Quick Observations on a Variety of Subjects
As I ve been re-watching episodes of Murder, She Wrote, I ve begun to notice that in most episodes, while it would be quite accurate to call them murder mysteries, they re usually not detective fiction. That is to say, while Jessica does solve the mystery of who committed the murder, she doesn t do it by detection. She Continue reading Detectives vs. Rememberers in Murder Mysteries
When I was young, it was common for people to blame Christianity in particular or religion in general for the existence of scolds. It never seemed to occur to these people that scolds love to scold people, and will use whatever seems to them the dominant moral framework to scold people. Scolds need to be Continue reading Scolds, We Will Always Have With Us
It seems to me that the institution of family gatherings has been on the way out for a long time in America, and as so often happens, people tend to mistake the last stages of a thing dying for when it started dying, because it is in the last stages of it dying that its Continue reading Family Gatherings Have Been On The Way Out For Half a Century, At Least
One of the things which struck me when I recently read The Communist Manifesto (plus two earlier drafts of it in FAQ form) was that Karl Marx seemed to believe that the industrial revolution meant the end of scarcity. When he described a never-before-seen problem of over-production, he made it sound like the problem was Continue reading Luxury Beliefs and the End of Scarcity
On the twenty seventh day of October in the year of our Lord 1985, the fifth episode of the second season of Murder, She Wrote aired. Titled Sing a Song of Murder, it is set in London. (Last week s episode was School for Scandal.) After some establishing shots of London and a small theater, the episode Continue reading Murder She Wrote: Sing a Song of Murder
When it comes to the monotheism of the Jews, one hears some amazingly stupid things from atheists. So much so that it s hard to even rank them. Sometimes it s not even the conclusion that s so bad, it s just the argument for it. In this latter category I rank things like atheists breathlessly saying that the Continue reading Idiotic Explanations for Jewish Monotheism
For the last thirty years or so, I ve been watching people complain about the progressive capture of institutions, turning them from what they had been into instruments of progressive propaganda. Newspapers became instruments of progressive propganda before I was born, and Universities turned into it while I was a child, but it became especially noticeable Continue reading What Parasites Teach Us…
Disney Star Wars is an endlessly fascinating thing not because it is such a colossal failure, but because it was such a predictable colossal failure that managed to be even worse than one would have expected it to be. (If you want to laugh at part of it, consider reading my review of the second Continue reading Disney Star Wars, Legacy, Snuffing Out the Torch
Anyone who pays attention to the stupid things said by actors these days is aware that actors saying stupid things has far less effect on how movies perform than they used to. These days all sorts of awful things barely make a splash. Even when they do, as in the case of Rachel Zegler with Continue reading The Studio System Made The Golden Age of Hollywood Stars
In my post about people who think LLMs are intelligent, I said that I think that these people are like the people who trust TV news commentators or newspapers. But people who actually trust those are largely people who hate AI and want to destroy it, datacenters, 5G, and frequently Republicans. These are not at Continue reading People Who Blindly Trust Authorities
Large Language Models (LLMs) are the things which are often called by the marketing term AI. To oversimplify, they consist a of a collection of enormous matrices and some ways of turning text into matrices and matrices into text. They are enormously useful tools for many applications, but the idea that they are intelligent is Continue reading I Don t Understand the People Who Think LLMs are…
On the twentieth day of October in the year of our Lord 1985, the fourth episode of the second season of Murder, She Wrote aired. Titled A School for Scandal, it s set at Crenshaw College in Vermont. (Last week s episode was Murder In The Afternoon.) It opens with a man solemnly reading from a book: Clothilde Continue reading Murder She Wrote: School for Scandal
I ve now heard of several SciFi stories which feature an all male race. The first was Seth McFarlane s Star Trek show The Orville. The second is the new Supergirl movie. How on earth does anything think this even means anything, let alone is clever? For a species to be entirely one sex, they must either Continue reading Why Do Some SciFi Writers Think An All Male Species Is Clever?
While it is true and important that ideas have consequences, I think a lot of people misunderstand the history of the 20th century because they forget that context has consequences, too. For example: Karl Marx s ideas had profound consequences. But original Marxism—if you actually read Marx, anyway—is profoundly stupid and can only be appealing in Continue reading Ideas Matter, But So Does Context
On the thirteenth day of October in the year of our Lord 1985, the third episode of the second season of Murder, She Wrote aired. Titled Murder in the Afternoon, it s set in New York City. (Last week s episode was Joshua Peabody Died Here Possibly. The scene opens with Felix, sitting at his desk, writing. Continue reading Murder She Wrote: Murder In The Afternoon
Agatha Christie is widely—and justly—regarded as a master of plotting mysteries. She does not, perhaps, get as much credit as she deserves for her characters—she was, without question, a master of characters, too. But, be that as it may, as I re-read her first novel, The Mysterious Affair At Styles, it is the issue of Continue reading Plot Holes in The Mysterious Affair At Styles
Authenticity is all the rage these days, at least on the internet, but while most people have at least a reasonable grasp on what inauthenticity is, I think that the concept of authenticity is often misunderstood. The most common way I see people misunderstand authenticity is by taking it to be the simple opposite of Continue reading The Authenticity of Thinking Before Speaking
On the seventh day of January in the year of our Lord 1990, the twelfth episode of the sixth season of Murder, She Wrote aired. Titled Good-Bye, Charlie, it is Jessica telling us the plot of her latest book. And, oh my, is it bad. It s so bad. It s how-is-she-a-famous-author bad. I ll get to the Continue reading Murder She Wrote: Goodbye, Charlie
I recently game across a fantastic tweet: If it disappears, the text is: Scooby-Doo is a devastating commentary on the prejudices of the Moderns. In their single-minded, one might almost say fanatical, desire to unmask all supernatural phenomena as the products of cranks and criminals, the Gang blinds all they encounter, and are indeed blinded Continue reading The Scooby Doo Gang Believed in the…
There s an interesting book, published in 1930, called Masters of Mystery. An overview of detective fiction until that point, it made the interesting observation of Hercule Poirot: Presumably for the benefit of the stupid Captain Hastings, Poirot talks in broken English—the broken English of the music-hall Frenchman Moreover, should this music-hall Frenchman interpserse his lines Continue reading…
There is a popular view on the subject of trying to reduce the amount of fat on one s body, which is that the first law of thermodynamics states that if you eat fewer Calories than you burn, you must lose weight. This is, of course, false, since the laws of thermodynamics have to do with Continue reading Thermodynamics and Reducing Fat
Mobile games—the kind played primarily on phones, though also on tablets—have a very, very strange property that they allow an effectively unlimited amount of money to be spent on them, and a few people—perhaps one in 100—do spend extraordinary amounts of money on them. There are people who will spend hundreds to thousands of dollars Continue reading Whales In Mobile Games
It s a bit sad how the title of this post could easily be a running series if I wanted to devote the time to writing it. There was a recent meta-analysis published in The Lancet called Assessment of adverse effects attributed to statin therapy in product labels: a meta-analysis of double-blind randomised controlled trials. It s Continue reading So Much Science is Bad These Days
I recently came across something I had no idea existed: on what looks to be a Christmas episode of a variety show, Werner Klemperer and John Banner performed Silent Night. Or, since they re singing it in the original German, perhaps I should say, Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht. For those who don t know, Klemperer and Banner Continue reading Werner Klemperer John Banner Singing Holy Night
I recently bought some archival-quality bookbinder s glue (amazon link) and some navy blue polyester satin ribbon and started adding bookmark ribbons to some of my hardcover books that didn t come with them. As the saying goes: it turns out that you can just do things. It turned out to be quite easy to do. There Continue reading I ve Started Adding Ribbons To My Books
I m just putting this here so I can find it again, I don t have anything to say on it yet, though it is quite interesting: She nodded understanding, visibly bracing herself again towards a world of shrewd daily business which had not ceased with the ending of a life. Be so kind as to tell Continue reading When Emma Cried in Saint Peter s Fair
I ve finally started reading Miguel de Cervantes famous novel, The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha. I m reading it in translation because my Spanish is nowhere near up to the task, but from the little I was able to compare (reading the dictionary more than the Spanish version), the translation I got from Penguin Continue reading Don Quixote Easy Virtue
Today my daughter showed me a humorous meme which said that one must be 18 to vote and 21 to buy liquor, but then it showed a ouija board and said that at 8 you can talk with demons for low price of $14.99. (If you re not familiar, the Ouija board has the letters and Continue reading Talk With Demons for Only $14.99
In order fully to understand this, it is necessary to realise, genuinely and thoroughly, that there is such a thing as an international difference in humour. If we take the crudest joke in the world—the joke, let us say, of a man sitting down on his hat—we shall yet find that all the nations would Continue reading G.K. Chesterton on International Differences in Humor
There are a great many young men who feel lost and hopeless in the modern world and many of them spend a lot of time on the internet complaining about it. This tends to rub older, moderately successful men wrong—very, very wrong. (Very roughly: men in their mid-thirties or older who have a wife and Continue reading The Anguish of Young Men in a Broken Society
Clue, which goes by the name Cluedo in Britain, is a very fun game that has had an enormous number of versions and a very enjoyable, if quite odd, movie based on it. If you don t know, the presmise of Clue is that Mr. Boddy has been murdered in a mansion by one of the Continue reading The History of Clue(do)
On the sixth day of October in the year of our Lord 1985, the second episode of the second season of Murder, She Wrote aired. Titled Joshua Peabody Died Here… Possibly, it is set in Cabot Cove. (Last week s episode was Widow, Weep For Me.) The scene opens on a construction site: But all is Continue reading Murder She Wrote: Joshua Peabody Died Here Possibly