Andrew Yang joins CNN as a political commentator. Is that the best he could do?

“The French Dispatch” appears, from its initial trailer, to be the most “Wes Anderson” Wes Anderson movie ever.

Andrew Yang dropped out of the presidential race tonight. He certainly stayed on brand when announcing it: > “I am the math guy, and it’s clear from the numbers we’re not going to win this campaign,” he said. “So tonight I’m announcing that I am suspending my campaign.” I hope he does something good with his newfound fame.

Per Matt Golderberg at Collider:

Now, the final Rotten Tomatoes tally has come in, and it looks like The Rise of Skywalker is the worst-reviewed Star Wars movie ever, sitting at 52%, one percent lower than Star Wars: The Phantom Menace.

I actually enjoyed Rise of Skywalker. The Last Jedi was the film that ruined the Star Wars franchise for me—it wasn’t really bad, like The Phantom Menace, but it both added and threw out so much of the Star Wars canon that it made the phone thing seem silly and unimportant.

Now that I have seen all all three “sequel trilogy” movies, the whole “Star Wars” franchise seems silly and unimportant. Creatively, the sequel trilogy was completely bankrupt, amounting mostly to remakes of the prior (good) films, and repeats and amplifications of prior plot points. I don’t hate it now, though. I think of it as enjoyable cinematic fluff: entertaining diversions, like really high-budget B-movies. It just isn’t important and it clearly doesn’t make any sense. Accepting that, I can enjoy them when I want to escape to “a time long ago, in a galaxy far away,” and otherwise not think about them at all.

Seeing this article, by Michael Cooper, today, a couple days before I leave on vacation, made me really miss visiting the Berkshires in Western Massachusetts:

For more than 80 years, Tanglewood, the bucolic summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, has made the Berkshires a vital destination for classical music.

Now it is getting into the talk business, too.

Listening to classical music, at and after sunset, on Tanglewood’s great lawn is one of my fondest memories. Going to see a lecture there would be fun, too, I guess.

A giant of Broadway theatre has died:

Hal Prince, Giant of Broadway and Reaper of Tonys, Dies at 91 - The New York Times

I think that every bit of this article from the New York Times illustrates what is wrong with the way we pick presidents in the US.

Five Democratic presidential candidates raised a combined $96 million from individual donors in the last three months — about three-quarters of the total fund-raising by the entire Democratic field, according to reports filed with the Federal Election Commission on Monday.

I have to admit that I am annoyed because my favorite candidate is not at the top of the fundraising list. That is a small worry, though. Overall, I am annoyed that all this money is spread out so widely amongst candidates, many of whom should gracefully drop out and run for lower, but still very important, offices.

Meanwhile, Trump looms over everything like Calamity Ganon over Hyrule Castle in “Breath of the Wild”:

Trump has more than twice as much cash as the best-funded Democrats.

President Trump has a big head start on the Democratic field in raising money for the 2020 election. He ended the second quarter with far more cash on hand than even the best-funded Democratic candidate.

I don’t think the Democratic candidates and campaign strategists have a real plan to win. I know there is still a good amount of time to make such a plan, but I’m not sure if there is enough time. I am already tired of the primary process, and it has barely even begun.

John Gruber’s take is dead on. For privacy reasons, there is no way I’ll buy an Eero now.

The bad Brexit news continues. The whole situation is baffling, like so much else that has happened since 2016. I knew the moment that Brexit passed that Donald Trump would be the next U.S. president, and the pace of insanity in world events has only accelerated.

If Elon Musk’s Boring Company can somehow bring down the costs of digging tunnels, that would be fantastic. However, I am skeptical (emphasis is mine):

On Tuesday, Musk put the total price tag for the finished segment at about $10 million, including the cost of excavation, internal infrastructure, lighting, ventilation, safety systems, communications and a track.

By comparison, he said, digging a mile of tunnel by “traditional” engineering methods costs up to $1 billion and takes three to six months to complete. Musk boasted of several cost-cutting innovations, including higher-power boring machines, digging narrower tunnels, speeding up dirt removal, and simultaneous excavation and reinforcement.

However, the process he describes is how modern tunnel boring machines work. And he rented his Canadian-built boring machine from a Wisconsin tunneling company. He’s using the Wisconsin company, Super Excavators, as consultants.

Is Musk just selling a wish and a dream here? I really hope not. I share his dream of solving traffic problems with underground mass-transit and personal-transit systems. We need more tunnels to route traffic away from (or at least beneath) city centers, and to open additional arteries into cities like New York City that are largely surrounded by, or bordered by, water.

I lived through all the cost overruns in The Big Dig in Boston. There were major deficiencies in planning, lots of cutting corners in terms of materials, design, and engineering that came back to bite them, and simple graft and stupidity at play. I am not sure that The Boring Company can really put a huge dent into all those things. A lot of them are not technical problems that engineers can solve.

The Big Dig was a huge mess that was on our minds in Boston for years. The end result of that mess of a project, though, was a much nicer and more cohesive downtown Boston. This came about mostly by reclaiming land that had been used for highway overpasses, not because traffic and commute times were substantially reduced.

I think that if Elon Musk and his Boring Company could somehow decrease the costs of building tunnels, it would be far more important than building a new, sci-fi method of transportation. I just don’t think that he is actually doing it, even though he is telling everyone he is.

“How is The Good Place so Good?" This is relevant to my interests.

It seems to me that massive outbreaks of food borne illness are becoming more and more common. That our current, worsening outbreak is the second E. Coli outbreak tied to my favorite type of lettuce in the past six months or so, and it is so virulent, is making me feel worried about our food system, and pessimistic about my country’s will to improve it.

An outbreak of E. coli food poisoning linked to romaine lettuce has widened and has now made at least 98 people sick, federal health officials said Friday.

More than half have had to be hospitalized because the strain of E. coli causing this outbreak is an especially nasty one, the officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration said.

People in 22 states have reported E. coli infections linked to the outbreak, the CDC and FDA said.

I’m no expert in this, but I feel like we have several problems in our food system that have, in the past few decades, started to compound in dangerous ways that we should have seen coming. Some of these problems include overcrowding of animals, overuse of antibiotics in livestock, and over-concentration in production and processing. When bad hygiene infects food, it’s worse now than it used to be. The bacteria are more resistant to antibiotics, and the food, and food borne illness, is distributed all across the country.

Another annoyance to me, as a someone who has eaten some raw eggs (usually in cookie dough or homemade eggnog) and rare meat over the years, is that I have never gotten a food borne illness from those activities. I have, however, gotten terribly ill several times from eating restaurant salads, probably due to unwashed hands or vegetables. There are menu warnings about undercooked meat in every restaurant I go to, but none about the danger of eating unwashed vegetables.

I am impatiently awaiting the day I can eat Caesar salads again.