If you’ve never heard the Aerosmith song “Dude (Looks Like a Lady),” now is as good a time as any to never hear it, too. In fact, all times are good times to never hear that song.

With schools going back in New Jersey next week, many parents are anxious that we will see another massive wave of COVID. But that absolutely did not happen when public schools went back in Florida. Spread of the virus has declined more and more since schools went back there. pic.twitter.com/27JvSeCdNu

— Central NJ Yimby 🇺🇸🚲🏙 (@YIMBY_Princeton) August 31, 2021

There’s just so much absurd manic hysteria about this. Lockdown lifers hyperventilating, liberals believing Covid chases you down the street like a pack of dingoes…meanwhile, Florida is basically YOLO as to precautions and kids are just not that at risk.

Strange place we are in as a nation, really.

The U.S. Is Off the E.U.’s ‘Safe List.’ What Does That Mean for Americans Traveling to Europe?

It means Americans should be very fucking pissed and at minimum punch at least 10 deliberately unvaccinated and anti-vaxxers in the face, hard. Or in the throat, whichever is easier to reach.

This is their fault. Fuck your freedom when it harms everyone.

Below is one of my favorite dance scenes from any film, from one of my (also) favorite French movies, Fanfan. Lord, talk about a movie that could never be made today.

I love the scene because Sophie Marceau is so natural and free while still being graceful. She doesn’t really dance like a dancer but every single thing about her is so much fun that the fact that she is not trained just makes it all the better. I wonder how many takes that scene had? I bet a whole lot. It requires a whole heap of rehearsal to make something look that unrehearsed. (Unfortunately, I could not find a higher-quality clip.)

And here is an older interview (in French) with Marceau. I like that French TV shows actually talk about substantive subjects with their interviewees, unlike American ones.

Yes, thank you, I will be watching this. I don’t often say this, but great trailer.

(Also, they made Margaret Qualley look really different here! Excellent makeup and lighting work.)

IT people every Monday.

This is true, but Friday afternoons in IT are also the worst because it’s always:

“Oh yeah, I forgot to mention [some problem that’ll take 10 hours to solve].”

Or, “Could you just [also some problem that’ll take 10 hours to solve].”

Even though IT people are paid well, it’s also seen as a labor of love so normals and MBA types think they are doing us a favor, often, by dropping two days of work on us on Friday at 5:30PM. Used to, I’d just do it but these days I refuse to most of the time.

But that’s one of the benefits of being both senior and really good at my job.

The vaccines work but we are pretending like they do not.

Why? Can anyone explain this to me? I know there is the liberal cult of “completely safe” but that doesn’t seem to be the only explanation, but it’s certainly highly contributory to this derangement. “Zero Covid” has been perhaps the most harmful fantasy to emerge from the liberal side in a long, long time.

I think some people are perhaps just too eager for the apocalypse. Any apocalypse will do. Most people think they are Katniss in The Hunger Games, but in reality they are the unnamed dude killed in the first 10 minutes by the Capitol troopers.

Why in the fuck would anyone want to use Discord for anything? That sounds like absolute hell to me. How did that catch on?

When I heard about it, I thought it was a joke. But no, it’s real.

It really is too bad Covid had to become a religious movement for both sides.

I blame political polarization. Once conservatives made being completely reckless about covid their political identity, liberals reacted by stigmatizing any level of risk, no matter how minor, considering it a violation of liberal identity. https://t.co/IoMCiTrQwO

— Amanda Marcotte (@AmandaMarcotte) August 28, 2021

Yeah, the twin and entwined “completely safe” and “Zero Covid” phantasmagorias lead to society-wide long-term destructive outcomes and measures that don’t actually help against Covid in any significant way. In addition, these attitudes tend to forestall real interventions like better ventilation and increased use of the outdoors. A huge and preventable failure.

i’m a cranky old guy but so much serverless tech shit i read today is just a recapitulation of ideas i was teaching as “enterprise java beans” two decades ago, except then the organization would control the app server rather than ceding it to some oligopoly cloud.

— Steve Randy Waldman (@interfluidity) August 29, 2021

That’s it right there. Serverless is a diminished and mindless redo of very old ideas, misunderstood and repackaged poorly by those too young and inexperienced to understand the problems we were trying to solve back then or the problems they should be attempting to solve now.

Just a huge cock-up all around by people too smart to do anything useful. “Smart.”