The Offline Report

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 .