Good morning. Hello. How are you? #371
Saturday roundup, no gardening, long weird thing about Kaizen and Lean Six Sigma, blouses, Thomas Jefferson, yeah, this is really all over the place today.
Good morning! Hello! How are you? Do you live in the Northeast? Did it snow? I’m sorry. As you may know, I watch all of these gardening YouTubers and so many of them live in warmer climates than I do - Texas and California mainly. And their gardens are so far along, it makes me so jealous. But I forget that good old zone 7b North Carolina is pretty warm too. Was talking to a friend yesterday and the late New England snowfall probably ruined some plants he had already put out. I looked up his average last frost date: May 10th. Oof. Of course, growing up, my birthday was May 7th and there was often snow still on the ground. I don’t think my mom started our garden each year until late May, maybe even early June.
Gardening, man. So green but so short.
It’s the weekend! I had yesterday off, so I’m already a ways into my weekend. I went to Lowe’s and bought more dirt. Thrilling adventure, let me tell you. Lotta people there, though. Probably (hopefully) my last garden center excursion for the season. I remember last year I went in, like, late April and my god it was so terrifying. Everyone was in masks and it was outdoors, but still. Just so many people. That early in the pandemic? Terrifying.
I did my podcast podcast yesterday too. Here is my plug for it. I was in a really good mood. Very chatty. Talked too fast. Did a long rambling segment about how Obama should do a Spotify Podcast with the founding fathers. Did a pretty good Obama impression if I say so. myself. Other topics included: Day 406, Vaccines, Chatham County’s 250th anniversary, Pittsboro’s water and the Guardian article, Playset builders getting COVID, spring walks, taxes, buying concert tickets, mom, Jane, work, Apple ATT, doing podcast interviews, more taxes, sociopaths in the workplace, gardening, dirt, composting, getting shit in the ground, more dirt, overwintered pepper failure, writing GMHHAY, plex additions: License to Drive, Soul, The Astronaut’s Wife, Major League, Howard the Duck, Light of Day, Camille Claudel, Vinyl: Lost Horizons, Anna B Savage, Lost Horizons, Insides, Shellac, Cathode, Mogwai, Disco Jazz, Casiotone for the Painfully Alone, Discogs sales: Sebadoh, LL Cool J, Green Day, Yello, Kirsty McColl, Bee Gees guy, Mojave 3, Harry Nilsson, Hayden, The Cure, Music: Dinosaur Jr, Arab Strap, Really From, Ribbon Stage, Godspeed You Black Emperor, Dry Cleaning, Chris Corsano and Bill Orcutt, Le Rev, L7, Demi Lovato (with a long Chuck Negron aside), Kasson Crooker, Taylor Swift, Spirit of the Beehive, The Moon Seven times and all of the Lynn Canfield projects including Area, Ack Ack, Shotgun Wedding, Lanterna and her 80’s tribute band, Alan Parsons Project, Teenage Fanclub, Matthew Dear, Liz Phair, Guided By Voices, Loney Dear, Fionn Regan, SOHN, SNL, Super Store, The Great North, Resident Alien, Thunder Force, Black Panther, Falcon and the Winter Solider, A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers, Fears of a Setting Sun: The Disillusionment of America’s Founders by Dennis Rasmussen.
Check it out. If podcasts are your thing.
Did I do anything else yesterday? Oh yeah! I cleaned the stove and the oven. Talk about a productive day. Top that!
Okay! I made a lot of random notes in my “topics” note yesterday, and there are some that have just been sitting there for weeks. Orphan notes. We’re gonna clear a bunch of em out. So here they are in no particular order:
“Muscle guys” gardening give me a good feeling. One guy at the garden center looked like Jeff Bezos took a lot of steroids. Like bald but super muscular and tough. And he was buying flowers. That made me feel pretty good about things. It’s nice when roided out tough guys have sensitive hobbies.
My mom used the word “blouse” yesterday and it made me giggle. I used to hear that word all the time. I thought to myself “wow there’s a word no one uses anymore,” but I suspected, even then, that people probably do use it. And sure enough, if you Google “blouse” the first two links are from H&M and Ann Taylor, so I guess people still use the word “blouse"?” When’s the last time you heard the word “blouse?” Leave a note in the comments. Here is a button to remind you.
Still reading Fears of a Setting Sun: the Disillusionment of America’s Founders by Dennis Rasmussen. In the Thomas Jefferson section. Man was there ever any greater disappointment than Thomas Jefferson? He is the, like, poster boy for “Hitler had some good ideas.” Just an awful, awful racist human being, who got more racist as he got older. But also had some good ideas. But. ugh. Got all bent out of shape later in life about how the Missouri Compromise and the slavery question was going to threaten the union and possibly lead to civil war and yeah, good for you Nostradamus but maybe, you know, be on the right side of the cause on that one. Jefferson got MORE into slavery as he got older. At one point during the Articles of Confederation era he introduced a bill to ban slavery in the US, and drafted two bills to ban it in Virginia. But by the end of his life? Super into slavery! Not cool.
But really I bring up the book today because it taught me, last night, that Poland used to have a monarch who was elected for life! Like we like to make fun of Alexander Hamilton for believing that the US should have an elected monarch for life. And every time I hear that I think “wow what a crazy idea where did that come from?” and the answer is Poland! Who knew.
Last night I watched the new video my friend Christine made for her band with her husband Tom, Vis Invis Electrique! It was so soothing. Jane, especially, loved it. She stopped what she was doing and sat there mesmerizied. “So pretty,”She said “So many colors.”
It reminded me, philosophically, a bit, of a video I did for my old band Rockets Burst from the Streetlamps in, um, I’m gonna say 1999 or so. Different, in the sense that Christine’s video is meticulously illustrated, whereas the Rockets video uses video footage, but similar in the layered, impressionistic, graphical approach. I had’t watched this in ages. Also, lol, it seems that there is only a 240p version uploaded to youtube. I will fix that in the next few days.
The Arcade Fire released a 45-minute instrumental song exclusively on the Headspace app, entitled “Memories of the Age and Anxiety.” I guess their friends in LCD Soundsystem were like “yeah, totally, we totally recommend doing 45-minute instrumentals sponsored by brands it is definitely worth it” and Arcade Fire were a little jealous so they did it? In any case I need a copy. Does anyone have one? has anyone hooked their Headspace app up to a DAW yet? Pretty please? Am I gonna have to do this myself? I do not want to download a meditation app. Not that I have anything against mediation. Just meditation apps. They’re like work parties. I mean. Clearly I have enjoyed a good work party in my life but… the fundamental mix is unstable and unwise, I have come to believe.
By the time Jane goes to school I want her to know what I do for a living, so when the teacher asks her “what does your daddy do for a living?” or “what job does your daddy have?” (do they still ask those questions in school or is that considered impolitic now) she will say “my daddy is a respectable businessman,” so the teacher will feel vaguely uncomfortable with the answer and think that maybe I am not a respectable businessman. Life goals, right there.
Jane took about 100 photos of us last night. I like this one:
Microsoft should buy Pinterest. Apparently they tried to, for fifty one billion dollars. God. I remember when Pinterest and Tumblr were neck and neck. Oh well. Guess they won that one. Apparently Pinterest decided that fifty one billion dollars was not enough money to buy Pinterest. This is incorrect. And Microsoft is obviously the correct home for Pinterest. Pinterest’s stock has grown 600% over the pandemic. This is irrational. And even with that growth surge, the stock is still not worth fifty one billion dollars. Besides. Microsoft would be a good home for Pinterest. They haven’t fucked up LinkedIn. I mean, well, you know. It’s LinkedIn it’s already fucked up but Microsoft hasn’t made it worse. I’m starting to think Microsoft would be a good acquirer. Look at Teams. They bought MindAlign and Skype, built Teams, and ate Slack’s lunch. They bought this little Apple software startup Forethought Inc and turned its flagship product into one of the most ubiquitous and influential pieces of software in history. Not so bad. Plus fifty two billion dollars.
A friend put in an offer on a condo in New York, the offer was accepted and then, like two weeks later, they un-accepted it and apparently this is a perfectly normal practice in New York and I don’t know how you people can live like that. My god.
I subscribe to too many newsletters now. I like them, I like being super in-the-know on certain topics, it’s useful and they’re definitely better than Twitter accounts or websites to stay up-to-date on, say, AI or Recycling. But it is hilariously obvious when not much has happened in their industry segment and they still have to put out a newsletter. A newsletter edition when the author has nothing to write about is kind of hilarious. That is a thought I, a guy who basically writes a newsletter about nothing, actually had yesterday. It gave me a chuckle. This is the logical end state of newsletters: nothingletters. More news from nowhere. More news from nothing.
I mentioned this in my Why is This Interesting edition down at the bottom in the link roundup, but i find it very interesting that Toyota is not suffering from the same microchip shortages as other automakers because after Fukishima, Toyota implemented a business continuity plan that required the company to keep six months of components on hand. If you have ever worked in certain types of consulting or manufacturing, you’d know about the business world’s obsession over the last 30 or so years for Just-in-Time delivery and manufacturing, Lean Six Sigma, all that bullshit. This is why Tim Cook is CEO of Apple: Because when Steve Jobs returned, one of the lessons he had learned in the wilderness is shareholders and stock analysts hate inventory bloat, and he hired Tim to get their inventory lean and JIT, and it saved them a bunch of money (inventory just sitting there is money just sitting there). The business world loves this shit. But the pandemic has given JIT a good slap in the face and I am here for it. Toyota’s always blazed their own pat - Kaizen would totally win in the Kaizen vs Lean Six Sigma battle of the kaiju.
I profoundly hope that other companies follow suit. I don’t know why, exactly. It is sort of a visceral, emotional feeling: like if businesses can’t recognize the reality of a more volatile world these days, well, then, capitalism has no business being a thing and we may as well all be communist and I am not especially keen to do communism even though I’m not super into capitalism either and maybe I’m some sort of “if FDR had pulled it off with those collectives beyond the TVA that woulda been cool” kinda guy. You know. Communism has some baggage. Also it’s just so tedious this left-wing right-wing thing and there are other paths and whatever I wrote a whole book about this I don’t need to dwell here. Honestly it’s probably a sunk-cost fallacy and facing the horror of realizing that capitalism was a complete waste of time means I never had to do any of this stupid-ass business shit and I coulda just kept making music and gardening. And that realization is just too much to bear. Like a high-level existential asshole version of “well I paid my student loans off, why can’t they?” And maybe, thinking about it, that’s not a good way to be, so, yeah, fuck it. Stay in denial, corporate America. You don’t need business continuity plans. Except the Japanese version of Capitalism isn’t much better. So.
Hrm well this is getting long and I only got through about half of my topics notes, but I think we’ll stop there. Here is a cute photo of our cats:
That was fun. I’m gonna do a ton of gardening today, so by tomorrow you should be receiving the gardening content that you’re craving. We’ll check the compost and plant a ton of plants today and tomorrow. I am excited. I put together this nice wheeled planter yesterday that’s gonna look real nice in the garden. Yeah. This is gonna be a great weekend. I am excited.
Today’s mix is a moody and quiet one. I did a lot of work on the mixes, I’m caught back up, so I don’t have to scramble to finish one right as I am ending writing this thing, with only four or five minutes left until I have to go up and get Jane from bed and feed her. That is nice. Shit it’s only 8:24 right now. But I still have to go through this and do the single half-assed pass of editing I do, and bold topics, and write the little subhead, and copy and paste it into Facebook and then send the email and then wait to receive it and then copy and paste it from the email into Scrivener for the book (easiest way to maintain formatting) so, you know, lots to do still.
This is a great mellow mix. I stand by every song on here. I spoke extensively about the Moon Seven Times on my podcast. I am newly re-obsessed with them. Like to the point I was stalking the singer on her 80’s cover band’s instagram the other day. Not healthy. Will stop. And the Willard Grant Conspiracy. God. What a band. Actually let’s double-check Mojave is still not on Spotify. Nope. Such a shame. Still, though. They wrote a song about Jane. And today is Saturday. And I am going to spend a bunch of it with Jane. So it is a fitting song for the day.
Talk to you tomorrow! Have a lovely weekend. Thanks for reading. It means a lot to me. Drop a line. Unless that will interfere with your hyper-scheduled weekend fun time. Pretty nice Saturday planned. Gonna go to Home Depot. Pick up some wallpaper. Some flooring. Maybe Bed Bath and Beyond. Not sure if there’s gonna be time. If that’s the case, forget me and stick to the plan.
“Blouse” : definitely a mom word
Had the exact same thought about too many newsletters this week. Strangely though, the ones I'm realizing I love the most are the ones that are so very specific. Movie Pudding is one that I love which you may also enjoy.