I paid off the mortgage on my house twelve years ago. Now I’m aging in place and depriving some young, deserving family of a home.
I’ve said it before. We’re living with the consequences of interest rates being kept too low for too long.
Category: All Posts
The Three Wise Men
Tomorrow morning I will be meeting with the surgeon, the chemotherapy oncologist and the radiation oncologist, for my first post-treatment consultation. I’m feeling nervous with a dash of hopefulness.
Update: I have been told that I am now free of cancer!
Howard’s End
On the Roku Channel I’ve been watching Leslie Howard’s son Ronald as Sherlock Holmes, in the 1950’s TV series. The shows are good fun, and being in the public domain they’re widely available.
The old Alfred Hitchcock Presents series is also on the Roku Channel. Ronald Howard appears in an adaptation of Ambrose Bierce’s 1890 short story, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”.
Howard as a Southern plantation owner was a clever bit of casting, considering that his father was Ashley Wilkes in Gone With the Wind. I can’t embed the Hitchcock episode, but this link will take you there.
https://therokuchannel.roku.com/watch/b19e33491d2656a3a444fce5d0281a12
A Fanclub of One
Of interest to very few other than myself, today on TCM I caught Bomba on Panther Island. It’s the second movie in the “Bomba the Jungle Boy” series and it features my very first childhood crush, Allene Roberts.
Allene’s dress that’s seen early in the movie seemed familiar.
Yep, just as I thought. It’s the same dress that Allene wore later in “The Haunted Lighthouse”, the first of her three appearances in The Adventures of Superman.
They weren’t kidding about “Poverty Row,” the term that was coined in the movie business for the ultra-low budget studios! Maybe it was one of the dresses Allene’s seamstress mother made for her.
Allene goes swimming with Johnny Sheffield, who before playing Bomba the Jungle Boy was simply “Boy” in the Weissmuller Tarzan series. Allene bears something of a resemblance here to Maureen O’Sullivan, who was Sheffield’s mother Jane in the Tarzan movies.
Speaking of Allene, eBay currently has a couple of unique items. I had a tough time deciding which one to bid on.
Norman Rockwell’s Vision of My Future
In 1965/66, Norman Rockwell envisioned the girlfriend I would have ten years later, right down to the drawing pad and jeans with boots. Except for her height. Marion was almost 5’10” tall. Few girls could pull off this classic “college art student” look so beautifully.
As with other Rockwell paintings, Picasso vs. Sargent has a humorous idea behind it, like a single-panel gag cartoon. Here is a critique by someone who has put a lot more thought into the painting’s gag than I have.
https://massmedievalist.substack.com/p/the-massachusetts-medievalist-on-23d
Trouble in Blogland
It was exactly three years ago that I finally whacked down the technical moles that were crippling my WordPress installation. In the aftermath of my struggles, I was left with some residual problems on older posts that I occasionally fix on an as-needed basis.
Now there’s a different sort of WordPress trouble. WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg isn’t happy with WP Engine, a large hosting service that caters to business customers, rather than hobby bloggers like myself.
His complaint is that WP Engine, which is owned by a private equity firm, takes advantage of the free resources available from WordPress.org, without contributing very much of anything in return. This goes against the idea of being an Open Source software participant.
Mullenweg cut off WP Engine’s access to WordPress.org, and WP Engine sued in response. A judge has decided that Mullenweg must restore full access to WP Engine.
Mullenweg’s hosting service is WordPress.com, so I can understand why he isn’t pleased with a competitor that wants the freebies without playing by the rules. I am neither on WP Engine nor WordPress.com. I’m on the third leading service specializing in WordPress, which is also owned by a private equity firm. Here’s hoping all is well between the respective parties.
Follow-up: It’s getting extra nasty!
“It’s hard to imagine wanting to continue to working on WordPress after this.” – Matt Mullenweg
https://www.404media.co/wordpress-wp-engine-preliminary-injunction/