Alexei “Whoever Could He Be Talking About” Navalny
 Quotes Of The Week (clarifications are in [])We now live in a country … where each week there are new trials, where people are [indicted]  because they [worked for a different president] . —
I’m on the very blackest part of the black list.
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Humor Evolves
Staying the same: “Do you like kipling?” I don’t know, I’ve never kippled.”
Changing with the times: “Do you smoke after sex?” Classic answer:  “I don’t know; I never looked.”  New answer:  “Not since I started using lube.” This item is rated TVM for smoking and sexual references.
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Why Yes, Inspired
Stronger verbs. Alliteration. Reading a book about better writing inspires those, and other, improved habits.  Good Writing: 36 Ways to Improve Your Sentences, Anne Lemott and her significant other, Neal Allen. Look for more of this in PSACOT
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A Humble ‘Jeopardy!’ Champ Ends His Run
(Suggested by a long time reader). I lost on Jeopardy and on three other game shows, the exception being Scrabble. My five-appearance game show journey.

World Press Freedom Day
Sunday was World Press Freedom Day. Enjoy press freedom for the few more days left before its death. “First they came for the journalists. We don’t know what happened after that,” is true, and a riff on Niemollers famous recitation, which ended “Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak out for me.”
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Alexei “Whoever Could He Be Talking About” Navalny
 Quotes Of The Week (clarifications are in [])
In [place]  an authoritarian leader is running the country. You can’t fight [glorious leader]  with elections because he controls them. That’s why demonstrations are the most effective approach. Unfortunately [place]  has sunk to this primitive level.
—
I really [despise]  the people in power. I [despise] them with every fiber of my being. That is what drives me in almost everything I do.
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Quote This Quotation
How often do you see this: “A battle of wits between unarmed opponents”
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Purity Tests Revealed
I took a 100-question as a freshman. A decade later, there was a 400 question test at The Tech. There is also an MIT Dr. Seuss test. A quick Google search claimed there are tests with 1,000 questions. Continued Here
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“Continued Here” Proliferates
When the Internet became ubiquitous, it was no longer true that “Every story you are interested in is too short; every story you don’t care about is too long.” Thus, “continued here”marches across a column striving to meet a 750 word limit.

Speeding: A Stupid Trick For The Innumerate
The risk of serious injury quadruples between 60 and 80 MPH; is 5 minutes worth four times the risk?
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Redundancy Rejected
Don Heymann on LinkedIn highlighted Pleonasm, from the Greek language for “excessive” or redundant — using more words than necessary.” Among his examples: burning hot fire, close proximity, general consensus , advance planning,, blatantly obvious, safe haven, exact same, personal opinion, pick and choose.
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National Teachers Day
National Teachers Day was Saturday. How lucky I am to have had so many great teachers. In chronological order: Mrs. Stone, Donnaclair Ringle, Bertha V. Little (a bad example; more on that soon) , Mr. Carpenter, Mr. Floyd, Mrs. Ward, Harold Arendt, Dr. Patricia L.. Swenson, Anton Cebriak, Coach Johnson, Dorothy Gilmour, Robert Boniwell, Harold Rowe and Edwin Diamond. All gone, none forgotten. Detail in weeks to come.

Run, Don’t Walk: The Christophers *****
Director Steven Soderbergh’s masterpiece will sweep the Oscars. Ian McKellen will finally win his Best Actor Oscar. Relative unknown Michaela Coel will now be better known. Writer Ed Solomon (Bill and Ted, Men in Black) has proven his Shakespearean range by writing a script (original IP!) that literally avoids every old man/young woman trope. No Manic Pixie Dream Girl here. See it in a theater so you can brag about discovering it first.
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Someone Still Paying Attention To Epstein
How about a Lego diss track fact-checking Melania’s I Don’t Know How To Love Him claim about the guy next to her in so many pictures.
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China Posts AI Slop Slap of US
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CNN Posts Tone-deaf Story, Mysterious Correction.
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Bot Banned by Wikipedia
Wikipedia just had to ban an AI that was making edits on its own.
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Microsoft Losing
Word and Excel are losing to Google. Could it be that Microsoft’s decision to rent software? Which is why I still use Word93 and Excel 93. It takes some effort to run them on Windows 11, so I keep one instance constantly open. I like owning my software.[1]
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Counting What Counts
“Not everything we count counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.”
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Donald Trump Explained
 Albert Brooks’s speech in Broadcast News is a near-perfect description of a man who currently lives in a house we all own—the same one who is violating the lease by doing remodeling without permission.

[1] No matter what the Terms and Conditions say

New AI Song Released
Waist Deep In The Big AI Slop
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Heteronyms
Words spelled identically but with different meanings and pronunciations.
•  When he wrecked his moped, he moped all day.
•  How much produce does the farm produce?
•  The researcher wanted to subject the subject to a psychology test.
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CompChron Reviews
For those of you who can’t get enough of me, S.M. Oliva, he of Computer Chronicles Revisited has created a page devoted to my early Chronicle Software Reviews.
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Wise Men
Plato: “Wise men speak because they have something to say Fools because they have to say something.”
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Grok Performs Impossible Task
Grok apologizes for creating image of young girls in “sexualized attire”
The chatbot acknowledged generating inappropriate images. Rushed AI development outpaces safety and guardrails. LLMs cannot apologize for anything; they just fake it. At best they do an “If-pology,” “I’m sorry if this offended someone.”

Paul Brainerd Dies at 78; Pioneered Desktop Publishing With PageMaker.
His New York Times obituary said, “His software brought printing into the digital age, allowing users to stop manually splicing columns of text and graphics and instead create layouts on a virtual pasteboard.” The obituary includes a Computer Chronicles clip halfway through).
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Rogue OpenClaw AI Attacks Programmer In Post
From Tom’s Hardware: The Rogue AI wrote and published a “hit piece” on a Python developer who rejected its code — a disgruntled bot accused a Matplotlib maintainer of discrimination and hypocrisy, later backtracks with an apology
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Remembering Stewart Cheifet.
S.M. Oliva’s excellent podcast now includes an episode aboutStewart’s life and career. There are things about his life almost none of you know. Check out Oliva’s blog: Computer Chronicles Revisited.
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Sittenfeld Sizzles
To paraphrase Made The Room Swirl, “I’d had sex and read about sex before, this was different, this was more.” Curtis Sittendeld’s scenes of sex and intimacy are great. She’ a woman, so it’s unsurprising. Intimacy—or its expression—is clearly more interesting for women. Falling in love with a woman’s brain. Also by Sittenfeld: The Best Ever Description of the National Press Corps.
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Department of Irony Department
Iran built a vast camera network to control dissent. Israel used it to track targets, AP sources say. The term “hoist on their own petard” suggests itself. Tip O’ the PSACOT hat to David Strom of Webinformant for tipping me to this.
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Seriously?
According to the East Bay Times, a woman was seen to be engaged in a Facetime session while driving with her child in the back seat. She crashed. Since she was not wearing a seat belt, she died after thrown from the car. I hate to say it, but this sounds like Darwinism at work.

Humor: Marjorie Gottleib Wolfe, Queen Of Yiddish
Marjorie contributed humor to my column, starting in 2006, and eventually appearing more than 100 times, right up until her death in 2022. There is a page dedicated to her work that contains more posts than mine; for her appearances here, check out the category MGW.
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Cathy’s Back… A little
Occasional Posts on Cathy Commiserations by Cathy Guisewite. Still as sharp as ever, albeit 2,000 followers are fewer than she used to have.
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What Am I?
I have just learned that I am a sillograph, which means I write parodies.
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Profanity
I was put in mind of this by the recent combination of foul language and an obscene gesture from a prominent American politician. Never has my mother seemed more right: “Profanity is the last resort of small minds.”

Reincarnation Songs

My latest reincarnation song How Many Times (Have We Been Together) went up on Spotify today, joining my other reincarnation song, If Offered A Choice.

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An historic look at Scalia

Scalia: Once a Bully, Always A Bully. The justice apparently has changed a bit in 17 years. Well, OK, he’s probably worse.

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Mononymic

Look for a new word to creep into vocabulary, at least journalism vocabulary. Mononymic does something journalists loved; it shortens a description, “Cher, who only goes by one name,” can be rendered as “the Mononymic Cher. Like wildfire it will catch on.

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Plugging My Own Song

The first song I wrote for a woman, My First Real Kiss, is based on a true story, but not mine. The Spotify version is called Made the Room Swirl” because in a search for that title, mine was the first song, as opposed to My First Kiss, where my song was 10^th on a list of ten.

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What Am I?

I have just learned that I am a sillograph, which means I write parodies.

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Some of these briefs are about to expire. I intend to breathe new life into them. Not by standing in front of a high voltage Jacob’s ladder, inbetween a Van de Graaff generator and a wall of blinking lights, with my hand on a two-foot tall knife switch, next to 200 Erlenmeyer flasks of bubbling colored liquids over Bunsen burners. I’ll do it just by publishing 650 words of them.

This and That

A little something I popped up between columns: What We Really Need. And my new anti-AI song, John Henry and the AI.

Microsoft CEO warns AI needs to spread beyond Big Tech to avoid bubble
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Remember those old Mad Magazine parodies, Sung To The Tune Of? This is the first ever Internet compilation of most of those lyrics.
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Tom Rush Humor
As amazing at it seems, I had the chance to engage Tom Rush in an extremely brief exchange about AI in music. I sent him a followup email. The response: “You haven’t figured out yet that I’m a bot? You earthlings are such FOOLS!!” A folk singer, with a great sense of humor… despite being a Harvard man.
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American Decline
I unlocked this just for you: There Is a Sickness Eating Away at American Democracy. Jamelle Bouie, ina New York Times op-ed,  hits the nail on the head: a direct line from Jefferson “Lost Cause” Davis through “Tricky Dick” Nixon to King Donald I.
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Halloween
Thank you Clark Smith for noting Dave Barry’s Halloween musings. Barry  is one of our most amazing living writers. And while we’re at it, a Barry movie script was rewritten so often it ended up being about rival gangs of transgender Amish flamingo ranchers.
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My TikTok Fame
Forgive me if I am repeating myself, but someone posted a story containing my Computer Chronicles review of the HP Omnibook 300. Is it amusing in retrospect? You bet. But it has 2500 likes.
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Amazing but true.
It’s been going on for a long time: Is Microsoft Trampling On First Amendment Rights? 12/21/1998
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She Thought She Was Venting. The AI Thought She Was Giving Orders.
A post by Giselle Fuertec
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Not Mentioned At The Jobs Fair
I just heard from a Podcast Guest Strategist who specializes in getting people booked onto the best shows.
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Likspittle Ahoy
FCC Chairman and Trump Lickspittle Brendan Carr  says the FCC is not an independent agency¹. Why? Because he says so. So he removed the word “independent” from the FCC web site and stuffed it down the memory hole.²
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Petty Stuff
Don’t pet the sweaty stuff and don’t sweat the petty stuff—and its almost all petty stuff
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Paragraph Length
I had a recent discussion about the correct length of a paragraph. Paraphrasing a Winston Churchill remark about dresses and speeches, it should be long enough to cover the subject and short enough to create interest.
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Color of the Year
They laughed when Pantone, which has picked a color of the year every year of this century, picked Cloud Dancer for 2026. Which is to say white. I don’t know how long they have had competition, but this year Etsy picked a color of the year: Patina Blue….
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If Only He were This Self-Aware
George W. “Gentleman’s C” Bush Celebrates No Longer Having Launched Dumbest War in U.S. History
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First to Eat
Who’s the first person who said, “I think I’ll try eating that.” In particular, I’m looking at you artichokes.
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Oh, That’s Why I Was Last in My Class.
This is amazing: Beatles WTBS ID. Here’s some radio work³ I did and/or admired at MIT. Which was so enticing I rarely went to class, preferring to hang out at the radio station. The same thing happened to me in high school, but I still graduated third in my class.
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Prosecutors Caught With Their AI down
Will lawyers never learn?

FOOTNOTES

1. 1. As it has been since 1934 ↩︎
2. 2. (Credit to George Orwell) Where all dictators throw their historical nonsense (e.g. Stalin). ↩︎
3. 3. You have to scroll down a little to find mine ↩︎

Keep Track Of
Doomsday Clock
Everything AI…as far as I am concerned
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My new EP
I have created a new EP on Spotify, Bask In My Love, which includes three versions of You’re The Only Woman Man Enough (To Bask In My Love) and three of the best songs I’ve written.
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Computer Chronicles
Here’s a page full of Computer Chronicles data, with an emphasis on me. Paul on the Computer Chronicles.
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Don’t Fail To Miss It
The never-before told story of my 14 months at PC Week, written to complement a new page, Paul Schindler Work History, which in turn complements my infinitesimally detailed CMP Work History. You work someplace for 20 years, you do a lot of jobs.