Good morning! Hello! How are you? I am good. Sun is shining, etc. Just returned from the weekly shopping run, which was made more sucky because the evil Harris-Teeter (god those guys are awful) just made up that a bunch of shit in our delivery yesterday was out of stock. This was after delaying the delivery twice with this great passive aggressive text that says “if this is a problem, call.” Oh, I see. You can text me the bad news but I have to call you up on voice to complain and sound like a total asshole to some poor delivery driver. Big nope. Anyway, we’re talking stuff that has never been out-of-stock, even in the darkest times of pandemic hoarding. So I went there this morning and sure enough, it was all in stock, with plenty of supply. Maddening. Also it looks like I lost my driver’s license somewhere in this whole errand because it’s been a year and I still don’t understand how the pockets work on the only jacket I ever wear that I’ve owned for, like, five years.
(“darkest times of pandemic hoarding” is a great phrase - the sort of thing you could throw into your sci-fi movie to describe a dark past. Like Obi Wan obliquely mentioning the Clone Wars in ANH)
Other than that, everything went all right. A dude at the recycling center pulled up and tossed five or six random cans into the bin from various parts of his car. Then he left. That was his whole recycling errand. I suppose that given the time - exactly 7AM - he could have been on his way to work or something and maybe he does this, like, every day. Reminds me of my old friend Mike who’s back of his car was filled with Dunkin cups. Mike could have used a collection center on his commute.
Today (I think) marks the tenth anniversary of my good friend, old roommate and amazing artist Jill Simonsen passing. I mentioned yesterday how my mom has relegated me to the guest bedroom, and how nice it was to sleep amongst my books. But there is another benefit to it: I get to sleep with the three large paintings of Jill’s. I’m so happy to own these. Especially the antennae one. I don’t think it’s the exact one, but I remember Jill painting one of the paintings in this series in our living room on Clinton Street. Meticulously, patiently going over every line. She was so good. Yesterday, I re-read the off-the-cuff obituary I wrote the week she died, and it made me cry, of course. I had forgotten that I wrote a one-year-later check-in. It was such an honor to take Fanny into our home, and she was a wonderful memorial to Jill for many years. It was doubly sad when Fanny left us a couple years ago.
For good measure, here is a video of Jill washing a car:
Don’t subscribe to that YouTube channel. That’s my old one. I made a dumb mistake. It’s too late to fix it. Now I have two YouTube channels. Which is dumb. But starting from scratch is fun.
Speaking of which I finished the YouTube review of the cardboard shredder. It is good stuff. It features a cameo by Jane at the end. I read this great article by this guy who does pedantic product reviews on YouTube about gadgets and it inspired me. I’m not going to, like, do it as a profession, but I feel like when I spend a ton of time trying to solve a problem, like cardboard shredding, that other people might have, I should put the content up there for the next person to learn from. Kinda like, you know, we envisioned the internet back in the day before it exploded and killed us all. Plus they’re easy to make and kinda fun and I miss all of this. I miss back when I, like, produced graphical and motion content for a living before I went exclusively into management. It was fun. I miss knowing all of the Final Cut Pro keystrokes (I haven’t even dared to open Final Cut Pro again since starting these videos. But i will soon).
One of Emma’s clients - a major media company - heavily relies on Airtable to produce a lot of their marketing content. Emma, and her division of the company, has a giant deliverable due this morning. And yesterday Airtable sent out an email about a “planned outage” at 11:30ET. Now, 11:30 is kinda late, but on the west coast — where this major media company has, natch, a giant presence — that’s 8:30 PM! The day of a huge deliverable by what I presume to be one of Airtable’s larger clients! That seems insane! Your planned outages should be at, like midnight west coast time! And maybe consult with one of your largest clients first? Crazytown.
Does anyone out there happen to know if Tony Wakeford got cancelled along with Death in June?
So I was on Onlyfans (for the articles) the other day, and this 29 year-old independent content creator was doing a Q&A for her fans. It’s a pretty common schtick in the Patreon/OnlyFans world: paying members get to ask a question and once a month or so you answer a bunch of questions from the fans. I very much enjoy Adam Savage’s for example (here’s one I enjoyed this week about working on R2D2). And it was the greatest thing. This grown woman was staying at her parents house, so she was hiding in her old childhood bedroom, and she had to speak really quietly because for some reason (I can’t imagine) most of the questions were of a deeply personal and sexual in nature. BUT — and this is the interesting part — there were so many questions about stock tips. This isn’t some pervy thing you need to go look up in Urban Dictionary. These consumers of adult content were asking their favorite adult performer in which stocks to invest. It was amazing. And you know what? Her answers were really good! She extolled the philosophy of Warren Buffet, promoting value investing and really getting to know the companies in which you invest. She said she couldn’t get behind the Robinhood and day trading thing, even though she had plenty of friends who did it. She exhibited deep knowledge of the various Reddit forums on stock investing. When the first question was asked I admit I (perhaps sexistly) thought “oh god this is not a good direction for America) but after listening to her answers? I’m pretty okay with the financial advisory industry being disrupted by OnlyFans.
Also: Normalize discussing the cultural influence of OnlyFans.
Also Also: Substack could really use auto-replacement of dashes with em-dashes like Medium has. I have gotten lazy.
If you are a fan of Claire Denis and/or the Tindersticks, I have put Trouble Every Day up in my Plex. If you’re not on my Plex and would like it, drop a line and let me know. Haven’t had the strength to re-watch it yet. Took a lot out of me back in the day. Next up from DVD.Com is Un Couer En Hiver, The Astronaut’s Wife and Dog Park. Sadly there have been no decent 4k UHD Blu Rays at Wal Mart for months.
Got an exciting mix for you today. Long-time readers will recall that back in high school, my excellent friend Carrie and I would make mix tapes for each other as part of a contest to make the most depressing mix tapes ever. They are some really good tapes (here’s one from the archive if you’re curious). Anyway, a good while back we had all chatted in the comments about taking up this hobby again, and I did it. It took me a good while to finish a single mix, but I am quite fond of this one. It’s interesting, when I was younger so many songs on the mixes were about thwarted love. That is distinctly less so now. Eh, actually, I take it back. Looks like about five of these songs are about romance in some way. But that, you know, includes Mount Eerie and… we all know how that turned out. Or if you don’t, maybe that’s for the best. God, that guy’s had it rough. Only one song on this tape is from “the old days” and honestly it’s not one of the most depressing songs I know anymore, but I thought it was a nice continuity hook.
So if you’re feeling down, annoyed with the last lingering throes of winter, perhaps today’s your lucky day and you can listen to these really depressing songs.
Much more to say — mind’s a bit racing today — but I think I will save some stuff for tomorrow. Time to go get Jane and bring her to breakfast and — oh. Yes. Play the “plate game.” Every morning I unpack the dishwasher. And every morning I get a single plate out of the dishwasher on which to prepare Jane’s breakfast. The game is to keep using the same plate for as many days as possible. Take out the plate, start breakfast, unload the dishwasher, begin the new day’s cycle of loading up the dishwasher with the plate I just used, thus putting it in prime position to be the plate I pick up the next morning. It seems easy but I am shockingly bad at it. I think my record is only, like, six days.
Similarly, there’s the “ginger game.” Did you know that the best way to store minced ginger is in vodka? It’s true it works great that shit last forever (well, like a month or more). PLUS, if you do it right and don’t contaminate the ginger, at the end you can strain the vodka and have ginger infused vodka! Double bonus! Except! In order to do this I have to remember every single day for like a month to spoon out the ginger into the wok before I spoon out the garlic or shallots, which are in oil. Because if I do those in reverse, I will get oil in the ginger, thus making it not suitable for future libation. It is so hard. I have never succeeded. I want ginger infused vodka so bad. But I keep messing up.
Brown Bear understands my problem. Time to go have a talk with him. Here’s a picture of him having a chat with me whilst we play “under the covers” yesterday evening. We had a nice talk about the challenges of parental home care. He really listens, Brown Bear.
Hope you have a lovely Wednesday!
I would recommend not watching that Claire Denis film. Or any Claire Denis film.