Good morning. Hello. How are you? #467
Nicotine withdrawal is making me listen to Blind Melon. Apple. Afghanistan. NextDoor. Flickering and Clank.
Good morning. Hello. How are you? I am okay. What day is it? Thursday? Okay, cool. Fine. I like Thursdays. I have, historically, been positively inclined towards Tuesdays. Today marks one week of no nicotine. I still want nicotine. Very badly. This is an unpleasant task I should have chosen dieting instead. Man I have had a lot of mints. I am so tired of mints. Ten different flavors helps marginally. I have three different packs of mints sitting in front of me right now. One thing I learned about mints is that some mints, when they say “three hour mints!” don’t mean that the mint will stay in your mouth for three hours, they mean that your breath will be minty for three hours. That is not as important to me. So, alas, the three hour mints did not offer me anything special.
I am listening to Blind Melon. I used to hate Blind Melon, but yesterday I was thinking I probably give them an unfair bad rap since I was just “too cool” back then to listen to them. Though I did see them live. Speaking of live, I have a feeling the same thing is going on with the band Live. Actually I saw Live live too. With Blind Melon, in fact. Live were actually good, weren’t they? I was just being a snob. The thing is, Blind Melon’s discography is short so I can pretty quickly investigate this supposition with Blind Melon. Live, as it turns out, never broke up, though they did go like a decade without their lead singer, but they kept putting albums out, and nine albums seems like a pretty big investment for a whim. But maybe. Not like there’s anything else going on in life. I guess I’ll just sit here listening to Live albums and gaining weight in realtime.
The new Low is going to be insane. There’s a third single out, it is crazy. They are off the hook. The sounds. The distortion. The tones. Like nothing else going on it’s really remarkable to hear, like, new sonic frontiers in the year 20201. I miss seeing them live so much. I stupidly missed my first low tour ever, like, in the history of the band, for Double Negative because I was busy being a parent to a young child. They tour so frequently and consistently I figured it’d just be a year or so till I saw them again. What could go wrong, I thought. Not like we’re gonna have a global pandemic or something. Whoops.
Programming note: It is totally cool if you like the blockchain. I do not view this as a political movement, really. I mean, I even find some of the technical aspects interesting. This is more like a Coke and Pepsi thing to me, Star Trek vs Star Wars, etc. We can still be friends, don’t take it personally. Yeah sure there are some political angles I find distasteful, but that’s true of everything. I just never, ever, want to work on it, that’s all I’m saying. This is the moment I become a luddite, is what I’m saying. I’m not saying luddites are cool or anything.
I got around to reading the transcript of Biden’s speech about Afghanistan and I guess I will go ahead and give him the benefit of the doubt. The Afghan government did not want a mass exodus, they were worried it would set off a panic. Okay, okay, whatever I am not a foreign policy expert, I don’t know who to believe, I guess I’ll just wait nine months for all the journalists to publish their books and I’ll try and get a handle on the situation then.
In the meantime, some friends of friends are funding on-the-ground assistance for people trying to get out, using their networks of contacts from their years there in the government or NGOs to assist in front-door-to-airport transportation, which is the hard part right now. It is not going to be easy, but this seems well-vetted and the best bet for donations if you want to help, right now, on the ground in afghanistan:
I feel so bad posting this but it’s just too funny. Yesterday in my Nextdoor a concerned parent mistook his son’s anal beads for drug paraphernalia:
I suppose it could have been a joke, but by the time I got the daily email telling me this was the new hot topic on Nextdoor — and oh yeah, I totally clicked that “View post” button — the original poster had, sadly, deleted the post. I hope his neighbors were gentle in their educational methods.
In today’s “Apple cares about your privacy” news, it seems that, like most companies, Apple has a list of banned words that you can’t use in getting things engraved on your headphones and shit. And it seems that they have taken the list of banned words from China — which you can imagine to be fairly comprehensive — and extended that list’s use into Hong Kong and into Taiwan. Not worrisome at all, nope, about Apple’s ability to, like, you know, keep China from foisting lists of banned things on them. In other news, it turns out that oh hey remember that photo scanning thing we were going to launch in the next version of iOS? Turns out we already launched it, on your phone, with the last version, and didn’t even tell you. That fucking rules. Apple is so cool about my privacy.
All of this definitely makes me believe that your attack on advertising “privacy” was driven by genuine privacy concerns and not, like, using a stick to get app makers to make paid apps, instead, where you can get a cut, instead of ad-supported ones, where you can’t.
I will be semi-fair and admit the only reason I keep railing on this is because I know that Apple probably sort-of does, occasionally, care about privacy, so there’s a snowball’s chance in hell that they can actually be shamed into fixing this debacle. Maybe.
I was thinking yesterday about my band t-shirts. Jane likes them, she likes reading the words on my shirts. And I mentioned that whole thing about my t-shirt organizational system, and how I recently bought a Pailhead t-shirt. Anyway, band t-shirts on the mind. And I was thinking about, how, like, most adult men who are almost fifty years old do not still wear band t-shirts, do they? Is this not normal? It seems normal in my peer group. Sean still wears band t-shirts (well, at least that one super cool Komeda tee) and so does Nick, you know, my lifetime same-age dude friends. But, like, it’s not like I see my neighbor dudes driving or walking around the neighborhood in band t-shirts. I don’t go out much but I don’t see them very often at the Walmart, except for that one time that dude was wearing a 4AD t-shirt and he pretended not to see me, also in a 4AD tee shirt. I’m still ripshit about that. Anyway I suppose it’s not normal to wear band tee shirts into middle age, in your fifties. Do I have to stop next year? Because I don’t think I’m going to stop. Still, I never really realized how weird it must seem to people, at this age, these days. Old dude in band tee. But, like, the Hells Angels and metal guys did it last generation. So, why not I guess?
Also I totally can’t decide if it’s “t-shirt” or “tee shirt” and I’m not gonna fix that. Not a typo. It’s like when your writing teacher says it’s more realistic if a character has more than one name that they go by. My character is t-shirt/tee shirt.
Jane and I were doing breakfast yesterday, and she was doing her normal thing, which is to say “what’s that sound” to every single sound. It’s an interesting way of learning. She just asks it constantly. I put the frying pan down on the burner slightly too hard and it made a clank and she said “what’s that sound.”
“That’s a clank,” I said. “A clank is when one piece of metal bangs against another one.”
And she just loved that. “Clank clank clank” she said.
Then the light bulb over the sink started flickering. It’s a whole thing. Emma replaced it but it’s flickering again which means that it’s probably the fixture which is a whole thing and we really do need to get an electrician in the house the little things are piling up, but we’ve never really found a good electrician yet. We like our plumber, though. They are coming tomorrow I am very excited. Anyway, I try to explain this to Jane. She is obsessed with light bulbs. She is so excited when one goes out, and we have to change it. Well, mama has to change it, because she seems to think only Mama possesses the special power to change light bulbs.
Time to change the lightbulb, she exclaimed. She is very excited about this. But I have to explain to her that no, the light bulb isn’t the problem, the light itself is the problem. The light itself isn’t something she’s ever thought about, so we work through that. And then I explain that the light isn’t burned out, it’s flickering. Flickering is when a light gets bright very suddenly and very quickly and then goes dim again.
“Flickering,” she says, rolling the word over her tongue the way an oenophile would to a sip of wine. “Flickering.”
“Flickering and Clank.”
“Flickering and Clank!”
“Flickering and Clank!”
Flickering and Clank. Jane probably learned like six, ten new words yesterday, but “flickering” and “clank” were the best ones. Every day, six to ten new words, she doesn’t always remember them all — she had trouble remembering “asterisk” yesterday — but most of it sticks. It is crazy. I wonder how often I learn a new word. One a month?
Here’s a picture of Jane “doing cute.” She did this voluntarily yesterday. Ignore my beard I am sorry.
Okay today’s playlist is a psych one because hell yeah psych rock. Mix of old and new. Really into Sonny Sharrock at the moment that guy is amazing. And I love the new Six Organs of Admittance I wish I could see that guy live again sometime.
Okay well I am about done here, and the Blind Melon album is done. It was pretty good! Not sure it’ll be a routine listener or anything. Also I had forgotten they had a second single besides “No Rain.” Poor “Tones of Home,” gets no respect. It’s not bad, Blind Melon is not bad. Someone get me a time machine so I can go back to 1992 and explain to young snobby Rick to stop hating on Blind Melon. And the Cranberries. And Stone Temple Pilots. Why you gotta be so cool rick. Senseless Things, Lulubox, Alert!, Steel Pole Bathtub, Adamski, The Weathermen, Hazel, Big Hat, C Cat Trance, Honey Tongue. No one remembers these bands. Come on, come on.
Tones Of Home I always preferred to No Rain
Bill always wears band t-shirts and he's 10 years older than you, so you're good to go.