Month: July 2025

There is something weird about hearing that CBS has let go of Stephen Colbert. My first thought was of the imbalance in power at work here.

CBS, like its sister networks, is on its way out. With so many other viewing options, and with a younger generation having moved on to streaming media, broadcast television is, for better or worse, becoming irrelevant.

Colbert, on the other hand, is a god to about 50% of America. For similar reasons he is detested by the other 50%.

But as they say, all publicity is good publicity. In the wake of this Completely Boneheaded Stunt, the man will simply move his unstoppable brand on-line, where he will undoubtedly get to keep a far greater percentage of the proceeds.

It is sad to bear witness to a dying part of the culture. But all things come to an end one day, whether it’s steam locomotives, telephone operators in old Hollywood movies, or transistor radios.

What we are witnessing is a weakening force of the past vainly trying to assert its continued relevance by attempting to dominate an unstoppable force of the present and future.

You don’t want to look, and yet you can’t look away. It’s like watching a kiss cam at a Coldplay concert.

Isn’t it crazy that the excuse used by the people who are violently rounding up innocent people off American streets and moving our nation rapidly toward a state of fascism is that they are fighting anti-Semitism?

Especially considering that one of their major tools is the creation of concentration camps in the United States.

Does that seem as obscene to you as it does to me?

I like traveling on airplanes because they are fast. And I like traveling on ferries because they are slow.

How can both of these things be true? In the immortal words of Edna Mode, nevertheless, here we are.

What is chronic venal insufficiency?

This terrible health scourge strikes not at the body, but in the brain.

It is a syndrome that imparts its sufferer with an insufficiency of empathy, a lack of kindness, and a tragic inability to care about the suffering of others.

In other words, the patient becomes chronically venal.

CVI can be identified by various telltale symptoms. These include an obsessive desire to punish one’s perceived political enemies and a continual need for self-aggrandizement.

Sadly, as of today there is no cure.

I love long airplane flights.

I especially love long airplane flights when I have a deadline, and I need to deliver something as soon as the flight ends. The combination of isolation and pressure puts me right in the zone.

Today during a long flight I finished a slide presentation for a talk I am supposed to give. The talk is tomorrow morning, so the conference organizers needed the slides by today.

Between takeoff and landing, I had just enough time to get the slides exactly the way I wanted them, and then write this blog post about it.

I wish I could always be productive when I am on the ground as I am when I am in the air.

Getting older used to bother me. But then one day I had a revelation.

Namely, that today I am the youngest I will ever be. And that will also be true tomorrow, and the next day, and every the day after that, for the rest of my life.

Perhaps one day, when I am older, I will look back upon today. And I will marvel at how youthful I was.

When I was about twelve years old I got it into my head that I should memorize things. So I memorized the things I loved — the first fifteen digits of pi, Jabberwocky, The Owl and The Pussycat, The Walrus and The Carpenter and Jenny Kissed Me.

Now, all of these years later, I can still easily recite all of those things from memory, as well as the lyrics to all of the songs I loved at that age.

Over the years I have repeatedly tried learning more digits of pi, but they never quite stick — those added digits always fade after a week or two. But those first 15 digits are burned into my brain as clearly as the day I first learned them.

What is it about our minds when we are young that allows us to memorize things so easily? And isn’t it sad that as we get older we lose that astonishing superpower?

It has become a meme recently to think about two A.I.s striking up a conversation with each other. There is indeed something spooky about this scenario — two soulless entities enacting a hollow imitation of human connection.

I first encountered this scenario when I read Isaac Asimov’s Foundation, the first parts of which were published in 1942. At one point he includes such a scenario as a kind of world-building aside.

Somewhere in the vast storage rooms of Trantor, the capital planet of the crumbling Galactic Empire, two A.I. entities are placed in storage. One is a holographic A.I. portrait of someone’s deceased wife, created many years earlier to converse with her grieving husband in imitation of her own style and personality.

The other is a similar holographic A.I. of someone’s deceased husband, created for a similar purpose. Each is programmed to respond when talked to, continuing the conversation.

In Asimov’s telling, the two framed portraits happened to be placed face to face on a shelf, where they proceed to spend several centuries, long after their creators are dead, in conversation with one another, until their futuristic batteries run down. Neither is actually alive or sentient, and the entire interaction is perfectly meaningless, yet there they are.

Whenever I think of A.I. engaging in conversation, I think back to this scene. There is something incredibly sad about it, and it has continued to haunt me to this day.

It has been clear for a while that the current inhabitant of the White House is not merely trying to destroy our country. And he isn’t also just trying to cause maximum suffering around the world in the process.

No, he is more ambitious than that. His goal seems to be to do these cruel and awful things in the cringiest, most embarrassing way possible.

Case in point: He has now set his sights on that great and powerful archenemy — Sesame Street. Yes, the guy is actually targeting for destruction the beloved children’s show with Muppets.

Let us pause for just a second here, and ask “Who doesn’t like Sesame Street?” Apparently, out of the 8 billion people in the world, exactly one of them does not like Sesame Street, and he happens to be living in the White House.

The most popular theory, which certainly fits the man’s psychological profile, is that Sesame Street has made fun of him in several episodes through the years. To someone with such a delicate and fragile ego, that is a capital offense.

But I think the real reason is deeper. In its various spoofs and send-ups, Sesame Street has often portrayed him, literally, as a ridiculous puppet in an orange wig.

And that’s the real offense, isn’t it? Revealing that the current inhabitant of the White House is actually just a ridiculous puppet in an orange wig.

Of course the question remains — who exactly is pulling the strings of this ridiculous puppet?

The current U.S. president has threatened to strip Rosie O’Donnell of her U.S. citizenship, apparently just because he doesn’t like her. I wish I were making that up, but these days it seems that truth is stranger than fiction.

On the other hand, it has been argued that it should go the other way: Rosie O’Donnell should strip the current American president of his U.S. citizenship. She certainly has cause, and it would make life easier for a lot of Americans.

You might think such an event would be unlikely. There are some who make the technical point that a private citizen does not actually have the power to strip a sitting president of U.S. citizenship.

However, considering the following fact: Rosie O’Donnell has exactly as much right to strip the president of his U.S. citizenship as he has to strip her of her U.S. citizenship.

So I guess it’s a stand-off.