"What's new?" the doctor asked me when he entered the room. At the moment he walked in, I was face-down and looking the opposite direction, on an exam chair that folded out into a bed (very slowly, while I watched the nurse hold the buttons on the remote) with my bare butt up in the sky in a too-familiar position usually reserved for lovers. "Well, I have this wound on my leg" I said. "I know that" he replied, having given me the wound two weeks prior while removing part of a painful bump on my leg for a biopsy. So, I guess that was sort of a stupid update to give you, huh doc?
He went on to inform me the bump was a type of benign tumor with "extra feeling cells" or maybe "extra feeling in its cells" - I don't remember exactly, neither seems exactly medicine-science-based an explanation. Ever eager to chop lumps off, this doctor, he explained it will grow back and probably still hurt like before if he does not lop a football-shaped chunk out of my leg around it. Football shaped - what, because the season just started? What sort of jamoke does this doctor seem to think i am?
I said I actually had to get going, implying I have the sort of important and busy job and hence even more important and even busier boss who would not approve of my taking extra time off his clock to get a new football-shaped wound put in. "Can i do it later?" I asked the doctor - who was probably at this point picturing all the cool doctor knives and punches he would get to use on my little lump, and he said "What, like later today?" Buddy....I hate to break it to you, but call off your dogs, your myChart message did not mentally prepare me for this. I would have brought a stuffed animal to hold for gosh sakes.
I've had this sitting in the drafts section of this blog software since gosh, when I got that lump cut off back in who knows when, September? August? Before the election. So this is now a mashup blog written from ashes. Enjoy!
I'm finally finishing this having just come back from Los Angeles, currently experiencing some of the worst wildfires in years sparked from unknown causes, but probably poorly maintained power lines, on Tuesday, and fueled into blazes by the Santa Ana winds. It was too windy for the bucket helicopters and tanker planes to make drops, so windy that the fire jumped over a highway and embers the size of charcoal briquettes flew in the air. When I arrived Wednesday morning, the city was covered in a thick layer of smoke from the Eaton fire. The Palisades fire burned in the hills north of Santa Monica, its dense smoke billowing out over the ocean. When the official fire maps updated, the fires had gone from a few thousand to tens of thousands of estimated acres burnt or burning. Whole neighborhoods have been totally wiped out, the toxic smoke makes everything smell like a campfire. I felt like a real jerk taking up a hotel room. When I was heading to the airport to skip town, someone accidentally sent an evacuation alert warning to everyone's phone - the whole LA county received it. For a minute, as the amber alert sounds rang out, we all thought for a moment that something in the wind had shifted, that maybe the embers and fire were heading in our direction.
It just felt awful. Yesterday morning the smoke was incredibly thick and low, and only half the people I saw were wearing masks. We are on year 5 of an air-spreading viral pandemic (potentially year 0 of the next one) and people have no idea where to get the N95 masks that we know protect us from sickness and the cancer causing particles in fire smoke. I saw a Mustang GT spun out against a tree on the side of Sepulveda Blvd. The Rand McNally estate in Altadena, with its orthogonal Turkish-inpired drawing room, either reassembled or faithfully reimagined from the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago, on Christmas Tree Lane in Altadena, burned down before I even knew it existed. A custom-built home perched above Sunset Blvd designed, built by its owner on an impossible lot, was reduced to its concrete pilings. Many of the most unique homes destroyed will be illegal to rebuild, their construction outlawed by various building codes and environmental regulations in the years since they were built. Some areas along the coast have exemptions to these regulations written in the law so they can rebuild mansions on the land until it falls into the ocean for good, and in the meantime keep the beaches in Malibu private.
My boss and his wife had to evacuate, and he was worried about people breaking in to their house. It sucks that we live in an America with a population with nowhere to evacuate, for whom a horrible uncontrollable fire is an opportunity to scratch out a little fraction of their wealthy surroundings for themselves. A man died outside his house holding a hose. Yesterday someone was arrested for allegedly setting another fire with a blowtorch. A rogue drone operator flew his dual-use technology into the path of one of two special fire-dousing planes on loan from Canada putting it out of commission, probably trying to get footage of water drops to watermark. None of this chaos impacted Raytheon HQ in El Segundo, or the Falcon 9 launched at Vandenberg carrying the "Seventh launch of SpaceX/Northrop Grumman-built satellites for the National Reconnaissance Office." The national security state is insulated from even the highest levels of civil disturbance by design, the indifference to people suffering is a feature not a bug. Wildfires are not the Enemy, and you and yours are not high-priority assets worth protecting.
Watching:
I love the movie Candleshoe - available to stream on Disney+. After Jodie Foster's street urchin tomboy character is sold by her "creepy" caretakers into the hands of an even creepier British conman, he whisks her away. Thinking she is being arrested for her many street urchin hijinks, Foster delivers one of the greatest lines of all time when, surprised to see the conman has taken her to a fancy hotel she exclaims, "This ain't no juvenile hall!" Just watch it. And quote this silly movie for the rest of your life.
I also really enjoyed Conclave - out now in theaters (*at time of writing). Ralph Fiennes gives a great performance in English, Latin, and Italian. The film has some really stunning "behind the curtain" visuals of the cardinals meeting in the Sistine Chapel. The use of music - Allegri's Miserere mei, a piece written to be performed only during Holy Week, only in the Sistine Chapel, the performance traditions of which were kept, in medieval times, secret by those who performed it, is beautiful and carries with it this power and majesty the church has. When I was a kid, I used to cross my eyes in church and make the double images of all the candles line up with each-other. I thought I would be a fighter pilot by now. Anyways I was convinced in the theater aliens would be making an appearance, spoiler alert: there are no aliens in this movie.
The best movie from 2024 I saw was Theda Hammel's "Stress Positions", out now on Hulu. You may remember Theda Hammel from earlier entries about Nymphowars (the best podcast of the last couple years). I was early to hear about Stress Positions and very late to see it, having missed every opportunity available to me until it landed on Hulu. It is a beautiful and visually stunning in a very real practical way (negotiating a giant disco ball out of a house and into the sun is one example of a sight I loved to see on film), hilarious and poignant (perhaps the best Covid-era media I've seen), and plays with the big questions of identity and meaning people are having today. Hammel's screenplay uniquely calls out the vapid, endless pleasure seeking, soul sucking emptiness modern life offers us, and the obstacles it throws up to building the community we want and need. I loved it!
Reading:
Basically nothing?????? Just kidding: here are some outlet recommendations:
404 Media is pumping out the cutting edge in technology safety/security news - their latest dispatch I saw discusses police phone-cracking software being less effective on the newest versions of iOS, but otherwise being able to easily split inside your locked phone. It's okay, a judge will probably sign off first! Now, they are hot on the beat of Meta's latest Trump-kissing "free speech" turn and AI slop.
The Space Review is my go-to fall asleep read, but I mean that in the best way. Jeff Foust and Dwayne Day, among others, write great articles on Space history and current events in the outer limits. Of note, Day's write-ups of US satellite surveillance history, and Foust's coverage of the astronauts stuck on the ISS.
Hearing:
Regrettably I am in my self-diagnosed OCD chapter of life. I have begun to believe that my constant cycle of obsessing over a health emergency I presume I have or feel coming based on a twinge, spooky feeling, or indigestion - is not a normal or healthy way to go through life. In fact, I think bouts of OCD and ensuing depression have greatly upset the course of my life! So listening to this podcast gives me so much insight I need to how my brain works and what has been happening in my life. Next step.......therapy...........?
Notable as a podcast for providing annotated transcripts. Also notable for a level of candor and detail that other podcasts lack on a variety of finance and institutional situations (how property is taxed, invested in, . Patrick McKenzie has appeared on my blog before, when I briefly chastised him for parroting the Manhattan Institute's Chicago Debt Doom talking points. I take umbrage with supposedly good and moral people of science and rationality who have little to say about people profiting off making the world more dangerous. I emailed him, twice, (he has a standing invite) and got the standard invite to coffee response, but I'm not sure our schedules will ever line up, and I think a disconnected one-way dialogue is probably a better use of both of our time right now. I might well just have bugged him about not being anti-nuclear weapons / war machine enough, and he'd probably take that back and write some really long essay to add to the pile with the other "smart people who believe stockpiles of WMDs are actually good, should be maintained and increased, any efforts to reduce them dismissed out of hand" essays they keep a cabinet of at the Heritage Foundation HQ. But I get a lot of out listening to this podcast and observing the patio11 orbit, including his Bits About Money blog.
This Spotify Japan playlist for people from the 90s came up while I was in JP:
Thinking:
What's the point of writing this? It's been a long time since I put out one of these blogs. I started a skeleton draft of a post at the end of June, and it overflowed with links to articles so fast I couldn't keep up with the pace of the news. Joe Biden went out to pasture after one of the great debate flops of our time, Kamala stepped up and picked the nega-Vance VP candidate without much drama, taking us from what seemed like an obvious Trump blowout in November back down to the usual nail-biter of an election we have come to know and love. Any and all momentum was then squandered by the Democrats being unable to say "War is Bad" or "Shit is too expensive" (ceding crucial "war is bad"/"shit's expensive" voters to, of all people, the Republican party). Kamala lost and seems to have literally packed her bags and left on vacation. Our ruling class is old, rich, and unfeeling.
Now we are living in the midst of two burgeoning wars - between Israel and Iran, and Ukraine and Russia. Both of which happily threaten to go nuclear. We have a crackpot soon to be running things here, with a legion of crackpots behind him. Every day the world gets a little less materially equal, we lose a chunk of the Amazon and the Great Barrier Reef and global average temperatures rise, people die to bullets and bombs made at a profit by companies owned by people who are mainly concerned with buying the biggest, fastest boat on Lake Wakahatcho - who couldn't care less about the blood and the guts and the children screaming. Good news - Mark Zuckerberg recorded an acoustic version of "Get Low" with T-Pain for his wife! How sweet! He's working hard on getting us sunglasses with virtual reality behind the eyes! With the right technology, you will never have to see or hear about the dead, the bodies, the rubble. You can focus on what matters, then, entering your DILF era and buying a new fancy watch!
I wanted to start writing this for a couple of reasons. One is that in this horrible digital slop world, it feels like finding actually good things is hard, and making sense of everything going on is hard, and I want to be helpful to the people I care about. While connecting with one another is technically easier than ever (mere clicks and taps away), I feel really distant from so many people in my life. Old friends, people I grew up with, family members near and far, all feel more outside my life than in. And I want to write this to remember and document what I was thinking and feeling and seeing and reading and hearing not just for me, but for the people I care about and think about. It's so easy to fall into being a shadow, and I think there is so much pressure on us (you included) to cease to exist in public in the face of a world that can swing a god's eye of attention on to you and crush you like a bug if you seem to ask for it. I'm haunted daily by relationships gone sour. There is no app for reconciliation, there is no "click to forgive", all we can do is try to each live a life we are proud of.
So I think it is good and brave to do your part to exist as a person and use your voice! Maybe now more than ever. I think a lot now about how many people there are - how big Billions is, how even the most niche interests today have thousands and thousands of passionate enthusiasts, how much larger than I can imagine the populations of people are in this world. It is great to be alive with you all!