For years, I’d been wondering what that little phrase was that you hear women sing at the end of commercials for Salonpas pain reliever. I did eventually manage to track it down. It sounds like “Sammy too,” but it’s actually the manufacturer with the name of the title of this post (obviously Japanese). I would have thought it was pronounced HIsaMITsu, but apparently it’s HiSAMItsu .
Anyway, they must have finally gotten the message from viewers that it was a head scratcher, so for the first time this morning, I saw an ad in which they actually showed the word at the end. It’s funny that they’d been singing it for all these years with complete ineffectiveness at conveying what it was.
RIP. He was a very funny guy, with a deadpan delivery that couldn’t be beat. A great straight man as well. And not just visually. He was famous for his hilarious phone calls, in which you only heard his side. We had one of his albums when I was a kid in the 60s. It was called “The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart.” Here’s an example:
It’s funny, but I recently saw a rerun of the 80s show, and I’ve had the theme song (which was by Henry Mancini!) getting stuck in my head periodically since. The last episode might have been one of the most brilliant endings of any television series, if you were a fan of the show in the seventies. It was part of one of the best Saturday-night prime-time comedy lineups in television history, with All in the Family, and Mary Tyler Moore. Oh, and Mash.
I want to back up to an older SSD, but when I open it to look at it with fdisk, I get the message: “fdisk: cannot open /dev/sdb: Invalid argument”
Any ideas?
[Update Monday morning]
I gave up on the drive, and went out and bought a new one at Best Buy.
[July 17th update]
So, I copied my Linux OS to the new drive using dd. But it won’t boot. It acts like its starting to boot, but the Fedora thing just spins ad infinitum. It won’t boot in the same desktop that I copied the OS from, or from the laptop. Any ideas?
Anthony Fauci, whose early career did so much to improve human health, leaves behind a tainted legacy. He and his colleagues abused their authority, overreached on lockdowns and vaccine policies, and dissembled about dangerous research that his agency funded. The populist backlash to these excesses is still building. The public’s growing distrust of medical experts—and new skepticism toward all vaccines—is a public-health timebomb.
It is tempting to attribute Fauci’s late-career lapses to some personal moral deficiency. I think that’s the wrong tack. Fauci’s ethical shortcomings weren’t personal so much as institutional; he had been given enormous authority while being almost completely insulated from political oversight. Even the president could not easily fire him. And his centralized control over massive research budgets meant that few scientists were willing to challenge his claims or policies.
Over the decades, Fauci came to see himself as infallible. He represented “science.” Instead of welcoming contrary views, as he did during the AIDS years, the older, more thin-skinned (and more institutionally entrenched) Fauci resented criticism and tried to silence dissent. If not for the persistent pushback from a few bold scientists, journalists, and lawmakers, he might have succeeded in shutting down crucial debates entirely. No federal official should have so much power, with so little accountability, for so long.
Few people have the probity to withstand the temptations of that kind of power.