Sarah Cooper

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One of the few bright spots of the last 8 months is Sarah Cooper and her brilliant videos. Nice piece in the Washington Post.

In a medium where teenage gamers become instant multimillionaires, Cooper is the strangest kind of overnight star. She has earned a master’s degree, written three books and developed more than a casual understanding of John Maynard Keynes. She was in her 30s before she did her first standup set, and spent the bulk of her adult life working at tech companies, most recently Google, where she led the team that redesigned the company’s popular word-processing program, Google Docs.

Gotta say it… I’m impressed by the Google Docs thing. She went from doing gigs in a pizza place in January to a Netflix special on October 27.

It is not your standard Netflix comedy show. For one thing, “Sarah Cooper: Everything’s Fine” is not standup. The special is a darkly hilarious and political sketch show filmed on the covid-claustrophobic set of a fictitious morning program hosted by a needy and desperately cheery character named Sarah Cooper.

If you’ve been living in a cave (or watching nothing but Fox News) you can check out her work on YouTube.

In praise of attic fans

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We’ve been hyper-vigilant since the beginning of the pandemic. No friends or family in our home since late February. But we have had a couple of service people in to repair broken appliances. No way to avoid that. Fortunately, our house has a big-ass attic fan so we opened a couple of windows and turn the fan on high. It sucks a huge volume of air (and virus) out of the house.

Reality

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My current view of Reality is a jigsaw puzzle with an infinite number of pieces, scattered across a table of infinite size. I can see only a few nearby bits of the puzzle’s image. Pieces snap into place by some unseen cosmic hand but I only see those close to me. I am overwhelmed by the number of pieces and the impossibility of finding where each fits. But they do and, in time, a little more of the picture can be made out. And I think, “Of course. It couldn’t have been otherwise.”

Historic Land Rover

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From Land Rover aficionado John Middleton:

My daughter and I had the rare opportunity to view and ride in the Oxford 1955 Series One that was used in the Oxford and Cambridge Far Eastern Expedition from London to Singapore. It was found on the Island of St Helena by a man from Yorkshire and rebuilt. I drove from Singapore to London in 2019 and is currently finishing up a tour of the US we drove to Memphis, TN to see it. Tim Slessor wrote a book about the expedition called First Overland and there’s a movie of expedition on YouTube.

Electric log splitter

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We don’t heat our home with firewood but Barb and I love a good fire. So I’ve been splitting logs for a lot of years. I used an axe until someone told me about splitting mauls. It’s hard work but good exercise (I told myself). But I’m done with the maul. Barb bought me an electric log splitter. She’s awful good about researching stuff like this and chose a very inexpensive splitter by WEN. At less than $300 it might be the cheapest electric log splitter sold. But set-up was simple and I was splitting logs in no time.

Took about an hour to split enough wood to last us the winter. We keep a rack on the deck and the rest in a big stack out back.

 

Waiting on my AI buddy

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I’d like to live long enough to have a chat with an AI that:

  • Has “read” my 5,700 blog posts
  • Has read my 4,000 Mastodon posts
  • Has watched/analyzed my 525 videos on YouTube
  • Has “read” the 858 books in my LibraryThing

Because there is no one who has or will get to know me that well. What would it be like to interact with an intelligence that “shares” those experiences? I cannot imagine.