The Old Fashioned is as classic as cocktails get, and the Liquor.com take is can’t-miss. If you’re more into the fruit-muddling version (as I am), try the Difford’s Guide recipe.
I’ve always been a tinkerer, though. So here, for your summer sipping enjoyment, is the Doc Variant: Read more
I just got out of the Mark Zuckerberg Maximum Security Online Penitentiary. Here’s what I went down for:
On this share from my friend Mike I commented: “I want to shoot this model.” Those of you know my work will understand why. Read more
The US celebrated its birthday recently, spawning a huge round of WE’RE THE GREATEST NATION ON EARTH® on Facebook.
I decided to take a look at the data surrounding all the things that make nations great. Since we’re America, let’s start with…
We rank 46th in life expectancy. Read more
“AI will probably most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime, there’ll be great companies.” – Sam Altman, Chairman of OpenAI
Our dalliance with artificial intelligence hit a major milestone last week. OpenAI, a research organization “with the stated goal of promoting and developing friendly AI in a way that benefits humanity as a whole,”* announced the release of GitHub CoPilot, which… Read more
My grandmother, Helen Marshall Smith, was born in 1914. Like most women of her generation her career opportunities were limited, and like nearly all women in her socio-economic stratum – Southern working class – her educational opportunities were nearly non-existent.
One more fact to note: she had polio as a child and that, plus some sort of hip issue I never fully understood, meant she spent most of her life on crutches.
I thought about Grandmother the other day as I wandered around Denver Botanic Gardens with my Nikon. Read more
Welcome to Colorado, the Shoot-’em-Up State
We do have a bloody history, don’t we? The latest breaking news happened the other day at the Table Mesa King Soopers in Boulder. At least three or four good friends live nearby and shop there regularly. And I used to shop there two or three times a week – I lived maybe a mile up the hill toward NCAR during grad school. Read more
I posted this to Facebook yesterday.
Got some interesting comments, but came away feeling like I needed to elaborate a bit.
Chris Rock explained to us the difference between rich and wealthy. Shaq is rich. The rich white man who signs Shaq’s check is wealthy.
That’s what I’m thinking about – the wealthy, not the rich. Because you can become a millionaire a lot of ways, including by being smart and working hard. Yeah, it helps if you aren’t born into poverty, but you can be a wonderfully moral millionaire. I’m lucky to know a few myself. I sometimes wish I were one.
But there’s a point where it’s not clear a person with a soul can pass. It’s like a glass ceiling, except maybe it’s made of some kind of humanity-sucking ur-obsidian. I’ll never forget Michael Milken in the ‘80s – a hypermillionaire cheating little old ladies out of their social security checks. Pure pathology.
Fitzgerald and Hemingway used to have an argument. Hemingway believed the “very rich” were more or less regular people with a lot of money. Fitzgerald disagreed. “Let me tell you about the very rich,” he said.
They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different.”
William Gibson took it a step further: first with the Tessier-Ashpools in Neuromancer and then with Virek in Count Zero, his argument was that they weren’t really human at all anymore (or that they won’t be in the relatively near future).
I look around the world today and wonder just how human our billionaire overlords really are.
Maybe this is why the idea of lizard people doesn’t scare me.
Yesterday I hit the button on my iPhone and said “Hey, Alexa.”
Siri replied, “Wow. Awkward.”
I was embarrassed to have gotten her name wrong.
I feel like I’ve been holding my breath for four years.
But today the relentless assault on truth, on justice, on fundamental human decency comes to an end. At least, the portion of it originating in the Oval Office does.
I know I’m imagining it, but it’s almost like I can feel my blood pressure dropping.
Of course, I know we haven’t really won anything, and I hope you know it, too. January 6 was just an amuse bouche, and even if we make it through the day without running street battles our various fascist terrorist cells still exist. Maybe not in sufficient numbers to take down the government (fingers crossed), but there are certainly enough of them to wage a disruptive campaign of terror of the sort we tend to associate with the Middle East or Northern Ireland.
Even if that doesn’t happen – even if the Proud Boys and the Boogaloos and Lauren Boebert lay down their arms and assimilate into civil society – Joe Biden ain’t the messiah. Along with the Clintons, Obama, Chuck Shumer, Cory Booker, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, Kamala Harris, and the entire Colorado Senatorial delegation, he’s the face of what’s wrong with the Democratic Party. His administration will be friendly enough to the various causes of social progressivism – up to a point. Our racist, militarized police problem, for instance, will get a sparkly Band-Aid at best.
And while he won’t fluff Wall St. in public the way any member of the GOP would, he won’t be putting them out of business, either.
In essence, President Biden will restore dignity to the oligarchy.
“Better than Trump” isn’t the same as “better.” So my expectations are tempered by my basic habit of paying attention and thinking about what I observe.
Still, while Better than Trump isn’t everything, it isn’t nothing, either. So if you’ll indulge me, I’m going to mark today by exhaling.
In the morning we all need to take another deep breath and get back to the barricades. Because losing less isn’t winning.
Union Station, Denver
Joseph Epstein is getting dragged hard this morning. The WSJ (for reasons that shouldn’t be too hard to discern) on Friday published a smarmy, self-important, and ridiculously uninformed op-ed in which he demeans Dr. Jill Biden’s use of “Dr.” Read more
I wasn’t surprised by the election results. They’re still incomplete, and Biden may yet win, but regardless of the final tally half the country turned out to make clear just what they are. Just what we are.
The thing that did take me aback a bit was the reactions of my friends. Sure, there was some outrage, as you’d expect. But the dominant response of the day was … heartbreak. Disbelief. Sadness.
If you wanted, you could attribute 2016 to ignorance. But 2020? Nobody is blind to what the GOP is anymore. This was a calculated assertion of spite. Read more
Short term:
A few months ago I wrote that “I don’t want to “heal America’s divisions.” I’m reflecting on that sentiment this morning, the day before what may be the most important election of our lifetimes.
Many of us have some version of the braying racist, fascist, misogynist drunkle archetype in our lives. A Karen, a Chad, a Becky. Maybe it’s a relative we have to contend with at holiday dinners. Maybe there are family obligations, so we grit our teeth, bite our tongues, and tell our children (before and after) to ignore the ravings of the yahoo at the other end of the table. For others it may be a long-time friend who drifted in the wrong direction through the years. Or maybe the friend never changed, but we drifted in the right direction. Read more
I came home this evening after running a couple of errands to find a half-dozen people at my door. Two or three were uniformed.
Two followed me around back as I parked. Since my girlfriend (let’s call her J) has never so much as jaywalked I figured they had to be after me. No idea why, but the adrenaline was starting to pump.
I’m not going to talk to cops but I can hear what they have to say. It turns out they were looking for a woman named Amanda, whom they had seen coming in and out of my apartment routinely over the past three weeks. Read more
lullaby pit 