Good morning. Hello. How are you? #364
Late start, Apple ATT, fear of publishing, more stupid Joe Manchin, potholes and Merle the Iris trader
Good morning! Hello! How are you? I am good. I overslept. A ton. I woke up at 9. It was so crazy. I kept sort of waking up thinking “boy the alarm has to go off any moment now, I sure am well rested,” but it never went off. Then finally I thought “well I guess I’ll just get up oh look at me I am so hardcore getting up before my alarm,” except, well, no.
Come to think of it, this wasn’t so crazy. This was my life for, like, fifteen years. Probably yours too. Doesn’t happen much anymore, though.
But hey! Because of that, you get a nice photo of the cherry blossom tree after sunrise today:
Cherry blossoms every day until they’re gone. Don’t worry, that’ll be, like, tomorrow or something. So beautiful, so ephemeral, blah blah. Man. Thank you, Keith, builder and former occupant of my home, for electing to plant this thing.
Wow I am very disoriented writing this thing at 10:15 instead of 7:30. I feel like the day’s already gone by. You’ve probably already had breakfast or something. I really messed things up, I am sorry.
Okay! What do we have today?
I wrote about Apple’s App Tracking Transparency framework for my friends’ Noah and Colin’s Why is this Interesting newsletter. If you’ve been around a while, you will recall I wrote something similar for this newsletter. I figured that, you know, maybe I should endeavor to write some business thing for a wider audience once again. Though I don’t really do that much anymore. It’s too scary, I can’t handle the pressure. I used to write about business and politics all the time on the internet, but every time I wrote something on the internet that blew up, you’d always get a few trolls just making you feel like shit. The proportions could be 100 good comments for every 1 trolly comment, but it still fucked with me. I am too thin-skinned. Books are fine, there are one or two middling-to-poor reviews of my various books on Goodreads or something, but you have to go looking for those reviews, and in any case, having all the reviews in one place makes it easier to see the good outweigh the bad. But when you write a piece for Medium or a publication or something, the troll comments just keep trickling in to you for days or weeks, at random times when you’re trying to watch Seinfeld reruns or something. It’s too much. I just stopped. It’s also why I barely promote anything I write. I guess this newsletter is a slight toe-dipping back into that, stuck between a lot of gardening talk to weed out the trolls. Seems to be working so far.
Joe Manchin went on CNN last night and claimed that the insurrection on January 6 was one of the things that inspired him to keep the filibuster. You read that right. A bunch of people violently attacked the capitol, so we better give them what they want. Once again, he tried to couch it in history and made the claim that politics have gotten more vitriolic as we’ve weakened the filibuster, which is an absurd claim. First, politics have always been vitriolic - I can say this because last night I read about how Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson actually anonymously funded a newspaper to attack the president, his own boss, in insanely ad hominem terms. This really is a low we’ve not even seen today. Imagine if Janet Yellen were secretly funding Newsmax or some shit. That’s what was happening. But even beyond that, we all know politics have been getting progressively more vitriolic for decades now, regardless of the various vicissitudes of changes in the filibuster. Did politics get substantially less vitriolic when the “pocket filibuster” came along? Nope! There is zero correlation and he knows it! But I gotta say. Tying it into the insurrection as a defense for the filibuster. That is pretty loathesome.
Incidentally, here are some great terms Jefferson and Madison used to disparage Hamilton and other Federalists: Monocrat. Angloman. Stockjobber.
Sounds like the code words to activate the Winter Soldier. By the way, that show is really pretty disappointing. Serious pacing issues. I’ve read that that’s because they cut out an entire global pandemic plot because, I guess, they’re wimps. But the show makes no sense and is going nowhere and it is a real bummer.
Took my mom to a clinic in Raleigh yesterday. It went fine. We’re getting close to wrapping up and mom getting to go back home. But the big news is: they paved the potholes on the merge ramp between 15-501 and 54! These potholes have been there forever. At least six years, as long as I’ve lived here. They’re on my commute to RDU and I have a whole system for avoiding them — you can tell the locals when they drive past those potholes because they locals all avoid them. And now they’re just… gone. I can’t believe it. I feel as if a part of my soul has been torn away. Poof.
[I would put a Horace Slughorn gif here but serious I am done with that woman]
Here’s a heartwarming story for you. I was going to recount it but i think I will just paste it as-is from our local community chatlist:
Date: Wed, 7 Apr 2021 11:47:17 +0000 (UTC)
From: Darla H <XXXXX@yahoo.com>
Subject: Looking for a lady named Merle
Hi friends....I had a lady show up at my house, out of nowhere, and ask me if I would like to trade "Irises"....that she is collecting different colors and would like one of mine...and she would drop off some other colors for me....I told her absolutely !....I have lost her contact information...and would love to thank her for this beautiful white Iris she gave to me....she said they are rare as well....I am so proud that I was able to keep it alive after the transplant....so I would love to thank her for it.....I was just thinking she knocked on some other neighbors doors and got to know them as well....and they might have her contact info....if you know her, would you be so kind to contact her to see if you can give me her contact information...I know she would love to see these gorgeous blooms.
Thanks in advance
Darla
Does that not just warm your heart?
Life in the country, folks.
I ready yesterday that 40% of my county is vaccinated. That seems impressive, though I haven’t actually looked up whether it is or not.
It’s Emma’s birthday today. I made her a nice flourless chocolate cake. She actually wanted two cakes for her birthday, so I made her one, and also bought her an ice cream cake, because she loves ice cream cakes. We are getting dinner alone, which is huge for us. She is feeling much better today from the shot, thank you for all of your kind words. We found a nice cake platform and bell jar from her halloween decorations so this is sitting on the counter right now:
mmmmm.
I bought 20 bags of additional garden soil yesterday. Should be delivered today. Gotta make a call and find out when. But yes, tomorrow. HARDCORE GARDENING. So excited. Gonna get as many plants out and seeds sown as I can. Hopefully my new sun gardening hat will be here. Hopefully I will remember to wear sunscreen. Hopefully it doesn’t rain. Except we want it to rain because the entire town is covered in pollen and it is insanely disgusting. Our “resting” air quality, indoors, on the air quality monitor is usually 4 or 8. Right now it’s resting around 50. Because of the pollen. I can feel it even through my four allergy medications. It’s intense. So, in a perfect world, it would rain until, like, 8 AM, stop till noon, rain till 1, stop till 4:30 or so, then rain all night. Yes please.
If I were on it today I would do a birthday mix for Emma, but I am not, and I only have one mix ready today: A country mix. So you get a country mix. It also, I am seeing now, has two Lucinda Williams songs on it, but too bad, there’s not time to fix it. Oh shit two Pistol Annies songs too. that’s okay, the Pistol Annies are great. Lotta lady country on here. That is a good thing.
Okay, well, I am very frazzled and my meetings are about to start, so this is all we have time for today. God. Getting up late. Ripple effect across your entire day. Very stressful!
It’s Friday! Yay! Let’s all have lovely weekends!
ah yes, jesus and mary chain: HUGE country act. [wink] HAPPY BIRTHDAY, EMMA—i'm so glad the immune response passed quickly, and she can properly enjoy her day. that cake looks DELICIOUS.