Events

The good news: After being off his food for two days, Parker seems to be feeling better. He ate a small breakfast and a small lunch, and we've just gotten back from a 25-minute walk that he seemed to enjoy. The bad news: His food is shooting through him with a velocity I have not often seen, so I've gone through two rolls of paper towels just today. I'm about to leave my house for several hours to perform Händel's Messiah (for, I believe, the 8th time), so Sir Poopsalot will be confined to a small area...

As the Washington Post rounds up their biggest Pinocchios of 2017, they've encountered an unprecedented problem: Usually, this is an easy task, as we sort through the craziest Four-Pinocchio claims on issues of substance made by members of both parties. But this is the era of Trump, and nothing is ever easy. If we were not careful, we’d end up with an all-Trump list. After all, there has never been a serial exaggerator in recent American politics like the president. He not only consistently makes false...

The first proto-blog post on braverman.org hit the Internet on 13 May 1998. (And it was a joke. Literally.) This is the 6,000th since then. And every single one of them is here. (The count of actual blog posts is now 5,804, starting from this site becoming an actual blog on 9 November 2005.)

Yesterday started with a performance on local television and ended with a three-hour rehearsal and midnight showing of Star Wars. I'd already planned to go into work late today, but Parker didn't eat dinner last night and he refused breakfast this morning, so I'm waiting to see if I can get him to the vet. With that and other things up for grabs today, plus two more performances this weekend, posting might suffer a bit.

I've started the third book in Jeff VanderMeer's "Southern Reach" trilogy, so it'll be a couple of days before I come back to the Atlantic's long-form analysis "The Nationalist's Delusion." Read both. They're not connected, but they're both good.

Via Bruce Schneier, an advisor to the project, Citizen Lab has created an online tool to help you stay safe online: Security Planner is a custom security advice tool from Citizen Lab. Answer a few questions, and it gives you a few simple things you can do to improve your security. It's not meant to be comprehensive, but instead to give people things they can actually do to immediately improve their security. I don't see it replacing any of the good security guides out there, but instead augmenting them....

I keep wondering if the Trump administration keeps doing the things its doing to destroy the Republican Party because they're secretly Democrats. Mark Theissen hints at this, but sarcastically: Stephen K. Bannon and his alt-right movement have helped accomplish something no one in a quarter-century has been able to do: get a Democrat elected in the state of Alabama. Alabama is one of the most reliably Republican states in the country. The last time a Democrat was elected was in 1992, and no Democrat has...