Good morning. Hello. How are you? #1066
Buttocksian, my Christmas hip hop single, 23 and Me sux, imagining Tim Cook using a HomePod Mini and getting pissed, very eventful bedtime.
Hello! Good morning! What is up? You working this week? I hope not. No one should work this week. The world should careen to a stop, everyone should be stuck where they are, the restaurants should close and.. etc. etc. Whoops one moment gotta deal with a potty emergency. Okay, we are back. One of the fun things about parenting: long, detailed conversations about pooping strategies and tactics. A thing we all think about but never get to discuss. Except when you have kids. It’s a nice little gift. I will miss it.
While we are on the buttocksian subject, last night Jane and I played dolls, and I taught her how to hold the doll properly supporting its head, and then it cried and we learned burping and bottle, and then I taught her the “lay the baby down on its back and fold its knees to its chest to make it fart” trick and my god she loved that so much. Just walking around laying her baby doll down and making it fart. Real trick that most parents leave out of doll time, but easily one of the most useful.
Forgot to do a sign-off on Friday, I would just like to insert a little apology here for that lapse in ettiquitte. Ettiquette? My god how do you spell that word. Etiquette. One T, two Ts, E. I will try and remember that.
Oh also before we get started here is my 2007 Christmas hit hip hop single, “Christmas is Murder.” You know you need to listen to it at least once this year. Really is the best Christmas song. One day I will have a Christmas number one with it. If I ever remember to post it to the internet in November instead of a week before Christmas.
Great weekend. Made use of the Timber Croc and that thing freakin rules. Got all my logs cut in no time. Makes your dinky little battery-powered chainsaw useful. I have both the 20v and 60v Dewalt chainsaws. The 60v has a longer blade and is more powerful, but is way more heavy. But I didn’t even need it with the Timber Croc. The logs were the right height and sturdy and you could saw at them from any angle and the 20v cut through even giant 20-inch logs with no problems at all. Of course all this wood was semi-rotted, having been laying in the leaves for nigh on two years now, but still! Timber Croc FTW.
Did the collection center and Walmart run. At the collection center there was an old woman who was using two canes, not a walker, and was trying to carry two plastic bags of glass over to the dumpster to recycle the glass. It really reminded me of that recurring poignant moment in the Kieślowski Trois Couleurs trilogy where that old lady was trying to deposit a single milk bottle into a Parisian curbside recycling receptacle. So I went over there and offered to take her bags of glass to the dumpster because, you know, I am a saint. I dump them in. They are filled with wine bottles, nothing else. I give serious consideration to telling this woman she should take up box wine instead, but it’s none of my business and in any case she could well be a suffering wife of an alcoholic who won’t take their own bottles to the recycling center. Anyway good deed done for the week I am just the best I am so kind and now I am bragging about it to you because I need you to know how great I am.
There were no Churro Kit Kats at Walmart. Looks like their time is coming to an end. Sad.
What is not great is 23 and Me who lied about how big their hack was, claimed it was a few hundred thousand when it turned out to be millions. And conveniently they didn’t admit the truth until they had prepped a new Terms of Service where they are trying to shunt everyone into a single group arbitration over the thing. No big deal, a company just gave up the genetic information of like half of America, god knows what that will lead to, and we will maybe get a penny or so. Super cool. Anyway, if you want to opt out of the new terms of service, you have until early January. You gotta email them at arbitrationoptout@23andme.com.
I’ve been pissed at 23andme since they changed from a one-time payment for the analysis site to a pay a subscription site. They use your data now in a bajillion different ways, and continually change their TOS. Anyway, previously, I had gone in and turned off every sharing setting I could find on the site. But so what. I just went up there and checked again and they’ve added a few more sharing types, and opted me in by default. So, I am done. Just deleted my account and emailed the opt-out address. At the very least, I encourage you to a) opt out, b) go log in and change your password, and c) turn on two-factor authentication, preferably with a hardware key or auth app and not your cell number. Better yet just delete the account, those people cannot be trusted, I swear.
I read an article about this yesterday and the article took this opportunity to do its general bashing on ad tech and targeting and, you know, I suppose you gotta continually drive this message home to the public because the public does not care about their personal data being used in advertising. But Genetics, I mean. I mean, the two are unrelated, at the moment: no adtech firm, even the shadiest one, is going to buy stolen data and use it in their profiling. Aw, shit, you know what, one of them might, I have met some shady-ass firms in my day. But the thing is, it’s already illegal to buy stolen data and use it in your profiling, so if they get caught, they’ll get punished, nothing else for us to do about it, it’s already illegal.
But the thing about genetic data is who the hell knows. God knows what it could be used for down the line, ten, twenty, fifty years ago. It strikes me that this whole incident is now a giant Shödinger’s Cat, er, Shrödinger’s Time Bomb. Like thirty years from now, modern encryption is useless and some arch villain remembers this incident and goes and grabs the entire stolen archive off of the dark web and uses it with Crispr to make weird genetically-focused bombs like… who the hell knows!
I definitely know that when I first signed up for 23andme back in the day I did not envision them using everyone’s DNA in these giant registries to capture serial killers from thirty years earlier. I mean that one turned out to be relatively benign, I guess, but who knows next time!
Always with the unintended consequences with technology. Hubris Hubris Hubris.
On Saturday I got “The Way it Is” by Bruce Hornsby and the Range stuck in my head, so I came home from some chores and I asked Siri to play it and Siri did and it’s a great song, even if that like “The line on the color bar/box” is a bit forced. Piano solo is fucking awesome and there’s a bit more synth in it than I remember, presaging Hornsby’s fantastic modern (post-Dead) output where he makes awesome synth records with Bon Iver, I kid you not. Anyway, great tune.
And then several hours later that day, I am at the grocery store and on the Muzak, on comes “The Way it Is” by Bruce Hornsby and the Range. And I feel like a special flower in the universe. How many people do you think get to hear “The Way it Is” by Bruce Hornsby twice in a day? Even die-hard Hornsby fans (Horny for Hornsby) probably don’t get this pleasure cuz they listen to other Horbsy tracks more often. They probably pooh pooh “The Way it Is” even though they’re wrong it’s a great track.
And then later in the day for no reason that HomePod Mini that played “The Way it Is” for me in the morning started randomly making noise while I wasn’t in the room and my wife texts me from the other floor and complains that the HomePod is broken because of course it is my god those things break all the time. I wonder what it’s like to be Tim Cook and trying to use your HomePod Mini in your house and it just never fucking works the way you want. We know exactly how Steve Jobs felt about this sort of thing he freakin lost it when Apple tech in his home didn’t just work but Tim seems to suffer much more silently. I doubt the dude even has three monitors and realizes how perpetually broken Notes is in Full Screen, and how the display driver inexplicably dims monitors all the time and how broken desktop pictures and screensavers are. But if he did, I can just picture him lowering his head, shaking it, and suffering silently to himself. Seems like they approach he’d take. He’d understand the bureaucratic, economic, organizational, and logistical reasons why this was the case. He would not blame Apple.
But man, he would be annoyed.
Had a dream about the new Man Ray club except it was built where the old Man Ray was. There had been a fire and Man Ray estates had burned down (convenient) so they rebuilt in their old spot. They tried to make it as close to the old club as possible, and it was pretty good. It had the three different rooms, the upstairs DJ booth, the basement and it’s dual entrances, etc. But it also had some key differences. There was an extensive upper floor with another lounge and a video game arcade. And there were bedrooms for visiting goths.
I liked that part.
Last night was 100% engaged, full-on active daddy bed time. Extended bed party, extended dance party, long doll session, teeth assistance, LEGO time, soccer time, the works. It was deeply exhausting and very rewarding. Kids are pretty cool, I love the simplicity of their joy and the purity of their pain. There was a moment where Jane remembered all of our old games – under the covers, daddy slide, climb on daddy, ABC circles — and asked to do them all and she was so happy basking in the nostalgia of games from 3 years ago — half her life. It was deeply magical and parenting sure can rule sometimes.
When there’s not potty emergencies.
I’ve begun my year-end tasks, starting with sorting all my photos. I have about 400 left. In the process, though, I have been finding some good Jane photos that never made it to GMHHAY so here the next few days we will be returning to autumnal themes. Enjoy.
Here’s an oldies playlist for you I don’t know man I am tired of making playlists but I put effort into this I swear. What is an oldie these days? I mean oldies these days are, like, the Violent Femmes and the Police. I am trying to predate that. Early 80’s, I think. I may have broken the rule at least once here. But that’s what I’m going for.
Right well jolly good take care talk tomorrow, unless, you know, vacation entralls me.