Baja sunset

Millennial quiz: What have you got if you've got Sick Puppies next to Puddles of Mud with Twenty One Pilots?

How do you do fellow kids?

The moon over Baja tonight was so beautiful. Here it is captured by three lenses. Ones an iPhone 14 Pro’s 24mm lens, another is a Canon RF 35mm, and another is a Canon RF 70-200mm cropped.

Researching places to stay and this is the third sentence in the second paragraph in Wikipedia:

In 1968, five Swiss artillery shells accidentally hit it, damaging a few chairs that were sitting outdoors.

I’ve never flown Delta Air Lines, but Britt did last week, and a friend here in Baja is a frequent flyer with the airline, both, unprompted, cited the seat-back entertainment as one of the reasons they would fly them again.

Customer satisfaction win for Delta.

📷 Practice (#mbmar Micro Blog March photo challenge prompt suggested by @hollie)

Ronald Sharp via James Clear’s excellent email, on how friendship transforms us (or any great relationship, really):

It’s not about what someone can do for you, it's who and what the two of you become in each other's presence.

“Now this being so, how much happier and better would the world not be if only it could be purged of women?”

From a March 28, 1912, letter to the editor of The Times, signed by C.S.C., one of the doomed. Who turned out to be Clementine Churchill. via Letters of Note

📷 Mirror (@Rori)

Now you’re just a music playback medium that I used to know.

(Found in an op-shop in 2017)

I'm feeling bullish on the new group-messaging app and platform, Wavelength, After reading John Gruber's review, then using it and joining a group, I think it could replace group chats in other places, but also serve as a platform for new conversations.

If you're interested, I've started a few group chats:

• The Frequent Travellers Society, because I like to talk about travel.
• The Celebrant Institute, you wouldn't believe it but it's for celebrants.
• The Apple Nation because I follow Apple like a sport, it's my favourite hobby.

Jump onboard if you're interested!

Eleven years ago I asked Britt to marry me, and honestly, it would still be my best idea yet.

I’ve written the story into my Rebels Guide draft chapter on proposals and how I think you should approach asking someone to marry you, now on the blog.

Over a decade ago Vinod Khosla wrote a series of blog posts about artificial intelligence, the forecasts hold up today, and the headline basically tells the whole story: 'Do we need doctors?' and 'Do we need teachers?'

📷 Slice (#mbmar Micro Blog March photo challenge prompt suggested by @meandering)

Last week Goldie grabbed a big knife off the kitchen bench when I wasn’t looking.

Number of times a well-regulated militia has been required in the USA this year: zero.

Number of times a school student has been wanted to not be shot at this year: way too many.

Dropped a new draft chapter of the Rebels Guide to Getting Married today: choosing a person to marry.

Thinking about the Coolangatta boardriders today

Ted Gioia on becoming a Substack shareholder and why the rest of the business isn't run like this. Why don't the creators own the platforms?

“I’d love to live in a world in which the major record labels were owned by musicians. Or the Hollywood film studios by cast and crew. Or those five huge publishing businesses were controlled by writers.”

📷 Prompt (#mbmar Micro Blog March photo challenge prompt suggested by @moonmehta)

I cannot imagine living in a community where the word “another” preceding “school shooting” isn’t cause for rioting in the streets and major societal change.

I'm just a boy, standing in front of a couple, asking them to make out in front of their grandparents.

(I'm a wedding celebrant)

When Vanilla Ice rapped that he was back with a 'brand new invention', he was indeed 'back' after his first hit, a cover of Play That Funky Music, but was the invention the lyrics (which is kind of the whole idea of a song), his theft of the Under Pressure bass line, or was he talking about the Ninja Rap that came out the next year?

Oh, this is awkward. The artificial intelligence doesn't know that the United Kingdom has left the European Union. If I tell it is it going to have an emotional meltdown?

📷 Support (#mbmar Micro Blog March photo challenge prompt suggested by @JohnAN)

I've spent a lot of time at the Los Sagrados Horse Sanctuary over the past few weeks, and the biggest take away for me isn't just the support we can offer to horses, but the support they offer to us.

The computer at Picfair has decided that these pieces of art are the ones people are most likely to buy from my print store and hang on their wall, prove it wrong.

Printing in most countries worldwide so delivery is usually local which means it's quick and easy.

art.josh.withers.co

Creedence Clearwater Revival's 'Have You Ever Seen the Rain?' is playing in the cafe and I'm singing 'Have you ever seen Lorraine?' and the guy at the next table is not handling it well.

The one where Father Nathan Monk casually suggests that Jesus might of been gay.

The Christians are going to roast you, Monk. Godspeed.

Are we giving the window washers at traffic lights too much money?

22 Jump Street is going to be Kanye’s Mother Theresa moment.

Which cinematic alien or monster do you think my huevos rancheros looks like? I’m seeing Dr. Zoidberg.

I have a confession. I don't know where to take the book I'm writing. I actually feel kind of stupid for even having thought I should write a book, when all I had was a handful of good ideas. It's not that I have writer's block, as much as I'm out of ideas ...

📷 Instrument (#mbmar Micro Blog March photo challenge prompt suggested by @UnfocusedWanderlust)

On Friday I was photographing Los Sagrados for their new website, and a musician came out to perform the flute and percussion for the horses. It was quite a thing to witness.

Disco tech

Luna and I flexing our frequent flyer privileges this afternoon.

This week in cactus

While Britt’s been away this last fortnight I’ve had heaps of one-on-one time with Goldie while her big sister is at school.

Jose M. Gilgado on embracing a title to help you actually become, that title:

The earlier you use that new term: “athlete,” “writer,” or “artist,” the easier it will be to accept your new identity and act accordingly.

Jon Haidt in Why the Mental Health of Liberal Girls Sank First and Fastest:

There was a culture that was encouraged on Tumblr, which was to be able to describe your unique non-normative self. That’s to some extent a feature of modern society anyway. But it was taken to such an extreme that people began to describe this as the “snowflake” (referring to the idea that each snowflake is unique), the person who constructs a totally kind of boutique identity for themselves; then guards that identity in a very, very sensitive way; and reacts in an enraged way when anyone does not respect the uniqueness of their identity. On the other side of the political spectrum, there was the most insensitive culture imaginable: 4chan. The communities involved in gender activism on Tumblr were mostly young progressive women while 4Chan was mostly used by right-leaning young men, so there was an increasingly gendered nature to the online conflict. The two communities supercharged each other with their mutual hatred, as often happens in a culture war. The young identity activists on Tumblr embraced their new notions of identity, fragility and trauma all the more tightly, increasingly saying that words are a form of violence. Meanwhile, the young men on 4Chan moved in the opposite direction; they brandished a rough and rude masculinity in which status was gained by using words more insensitively than the next guy. It was out of this reciprocal dynamic that today’s Cancel Culture was born in the early 2010s. Then, in 2013, it escaped from Tumblr into the much larger Twitterverse. Once on Twitter, it went national and even global (at least within the English-speaking countries), producing the mess we all live with today.

Bono and The Edge's Tiny Desk Concert is beautiful. In particular, the "argument between two mates", Stuck in Moment You Can't Get Out Of.

Missing home/Australia/Gold Coast tonight

After reading this, all I want to do is walk the streets of LA.

Helen Garner on happiness in The Guardian:

What is happiness, anyway? Does anybody know? It’s taken me 80 years to figure out that it’s not a tranquil, sunlit realm at the top of the ladder you’ve spent your whole life hauling yourself up, rung by rung. It’s more like the thing that Christians call grace: you can’t earn it, you can’t strive for it, it’s not a reward for virtue. It exists all right, it will be given to you, but it’s fluid, it’s evasive, it’s out of reach. It’s something you glimpse in the corner of your eye until one day you’re up to your neck in it. And before you’ve had time to take a big gasp and name it, it’s gone.

Virginia Heffernan in the Wired article on TSMC, "I Saw the Face of God in a Semiconductor Factory":

In 1675, A French merchant named Jacques Savary published The Perfect Merchant, a mercantile manual that came to double as a guide for doing commerce around the world. Albert O. Hirschman cites Savary to explain how capitalism, which would have been regarded as little but avarice as recently as the 16th century, became the sanest ambition of humans in the 17th.

Savary strongly believed that international trade would be the antidote to war. Humans can’t conduct polyglot commerce across borders without cultivating an understanding of foreign laws, customs, and cultures. Savary also believed the Earth’s resources and the fellowship created by commerce were God-given. “It’s not God’s will that all human necessities be found in the same place,” Savary wrote. “Divine Providence has dispersed its gifts so that humans will trade together and find that their mutual need to help each other establishes ties of friendship among them.”

📷 Spice (#mbmar Micro Blog March photo challenge prompt suggested by @cygnoir)

It's been four months since I've blasted this idea across the internet, so here's my regular reminder that I blog before I post on social, and that blog automatically sends a weekly roundup to anyone that subscribes.

I can't stop thinking about this RIAA story with Steve Jobs. It's amazing how fragile - while also strong - the world is. Thank God Rogue Amoeba made it through, I use their software every day.

How to cook soup, by the late Dean Allen:

First, you need some water. Fuse two hydrogen with one oxygen and repeat until you have enough. While the water is heating, raise some cattle. Pay a man with grim eyes to do the slaughtering, preferably while you are away. Roast the bones, then add to the water. Go away again. Come back once in awhile to skim. When the bones begin to float, lash together into booms and tow up the coast. Reduce. Keep reducing. When you think you have reduced enough, reduce some more. Raise some barley. When the broth coats the back of a spoon and light cannot escape it, you are nearly there. Pause to mop your brow as you harvest the barley. Search in vain for a cloud in the sky. Soak the barley overnight (you will need more water here), then add to the broth. When, out of the blue, you remember the first person you truly loved, the soup is ready. Serve.