Good morning. Hello. How are you? #1122
Greenhouse shelves, sick kid, Elon's OpenAI lawsuit, trees, a topic round-up.
Good morning! Hello. How are you? Issue number 1122. Good number. It is Thursday what fun. Time for the weekly COVID stats for our area. What joy. Wow. First time that I can remember that in the 9 nearby sewage districts, the wastewater isn’t up in a single one of them: 8 down, 1 flat. Exciting. Oh wow. They changed their hospitalizations page to include all respiratory illnesses, emergency room visits only. I… guess that’s better? Pure 100% Covid, and pure hospital admissions was maybe more accurate? But also… this is pretty good? I will take it. Anyway, the levels are down on both, so that is just dandy.
Speaking of dandy I would like to formally issue a correction regarding yesterday’s entry. The Dandy Warhols are, in fact on tour. They are just not coming here. But they did play Boston the other night, and played “Ride” and “Not Your Bottle” for the first time in, like, 20 years, so that is pretty cool. But I will not get to see them.
But I am going to see KMDFM tonight so put that in your industrial dance pie hole and chew on it. Here have a picture of a plunge pool we’re working on in Chapel Hill:
Jane is sick today. Sort of. She decided she was sick and, being a kindergartener who didn’t go to pre-school, there’s always some sort of sickness. Her stomach has been hurting for weeks. She had a fever of 90.0°F today. And sniffles. She could have gone to school if she wanted, and she thought about it — really did want to give her teacher her birthday book and wanted to go to music class. And we had a very civil conversation about it. And she agreed that we could probably go to the parking lot and have the nice lady come out again. But Emma and I are getting a bit worried about this longish-term stomach thing, and Jane agreed she’d go to the doctor “soon,” which is a real win: she’s been insisting she not go to the doctor lately. So I took the win. We are now in the playroom. She was reading this over my shoulder but she has since moved on.
We only talked using our hands as puppets all morning. Murder on my tennis elbow, which is approaching its first birthday. Happy birthday, tennis elbow.
Sold our Olivia Rodrigo tickets for Charlotte. Who was I kidding. We were never gonna go undertake an arena show with Jane on a Friday. I reserve the right to blow ungodly sums of money on tickets for the Boston show while we’re up there for spring break.
Finished the greenhouse shelves yesterday. They look pretty good. I mean, it’s a bummer to see so much ugly stuff inside the greenhouse, but I made it look as nice as I could. I think once the beds are filled with green you will notice it less, and there is always an option to hang a curtain on that side that blocks the view a bit.
Look at those black buckets, I specially raised the bottom-most shelf so it would fit two buckets underneath it. I re-made all my amendment buckets so they were all black and all matched. Very proud of that.
One thing that sucks is it seems that 3M reformulated their outdoor painter’s tape so it now does not take a Sharpie Marker. I am sad. That was my standard labeling solution. Now I am using a green frog tape but it’s not as good. It will weather. Maybe I need a different marker. Experimentation is needed.
More importantly, I now have a place for the seed trays and I can finally start planting things both in the trays and in the beds. THIS WEEKEND. I solemnly vow.
The other greenhouse things I would like to accomplish this weekend are obtaining a helical pile and getting my hose system mounted on a 4x4 outside the greenhouse door, and getting the data all connected up. And I need to hang the string lights.
Much to do, much to do.
But today, I will focus on, you know, my job, and I will focus on taking care of my “sick” daughter.
Also I will say that if you like sci fi you should be watching Halo. It is really good. I have never played the game Halo. The sum total of my Halo experience is occasionally watching people play it on the projector at the Barbarian office in Boston like ten years ago. I didn’t know anything about it. Doesn’t matter. Show is great.
Also I will say that Elon Musk is a dumb dumb and so is Sam Altman and X sux and so does OpenAI, but Elon does have a point in his lawsuit against OpenAI and this whole for-profit owned by a non-profit thing is basically a giant tax scam and confidence game and for all of his dumb lawsuits this is the single one that maybe he should win.
Also can you imagine how fucking gung-ho the world would be if the Tesla board fired Elon Musk and then announced a compact EV pick-up truck like the Maverick, that just.. looked like a nice compact pickup truck? People would fucking lose their minds. Do you know how many city dwellers want an EV truck the size of a Honda Acty? My god.
It is political season and I am saying STOP to maybe 5-10 text messages a day. And they do stop, but where they fall, three more rise. I am —
(hold please I have to wipe Jane’s bum is that normal at this age my god how do we get her to stop someday she’s going to remember this and she is going to be so mortified)
— convinced these people sell off your phone number and details to two-to-three other political groups before they text you a single time, so they have at least made their money off of you before you text STOP back to them.
I had to tell my second wife AOC to stop texting me. That was a bummer. But, then, I am a little peevish at her for her line-straddling on certain political issues at the moment. I am sympathetic, her intellect has made her a smart political animal, and she has mayhaps lost a bit of her truth-telling. I can relate. I blame Boston University’s International Relations program, from which both of us graduated.
Here is a headline that a reputable news source in the United States printed yesterday. I am as much as a mainstream media apologist as you will find, but come the fuck on:
Other things I would like to say to you, as I clear out my topic list, which was filled with a bunch of snippets that will never make full passages in GMHHAY. Maybe one of these will resonate you. Because there is a thing I’ve learned after one thousand, one hundred and twenty-two issues of this thing: there is no accounting for taste when it comes to writing. I can never predict which passages are gonna resonate with you guys. The world contains multitudes. That realization was, by the by, one of the topics from the list.
I have always really liked it when trees grow over roads to make a sort of tunnel and it occurred to me the other day that I now own some of those trees, and several of the trees on the Chore House (tentative new name) in fact are arching and growing over the main road against which the lot abuts. I am very happy I now own arching trees. I own a lot of trees. Can you own trees? No, you cannot. I am the steward of a lot of trees. This is the high-point in my life for the number of trees that I watch over. This makes me happy. Trees rule. Jarvis was right.
(Just Googled “trees jarvis” to make sure if you wanted to Google that obscure aside you could get to the answer and indeed you can.)
When I was in sixth grade or so and I was reading the entire bible I got to the Song of Songs and it was super arousing and it is one of my earliest memories of puberty and I was thinking the other day about how that should have screwed me up a lot more and turned me into some god freak like Nick Cave and I am very thankful it did not.
Speaking of Nick Cave he has a new song and I need to talk to Andy Shea about it because at least it’s not more droning loops and the same stuff he’s been doing for a while now but on the other hand it is an undeniably happy song and this is going to mess with me. I don’t know how to feel about this and only Andy could have helped me work through these feelings.
Speaking of dead friends I just found out a girl from Alaska I knew died. I didn’t know her well but my best friend c 1995 dated her for a while and she was kind and I always liked her and it makes me sad. RIP Jamie J.
I realized the other day that I love my new turntable set up but that in moving it closer to me and connecting it to the studio monitors, I now no longer have an excuse to get up from my seat every 15-30 minutes stretch. But then I realized ha ha joke’s on me, because I am a man in my 50’s who is on his fourth can of water today already at 8:30 AM so I have to pee every 15-30 minutes anyway.
All right well that’s a good clearing out of the notepad. We’ll skip the “Aaron Bushnell” note and the “Biden is old” note because what is there to say. Well, lots. But not today, as Aragorn says.
But not today.
Todays’ media of the day is… drumroll… Oh I know. A song called “Romeo’s Tune” by some dude named Steve Forbert. It is old. My friend Todd sent it to me. It’s a good tune. Todd said, and I agree, it feels like a song we should have already known. I find it very comforting. Even though I know nothing about it.
Have a lovely Thursday. Check your local Covid stats. Report back.
Romeo's Tune is such a great song. Growing up only having exposure to AOR radio, I knew nothing of punk, alternative or anything like that. I just remember there were a number of songs on super light rotation that I just loved. I think these songs were played like maybe twice a day but I listened to so much radio that I got to know them. My memories:
Steve Forbert - Romeo's Tune
The Police - Roxanne (and later Message in a Bottle)
Bram Tchaikovsky - Girl of My Dreams
The Clash - Train in Vain
The Records - Starry Eyes
The Ramones - Rock and Roll Radio
Boomtown Rats - I Don't Like Mondays (I remember thinking this song might be Queen as a teenager)
It wasn't until I discovered college radio a few years that I had the ability to dive deeper and find out where this stuff was coming from (and that there was much more of it and most of what I thought I liked was absolute crap).
re: the greenhouse gear... you don't already have a label maker? my friend steven has one in his workshop that prints on 1-inch yellow tape—it's great!