The Gang Leader as President | Talking Points Memo:

Trump’s role as chief rabble-rouser and civic arsonist in 2016, bewilderingly, never really changed — despite his election victory — because he never really consented to become President. He grabbed hold of the bundle of powers, but in a critical way — not the authority and certainly, not the responsibility or accountability. He remains the warlord, the strongest force in the land. But the position of president, the constitutional figure intended to make an effort at public unity and steer the ship, remains vacant. And thus we have a chaos, with attempts to stitch together the fabric here and there with ad hoc confederacies of governors, in which he thrives.

I guess I’m glad that my town has some bike paths and bike lanes. I just wish that they actually went anywhere or connected to anything.

The cat would like to be let in the people door.

Hard drive destruction

Twitter threads suck and I refuse to read them.

Alan Jacobs hits the nail on the head regarding Twitter threads:

When you write a Twitter thread, what you are telling me is that you don’t care about your own ideas enough to articulate and display them in a proper venue. And if you don’t have respect for your own ideas, you certainly can’t expect me to.

You don’t have to create a blog of your own to post something to the web. You can use a free service like Rentry — I used to recommend also txt.fyi but I think it’s dead. You can even do what the celebs do and write something in Apple Notes, screenshot it, and tweet it as an image. There are a hundred ways to post longer-than–280-characters writing to Twitter, and when you write threads you are choosing the very worst one.

Yep.

Whenever I see “1/x”, it tells me that you couldn’t be bothered to structure your thoughts before spewing them out into the void, or to go to the effort of writing them all in one place. It is disrespectful to readers, and not worth my time to try to track down the whole thread.

Constantly drippy nose from seasonal allergies is even less enjoyable when wearing a face mask.

Joe Jackson’s Night and Day came up in my recommendations this morning, and so I am listening to it while I knock some stuff my todo list before my morning meetings kick in.

I have listened to some random Joe Jackson stuff over the years—and I think maybe I have Look Sharp! on vinyl somewhere—but I have never listened to this entire album.

It’s pretty good so far.

I agree with Patrick Rhone one hundred percent here. The permanence of digital storage is a myth. Devices fail, file formats are deprecated, and apps are abandoned. Don’t trust anything you want to keep to an app or a file. If you want to be able to read it twenty year from now, write it down on paper.

There are worse songs than Common People to have stuck in one’s head.