Grandpa Dave Reads the News

In the obit section, we are celebrating the life of George “Funky” Brown, the drummer and one of the co-founders of Kool & the Gang, who just died in Los Angeles at age 74. He had been battling lung cancer. When asked to describe his music, he always replied, “the sound of happiness.” Here is a link to “Celebration” on Youtube, which he co-wrote: https://tinyurl.com/ycyuhvk6.

You can decide for yourself how happy it makes you. I have been playing it on a loop, and I am happy! It opens with “Funky” George on the drums – the backbeat is totally infectious. Plus, wait for the “jump, jump, jump” part, on the offbeat: it invites you to participate in the fun, like when watching the Wiggles. But you have my permission to do it as a grownup.

Feel free to check out Jungle Boogie, which he also co-wrote. The band members were from Jersey City and were largely self-taught. I’m for it. Are you happy yet? Sit-down dancing, anyone?

Because I am starting this blog, here is a piece I wrote on November 11th. Happy Veterans’ Day!

The Graphical Data Presentation Award O’ the Day goes to Janice Kai Chen, a journalist for the Washington Post who created this wonderful chart. It shows when the combination of broadband speed, distance, and data size would make it faster to use a carrier pigeon than it would be to use the Internet when sending vacation photos to your grandchildren:

You can’t make this stuff up. The conclusion here is that for relatively short, inter-city data transport (like the distance between New York and Philadelphia), put the data on a USB stick, tie it to a carrier pigeon, and let it go. And also important: keep a copy! Pigeons can get lost over Trenton! Ms. Chen is a graphic journalist for the Post; did you know there was such a thing? I didn’t. She has a Master’s degree in Geography, which seems to work well for this job.

And FYI, the state with the median download speed in the US is Indiana, at 29 Mbps, or “mega” bits per second (this is from FastMetrics), putting Indiana in the middle of the chart above. Delaware, at 59, wins while Alaska, at 9.94 Mbps, brings up the tail end. The economics seem to favor more densely populated areas where the provider can spread the investment in equipment over more customers. My computers benefit from a 1 Gbps connection (I live in a densely populated area, which is about 100 times faster than the median Alaska bandwidth.

On a personal note, my wife’s grandparents raised pigeons in Illinois, and I recently mailed a USB stick to a cousin in Hawaii with 8 gigabytes of vacation pictures (or 64 gigabits of Internet data) because his Internet connection is slower than mine, and he didn’t want to wait forever for the download. So I love this chart!

Grandpa Dave here, and I get up way too early in the morning, probably because I am old, and start my day with a pot of coffee and my trusty MacBook Pro which I unleash on the news o’ the day. (OK, it’s really things that happened yesterday that get published today.)

I have been occasionally writing my thoughts about selected news stories and created this blog because I thought there might be other people also interested in what I considered to be newsworthy. It’s not “all the news” and it often is not “fit to print,” but half of it is before I have had enough coffee so I make no promises.

FYI, I start with the Washington Post (for overall coverage of things American), then Google News (which I’m sure uses AI to guess only those stories that a robot thinks I would want to read), then the UK Guardian (to get a more objective view from across the pond), and then wherever things take me. I have browsed the Christian Science Monitor (fewer stories but nicely crafted), the New York Post (shared ownership with Fox News), Fox News (or sometimes OneAmericaNews, which is a bit more to the right), BoredPanda (please don’t ask), Al Jazeera (to stay balanced, it’s actually pretty good), the New York Times (I have a print subscription), and you get the idea.

Grandpa Dave, November 2023