Heat is awful, humidity makes it worse, and deathly stillness renders it just about insufferable.
The other night my neighbor was standing on his porch. He blew a smoke ring. Next morning, it was still there, though the morning fog had made it soggy so it had sunk to the ground.
The chief concern about Elon Musk’s various enterprises isn’t that they have made him rich and will make him richer, but that what he puts out is becoming so good that he could one day hold us victims to monopoly pricing and then slack off.
When the numerous officials in the current administration are put on trial (and, one hopes, convicted and subjected to draconian punishments), their pre-trial fears ought to include that the jury that will judge them is made up of coffee drinkers.
Our blowhard, none-too-bright president wanted it to be clear, and he said so on his little message board on March 6: “There will be no deal with Iran except UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!”
Father Mark spoke matter-of-factly, perhaps with just a touch of resignation. “Oh, I’ll probably die young,” he said. “My father died when he was 43. Cardiac.”
As has been noted here many times, it is not possible to do anything online (and often elsewhere) without being tracked. Nothing is considered to be unquestionably private anymore. Artificial “intelligence” is making the situation worse. I strongly suspect that those who welcome our new computerized overlords will come to regret it.
Many people own “smart” televisions, which is to say sets or boxes connected to the internet. Practically none of those people have read their televisions’ privacy policies. If they had, they would be horrified.
Everything considered, it was inevitable. If there’s any surprise, it’s that it hadn’t happened before now.
Then again, maybe it had.
Sometimes it seems as if the universe is warning us against something. Or, perhaps, it is just measuring our determination. Testing us. In “The Once and Future King,” the fine telling of the Arthurian legend that set to music became “Camelot,” T. H. White offered the parable that sometimes bad things happen to keep worse things from happening.
Over the last few years, as frequent readers here know, I’ve taken interest in the lovely, even cute, Japanese culture.