In 1974 my friend and mentor Sylvia Porter, the financial columnist, was summoned to Washington by the president, Gerald Ford. She had been asked to head a government effort to reduce inflation, which as a result of the 1973 Arab oil crisis had risen to 12.3 percent. When she got there, she was dismayed. The program consisted of red campaign buttons bearing the message “WIN.” Ford said the letters stood for “Whip Inflation Now.”
It startles me to realize that I’ve lived in this little house longer than I’ve lived anyplace else. I moved around quite a bit in New York and Connecticut, yet my few years’ tenancy in each of several places there is longer in my memory than my 20 years next spring spent here.
The idea of trying to build a privacy-respecting television box took root when I heard of something called Plasma Bigscreen. “Plasma Bigscreen is an open-source user interface for TV's [sic]. Running on top of a Linux distribution, Plasma Bigscreen turns your TV or setup-box into a fully hackable device,” says its website, linked above. “A big launcher giving you easy access to any installed apps and skills. Controllable via voice or TV remote.”
Your television is spying on you, as mine is spying on me. This is true unless you are watching only programs via broadcast signal and receive them through an antenna — and maybe you’re having your information collected even then.
Your television is spying on you, as mine is spying on me. This is true unless you are watching only programs via broadcast signal and receive them through an antenna — and maybe you’re having your information collected even then.
Gee. Every month people in the financial industry predict that inflation will go down. Almost every month, inflation doesn’t go down. Turmoil in the markets results. It is worth remembering that brokerage houses make money when you buy a security, but they also make money when you sell a security.
There will be a total solar eclipse in much of the U.S. on Monday. It will represent a rare occasion to watch . . . feather-headed television anchors say things even stupider than usual, which is a feat. Many people will destroy expensive cameras and others will damage their eyesight attempting respectively to capture and observe the event.
A friend was preparing for a visit to Japan. He would be spending a few days in Osaka and wondered about things to do in Japan’s second-biggest city. I said that I’d seen that the Grand Sumo championship would be underway there during his trip. It might provide an interesting cultural experience.
You’re probably not a “big-C” Catholic. Most people aren’t. Some of us increasingly doubt that the pope himself is. We can’t tell, because he spends most of his public time being a fascio-leftist politician.
Easter is a week and a half away, and it seems a good time to bring up something I’ve pondered for decades, on which Roman Catholicism gave me a unique view.
And so we turn to fairytales. I don’t mean the softened modern children’s story versions, but the hard-core, often brutal originals. They usually don’t have any moral: they’re not fables. Instead, they are fanciful stories that occasionally go in the direction of fable, often in the direction of religion, sometimes taking us nowhere but a place of fear and bleak despair. They are more sophisticated versions of campfire ghost stories.