Was perplexed by a smalller number than expected of my crusty Seattle potato bread in the dough proofer today, and more sholupan than I normally put in the day's prep list. Only to discover I reversed the order of items in my request to the baker, probably because of anomalous inventory on Tuesfay.

In a first (at least as far as I can remember), as soon as one of my Japanese staffers arrived the Tokyo Gas guy stopped addressing me personally and started explaining things to her. Other than some minor details at the end.

I really need to figure out something to draw in customers on Mondays and Wednesdays

SCHUMER: Well, I—for one—am touched by this act of generosity. Perhaps one day, all of humanity will know the saying “Be welcoming of Greeks bearing gifts.”

But he's not. He's taking the proceeds from the Nvidia stock disposal and going all in on OpenAI. Which will likely be a bigger fiasco than his WeWork gamble. Nvidia has a real business that will suffer when the AI bubble bursts but will likely pull through. The AI-only plays will crash harder.

The thing about Mamdani is that he’s a talented politician but not otherworldly or one in a billion, he’s just a competent guy with popular ideas who ran against an entitled piece of shit and to me it’s a lot more optimistic to imagine 1000 campaigns like his than to view him as a unique phenomenon

OpenAI seems valued a lot like WeWork was. Which seems like madness, since an IPO would likely expose the flaws of OpenAI's business at least as starkly. NVidia is valued more or less like Microsoft was in its growth era. May I suggest investing in cheese?

I have a surplus of summer clothing, but I'm short of long pants, and my pajamas are all torn to shreds. The casual no-dry-cleaning slacks I wear are hard to find in my size (even when I was relatively skinny, thanks to particular cut decisions) in Japan, so I resorted to Amazon US again. ¥$ Yikes

Takaichi: they're eating the shika, they're eating the nyanko mainichi.jp/english/arti...

The model of holding individual senators responsible is broken here. The retirees clearly agreed to take the fall. Which is why the nos should get no credit for voting no unless they move to oust Schumer

Delete your bot account

Chuck Schumer Helps Pull Democrats Back From Brink Of Courage

Good timing for Dick Cheney to die shortly after the start of construction on hell's former East Wing, soon to be resurrected as the Kissinger Ballroom of Hell

damn mamdani killed dick cheney and he’s not even the mayor yet

Finally Dick Cheney is actually dead, not just metaphorically

Interesting paper! When you ask people about the most important issue "facing the country," they often say immigration. But when you ask them about issues facing them personally, it doesn't crack the top 10. This indicates that voters are reacting to media narratives, not their own experience.

once again posting The Chart

Spiced pumpkin cheesecake for Halloween 🎃 courtesy of #Nokucheese in Mizonokuchi (and the spooky mind of @jason.jagaimo.com 👻). Great to eat as the rain is absolutely hammering down tonight.

A run on carrot cake turned an otherwise slow day into a marathon. I only got to leave at 11pm, just as the bug killing machine turned itself on. Upside: enough carrot cake for the weekend. Downside: I'm gonna be fucking tired tomorrow. But you should come and get carrot cake and a sandwich anyway.

Spotted a pair of giant (for Japan) pumpkins a bit over a week ago at Marui. Kept planning to tell my wife but repeatedly forgot. She came and helped at the shop today and I remembered. Both were still there. 780 yen. Probably a better deal than we could get in the US without a drive to a farm.

1/ A longtime Wired editor just wrote a mush-brained essay about how he totally missed the political rot of Silicon Valley (& still doesn't get it). But in the late 1990s, a Wired journalist warned of a toxic ideology bubbling up from tech. Paulina Borsook has largely been erased. Let's change that

I feel for the family but for fuck's sake, it's got no trespassing signs (and no climbing signs) and it's obviously been rusting for decades. People ignoring warnings and doing obviously reckless things can't be protected from their own lack of judgment. komonews.com/news/local/f...

Tolkien understood masculinity to a level Elon Musk and fascist tech bros can NEVER understand. All the shit they do in Call of Duty he did for real in the mud and blood of the Western Front. He came out of that rejecting all of the macho bullshit they claim it teaches you. Fuck 'em.

Zorg is at it again

i think if you ride public transit enough you learn that most weird behavior is not dangerous, and conversely i think driving a car teaches you that everyone is trying to kill you at all times

Liquidating the last littke bit of stock I have in non-retirement accounts reminds me of a colleague who said "I think I have enough for retirement but not for the years before then." My retirement funds aren't spectacular but should be enough to manage a semi retirement in 15-20 years.

Verpiss dich

I would rather live next door to someone who speaks another language than live next door to someone who doesn’t want to live near people who speak other languages. I know nothing about Person A but I know person B is a shitbird.

In the spirit of Prince Shōtoku, I refer to my return flights from the US back to Japan as "from the land of the unwashed asses to the land of the unwashed hands."

every day I am forced to see the dumbest thing I have ever seen

Rough week. Started looking up today because we were tracking ahead of last Saturday until around 5pm. Then traffic died. I sent everybody home a bit early today, including my brother in law who helps fill in the gaps during our new dinner service.

Updating my LEGO White House

Triple SecDef sitting in his office, angrily watching Boots, scrolling Grindr, fatshaming Generals

My least favorite genre of mobile ad these days are videos of "AI language tutors" brutally mispronuouncing Japanese and pitching their apps as a quick path to learning a language.

I am not thrilled with today's sales. Yikes. It's probably worse than this day last year when I wasn't even in preopening, but just introducing people to what I was testing.

Cross cultural dadjokes are best dadjokes www.instagram.com/reel/DP2RfaS...

Pumpkin, bacon, cranberry and cheese in one sandwich 🥪from #nokucheese (from the bread and sandwich mind of @jason.jagaimo.com) and brought to my door by Uber Eats… although I’ll admit the latter was very lazy, due to having a rather packed day 😅

Inspector Clouseau is on the case! Perhaps the ladder does have something to do with the theft?

Great. Another thing that can go horribly wrong if you encounter a dumb or ill-informed cop in Japan. mainichi.jp/english/arti...

Been playing a lot of Halloween playlists on Spotify recently and I just keep thinking about how dreary October must have been before Michael Jackson invented Halloween

2 groups of women came in for dinner or dessert/drinks tonight,and a mixed gender trio of repeat customers came after I was starting to shutter the place. While I'm not sure our evening hours make business sense yet, it seems like there might be something to it.

This is when it would be nice to have a SCOTUS ethics policy with actual teeth so these horrid people can't just turn to their favorite billionaire to finance their continued comfort while other fed workers struggle to buy groceries and pay for housing with no paychecks

Supreme Court 'expects to run out of funding' in hours due to shutdown: report

Still tracking "up" in sales this month, though not by enough. I'm still at the shop because a trio that has come in before noticed I was half closed, but popped in anyway. I let them order a cheese plate and three glasses of wine. Not worth keeping my brother in law working but worth it solo.

Chicago cyclists are buying out tamale carts to keep vendors home and safe from ICE. blockclubchi.co/42KQ57O

My sales today so far, while not anywhere near a record, are already ahead of the whole day yesterday. I'm not exactly full of energy after a poor night's sleep. But at least I'm not deeply discouraged.

Today was the kind of day that makes me feel like giving up. Customers seemed happy. There just weren't enough of them. Unusually large number of UberEats orders, mostly from repeat customers. But terrible numbers overall.

They were only expressing a desire to gas political opponents. They were not stating facts about Charlie Kirk like some vile Jimmy Kimmel type. #RepublicanLogic

The good news: carrot cakes are in the oven. Bad news: in order to make banana bread I need to go buy low protein flour (as usual, plenty of bread flour). That means probably a late night, and keeping staff longer on a decidedly unprofitable day. So I don't wanna.

Don't think I've ever had this problem before. Plugged in hand mixer. Big popping noise. Set it down on my scale instead of the stainless steel counter refrigerator. Another popping noise (capacitance or residual short). Instantly the cable self-severed. 2000 yen doesn't buy durability I guess