Katrina will be out of town for a few days, and I’ll be Mom-sitting at their house, beginning tomorrow. They don’t have the internet, which means this site won’t be updated until Wednesday.
Sorry about the next three days of silence, but being freed of the daily five-hour, three-bus round-trip, riding to Mom’s house and then riding back, might leave me time and energy enough to write. I’m going to bring my laptop, park it on Mom & Katrina’s dining room table, and hope to have a few pages ready to post when I return home and to the internet.
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Katrina has a smart TV, which Mom is unable to turn on, not because of her health issues, but because it’s so damned complicated. Turning it on requires pressing eleven buttons on two remotes, each button pressed in exactly the right order, traversing a maze of “smart” ads and “smart” options for services my mom and sister have never subscribed to.
A couple of years back, Katrina showed me how to turn the TV on, but I’ve never successfully done it solo. It’s too baffling, plus there’s a conflict of interest: I prefer it off.
Mom, though, likes to watch TV, and I want her to be happy while I’m taking care of her, so I asked Katrina to re-brief me on the 11-button process. This time I took notes, and may have it down. At least, I know the final button I’m looking for — HDMI 3. If I can navigate past all the “smart” ads and find HDMI 3, Mom can watch TV.
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While Katrina was teaching me this, the smart TV smartly interrupted, placing this message over the screen:
“Your daily update is now beginning. In order to bring you the best experience possible, we’ll be updating all of your TV boxes. This will interrupt viewing but should take less than five minutes to complete.”
“Oh, this,” Katrina said with a sigh. “I hate it when it does this.” Then we waited five minutes for all of Katrina & Mom’s “TV boxes” to update.
“What the hell is a TV box?” I asked Katrina. She doesn’t know. She also doesn’t know what’s being updating once daily, or how these updates bring her “the best experience possible.”
My guess is that once daily, their TV sends all the latest info on what shows Katrina and Mom have watched to some database, where the info is sold, to better target them with more ads.
I’m so old, I remember when TVs had a physical ON/OFF button, which immediately turned the TV on or off. Ads weren’t targeted. There was no database. Nothing interrupted viewing for five minutes daily.
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Speaking of the hell of technology, take my phone, please. All I want from it is the ability to send and receive text messages. If that function was available without a phone, I would own a text-messaging machine instead.
I rarely use the phone to make or receive calls, and strive for never. My ringer is off 24/365, unless someone I love a lot has told me, in advance, that they need to get hold of me.
Over my 20 or so years carrying cell phones, I’ve purchased a new one three times, always because the service provider was discontinuing support for my antique device. Each time, after unwrapping the new phone, the first thing to do is un-install whatever apps are pre-installed, mute all functions that make noise, turn off internet access and tracking, etc. The name’s Ludd. Ned Ludd.
The number of times I’ve used, needed, or even wished for a flashlight on my phone is zero, but somehow in sending a text and then slipping the phone into my backpack, I accidentally pushed whatever button lights the flashlight. It’s very bright. How the fuck do I turn it off?
Checking my messages, there were five calls from Mr Urgent — two from Tuesday, two from Wednesday, one from this morning. All his calls were marked “urgent,” but never yet has he said what work he needs me to do.
Whatever it is, though, gosh, it sure seems urgent.
From Pathetic Life #25 Wednesday, June 5, 1996
Haven’t mentioned her in a while, so you might be under the stupid misimpression that I’m recovered, or at least recovering from Sarah-Katherine. Nope.
Usually there’s a week between letters, and usually I’d wait for a reply, but even more usually I’m an idiot so yesterday I wrote her a letter, long and idiotically heartfelt. This morning I wrote her another letter, short and sort of explaining/apologizing for yesterday’s letter.
And it gets worse: not only was I damned fool enough to write two letters, I also mailed them both, soon as I’d written them.
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Now it’s twilight, as I look out over the tops of all the other rent-by-the-week hotels on the block. The McMillan is the tallest of them, so the view stretches pleasantly.
A mile or so in the distance, the hills are bathed in the approaching sunset. Houses and trees are silhouetted against a pale blue, darkening sky. Toward the north side of the hill, amidst a cluster of recent development, is a large house that’s burning down.
It’s so far in the distance, I can’t see whether the fire trucks are there, but brilliant yellow flames are dancing like Baryshnikov, and thick, gray smoke rises slowly to the setting sun. As I said, it is a rather pleasant view.
This is an entry retyped from an on-paper zine I wrote many years ago, called Pathetic Life. The opinions stated were my opinions then, but might not be my opinions now. Also, I said and did some disgusting things, so parental guidance is advised.
The federal government if demanding children’s private medical records without even telling their families. If that’s OK with HIPPA then there’s simply no such thing as privacy.
The lower court’s ruling said the map discriminates against black people in violation of the Constitution, but the Republican Supreme Court is saying that’s not only AOK, but it’s so obviously AOK we won’t even explain it.
All across the right-wing, assorted hatred of brown and black people, gays, queers, and trans people, immigrants, non-Christians, workers, the poor, the disabled, the left, the media, the well-educated, science, expertise of any kind, etc, is always a powerful force, but any of those hatreds are optional for any specific right-wing group. Hatred of women is the hatred that seems to be required — that’s the hatred that ties all right-wing hatreds together.
Excerpt: Maine, Washington, Oregon and Massachusetts were all hit with lawsuits May 27 from the DOJ, which alleges that their unwillingness to provide confidential, or undercover, license plates for federal immigration agents is “discriminatory” and unconstitutional.
The Washington Post did the work here, then (intentionally?) buried the lede with that boring headline. Here’s what matters:
Trump’s Office of Legal Counsel has quietly issued a memo declaring the Presidential Records Act unconstitutional, AOK to ignore. You’ve never heard of the Office of Legal Counsel, but in sane administrations OLC memos are considered The Law, so this is effectively a cloaking device, allowing the Trump regime to withhold or destroy whatever records might prove the administration’s routine daily lawbreaking.
Excerpt: The government could not issue grants to projects or groups that “deny the biological reality of sex or the sex binary in humans,” for example. Nor could it seek to fund initiatives that “promote anti-American values,” contribute to illegal immigration, advance diversity, equity and inclusion or assist in voter registration.
The rules would further limit the ability of grant recipients to engage in some “issue advocacy.” Those that are funded would be scrutinized for their compliance with “religious liberty laws” and their “memberships and affiliations” with outside groups. And they could face the outright termination of their grants if the Trump administration someday determines that their actions are not in the “public interest.”
60 Minutes has always been overrated, but it was the best journalism allowed on commercial TV. We’ll be a shittier nation as CBS News murders that show.
Excerpt: “I felt it was very important to identify that the protesters themselves were being very aggressive and that they were half of these confrontations, and so I instructed my producers to find images in which we see the protesters acting aggressively. We found a picture of a protester chest-bumping an officer. We found a picture of an officer being hit in the head with a snowball…
“And about four hours after our deadline, Bari Weiss sends an email to my boss, Tanya Simon. Two of the things in the email include, can we make the protesters look more violent? Now, I’m paraphrasing. I don’t have the quote, but that’s what was communicated to me. And the other thing, Renee Good’s car. You need to describe her as driving toward the officer.”
Me again: Pelley had already reported a falsehood, both-sidesing that “the protesters themselves were being very aggressive and that they were half of these confrontations,” so it’s a little late and lame to be shocked, shocked when the boss asks for further falsehoods.
Ali Velshi is a bald man who had a weekend show on MS NOW. I’d never heard of Velshi, never watched his show, and I seriously doubt much of it was worth watching, or I would’ve heard of it.
But if every episode had been like this — his going-away speech from his show’s final episode — I would’ve been watching Ali Velshi every weekend.
I have never & will never see the appeal of a “password manager.” Why trust software to handle your security, when you could, you know, know your own passwords.
Excerpt: Aliyah, a light-skinned Black woman dressed in country-western gear, is struggling to sell metal buckles she handmade on TikTok. In a video for the social media platform from March, she cries to the camera and pleads for views: “Even as a black woman, I have more faith that white women will stay 13 seconds [on this video] to save my belt buckle business,” the onscreen text reads. She wipes a tear off her cheek.
But Aliyah isn’t real, and neither are her supposedly handmade products — she’s one of many AI-generated influencers created to sell mass-produced products via dropshipping on TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram. Identical belt buckles — sunflower design, detachable knife inlay, and all — are sold on the fast-fashion site Shein, and for a quarter of the price.
Excerpt: Since Hannah joined the Fresno Police Department in 2017, there is a chance he was involved in the 2018 incident where Johnson and his uncle were falsely accused of burglary, but the names of those officers were never released.
Excerpt: Kids are routinely slammed to the ground for minor misbehavior. Police punch children in the face. They shock students with Tasers for being in the wrong place. Or point guns at unarmed teens. Cops put handcuffs on a 6-year-old who later cried to his father, “The police wants me to die!” In some cases, low-level disciplinary infractions that should lead to no more than a trip to the principal’s office left children facing criminal charges; the well-documented school-to-prison pipeline in all its ignominy.
Excerpt: The Trump administration’s decision to dismantle most of a $386 million federal ocean-observing network will leave scientists without an irreplaceable source of data used to understand how climate change is affecting crucial currents and marine ecosystems and increasing coastal flooding.
Me again: The article says this is going to happen, but apparently it’s already underway:
Special thanks to Linden Arden, Becky Jo, Joey Jo Jo & John the Basketemeritus, Jeff Meyer, Dave S, Name Withheld, and always extra special thanks to my lovely late Stephanie, who gave me 21 years and proved that the world isn’t always shitty.
News always and only from reliable sources, and I decide what’s reliable — no right-wing bullshit, no Substack because fuck Nazis, and no RawStory, Newsweek, or other clickbait sites. Written news is preferred; video links will be rare, and damned near never to videos where the reporter sits, stands, or strolls in front of a camera — that’s show biz, not news.
If you’re blocked from reading anything linked above, please send an email, and I’ll reply with the article’s complete text, via my computer’s fine ad-blockers and paywall-vaulters.
