There is an extremely smug crackpot prowling the streets of Minneapolis today

This past weekend, I had a brief encounter with a ranting, raving kook howling about nefarious Jews and the virtues of the Tao. He also predicted that the Pope would die in 48 hours.

Uh-oh. The Pope has died.

Pope Francis, the first Latin American leader of the Roman Catholic Church, has died, the Vatican said on Monday, ending an often turbulent reign marked by division and tension as he sought to overhaul the hidebound institution.
He was 88, and had suffered a serious bout of double pneumonia this year, but his death came as a shock after he had been driven around St. Peter’s Square in an open-air popemobile to greet cheering crowds on Easter Sunday.

He was 88, had been very ill, so it’s not much of a prediction, but OK, he gets to score 1 point. I’m going to predict that the street kook is feeling full of himself today and is babbling more nonsense more vehemently, a prediction that is even more predictable.

Anyone want a furry 10-lb wrecking ball?

Last night, this beast nearly cost me a lot of money.

She decided to jump up on my desk, but she is not a sinuous, agile feline — she is an inept, clumsy idiot. She landed on my webcam and sent it flying, and then tried to recover badly by leaping up and back, ending up between the wall and my computer, where there’s nothing but a tangle of cables which did not provide a solid purchase. She scrabbled frantically at the cables, disconnecting most of them, and hurled herself at the wall, then bounced into the back of the monitor.

I don’t know what she did next because all I saw was that my computer shut down and the monitor was toppling forward into my face.

Anyway, if anyone needs a demolition cat I’m willing to throw her into a box and pay for the postage.

Major space news!!!!

Jeff Bezos launched Katy Perry into space for 11 minutes.

That’s it. That’s our big news today. Woo hoo.

You can find a most excellent summary of the whole thing in the Guardian.

Given the mixture of freebie rides and seats sold to the super-rich, the thing people always say about Blue Origin tickets is that prices range from zero to $28m dollars. A bit like a seat on a RyanAir flight to Tallinn. But these spots were all personally gifted by Bezos and Sánchez because this was an Important Mission. Which also meant the whole thing was exclusively documented by Blue Origin’s Pravda-like web channel. Here, the anchors and reporters kept explaining that – unlike when men went to space in the past – this mission was all about emotions. But look, it’s great that we’re valorising emotions above all things, because it gives me permission to say how very much I hated this entire, hilariously vacuous spectacle.

You aren’t bad, neither is your phone…but the capitalists who abuse it are evil

I get all kinds of awful advice from the internet. Just now, on my work email account, I got a message from the Star Tribune telling me how to Make your smartphone dumb, and other tips to break social media addiction. Maybe the first thing I need to do is tell the Star Tribune to stop sending me this crap.

You could switch to a flip phone. You could quit social media. But there are also ways to make your smartphone dumber, with apps and hacks and old-fashioned mindfulness.

First, you have to understand why social media is sucking you in. Studies show that engaging with social media can produce oxytocin and trigger tiny releases of dopamine, said Kit Breshears, an instructor with the Earl E. Bakken Center for Spirituality and Healing at the University of Minnesota. Apps feature a pulldown refresh mechanism that functions a lot like a slot machine.

No, I can’t do that. My phone has gradually become an essential tool for working with teaching and administrative materials — I can’t shut it off, since I have to deal with push notifications in order to log in to official university web pages, and because my students contact me through the phone (yes, I gave out my personal phone number to my students) to tell me if they need help at the genetics lab, any time of day. I can’t make my smartphone dumber, without compromising my work!

I’m also prejudiced that this advice is coming from the Center for Spirituality and Healing. Here’s an idea: shut down that palace of quackery.

But also, I have a problem with placing the blame for the problem on the user, and making it our responsibility to police the corporations that are sending out the addictive poison. I would love to be able to get a little dose of oxytocin and dopamine at will. What’s wrong with that? Taking a break and looking at cat photos (or in my case, spider photos) might be beneficial to our emotional well-being. The problem isn’t that we can self-administer mild pleasure with a click of a button, it’s that that mechanism has been hijacked by capitalism. You want a little relaxation, and it’s always accompanied by companies using it to sell you something, or make you feel bad for what you are doing, so that you have to buy the cure they are selling. This one article mentions a $59 device to block signals in your home, and an app you can download to reduce your phone to a “minimalist phone”. Fine. But the problem isn’t that I have a device that can access the internet at any time, it’s that the internet has been shittified to such a remarkable degree that it’s painful to use it.

You know, I was just noticing something recently: my habit is to charge up my phone when I get home from work, and then put it by my bedside overnight, in case there’s an emergency. I’ve felt like I’ve got infinite battery, because it almost never drops below 90% charge, unless I’m away on a long trip. Apparently, I’m not addicted to endless doom-scrolling. It’s possible to be a hopeless nerd who loves his fancy gadgets and not be the kind of fool who follows the advice of a quack from CSH.

Mainly, though, stop blaming your phone for your own problems with technology and capitalism.