CSotD: Monday Miscellany

Joy of Tech takes a shot at Facebook, which has launched a new way of tracking your activity in order to show you more ads, or, as they explain it, better ads. Which brings to mind the famous Monty Python sketch in which the woman protests, “But I don’t want any Spam!”

Here’s an article from Gizmodo explaining more, and starting with the (apparent) facts that Link History isn’t everywhere yet and it’s only on your mobile interface. I don’t use the Facebook app on my phone because when I leave home I leave as much interconnectedness behind as I can. And I’m not in India, which I gather is a test market for this venture.

I don’t have as dour a view of Facebook as Joy of Tech has, but it’s largely a matter of comparison. Xitter has degenerated into such hateful, reprehensible fascist garbage that I can’t imagine why anyone remains on it, while Threads is a lot of people yelling and BlueSky is the same people posting over and over. And Instagram, so far as I can tell, is just for pictures, not conversations.

So that’s my endorsement for Facebook: It doesn’t suck as much as everything else, though sometimes I go on a tear of blocking “Suggested For You” garbage and I’m aware that clicking the “See Less of This” thingie has no impact on the stupid little videos they think I want.

Anyway, that Gizmodo article tells you how to keep Facebook from tracking you. Or, how to keep them from not ramping it up.

And that it’s all futile anyway.

Which makes this Pooch Cafe (AMS) relevant, because we’re all living in a fishbowl, soaking in our own virtual emissions etc etc.

I got a particular laugh out of the punch line because I tried Yellowstone and discovered that it’s just a resuscitation of Dallas, only the woman who plays the Suellen clone drops her britches a lot.

I’m not sure if I hate Kevin Costner’s character because it feels like what a bunch of Hollywood writers in polo shirts and boat shoes think cowboys are like or whether I’m still recovering from Dances with Wolves, which was about what a bunch of Hollywood writers in polo shirts and boat shoes think Indians are like.

It’s not Costner’s fault. About 99.8% of our entertainment has been extruded by a roomful of Hollywood writers in polo shirts and boat shoes.

Still, if the alternative to bingeing Yellowstone is floating in my own bodily emissions, well, it’s a tough choice.

Which brings us to a little inside joke in Bliss (Tribune), given that Harry Bliss lives in JD Salinger’s old house about 10 miles south of where I’m sitting. Salinger famously avoided literary groupies, but was well known in town and the people there happily sent tourists on wild goose chases rather than telling them were Jerry actually lived.

I don’t know if he owned a polo shirt or a pair of boat shoes, but Holden Caulfield’s impatience with phonies suggests otherwise.

My own inside joke on this is that I went to a writer’s conference in 1970 in which we each got a coaching session from one of the two novelists there. I got Mr. Boat Shoes, whose mentoring consisted of him prompting me for hipster slang he could work into his next best-seller.

I found out later that most of the people assigned to him were sneaking up to Isaac Bashevis Singer‘s room for more valuable advice.

Here’s someone else whose advice I’d rather have: Roz Chast.

I steal her book title with some regularity and now she offers this look at people who discover their interests late in life, perhaps after having piled up some debts that I don’t think will be paid off by selling melons or lettuce or whatever that is.

Fortunately, I didn’t get a masters, having read Candide as an undergraduate and realized that nobody was hiring Philosopher Kings, and hadn’t done so even in Plato’s day.

I finished my degree largely because, as my grandfather advised me, it would take less time and effort to do so than to continuously explain to people why I hadn’t.

He offered as an example a fellow he knew who got through college and law school, hung out his shingle and discovered he didn’t want to be a lawyer, so signed up to go fight World War I instead.

Sunday’s Lockhorns (AMS) brought to mind the opening scene of King Vidor’s 1928 classic, “The Crowd,” which begins with a proud father bragging that his infant son can be anything he wants, then cuts in a famous shot to a scene of the kid grown up and one more anonymous drone in a sea of identical desks.

Cultivating a truck garden seems comparatively rewarding.

I laughed at today’s Speed Bump (Creators), for the gag itself, but also because there’s an insider twist, since mentioning pickleball is acknowledging that everybody is mentioning pickleball.

It used to be that Sex in the City would launch these sudden fads for Cosmopolitans or teramitsu or Jimmy Chooz or whathaveyou, and Seinfeld would introduce the Clever Phrase du Jour that everybody had to work into their conversations.

It doesn’t seem so centralized anymore and I have no idea where the pickleball thing erupted from, but thank god Taylor and Travis haven’t taken it up.

Yet.

We finally got some snow yesterday, about eight inches of very light powder, which makes the current They Can Talk extremely timely.

I’ve been lucky in that regard. I had ridgebacks for years, but, while they hated both snow and rain, they were so determinedly housebroken that they’d wait for 24 hours or more before begrudgingly stepping outside, while my current pup is Scandinavian and doesn’t appear to notice snow except as one more thing to play in.

I laughed at this, but most of my dogs have looked on litter boxes merely as a source of Almond Roca.

January 2 was National Introverts Day, and Loose Parts (AMS) picked up on the concept this past Sunday.

The joke is that, in reality, if you mention introversion, you will be besieged by crowds of people waving their hands and shouting “I’m an introvert! I’m an introvert!”

Introversion is in, baby!