Good morning. Hello. How are you? #1042
Weekly covid stats, my friend was attacked, Vice Admiral Holdo is a terrible manager, kid stuff, Apple bugs, car stuff, Kit Kat thieves, car stuff, log stuff
Mornin’ son. What’s shakin? Had a dream last night Gavin Friday stopped by my house to pick up a laptop cuz his broke while he was driving the Blue Ridge Parkway. He is doing well he says hi.
Thursday? Oh joy. New NC Covid stats coming out. Let’s check em out together. Still checking them every week. I am a creature of routines. Not habits, routines. Hrm. Looks pretty promising. Raleigh wastewater trending down, down to 16MM viral gene copies per person. Carrboro (the closest public sewage system to me) down to 17MM. Pittsboro doesn’t track anymore. Cary down to 24MM. Meh. Durham down to 8. All down. Excellent. The number of people in the state of North Carolina hospitalized for COVID is down to 459 to 490. Leading indicator but still nice. At one point, back in the day, it was down to 80.
My friend in New York was attacked the other day because he has brown skin and was wearing a scarf. She was wearing a scarf too, but, you know, she is white so she can’t be a terrorist. He had his 18 month child with him. The reason he was attacked was because a woman’s child came over and started talking and playing with his child, and that woman did not like it at all, so she screamed at him that he was not welcome there, threw her phone at him, threw her hot coffee at him. He filmed it all. He was never in any real danger, but doing this in front of someone’s kid is really next level. It’s the sort of hatred and racism that you know exists but every time you see it you’re just stunned that people can be that overt and outright and malevolent about it.
The craziest thing is she did this all in front of her kid.
This conflict is making Americans crazy and needs to end. But it will never end.
This map explains a lot about my childhood. Ten percent of Alaskans are veterans! Highest in the nation. How many times have we heard up there that Alaska was the last place they were stationed, they got out of the military and looked around and said “yeah okay, I like this place,” and just… stayed. Crazy.
Just back from taking Jane to school. There was a right-hand drive army Jeep – the dude checked out my Lightning. There was a new Prius those things look even better in real life than they do online. Legit thought it was a Lotus for a hot sec. Gave the old man driving it a thumbs up. He did not look at me. Someone in a Camry cut me off switching to the right-hand turn lane at the exit to get out faster, then he proceeded to drive 12MPH below the speed limit the entire way to the highway. Love that.
Car stuff, car stuff. Turning into Ryan McManus over here.
But speaking of car stuff, I know there’s a company out there who makes physical buttons for Teslas. But these all seem to be digital buttons — Bluetooth or something. What I was wondering today was if anyone made any mechanical buttons for touch screens, that I could stick on my giant, massive touch screen in my truck (which I love, I really do) in the places where I want a button for climate control. It turns out there seems to be a pretty healthy market for said buttons, but the target market seems to be gamers who want to stick them on their phone to make their phone feel more like a traditional gaming controller. But I have just purchased a few of these to see if I can stick em over the fan control, seat temperature and climate control touch-screen areas of my giant touch screen, since those regions never move, and they’re the ones I need to touch the most and it is a giant, giant pain to ever hit them properly while driving because auto makers do not care about us and pretend that “there are just too many functions in a car now to have buttons for every one” is a reason even though they all know, and we all know, that the only ones we actually need buttons for are climate control. Mofos give me a physical button for “help me parallel park” but not “can I have a temperature that isn’t scalding or freezing please.” Sweet lord o mercy.
Anyway, I will let you know if they work or not.
Jane is doing great we had a lovely time last night, we had a good breakfast, today is PJ day, she is wearing a mix of Hello Kitty pants and a red top. PJ day is the perfect day for a solo dad to deliver his kid to school. It was a surprise PJ day so, you know, the parental gods were smiling on me. She fell right asleep at 8:15 and when I went in there at 6:50 she was still sound asleep. Kinda crazy.
I spent the rest of the evening re-watching The Last Jedi and honestly, I don’t know what the deal is. It is a perfectly good movie. Easily one of the best Star Wars movies. The chase plot is perfect explained. Admiral (sorry, Vice Admiral) Holdo is just a bad manager. There’s a reason she was only, like, seventh in command of the Rebellion: because she was not a good people person and she could not keep her troops in line because she is under the mistaken impression that a ragtag group of volunteer rebels can be bossed around like children. Excellent management lesson right there.
The Holdo Maneuver is dumb but it would work and the real dumbness (real word) is all the other space battles in Star Wars where people don’t just ram ships into one another. And it’s not like we know anything about light speed jump mechanics in Star Wars so hey, why not. “One in a million shot” lol. Okay, that part is dumb. But it worked.
And the whole Canto Bight thing is fine whatever its fine. They find another code breaker completely randomly that part is weird but it didn’t really matter, they could have found the code breaker they were looking for just as easily and the movie would have been just the same and — yeah, actually, not sure why they didn’t do that. But the structure of the Canto Bight thing didn’t bother me as much this time. Even if the whole plan, in the end, was useless and Finn and Rose got like ten ships of Rebels killed and maybe they should wrestle with their responsibility for that. But also — on Holdo! No reason not to, you know, tell the troops the plan.
Holdo is the real villain of The Last Jedi.
Hold please gotta force quit Notes.app and relaunch it again, because, again, the worlds most powerful and valuable company cannot make an app that stores text. They are too busy thinking about buying ESPN to make a notes app. Actually that is probably just a Wall Street rumor. It would be so dumb. Please, no, please, god, no. Work on your Notes.app instead.
Speaking of bugs a new Substack bug just dropped, check it out. If you insert three images into your Substack using Safari, the third one will not drag and drop into the text but rather it will just open full-window like when you drop an image into a blank browser tab. This will continue until you restart Safari. Refreshing the page will not fix it.
Hrm come to think of it, that sounds more like a Safari bug.
Listening to a band called Les Big Byrd and I don’t know much about them but this album is great. Melodic, poppy drone. Maybe Stereolab meets Can. Sweet stuff. Two Rick thumbs up.
Thank you to all the people who sent me this gripping tale of an article about Bokksu and the two hijacked containers of Japanese Kit Kats. Really is great stuff, and I appreciate all of you who remembered my love of Japanese Kit Kats. I have historically avoided Bokksu generally because of the cost, and this article confirms it. Generally I have obtained my Japanese Kit Kats from Asian groceries which also mark them up, bot as much. Though I gotta say, the baby steps Kit Kat has done to bring this phenomenon to America have been pretty great. The current Churro-flavored Kit Kat Minis are as good — and maybe better — than any of the Asian flavors. They have been my go-to Kit Kat minis for a few months now, though not to worry, I still have about seven Japanese flavors in the house.
My log splitter arrived and I am very excited. Thing is huge. I unboxed it yesterday and it is just a beast. Battery powered log splitters are not small. But it does 12 tons of pressure and I am going to split some logs tomorrow and it is going to rule. Log splitters! Woooooooooooooooo!
Hrm I guess that’s all I got today. On a fourth day straight of a lot of work, gonna be a busy day. But it’s my last day of the week, what with a holiday and all tomorrow. Holiday Fridays off are better than normal Fridays off because coworkers don’t keep Slacking me things, forgetting that I am taking every Friday off for the rest of the year. Hopefully no one bugs me tomorrow and Jane and I can spend the day outdoors and she can learn to split logs too or something.
For, you know, the ten minutes until she gets bored and wanders off.
Justa mix for you, old and new. That meme is going around again about bands you’ve seen and someone mentioned Seaweed as their first show and… wow. That’d be great. Got me thinking about them again, which was nice cuz I had “Ice Cream” by Blackpink and Selena Gomez stuck in my head for a week. I am trying to like the new National but the lyrics are seeming… kinda dumb? Munki got remastered and it sounds great. New Drop Nineteens is legit solid and I can’t wait to see em. I put Nation of Language on here cuz I was supposed to see them tonight and I vowed not to miss it but I am single parenting, so… alas.
Talk tomorrow, fair friend. Not fair weather, mind you. Fair.