Courtesy of my ol’ pal Denro, this picture was taken almost exactly ten years ago at a comic book convention we attended in New York with Joe Sinnott. It was a happy time, with Joe and Stan hale and hearty and doing great.
Alex Saviuk, Joe Sinnott, Stan Lee
I used David Bowie’s “Five Years” for my Five Years post. What can I do here that’s similar? Oh, I know!
After Disney bought Marvel, Joe’s retirement checks came from Disney, and he’d joke about being a Disney artist. Joe would have gotten a kick from knowing this old photo of himself makes an appearance on Disney+.
I mentioned Jim Dawson a few weeks ago, and today on Facebook he posted this picture. That’s Jim in back. Is that comic actor Martin Short in the middle, looking like Harpo Marx? Jim likes to joke, so I assumed it was an April Fool gag.
But no, it wasn’t a joke. Jim wanted to note the passing of Warner/Reprise Records A&R executive and producer Andy Wickman, on the right wearing glasses. Standing in front was Phil Spector.
IoT. Internet of Things. Not something that holds a lot of interest for me. If package thieves were a concern, then I could see getting a webcam for the front porch. But as I recently learned, Google has rolled streaming media into its Home concept.
This is the Cast tab in the Google Chrome browser on my desktop PC when I am not using Chromecast.
This is the Cast tab when I am casting. Not from the PC, but from my Pixel 4a phone, going to Chromecast Audio on the upstairs stereo.
So of course this is how it looks when casting from the phone to the Onkyo A/V receiver downstairs.
When Google Chrome is running it finds compatible devices on the local network and maintains connections to poll for changes.
TCP 192.168.1.179:63387 Chromecast:8008 ESTABLISHED
TCP 192.168.1.179:63388 StreamingStick4K:8060 CLOSE_WAIT
TCP 192.168.1.179:63390 RokuStreamingStick:8060 CLOSE_WAIT
It makes sense to check casting devices, but it raises thorny questions. What else might Google be monitoring, now that it considers everything to be part of an IoT Home, and are there vulnerabilities in the casting protocol that hackers could exploit?
This is my maternal grandfather. He was an English professor at a college in Illinois.
Eugene Waffle, 1903-1968
He went bald, then had a detached retina. If I had taken after him any more than I have, I would have dropped dead from a heart attack 18 months ago.
Speaking of Mom, she used to live the theater life in New York. If this wasn’t her favorite song, it was one of them, sung by a young Jerry Orbach long before Law & Order.
My favorite song expressing the same sentiment is this one. I posted it 18 months ago, after not dying from a heart attack.
Over a period of fifteen years I traveled to many rural American hospitals. Some of them were a long drive from a large airport. Others had a connecting flight aboard a twin-prop plane to a small regional airport.
In the years since then, some of those hospitals have closed. The crisis in rural healthcare continues to worsen.
Some hospitals here in greater Boston have closed, but for a very different reason. There were too many of them. Competitive pressures are ongoing, with Massachusetts General Hospital pursuing what some see as aggressive expansion plans.
Every six months I drive into downtown Boston for an appointment with an eye specialist. In late 1999, after suffering a spontaneous retinal detachment, I was left for blind by an incompetent eye surgeon in Worcester. I was referred to him by a optometrist in a neighboring town, who delayed seeing me after doubting my claim of a detached retina.
My sight was saved by a specialist at the Massachusetts Eye & Ear infirmary, who I found only because my boss’ wife worked there. Based on my own experience, the closer you get to Boston the better the medical care is.
P.S. This ad happened to pop up on Facebook. An ad for the place where my botched eye surgery was done.
