Good morning. Hello! How are you? It seems like I can’t type this morning, I’ve made about eleven typos on this first sentence. My fingers are stiff. That’s what I get for, you know, spending time away from the computer. Great. just great. Only thing I was ever good at. It’s Monday. I have a headache — a hangover, if you will. I had two whole tiny wines last night, so naturally I feel like I am going to die. Suitable mood for a Monday morning. Only one meeting today, though — that should make it bit easier to dip my toes into the pool of the week.
Programming note: Friday’s single-topic post got about half the readers of a normal post, so I guess this is why I’m not a pundit? Anyway, Apple is trying to contain the PR damage, and they have now said “if you turn off iCloud we’re unable to match photos,” which is exactly the sort of non-denial denial that makes people paranoid since, of course, two things are required for a match: a scan and a pairing of the hash to the hash in the database. According to their non-denial denial, so far, it’s still conceivable that they could be scanning every photo, whether iCloud is activated or not, but not sending hashes to the internet to compare against the database if you have iCloud turned off. Daring Fireball says “If you don’t use iCloud Photo Library, no images on your devices are fingerprinted,” which sounds pretty clear. But he doesn’t say where he learned that from. There is no link, no quote attributed to Apple. It certainly doesn’t say it anywhere in any of the published docs. But DF has a million sources inside Apple, of course, so maybe someone actually told him this. I still suspect that the most likely explanation for all of this is Apple’s comms team bungled this, but it is still too soon to tell.
Programming note 2: A few days back, when ranting about Q-anti-vaxxers and their moronic phrase “do your own research,” I made a passing comment about the World Book Encyclopedia that was disparaging to the World Book Encyclopedia. I would like to apologize to the World Book Encyclopedia community, it was not fair to rope you into this controversey. You were a trusted friend for generations, and I kid of wish I had a copy in the house right now. I’m sorry that Wikipedia supplanted you. I wonder if kids spend days reading Wikipedia the way I used to read, from cover to cover, each volume of the World Book. I learned so much from you, even if a lot of it has since changed, or I learned later that things weren’t completely true. That was kind of my point, though. For “serious research,” at best the World Book is a good starting point. But it should not be your whole research oeuvre anymore than Youtube should.
I had the Red and Gold set. This set. I treasured it my entire childhood.
I went and turned off my iCloud in the meantime. This is probably a step too far for most people, but I am sick of paying like four different cloud storage companies every month, and I need to do some housekeeping in this regard anyway.
My bank sent me one of those tut-tutting emails reminding me to care about safety, and I’m like “rich words coming from a bank that doesn’t support non-SMS 2FA.”
Anyway.
Gardening.
It was raining on Friday and Saturday – yay! We had a giant downpour Saturday morning. Limited my time in the garden but the plants were very thankful for it, and everything is doing great. Since I started using the cages and built the hoop house, the grapes have doubled in size, which means that all summer someone was eating their leaves. But they are no safely ensconced in the hoop house, along with the new cucumbers that are going gangbusters, as well as the new beans, ditto. AND I saved the old beans, I think. I mean, they look good again. I trimmed back all the parts eaten by the deer and they’ve grown back. The hoop house is filled with green, which is very exciting. New soybeans and watermelon seem to do be doing well too. Tomatoes are mostly a failure this year, but the experiments were worthwhile and we’ve learned that we can grow them in our dirt. The tomatoes growing in-ground are actually doing great, but I put them in a place I can’t protect them from the animals, so every tomato they grow gets eaten by those bastard squirrels.
The seeds inside are doing well, except the spinach, which I learned may not germinate in their seed cells because it’s all in the garage and our garage is wicked hot in the summer and the seeds don’t really sprout until it cools off, which is a whole pain in the neck regarding my seed setup that I had not considered. Crap.
Anyway, it’s a short one but here’s this week’s gardening video, which features a baby turtle hiding out in the compost! I think I hit it with my pitchfork. The little guy was still moving around and seemed okay but I feel so guilty. I’m sorry little turtle! I will try and not bug you anymore! Anyway, here’s this week’s video:
Another fun thing that Emma and I did (so much fun much fun we are party machines) is that we de-rusted a bunch of tools using this amazing de-rusting stuff that Adam Savage recommended and it was every bit as good as he said so now all my garden shears are clean and not rusted anymore and it was very, very satisfying. Strong recommend.
What else did I do this weekend. Lesseee. I failed to get a PS5 again, that was a bummer. It was Walmart too I really though this was going to be the time I succeeded, Walmart is my jam. No luck. I cleaned the stove. I organized a bin of Cubitec bits and took it to the storage unit. I super glued back together a plate that I broke by carelessly putting it away. Stuck it at the bottom of the pile so I don’t have to think about it again till thanksgiving. I shredded cardboard. I tried to rip a Blu Ray Netflix disk and it stumped me with its copy protection — a first on a non-UHD Blu Ray. I ordered the groceries. I sold a CD — by Animalhouse, Mark and Loz’s post-Ride band. I shipped out a hard drive I sold on eBay. I turned on the 3-month trial of Apple music and migrated my 5,000+ song playlist “all the good” to check out its interface for playing music throughout the house. It’s decent. I figure I will stop paying a bunch of extra money for iCloud backups and spend it on Apple Music instead. Maybe. Clearly I’m not so annoyed with Apple that I’m blackballing them. Ha. Yeah. Right. I’m stuck forever.
I did two Jane bedtimes — Friday and Sunday night. She was very pleasant on Friday night, and we read an Elephant and Piggie book. Well. She did. Read every word, even though she’d never seen the book before. It is crazy. I knew she could read, but she can read. It is crazy! Also she is drawing so much! It’s crazy! She drew a cute animal that has big ears like a bunny but long legs. She would not tell me what it was.
The second night was less pleasant and she spent a ton of time stalling on bedtime and she lied to me, which is a big bummer. Normally, when she’s stalling I just pick her up, take her to bed and say “okay now you’re going to go to bed or we can go do the bedtime routine if you want but no more stalling?” And if she says okay or “try again” I say “yes we can try again but you have to go do bedtime routine, are you going to do that if we go back in the playroom?” And she says “yes.” And up until last night, every time that she’s ever gotten to that point and says “yes,” I can put her down and reliably know that she’s not going to stall (well, at least not in that way) anymore and will go do the thing she just said she would do. But last night she said “yes” and then immediately started stalling. I was not having it. I am hoping this is like the phase where she was climbing out of her crib for a while but Emma put a stop to it by standing there and always stopping her from climbing out. If I can make her realize that the lie doesn’t get her any further along in her stalling, hopefully she will abandon it as a tactic. But it was really sad. I had mentioned to Emma a few weeks ago that I knew it was coming, and I wan’t looking forward to it and, well, yep. It sucked.
Another funny Jane thing is that we are teaching her about kindness and it is generally working great, she has expressed a strong desire to be kind and she is always asking if things are kind or not, which is hilarious because well over half the things she’s asking about are neutral. Like “is drinking kind” or “is laughing kind” and I am trying to introduce the concept of “neutral” or something, but i don’t know exactly how to answer those they send me into an existential spiral it’s pretty funny. She also spilled her drink and asked if spilling was kind, so at least I’ve successfully introduced the concept of accidents, and how it’s all about what we do after the accident. I think she gets it. The other funny thing is she is most of the time saying please now, and even enthusiastic about it, but sometimes she forgets and I have to say “you didn’t say please,” which immediately reminds me of the Ultra Vivid Scene song “You Didn’t Say Please” so now I have this completely inappropriate song about S&M in my head all the time.
I organized my adaptor bin into one of the new drawers on my new workbench. Exciting stuff, I know, but it looks awesome:
I finished the Cosey Fanni Tutti autobiography and it was very good and fascinating and… This is morbid and so not my business but I kinda wish it was finished after Gen passed because I think it would maybe have had a slightly different tone. But whatever. It was very interesting, and I am thankful for the insights into late-period TG and especially Peter Christopherson because I think he might be one of the most talented people of his generation. I had sort of stopped paying attention to the TG reunion after seeing them at Coachella, which was not the right venue, and I was bored. But this weekend I listened to the X-TG albums Desertshore and The Final Report and they are really great. Desertshore especially with its guest vocalists of Gaspar Noe, Sasha Grey, Blixa Bargeld, and Anohi. Just a beautiful album.
All in all it was definitely a better written, more informing, and coherent autobiography then Genesis’ but, then, also, Gen died before they could finish theirs, it was a work in progress. There’s a lot I sympathize with in there. Reunions, man, they must be a headtrip. You spend so much time with these people, have such an intense relationship, love and fight and hate and bond, then it all ends, you go your separate ways, and decades go by and then suddenly you’re thrust back together with a lot of unfinished baggage. My band had a reunion and it was nothing like that, but, then I imagine if Barbarian was a band and had a reunion, that would be chaos and hell. And imagine if I were broke and needed the money even if it was taking an emotional toll. Sounds awful.
I also think a lot about the A&R people, reporters, concert bookers, etc that have to be around a famous band doing a reunion because they’re all broke and still don’t get along, and you’ve spent your life worshipping these people and now you have to witness them all being so, so human. I have some insights into that from my past music industry life but, god. I am glad I didn’t have to interact with TG on their reunion shows.
Now I’m reading a book about cyber security and it is terrifying. But we’ll save that for later.
Famed biographer Walter Isaacson has agreed to do Elon Musk’s biography. I feel like this is not going to go well for either party. I mean, on the one hand, I am annoyed because even though there have been two Musk biographies, and I’ve not felt any desire to read them, of course I’m going to read an Isaacson biography. Even though I found his Steve Jobs biography a bit… laudatory? But yeah, I’m gonna have to read it. But Musk didn’t cooperate with those other two biographies really — I think he might have done an interview or two but I don’t get the impression he, like, you know, sat there and rifled through old photos with them (hahaha can you imagine Elon Musk even owning a box of old photos?). He may well find upsetting the prying experience of coopersting with a biography that is also endeavoring to be comprehensive and fair. On the flipside, there’s no way Isaacson is ready for the nerd army of Musk Stans out there. I just have a bad feeling this is not going to go well. But I guess we’ll see.
Hrm I am not feeling super well this morning my headache seems to have migrated to my stomach. Lovely. Okay let’s wrap this up. Do a mix. Cover songs! Bonus super extra-long mix of covers, because I’m too lazy to pick which 12 minutes of covers can be moved to vol 13 and wait another two months for you to hear them. So you get them all! So many coverrs! Mostly new covers! Except for the Dictators. And Tina Turner. I was reading about Ball of Confusion recently, trying to figure out the origin of the phrase “and the band played on” and I didn’t even know about this electro-Tina Turner version. It’s really good! Also the Ball of Confusion Wikipedia page doesn’t even mention Love and Rockets which is ridiculous. Also strong recommend on the Bruce Hornsby Dinosaur Jr. cover. Don’t sleep on Bruce Hornsby’s 21st century output that guy is doing some very interesting stuff. And this Glenn Campbell live cover of U2 makes me desperately wish I had ever seen him live. Alas.
OK I am going to go do some stretches and see if they don’t relieve the nausea a bit. HANG IN THERE. We can get through this Monday. Together.