Good morning. Hello. How are you? #408
The end of the mask era, the pandemic as a mid-life crisis replacement, how bad Google is at search, thinking too much about a YouTube video, and Luke O'Neil's wise words about restaurant workers.
Good morning! Hello! How are you? Welcome to Wednesday. Wednesday is a good name. I wish I had more opportunities to name people and things. Wednesday would be a good one. I have been naming things at work, but they’re all acronyms, it’s not as fun. We have code names at work for other things, but those follow a set paradigm, and it’s naught to do with me. I have a few kids and pets, but those are joint affairs. I really want to name something Wednesday. And something Thurston. And Charlotte Susan, because then she or it would be Charlotte S. Webb.
Just back from the Walmart, where a good 90% of the employees there have stopped wearing masks. The vast majority of the (very few) shoppers were still wearing masks, but not all - maybe 80%. This means that my dream of America becoming like Asia and wearing masks routinely is dying, just like any dream we had of European, Fabian safety-net-style health care. Just a fantasy. Speaking of the Fabians, I can find no evidence that I am related to Beatrice Webb, and it has made me sad for a very long time. While we’re speaking of Webbs who founded universities, I can also find no evidence I am related to William H Webb, founder of the Webb Institute of Naval Architecture, though the geography make it somewhat more conceivable.
Anyway, the mask situation also means that I am hereby transitioning from a good, faithful citizen of America who believed in personal sacrifice for the greater good, into some sort of weird reclusive weirdo, who shops at 7 AM not because it’s healthy or safe but because he’s a weirdo and doesn’t want to be around people. This pandemic happening at the age of 47-49 is interesting. I didn’t feel middle aged before the pandemic, and I didn’t feel like I was having a mid-life crisis. I think the pandemic is just going to be the bridge I cross from one human phase to another — just like everyone else, of course, but in my case — and perhaps that of other middle-aged people? — it seems to be taking the place of any midlife crisis. The pandemic is the crucible, and the catalyst for change. It is kind of nice, in a way, because unlike other midlife crises where you’re just sitting there, then BOOM! I MUST CHANGE EVERYTHING!, this one has an outside reason, and a valid one. But yeah, coming out the other side, feels more clear I won’t be the same. Not sure if that’s good or bad.
Anyway, Walmart had no tomato cages. No new Blu Ray discs. No new vinyl. They had no parmesean cheese in solid blocks. Now, I know Walmart is not really a cheese mecca, but you’d think they’d have, like… one kind? Kinda shocking. Do you guys know about the whole deli situation at Walmart? They used to have real delis with deli workers, but they shut them down to shut down some labor activism. I am trying to find a link here, but it’s like finding a needle in a haystack, searching Google for specific dodgy Walmart labor practices. In any case, my Walmart has a deli, but it has been empty for years now, right around when I read this article. So, you know, evidence sitting right in front of me. A fully built deli that hasn’t had an employee in it since, like, 2017 or so. Definitely not a COVID thing, preceded it by a good bit.
Speaking of not being able to find something on Google, can I tell you how much Google sucks? Google sucks. It sucks in so many ways. We are all blind to how much Google sucks. OH. WAIT. To be clear, I am not talking about the company Google. They suck, sure, but not any more than a bajillion other tech companies. I am talking about the product Google. That we all use a hundred times every day and subconsciously think can find anything. Well, it can’t. It is garbage. Google doesn’t just suck it sucks in so many ways:
This guy Brian Feldman is shutting down his Substack. I don’t know Brian, but I can pick on his internet references (Urlesque, memes) and pin down a rough period he started on the internet. Oh wait, he says: eleven years ago. It made me feel very old. Anyway, in his (very good) essay, he said something that kinda hit me like a thunderbolt, even though I conceptually knew it already: “Finding the unique stuff takes more work than you might think, because everything is personalized algorithms and patterns and nothing is indexed by Google anymore.” This is way one in which Google sucks now: personalizations and algorithms have made it less useful. This one is, perhaps, not their fault, but, boy, is it true.
The second way Google sucks we have discussed before, which is what I call the “Weirwood scenario,” where Google has just decided that George RR Martin invented Weirwood, even though it is manifestly not true, but you cannot find that truth on Google, because Weirwood is now part of something super popular, so that is the only search results you get for the term, even when using all those clever search parameters like the minus sign.
This is related to the third way Google sucks, which is that it doesn’t understand books or research papers. It can index them, but it can’t parse them in any meaningful way aside from exact search terms.
Then we have the self-dealing, where something like 70% of a Google Search Results page now is Google shit pointing to more Google shit. It is, sometimes, the shit you want. It often is not. Especially the one where they try and answer questions. It is comical how often those are wrong. I just Googled the first thing I thought of, here, have a look:
Okay. Cool. I like that Google is presenting this as a concrete fact. Awesome. I feel really bad about this one, because a close, dear friend of mine is one of the leads on the project at Google that makes all of those modules at the top, and some of them are really clever and great! But some of them just give the wrong information. Consistently.
I was reading a tweet yesterday, I can’t find it because Google sucks, where someone — I think Melody Joy Kramer — Oh, yes, it was. Here it is. Anyway, it’s a thread about how Google keeps recommending the worst news outlets regarding the Nikole Hanna Jones UNC Scandal. The best reporting is, hands down, by The Assembly. It is authoritative. No one else has done anything even close. But Google cannot tell you that. It just keeps recommending the same shit like The Daily Mail.
SEO has made Google garbage, of course. This is probably not their fault, but it’s made it garbage just the same. In the old days, Google could just count the number of links to a page and rank accordingly. This was the brilliant insight that made Google. It hasn’t been true, however, for ages. Counting the links is useless on many, many topics. It’s just the worst. My mother in law is in the market for a new Electric Piano. Think Google can help? Nope!
WTF is Music Radar? Who knows! I am a musician! I’ve never heard of it. Maybe it’s good, maybe it’s not. But I immediately assume it’s probably just clickbait precisely because it’s the first link on Google. Fantastic.
Anyway. Whatever. I didn’t mean to rant about this today. But, god. Google sucks. And it has so many horrible ramifications. There are so many topics where people do googling on them and get bad information and then internalize it. I was recently writing to a friend about QAnon and I wrote him this:
I think about Q Anon. I think about their deviously ingenious mantra to "do the research." Embedded in that mantra is a deep, profound confidence — and not at all unwarranted — that when someone takes this reasonable advice, the odds are 99% that they are going to go "do their research" on the internet. And the internet is broken. The internet is not fact. The internet is not fact when you google Weirwood and it tells you it's from Game of Thrones and the internet is not fact when it tells you were serious problems with the 1619 Project. Doing your own research doesn't mean doing it on the internet. It doesn't now, it may never.
That was a really good email. I kinda want to print it in here in its entirety one of these days, but… Maybe not. Maybe we got to personal.
We talk a lot about how our social platforms are breaking the web, but for my money, Google is every bit as awful, and more nefariously so.
Anyway.
I was watching my YouTube videos the other day like my grandma used to watch “her game shows,” and there was this unintentionally hilarious video by Shelby Church, a really quite talented young woman who makes sorta financial self-help videos on the internet about real estate and Teslas. And this one was a video about considering moving to Texas from California (she lives in LA) and it was so funny. Like unintentionally. It was pretty much about real estate and taxes and rent. The whole video! Oh and it talked about how Dallas had a lot of parking and not many homeless people, except for in Deep Ellum (aka the best part of Dallas) and why would you go there. And I thought to myself — and this is not fair to her, but I thought it — this is how people become Republicans. They start caring about nothing but taxes and rent and parking and homeless people and they want their environment to reflect that.
In the end, Shelby redeemed herself. She said she wasn’t going to move to Dallas, and that LA was still her preference and the taxes she paid there were worth it. I found this interesting for two reasons: first, she didn’t say whyLA was better. Just that it was. She didn’t say, like, “LA is amazing because a huge percentage of the people here are amazing craftspeople, at the top of their game in a wide array of skills,” which, you know, is one of the things I love about LA (hat tip to my friend Kestrin who opened my eyes to this). She didn’t say she liked the parties or the editing facilities or the beaches. Just.. nothing. She just listed a million great things about Dallas and then said she liked LA better. It was weird. The other weird thing is that she very clearly viewed the tax as pretty much an entrance fee. This is not wrong! I think a lot of people think this way. They do not equate taxes paid with services they receive, or good that the state can do. They just view it as a price of admission. I don’t really pin this on her. But it made me sad. Services from taxes are like good news in journalism or giving thanks: we know they are supposed to be an equal part of the story, but no one really thinks that way. Kinda a bummer.
In other news Hal Hartley is releasing The Book of Life and The Girl From Monday on Blu Ray, so if you are a Hal Hartley fan, go pick those up. I am very excited. Now we just need a No Such Thing Blu Ray. God, it must suck to be a director who doesn’t own the rights to their films.
One other thing I want to throw in here today is this amazing passage by Luke O’Neil from his most recent hell world, regarding restaurants, their guests, and the labor situation. It really seemed to perfectly capture things in a way I’d not heard so succinctly before. ‘Twas an eye-opener for me, and I do love a good eye-opener:
Here have a pastoral photo from The Great British Baking Show to cleanse your pallette after that depressing dose of reality. I love this photo. I added it to my rotating line of desktop photos:
I already miss you, GBBS. Mythbusters is great, but it’s a different sort of jam. No one can replace you.
Okay, wow, well, I have so much more I want to write today, but time presses, duty calls, gotta go get Jane out of bed and have breakfast and then work work work work work like Rihanna does.
Today’s playlist is a moody and quiet one, cuz that’s the only one that’s done. Had a busy day yesterday. Haven’t had time this week to scan the music websites for new albums to add to the “to investigate” playlist and get some fresh music up in this joint. There’s a new live version of Song for Zula up on Spotify, though, in case the studio version and the other two live versions aren’t enough. As someone who can listen to that song on repeat for hours, I welcome this new interpretation. And I’ve had Evangeline in my head for weeks now. God, that Angels of Light show with Akron Family at Great Scott. Does anyone else remember that? Just insane. Just amazing. Be My Weapon is, you’ll recall, the later band by some guys from Swell, which was a great band. And I even put some new stuff on here. Enjoy!
Okay! Talk soon!