Loose Links

The big and scary news about the deaths of Gene Hackman and his wife, Betsy Arakawa, is that she died first, and suddenly, of hantavirus, which kills up to half the people it infects—often quickly.  It’s bad shit—or from bad shit: from rodents. Hackman, who had advanced Alzheimer’s, died later of his wife’s absent care. Their poor dog died in the crate he was in when Betsy brought him back from the vet. His death brought to mind what apparently befell the young male lead in “Ex Machina.”

Sara Watson: “I believe more than ever we are approaching the Troy-is-falling moment.” Bonus Sara link: A People’s History of Tech.

I never had Facebook Messenger on my computer, just on my phone. In order to get it on my computer, Facebook required a password change, which was a freaking ordeal, with pin codes sent to “your devices” or “your chat” that failed to appear, far as I could tell, anywhere, plus other fails. Confusing things further is that I made the huge mistake many years ago of adding a second Facebook account for David Searls, just for dealing with relatives and old friends who knew me before the world nicknamed me Doc. Confuses the shit out of both accounts. Also messing up the first account up was that I got it back in ’06 when Facebook was only for university folk and it has remained stuck ever since on a university address I haven’t had since 2010. I have another address associated with it, but that sometimes seems not to help. Anyway, that was just a half hour of my life wasted. Okay, here’s a link, to Jamie Smith’s newsletter. Somewhere in there he says “Password reset is the new login.” Too true.

We save daylight tonight by losing an hour. Here in Indiana, where we should, and used to be, in the Central time zone, we are at the far western edge of Eastern, which means the Sun comes up in the afternoon. I’m only half kidding. It rises at 8:04 AM and sets at 7:48 PM. In other words, at 3:56 minutes before Noon, and 7:48 after noon.