Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #1217
A lot of medical visits. Cindytalk. The Sundays. T'Pau. if you needed to catch someone up on the Office Space/Superman 3 joke, where would you start? A bonkers kids book about Notch.
Good morning everybody how are you happy Friday. I am listening to an original Touched Raw vinyl pressing of Cindytalk’s 1996 masterpiece Wappinschaw, which I have not listened to in a few years. I own two copies of the recent Dais records reissue of the album, and two copies of the original CD Touched Raw pressings, but I did not own a Touched Raw vinyl copy until recently when a gentleman sold a very reasonably priced copy on Discogs. It is taking me back. My friend Annie and I brought Cindytalk to America in 1996 for the tour to accompany this album. It was amazing and harrowing and intense and I probably still have a little PTSD about it but at least I got to meet Layne Staley and watch a Space Shuttle launch and see Bowery Electric a million times and play Prince’s club and Off Ramp in Seattle in its heyday. Here, here’s a photo. Corona, 1996. I think Annie took this one.
Incredibly busy day yesterday, in the pouring rain. Went to the allergist for the first time in ten years, we had a good joke about it. Dude’s office has been supplying me my sublingual drops the whole time so I figured if he wanted me to come in for a visit they would tell me that and withhold the drops. “I would have thought that too,” he said. “I will have a talk with the front desk. You should be coming in every year.” We had a good laugh. I swear to god in ten years the dude looks younger and healthier and he is Benjamin Buttoning that shit and I told him as much. I was a total ham.
Protip for all middle-aged men out there: laugh about your medical indignities and make a ton or jokes while at the doctor. It makes the whole thing way easier for everyone, and makes it easier to be honest.
Anyway after ten years he gave me an additional med for my continually flooded sinus cavities and I guess maybe it’s working today because I have a runny nose to end all runny noses so maybe they are draining, I don’t know. We will stick with it.
Also I would like to state for the record that for the first time in my life, while at the Allergist, I parked, looked at the sky, thought “looks like rain, better bring an umbrella inside,” did it, and I ended up needing it. I am a god damn adulting machine.
The UNC system has this whole thing where they have an appointment time — say 10 AM (have one in an hour, in fact) and then they forever more, in every circumstance, then tell you from there on out that your appointment is fifteen minutes earlier, in this case at 9:45. They are obviously sick of everyone’s shit and people are late all the time. It is some real weird choice architecture Kahneman and Thaler Nudge shit and I do not like it because I am sorry, I arrive at my appointments on time, early in fact, but now you make me feel like I am late. And the nurses always give you a side-eye and I want to shout “It’s not me! It’s your choice architects! *I* am fine! And don’t you know all this Nudge stuff is considered a giant liberal conspiracy by the Qanon crowd these days? I just got in a weird online argument about it yesterday! The dude ignored all the science and told me — get this hilarity — that people are rational! I pointed out the bottomless science supporting Kahneman and Tversky (who really deserved the Nobel too) and somehow he was telling me that science does not care about your priors! When hilariously, my priors were the same as his! I used to think people were rational too! Because my idealogue economist teachers pretended they were! But I updated my priors! Because of science! He did not! He’s the one! Him!”
The nurse would have loved that I am sure.
Went and got a blood test in the pouring rain (good goth song title), for the allergies (exciting!) and my CK levels, which is an enzyme your body releases when your muscles are all fucked up. Given that my muscles are fucked up in a million places, we needed a follow up test to make sure it was not that king of muscles, the brain. It was not. Levels back to normal. Probably the sprained foot I healed. I am such a fucking adult going to the doctor and fixing things, look at that.
Stopped in the pharmacy and goth girl has dyed her hair blonde and it is weird but also kinda badass. She is giving off a “Lead singer of T’Pau vibe” now. Heck yeah let’s talk about T’Pau, “Heart and Soul” is up there for one of the greatest songs ever written. I have looked her up. Her name is Carol Decker. She seems happy.
Speaking of badass lady musicians, I was driving around suburbia yesterday going to doctor’s appointments and The Sunday’s “A Certain Someone” came on my truck radio. Just one of the best, most twee songs ever written. And the song kicks in and I say “fuck yeah” and turn it up like it is Freedom Rock or “More Than a Feeling” or something and it felt great. Here is a youtube fan video:
Harriet, please make more music. Or, rather, release it. Indie Intelligence reports you and your husband have secretly been making more music this whole time.
I cancelled our trash collection because I am on a rampage against monthly bills who needs people to pick up your trash I already go to the collection center every week and they have trash drop off too. It’ll be like my childhood. I do not need modern services I am a real man.
I skipped Merge 35 last night because of a pool meeting that ended up not happening, but that was fine there was nothing in the lineup I found unmissable. I would have definitely not missed Titus Andronicus were it the full band, but it was just the lead singer solo. And I have, I am realizing, a pathological fear of solo dudes with electric guitars. Acoustic is fine but not electric. Sorry Ted, I need the Pharmacists. Weirdly, yesterday as I was driving from allergist to blood lab, a Titus Adronicus song came on and it made me realize something contradictory: far and away the thing I find most compelling about Titus Andronicus is his singing and lyrics. And yet. I cannot go. This is not rational. I also have no reason to believe Patrick Stickles performs solo live with an electric guitar but I cannot take that chance.
I was on a conference call at work with my CTO and head of demand and they were giggling because they had one of those epiphanies that were sitting right in front of you for years. Just the best, right? Like such a good idea. And you could have had this idea a month ago, a year ago, and that is annoying, but also it is such a good idea you are euphoric. I love those so much. And I am now thinking about how no one models this inevitible behavior into business models. It’s just a thing we all know happens, built into the “organic growth” or “innovation” rubrics in business. But anyway, great feeling.
But in this case another fascinating thing is that the innovation itself — well, I will not go into the details because it is hella complex and involves fuzzy logic and the ghost in the machine of computers when you get into RNG etc. etc. BUT, to keep things simple, for our purposes here, let me just say that it has strong (non-fraudulent) parallels to the Superman 3/Office Space half-penny plotline.
Now, Superman 3, of course, is hella old. But nowadays, Office Space is hella old too! Twenty-five years this year (someone throw an Office Space con!). These two are not young but they are not old, they’re not like me where, upon watching Office Space for the first time in 1999, I was angrily shouting out “this is a Superman 3 ripoff! until I realized that was the joke” lol embarrasing.
BUT I am saying all this now to pose you a riddle: if you needed to catch someone up on the Office Space/Superman 3 joke, where would you start? Would you tell them to go watch Office Space? OR… would you tell them to go watch Superman 3 and then Office Space? OR… as my wife pointed out when we were discussing this last night… wouldn’t it be weird to tell someone to watch Superman 3 without watching Superman 1 and 2? Shit. Do people need to spend eight hours of their life getting caught up on shit just to understand the Superman 3/Office Space joke?
Look I am a CEO I need to make a decision on this it is vital to my company’s success.
There is this children’s series of books that are, like, about, I dunno, modern-day Silicon Valley heroes. And Emma seems to have checked one out of the Chatham County Library that is a book about Notch, the inventor of Minecraft, because Jane is on a Minecraft kick these days. And I swear to god, the book is the craziest thing ever. It is this weird pastiche history of Minecraft and Notch that tries to be honest about cyberbullying and the real weird way that Notch just got sick of Mincraft, and the fans, and tweeted out he wanted out and Microsoft swooped in and bought it and then he and his two compatriots quit the very next day. Which is all true and it even mentions him buying that insane, stupid mansion in Beverly Hills, and then says something like “he spent the rest of his days chatting with fans and programming games’ and just leaves out he turned into a total redpill lunatic before — to his credit — realizing he did not belong on the internet at all. Wonder what is up with Notch these days. Anyway, it was such a weird book because — and this may be a controversial opinion here — the happy ending for Minecraft is Microsoft. Microsoft made Minecraft better, tolerable, ubiquitous. Imagine Minecraft in the hands of Notch still oh wait you don’t have to, that is Harry Potter. Microsoft is the hero here, write a book about them, lol.
And then! On the back of the book it is like : Other books in this series! Elon Musk! Tim Cook! I can’t remember all the names but, like, half of them are full-on redpilled crypto Trump lunatics. It is a real time capsule.
Copyright 2017.
Looks like since then the series has course corrected and now they have John Lewis and Emma Watson and Lin Manuel and Simone Biles but oof. Shaky start.
I would like to thank my wife for solving our month-ling GFCI-outlet-in-the-garage-keeps-tripping problem. It was something outside. Probably the new irrigation controller. Hazzah I can charge my truck at home again.
Daddy Jane bedtime last night, no dance party, Daddy School was kind of a catastrophe, still a bit raw after an incident at dinner where we had to escape a harrassing hornet (feel like it should be “an harrassing hornet”) and she didn’t want to stop playing Minecraft and threw a giant fit that culminated in her finding a makeshift pulpit and lecturing us for an hour, complete with politician/apple keynote hand gestures like fist-in-palm and both hands simultaneously karate chopping a fish. It really was something.
But the rest of Daddy Bedtime was great, and she let me read to her (the aforementioned bonkers Minecraft book) and did not act like we were in an episode of American Ninja Warrior and she laid down and said good night I love you daddy and maybe that terrible, terrible phase is coming to an end.
The writing time of this edition of GMHHAY was exactly the length of Cindytalk’s Wappinschaw and the bagpipe solo that ends the record is just finishing up now.
Here is a moody and quiet playlist to take us into the weekend. All new stuff. Very into this Loma album, I have spoken of the high quality of the new Cigarettes After Sex album. Discovered HOO and mui zyu a couple days ago and love them both, know nothing about them.
Have a good weekend everyone. Don’t forget to tip your servers. Xoxo.
Rick, I haven't talked to anyone in DECADES about the time I saw Cindytalk in Minneapolis with you at First Ave in 1996. That show broke my brain! It was part of your "Cindytalk Duz America: A Rick Webb Joint" tour. Actually, the tour was almost certainly named differently, but this just illustrates that none of my memories of the show can be trusted. Case in point: all these years I believed their singer, that man in the dress with the ethereal voice, was named Gordon and I just now searched them on Wikipedia only to discover not a single Gordon has ever graced their lineup.
Here's what I remember: Val telling me you had organized a tour for a band I had never heard of, somehow a plan was hatched to meet at First Ave, and then hop in the band van to get a ride back to campus after the show. So I said "Yolo!", got on Google to research the band and downloaded a few mp3 to hear what Cindytalk sounded like. FALSE! To any millennial or younger readers of this comment: none of those things existed yet! We didn't say Yolo, we had a primitive thing called "Netscape" a browser that was kind of like using the card catalog system at a library, and we listened to music mostly on shiny discs called 'CDs' that made quite a light show when you put them in a microwave. So, I showed up at the club still knowing nothing about Cindytalk, but fully prepared to spend an enjoyable evening catching up and hanging out with Fairbanks Legend Rick Webb and a real live actual rock band.
However, from your first hurried "Hey dude", it was clear you had about 3 gazillion other things on your mind, probably related to being a tour manager. The rest is a blur. The show was intense, noisy, at times beautiful, the singer "Gordon" was incredible, but I had no conceptual box to put it in. Later in the van hanging out with the exact same people that I had seen on stage further strained my operating system. I was having a real "Rock Stars are People Too?!" kind of a moment, coupled with trying to comprehend how it is possible for someone to FIRST know a band on a personal level and THEN just bring them on a tour of your country. My brain broke and I immediately forgot how to talk. Band members tried to engage me. "Gordon" asked me how I liked the show. I forget if words or just sounds came out of my dumb stupid mouth, but whatever it was it was totally inadequate. At best the band thought that taking mute college kids out to shows was just some nice charity work that you liked to engage in from time to time, and at worst they thought that I didn't like the show. It haunts me to this day that it's probably the second.
Or hopefully they saw the situation for what it was: a small-town Alaskan hick was having an experience that was TOO BIG and would take some time to process. Did I manage some words as I got out of the van back on Grand Ave in St. Paul? I don't know but I really hope that I managed to say 'thank you'. Just in case I say to you now Rick: thank you for an amazing experience. The details are blurry, but the felt-sense memories are still vivid to me all these years later. And as a small bonus I got an imaginary friend out of the deal that I can talk to anytime things get to be too much. He's a kind man in a dress with the voice of an angel. His name is Gordon.
Shoutout to T’pau and Heart and Soul! Awesome underrated 80s song.