John Mayall (1933–2024)

The New York Times has an obituary (gift link).

I wanted to find something with Mayall playing piano, solo. I got close: here’s “Bear Wires,” with Bob Hite of Canned Heat.

Later in the day: I found what I was looking for: “Milkman Strut.” That’s a door closing at the start. Explanation: a milkman’s arrival had interrupted recording.

[From the Times obituary: “In 1969, after recording the album Blues From Laurel Canyon and befriending members of the American blues band Canned Heat, Mr. Mayall moved to the Los Angeles area, where he lived for the rest of his life.”]

TV as radio or children’s game

Often we watch a movie and then, at 10:30 Central or so, we turn on The Eleventh Hour and start from the beginning. As the show runs, we listen as we look at our devices. It’s television as radio.

Now and then we look up, and when there’s a panel of commentators across the screen, television turns into the children’s game Guess Who?  “Is your person wearing a ridiculous hat?”

Or better, and meta: “Does your person look like they could be a person from Guess Who? ” The person in question: a mustachioed gentleman wearing a bowtie. (It‘s Charles!)

“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.