Good morning! Hello! How are you? We got your Good morning! Hello! How are you? here. Extra extra! Special edition of Good morning! Hello! How are you?! Read all about it.
Programming note 1: My wife would like it known that the black-and-gold motif in the living room is inspired by my framed Factory Records and Haçienda material on the walls in the adjoining stairwell, not by the Soft Cell song Sex Dwarf. That is just lovely and I am touched.
Programming note 2: I should really learn that the M in Walmart is not capitalized. Everyone does this to me at Timehop — capitalizing the H and calling it TimeHop. And when they’re, like, a vendor or someone trying to sell me something it really irks me. So I am sensitive to it. Even though I’m not trying to sell anything to Walmart. At the moment.
I went to a bar last night. Can you believe it? I went to a bar and saw a friend and met a couple new people and had a couple beers and then I came home and went to bed. It was thrilling. Yes, the bar was mostly in the old bar’s parking lot. But I can still claim I went to that bar. It was very weird. Everyone wore masks when they walked around between their seats outside and the bar inside, or when they went to the bathroom, but then they sat down with friends and took their masks off and drank beverages together. It was verrrry exciting. It was pretty crowded to! I mean, like, mostly every table in the two-patio back area was taken. Not sure if this was because of Cinco De Mayo or this is just the way things are out there in the “real world,” but I didn’t even mind. I was vaccinated, my friend was vaccinated, her other two friends were vaccinated. SO EXCITING.
On the other hand, I have completely lost the skills I used to take for granted about going out. My version of the ole spectacles, testicles, wallet, watch trope is completely out the window. I kept forgetting everything. Forgot to lock the car. Forgot my nicotine lozenges. Could not decide what to do about my hair. I did remember to bring actual cash to the bar, though, and I paid with actual cash for a can of beer from a friendly woman behind a bar. Thrilling.
My friend Miranda was in town, picking up a sweet old 90’s Subaru in excellent condition for $4,000. She is driving it back to Western Mass today. Wish her luck. She stayed in Chapel Hill for one night, had dinner at Crook’s Corner with two friends (I am so jealous she got to go to Crook’s Corner we are going to have to go soon. It had a lovely patio before the pandemic). And she and those friends met me at one of my favorite bars in Chapel Hill, OCSC. Just lovely. Another great thing was that the two friends, though they live in Mebane, knew the status of most Chapel Hill bars and restaurants, which had nice outdoor areas, etc. So that was useful. But really, couldn’t ask for a better person to gently guide me back into society than Miranda. Thank you thank you!
Really. Just a shockingly thrilling adventure. I was dreading it beforehand, also because I was pretty sleepy from having gotten up an hour early like I always do on Wednesdays, but the whole thing worked great.
Those other 100 people who were at the bar that clearly have been going to bars for quite a while would probably think I’m a lunatic. Maybe you do too, having been going out for a while now. Well, that’s fine. I’m a n00b. What can I say.
Also I am going to need to lose this COVID weight. It is ridiculous.
Yesterday I gave the Raphaels a listen - Stuart Adamson’s post-Big Country band, a Country-ish band from when he lived in Nashville. It was pretty good! He seemed real sad. I am probably reading too much into it. It is hard not to.
The Facebook Oversight Board — the faux, is-it-independent-or-is-it-not “Supreme Court” Facebook has set up to police its moderation decisions — made a decision on Facebook’s ban of Donald Trump yesterday. If you want my unpopular opinion, the board got the decision almost exactly right. They said “yeah that guy said a bunch of shitty and clearly bad stuff and banning him makes sense but since you don’t actually have a policy of what will get you permanently banned, you should probably make one. Do it in the next six months. Trump can stay banned in the meantime.” I mean, the whole board is kind of an insane, weird thing. No one really believes that Facebook will listen to it when it rules in a way they don’t like on some actually important decision. There is a sense from everyone that the board will, one day, step out of its narrowly proscribed lane and rule that Facebook has to do something bigger that it doesn’t want to do. And then the fireworks will fly. But today is not that day. Today is the day where Facebook made a board that they could blame for their unpopular decisions and that board deftly avoided that pitfall. The whole thing is basically a charade but I can’t find fault in the members of the board’s actions. They seem to understand the charade, their role in it and the potential longer-term opportunity. I still suspect the whole thing will probably end with a whimper, but today is not that day.
I got a new, unsolicited credit card in the mail. It seems real. It’s from Barclay’s. It has a $25,000 credit limit on it. I don’t need it. But I suppose it couldn’t hurt to have more credit they say they like that when calculating your credit score, right? Ha look at me. My score was in the 200s for a decade but now I’m all a grown-ass man with 800+ furrowing his brow and rubbing his chin wondering if it could be better. Fuckin capitalism. Anyway, the weird thing about this credit card is it says RICHARD WEBB BARBARIAN GROUP on it, and, like, well, I haven’t worked there in ten years? And now I’m all paranoid. Is Barbarian still using my credit? How did this totally new bank get my mailing address and associate it with a company I left four years before i got this address? And what would actually happen if I called and activated it?
There was a super fascinating article in Bloomberg about Jeff Bezos and how he won his battle against The Enquirer, back when they leaked his affair and claimed they had a Bezos dick pick (they didn’t. They had been lied to by Bezos’ new girlfriend’s brother). It' is all monumentally clever, what Bezos did, to win that battle. However, also, as it turns out, the owner of one of our most trusted newspapers lied to us, or at least strongly mislead us. The genius of Bezos’s victory is he got the public to believe that The Enquirer’s actions against him were politically motivated, and perhaps tied to Saudi Arabia and the Trump administration. It does seem conceivable that the publishers of The Enquirer wanted to destroy Bezos, and the article never really goes into why they wanted to destroy him. So one could argue that base urge to destroy Bezos was politically motivated. But it does not, benefitting from hindsight, seem to be tied to the Trump administration or Saudi Arabia. This is very important because, you will recall, The Enquirer got caught doing Trump’s dirty work, the law got involved, and The Enquirer and its executives signed a consent decree — basically a legal settlement with the Justice Department saying “yeah, we did bad things, thank you for letting us off with a warning we promise we won’t do that anymore and if we do, you can prosecute us.”
Bezos knew this, so when Bezos started saying in public “oh this seems related to Trump and the Saudis” he wasn’t just doing normal deflecting, he was also alerting the Justice Department to come investigate these guys some more, and freaking them out at the possibility. It was brilliant.
It was also, as far as this article tells us, untrue.
I’m sure he couched his words — I’m not going to go back and read his bonkers Medium piece again — but still. This seems… not cool. Nefariously genius. The actual work of a Bond villain. Impressive.
I’m working on this radio station for Emma, and I sort of have it figured out, but this heavy rotation, light rotation thing is making it basically impossible to do it in iTunes. I can sort-of do it using a combination of playlists and smart playlists. I made a playlist of heavy rotation and one of light rotation, then a smart rotation that says “take 20 items from the Heavy and Light playlists” and… it works? It takes 19 songs from the Heavy playlist, and 1 from the Light playlist. But… I don’t know why?
Like nothing in that set-up dictates how many to take from each playlist? Does it just magically know? it doesn’t seem like something I can rely on. Also the “live updating” only seems to update the playlists when a new song is added, which isn’t going to work. I would want the thing to update every 2 hours or so, because that’s about as long as a radio station’s rotation cycle lasts. It’s weird if you don’t hear a popular band in more than two hours.
It’s kind of shocking to me how hard this is and I’m not exactly sure how to do it. I am not going to have to spend an inordinate amount of time researching the ten or twenty various “radio station” software offerings from the shareware world, none of which seem, on a cursory glance, to be built for this. They’re all mostly focused on internet streaming, not automating the song selection from heavy, medium and light playlists.
Well, I guess I should have kept up my career as a radio station music director. Doesn’t seem to be a job that AI is coming for any time soon.
Today’s mix is a mix of just stuff. But it’s good stuff, honest. It has a nice flow to it, too. You will enjoy it. If you like rock and/or roll.
Have a mostly meeting-free day, and one big long deliverable to work on. So let’s get crackin! Let’s get those decks cleared for my four-day birthday vacation! EXCITING!
Hope you have a lovely Thursday!
dude you better call and investigate this new credit card. i do not trust that AT ALL.
your night out sounds downright intoxicating (and i don't mean in the booze sense!) i think i've met exactly one new person during the pandemic and it was a thrilling evening for me.
also enjoying keeping up with your radio station. i hope you figure it out!