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Nine years of friendly surveillance
On Jan. 23, 2015, I became the first kid on my block to get an Amazon Echo, welcome the kinda-smart speaker into a very skeptical family. Amazon announced its “crazy speaker that talks to you” in late 2014, offering it for $99 to Prime members who moved fast to get on the waitlist. It offered…
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Number Go Up
I’m a sucker for a gossipy business book, and Zeke Faux’s “Number Go Up: Inside Crypto’s Wild Ride and Staggering Fall” is the kind of thing I can’t resist. Faux tracks Sam Bankman-Fried and his associated crypto cronies around the world, tracing the wild and weird interrelated stories of Bitcoin, NFT’s, Tether, FTX, and other…
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Madame Bovary (1949)
My younger kiddo is reading “Madame Bovary” for high school lit, so we decided to watch the movie last night. Turns out that’s a tougher decision to make than you might think, as it’s been adapted lots of times, a 2015 version, a 1991 version, a TV version in the mid-70s and an old-Hollywood version…
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Buying merch
I’m in Charlotte tonight for The Mountain Goats / Craig Finn / Bully show (which I’ll post about over the weekend), but I was thinking about all of the ways that the venue and the artist make money, and where the real money probably is. There was probably more that I didn’t list, but that’s…
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Ready to run again
Being sick, I haven’t run for a week, which is the longest I’ve gone without in a long time. Probably since I had Covid in August of 2022. Heck, I’ve barely been outside in the last week, owing in part to my cough and also to the bitter cold we’re seeing right now. Luckily, I’m…
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Craig Finn show on Thursday
Headed up to Charlotte on Thursday to see Craig Finn and Bully open for The Mountain Goats. I’ve seen Finn with The Hold Steady numerous times (er, like six times last year, but who’s counting) but this will be my first solo show. I was supposed to see him in Nashville a year or so…
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The Lost Weekend
I don’t get sick often — typically a once or twice-a-year head cold, maybe a cough or a raspy throat that gives me a cool voice. This weekend, though, the collective crud caught up with me. When I went to clear my throat late Friday night, my lungs made a deep, croupy growl that told…
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Get the Paper(s)
Since I’m now older than Methuselah’s guest towels, it seems only reasonable that one of the highlights of my week is Sunday morning when I get to drink coffee and pore over my newspapers. Every Sunday I get the NY Times and the AJC, and I completely dig the sensory experience of going outside in…
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Stand in the place where you play
I bought an Asus ROG Ally in 2023 which, if you aren’t aware, is a Windows-based gaming handheld. It has a pretty crummy out-of-the-box experience, which I think has hampered its uptake, as it’s a very capable, powerful system for handheld gaming and some light productivity on the go. Maybe I’ll write more about it…
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Seasonal ineffective disorder
I hate being cold, so this is what I generally consider my Cranky Era of any given year. Looking ahead at the forecast, we’ve got lows in the teens next week so I’m not going to want to do much of anything. But I’m trying. I’m determined this year to stop letting the cold get…