Paul Reubens died, at age 70, on Sunday, after a long illness. He was best known as Pee-wee Herman, and that’s the person who I certainly knew, and loved for his quirkiness and queer innocence. Some people might remember him as the guy who got caught with his pants down in the back of a porn theatre, long before we had cancel culture, but just like Kramer from Seinfeld, some times you weigh more than a duck, and you end up burned at the stake.
I came to the United States in 1984, just as Ronald Reagan was winning his second term, and just before Paul Reubens hooked up with Tim Burton (who went on to make Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands, and Batman, along with many other memorable movies) to make the movie “Pee-wees Big Adventure” in 1985. It wasn’t the movie , however, that captured my attention, but the Saturday morning CBS childrens show “Pee-wee’s Playhouse.” From 1986 to 1990 I watched each Saturday morning while Pee-wee paraded a gaggle of soon-to-become famous actors across the screen (Laurence Fishburne was Cowboy Curtis, Phil Hartman was Captain Carl) as weird and wonderful characters in his make-believe world, that was simple, and kind, and surreal, and certainly aimed at adults more than kids. But the best kids entertainment (Bugs Bunny, Sponge Bob Squarepants, for example) are really gritty satirical adult shows masquerading as kids shows which makes them even better entertainment (and watchable by the whole family!)
Pee-wee gave me some lifetime lines, such as “I know you are, but what am I?”, and the common French line “merci, blah, blah.” And of course my favorite: : “I wouldn’t sell my bike for all the money in the world. Not for a hundred million, trillion, billion dollars!”

I’m saddened by the death of Paul Reubens, and I hope he’s remembered as the comic genius he was.

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/postscript/paul-reubenss-preposterous-grace

I was searching on Google for a tool rest for my wood lathe and came across a website with the following text, accompanied by (relevant to the search) photographs.

I sure hope ChatGPT is NOT being trained on text like this, although since it employs the entire corpus of the web for written forms of language I suspect this is part of what the generative pre-trained transformer is basing its next response on…

(And oddly, the text below reminds me of the descriptions usually accompanying anything being offered on Ebay by a Chinese seller.)

Tool Rest For Wood Lathe
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Each new year day I try to do things I hope to continue all year long. This includes a New Year’s Resolution Ride, something I’ve done almost without fail for 43 years. This year I also made a spinning top, took some photos, read something, listened to a podcast, and posted on my Facebook group, Spin in Style. I visited with my children and caught up with an old friend. It was a full day, and now I’m tired.

I listen to the following podcasts on a regular basis.

My first thing in the morning go to is The Intelligence (daily) from The Economist. I also consistently listen the following weeklies: from The Economist there’s Checks and Balance, Drum Tower, and Money Talks. The really great thing about these podcasts is that you don’t have to subscribe to The Economist to listen to them. (Sometimes I wonder why I pay my $170 annual subscription when this is the case…)

I also listen to Up First from NPR and The Daily from the New York Times each day. Depending on the topic I also regularly listen to Babbage and The Economist Asks from The Economist, The Ezra Klein Show from the NYT, This American Life, What Next from Slate Magazine, Today Explained from Vox, NPR’s Short Wave on science, as well as NPR’s Planet Money. I often enjoy Fresh Air from NPR as well as The Long Read from The Guardian.

I listened to many podcasts this year. My favorite podcast was The Prince from The Economist, an 8-part (plus extras) series telling the story of Xi Jinping, the General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party and President of the Peoples’s Republic of China, the most powerful person in the world (sorry Joe…) Despite restrictions on foreign journalists inside China, host Sue-Lin Wong and her co-authors created a deep and personal view of the leader of China and his vision for the 1.4 bilion people under his control. The story is primarily told through interviews with Chinese and non-Chinese people with first hand experience of Xi and China, although many now live outside the country. I highly recommend this podcast to anyone who wishes to better understand what must be the most important country and leader in the world over the next ten years.

I also listened to another 8-part podcast called Gatecrashers which tells the story of how the Ivy League schools discriminated against Jews in the twentieth century. Each episode tells a story from one of the eight schools, starting with Columbia and ending with Harvard. It’s super interesting and both desettling and uplifting overall.