Trump Broke Democracy

One of the rationales many people had for electing Donald Trump as POTUS was that he was a “disrupter” who would “shake up the system.” Mission accomplished; the presidency of Donald Trump has been a wild ride. Or, more accurately, a broken ride at a more-or-less abandoned theme park out on the edge of town. The park is apparently open, but the rides aren’t really staffed and the safety bars can’t be lowered.

Unfortunately, shaking up a system is far too easy when you don’t understand how it’s supposed to work. Once, people might bang on the side of their TV sets if the picture got wobbly. You don’t see that anymore. This, however, is figuratively the “troubleshooting” technique of Donald J. Trump: just break things further. Added to this is
Trump’s unshakable belief that other people, laws, rules, (or norms of any kind), only exist to benefit him personally. The rest is window dressing. Fortunately for Donald Trump, there’s a whole political party dedicated to window dressing.

No more. Donald Trump must go.

J.J. Johnson’s Broadway Express

Over at Jazz Wax Marc Myers has a nice write-up on the J.J. Johnson recording, Broadway Express from 1965. As Myers notes, the sessions took place in December of 65′ and involved differing personnel. Broadway Express was sort of a non-jazz date with jazz musicians, but the arrangements, by guitarist Mundell Lowe, are fantastic. Also, don’t miss Chuck Israels comments in this post (you’ll need to scroll a bit) about another of Johnson’s forays into show tune material from a few years earlier, titled J.J.’s Broadway. It featured five trombones (J.J., Urbie Green, Lou McGarrity, Dick Hixon, and Paul Faulise), plus rhythm section.

From Broadway Express, here’s Johnson performing Lowe’s arrangement of Once in a Lifetime, from Stop the World I Want to Get Off on December 13, 1965:

Gadzooks, It’s Not a Backslash

We’ve been into this World Wide Web thing for a while now. That’s right — it’s really been over 20 years, despite what certain fictional histories might lead you to believe. Despite that, you still hear many people in various forms of communication misread web addresses like this:

“Find more information at so-de-so blah-de-blah backslash something else.”

Nope — it ain’t a backslash. Take this web address:

http://www.nytimes/cooking

Those slashes above aren’t backslashes, sisters and brothers. Nope, those are forward slashes.

Why do people suffer from this misapprehension? Well, it may come from the legacy of a computer that (once-upon-a-time, when people saw it nearly every day) featured a little prompt that looked a little sumthin’ like this:

C:\>_

That prompt contained a backslash, but web addresses do not. Note that the problem became rampant enough that many web browsers actually convert back slashes to forward slashes if people try to type them in.

Over time, people have realized the error and have begun to read web addresses: “Find more information at so-de-so blah-de-blah forwardslash something else.” There’s no need to do this either. Just say “slash,” everybody.

To clear up another misapprehension, if you’ve (unfortunately) got the Facebook, you do have the internet: