Former Chicago Opera Theater artistic director Lidya Yankovskaya, with whom I have worked several times, has started moving to London because she doesn't want her children to grow up in the anti-humanities environment the United States is becoming:
“I want to be sure that my children can grow up feeling like they can always express themselves freely. I want my children to live in a society that really takes care of its people. I want my children to live in a world that really values things like the arts, that really values things like education,” she told WBEZ on a recent Zoom call from Sydney, where she has been leading Georges Bizet’s classic “Carmen” at the Sydney Opera House. “In London in particular, there is such a culture of valuing intellectualism, of valuing the arts and artistic pursuits for their own sake.”
As I'm no longer eligible for the kinds of highly-skilled migrant visas I could get 15 years ago from Europe and the UK, I am a bit envious. But I also understand her completely, and if I had kids, I might also make more of a concerted effort to go somewhere closer to my values.
Two more nuggets about the end of the United States as a functioning country:
Well, that's enough optimism and cheer for one afternoon! Time to get back to my real job.
A smattering of stories this morning show how modern life is both better and worse than in the past:
- A criminologist at Cambridge has spent 15 years working on "murder maps" of London, Oxford, and York, showing just how awful it was to live in the 14th Century: "The deadliest of the cities was Oxford, which he estimated to have a homicide rate of about 100 per 100,000 inhabitants in the 14th century, while London and York hovered at 20 to 25 per 100,000. (In 2023, the most recent year for which data is available, London’s homicide rate was about 1.2 per 100,000 inhabitants.)"
- An economist I've quoted often on The Daily Parker looks at the entirely-predictable falling out between the OAFPOTUS and the Clown Prince of X and finds a perfect example of the worst corruption the US government has ever experienced: "both men start from the presumption that the U.S. government is an entirely corrupt enterprise, with the president in a position to hand out personal favors or engage in personal acts of vengeance."
- Yascha Mounk sees it as the OAFPOTUS failing to build a coalition. (That this feud has erupted between two malignant narcissists and may be entirely kayfabe is left unexplored by both writers.)
- Jeff Maurer takes a different view that is no less depressing: "that farting baby penguin is a harbinger of the end of democracy (is a sentence that I thought I’d never write). ... Trump found a major flaw in our system, which is that you can get away with illegal stuff as long as you do so much illegal stuff that nobody can keep track."
- A tech bro with about the competence you'd expect named Sahil Lavingia used an LLM to create a script that purged more than 600 Veterans Affairs contracts in a partially-successful attempt to become the Dunning-Krueger Champion for the month of April.
- I'm not sure Slate's Scaachi Koul is entirely fair to Katy Perry in an article from earlier this week, but it's a compelling read.
Finally, I plan to spend a good bit of this afternoon on my semi-compulsory half-day holiday reading an actual book, John Scalzi's When the Moon Hits Your Eye, his latest and one of his silliest. What would happen in the moon suddenly turned to cheese? Hilarity, in Scalzi's world. It's a lot more fun to read than any newspaper.
And then...dinner at Ribfest!
Leading the hit parade of horrors this morning, London's Heathrow Airport completely shut down after an electric transformer caught fire yesterday, leading to over 1,100 flight cancellations so far. Flight operations have resumed, sort of, but Europe's busiest airport going offline will cause rippling failures throughout world aviation for a few more days at least.
Speaking of massive transport failures, we have yet more evidence that the Clown Prince of X knows dick about cars (or rockets or software or anything, really) as Tesla recalled nearly all of its Cybertrucks after people discovered the door panels can fall off. That's if they don't rust, or crumple, or warp, or cut your fingers off.
I Googled "how bad is the Tesla Cybertruck" and got so many responses I had to whittle the search down to just the last month, and it still took a couple of pages to find a source that most people trust: Consumers Union. And they don't like it at all. (I love this bit, too: "Unfortunately, we can’t ask Tesla any follow-up questions about the vehicle—even clarifying ones that could help us better understand it—because Tesla dissolved its media relations department in 2020, and the company did not respond when contacted through its press email." This is the guy now destroying the US government. You were warned, and you voted for the OAFPOTUS anyway.)
Time to walk the dog again, now that it's up to 9°C.
Before I link to anything else, I want to share Ray Delahanty's latest CityNerd video that explores "rural cosplaying." I'll skip directly to the punchline; you should watch the whole thing for more context:
Elsewhere,
There is some good news today, though. In the last 6½ hours, the temperature at Inner Drive Technology World Headquarters rose almost 9°C (15°F), to an almost-balmy -3.5°C. The forecast says it'll keep rising another 12°C or so through Sunday. So our first cold snap of the winter appears to be behind us.
Also, kudos to the UK Home Office. I just applied for my UK Electronic Travel Authorisation, paid my £10 ($13.06), and almost immediately got approved. It helps that (a) I just entered the UK twice in September with the same passport, and until the UK decided Americans could use the EU passport lanes, I was in the UK Registered Traveller programme. So they've vetted me quite a few times already.
When will I next go there? I hope January. I haven't said a lot about it, but I moved to a new practice at Milliman on November 1st, and half my team—not to mention, my boss—are in England. I really need to meet them in person before too long. The other half of my team are in Seattle, where I also need to go soon, when I can work it out with my friend who brought Hazel through my house when they moved out there.
So, I'm aiming for Southampton in January and Seattle in February, because who doesn't love passing north of the 48th parallel in the winter?
The US Thanksgiving holiday tomorrow provides me with a long-awaited opportunity to clean out the closet under my stairs so an orphan kid more boxes will have room to stay there. I also may finish the Iain Banks novel I started two weeks ago, thereby finishing The Culture. (Don't worry, I have over 100 books on my to-be-read bookshelf; I'll find something else to read.)
Meanwhile:
- Even though I, personally, haven't got the time to get exercised about the OAFPOTUS's ridiculous threat to impose crippling (to us) tariffs on our three biggest trading partners, Mexico's president Claudia Sheinbaum used our own government's data to call bullshit on his claim that Mexico hasn't done enough to stop the flow of drugs into the US: "Tragically, it is in our country that lives are lost to the violence resulting from meeting the drug demand in yours."
- The UK will start requiring all visitors (even in transit) to register with their new Electronic Travel Authorisation scheme as of January 8th—similar to how the US ESTA program has worked for the last 16 years.
- Evanston, Ill., my home town, wants to protect bicyclists on one of its busiest streets, which of course has a bunch of stores panicking. (Note to the merchants: bike lanes don't hurt business, and in fact they encourage more foot traffic.)
- John Scalzi mourns the loss of Schwan's Home Delivery and it's bagel dogs.
Finally, as I mentioned nearly five years ago, today's date is a palindrome if you happen to study astronomy. The Julian Day number as of 6am CDT/12:00 UTC today is 2460642. Happy nerdy palindrome day!
The History Channel sends me a newsletter every morning listing a bunch of things that happened "this day in history." Today we had a bunch of anniversaries:
And finally, today is the 958th anniversary of the Battle of Hastings, which is the reason this blog is written in a Celtic-Norse-Germanic-French creole, not just a Celtic-Norse-Germanic creole.
President Jimmy Carter turned 100 today, making him the first former president to do so. James Fallows has a bit of hagiography on his blog today, and the State of Georgia has declared today "Jimmy Carter Day." I hope I make it to 100, too, but I don't expect the State of Illinois to declare that day a public holiday.
In other news:
Finally, yesterday the UK turned off its last operating coal-fired power plant, ending a 142-year run of burning coal to generate power. XKCD points out that in those 142 years, the UK burned the equivalent of about 3 inches of its land surface generating electricity.
And of course, I'll watch the Vice-Presidential Debate tonight at 9pm Eastern, but I don't plan to live-blog. Reactions tomorrow, though.
I can scarcely believe I took these 10 days ago, on Friday the 20th. I already posted about my walk from Borough Market back to King's X; this is where I started:
You can get a lovely snack there for just a few quid. In my case, a container of fresh olives, some bread, and some cheese set me back about £6. Next time, I'll try something from Mei Mei.
Later, I scored one of the rare pork baps at Southampton Arms. Someone else really wanted a bite, too:
Sorry, little guy, I can't give you any of this—oh darn I just dropped a bit of pork on the ground. (Lucky dog.)
Finally, this screen shot shows why I love Europe so much. (It's in French because I switched my phone's language settings to help practice while I was preparing for the trip.) The blue dot in the center-left shows where my train was at 20:06 France time (18:06 UTC) on Saturday the 21st. The stuff in the upper-right corner shows my phone's GPS utility. If you look at the left side of that box, you can see "Vitesse 303;" i.e., a speed of 303 km/h, or 190 mph. And that isn't even the train's top normal operating speed.
If we elect people in this country who actually care about climate change, we could have trains like that here, too. But given the proportion of the electorate who plan to vote for the convicted-felon rapist demented geriatric XPOTUS in five weeks, I am not optimistic.
I meant to post more photos from my trip earlier this month, but I do have a full-time job and other obligations. Plus it took me a couple of days longer than usual to recover, which I blame squarely on the shitty hotel room I had for my first night causing a sleep deficit that I never recovered from.
I posted a couple of these already, but with crude, quick edits done on my phone. I think these treatments might be a little better.
Sunrise at O'Hare on the 18th:
The hills of Hampshire:
Invasive megafauna preparing to attack:
Why I decided to walk for 10 km through Hampshire in the first place:
The Grand Canal:
It might take a few days to get more of these done. I'll post more as I get to them.