I was yesterday year's old when we realized the Sundance Film Festival was made by Robert Redford, who played The Sundance Kid.

We watched 2/3 of the movie last night... I had forgotten I had seen it like 9 years ago.

It kind of drags, to be honest? And the whole flirting on a bicycle scene with "Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head" is pretty incongruous.

(Randomly, I just noticed the movie was written by William Goldman (most famously to my crew as author of The Princess Bride) and I'm reading his old summer read smash "Boys and Girls Together")

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An actual quote from the [UK] Secretary of State for Business and Trade [Peter Kyle]
Too often people go to university to 'explore research and knowledge'

Look forward to Wes S saying 'too often people go to hospital to have operations'
or Heidi Alexander saying 'too often people go to the station to catch a train'

I haven't listened to the whole thing but the summary of America's political divide is psychological, not ideological: "American politics has become divided along epistemic and psychological grounds between "intuitionists" who think with their guts and "rationalists" who prefer science and logic."

Which Colbert nailed with
"We go straight from the gut, right sir? That's where the truth lies, right down here in the gut. Do you know you have more nerve endings in your gut than you have in your head? You can look it up. I know some of you are going to say "I did look it up, and that's not true." That's 'cause you looked it up in a book."

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Concord MA is a great place to argue against authoritarians.

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Cancelling Hulu/Disney+ because of the authoritarian Jimmy Kimmel censorship.

One of the things giving me any hope in this time has been, it was still ok to talk crap about the president and republicans. FCC Chair Carr (you know, the guy who wears little golden Trump in profile pins) makes it clear, if you want your billion buck merger to go through you have to suck up to Trump. Amusingly he claims to be in favor of free speech.

A sunny disposition is worth more than fortune. Young people should know that it can be cultivated; that the mind, like the body can be moved from the shade into sunshine.

I reran into that quote the other day (along with some other great quotes, many about dealing with fear and angst.)

I've been thinking a lot about how it's like there's a separate part of my mind who really wants me to worry... who sounds alarm bells all the time, who doesn't realize triggering a fight or flight response will too often lead to the "flight" of angsty procrastination...

Like, I think that quote is right. More often than we realize we have some level of control of the spin we are putting on our view of life, and you might as well try to nudge things to be content and productive, as much as you can.

The ultimate goal of the Trump administration is seemingly to turn us into the colonial Williamsburg of internal combustion. Right now, Beijing is offering cheap, clean power, employment, trade, and a route to prosperity. Washington is offering tariffs, policy chaos, White nationalist memes, and South Korean workers in shackles after a raid on an EV battery factory. This is no way to win the grand strategic contest of the 21st century.

Saturday hit the Big E w/ Lynette and Kyle. Mostly it was a food tour, though we didn't go quite as crazy as we might have thought (things starting with - are just samples)

-cheese and jerky
cream puff
truffle parmesan poutine
-soups, dips
maple creamy
steak sandwich w cheese and peppers
cider slush
-salsas
smutty nose pumpkin beer
giant turkey leg
lemonade
canoli

(compare with me and Melissa and Liz in 2015)

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Heh. You might be able to test this for yourself ChatGPT Goes Completely Haywire If You Ask It to Show You a Seahorse Emoji. I got about the same result with "show me the seahorse emoji" and "is there actually a seahorse emoji or no?" - but when I said sure to "Do you want me to show you how it renders across different platforms (Apple, Google, Twitter, etc.)?" it righted the ship.

Thinking about the argument "well it's also probably an argument that there SHOULD be a seahorse emoji", though the idea that LLM points us to what should be rather than what is is kinda scary.

My current descriptor of ChatGPT et al is that it's a blender and remixer of commonsense. Crazily useful sometimes! But that blender makes some bizarre misinformation smoothies at other times. cracked.com has a pretty good interview with Drew Carey. Cleveland Rocks!