Good morning. Hello. How are you? #1068
Chores, 60 acres for a boat storage facility, Donald and the Supreme Court and hypocrisy and the historical clarity of later amendments
Good morning, friend. Happy Wednesday. It’s Rick, your friendly neighborhood life chronicler and half-assed pendant. Jane is standing next to me. We are listening to Genesis. But the important thing is that I am writing to you. You know, most of your newsletters have elected to take this week off. Where, I ask you, is Matt Levine? On vacation, that’s where he is. But not I. Well, I mean, I am on vacation, from work but not from you, my friends, my flock, my therapists. Because I am dedicated.
“I’m here!” Jane says. She smiled. It is a nice smile.
She does not, however, want to go to Walmart this morning. Which is disappointing.
“I like typing,” she says.
Okay Jane, type something for our friends:
‘‘Good morning!’’ <3
She is going to draw us a picture now. Wow if this works out maybe you guys can get a live picture.
OK. Focus. Yesterday I finally got the compost bins done. They look great. I would give you a photo of them but I forgot to bring my phone over to the other house when I worked on them. I will take one for you today.
I also put a real dent in my year-end tasks.
I did my Discogs/iTunes reconciliation: removing sold items from my collection inventory, making sure the iTunes version has the correct cover art, making sure that artist is properly organized in iTunes (much like Twitter/X, I refuse to call it “Apple Music” cuz that is dumb). It was relatively quick this year, as I only sold like 30 CDs before I decided to put an end to it all.
I updated my Goodreads with all the books I read which was also easy because I only read like 20 books this year because I am always tired because I have a kid and I don’t travel much anymore because it is an environmental catastrophe. Twenty books. Humiliating. I am so embarrassed.
I backed up my iMovie library and offloaded it to my NAS’s cold storage volume but that was also easy because I only made one movie this year — that little sample of how Taylor Swift’s “Ready for It” sounded like Godflesh’s “Someone Somewhere Scorned.” Still somewhat confused how this did not become a viral hit.
But most excitingly I went through the “best” folder of Jane photos from 2023 and I chose 17 new photos of Jane to go into rotation on my phone lock screen and I am already reaping profound emotional rewards from this 45 minute exercise the new photos are just great I am so happy.
I had an epiphany that I could put a bus station across the street from my downtown train station in my Cities: Skyline city Janesville and I spent 20 whole minutes playing the game, getting that all set and it worked just great and now I have no traffic at the train station and my traffic flow improved from 75 to 76%.
I watched the first two hours of this year’s Civ Giv, an annual charity Civilization game. It is eight hours long. Somehow for the last three years I’ve managed to watch the whole thing god knows how.
Oh and there was a point where I had to gather up Jane and Emma and take them to Southern Village to a lawyer’s office to sign a bunch of paperwork so the pool gang could buy 60 acres of land along Fearrington Road to make a boat storage facility and let me tell you, Jane did not want to go. Thank you to that law firm for having Hersheys in their office. Thank you to Emma for putting up with our absurd schemes. Thank you to Southern Village for having an Al’s Burger Shack, even if the license plates on the wall are fake. You can buy kits of 50 fake license plates to decorate your walls did you know this?
Donald Trump got kicked off the ballot in Colorado and it is hilarious. It will go to the Supreme Court and even though they directly quote Neil Gorsuch unequivicolly stating that it is the absolute right of states to decide who should be on the ballots in that state, Neil Gorsuch will vote to overturn the Colorado Supreme Court because he is a hypocrite and everyone already knows it so he doesn’t care if people know it. States Rights indeed.
It really is something that America is confused about this. They could have made Section 3 of the 14th amendment say explicitly “after January 6, 2021, and the actions of that day, Donald Trump cannot run for a second term” and people that call themselves originalists would say They didn’t mean that!
The reconstruction amendments — and, really, any amendment from the 1800’s on — are hilarious because there are these whackjob conservatives who pretend they are all about how the constitution cannot be “interpreted” and it can only mean exactly what the drafters mean. The reason they say this is not because they believe it but because it is very convenient that we have somewhat spotty historical records of the 1700’s, so they can make shit up. Except historians are good at their jobs and we mostly know what the framers meant, and, surprise! They did not mean for the second amendment to let everyone own a gun. This is very clear from that history they claim to care about but they just ignore it.
And of course it all breaks down the later the amendment was ratified, because history is very clear about Reconstruction and it’s pretty damn clear that no one intended to allow Robert E Lee to run for president. But none of this matters because the Supreme Court is just making shit up.
Oh look Jane finished her picture let’s take a look.
No daddy in the photo. But it is still pretty great.
Now she is standing next to me doing happy hands.
Hi Jane.
Anyway, I had kinda a rough day yesterday. Jane woke me up at 6:30 and she was cranky all morning, prone to sporadic screaming fits about random shit like she didn’t like the color of my clothes or that we weren’t playing with the balloon. It really wore me down. Then I had to do that whole family wrangling to the law firm which no one wanted to do and made me feel like a heel. It continued all the way through Bed Party where she kept bossing me around and it was no fun. Just an exhausting day. And then I had to look at Taylor try and make an angry face in that scene in the “Look What You Made Me Do” video where she is standing at a cross — sorry, a T for Taylor get it? — on top of a pile of all the old Taylors. It is just hilarious trying to watch her make that face. It’s against everything she holds inside. They had to cut away and do a second take. Every time I see it, I laugh and feel kinda bad for her.
And then we watched more of that “For All Mankind” show and I am not sure I’m gonna like it but I’ll give it a chance for a while.
OMG Jane just came over holding up a sign demanding to start typing. Think I better listen to her!
Then end.
I just made today’s mix. It’s awesome. Bon Jovi is awesome (sorry Todd). Olivia Newton John is awesome. Spice is awesome. Etc. etc.
Until tomorrow!