You might have heard of an article published by Reuters late last week in which after extensive research and what I guess they’d call shoe-leather detective work they identified the famous British stencil-graffiti artist known as “Banksy.”
If you’ve been conscious at all the last 10 years or so, it’s been pretty tough in American politics. Outright assassinations, attempted assassinations, and the type of conflict that could turn violent at any time. Many people think they cannot have a conversation across the political aisle, so to speak, without harming or ending friendships, and even family relationships. We’ve all experienced the tension here; no one we know has been free of its effects.
It was among the most welcome phone calls I’ve ever made. The call was to Frontier or Verizon or whatever it is they currently call themselves. I was calling to tell them that after 21 years, one month, and five days I was done with what in my estimation is the worst phone company ever.
Two esoteric programming events bubbled up this past week. If you’re not into computer science, they may appear irrelevant to you. They’re not. The arcane managed to bring to life our pressing questions about whether AI can create or is a regurgitation machine.
If there is anything as embarrassing as confessing one’s sins it has to be confessing one’s stupidities.
Yet here we are. Instead of describing how well my cool new Starlink-based phone-internet setup is coming together, I’m obligated to detail how I fell for a swindle so obvious that there’s no escaping the fact that my mind must have got disengaged for a while.
Remember when everyone on the Right was rightly upset at the government censoring opinions it found distasteful? Somehow that seems forgotten in the other war of this weekend.
It seems that the sycamore has been granted a reprieve. For now. The great and awful tree had been destined to attain horizontality as soon as I could find someone who would do it. That was necessary to give my cool new satellite dish a clear view of the sky. The tree is still under a death sentence, but the latest and most urgent reason for sending the thing to the wood-chip pile seems not to have existed at all.
A few hours away from me you can visit Silver Dollar City — a scenic, wooded theme park in the Ozark Mountains where craftspeople blow glass and mill flour 19th-century style. It’s charming and memorable. It’s also not the way I buy glassware or food normally.
If only I can get the dish on top of the stick!
As I wrote that I was suddenly reminded that a few decades ago it was popular for performers on variety shows to spin dishes on the tips of what looked like pool cues, the trick being to get many dishes spinning on many pool cues at once. At some point the studio audience would applaud. We were more easily pleased in those simpler times.
Ken Burns and Lynn Novick once again give us compelling entry into one of the makers of the American century in the documentary Hemingway. The writer Ernest Hemingway lived alongside the avatar of the same, through some of the most consequential times in history.