different classification. Cooking with cooking; electronics with electronics; plumbing with plumbing. Don’t put the spare measuring cups in the drawer with the extra screw-drivers sort of thing.
AesopFan:
When I was a teenager, it seemed half my friends had fathers with work areas in a shed or the back of the garage with a billion tiny plastic compartments or baby food jars stocked with screws, nuts, washers and whatevers.
That’s a tradition which hasn’t survived much into the 21st C., for white collar fathers anyway.
@AesopFan:
I’ve read a few books along those lines, too… around the time the Mari Kondo craze kicked off. One was by a Japanese male author who said that one should treat Amazon, etc. as one’s warehouses and not hoard stuff. True enough in normal times. Come to think of it, my Gordian Knot of cables, connectors, and hubs isn’t likely to stand me in that much good stead after the Deluge.
@Huxley:
That’s right! Lots of jars. I’d forgotten that.
I read Kondo’s book, and she does have a lot of good ideas, but for me it was a non-starter because she was (at the time) single with no kids and it showed in her advice. And she never saved any kind of official papers “because you can always get another copy.”
Yeah, right.
I claim genetics for my quirks: my Dad had all those little jars, carefully labelled, and also the multi-drawer parts bins. However, he was always able to find what he wanted.
One day, he was mildly chiding my Mom for doing something he considered wasting time (I don’t remember what). She gently asked what he had been doing for the last three hours. “Sorting my old screws,” he admitted ruefully. Advantage: Mom.