Uncategorized

You may recognize that line from the most quotable movie ever. (If not, the clip below may refresh your memory.) The worst thing I’ve heard today is, well, the worst thing I’ve heard since someone in Hollywood had the bright idea to remake that movie. (Thankfully, it hasn’t happened. Yet.) There is a new audiobook […]

For two hours Sunday and via a chain of roughly thirty prompts, I asked an AI engine to write Shakespeare’s Antigone. It’s not Shakespeare, not even Beaumont and Fletcher… but it’s not awful, either. It’s better than Gammer Gurton’s Needle. The language is superficially right. It’s probably good enough that an untrained ear couldn’t tell […]

Out walking today, I had what I thought was a great moment for a book I’ve been working on for a while. And as is my wont, and as I preach to others, I opened OneNote on my phone and “wrote it down,” which these days often means turning on the speech-to-text facility and speaking […]

No, there’s no umlaut over the U. This isn’t über-rape – I don’t want to know what that might be – but Uber- and Lyft-rape. An article in the NY Times suggests this is a significant problem. I mean, even one incident is a serious problem but here I mean significant as in “significant figures,” […]

I used to walk around with one of these: This was 1989 or so, and I was freelancing, and needed to be available to clients. Or so I told myself, and indeed I got calls on it from actual, paying clients. (I have the same number thirty-five years later. What I no longer have is […]

I came across a survey that says Gen-n would pay considerably more for Broadway theater more when they understand how much work goes into it. Gen-n = anybody younger than me, which at this point is a whole lot of people. And I’ll ignore the fact that the survey was created by folks who have […]

The NY Times acrostic today [spoiler alert] is a passage from John McPhee’s Coming Into the Country, a book that was serialized in The New Yorker in 1977. That’s where I came across it. My parents subscribed, and though I was at that time living on my own in Greenwich Village, I probably went “home” […]

Jimmy Carter. Peter Yarrow. A former colleague at Microsoft. And of course millions whom I don’t know, every day. But that’s sort of the point. When we’re young, younger anyway, we hear about people dying, but mostly it’s as indirect as those millions I just mentioned. Yes, rarely – I hope rarely – it will […]

A jigsaw puzzle is a) a metaphor, b) a way to take a break, c) an excuse to not-write, or d) all of the above. When our kids were young, we used to play the game Memory with them, where you win by remembering where various words are placed in a face-down array of word-cards. […]

The New York Times crossword puzzle this morning (Friday) features the following clue (fifteen letters): Shell food? The answer is something I have never considered and hope never to think about again, but I’m afraid it’s going to haunt my nightmares: GasStationSushi Lovely pun, but I get shivers thinking about the actual (possible) product. And […]