“President Venn Diagram”

[xkcd, July 21, 2024.] The webcomic xkcd is on the case.

Goodbye, goo.gl

At Daring Fireball, Jon Gruber reports that Google is shutting down its URL shortener. After August 25, 2025, links with the form http://goo.gl/*/ will no longer return results.

Gruber asks,

How much money could it possibl[y] cost to just keep this service running in perpetuity? Tim Berners-Lee wrote his seminal essay, “Cool URIs Don’t Change” back in 1998. It’s bad enough when companies go out of business, taking their web servers down with them. But Google isn’t struggling financially. In fact, they’re thriving.

I’ve used the Google URL shortener on the cumbersome links for pages in Google Books. Where are those shortened links? Scattered somewhere in these pages. Oh well.

One original thought

One thought, not derived from commentary elsewhere: this clip makes me think that Andy Beshear would be an excellent vice presidential choice for Kamala Harris. He’d be the anti-Vance.

A cartoon(ed) martyr

[Editorial cartoon by L.K. Hanson. Click for a larger view.]

This editorial cartoon was drawn to appear in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. The artist, L.K. Hanson, explains that the paper decided that it was “too soon” and refused to publish it. Thus Hanson asks that anyone who wishes to pass the cartoon around do so.

It should be noted that Trump’s martyrdom complex began well before the July 13 assassination attempt.

[Found via Daughter Number Three.]

OPEN [space] DOOR

Jessica Fletcher (Angela Lansbury) has written the script for a virtual reality game, A Killing at Hastings’ Rock. After software developer James Lindstrom is killed (irl), young computer whiz Alex (Shawn Phelan) tries to hack into Lindstrom’s password-protected files to figure out the secret behind a mysterious locked door in the Hastings’ Rock world. Jessica is right by Alex’s side. From the Murder, She Wrote episode “A Virtual Murder” (October 31, 1993):

“Oh, man, this — it's unreal. I've run my random character generator, my password algorithm. I've never met a computer I couldn't crack in less than ten minutes.”

“Alex, James Lindstrom was a genius, right?”

“Oh, he told you too, huh?”

“Often what stymies the rest of us about genius is its ability to reduce the complex to the simple, to the obvious. I mean, what about something basic, like “open door”?

[Types.]

“That's it! We're in!“

The screen shows the password as OPEN DOOR, space included.

“A Virtual Murder” is a hoot. In addition to extended glimpses of Jessica Fletcher wearing what purports to be a virtual-reality headset, there are repeated references to “source codes” (plural). Here’s an appreciative commentary on the episode.

Related reading
All OCA Murder, She Wrote posts (Pinboard)

Kamala Harris’s vinyl

From May 2023, Kamala Harris leaves a D.C. record store. With Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald’s Porgy and Bess, Roy Ayers’s Everybody Loves the Sunshine, and Charles Mingus’s Let My Children Hear Music.

[Billboard identifies the Mingus LP only as “a record.”]

HCR on July 21

Heather Cox Richardson on yesterday’s big news.

Joe Biden has dropped out

“It has been the greatest honor of my life to serve as your President. And while it has been my intention to seek reelection, I believe it is in the best interest of my party and the country for me to stand down and to focus solely on fulfilling my duties as President for the remainder of my term.”

The New York Times has the story (gift link).

I think it’s the right choice. But still I have tears in my eyes. Age, dammit.

Mott Street, in July

[With apologies to Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart.]

[127 Mott Street, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

And tell me what street compares with Mott Street in July, sweet pushcarts gently gliding by. Please imagine the pushcarts gliding. See also Delancey Street.

Click for a larger view and see if you can see the four people at their windows.

*

July 24: A belated thought: check the WPA Guide:

The pushcarts on Mott Street from Canal to Broome, a block east of Mulberry Street, are relics of a thriving market that once embraced the four streets west of the Bowery. They sell ripe and green olives, artichokes, goats‘ cheeses, finochio (sweet fennel), and ready-to-eat pizza, an unsweetened pastry filled with tomatoes and cheese, meat, or fish.

The WPA Guide to New York City: The Federal Writers’ Project Guide to 1930s New York. 1939. (New York: The New Press, 1992).

Notice that the exotic food pizza has to be explained.

Related reading
More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard)

Asylum and asylums

As reported on the platform formerly known as Twitter (which I’m unable to link to), Asha Rangappa suggsts a “missing link”:

When he hears the word “asylum” in connection with migrants he thinks it means insane asylums, not refuge from persecution. Hence Hannibal Lecter, etc. Omg.

The word asylum comes to us from the classical Latin asȳlum, refuge, sanctuary, which derives in turn from the Hellenistic Greek ἄσῡλον, refuge, sanctuary. The still-familiar meaning (1596): “a secure place of refuge, shelter, or retreat.” The dictionary dates the meaning relevant to refugees to 1842: “Protection and (usually temporary) permission to stay granted by a state to a refugee, esp. a political refugee, from another country.” If Trump is indeed imagining insane asylums, he’s latching onto a later meaning (1775) that the dictionary labels “chiefly historical ”: “a secure institution or establishment for the confinement and treatment of people diagnosed with severe mental illness; a psychiatric hospital. Also: a prison for mentally ill criminals.”

And speaking of secure institutions, I’ll cite Chris Sununu, Republican governor of New Hampshire, speaking about Donald Trump: “I doubt that he’s so crazy that he should be in a mental institution, but if he were in one, he ain’t getting out.”

*

Here’s the X post. Thanks, Daughter Number Three.

Omg I think this is the missing link. 🎯 When he hears the word “asylum” in connection with migrants he thinks it means insane asylums, not refuge from persecution. Hence Hannibal Lecter, etc. Omg. 🤣😳 https://t.co/C58QDtHZpT

— Asha Rangappa (@AshaRangappa_) July 20, 2024

[Sununu’s words appear in an introductory video for George Conway’s Anti-Psychopath PAC.]