Burns After Reading: 14

Welcome to the 14th installment of Burns After Reading. Kat and I spent the last week of August traveling to Seattle and Mt. Rainier to escape the Durham heat. Mission Accomplished.

The word I overused on the trails at Mt. Rainier was "Amazing!" I was blown away by cool nights, warm sunny days, birds, bears, and mountain meadows. We saw more bears in a day than I had ever seen in my life. They were just chowing down on the bounty of the meadows. Too close to the trail for my comfort in a few instances.

An unexpected bonus was that our lodging, The National Park Inn, was devoid of both cell coverage and WiFi. This is an amazing way to force a disconnect from normal routine. I had to read the guide book and map to plan the trail for the next day. I did not have to listen to any reviews or social media posts about that trail.

As usual, you can find a spoken version here.

Burns Behaving Badly

In another life, I'm a museum director. Much like me, this Jason Burns knows that the only barrier for Americans is finding plentiful parking for their SUV that's less than 10 steps from their destination. God forbid you ask someone to PAY for parking, or walk two blocks from a parking garage. That will be the barrier that destroys your business. Here's how he promotes the history museum.

There is a small parking lot behind us. You can park there for free and you could come in and visit us.”

Very smart! It's how I invite friends downtown for drinks. With a map of free parking circled and labeled using screenshots of Google Maps.

Bird of the Month

This month is brought to you by the Tufted Puffin. As we cruised by the San Juan islands we were invited to a Puffin Party. Our boat was surrounded by a handful of bright orange-billed birds bobbing in the water.

I learned they only have these luxurious tufts and brilliant bills during mating season. Look at this absolute Fabio of a bird.

Read

No books finished this month. Not a lot of articles either. I've been detained by events in the real world. Work and life stuff.

Cory Doctorow

However, I did like this quote from Cory Doctorow.

Fundamentally, Piketty argues that the cheapest way to stop people from building a guillotine on your lawn is to build hospitals and schools; this is cheaper than paying for guards and prisons to lock up would-be guillotine builders. ... Whether it's letting Bill Gates decide how your schools will work or letting Elon Musk decide how your public health system runs, the result is political chaos and a societal nudge away from the rule of law and towards guillotines.

It's colorful and extreme enough to be memorable.

Tangle on Michigan Primaries

This coverage of El-Sayed shows he's a gifted communicator. It's also of a common theme with Cory's piece above. We can have nice things. In fact, we should, because the alternatives lead to ruin.

“When you’re bought off by DTE and Blue Cross and Big Pharma and Big Tech and AIPAC,” he continued, referencing the big money backing Stevens, “don’t be surprised that there’s a ‘pro quo’ that comes with that ‘quid.’ That money doesn’t just fall off trees. $60 million from outside organizations in this race… those exact organizations expect something on the other side. And that’s that they expect to own your next U.S. senator.” After explaining that he was outspent 12 to 1 in the race, he said to the audience, “You are going to see an ad, probably two of them, on behalf of AIPAC during the next commercial break, lying about me and my record.”

The meta commentary about how these ads work is brilliant. People viscerally HATE these ads. I used to mute them. Now I pay for YouTube Premium (lite) so I am not confronted by them at all. It's not because I think Google should have more money, it's because ads like these fill me with disgust.

Freedom from these donors, El-Sayed insists, will allow him to enforce antitrust policy, tax billionaires, and vote to keep money in Michigan — rather than sending that money “somewhere else to drop bombs on kids.”

The reason this article stuck with me is the closing line that Isaac Saul from Tangle chose.

If you think this messaging has narrow appeal to just far-left progressives in Michigan, I think you need to spend more time talking to Americans.

That's right, another thing Americans hate besides paying for parking is paying to murder children.

Watched

Felicia Day is kickstarting a movie with the cast of The Guild. Kate is trying to get me to play Everquest. I have a slight aversion because of my former addiction to World of Warcraft (WoW) that consumed a few years of my life.

The upshot though is that because Kat has never played WoW, we got to watch the first few seasons of The Guild. I feel like these really hold up. There are so many fun characters that I can come back years later and appreciate it from a different angle.

Hobbies Not Started

Some things that seem like they would be fun.

Tower Crane Operator

I could become a tower crane operator. I've watched a bunch of videos and the selling point seems to be that you get to work with big equipment AND wear pajamas, or at least slippers. These two creators take very different approaches to their content: Manuela Preis and Heavy Brown, but both are entertaining in entirely different ways.

Omarchy Linux

There is always time to hop to a new Linux distro. Omarchy has been making the rounds in my feed and looks appealing. DHH is behind this one and is enthusiastically advocating for it. Being based on Arch is appealing. The demo video he made here looks nice. Maybe this is a next month project.

Hobbies Started

Here's what I have been making time for.

MeshCore

I bought some small LoRa radios and flashed the MeshCore firmware on them. This lets me communicate with folks (and play radio) when all other sorts of communications are down. Check out the rdumesh.org site for info. Warning that some of the articles are written by people using AI and it's obvious and bad, but still informational.

Bird Watching

Kat bought me a spotting scope for my birthday, and I had to add on a tripod, a pair of compact binoculars, and a binocular chest mount pack for hiking. It may seem like I'm complaining that this gift made me buy more things, but I'm absolutely thrilled. Now I can completely nerd out over birds.

We took the spotting scope out on a gloomy day, and while we didn't see too many birds, I got some great zoomed in views of a Red-Headed Woodpecker and Turkey Vultures at extra long distance.

I hope there are more opportunities for bird watching in September. My ideal scenario would be to catch more of the coming fall migration.

Lyrics Loved

Lemons by Byre

Another song caught us completely off guard this month.

When life you gives you lemons
You don't make lemonande
You use em to make girls cry
You take those lemons
No sugar at all
You squirt it right into her eyes

Petty Party

We caught a Tom Petty cover band at the Pike Place Market. This is in the music section but it deserves to be in the cool clocks section. Alternative title: Horny for Horology.

This photo is of the band "The Long Winters," but we really had a great time singing along with Petty Party.

Top 50 US Rock Albums

A friend suggested that my critique of a list of the Top 50 US Rock Albums might be unwarranted. "What do you expect from a site called UltimateClassicRock.com?", she asked. She's not wrong.

While I didn't always agree with the placement or album selection, I really enjoyed spending the past few months listening to entire albums in between meetings. I got to pick the next one from the list, check out the artwork, and then make a quick note about my thoughts.

Some albums like Nirvana's Nevermind are burned into my brain, including the track order. Some like Funkadelic's Maggot Brain were total surprises to me.

An album is the perfect unit of music consumption and it's a shame we have lost this.

Zero Context

Spent $1,000 on picture frames. Don't ask me how many frames that is because I don't want to talk about it.

• Bought milk and bananas from an ACE Hardware. Used my ACE rewards number.
• Urinal dividers that block at eye level instead of the usual crotch level divide. This makes a lot more sense to me.
• A server that delivered food to all tables with the line: "Starvation is over! Hah hah!"
• When a whale exhales (blows) and the sun shines through it, it's called a rainblow.
• Cave Crickets are creepy!
• Cleaned cat puke out of a laser printer, twice. The first time I laughed at the absurdity of it. The second time, I did not laugh.
• It used to be that your penis pills and weight loss ads came from spam. Now they come from your company health program. Truly, we must be living in hell.

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