Good morning. Hello. How are you? #345

Good morning. Hello. How are you? I am okay. My back still hurts. I have today off — one of the mental health days Timehop has been giving during the pandemic. Of course, I didn’t realize it was a day off, and I scheduled one of my mom’s tests right in the middle of the day, thus breaking up a beautiful, unsullied stretch of potential garden productivity. Ah well. This initiated a fairly large rage, sadness and self-anger spiral for about twenty minutes when I put two and two together the other day - free time is so precious right now¹. But I think I am okay about it now. I can still manage to get a few things done today, I hope. Janet took Jane last night, so I have this whole morning until noon undisturbed. It’s not as much as a whole day, but it’s not nothing, and still hugely appreciated. I will survive.

Yesterday was rough with its meeting-every-hour cadence. Reminded me of my old life at the Barbarian Group, where every day I would get to work, look at my calendar, and start going to meetings, at least 8 a day, sometimes 13 or 14. I would never know what the next meeting was going to be about, really, till I got there. Then I’d have to spend the first minute or so of the meeting trying to load up my brain with all of the relevant information like a slow, old 90’s computer. Perhaps like the Bounty Bear. I do not enjoy that life anymore. But I got through it. It was, however, definitely one of those days where you wish the meeting you were in was a meeting where you were on mute and with your camera off, not really listening because you’re just a peripheral participant. Would have killed for a few of those.

(Really can’t get enough of that movie.)

Ah, well. What can I say. I am getting soft.

A programming note, today, a horrific one. Felix Salmon pointed out to me that no, in fact, we did not get a break from mass shootings, the media just took a break from reporting them. I’m mortified I didn’t know this, doubly so given how much media I relentlessly consume, follow Shannon Watts and the Parkland kids on Twitter, and try and stay informed. I was aware of the rise in the violent crime and murder rates, and I guess I should have put two and two together on the mass shootings, but. Yeah. I stand corrected.

Additional programming note: If you are a non-tech person (and thank you so so much for being here, non tech people. I really prefer to write about non-tech these days), but are curious about the Substack brouhaha, this was a great writeup explaining why people are upset about it.

Third programming note: I’m gonna try Substack’s footnotes functionality today, because I’ve always loved footnotes, but I am thinking the GMHHAY format has so formed in the Facebook world, that the discursiveness that footnotes mitigate has now become part of the house style. We shall see.

A thing I’ve been following that I’m kind of obsessed about: Chuck Shumer’s blocking the revised flood insurance rates, because, you know, Long Island. The quick version of this is that flood insurance rates are one of the easiest tools we have to make a large impact on climate change: the government artificially influences the market by having FEMA publish a flood insurance zone map which influences the rates. The map has historically been niavely conservative, and thus many houses are paying way below what they should for flood insurance, thus incenting people to build where they shouldn’t be. This has been (somewhat) getting fixed over the last year. The new rates were supposed to go into effect right around the election but of course Trump punted on that. But so did Schumer, because… New York has a coast I guess? Ninety-six percent of people would see no change or a change less than $20, but a small few with big houses on the coast could see rates as high as 50%. This is good. This is the project working, this is the solution to the problem. But I guess we can’t have that. I have always been sorta tolerant of Chuck even as people blithely imply he’s terrible but… this one irks me, not gonna lie.

I am listening to a C Cat Trance album I just got in the mail that I have not heard before: Khamu. I am realizing as I write this that this album is actually on Spotify and I could have just listened to it there, but it’s nice to have the vinyl. I am getting increasingly antsy and concerned about my vinyl collection - the space it takes up, the burden, but also the environmental impact. But at least with used records I don’t have to feel *quite* so bad about it. I’m keeping these slices of petroleum products safe from future pollution. I tried to write a short story once about exactly this topic but lost steam and just published it halfway done.

Oh! This is good shit you’re gonna like this. Last night Jane was going to Grammy’s and I was coming up the stairs to say goodbye. Our stairway to the basement has a lot of my old rock memoribilia in it. At the top of the stairs is a framed Fac51 Haçienda mail order form where you could buy Factory Records merch. It is nice. Here's a picture of it:

Now, longtime readers my recall that I have a Keynote deck I use as Flashcards to teach Jane punctuation marks. She’s very good at them. We just ran through the deck on Sunday for the first time in a month or so and she remembered most of them, but she had forgotten the cédée and the circumflex. Still, she definitely got a 90%.

You will note the large C with a cédée on it on this piece of art. Can you see where this is going? It’s so good.

“Cédée” she said.

“Yes! Good job.” I was so proud. Proud daddy.

“It’s cédée shirt.” And then she just laughed and laughed and laughed.

Jane made very excellent pun.

God. I feel like freakin Paul Graham telling this story.² But it’s true. I swear.

Also yesterday, Jane asked how to spell “Yup.” But I wasn’t sure if she was saying “yep” or “yup” and I didn’t quite know how to proceed and keep it simple. I could pick one and teach her that, but I like them both. I could try and explain it but those sort of grammatical exceptions are still a bit confusing to her. I made no decision on this topic and avoided it. Oh also she did that memorizing thing again. I was wearing my Pygmalion-style Slowdive tour t-shirt and she said right away in the morning “Slowdive!”

These things make me very excited.

I have to buy my mom more crossword puzzles today and… it’s actually really hard! Like, there is no newspaper anymore. And I did find two books of crosswords at Walmart in the old-people books section (right next to the old-people electronics section and the old-people records section and I swear they should probably just move all of those sections up the front of the store by the old people medical supply section). But my mom has worked her way through those. And, so… where do I get more? If I go back to Walmart…. aren’t I just going to get the same two books? They were with the books, not the magazines. Do they… refresh? No, right? I need to find a new source. I ordered one off of Amazon but, seems to me that this is a fairly interesting problem. Can you subscribe to crossword puzzles? Do print newspapers still have them? We get two county print papers but they don’t have them (I don’t think) and in any case they’re weeklies, they wouldn’t be frequent enough. Anyone have any solutions here? I’m actually semi-serious when I say this would probably make a half-decent startup.

Ugh someone just returned a Bee Gees CD I sold because they’re one of those collectors who cares about matrix runouts³. These people are so frustrating. It makes perfect sense for highly priced stuff where each variant matters, but this is a commodity CD sold for a couple bucks, and not every matrix runout variant has a separate entry on Discogs, and in any case, there’s no way to tell on Discogs if this is a CD for which people care about the small laser-printed words on the inner circle of a 20 year-old CD. It’s only the second time I’ve been burned by this, but. I wish there was some way to make it more obvious.

ANYWAY. Oh! Gardening news. I had a long talk with my neighbor Ricardo yesterday and he watched one of my YouTube videos and pointed out that my grow lights were too close to the plants. OF COURSE! I had lowered them when they were seeds, mentally noting that I needed to raise them again, but I forgot to raise them once the plants sprouted and grew! This was a big part of the reason I’ve been having so much trouble with water. I am so thankful and this marks the second time I’ve gotten some useful gardening feedback from my YouTube videos, so even though barely anyone is watching them, they are proving to be valuable. That is great.

My big goal for this weekend is to get the compost bins built. The weather looks iffy, but I am optimistic. Wish me luck.

Today’s mix is a mix of cover versions - volume 6. Astute listeners will notice the transition from a cover of the Wedding present, to a cover by the wedding present. I learned about Should, and their cover of Spangle one late night at the wonderful Greenpoint bar Ramona. It was playing, I asked the bartender about it, he went and looked and he told me who it was. He also mentioned that the owner of Ramona makes them play specific music and the bartenders don’t get to choose which, if you ask me, is heresy and should be a labor law violation.⁴ The one exception to this should be the old, non-internet-enabled Jukebox at the Magician, which was fantastic. Sonic Youth’s “Superstar” came on yesterday. I desperately wanted to put it on this covers mix but it’s already been on a previous one. But it got me profoundly nostalgic for that jukebox, for that bar, for that amazing woman who has bartended there for years. I don’t know how to get in touch with her but she has been a huge part of my life for well over a decade. Jill and I used to meet up there - or 151 - at 1 or 2 AM when we had finished all our other stuff and have a nightcap before we went home. And the same bartender is still there today, I go visit, she asks how NC is. I really, really want to go back.

A related thought I had yesterday, regarding my reminiscing about live Jesus and Mary Chain shows, and generally all my reminiscing about live music: right now we’re in this liminal space where such reminiscing can be attributed to either the pandemic or generally-just-gettin-old. That is, paradoxically, kind of nice. Like if there were no pandemic and I rambled on and on about this-or-that rock show I saw twenty years ago (and we all know I’m terrible about this), well, I’m just an old fart. But right now? Such reminiscing is a statement of support for the live music industry as a whole. It is an activist statement, a progressive political one. It is a civic duty. That’s nice. The difference between your dottering grandmother blathering on about her prom vs marching in a protest march or something. Bwahaha, okay Rick. Shut up.

Okay that’s it for today. I feel like this edition of GMHHAY is missing one little 👩‍🍳💋, but it’s not coming to me.

1. Free time really has been one of the great redistributions of the pandemic: some people had so much of it, others had so little. I’m sympathetic to both sides but, god, I could use a smidge more.

2. Paul Graham is a sadly misguided financier who tells stories about his kids on the internet that I, and some of my friends, are convinced are mostly made-up to promote his questionable politics.

3. Sometimes when trying to find a relative, representative sentence to bold in one of these paragraphs about nothing, I have a very hard time.

4. Hrm maybe that bar wasn’t so excellent when viewed through the prism of labor rights, and I was already giving it a pass for its dodgy clientele. But the drinks. Delicious.