Some Weekend Reading

On the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks in the US, we also note another sad milestone of Russian casualty counts in their Ukraine invasion. A Highly Regrettable Anniversary and A Newly Regrettable Milestone Today is the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks by al Qaeda that resulted in mass deaths in New York & elsewhere, inaugurating a new Forever War in which the US participates with regrettable relish. On an eerily similar note, today I noticed another milestone in Russian casualties in…

Every couple years, the battery on my now-antiquated electric lawn mower stops taking a charge. It’s been a couple years since last time, so… The Third Session with the Lawn Mower Battery Surgeon The Venerable Black & Decker SPCM1936 It is a truth universally acknowledged that anyone, having acquired a suburban American house, must be in need of a lawn mower. And so it was, Chez Weekend, with the purchase of Château Weekend some 15 years agone. The mighty mowing machine in question has been the…

Remember when we wrote about the surveillance cameras tracking pretty much every car? Remember when we wrote about the anti-surveillance fashion that makes ugly sweaters diverting cameras? Now imagine both at the same time. Anti-Surveillance Wraps for Cars Here on this Crummy Little Blog That Nobody Reads (CLBTNR), we’re not fans of fashion. (It’s a Nerd Tribe thing.) But then again, we’re really not fans of warrantless dragnet surveillance. So we’ve previously written approvingly [1] [2] of…

Doomscrolling is nowadays a way of life. Sometimes life happens on trains, especially in Germany. DOOM Runs on What?! Incorrigible readers of this Crummy Little Blog That Nobody Reads are, no doubt regrettably, aware of our occasional pieces on the first-person shooter computer game DOOM running on hardware that seems… inadvisable. It’s been made to run on pregnancy tests, in PDF files [1], in the statistical analysis language R [2], and to self-distribute for installation by the internet…

Republicans want to deport all sorts of people from America, usually for racist reasons. Now they want to ‘deport’… Americans?! A Bill to Do What?! Incorrigible readers of this Crummy Little Blog That Nobody Reads will recall we’ve repeatedly screamed in frustration at the naked racism of Republican attempts to deport people. For example, the proposal to deport Native Americans [1] is incredibly stupid, given that Native Americans have a superior claim to a North American birthright than anyone…

The Trump Department of Justice has now lost 20 out of 20 lawsuits to obtain state voter registration information. What should a Bayesian believe about their probability of success in the future? States Control Elections… But Trump Wants To Control Them Instead Over the last decade or so, Trump has repeatedly claimed that voting is infested by illegal immigrants who somehow always vote for Democrats. There is, of course, no evidence that any such problem exists, let alone that it biases…

Natural disasters occur all over the US, and part of the role of the federal government is to help out states in recovery. Except… Trump seems to think Democratic states deserve disasters, and withholds aid based on his political needs. Federal Disaster Aid in Democratic & Republican States An article earlier this year in Politico included data showing Trump was using disaster relief funding denials and delays for political punishment. [1] This was recently confirmed by some Associated Press…

Today I voted in the primary. Voting by Mail Lately, Trump has been trying to restrict or eliminate voting by mail. In particular, he’s been trying to get the Post Office to refuse to deliver ballots, but only in states that did not surrender their voting info to him, so he can purge/disenfranchise Democrats. Fortunately, pro-democracy organizations like Marc Elias and Democracy Docket have been fighting this in court, and have won 18 out of 18 times so far: So here in Massachusetts, I got my…

A new seasonal song, for this moment in American politics! 99 Bottles of… What?! Americans of a certain vintage are acquainted with the tedious children’s song, “99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall”. [1] We have a somewhat more immediately applicable variant upon that theme for this portion of the political calendar, while we are all looking forward to the Big Trump Whump: 99 days to the primary, 99 days remain. Mark one down, canvass your town, 98 days to the primary! The Weekend Conclusion C’mon,…

Now you can track Flock surveillance cameras and other automated license plate readers. Why is there a cluster of them on every approach to Tufts University in Massachusetts? Automated Surveillance of Car Traffic There are these things called “automated license plate readers” (ALPRs). They’re basically a camera, a computer, and a network interface that picks out and reports car license plate numbers, along with date/time/location stamps. They then report this data to various authorities,…

Here in New England, we got some serious smoke from the Canadian wildfires. How does it compare to other places? Interplanetary Smoke On 2026-Jul-15, smoke from some extensive Canadian wildfires blew down into the US, creating some surreal atmospheric color. (Also surreal: Trump, being an idiot, decided it was because Canadians didn’t properly rake leaves in their forests, and vowed to impose 50% punitive tariffs.) Californians are used to such things, but in New England that much smoke is very…

I never that knew GK Chesterton, a 19th - 20th century writer, raconteur and master of the bon mot, knew about 21st century industrial and laboratory safety culture. Neither did Chesterton, probably. Types of Safety, Type-Safety, and Good Ol’ GKC So I was reading – as one does – about software safety and the use of the programming language Haskell to make certain kinds of faults impossible [1], what with isolation of side-effects in monads, an expressive (!) but strict type system, lazy…

DOOM is getting closer to my sensitive spot. DOOM Now Runs in R?! Incorrigibly persistent readers of this Crummy Little Blog That Nobody Reads (CLBTNR) know that we’ve followed with some amusement the attempts to port the game DOOM to increasingly absurd hardware platforms (e.g., PDF files with internal Javascript, the Domain Name System, and so on). Up until now, it’s all been good, clean fun. On somebody else’s platform. But now… they’ve made it run (using FFI, which cheating, but only sorta)…

An historian of fascism and authoritarianism recently made a checklist of how democracies collapse; things in the US look very, very bad. Trump Preparing to Subvert Elections If you haven’t been paying attention — and believe me, I understand if you haven’t the spoons to do so — Trump is winding up the machinery to subvert, challenge, or discredit the fall mid-terms. Multiple news sources report [1] that Trump has fired all members of the bipartisan federal Election Assistance Commission. This…

Another few months passed, another grisly Russian casualty milestone passed in Ukraine. The Update from Ukraine As the few stubborn readers of this Crummy Little Blog That Nobody Reads (CLBTNR) know, we express … strong opinions about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which opinions we have been shouting into the Internet void for some time now. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10]

The climate news is… bad. Very bad. As in: it looks like summer months in some heavily populated places are quickly approaching medically unsurvivable levels. Another Sort of French Bakery I love French bakeries. Whether boulangeries or pâtisseries, there is a delicious experience in the offing, as well as pleasant exchange with the proprietors and a cultural lesson. However, today’s post on this Crummy Little Blog That Nobody Reads (CLBTNR) is about a French bakery of an altogether different…

It turns out the term “whitebread”, used to insult white American racists/nativists has some actual history, involving actual… white bread?! White Bread and Your Humble Weekend Editor When I grew up in the American midwest in the 1950s - 1960s, white bread was sort of the “default” bread. Anything else was some ethnic variety (“German rye”), or for food nuts who wanted whole wheat. Now at my advanced age, I’ve learned to appreciate the virtues of many kinds of bread: whole wheat, pitas,…

Today is Juneteenth. Let’s think about that — briefly, since as an old cishet white guy I have limited personal experience here, but can speak respectfully. Juneteenth Juneteenth is a story about the end of slavery in the United States. President Lincoln had issued the Emancipation Proclamation 2 years earlier in January of 1863, but the Southern states – even those already defeated – wouldn’t implement it without compulsion. This is exactly like the Southern states who took 14 years to comply…

Remember when the right-wing nuts went crazy about vaccines, claiming they killed randomly with heart attacks, myocarditis, “turbo cancer”, and such? Well… some time has passed, and we now have some big studies with long baseline data on that. Guess which way it comes out. I dare you. COVID-19 Vaccines vs Cardiovascular Health Right-wingers have all sorts of fears about COVID-19 vaccines (indeed, fear seems to be one of the indicators of right-wing & authoritarian follower personality [1]). For…

Where’s the kaboom? Boston, that’s where! One Rainy Afternoon Last Saturday, 2026-May-30, at 2:06pm EDT (18:06 GMT) here at Château Weekend, we were just sitting on the couch reading. It was raining, so it was no particularly shocking thing to hear the boom of thunder. But… it was particularly loud thunder that shook not only the windows but the house. I thought maybe it was a nearby lightning strike, or at any rate thunder just above the house. But there was no flash, and the Weekend Editrix…

Some (slightly belated) thoughts on US Memorial Day, 2026. Memorial Day and the Melian Dialogue It’s Memorial Day again. It seems that every year (2022, 2023, 2024, 2025) this causes some sad introspection, because of the nature of our times (and, to be fair, because of who I am). I’m absolutely sick of hearing the right-wing patriotic talk of how the US is great, has never started a war, never taken territory, never committed war crimes, and other lies. On the other hand, I’m also sick of…

Another New England winter has come & gone. Well… almost. The Spirit of Winters Past Here in New England, we take winters seriously. Not as seriously as we did 45+ years ago when I moved here, but still pretty seriously. There are a number of beautiful things to be seen in winter that you just don’t see in warmer places, or in colder but flat places like the US midwest. Here, for example, is what is sometimes called an icefall: artesian water normally forced out of mountain rocks by pressure,…

Apparently, ICE is still persistently trying to ‘deport’ Native Americans?!