Nothing New Under the Sun

 

September 6, 2026

  

I watched “You Can’t Take It With You” yesterday. Lots of interesting tidbits: Lionel Barrymore plays the polar opposite of his Mr. Potter character in “It’s a Wonderful Life”; the father of Eddie Arnold (who plays a man very interested in the common good in “Green Acres”) plays a ruthless Mr. Potter-type businessman; and Jimmy Stewart’s character is interested in developing solar power by studying photosynthesis.

 

At one point Barrymore says, “Communism, Fascism, Voodooism… If things go a little bad nowadays, you just go out and get yourself an -ism, and you’re in business.” And, “Lincoln said, ‘With malice toward none and charity to all.’ Nowadays, they say, ‘Think the way I do, or I’ll bomb the daylights out of you.’”

 

Still true.

 

But I was most fascinated by the interest in solar power back in 1938. 

 

 

AI and Food Promos (The Redo)

 

September 9, 2026

 

I feel that I’ve been too wordy lately. After all, a lot of my early blog entries were one sentence, or three at most.

 

So, I’m going to redo the one about using AI to make your food promotions look better.

 

 

People who think that using AI to make food look better in restaurant promos is disgraceful

 

Clearly haven’t ever tried to make their cooking look like the (pre-AI) pictures in their own cookbooks.

 

AI Is Just Keeping Up the Tradition

 

 

September 9, 2026

 

 

There was an article in yesterday’s paper about how some people are upset that some restaurants are using AI-generated photos to make the food on their flyers and other materials look good.

 

 

“It’s dishonest!” they cry. “It makes everything look perfect, and that’s not what they serve!”

 

 

OK, and no model’s picture was ever airbrushed, and no cookbook uses techniques to make its food look way more glossy or perfect than it is. Hasn’t anybody but me suffered from Presentation Envy—the feeling you get when your dish isn’t as perfect as the one in the picture in your cookbook? They use tricks, too, but without AI. Get over it, folks!

 

 

Now, if AI presents you with a thick burger that should easily be a half-pound, and it looks temptingly juicy, and the restaurant serves you a charred slice of ground beef on a dry bun, that’s false advertising; but again, not restricted to AI.

 

 

Fight the good fight, people, not the stupid ones.

 

They Can See It Coming

 

August 21, 2026

 

I don’t know where Vince Flynn and Kyle Mills got/get their ideas for Mitch Rapp novels, but they sure can hit the mark.

 

In a previous post, I wrote about Kyle Mills giving a step-by-step scenario of how a pandemic would play out, before the 2020 COVID pandemic.

 

In Protect and Defend, written by Vince Flynn and published in 2007, Iran threatens to close the Strait of Hormuz. The idea is seen as laughable in the book, and yet, here we are.

 

I hope that other negative scenarios that they envision don’t play out.