
Kirk Israel's commonplace and blog. Quotes and links daily since 2001.
2025.06.16


2025.06.15
Happy Fathers Day to those who celebrate!
I had a new introspective thought yesterday- it doesn't have the vibe of "oh my gosh this explains everything" but it seems like it might be a valid piece. I lost my dad when I was 14 after me and my mom being there for him through a year or two of debilitation. (Which is obviously kinda traumatic, though sometimes I think back to how some evaluation I had done around second grade noted I was more attached to my mom than my dad.)
But now for the first time I wonder, did witnessing that reshape my landscape about my own potential for fatherhood, and explain why something like Uncle-hood works so much better for me? Like somehow I either took in "dads get sick and die" or maybe "dads aren't necessary".
I dunno. Maybe it's a just a Just-So story. But I wonder.
2025.06.14

2025.06.13

2025.06.12
Computer Stew is a really interesting, really fun web experiment. Basically, some guys decided to see that if they could make a daily show with less than $3000 in startup costs, using the Net for distribution and consumer grade hardware. The short answer is, yup, they can, and the result is sometimes funny as heck. If you only have time to see one episode, check out notepad.exe, in all-singing all-dancing music video tribute to everyone's favorite Windows text editor. "N to the O to the T to the E, P to the A, D, E, X, E my Notepad!"(I love how one of the characters was always a voice over a speakerphone)
So that song has stuck with me for decades. I saved the crappy realmedia file for the video - I don't have anything to view it anymore, but I tried converting it to mp4....
the quality is SUPER bad but I'm not sure if that's the conversion or just what we had way back in those pre-youtube days.
2025.06.11
Donald Trump announced Tuesday that he will begin "winding down" FEMA after this year's Hurricane season and, perhaps the more significant statement, that he will begin distributing disaster aid directly from the President's office. In other words, disaster assistance will be the President's personal gift, an assist for friends and those who display loyalty. It's part of the broader pattern we can see across the horizon: Trump takes the policing and military powers of the United States and the national tax revenues (drawn disproportionately from the blue states) and uses it to make war on states he considers enemies.
2025.06.10
(also, perfect comic timing)