tom moody

Some additions to our feed reader list:

Go Read explained in a blog post (hat tip Pretzel). "Open source" but Google login required.

Digg Reader. Yves Smith of Naked Capitalism recommended this initially, particularly as an alternative to Feedly and its design in "hipster Brooklyn green." Later she complained it wasn't so great for organizing large numbers of feeds.

AOL Reader (still in beta) - you have to sign in using AOL's or one of the other big evil spy companies' logins, natch. It's funny how we've come full circle here, speaking as a denizen of the BSW (big scary web). In the '90s AOL offered a closed garden version of the BSW, then the BSW flourished for 6-7 years without adult supervision, then Facebook "perfected" the AOL model, then Google imitated Facebook and ditched Reader, and now AOL offers its closed-garden readers a tool to help them access all the content that's still out there on the BSW (while continuing to drive users to the major players via logins).

Am being judgmental but it's gallows humor because it's only a matter of time before this happens.

Meagan Day (writing in Full Stop) on Joan Didion (writing in the New York Review of Books in 1989) on Ronald Reagan:

Didion’s opinion of the President himself is best exemplified in an anecdote she recounts in which the Reagans, while traveling during the 1980 campaign, attended a rural church service. Their pew-side experience up to this point had mostly been at places like Bel Air Presbyterian, where during communion congregants treated themselves to individual circular wafers and drank wine out of small cups passed around on a tray. When communion began at the small Virginia church, Nancy Reagan was scandalized that people were all drinking from the same cup. Her aid, registering her panic, assured her that she could just dip the bread in the wine; frazzled, she dropped it in. Ronald Reagan — on autopilot, as if he were reading from a teleprompter — followed suit by confidently plopping his bread into the chalice, never comprehending his mistake, his face radiating piety as his wife and aid looked on mortified. After the final hymn he stood outside the chapel shaking hands and nodding with interest. Here was the President, “insufficiently briefed (or, as they say in the White House, ‘badly served’) on the wafer issue but moving ahead, stepping ‘into the sunlight,’ satisfied with his own and everyone else’s performance, apparently oblivious to (or inured to, or indifferent to) the crises being managed in his presence.”

Funny story but it would mean the Reagans had never been to a Catholic or Episcopal church, where communicants routinely chalice-sip. Is it possible Ron's and Nancy's bubble of conservative SoCal cluelessness extended this far? Guess so if this happened the way Didion tells it. Meagan Day's article reiterates what we all knew in the '80s: that Reagan was (to use that decade's phrase) an "amiable dunce" who acted as a Trojan Horse for vicious neoconservatives (whom she calls neoliberals but the point is the same).

SM: How did Pacific Rim end? I got 3D battlebot fatigue (enhanced by the size of the screen at the Uptown) and ducked out as Stringer Bell was suiting up for definitive Megatronage.

TM: I saw it in 2D (with earplugs) so I could make it to the end.
The tattooed nerd mindmelds with a Kaiju and learns that the spacetime link will explode unless alien DNA comes into the link first.
Stringer dies by exploding the bomb that was supposed to go with them into the gate, buying our heroes time to get a dead alien and take it into the gate with them for its DNA identification. (I think - it was all pretty confusing.)
Because their old Jaeger is "analog" and "nuclear powered" they can turn it into a bomb.
They enter the gate and we get a brief glimpse of the Kaiju world with a baby Kaiju looking up expectantly. The bomb explodes, sealing the gate, and our heroes escape in pods just in the nick.
After the credits Ron Perlman slashes his way out of the Kaiju that has eaten him.