Cup of Coffee: January 16, 2024

Good morning!

First, a little housekeeping:

• Sorry about the green hyperlinks yesterday. I had them in because I was trying to replicate the green links I had over at Substack. I hated the color and thought I had changed it back before I sent the newsletter out yesterday but I apparently just changed it on the web, not the email. I think it’s fixed today;

• I think I ironed out the font variations in blockquotes and bulleted lists like this one. They should all be the same as the body text (it’s Georgia for the record). Now, many of you said that you don’t like this font or the spacing or the kerning (whatever the hell that is) or lodged other complaints about fonts. I am open to changing things, and I’m open to suggestions which properly understand that my design skills are limited to “selecting font from a drop-down menu,” but I do prefer serif fonts. I think I can change some line and paragraph spacing too, so if that’s an issue thoughts are likewise appreciated there as well;

• I realize commenting isn’t quite as robust here as it was at Substack. Things like notifications, nesting, reverse-chron, etc. just don’t seem to be things here. It also does not, apparently, give a “comment here” button on the email. Instead, it requires you to go to the web version of the newsletter to do it. That’ll be another thing I’ll look into, but I think that’s a Beehiiv issue, not a me issue; and

• A lot of people asked if Beehiiv has an RSS feed. It does. I think. There is a way to enable it anyway, and I did what it told me too. The result is that it generated a link to a long XML file? I have never used RSS before so I do not know if that’s what people were looking for. In the past I’ve noticed buttons on web pages that supply that, and I can’t seem to do that here, so someone let me know if that link works. And if you have suggestions as to how to make it visible for folks in the future. As always, I’m pretty dang ignorant about such things.

There will no doubt be more things we discover like this. Sort of like how the guy that bought my old house in New Albany has likely discovered by now that the air vent in the ceiling just inside the front door is actually fake and just covers a hole my dad and I made while trying to fix something nine years ago. There are always surprises!

[Editor: Wait. You put a vent cover over a hole in the drywall rather than fix the hole? And you sold your house in that condition?]

For starters, I always meant to get around to fixing that. I just forgot. Probably because the vent just looked so natural there that I’d go months and months at a time without ever thinking about it. Also, it was a seller’s market and the dude voluntarily waived inspection. If he’s figured it out by now he’s no doubt gotten a lot of mileage out of it in one of those “you would not BELIEVE what the jackass who used to own this place did” stories. I’d say we’re even.

Anyhow, today is a normal newsletter. They all should be going forward. Yay!

Inside today: an extension for one of the game’s best executives, the international signing period, the Iowa caucuses, Great Moments in Civil Rights, saying goodbye to funny highway signs, The $1 million stereo system, and one of those things that I really don’t think anyone is really doing but the New York Times found some weirdos so now we’re gonna pretend it’s a trend. So like I said: normal day.

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