Good morning. Hello. How are you? #419
Music memories, Walmart woe, iPad interchange, Laguardia longing, Perimeter rule peril, Robinson reading,
Good morning! Hello! How’s it going? All well over there? I do hope so. I had a dream last night I started a new band. It was a solo thing. You know how it goes. I wanted to have band members, but I am old and my connections to other people are degrading, so it was going to be a solo thing to start, and maybe once it was a going concern I could convince a few friends to join it. It was just me and some mysterious little box — not sure if it was a sequencer or a synth or an audio player or what. It was going to be a sort of mix between, like, Leonard Cohen when he used to do Tower of Song all by himself on his late-career tours, Laurie Anderson and maybe some of the wry humor of Stephin Merritt. Shit that sounds really good actually. But it was not good. There was one really good couplet, though, and I really wanted to remember it when I woke up. But, alas, no dice.
So I decided this morning to listen to my last album, the Defective Frequency album. And you know what? I stand by that album! It’s pretty good! I still like it. I really, truly love “I Was Right,” “Space Force” and “Pasture Cropping Drinking Song.” I mean, Pasture Cropping is just epic. When I made that album I thought “just make an album you like, don’t worry if anyone else gets it” and that was very wise advice. No one else ever listens to it, but *I* like it, and I’m happy to have something I like out there in the world.
Here I’ll put a link to it maybe I can get a single song over 1,000 plays on Spotify hahaha yeah right.
Just back from Walmart this morning. Didn’t really need to go — my list was basically non-existent. Harris Teeter managed to have everything in stock yesterday, but consistent with being Just The Worst, they unilaterally changed my delivery time from between 12 and 1 to between 1 and 2. And they did it in that gloriously assholish way where they text you and then say if this is a problem to call them. THEY get to deliver their news impersonally, but if you want to challenge it, you have to be the asshole and call. I seriously loathe any business that insists on moving an online transaction to the telephone, and it is doubly assholish during the working hours were, hello, people have fucking meetings. Just drives me mad. I think I’m done with Harris Teeter. Gonna try and move over to Lowe’s Foods.
Anyway, Walmart was fine, whatever. They are seriously committed to mulch. Just thousands upon thousands of giant bags of mulch. Never mind that most people buy mulch from a place they can buy it in bulk. Or that in our county you can go to the dump and get ultra-cheap mulch. Or that a lot of people get it from their landscaping companies. Walmart wants to sell mulch in plastic bags and dammit, Walmart is an economic force in this country and they will do it, dag nabbit. They don’t sell hard parmesan. Isn’t that weird? Like they have a semblance of a cheese counter, and they sell grated parmesan, but an actual block of the stuff? Nope. The Blu Ray section is garbage and, surprise, the vinyl section still does not have the “Walmart exclusive” of Taylor Swift’s Folklore.
And when I got to the car I wiped my phone down with a disinfecting wipe, used hand sanitizer and removed my hat and mask like it was June of 2020 and I am not ashamed about it.
So. Yelissa and Kyu at work are updating the company inventory of all laptops. I don’t have a work laptop, I have a work Mac Mini, stuck in the office up there in New York that I haven’t seen in more than a year, and a work iPad, sitting next to me. They ask me for the serial number last week. Things’ not plugged in, I never use it, honestly, what is the point of an iPad you can do everything on it on your phone or your computer. But I charge it up to get the serial number for them….
….and I can’t unlock it. My passcode doesn’t work.
What’s weirder is that while you can’t see the desktop background, you can see a blurred version of it when you’re trying to enter your passcode, and it’s kind of a blurry red thing, and looks nothing like any of my desktop patterns. But it is sitting here, in my house. It is attached to what is unquestionably my iPad keyboard because it has a Nimbus sticker on it, right where I put the sticker.
So it really seems that somehow, in the last sixteen months, sitting here in my house with no visitors, someone switched my iPad with another one of the same model? Which is of course absurd. But what else could have happened? Jane managed to guess my six-digit passcode I know for a fact she doesn’t know, and got into the settings and changed the passcode, by typing in, again, the old passcode, then successfully typing in the exact same new passcode, twice?
This seems supremely unlikely.
Clearly there is a ghost in my house, as Band of Horses say.
In any case, is this your iPad? Does this background look familiar to you?
I am super confused.
Started watching that Sweet Tooth show last week, watched two more episodes last night. I don’t hate it, but, god, the narration is so annoying. It adds nothing. It says nothing. Like literally just keeps saying “stories have to start somewhere, this one starts here.” Well shit. That is hella profound. You don’t say. After three episodes, I’ve not noticed one point where the narration added any meaningful information. I wish I could turn it off. Other than that I kinda like the show. It is very pretty. It has very hip, bombastic, epic music in the post-Arcade-Fireian milieu. The antlers look great. It is doing the trick.
They enshrined Laguardia’s perimeter rule into law. I’m not sure how I feel about this. The “perimeter rule” is a rule that flights to and from Laguardia can only go 1,500 miles — except for a weekend flight to Denver, natch. This is to make it so all the “bigger planes” have to go to JFK, to, I don’t know, protect the noise rights of the people who live by LGA at the expense of the people who live by JFK since, hello, people live right next to both of them. Also the rule was completely at odds with modern trends in flying, which have been, of late, moving away from bigger and bigger planes, but toward more frequent flights of small planes. Well, at least before the pandemic. Heaven forbid the perimeter rule make a rule around what it was actually trying to accomplish: keep big planes out of Laguardia. Seems to me if Delta wants to fly an E175 in a 75-seat configuration to LAX from LGA, who cares? Same-sized plane as they fly into Laguardia already. The rule was weird enough, but now some brilliant New York state lawmaker from Queens got it passed as a law. Brilliant.
When I was flying into Boston the other day, the flight attendent was telling someone how awful it is to fly into LGA right now. She said you have to take a shuttle between terminals C and D, Delta’s two terminals. Which I guess wouldn’t be that bad for me, since I don’t change planes in LGA, but does sound somewhat of a hassle when checking in, if they check-ins aren’t unified, but, then, I guess they weren’t before, and you already had to pay attention to which terminal you were going to. And then I read an article in the New York Times about how bad cabs and Ubers are in NYC, especially at LGA, so that is a bummer. Kind of makes me not want to go there for a little while longer, because, what? Gotta wait an hour for a cab? or fly into JFK and take the train which is actually super fun but really messes with your schedule because there are only a few flights a day into JFK. Anyone been to LGA lately and taken a car home? How is it?
I really miss LGA, though, not gonna lie. And I liked working on my book about it. It was a pretty swell book. I should finish it one of these days. Hahahahaha yeah right.
Oh speaking of which, I started reading a great biography of Joan Robinson yesterday. I bought it like five years ago when I wanted some background color on the mother of monopolistic competition and the first to successfully even attempt to factor the existence of advertising into Marshall’s dreamland perfect economy that never existed (okay, okay, lets not forget Chamberlain don’t worry we haven’t forgotten Chamberlain but honestly that dude shoulda published his thesis more quickly. No biographer for you.). It kinda made me want to finish Which Half is Wasted — I’m confident I could bang it out super quick now. If I had… six months uninterrupted I could finish it. I really want to. But, you know. Job. Baby. Pandemic. Been a bit… busy. It’s crazy that it’s been well over a decade and still no one else has tried to comprehensively tackle advertising economics.
Man. Having one unfinished book is bad, but two… mortifying. Plus a novel but who’s counting that.
Evening walk yesterday was lovely. We saw a bunny. And the Persian Silk is getting its flowers. I tried to take a picture of it with my wife and child, but they were not feeling particularly cooperative. Do note, however, Jane’s new alphabet shirt from Kodiak, Alaska, with the letters made out of Alaskan things, gift from her grandma.
Man, she sure looks cranky there. And that’s the best of three.
I’ve been stalling for 20 minutes hoping some genius strikes for one more passage or anecdote in here today, but no luck. Oh well. What you get is what you get I guess. Let’s do a playlist ! A raaaawk playlist. I dunno. I kept finding these rock songs I kinda liked that didn’t really fit into any other playlist. Just mostly straight-ahead rock and I figured it might, you know, make a vibe if I put them all together. If you still like, or ever liked, rock and roll. It has its moments.
Okay, today is Wednesday, so it’s the day where I gotta get Jane out of bed, dressed, and fed breakfast as quickly as possible so I don’t miss my 10 AM meeting. It’s an hour of extraordinary stress, because — and you may not know this — children have minds of their own and don’t seem to super care about your work schedule. She knows “daddy has to work,” and understands I really want to (well, “need” to) go downstairs and get in front of the computer, but that is only a matter of academic interest to her. Yesterday she adopted a grape at breakfast it was super cute. She did not want to eat it, she wanted to keep it like a pet.
Can't be certain but I would bet your iPad updated its iOS at some point and that's the default for iOS whatever. Looks similar to the most recent Mac one that shows up on the login screen... then your personal choice comes up when you log in.