Andrew Pulver reporting for The Guardian:

Paul McCartney and Elton John will appear in the sequel to cult mockumentary This Is Spinal Tap, for which filming is due to get under way early next year, it has been revealed.

[…]

News of plans to make a Spinal Tap sequel broke in May 2022, when the project was shopped at the Cannes film festival international market. Reiner said then: “I can tell you hardly a day goes by without someone saying, why don’t you do another one? For so many years, we said, ‘Nah.’ It wasn’t until we came up with the right idea how to do this. You don’t want to just do it, to do it. You want to honour the first one and push it a little further with the story.”

The original film’s main cast of Michael McKean, Harry Shearer and Christopher Guest are due to return, although Tony Hendra, who played cricket-bat-wielding manager Ian Faith, died in 2021. The plot will reportedly centre on Faith’s death, after which his widow inherits a contract that requires the band to do one last concert. Reiner is also due to return in the character of film-maker Marty DiBergi, a figure supposedly based on Martin Scorsese, who had directed celebrated music documentary The Last Waltz in 1976.

This sequel goes to 11 – one louder.

Jon Meacham, a distinguished presidential historian, contributing writer for The New York Times Book Review, contributing editor at TIME, and a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, delves into the roots of American history, contending that conflict is the crucible from which history emerges. In his exploration, Meacham dissects the shaping of America’s soul by the juxtaposition of “our better angels” and our darker instincts. Drawing from pivotal moments such as the post-Civil War Reconstruction, the tumultuous rise and fall of the KKK, and the establishment of the NAACP, he offers insights into the forces that have shaped the nation.

Meacham contends that an honest examination of the unvarnished history of the United States is essential for every American. By understanding the past, we gain the ability to navigate away from previous pitfalls and propel the country forward purposefully. His observations and perspectives on the expansive sweep of American history instill hope we exercise “our better angels”.

The documentary, which spans over three hours, is advocated as essential viewing for every American. Meacham’s comprehensive exploration serves as a call for citizens to invest the time and effort to absorb the genuine, unfiltered history of the country, fostering a collective understanding that can guide the nation towards a more enlightened and inclusive future.

Mad Max: Fury Road emerged as a cinematic masterpiece, standing out as one of the finest films in recent memory. Renowned for its intense car chases, it gripped audiences from the very first frame, keeping them on the edge of their seats throughout.

Now, the trailer for Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga has been unveiled, and it’s nothing short of fantastic. The production team for Furiosa boasts the talent of editor Margaret Sixel and several other award-winning individuals from the Fury Road crew, heightening expectations for this upcoming installment. Anticipation is soaring, and I can hardly wait for what promises to be another exhilarating chapter in the Mad Max universe.

At Luna’s Blog - an interesting comparison of the minimum wage to CEO salary pays

Then I got curious, and added some CEO salaries for comparison. The vast disparity is nothing new to me, but seeing it like this…

It’s fucking sobering.

Who would’ve thought that Ted “Theodore” Logan would grow up to own a motorcycle company and make a switch to the bass guitar? Absolutely outstanding. Keep partying on, dudes!

By the way, the band totally should’ve been named Wyld Stallyns.

As if the Jan 6. rioters and insurrectionists had enough to worry about local law enforcement, FBI and the military - they have a new potential threat. Their dates.

Nearly three years ago, a young professional in the nation’s capital was sitting in her apartment after the Jan. 6 attack and saw that the FBI was looking for help identifying the rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol. So she opened up the Bumble dating app, changed her political beliefs to conservative and got to swiping.

The woman reached out to several Donald Trump supporters who the app showed were in the Washington area, hoping to elicit confessions from those who had flooded into the city because they believed his lies about the 2020 presidential election.

On Wednesday, one of the Bumble users she turned in to the FBI pleaded guilty to assaulting law enforcement officers with chemical spray and a metal whip.

I am not a fan of Gibson guitars - just can’t get along with them. Too heavy, awkward and the headstocks break off if you look at them the wrong way. And Gibson leaves a lot to be desired when it comes to quality control and their extortive pricing. After all this is a company that sells an “artist signature” of a knock off.

Yea, I am a Fender man. But I digress. Give Gibson credit where its due. Their Icon series is fabulous. This episode with Noel Gallagher of Oasis fame is amazing.

Gallagher on songwriting:

I guess the one thing you gotta have as a songwriter I think is you gotta trust in your own instincts and you’ve got to be fearless and not listen to anybody else. If you haven’t got those things you should be a professional songwriter that sits in a shed and writes songs, you know, for pop stars. Then you do listen to other people and you know you do give a shit because you are trying to get on the radio. All the songwriters I admire never really gave a fuck. Niel Young, Bob Dylan, David Bowie, Macker, John Lennon, Weller.

In my book, Noel Gallagher has earned his way into that group of song writers.

Stephanie Saul and Anemona Hartocollis, reporting for The New York Times:

Support for the presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and M.I.T. eroded quickly on Wednesday, after they seemed to evade what seemed like a rather simple question during a contentious congressional hearing: Would they discipline students calling for the genocide of Jews?

Their lawyerly replies to that question and others during a four-hour hearing drew incredulous responses. “It’s unbelievable that this needs to be said: Calls for genocide are monstrous and antithetical to everything we represent as a country,” said a White House spokesman, Andrew Bates. […]

Much of the criticism landed heavily on Ms. Magill because of an extended back-and-forth with Representative Stefanik. Ms. Stefanik said that in campus protests, students had chanted support for intifada, an Arabic word that means uprising and that many Jews hear as a call for violence against them. Ms. Stefanik asked Ms. Magill, “Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Penn’s rules or code of conduct, yes or no?”

Ms. Magill replied, “If the speech turns into conduct, it can be harassment.”

Ms. Stefanik pressed the issue: “I am asking, specifically: Calling for the genocide of Jews, does that constitute bullying or harassment?”

Ms. Magill, a lawyer who joined Penn last year with a pledge to promote campus free speech, replied, “If it is directed and severe, pervasive, it is harassment.”

Ms. Stefanik responded: “So the answer is yes.”

Ms. Magill said, “It is a context-dependent decision, congresswoman.”

Ms. Stefanik exclaimed: “That’s your testimony today? Calling for the genocide of Jews is depending upon the context?”

In addition to Magill, the chair of Penn’s board of trustees also submitted his resignation - the shortest tenure in Penn’s 260-year history.

The reckoning has come for Harvard, M.I.T., and Penn for the bizarro-world political climate that’s taken hold at these universities in the last decade or two. Where the insular far-left worldview where the oppressed are viewed as inherently just, but comes across as absurd to everyone living in the real world.

You can only pretend to live in a bubble for so long.

As I am approaching 50, and the hair line is starting its retreat - I love this opinion piece by Edith Zimmerman

Bald guys are hot. Bald guys are no-nonsense, bald guys have other things to think about. Bald guys aren’t using a bunch of hair supplies, bald guys have more time to spend doing attractive and useful things, like building houses and making jokes. Bald guys are magnificent. Bald guys seem to have seen something more of life. Bald guys know things, if you know what I mean.

Guys with beautiful hair are wonderful, but they remind me of myself. Not because I have beautiful hair, but because I also want beautiful hair, and there cannot be two of us.

I am a huge fan of NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert series - and I don’t know how I missed this! Good old organic blues music with real instruments and soul. So good to hear real music played in a sea of pop and rap.

It was the summer of 1985. My parents had just purchased a Commodore 64 from a neighbor for $200 - complete with a 1541 disk drive and a carton of 5 ¼ inch disks - which I had no idea what was contained in them.

After a few hours of reading the manuals and struggling to figure out what I am going to do with this beige colored bread box - I put the first disk in typed the following:

load "*", 8, 1

And after some furious whirring - up came a screen:

For the next three weeks I spent the entire day locked away in our den behind the kitchen avoiding the grues, thieves and plundering The Great Underground Empire. Those were some great times.

The code to most of the Infocom interactive fiction games, written in ZIL (Zork Implementation Language,) have been around since 2019. This was pretty much useless unless you had a ZIL interpreter (AKA Z machine) for your system. There were many open sourced Z machine implementations for just about every machine out there. But the originals were thought to be lost.

Until now.

Andrew Plotkin has published a git repo with all of the source code for the major platforms, details what they are and how he found them in a blog post on his site.

So the game source was big news. Infocom’s interpreter source, however, remained obscure. This was the game-playing software for each platform: the Apple 2 interpreter, the Commodore 64 interpreter, and so on. A particular Infocom game release (“Zork 3 for the C64”, say) was a floppy containing the C64 interpreter and the Zork-3 game file. Boot the floppy, the interpreter starts up; it loads the game data and the game begins.

These interpreters were well-studied by IF enthusiasts in the early 1990s. That’s how we got the first open-source IF interpreters and the modern Z-machine specification. Functionally, we know how they work.

But we never had their source code. You might ask, who cares? It would have been pretty opaque assembly code anyhow. But it’s a layer of insight into the developers' minds. Comments, variable names, documentation.

This is the best holiday gift for hopeless nerds like myself.

Renowned historian and ‘Sapiens’ author Yuval Noah Harari, in an interview with Ari Melber, who asks Harari about his scholarship, its applications, recent AI developments and criticism of Harari’s writing. Among the many thought provoking insights from Harari - this one really breaks down the current American political climate:

What you see in a lot of modern politics is this delicate dance between conservatives and liberals which I think that - for many generations they agreed on the basics. Their main disagreement was about the pace. That both conservatives and liberals basically agreed we need some rules and also we need the ability to change the rules. The conservatives prefere a much slower pace

[…]

The conservative instinct is to wait it’s it’s dangerous and the liberal instinct is to try it out and see what happens. You see this kind of delicate dance, when things are going to slow people vote in more liberal administration that will speed things up and will be more creative, bolder in its social experiments. When things go too fast then you say okay - liberals you had your chance now lets bring in the conservatives to slow down a little and have a bit of a breath.

And what really I think is happening in recent years and I don’t have a good explanation for that is that in many parts of the world you see a kind of conservative suicide that conservatives are abandoning their kind of traditional role to slow down and conserve institutions and traditions and so forth and they still call themselves conservatives but they become this kind of new radical party which is more about ignoring traditions and destroying institutions

Then it becomes the job of liberals to be the audience of the institutions and the are not good at it. They don’t know how to do it. You know instead of a car that you have one leg on the fuel pedal and one leg on the break you have two legs on the fuel pedal and no leg on the brake and this is a recipe for disaster.

An amazing one hour conversation.

The 3d Demo that would change the course of Nintendo - discovered 30 years later. The fascinating history and story of the discovery of the X demo by the Video Game History Foundation.

Boy this brings back the memories. The 80s was the best time to grow up.

An amazing 20-minute film by Hiroshi Sumi. An homage and loving look back at the earliest days of Industrial Light and Magic. That was a magical time in movie making that we will never see again.

In our digital heavy lives today - a cocktail of TickTock, Facebook, Instagram and Google are destroying us mentally by the minute. In the past, we were were forced to use our brains extensively. From memorizing how to get to anywhere, problem solve and retain knowledge and socialize with our friends and family. With social media, everything is being replaced by a post, a text, or a Google search.

Natalie Worth makes an excellent point:

Dopamine also causes us to spend a lot of time in the limbic area of our brain, which is responsible for our emotions, instead of the pre-frontal cortex, which helps us plan for the future and problem-solve — not an ideal mix. And even worse, when we do get the chance to solve a problem, we’re offloading it to Google.

[…]

Traditionally, we learn by committing information to memory, but because we can look up any information at any time, we don’t need to retain things in our own memory. We’re offloading our retention and memory to Google. In 2011, Harvard researchers coined the term ‘The Google Effect’ when they found that when we’re faced with a difficult question or problem, instead of knowing how to answer it ourselves, we’re instead really good at knowing where to find the answer — our trusty searching tool, Google.

So what to do about this? The solution is to force yourself into using your brain for 1-2 hours a day. Solving puzzles, art, language learning, playing games or musical instruments, reading, or writing.

Basically everything we used to do before social media.

Inaugural edition of Jessica DeFino’s column Ask Ugly:

To self-soothe, I went home and wrote a detailed account of exactly how much time, money and effort it takes to maintain the ageless, expressionless “Instagram face” look for Fashionista.com – roughly 16 cosmetic treatments and $17,000 a year. And that’s without 2023 inflation.

Still, understanding that the youth-centric beauty ideal is an algorithmic black hole designed to absorb my brain space didn’t make me feel better. For a long while after, I felt bad.

Who could blame me? The false equivalence “beauty = good” is everywhere: anti-ageing products are laden with religious significance – “holy grail” moisturizers, “miracle” ingredients. Anne Hathaway’s youthful appearance is credited to her “unproblematic” behavior. “You look good for your age” is a common compliment, with good meaning young – a construct designed to keep people consuming, and consumed by, a need to prove their worth.

Of course, Indigo Girl, you know this! Lots of people know this! It’s why so many are set on rebranding conventionally bad, ugly or negative traits as good, beautiful or positive traits. Stretch marks are now “warrior marks” or “earned stripes”. Wrinkles are now “signs of wisdom”. I saw an influencer refer to her forehead line as “a hard-earned mark of enduring and carrying on” the other day, and I’m sorry to her and the Indigo Girls, but I hate it so much! This “reclaiming” is not better than the original fallacy. It still frames the physical body as a marker of worth and assigns a moral value to a slab of flesh that intrinsically has none.

[…]

To answer your question, Indigo Girl, no, I don’t think you should be more proactive about anti-ageing. Not because your crow’s feet are good or beautiful or representative of some deeper wisdom, but because they come with the territory of having a body.

The Web Design Museum has Taylor Swift’s website from 2002 - including “dialup” and “broadband” download links to her music.

I can’t say I am a fan of her music, but I can’t deny her talent or her technical marketing savvy. Even at a young age, Swift was way beyond in marketing her music than just about anyone in the music business. I am not a bit surprised that she has surpassed 1 billion dollar net worth in jut 16 years since her debut album.

Andrew Ross Sorkin and Robert D. Hershey Jr., reporting for The New York Times:

Charles T. Munger, who quit a well-established law career to be Warren E. Buffett’s partner and maxim-spouting alter-ego as they transformed a foundering New England textile company into the spectacularly successful investment firm Berkshire Hathaway, died on Tuesday in Santa Barbara, Calif. He was 99.

His death, at a hospital, was announced by Berkshire Hathaway. He had a home in Los Angeles.

Although overshadowed by Mr. Buffett, who relished the spotlight, Mr. Munger, a billionaire in his own right — Forbes listed his fortune as $2.6 billion this year — had far more influence at Berkshire than his title of vice chairman suggested.

Mr. Buffett has described him as the originator of Berkshire Hathaway’s investing approach. “The blueprint he gave me was simple: Forget what you know about buying fair businesses at wonderful prices; instead, buy wonderful businesses at fair prices,” Mr. Buffett once wrote in an annual report. […]

A $1,000 investment in Berkshire made in 1964 is worth more than $10 million today.

Mr. Munger was often viewed as the moral compass of Berkshire Hathaway, advising Mr. Buffett on personnel issues as well as investments. His hiring policy: “Trust first, ability second.”

Today most people are hesitant on EV cars for three reasons: initial upfront costs and worry about running out of battery power far from a charging station. In regard to upfront costs, EV vehicles will come down in price as competition increases and range anxiety will diminish as money from the Inflation Reduction Act flows into building more charging stations and making discounts for electric vehicles available right at the dealership.

The third is the campaign by the existing car companies sowing doubt about that such vehicles aren’t really all that much better for the environment than hybrid vehicles that have both gas and electric motors, and might even be worse, because of everything required to manufacture batteries and mine the materials that go into them.

Dr. Stephen Porder in a guest essay for the New York Times:

If you look under the hood, so to speak, these concerns share two fundamental misunderstandings: They assume that the electric vehicle industry is locked in to today’s technology, and they discount the huge environmental drawbacks of gas-powered alternatives. Electric vehicles are like digital cameras in their early iterations. They are already better than the alternative for almost everyone, and improving at a breathtakingly fast clip. And while there are environmental concerns with them, they are dwarfed by the benefit they provide regarding climate change — the biggest environmental threat to human well-being in the 21st century.

But let’s do the math as I’ve done for my family’s two E.V.s. We got the first to replace our 10-year-old, gas-powered Subaru, and after only two years of driving, the E.V. has created fewer emissions over its lifetime than if we had kept the old car. It will take our second E.V. only four years to create fewer emissions over its lifetime than the 2005 hybrid Prius it replaced. That’s counting the production of the batteries and the emissions from charging the E.V.s, and the emissions payback time will only continue to drop as more emissions-free wind and solar power comes onto the grid and battery technology improves.