Chris Lott @fncll@social.coop

Scrolled past a headline that Sarah Palin has advice for Kamala Harris. Here’s some advice for @SaraPalinUSA: no one, on either side of the aisle or in between, wants your advice or cares about what you have to say about anything.

There is one remarkable thing about The Daily’s two-parter on “cancel culture”: no one mentioned in it who didn’t break the law was cancelled. More power to consequence culture!

TL;DR should go before the article that is TL. That is all.

📚 Finished Diary of a Nobody by the brothers Grossmith. Wickedly funny. My triumvirate of British comic novels now includes this, Three Men in a Boat, and pretty much any Wodehouse. Pooter, Perkupp, Cummings and Gowing, Lupin…indelible characters every one.

📚 Finished The Collapsing Empire (John Scalzi). Fast-paced, fun, intelligent and funny space opera. I expect nothing less from Mr. Scalzi. The premise is such that I have high hopes the next installment(s) in the trilogy will actually be better than the first. That’s rare.

📚 Finished Eclipse (John Banville). A re-read. If I ever read it a third time there wll be hardly a page left unhighlighted. There is no finer crafter of sentences than Banville. His writing is so good it makes me despair of my own.

🎵 Man, I forgot how much I love Stanley Turrentine’s playing…especially the Blue Note recordings with Blue Mitchell and Sugar (the first CTI album)…and anything else with Freddie Hubbard.

Politics do/don’t kill people in the same way guns do/don’t kill people. I’m neither celebrating nor saddened by Cain’s death. I am sad for others he likely infected, without consent, through his choice of selfishness and denial of science → https://fncll.org/go/cain-dies

There are many good reasons not to require students to turn their cameras on, but in Zoom, at least, the potential trauma of the mirror image (cf https://fncll.org/go/zoom-no-camera) isn’t one of them. Just show them how to disable self-view (https://fncll.org/go/zoom-no-camera).

Representative Dolt @RepLouieGohmert is operating on a whole different level of stupid:

“I can’t help but think that if I hadn’t been wearing a mask so much in the last 10 days or so, I really wonder if I would have gotten it.”

‘Tis the season for promotion of repetitive keynote presentations…so many words saying so little, built on the back of straw men — straw hobby horses, really — promoted by people who should know better (or are afraid to not be seen cheerleading).

Bloggers and Modern Essayists: https://micro.fncll.org/2020/07/28/bloggers-and-modern.html

Bloggers and the Modern Essayist: https://micro.fncll.org/2020/07/28/bloggers-and-the.html

The Microsoft Teams everyone is talking about must be different than the MS Teams I have used. My Microsoft Teams is, like most MS products, a half-wraith imitation of better products. Microsoft always has the right idea, executed poorly. AI design masquerading as human, maybe.

Eduardo Corral in conversation with Ocean Vuong…and a copy of Eduardo’s new book with a signed book plate? Sign me up! Oh wait, I just did. You should too. https://fncll.org/go/corral-event

Have any of you done the (apocryphally attributed) Warren Buffet 5/25 exercise?? I feel like I’m doing it wrong…I have pretty diverse interests, but coming up with 25 is hard. Maybe I’m not being specific enough. https://fncll.org/go/25-5-exercise

♫ Best albums of 2020 so far, imo, (what are yours?) are from: Run the Jewels, Taylor Swift, Car Seat Headrest, Caribou, Fiona Apple, Phoebe Bridgers, Westerman, Ghostpoet, Laura Marling, Drakeo the Ruler, Royca da 5’9”, Makaya McCraven, Lil Baby, Pinegrove, and Soccer Mommy

More like Mike Dickta, amiright?

Mickey Kaus couldn’t name three people who were “cancelled” if you offered him all of the Trump wall he lusts after. Why? Because CANCEL CULTURE DOES NOT EXIST. If Mickey is so afraid of consequences for his speech, maybe he shouldn’t try so hard to be a public commentator.

I generally like, and recommend!, the @bookwormfm podcast (though it can go kind of loooong), but…when speaking about/to passion, look up the concept of etymological fallacies. There are 99 problems with the “follow your passion” idea, but etymology ain’t one.