The Offline Report

Constructing a blog off-ramp is tricky. The true bloggers are committed to blogging for life. I only know of one, Dave Winer. Though Om Malik is also keeping pace. I started this blog in 2018 knowing it was going to be publishing blog posts on a regular basis for about two years. I plan to pin this post up top and update the blog with occassional posts from here forward. This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License .

He was emotional. He probably coud not keep his tie straight for long. But artists have to be more disciplined than others if they want to complete works and unveil them to criticism, so Ludwig would clean up on a regular basis. A digital portrait by Becca Saladin guestimates his appearance if he were living among us today: This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License .

These letters to the editor were clipped from the Dec. 4 e-edition of the Los Angeles Times. Web versions can be read at this link . Rebuttals published on Dec. 6 settled the matter. (Web versions not found.) A letter published Dec. 9 showed some could not let it go. This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License .

Thinking too hard can block coding and writing progress in similair ways. I just drafted an op-ed pitch and hit the block of pain despite being steeped in knowledge on the topic. So I took a step back from hot thinking to warm thinking with some mechanical brain-dead ways to perform idea composting. I got out the three by five cards and just wrote down ideas with words, one idea per card. I used about four of 25 cards for the final draft. The last leg of an idea's journey is being put into words by someone, usually a human. Wall-staring is another productivity hack I'm using lately. It's an escape route from doom-scrolling. Here's how to do it: remove a wall picture from its hanger and leave it on the floor, leaning on a wall below eye level. Stare at the space where the picture once was. This forces insight. This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License .

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVn3X4dwi1dqGaBnD3Nlukushr0Us06iVtdLj-d2ewpsy079PXa_tPyWyUGLPLYlYlPl6VqGfAYwxhyphenhyphenD4Ibv6CSPvcjc-4cX6OA5AaWau_L-NHNa1ZHwINtZnNPy1vDWh8busDErjdHCfi/s0/fred-rapp-dog-petey-2-1.jpg " style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "> Petey closes the case: At 5:45 a.m. the next morning, Rapp was found by an off-duty Sgt. named Charles Brooks, who was hunting in the area. Brooks noticed a dog, Petey, which he would later discover was Rapp’s, wandering along a trail. The officer followed the dog’s footprints several hundred yards and found Rapp, sitting near where he crashed his car. This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License .

History books rarely capture these times. I remember once my father telling me of a trip to Mexico his family took when he was just 10, with a hired "driver" who called my dad's Superman action figure "Super Hombre". They were a working class family so it was a surprise to hear of such a luxury spend. They'd hired the driver because my grandmother's mother, who was lively intelligent and living with them, had just died, giving my grandmother freedom and a retroactive yearning for it. Also WWII had just ended. With that latter fact dispensed by my dad, everything linked up again in my mind. E.B. White wrote a famous essay that's now published in hardcover titled "Here is New York". The essay was originally commissioned in 1947 by Holiday magazine (where White's stepson Roger Angell was a junior editor) which served a travel boom audience. ---------------------- Further Reading: How Venture Capitalists are Deforming Capitalism:     ne

This letter to the editor (LTE) is about poor messaging for COVID-19 mitigation efforts, but it hints at a broader theme: NOV. 22, 20203 AM To the editor: Los Angeles County health officials are baffled by what’s causing the ongoing COVID-19 surge . They should drive around and observe people, then go for a walk in the evening and ask passersby to put on a mask, and see how aggresive people become. Go shopping at a grocery store or pick up food at any restaurant, and don’t indentify yourself as a county official. Observe people’s behaviors. It’s really that simple. People with poor masking habits are a big problem. They are hostile when asked to wear their mask correctly. There needs to be a better effort at public education. Where are the daily alerts to our phones telling us to mask up? I see Amazon trucks everywhere; why don’t they put up “wear your mask” signs? With the messaging efforts of today, the Allies might not have won World War II. Officials are treating this

"Shame is an unpleasant emotion. At its mildest, it is a slight ache in the chest and a loss of vigour and energy. At its most potent, it physically deflates you—your head sinks into your shoulders, your shoulders slump and your body crumples. It emotionally stunts you—your brain feels foggy and sluggish, you question yourself, you lose heart, you hold back your feelings and opinions. It's an emotion which reduces your mental capacity—you draw a blank and can't think or come up with any ideas. It temporarily exiles you from the world—you feel overexposed with a desperate need to hide from others. It creates a dark, introspective, confinded space in your psyche where nothing else can enter. It brings you face to face with yourself, where you can see all your flaws and your spots up close. It makes you painfully aware of the fact that you are limited and not as god-like as you sometimes feel. It is the parent who tells you 'no' and 'go to your room'." -

Three letters to the editor today respond to a story of a church pastor who defies limited capacity directives meant to slow the pandemic. The article the letters respond to describes what happened: “There’s another virus loose in the world, and it’s the virus of deception,” MacArthur told the congregation in his Aug. 30 sermon. “And the one who’s behind the virus of deception is the arch deceiver Satan himself.” Throughout the summer, MacArthur repeatedly insisted no one from the church had contracted the coronavirus or been hospitalized with COVID-19. Yet congregants have indeed been stricken and hospitalized with COVID-19, according to MacArthur’s own account in a church interview in April. They included a young couple who were hospitalized and a visiting pastor who died of the disease shortly after attending a church conference in March. ---------------------------------- Further Reading: L.A. megachurch pastor mocks pandemic health orders, even as church members fall il

Math was my first language. I earned my Bachelor's in it. And while I was literate, my reading ability, speed and comprehension picked up well after I graduated. That's probably because my desire to read increased due to people in my social circle. I posit that reading comprehension is elastic through adulthood, and culturally contagious. I bring this up because many people after age 18 self-sort into the category of "not a reader". "Is that available as a documentary? I'm 'not a reader'" said a prolific poster to one usegroup I belonged to years ago. This non-reader wrote grammatically correct, insightful, well-structued and lengthy posts on the usegroup topic. But alas, we could not swap notes on any book because this non-reader seemed to lack the confidence that she could climb the initial three pages of a book before the topic grabs and propels a "fluent" reader to the end of the first chapter. Some citizens get their news throug

I voted for Biden, but one thing Trump did was postpone the disintigration of the United States via media balkanization. He was the only show in town, in every town, every week for the last five years. Only someone like Barack Obama had a need and ability to command that kind of national attention. It just occured to many of us that family gatherings we all looked forward to will not happen in the numbers or crowd sizes we anticipated, because, oh yeah, covid virus. This leaves us with elephant-sized vaccuum in our country. While reporting a music story two years ago I happened upon this really humorous 2014 HuffPo article on the balkanization of popular music today. Its title, "Remember When the Music Didn’t Suck", is deceptive because it winds into something more profound than gripes about autotune and quantized drum beats. "Back in the 1980s, you may not have liked Thriller, but at least you knew Thriller," the author Galanty Miller said. He continued: "To

On ABC, Rahm Emanuel literally says a Biden White House should tell people laid off from retail stores like JC Penney to learn to code. He actually said this. Amazing. pic.twitter.com/xlSnVi7445 — Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) November 7, 2020 Tweet link: CurtisHouck . -------------------------------- Further Reading: "Programming is not about typing, it's about thinking." - Rich Hickey    twitter.com/CodeWisdom   🐤 This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License .

"Ambition must be made to counteract ambition." - James Madison. This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License .

This letter to the editor appeared in today's San Francisco Chronicle. This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License .

Without getting their endorsements, Trump campaigned to voters who watch the debate with the sound turned down by appearing with bling celebrities since mid-October: Ice Cube , NOT Ice T , Kanye, Kim Kardashian (Mrs. Kanye), 50 Cent, Lil' Wayne, developing ... Is this having any traction? The New York Times today, on October 30 reports: Racial and ethnic divides? Actually, Biden is making gains with white voters, and Trump with nonwhite ones. Link to full story is here . The Washington Examiner reported yesterday October 29 that Nearly one-third of black voters will vote for Trump, Rasmussen report finds . The onset of evidence this effort was underway appeared in what must have been Don Trump Jr.'s attempt at a deceptive retreat, doing his best Ferris Beuller impression under a blanket on Instagram , crying 'Hey guys hope you’re doing well. Just watching my algorithm get crushed. I guess I did something to p** off the Instagram gods. Hopefully you’re seeing this stuf

March 13, 2020 It's only March 13th. Yet the 2020s are adhering to (my) prediction this would be a turbulent decade. Resilience science is practically a field of study now—hat tip to Chef Jose Andreas and World Central Kitchen for being early practitioners in this burgeoning discipline. Terrestrial, regional news can orient, calm and lift the spirits. It took weeks-long wildfires in 2017 for this chord-cutting household to buy a TV antenna. Tuning into the daily CALFIRE updates was incredibly calming during the mornings we dashed around to get ready for work. We didn't listen to every word, but it was reassuring knowing *someone* was monitoring and responding to events. Flipping the pages of a reliable newspaper is the best way to consume news for people who know how to navigate the medium. But there is a hump for a reader, who first feels overwhelmed and stupid for not knowing which headlines to skip. For supplemental news updates throughout the day, a quality, reliable te

(April 8, 2019) Leaving the screen on occasion is not enough to build a truly individuated mind. But it's a start. Only touching autonomous media -- leaving the internet hive and entering another world -- will break temporarily the infantalizing umbilical chords of the social media silos owned by Facebook media group. And individuating on a habitual basis is vital for maintaining a democracy. Until one is individuated from one's parents, he or she always will be dependent on them for opinions and thought. That's the healthiest version. Individuating from cult leaders also is important. A cult leader-like offer from who appears to be a mere friend says "turn all your decisions over to me, I'll make them for you." It's a tempting salve to a stressful ambiguous and chaotic time. A blog post plugin could solve a problem. A blog article, a news article, is not the final word on any subject. But when we're in the habit of consuming a finishable snack

A lively discussion of Aristotle's "Poetics" broadcast on the BBC podcast "In Our Time" years ago so struck me that I've replayed it and saved the transcript and youtube link (which frequently expires). Aristotle was the son of a physician, and he himself was an excellent dissector and biology "classifier" while also being a protege of the mathematician, Plato. I'm writing about the treatise "Poetics" now because of the new comedy " Everything is Fine " which I saw on Netflix last night. Unlike his mentor Plato, who published several "dialogues" with a re-created Socrates for the purpose of immediate public consumption, Aristotle wrote from self-imposed exile several seminal works in his 62 years to be published poshumously including "Politics" and "Poetics". Aristotle felt plays were important for the public to attend, with the full public understanding they were mere representation of life

This April, when all of America had caught up to the early shelter-in-place cities and implemented their own "lockdown" rules to fend off the new coronavirus, our president tweeted a trio of "LIBERATE" commands to three states , then stopped. Two of those states' governors have since been talked about as kidnapping targets before their would-be abductors were foiled. (SNL had a really funny sketch about this two nights ago that I cannot find now.) Moreover, mask mandates have become not only partisan, but recently so. Republican state legislators in Wisconsin on Oct 5 went to court to stop their Governor from issuing tiered lockdown measures to flatten their Fall curve of novel coronavirus infections . Mississippi's governor ended that state's mask mandate on Sept. 30 and infections have risen. Political operatives, oddly, were mocking contact tracing and calling it "communist" on cable news this August and September. It all appears to b

A story is out today that cites an organization called NewsGuardTech that claimed to measure a sample of Facebook Twitter and Pinterest stories. Using these measurements the organization claims misinformation is more widely shared now than it was in 2016. Journalism science is an under-developed field. But this is a step in flushing it out. NewsGuardTech has a website here . This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License .

Americans are in a strange situation. We have to make backup plans for our backup plans. Defensive-only living takes our attention away from moving forward. Hey Zeus, can you steer for a while? -------------------------------- Further Reading: "If the outcome of the election is not clear by Jan. 6, the decision goes to the House. But the vote is not as straightforward as Democrats having the majority of seats overall. Each state would get a single vote, which would be determined by the party that has the majority of members from that state."    npr.org This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License .