Good morning. Hello. How are you? #463
Good morning! Hey there! How are you? What is up? It’s Friday wooo! I have it off, because I work for a nice progressive company that cares about its employees and gives the whole company a monthly recharge day where we all take the same day off, in addition to other generous policies. It’s just great. I am going to do my podcast today and some gardening it’s going to be lovely. Jane is over at Janet’s this morning so that is nice too. I am going to have something else for breakfast. I’m not 100% sure what yet. Maybe a breakfast burrito. I’m wearing my new Pailhead tee shirt today, which is just fantastic. The year is 2021 and you can just go online to Wax Trax’s website and purchase a Pailhead tee shirt. It is just great. Consider bringing one into your home.
The census came out yesterday. Well, detailed local-level information came out about the census yesterday. They provide an overview, but the detailed data isn’t provided in any sort of digital format that is easy to parse, so everyone has to get the data and then start crunching the numbers. It is a bit soon to say, but I think we can be cautiously optimistic that most of Trump’s malevolent chicanery around the census didn’t do too much damage. Or maybe it did, and the country is turning even more urban, muli-cultural and blue than it is anyway, and without the census we’d all see that modern republicanism is the spent force that it is, and their census tricks are the only reason they are clinging to power.
In any case:
The Villages, Florida, was the fastest-growing place in the US, adding just under 40,000 people. And yet. New York added over 600,000 people over the last decade, the largest of any city. AOC focused her entire office on census participation in Queens, and Queens had the most growth of any New York borough.
Still, though, the devil is in the details of redistricting. “Blue states” as a whole will lose more seats and “red states” will gain them. But this is because people are moving to cities, and the cities in these places are often blue. Here in NC, the population growth has been almost entirely driven by the population growth in the very blue Charlotte and the Triangle. We’re under a lot of court orders about redistricting, so that one additional seat may well be blue. New York State lost one, but New York City grew, and will probably gain and the lost seat will probably come out of a red district. Ditto California. Oregon and Colorado should be okay. Where re those two seats in Texas going, and what is happing in MI, IL and OH with their seat losses. This stuff is going to matter.
But all in all, things could have been worse. The march of America turning predominantly urban and multicultural continues.
Yesterday I spent two hours clicking a button that said “CLICK AND HOLD” every couple of seconds, spending from 1 to 2 PM and 9 to 10 PM in a virtual queue at Walmart dot com trying to buy a Playstation 5. I did not succeed. I don’t know why I do this to myself. I made my entire lunch stir fry, cutting vegetables, everything, while pressing this dumb button. It reminded me of this great pitch we had at Barbarian for Jackass where you would watch a sequence of increasingly disturbing things and you’d have to keep the mouse button held down to keep watching them. I’m still kinda shocked no one has made a game like that on the internet. Like yes you could cheat it, but so what? It’s still kinda brilliant.
We had a visitor yesterday! Outside, of course. Alice was in town to do some UNC work and she came over for an hour or two before her flight back to NYC. It was lovely. Human beings and human interaction. They can be kind of fun, I have discovered.
Alice told me that I seemed kind of down from my recent GMHHAY posts and I think that was true a few weeks ago but I’ve been okay the last couple of weeks.
She also complimented me on yesterday’s mix, which I am listening to right now, and it’s pretty great. It’s crazy I never loved any of these songs back in 1997 — and actively hated Counting Crows for some reason — but this is a great mix and I am super into it. Like ten of you wrote to me yesterday to say the same thing, so that was pretty great. Friends are great people are great I miss people. Up with people.
Speaking of which, after Alice left, I did another thing and talked to another friend on a thing called the telephone for an hour which was disorienting and crazy. I could have sworn this telephone thing was only for business conversations — and I did have one of those yesterday as well. But it turns out you can talk to actual friends on them. It is weird and scary but also fun. Kind of like losing your virginity to a nice person. So, thank you for that, Mr. Benjamin Palmer. Sorry I just made it weird.
There was an op-ed in the New York Times yesterday by Alex Stamos, former head of security at Facebook, and Matthew Green of Johns Hopkins, and it basically said what I did about Apple’s new CSAM implementation, albeit far more eloquently and on the op-ed (oh, sorry “guest essays”) section of the Times. It is unclear to me, but as far as I can tell, Apple still has not told anyone when, exactly, the scan (yes, scan) of your photos happens on your device, and whether the scan is definitively disabled when you turn off iCloud. The issue, predictably, has fallen off of the radar of the press already, which is unfortunate. In any case, I’ve disabled iCloud on my phone ahead of the OS update. This probably seems pointless, given that I also have Dropbox backup of my photos activated on my phone, and my photos go from my phone to Dropbox every night, where they are presumably scanned against the NCMEC database. That is just fine, at least the scanning is not being done on my phone. In the words of Stamos and Green:
The computer science and policymaking communities have spent years considering the kinds of problems raised by this sort of technology, trying to find a proper balance between public safety and individual privacy. The Apple plan upends all of that deliberation. Apple has more than one billion devices in the world, so its decisions affect the security plans of every government and every other technology company. Apple has now sent a clear message that it is safe to build and use systems that directly scan people’s personal phones for prohibited content.
Speaking of Johns Hopkins (wow what a fortuitous yet tenuous transition), they have updated the layout of their trusty standby COVID Dashboard, that has been the gold standard throughout the pandemic. I still check it every morning, entering the data from it into my personal journal on 750 words every morning. yesterday they added a whole batch of 28-day data to the main home page:
I think that could be useful, if I had some sort of mental anchor for those numbers. I’m sort of debating if I want to look at those. I do something similar for state and local-level data, mostly focusing on the delta. But for the country and world I have the case and death numbers so ingrained in my head, I don’t know if I can work with the 28-day numbers. We shall see.
Also, it’s pretty clear, now, in the US deaths numbers, that there is another wave happening because of Delta. For a long while everyone was hoping we were vaccinated enough, and treatments had gotten better, and while our case counts were exploding, perhaps the deaths would not. Alas, this seems to have been wishful thinking. It’s small yet but it is clearly increasing again:
Real infographic edition here today, sorry. I didn’t take any new photos of Jane last night because she was at Grammys and didn’t walk with us. I will try and rectify that tomorrow, sorry. I know she is more pleasant to look at than charts and graphs.
Speaking of Alice (ha) several years ago she and I and her husband Harry were out in LA for a wedding. We got there a few days early cuz LA is a great town and Harry suggested we all go see Jon Brion in concert. I had never heard of him, amazingly, but I consented to go. It was at the Corona Theater, which was very exciting to me because that is where Anaïs Nin had her readings and performances during her LA years and I had just read the latest volume of her unexpurgated journals from the LA years.
But anyway, the show was great, and — many of you already know this — Jon Brion is an insanely talented person and he seemed to have really found his stride with this long-term residency at the Corona Theater. It was awesome.
But one thing that really struck me was his version of “Waterloo Sunset,” by the Kinks. I’m not the hugest Kinks fan in the world (sorry, old roommate Dave) but I knew the song and always kinda liked it just fine. But I found Jon’s version on the piano revelatory. I think about it all the time. I love it so much. It runs through my head almost every week.
But the thing is, there’s no version online anywhere of Jon Brion’s amazing piano version of “Waterloo Sunset.” There seem to be two other versions – a live YouTube clip of him playing it on the vibes at Warsaw in Brooklyn (which makes me feel is so dumb since I lived right by there but didn’t know about him yet), and one with Elliot Smith, with both of them playing guitar, shot and recorded for a pilot for the Jon Brion show – which totally should have happened.
I wonder if Jon is secretly recording every show at the Corona and someday will release, like, a ten album box set or something. That’d be cool.
So, anyway, here’s that version, even though it’s not half as good as the piano version.
OK let’s do a mix today. Just of mix. Lot of old, some new. Thank you to Roger for reminding me how awesome the last Darling Buds and House of Love albums were. Thank you to Jon Whitney for Karate, Guns and Tanning. I think it was Nicky who told me about Nation of Language and maybe New Candys too. We got a real community of musical enthusiasts going on here, all working to bring you these fantastic playlists. Tip your bartenders ladies and gentlemen. And that Boa Constrictor song just popped into my head yesterday. It was one of my childhood favorites, my mom sang it to me all the time. I just loved it. Hadn’t thought about it in decades. Had never heard The Undisputed Truth’s barn-burning ten-minute full version of Ball of Confusion and it is amazing.
Okay! Weekend! Projects! Fun! Rest and relaxation! Immediately followed by guilt for not being more productive! Woo!
Have a button!