Having Saturday morning coffee with BBC World Service playing in the background.   Up early having a new sofa delivered (how do you end up with a defective *sofa* that needs replacing?)  Sick cat going back to the vet.  Some light rain coming down.  Very unisual during this heat wave.

Enjoyed Friday afternoon watching Spain vs Portugual at a local bar with the folks from work (no photos; don’t want to incriminate anyone).

A friend posted an old video of young William F. Buckley and impossibly young Noam Chomsky debating.  I always thought Buckley was a very smart guy, but now I am thinking he never took on anyone he couldn’t run circles around and / or intimidate (well, maybe Gore Vidal).

I didn’t watch the whole thing.  Didn’t have to.  Buckley has no real arguments and no real facts.  He is just regurgitating what would be called “talking points” today.  It is almost embarrassing to watch the smartest guy American conservatism has ever produced (?) Get taken apart like this.  Wish I would have seen this 40 years ago.  I see the full version is out on YouTube.  It is below instead of the 15 minute clip I originally watched.  I see there is also a Chomsky vs John Silber YouTube.  Silber was a  conservative Texan and former BU president who ran for office in Massachusetts in his later years.  I met Silber my first day at BU and he impressed me (maybe more on that later).  I still like the man but understand how other people could find him irritating. Will have to watch Silber vs Chomsky.

It gets me to thinking about how we get where we are, what accidents and luck, good and bad, take us places.  It is good to have goals (or this week, goooaaaals!!!!”), but if Noam Chomsky hadn’t gotten beaten up by some anonymous Boston cop at a protest, how different would the world be?  Cheers to you, Mr Chomsky, and maybe even to you, Boston Cop, whoever you are.

One of my favorite pieces of popular music in recent years is Bob Schneider’s King Kong trilogy.  For reasons I can’t imagine, someone put these on Spotify as a single long work, which is ok, but mixed the order of the songs.  I’m usually not pickey about these things but in this case, at least for me, it totally wrecks the enjoyment of the work. As a public service I have put the original three parts out there as playlists.

My friend Marilyn sent me an article from the New Yorker (What Happens When a Bad-Tempered, Distractible Doofus Runs an Empire?) about Kaiser Wilhelm II.  I don’t like heavy handed comparisons, but it made for an interesting read.  Sent me to the Wiki page on Kaiser Wilhelm II, in particular his personality.  A quote from a biography:

… gifted, with a quick understanding, sometimes brilliant, with a taste for the modern,—technology, industry, science—but at the same time superficial, hasty, restless, unable to relax, without any deeper level of seriousness, without any desire for hard work or drive to see things through to the end, without any sense of sobriety, for balance and boundaries, or even for reality and real problems, uncontrollable and scarcely capable of learning from experience, desperate for applause and success,—as Bismarck said early on in his life, he wanted every day to be his birthday—romantic, sentimental and theatrical, unsure and arrogant, with an immeasurably exaggerated self-confidence and desire to show off …

Not many things shock me these days.  The death of Anthony Bourdain did, though.  My brother, who is a restaurant guy, turned me on to Kitchen Confidential when it first came out.  I have been a fan ever since.  A good article from last year in the New Yorker about Bourdain.

Profiles
February 13 & 20, 2017 Issue
Anthony Bourdain’s Moveable Feast
Guided by a lusty appetite for indigenous culture and cuisine, the swaggering chef has become a travelling statesman.

By Patrick Radden Keefe

Let’s wrap this Top Ten album thing up.  Been a fan of Buffett for a long time.  I like lots of his albums, but let’s put his early live album out there.  Maybe not well known today, but a good mix of fun and ballads around the time Margaritaville came out.  The first Buffett album I bought and still a good one.  I might have to stick one more post out here with runners up.

A song written about my wife’s Rum Cake (yes, it is that good).

A couple of article in Stratechery about Platforms and Aggregators.  Took me a while to digest this and understand the distinction.  The two articles are:  The Bill Gates Line and The Cost of Developers (which discusses the Microsoft acquisition GitHub).  The (paraphrased) Bill Gates quote discussing Facebook maybe sums it all up:

“This isn’t a platform. A platform is when the economic value of everybody that uses it, exceeds the value of the company that creates it. Then it’s a platform.”