I have finished watching all these 8mm recordings my grandfather left to me, which have been converted into 8 20-30 minute mp4s. At some point I have to edit these down to make them presentable, because a) they’re in random order, b) the clips within each mp4 are in random order, and c) we are not a family of cinematographers or directors. Here are a few challenges for me:

• What I’ve got is the story of the whole Myers family from 1958-1985. Except there is no story, it’s a hodge-podge of brief moments.
• A lot of it is told from the perspective of doting parents and grandparents who are thrilled about their kids. It’s going to have limited appeal.
• The filmographers are terrible. They don’t believe in dwelling on a single person or group, but jitter all over the place.
• The actors all suck. The camera gets pointed at them, and what do they do? They stop, stand, and stare. The action freezes.
• There are long stretches where the camera pans over scenery. The actors may suck, but at least they’re alive. Do I really need to see that hill? I can tell when my dad is wielding the camera, because he really likes lingering over the landscape.
• There are a limited and repeated set of circumstances that trigger the family to haul out the camera: mainly, Christmases and summer vacation. There are too many Christmases, and sadly, not enough Christmases. Also, every summer we all immediately crowd into a tiny wading pool.
• The biases are obvious — they used the camera a lot more when it was new. That means I have a lot of video of me at age 1 toddling stupidly about, but not as much of my baby sister Lisa. If I edit this to match the representation in the shots, it’s going to look like a vanity project.
• Way too much sweetness. Seeing my great-grandparents laughing and hugging and kissing in their 90s was a bit overwhelming. We really had a happy family, but it’s exaggerated because the sadness and loss was never filmed.

I have a 3-day weekend coming up. Maybe I’ll be able to put together a short video from a small slice of this mess over the weekend — something that my surviving brothers and sisters will appreciate, at least. I have a project!

There is a company based in Virginia that makes high-end deli meats and cheeses. I didn’t know much about them, but I heard some gross, revolting stories that made me look. Rubbernecking the accident and all that, you know. Their main page is a bit daunting right now. They have recalled a lot of their products, saying they’re potentially contaminated with Listeria.

What they don’t mention is that 57 people so far have been hospitalized thanks to their food, or that there are 69 records of “noncompliances” flagged by the USDA in the past year. But don’t worry, the company says food safety is their “highest priority.”

Do you want to read about Boar’s Head’s offenses? No, you do not, so I’ll put them below the fold. Don’t read unless you have a strong stomach.

[Read more…]

There are two kinds of parents. 1) The ones who want their children to follow in their footsteps, take over the family business, continue their tradition as a farrier or door-to-door salesman or whatever. They live in dread that their child might turn out different, leave their faith, or someday disagree with their opinions. 2) The ones who encourage their kids to explore and develop their own interests and find happiness in their own skin. Guess what kind Richard Hanania would be if he, god forbid, were a parent?

The disclaimer that I’m for women living the lives they want is negated by the fact that he’s calling a successful young woman living the life she wants the nightmare scenario.

Just as the entire Republican party is echoing Hanania’s racism, they also share a love of misogyny.

Last week, Ann Coulter and other Republican bottom-feeders grossed normal people out by mocking Guz Walz for getting emotional during his dad’s speech at the Democratic National Convention (DNC). The insults didn’t just prove that the self-appointed protectors of “family values” wouldn’t know a loving family if they saw one. It was a reminder that the Trump campaign’s strategy continues to be appealing to ugly, bitter people with a message of resentment.

But the Walzes aren’t the only family whose evident happiness infuriates the extremely online MAGA movement. Harris’ family has drawn ire, as well. Especially her stepdaughter, 25-year-old model and designer Ella Emhoff, whose creativity, beauty, and easygoing love for her family has sent many on the right into paroxysms of rage. The daughter of Harris’ husband, Doug Emhoff, triggers the incel-minded online right by being a Brooklyn hipster who rejects the tiresome conservative rules for how women are allowed to dress or behave. In response, Donald Trump’s fanboys are in a total meltdown, unable to accept the existence of a woman who doesn’t care what they think of her. And they can’t hide that they’re furious that she looks great doing so.

In the real world, Ella Emhoff, who graduated from Parsons School of Design and has a modeling contract with IMG, is being declared “a fashion icon” for her effortless pairing of high fashion with her quirky tastes.

I guess I’m in category 2, since my 3 grown children are all living lives nothing like what I would choose for myself, and I’m proud that they’ve done that. Who wants to live in a world where half the people are forced to be tradwives? (Republicans, I guess.)

I should plug Kavin Senapathy’s new book, The Progressive Parent: Harnessing the Power of Science and Social Justice to Raise Awesome Kids.

Richard Hanania and the whole damn Republican party would hate it, which is why you should all run out and order it.

Once upon a time, I accused Nate Silver of being “a numerologist, or a horse race handicapper, and I suspected he was juggling the numbers to fit his expectations”. I was not very perceptive, and I missed the heart of Silver’s problem. He’s a gambling addict. I shouldn’t be surprised.

He has come out with a new book, essentially a confession, titled On the Edge, a 572-page doorstop that is actually a gambling manual. He has this mentality where the purpose of predictions is to win and win big, and he’s constantly angling for the risky bet that pays off on long odds.

This is the blurb for the book.

In the bestselling The Signal and the Noise, Nate Silver showed how forecasting would define the age of Big Data. Now, in this timely and riveting new book, Silver investigates “the River,” the community of like-minded people whose mastery of risk allows them to shape—and dominate—so much of modern life.

These professional risk-takers—poker players and hedge fund managers, crypto true believers and blue-chip art collectors—can teach us much about navigating the uncertainty of the twenty-first century. By immersing himself in the worlds of Doyle Brunson, Peter Thiel, Sam Bankman-Fried, Sam Altman, and many others, Silver offers insight into a range of issues that affect us all, from the frontiers of finance to the future of AI.

I fwowed up in my mouth a little bit. You, too, can be just like these con artists and charlatans — it’s the future of finance and AI!

Here’s the revelation that shocked me.

Whoa. He’s gambling $10,000 a day on basketball? If you had a friend who was throwing away that much on his gambling habit, wouldn’t you take them aside and suggest that they get help?

Notice also that he was churning $1.8 million into his daily betting routine between October and May, and at the end he comes out ahead…by about $5000. That’s some return on investment.

Also, I don’t believe him. I had an uncle who was addicted to betting on horse races, who claimed to have a system, who told me that on average he was coming out ahead, just like Nate Silver’s graph. Unfortunately, he was somehow living in poverty, getting by marginally, unable to afford the basics, and we’d just sometimes learn that he’d made a big score because he’d come home staggeringly drunk. The only people who profit in the long run from gambling are the race track owners and the bookies and the guys who run the liquor concessions.

I will say that hardcore gambling does have one useful outcome: it’s practitioners tend to be pretty glib about rationalizing their results. Somehow I’m not surprised that a gambling addict can write a 572 page book to justify his methods.

Just asking. I inherited this great big pile of 8mm film recordings made by my grandfather and father in the 1960s and 1970s and 1980s, which were pretty much unviewable — have you got an 8mm projector lying around? So I dropped them off at a Walmart Photocenter along with $650 to have them converted to digital. They’re sitting in Seattle right now, and I thought it would be a while until I could see them…but, you know, digital, so I just got an email saying I could view them over this thing called the internet.

Oh my god.

There’s my childhood, laid out in grainy, poorly lit, soundless, washed-out color. Christmases and camping trips, my great-grandparents alive again, my grandfather looking hale and sober, my grandmother middle-aged and strong, my father digging clams and picking up his kids, my mother in her 20s looking good, and all my siblings back again. I only had a few minutes to skim through these hours of film, but later I’ll have to watch them thoroughly and wallow in the old days.

Here, for instance, is me hugging my late brother sometime in the early 1960s.

If I’m found dead, drowned in a puddle of tears later this week, you’ll know what happened.

I’m going to upload these many recordings to YouTube to make them accessible to the rest of my family — no one else in the world will care but these are like jewels of ancient cinematography to me.

My son occasionally sends us photos from his location in the Middle East. I thought living in a small rural town in the Midwest was a little less than stimulating, but here’s sunset in Kuwait.

It looks a little strange because there’s a sandstorm about to blow in. The next day…

Next time we get a blizzard or whiteout, I’ll look at that and think, “it could be worse” (which is a very Minnesota thing to say, by the way.)

It’s that time of year when my wife’s garden bears fruit and it’s my turn to get to work in the kitchen. I get to spend my day rendering tomatoes and peppers and onions and garlic into sauce.

Then I have to prepare a lecture that tries to answer the question, “where did prehistoric people think humans came from.” Fortunately, we have a prehistoric historical document.