50 years ago, an artificial-intelligence researcher said, “Tell me something only an intelligent being can do, and I’ll build you a computer that can do it.” Sounds like someone answered, “Pass the LSAT.”

The Ages of Man: 1. Youth 2. Older than the cop 3. Older than the doctor 4. Older than the President 5. Older than the Pope

Filling out a survey. The last question was, “what are your three favorite brands?” Having none, I replied Hennessy, Kubota, and Apple. I’m now genuinely curious what’s going to show up in my spam folder.

The owner comes out of the kitchen to a table near mine. “Are you the one who ordered a Reuben with bacon on it?” Extremely white person: “Yes.” “Just checking — I think it violates a couple of dietary laws. Do you like ranch dressing on things, too?” “Yes.” “Ok; that’s fine then.”

33 degrees and snowing outside, and this feral daffodil thinks it’s spring.

Congratulations to Jeph Jacques, who just got to the 5,000th Questionable Content comic. www.questionablecontent.net/view.php

I took a series of screenshots on my iMac and somehow it made them into a single multi-page .png file. I’d like to do that again – anybody know how I did it?

The Internet Archive lets me check out a 200-page book for 1 hour. I wish I could read a lot faster than I do.

My new iMac says PHP has been deprecated. What do the cool kids use these days, to stick one dynamic line into a page of static html?

Pollster on telephone: Please tell me your age group. Are you 18-25… Me: skip to the end

braddelong.substack.com/p/in-whic… contains people saying something nice about @manton

I hired a real-estate agent to find me a tenant. She came back with two stacks of applications. One stack was people who might be OK but were a gamble because they had jobs. The other was people whom I could trust to pay the rent on time because they were on disability. The rural economy is just plain broken.

Just got a fundraising letter from a candidate who hopes to be “only the tenth woman to hold statewide office”. I think at this point we can declare victory and stop talking about it.

Brad Delong is the one who persuaded me to join micro.blog. He has a book out today: www.basicbooks.com/titles/j-…

“Sportsball” is a useful term to describe the subset of sports that has TV timeouts.

INADMISSIBLE, adj. Not competent to be considered. Said of certain kinds of testimony which juries are supposed to be unfit to be entrusted with, and which judges, therefore, rule out, even of proceedings before themselves alone. Hearsay evidence is inadmissible because the person quoted was unsworn and is not before the court for examination; yet most momentous actions, military, political, commercial and of every other kind, are daily undertaken on hearsay evidence. There is no religion in the world that has any other basis than hearsay evidence. Revelation is hearsay evidence; that the Scriptures are the word of God we have only the testimony of men long dead whose identity is not clearly established and who are not known to have been sworn in any sense. Under the rules of evidence as they now exist in this country, no single assertion in the Bible has in its support any evidence admissible in a court of law. It cannot be proved that the battle of Blenheim ever was fought, that there was such as person as Julius Caesar, such an empire as Assyria.

But as records of courts of justice are admissible, it can easily be proved that powerful and malevolent magicians once existed and were a scourge to mankind. The evidence (including confession) upon which certain women were convicted of witchcraft and executed was without a flaw; it is still unimpeachable. The judges’ decisions based on it were sound in logic and in law. Nothing in any existing court was ever more thoroughly proved than the charges of witchcraft and sorcery for which so many suffered death. If there were no witches, human testimony and human reason are alike destitute of value.

Is this where the cool kids are going to hang out now?

No matter which store, they’re always nearly out of plain soy milk but they’ve got a full shelf of vanilla-flavored. Has the purchasing department been bribed by Big Vanilla?

Trying to remember how old I was when I figured out that Ron wasn’t Mr. Bacardi’s first name.

A blue jay is sitting on the garden fence. A minute ago, he was holding a cicada in his beak. Then he swallowed it. Since then, he’s been sitting there with his mouth wide open. Suspect cicadas don’t taste very good. 🌱

I haven’t filled up the bird feeder lately, so a squirrel just climbed up there with a walnut in his mouth. BYON.

Had to clean up a roadkill skunk in 95° heat today. Even though I’m fully vaccinated, I think I’m going to keep a mask around. They come in handy.

2020 has me much the worse for wear. #mbnov

Oh, say can you see? It’s cloudy and rainy today.

Some of my jokes are so elderly that audiences pay them respect.