🍿 The Ring (2002), held up rather well, though with more jump scares than I remembered. It’s the lack of gratuitous gore that makes it scarier than some other attempts. Gloomy Washington state standing in for gloomy Japan was an inspired choice.
June 6, 2023
🍿 Evil Dead, the 2013 version, had nothing of the qualities that made the original trilogy enjoyable. “Thank you”, CGI, for turning a campy gross-out horror comedy featuring plastic puppets squirting purple slime into yet another festival of gore.
Let the record show that I am bullish on Vision Pro, in part because of the glowing reviews from the likes of Ben Thompson and Matthew Panzarino, but mostly because of the misguided negative comments which are delightfully reminiscent of 2007. It has potential!
Reginald Booker and Sammie Abbott are second only to Pierre L’Enfant in their influence on Washington D.C.’s urban development, and they were neither architects nor civil engineers. I would happily watch an HBO/Apple TV+ miniseries about their fight with the congressmen who wanted to pave over the capital with miles and miles of highway. I mean, just look at them:
Exhibit A:
Sammie Abbott (left) and Reginald Booker testifying against the freeways in 1969 (photo from the Evening Star).
The Man they were fighting against was Rep. William Houston Natcher (D), chair of an Appropriations subcommittee which wanted to flood the District with money in a cash for concrete program. And again, a picture here is worth more than a thousand words:
Exhibit B:
William H. Natcher (right) at the Great American Villains' Convention, circa 1971.
Thanks to Booker and Abbott’s good work, DC now has a semi-functional metro under an agglomeration of vibrant, interconnected, walkable neighborhoods, instead of a completely dysfunctional and congested freeway system criss-crossing a checkerboard of destroyed city blocks, à la Baltimore. The Washington Post wrote about the pair a couple of decades ago, and the story is engrossing as ever. Someone, anyone, please forward it to David Simon.
Fein was rehired by one of his clients, who wasn’t pleased with ChatGPT’s work. But it isn’t enough to sustain him and his family, who have a little over six months of financial runway before they run out of money.
Now, Fein has decided to pursue a job that AI can’t do, and he has enrolled in courses to become an HVAC technician. Next year, he plans to train to become a plumber.
“A trade is more future-proof,” he said.
CGP Gray’s Humans Need Not Apply video is eight years old, but has never been more relevant. Leaning towards a profession more rooted in the physical world is a good instinct to have, for now.
📺 Ted Lasso, Season 3: better than the second, not quite as impactful as the first. Since the circumstances of the show’s debut were literally once-in-a-generation you can’t really fault it for that.
But isn’t it a bit sad that everyone but Ted has had a fulfilling arc?
June 3, 2023
Finished reading: The Formula by Albert-László Barabási 📚
The perfect self-help book for your nerd scientist friend who wants to succeed in academia; broadly applicable to other areas of human endeavor, such as competitive hot-dog eating, crocheting, and investment banking.
June 2, 2023
Finished reading: Empty Space by M. John Harrison 📚
The third and final installment of M. John Harrison’s Light series. As before, I was left wondering, between the baroque prose and the twisting parallel plots, what on Earth I had just read. But figuring it out is nine tenths of the fun!
June 1, 2023
Nearly 20 years have passed since I last attended a football (as in soccer ⚽️) match, but there we were at DC United versus Montreal last night. The fans were much more amped than I expected — a good mix of DC’s many colorful communities.
As for the score… well, can’t have everything.
Are these the two Americas everyone keeps telling me about?
