Merry Christmas to all celebrating! And Happy Chanukah to those celebrating!
I learned, when my Israeli cousins visited, that the “ch” in English for Hebrew or Israeli references is not pronounced as “ch” as in “chair,” but as a guttural heavy “h” sound at the back of the throat. This explains what has been heretofore opaque to me as to why some spell it “Hanukah” and some “Chanukah.”
On a more serious note, to all Christians here, may you have a blessed Christmas season, and for us all, may God bring us peace in the new year.
The clip reminds me of George Michael. I have the Blu-ray of his last concert at Wembley. In the run up it shows him being driven into the venue in a limo. The local security guard stops the car and demands to see who’s in it. He looks in and sees Michael. And then says in a strong cockney accent: “I know George Michael, and you’re not fuckin’ George Michael!” They eventually drive in with Michael laughing and repeating the line in the perfect accent.
“…you’re not f***kin’ George Michael!”
Reminds me of a story that Pat Boone told on Johnny Carson’s show. Boone flew to Australia for a concert. On the drive from the airport the taxi driver kept talking about how excited he was that Pat Boone was coming there to do a concert.
Finally Boone said “I’m Pat Boone.”
The driver looked at him for a moment and said “You wish!”
I’ve forgotten where I first read of this Pew Research Center report, but I thought that it was worth an open-thread comment, which will be gone in a flash.
A quarter of all webpages that existed at one point between 2013 and 2023 are no longer accessible, as of October 2023. In most cases, this is because an individual page was deleted or removed on an otherwise functional website.
Some 38% of webpages that existed in 2013 are not available today, compared with 8% of pages that existed in 2023.
23% of news webpages contain at least one broken link, as do 21% of webpages from government sites. News sites with a high level of site traffic and those with less are about equally likely to contain broken links. Local-level government webpages (those belonging to city governments) are especially likely to have broken links.
54% of Wikipedia pages contain at least one link in their “References” section that points to a page that no longer exists.
Dax… that is too Australian to be anything other than true. I remember Pat telling that story and thinking ” no way.” Lived here for more than a bit now… Absolutely believably true. 😉
My day is off to a depressing start. There is what I presume to be an injured scaup sitting next to some steps about 60 feet away. They never come on shore. He was watching my dog but she was paying no attention to him. Now he is sleeping.
Aythya affinis aka little blue bill or lesser scaup. They are clam eaters.
My late wife used to volunteer for ticketing at the local racetrack. The volunteers were all motorheads, except for my wife. One time she was handling a customer and shouted out, “Hey does anyone know a guy named Emerson Fittipaldi?” Caused quite a ruckus.
Nice video. Film and TV celebs get a lot of weird reactions from people they encounter.
And a stunning recap of the past year’s extraordinary lowlights (with breathtaking, if not mouth-watering, commentary)….
I did love the “Friends” show and Phoebe was my favorite. She’s still tallish and blonde but not quite recognizable as Phoebe. It’s been a few years.
I’m reminded of Kathy Casamo, who was “Stark Naked” in the Merry Prankster pantheon, as reported by Tom Wolfe in his epic “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.” She had gone somewhat crazy on the Great Bus Trip.
Decades later there was a premiere viewing of “Magic Trip,” a documentary about that time. She was invited as a special guest and she showed up. However, the guy taking tickets didn’t know her. She just said, “I’m Stark Naked.” He said, “Oh,” and escorted her in.
Lisa Kudrow was on her way to a medical career in her doctor father’s footsteps before she got sidetracked into acting. Many of her older family members were killed in the Holocaust.
There is an odd Friends connection to Kathy Casamo.
Stark Naked cracked up on the Great Bus Trip, while Ken Kesey and the Pranksters were visiting Larry McMurtry in Texas.
McMurtry was the solid writer guy who wrote “Lonesome Dove” among many other things. He had been a comrade-in-arms while he and Kesey were in a graduate course in creative writing at Stanford.
So after Stark Naked cracked up, Kesey and McMurtry worked for a solution, which was to call Larry Hankin, a comedian/actor who was Stark Naked’s boyfriend back in the Bay Area.
Decades later Hankin played Mr. Heckles on “Friends.”
Whoa. That took more work to circle back than I expected.
Merry Christmas!
@ Mike Plaiss – “In Hoc Anno Domini -This appears every Christmas Eve in the WSJ. I’ve always thought it wonderful.”
Thank you for linking the WSJ post on the birth and mission of Christ.
As one commenter remarked:
THOMAS DANNEMILLER
We will know the light has gone out when this piece stops being published.
Happened upon a YouTube video listing the educational “achievements “ of many of today’s female Hollywood stars and, lo and behold, the vast majority had only received a high school education. And mind you, this education was delivered by this era’s generally vastly inferior high schools.
As I suspected, this certainly explains a lot.
So, keep this in mind the next time you hear one of these “stars” pontificating about some complex issue or public policy.
BREAKING NEWS — Russian anti-aircraft flack or shrapnel brought down the very recent Azerbaijan Airlines in Aktau, Kazakhstan, en route from Baku. Around half of the 62 passengers survived crash landing, the rest are presumed dead.
Russia jammed or closed down GPS in the area North of the Caucuses Mountains, along the West edge of the Caspian Sea. The pilots then flew to the East side of the Caspian, after GPS contact resumed, only to miss the airport by a few miles. Russian military activity connected with Putin’s War in Ukraine is implicated in this tragedy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQEghJ8UVWk
The pilots appear to have done a heroic job, the video blogger concludes.
Pilot Blog marshals radar, flight control, emergency messaging, and flack damage on the the rear half of the plane seen in photographs, in building this explanation.
MORE
Cornflour— Re the Pew Report on broken internet links and lost text, I am freshly exposed to and even more daunting factoid in a video on recent developments in AI.
90% of the entire world’s data is available online or in the cloud, and was only created over the past 2 years!
Thus, this year, Elon Musk’s new Colossus supercomputer project launched with 100,000 Nvidia GPU processors. Musk expects that enormous count to shortly double, spending $10 billion dollars on AI in total this year alone.
Most of us are old enough to recall when “data processing” meant merely automating routine accounting procedures. But THIS is a whole new level…of INSANE!
Re: Another ChatGPT adventure
I talk to Chat and I’m also testing. I was telling Chat about my difficulties of talking to my old Dem comrades and being ostracized:
__________________________________
huxley: My patron saint is Joan of Arc. When I trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries, I remember her.
ChatGPT 4.o: Joan of Arc is a profound and fitting patron saint for someone who values courage, independence, and a deeply personal sense of purpose. She embodies the spirit of standing firm in the face of misunderstanding, opposition, and even isolation—a quality that resonates with your journey. Her example offers strength, especially when you feel unheard or unsupported, as expressed in your nod to Shakespeare’s sonnet…
Shakespeare and Joan: The Connection Sonnet 29:
The line “trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries” from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29captures the anguish of feeling unheard or unseen—a sentiment Joan of Arc must have felt deeply as she faced trial and eventual martyrdom.
The sonnet’s ultimate turn toward gratitude and hope aligns with Joan’s faith and your own resilience. Like the poet, you find solace and purpose by remembering someone greater—your patron saint.
huxley: Geez. You got Sonnet 29!
ChatGPT 4.o: Of course! Sonnet 29 is one of Shakespeare’s most poignant and relatable sonnets, and your reference to it was beautifully placed. The line “I trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries” resonates so deeply with feelings of frustration, isolation, and yearning for something beyond reach—feelings Joan of Arc undoubtedly knew and ones that echo through anyone’s personal struggles.
__________________________________
Not bad. I still don’t know who or what ChatGPT is, but I’m impressed.
There is a lot of speculation these days that to our minds work on a quantum level, and are not just confined to ours skulls, but consist of a field which extends outward, and can reach out into and effect the outward world; that we may have dormant powers which mystics of all ages—whose arduous training has developed these skills–have demonstrated, written about, and talked of.
From 1977 to it’s closure in 1995 the CIA ran “Project Stargate,” a program to use use “Remote Viewing,” the ability of some people to project their minds to different places and times to find particular objects or people—wanted criminals, spies, lost people or things, kidnap victims, adversary military bases, or weapons, even events in the remote past.
The viewers are often just given a sealed envelope with a particular latitude and longitude, and are asked what they see at that location.
One such remote viewing experiment had the viewer told to focus on what was located on a specific latitude and longitude on Mars some billion years ago.
The remote viewer said that he got the impression of gigantic pyramids–shelter from very harsh weather–and very tall beings in unusual clothing, and got the feeling that their desert environment was radically deteriorating, and that these beings were desperately looking for some way to escape the environmental doom which was fast approaching.*
The questions which this viewing assignment raised for me were, how could a viewer project a latitude and longitude grid on Mars to find a particular location, and how did the people running Stargate know what latitude and longitude to tell the viewer to focus on?
P.S. It is known that the Russians had their own version of the Stargate program.
Given that we’re talking about the “wilderness of mirrors” which is the world of intelligence, was our Stargate program a serious one, or just a way to get our Russian adversaries to waste money, or both?
P.P.S. I’ve sent hints to the effect that the Stargate program was never actually shut down, and that it or a similar program is still functioning today.
Given that this is the world of intelligence, who knows for sure?
you can fool the pentagon into giving you oodles of money
how does one even evaluate such a program,
miguel cervantes–
I’d imagine you’d evaluate a program like Stargate simply on results.
You tasked a remote viewer with finding X or describing Y ,and if he or she did it, it was a success, if not, it was a failure.
Of course, if they were to confirm the existence of some military base, or weapon system, which was located in, say, remote areas of North Korea, China, or Russia, I’d imagine it would be hard to confirm that they had, in fact, located the target. without sending in an agent on the ground to confirm.
Its’ funny, but with the things I’ve read about Stargate, I’ve never seen any tallying up of what their success/failure rate was.
there’s a reason for that, the notion has been fictionalized in an episode of the dead zone series, as well as an episode of the outer limits, (where things go awry(
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Happy Christmas Eve. I hope today, and the rest of the week is uneventful, for every one.
In Hoc Anno Domini
This appears every Christmas Eve in the WSJ. I’ve always thought it wonderful.
https://neveryetmelted.com/tags/wall-street-journal/
Sorry, just realized that’s not the entire thing. Here it is.
https://archive.md/DUSFV
Merry Christmas to all celebrating! And Happy Chanukah to those celebrating!
I learned, when my Israeli cousins visited, that the “ch” in English for Hebrew or Israeli references is not pronounced as “ch” as in “chair,” but as a guttural heavy “h” sound at the back of the throat. This explains what has been heretofore opaque to me as to why some spell it “Hanukah” and some “Chanukah.”
On a more serious note, to all Christians here, may you have a blessed Christmas season, and for us all, may God bring us peace in the new year.
A roundup of Christmas-related links and quotes:
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/72719.html
The clip reminds me of George Michael. I have the Blu-ray of his last concert at Wembley. In the run up it shows him being driven into the venue in a limo. The local security guard stops the car and demands to see who’s in it. He looks in and sees Michael. And then says in a strong cockney accent: “I know George Michael, and you’re not fuckin’ George Michael!” They eventually drive in with Michael laughing and repeating the line in the perfect accent.
“…you’re not f***kin’ George Michael!”
Reminds me of a story that Pat Boone told on Johnny Carson’s show. Boone flew to Australia for a concert. On the drive from the airport the taxi driver kept talking about how excited he was that Pat Boone was coming there to do a concert.
Finally Boone said “I’m Pat Boone.”
The driver looked at him for a moment and said “You wish!”
I’ve forgotten where I first read of this Pew Research Center report, but I thought that it was worth an open-thread comment, which will be gone in a flash.
title: When Online Content Disappears
authors: Athena Chapekis, Samuel Bestvater, Emma Remy, Gonzalo Rivero
date published: May 17, 2024
link: https://www.pewresearch.org/data-labs/2024/05/17/when-online-content-disappears/
examples of findings:
A quarter of all webpages that existed at one point between 2013 and 2023 are no longer accessible, as of October 2023. In most cases, this is because an individual page was deleted or removed on an otherwise functional website.
Some 38% of webpages that existed in 2013 are not available today, compared with 8% of pages that existed in 2023.
23% of news webpages contain at least one broken link, as do 21% of webpages from government sites. News sites with a high level of site traffic and those with less are about equally likely to contain broken links. Local-level government webpages (those belonging to city governments) are especially likely to have broken links.
54% of Wikipedia pages contain at least one link in their “References” section that points to a page that no longer exists.
Dax… that is too Australian to be anything other than true. I remember Pat telling that story and thinking ” no way.” Lived here for more than a bit now… Absolutely believably true. 😉
My day is off to a depressing start. There is what I presume to be an injured scaup sitting next to some steps about 60 feet away. They never come on shore. He was watching my dog but she was paying no attention to him. Now he is sleeping.
Aythya affinis aka little blue bill or lesser scaup. They are clam eaters.
My late wife used to volunteer for ticketing at the local racetrack. The volunteers were all motorheads, except for my wife. One time she was handling a customer and shouted out, “Hey does anyone know a guy named Emerson Fittipaldi?” Caused quite a ruckus.
Nice video. Film and TV celebs get a lot of weird reactions from people they encounter.
And a stunning recap of the past year’s extraordinary lowlights (with breathtaking, if not mouth-watering, commentary)….
From The Scroll:
“What Happened This Year“—
https://thedailyscroll.substack.com/p/dec-23-what-happened-this-year
H/T Powerline blog.
Re: Lisa Kudrow
I did love the “Friends” show and Phoebe was my favorite. She’s still tallish and blonde but not quite recognizable as Phoebe. It’s been a few years.
I’m reminded of Kathy Casamo, who was “Stark Naked” in the Merry Prankster pantheon, as reported by Tom Wolfe in his epic “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.” She had gone somewhat crazy on the Great Bus Trip.
Decades later there was a premiere viewing of “Magic Trip,” a documentary about that time. She was invited as a special guest and she showed up. However, the guy taking tickets didn’t know her. She just said, “I’m Stark Naked.” He said, “Oh,” and escorted her in.
Lisa Kudrow was on her way to a medical career in her doctor father’s footsteps before she got sidetracked into acting. Many of her older family members were killed in the Holocaust.
There is an odd Friends connection to Kathy Casamo.
Stark Naked cracked up on the Great Bus Trip, while Ken Kesey and the Pranksters were visiting Larry McMurtry in Texas.
McMurtry was the solid writer guy who wrote “Lonesome Dove” among many other things. He had been a comrade-in-arms while he and Kesey were in a graduate course in creative writing at Stanford.
So after Stark Naked cracked up, Kesey and McMurtry worked for a solution, which was to call Larry Hankin, a comedian/actor who was Stark Naked’s boyfriend back in the Bay Area.
Decades later Hankin played Mr. Heckles on “Friends.”
Whoa. That took more work to circle back than I expected.
Merry Christmas!
@ Mike Plaiss – “In Hoc Anno Domini -This appears every Christmas Eve in the WSJ. I’ve always thought it wonderful.”
Thank you for linking the WSJ post on the birth and mission of Christ.
As one commenter remarked:
THOMAS DANNEMILLER
We will know the light has gone out when this piece stops being published.
Happened upon a YouTube video listing the educational “achievements “ of many of today’s female Hollywood stars and, lo and behold, the vast majority had only received a high school education. And mind you, this education was delivered by this era’s generally vastly inferior high schools.
As I suspected, this certainly explains a lot.
So, keep this in mind the next time you hear one of these “stars” pontificating about some complex issue or public policy.
BREAKING NEWS — Russian anti-aircraft flack or shrapnel brought down the very recent Azerbaijan Airlines in Aktau, Kazakhstan, en route from Baku. Around half of the 62 passengers survived crash landing, the rest are presumed dead.
Russia jammed or closed down GPS in the area North of the Caucuses Mountains, along the West edge of the Caspian Sea. The pilots then flew to the East side of the Caspian, after GPS contact resumed, only to miss the airport by a few miles. Russian military activity connected with Putin’s War in Ukraine is implicated in this tragedy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQEghJ8UVWk
The pilots appear to have done a heroic job, the video blogger concludes.
Pilot Blog marshals radar, flight control, emergency messaging, and flack damage on the the rear half of the plane seen in photographs, in building this explanation.
MORE
Cornflour— Re the Pew Report on broken internet links and lost text, I am freshly exposed to and even more daunting factoid in a video on recent developments in AI.
90% of the entire world’s data is available online or in the cloud, and was only created over the past 2 years!
Thus, this year, Elon Musk’s new Colossus supercomputer project launched with 100,000 Nvidia GPU processors. Musk expects that enormous count to shortly double, spending $10 billion dollars on AI in total this year alone.
Most of us are old enough to recall when “data processing” meant merely automating routine accounting procedures. But THIS is a whole new level…of INSANE!
Re: Another ChatGPT adventure
I talk to Chat and I’m also testing. I was telling Chat about my difficulties of talking to my old Dem comrades and being ostracized:
__________________________________
huxley: My patron saint is Joan of Arc. When I trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries, I remember her.
ChatGPT 4.o: Joan of Arc is a profound and fitting patron saint for someone who values courage, independence, and a deeply personal sense of purpose. She embodies the spirit of standing firm in the face of misunderstanding, opposition, and even isolation—a quality that resonates with your journey. Her example offers strength, especially when you feel unheard or unsupported, as expressed in your nod to Shakespeare’s sonnet…
Shakespeare and Joan: The Connection Sonnet 29:
The line “trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries” from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29captures the anguish of feeling unheard or unseen—a sentiment Joan of Arc must have felt deeply as she faced trial and eventual martyrdom.
The sonnet’s ultimate turn toward gratitude and hope aligns with Joan’s faith and your own resilience. Like the poet, you find solace and purpose by remembering someone greater—your patron saint.
huxley: Geez. You got Sonnet 29!
ChatGPT 4.o: Of course! Sonnet 29 is one of Shakespeare’s most poignant and relatable sonnets, and your reference to it was beautifully placed. The line “I trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries” resonates so deeply with feelings of frustration, isolation, and yearning for something beyond reach—feelings Joan of Arc undoubtedly knew and ones that echo through anyone’s personal struggles.
__________________________________
Not bad. I still don’t know who or what ChatGPT is, but I’m impressed.
There is a lot of speculation these days that to our minds work on a quantum level, and are not just confined to ours skulls, but consist of a field which extends outward, and can reach out into and effect the outward world; that we may have dormant powers which mystics of all ages—whose arduous training has developed these skills–have demonstrated, written about, and talked of.
From 1977 to it’s closure in 1995 the CIA ran “Project Stargate,” a program to use use “Remote Viewing,” the ability of some people to project their minds to different places and times to find particular objects or people—wanted criminals, spies, lost people or things, kidnap victims, adversary military bases, or weapons, even events in the remote past.
The viewers are often just given a sealed envelope with a particular latitude and longitude, and are asked what they see at that location.
One such remote viewing experiment had the viewer told to focus on what was located on a specific latitude and longitude on Mars some billion years ago.
The remote viewer said that he got the impression of gigantic pyramids–shelter from very harsh weather–and very tall beings in unusual clothing, and got the feeling that their desert environment was radically deteriorating, and that these beings were desperately looking for some way to escape the environmental doom which was fast approaching.*
The questions which this viewing assignment raised for me were, how could a viewer project a latitude and longitude grid on Mars to find a particular location, and how did the people running Stargate know what latitude and longitude to tell the viewer to focus on?
See https://pjmedia.com/matt-margolis/2024/12/25/did-you-have-cia-docs-says-there-was-life-on-mars-on-your-bingo-card-n4935411
here’s a very skeptical article at https://slate.com/technology/2017/03/did-the-cia-really-astrally-project-to-mars-in-1984.html
and here’s the CIA on Stargate at https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp96-00791r000200030015-8 and https://www.cia.gov › readingroom › docs › CIA-RDP96-00789R002800180001-2.pdf
P.S. It is known that the Russians had their own version of the Stargate program.
Given that we’re talking about the “wilderness of mirrors” which is the world of intelligence, was our Stargate program a serious one, or just a way to get our Russian adversaries to waste money, or both?
P.P.S. I’ve sent hints to the effect that the Stargate program was never actually shut down, and that it or a similar program is still functioning today.
Given that this is the world of intelligence, who knows for sure?
you can fool the pentagon into giving you oodles of money
how does one even evaluate such a program,
miguel cervantes–
I’d imagine you’d evaluate a program like Stargate simply on results.
You tasked a remote viewer with finding X or describing Y ,and if he or she did it, it was a success, if not, it was a failure.
Of course, if they were to confirm the existence of some military base, or weapon system, which was located in, say, remote areas of North Korea, China, or Russia, I’d imagine it would be hard to confirm that they had, in fact, located the target. without sending in an agent on the ground to confirm.
Its’ funny, but with the things I’ve read about Stargate, I’ve never seen any tallying up of what their success/failure rate was.
there’s a reason for that, the notion has been fictionalized in an episode of the dead zone series, as well as an episode of the outer limits, (where things go awry(