My home-baking experience has gotten more analog this week after our beloved and much-used KitchenAid stand mixer fell off a counter and took enough damage to break some non-user-accessible part of its motor. After hand-kneading the dough for two loaves of bread, a pizza crust and a batch of English muffins, I can report that old-school baking provides a decent upper-arm workout.

4/26/2020: How sporting is this? Sports-network fees stay in the pay-TV lineup despite no live action, USA Today

If you were hoping one tiny upside of the novel-coronavirus pandemic would be a break from regional-sports-network fees on your TV bill, you’re going to have to wait for the leagues involved to announce formally that their 2020 season either won’t happen or will be cut back by a large and defined margin. Sorry!

4/26/2020: Suspicious “reopen” domain names, Al Jazeera

I appeared via Skype on the Arabic-language news network to discuss reports from Domain Tools and my old Post pal Brian Krebs that many of the sites suddenly created to urge reopening the U.S. from coronavirus lockdown were actually created by the same set of sketchy right-wing activists. This led me to ask my producer in AJ’s D.C. bureau how you’d say “astroturfing” in Arabic; he said the closest thing would be “التنجيم” (pronounced “tanjeem”), which apparently has a dictionary translation of “astrology” but has lately picked up other meanings.