When I was a kid, I was fascinated by Chuck Yeager and by test pilots in general. I did not know he lived to see 2020. Rest in peace.

🎵 Today’s listen: “Everything Will Change” by The Postal Service. It’s the remastered audio part of a filmed concert from 2013. Sadly, it isn’t new music, but it’s fun to hear the band play live.

It could just be end-of-the-year malaise, but I have given up on Inbox Zero. I will probably just declare email bankruptcy on January 1 and archive or delete everything in one fell swoop.

I would have thought that Bob Dylan’s entire song catalog, which he sold to Universal Music Group, would be worth more than $300 million. After all, that was the going rate for Taylor Swift’s much smaller one.

I’ve become so accustomed to global warming that I now expect December temperatures to be 40-50ºF and a sub-freezing day like today feels unusual.

🎵 Today’s listen: “My Woman” by Angel Olsen. I am a huge fan of her newer album, “All Mirrors”, so I decided to listen to her prior album. It’s pretty good, and has a strong finish, but it is not as compelling to me as “All Mirrors” is.

After about eight years of service, the right-click button on my trackball just stopped registering clicks. I guess the switch is broken. Luckily, there are two other buttons I can use, so I remapped right-click to one of the buttons on the top. I hope I can get used to it.

I enrolled in the Apple Small Business program today. I am grateful for it, even though I am among the smallest of the small developers on the platform.

Puerto Rico: Iconic Arecibo Observatory telescope collapses. I’m sad to see this observatory damaged so badly. It loomed large in my imagination as a child, mostly from magazine articles and SETI, and then the movie “Contact.”

Trump Has Discussed With Advisers Pardons for His 3 Eldest Children and Giuliani. Yep, nothing to see here. Swamp: drained! 🙄

The podcast landscape is changing apace. Spotify seems to be doing well with its exclusive podcasts and its various podcast network acquisitions. I’m of the opinion that their exclusive podcasts are, essentially, _not _podcasts, because I can’t listen to them in my preferred app, Overcast.

Apple Names App of the Year Winners. I guess this is important. I haven’t bought an app for myself all year (on iOS at least), though I am still paying for my Ulysses and Overcast subscriptions.

🎵 Some good news for fans like me: The Hold Steady Announce New Album, Share New Song.

I have blocked reddit.com at the DNS level because I can’t stop wasting time there. 😒 Now that I don’t need headphones or mechanical keyboards, I really should stop checking them out, and then getting lost in memes and other internet detritus.

WTF Happened in 1971? I heard about this site, which is full of scary economic charts, on TWIT. Apparently, the year 1971 is a major inflection point in the trajectory of the American economy.

🎵 I found a new Bleachers single today, featuring Bruce Springsteen. I was hoping for a new album this year, but this will have to do for now.

I probably shouldn’t have baked this tonight, but I’m glad I did.

The Taylor Swift “folklore: the long pond studio sessions” film on Disney+ is phenomenal.

I’m happy my work week is over, and I’m looking forward to desserts tomorrow.

This metal monolith in Red Rocks is quite an expensive, and bland-looking, prank.

I’m weirdly not into Thanksgiving this year. I don’t even want to bake a pie (I love pie—usually). I really want brownies instead. And I want lasagna instead of turkey—but I won’t get my way with that, I’m afraid.

That Elon Musk’s wealth grew by $100 billion this year is super alarming to me.

Who else but Ken Jennings could possibly take the helm?.

Indi Samarajiva compares Trump’s refusal to acknowledge his loss of the election with a coup she lived through in Sri Lanka:

The coup was a farce at the time but how soon it turned to tragedy. They called it a constitutional crisis, but how soon it became a real one. Right now, the same thing is happening to you. I’m trying to warn you America. It seems stupid now, but the consequences are not.

We are squarely in the farce phase. Bill Maher has been calling it, since at (at least) 2016, a “slow moving coup.” This coup is almost certainly not going to succeed, but the damage has already been done. I expect to see it happen over and over again, until it actually works.

iJustine’s M1 Macs review video is absolutely hilarious.