In Impromptus today, I have a number of topics, pretty much all of them contentious. “This is the life we have chosen,” as Don Corleone does not say in The Godfather. (In The Godfather Part II, Hyman Roth says, “This is the business we’ve chosen.”) I have U.S. Steel and the New York Yankees; Donald Trump and religion; crime in our great cities; the example of Simone Biles; and more.
Try it out here.
Now for some mail. In a column last week, I discussed, and decried, the state of our politics. A reader writes,
I’m so saddened and disturbed to read the political news that I begin to avoid it, praying that somehow it might not be true, that there might yet be a surprise, or an intervention . . . something, anything. But everything I read tells me no.
To quote E. Scrooge, “I’ll retire to Bedlam.”
What a great phrase.
Readers and I have been discussing questions of identity — how to identify oneself on the Census and so on. A reader says,
When asked, I write “Human.” Does that choice make me a “globalist”?
Yes — busted.
Back in March 2021, I wrote about, and podcasted with, Michael Wooldridge, one of the world’s leading computer scientists. He teaches at Oxford, in England. (Some people think of Mississippi, understandably.) Professor Wooldridge told me about his first encounter with a computer. I will quote from a post of mine:
. . . in April 1980, when he was 13, something remarkable — something great — happened.
A friend said that there was a new thing, a computer, at the local Radio Shack. Mike Wooldridge didn’t believe it. But there it was, in the window: a TRS-80 (Model I). The boys went into the store and asked if they could play with it. The guys in the store said sure. They gave the boys a book about programming. And the boys sat right there in the window of the store, playing with the TRS-80, and writing programs for it.
“I was hooked,” says Wooldridge, “and the rest is history.” Very quickly, “I knew I had found the thing that I wanted to do.”
The first computer he ever owned, personally, was a British product: a Sinclair ZX80. He wishes he had held on to it, because today you can fetch a lot for one on eBay.
I have heard from Leon Heller — who writes,
Mike Wooldridge mentioned the TRS-80 Model I — I got one of the first ones to come into the country. I was working in the HUSAT group at Loughborough University at the time and drove down to the Tandy store in Luton to collect it.
That acronym, let me say, stands for “human sciences and advanced technology.”
Mr. Heller continues,
It was actually my second computer — I’d previously built a Motorola 6800 D2 from a kit. It just had a hexadecimal keypad and display — programs had to be written in assembly language and hand-assembled into machine language.
I formed the National TRS-80 Users Group, which is still going!
Phenomenal.
Finally, a language note:
Jay,
Good morning. I thought this would interest you: Yesterday, Hoda Kotb was interviewing someone on the Today show — and she said, “Those stories really nutshelled your life.” I had never heard “nutshell” used as a verb.
One of the glories of English: You can verbify anything.
Thank you, one and all.