PicoBlog

When a man is tired of memes, he is tired of life. Samuel Johnson’s original observation pertained to his hometown of London, the streets of which he knew better than most. As a man of letters and author of a best-selling dictionary, he wrote volumes. But nowadays, in the words of one English professor, “Samuel Johnson is one of those figures whom everyone quotes and no one reads.” (The use of “whom” is how you know an English professor wrote that.

I had a kerfuffle with Substack, so I couldn't respond when this was new, but I'm back on, so here goes. Don't blame that chiropractor for being a chiropractor, but for being just another quack -- like Christiane Northrup -- MD... Chiropractors spend 4 yrs in DC school, post college. They study things like anatomy & physiology, pharmacology, radiology, pathophysiology, et. al. Just as MDs who are board certified can go off the rails, so can DCs.

Those of us who love the Bad Brains always will love Bad Brains, but America’s continued, vocal protests to end the violent, systematic oppression of Black Americans have revitalized the band’s message of unity and resistance. Founded in 1977 by four Black men in Washington D.C., Bad Brains blends punk, reggae, metal, and funk, a mix you hear most across the course of their first three landmark albums, Bad Brains, Rock for Light, and I Against I.

1.        The Holy Sinner I had a different post lined up for this week – in fact I’ve written over half of it – but then this image came into my life and I can’t get it out of my head: As you can see, this is an image of Trump praying.  Only it is fake – or, as we call it these days, generated by AI. Trump’s right hand has six fingers, which is a common mistake that AI image generators often make, but which is also ironic given his insecurity about having small hands.

Welcome to the Convivial Society, a newsletter exploring the relationship between technology and culture. This is what counts as a relatively short post around here, 1800 words or so, about a certain habit of mind that online spaces seem to foster. Almost one year ago, this exchange on Twitter caught my attention, enough so that I took a moment to capture it with a screen shot, thinking I’d go on to write about it at some point.

I was thinking this morning of a game I used to play with my creative writing students I stole from somewhere/someone, but don’t remember now where/who. I called it “The Metaphor Game,” and it is designed to force students to turn off the logical parts of their brains and turn on the metaphoric, associative functions that are such an essential part of being human. With the advent of AI, I think this game/these aspects of HI (human intelligence) will increasingly become all the more critical to nurture.

From time to time, I have argued that most high-quality cocktail recipes that call for gin can be productively swapped with mezcal — the earthy, often smoky cousin to tequila.  We have seen the mezcal-for-gin swap work in drinks like the Mezcal Negroni, the Mezcal Last Word, and the Mezcal Espresso Martini. All of these drinks are not just good. They are so successful that one might reasonably argue that they are superior to their gin-based predecessors.

In its own peculiar way, TikTok has become an outlet for social commentary, a modern-day news channel, if you will and while it may be difficult to keep up with social media squabbles, there are certainly some that are worth following up on. If you’re on TikTok, you’ve certainly heard of the Mielle Rosemary Mint oil, the hashtag has over 1.5 million views and Google searches have tripled in the last year.

By Ayn Honymous Rivers of ink have been spilled analyzing the recent Supreme Court ruling ending overt race-based affirmative action for college admissions. It begs the question; will this precedent also apply to overt gender discrimination? The Massachusetts Institute of Technology offers a potentially interesting case. MIT prides itself on having gender-balanced its entering freshman classes for at least the past two decades. How could anyone have a problem with that?