Good morning. Hello. How are you? #532
Good morning! Hello, there, how are things going for you on this Friday? It seems I forgot to take this Friday off in my “take every Friday for the rest of the year” plan, so I am working today, but I suspect there isn’t too much work. BUT the evil insurance people just came back with two additional applications that I have to fill out today, so I am glad I didn’t take today off because let me tell you, I am not super excited about the idea of filling out insurance applications on my day off. I’m listening to my Release Radar playlist and it’s pretty anodyne this week — a LOT of live versions, remixes, etc. There is a new version of “Just Like Honey” by the Jesus and Mary Chain, and I can’t figure out if it is a Taylor’s Version situation, one from the vault or what. It’s not live, it’s not a remix, it’s a fairly faithful new version. There seems to be one article on the subject so far, and they’re like “we don’t know, but they did sue Warner last year,” so I guess it is a Taylor’s version sitch. Exciting. Or, rather, shitty and depressing that Warner is ripping them off. God, the music industry really was a bunch of vultures for a very long time.
Programming note: Don’t forget to fill out this form for a holiday card this year!
https://www.postable.com/thewebbles
Wanna good cry today? Read this obituary in the New York times. Man. This guy.
At the age of 96, Mr. Rosenberg was decorated by the French government as a commander of the Legion of Honor for his servicein World War II. Last year, he published a memoir, “The Art of Resistance: My Four Years in the French Underground.”
Karin Rosenberg, who first met her husband in the 1980s, knew nothing of his valor for years.
Man.
My desktop today is this photo of me at Scout Camp at Lost Lake in Alaska. I thought you might enjoy it:
Speaking of Taylor’s version, or at least the Sad Girl Autumn version, I listened to it a few more times yesterday, since Taylor released both a video for it (sort of) and a lyric video for it on her YouTube channel. It occurs to me that this version re-works the emphasis of a lot of lines, making the “emotional crescendo,” as Pitchfork called it, more clear. Pitchfork: “The extra bulk dilutes the original’s walloping crescendo, making it harder to locate the emotional climax.” I think that is a fair critique, and oh, look at that, Taylor knew it and made yet another version. Fascinating.
Yesterday after Grammy came and took over Jane, I went out to Walmart and Harris Teeter and did all my thanksgiving shopping. In this week’s grocery delivery, Harris Teeter was out of unsalted butter. Like, who is ever out of unsalted butter? It got me paranoid and I decided that this year’s thanksgiving shopping has the potential to be a thunderdome situation like grocery shopping last spring, so I decided to get a jump on it before the weekend. Walmart and Harris Teeter were both absurdly busy at 10 AM on a Thursday, but they weren’t really out of anything. I was being paranoid. Everything was fine. The butter was a fluke at Harris Teeter on Tuesday, and they had plenty today. So all of my Thanksgiving shopping is done, and it was a nothing burger and this is a parable, I think, for the Christmas Shopping situation with the congestion at our ports. Things might have fewer discounts this year, because retailers are resorting to air freight, but I think things are going to be in decent supply. Call me an optimist.
I am going to only cook a breast and not a whole turkey again this year. No one in our family eats dark meat, really, I mean, people don’t mind it but they don’t miss it. And I was making these giant turkeys and no one ate the dark meat so, breast only. Dry brine. Mashed potatoes, corn, beets, carrots, stuffing, asparagus, Grammy brings the apple pie. I am forgetting a few things. It will be delicious.
The tree people were here for a third day (fourth?) but I think they are done now. They were cutting a bunch of trees, crappy little straggly pines, to make it more sunny for Grammy’s solar panels. Honestly, you couldn’t tell any were missing. They mulched them all and I kinda wanted all the mulch but I let them take it away because they were big scary redneck dudes and they scared me. They didn’t have Punisher and thin blue line stickers on their trucks like the last batch of contractors had, but, you know, they still scared me. Might smell the socialist on me.
It occurred to me that this is a distinctly American phenomenon, and kind of a hilarious one: deeply “conservative,” pro-capitalist, pro-rich service personnel and contractors, whose main clientele are rich liberals who believe they themselves should be taxed more to help out their anti-union contractors, who don’t want the help. My county is a battleground county in a battleground state, so you never know for sure if your contractors can tell you’re secretly a flaming progressive. Can they tell by looking at you? Will this trucker hat help you blend in? Will they notice it’s a trucker hat for a goth band or the internet and not for a gun? Is it enough? Do they care? Do they secretly disdain their clients whose politics are more pro-labor than their own? It is all very strange. I think about it all the time.
Our lawn was invaded by about a thousand starlings yesterday and it was kind of terrifying. I opened my door to try and get a better picture than this one and they all shuffled away, not quite scared enough to fly, but they moved along. This was honestly shocking to me, since I figured when I opened the door, at most they would look at me with disdain and ignore be, but that there was a non-zero chance that they would all gang up and attack me like in The Birds. It did not seem likely they would, you know, get scared. I am bear hear me roar. Since they ran off, though, this is the best picture I could get:
Look at those colors, look at those leaves, things are very pretty here right now.
So the ConstitutionDAO failed to win the Constitution yesterday. For those not aware of this madness, a bunch of crypto people tried to crowdsource the purchase of one of the last remaining early copies of the US Constitution that is in private hands, and get it into a museum. They raised a boatload of money, something like $30 million, more actually. The copy of the Constitution was being auctioned by Sotheby’s. They did not, however, win. Some rich guy presumably won. But they view this as a huge win for the crypto world, because of all of the attention it brings and attention means more people into their crypto ecosystem and, though they don’t come out and say, it, presumably this is good because the price of tokens goes up and they can all get more rich, which boy, sure seems to be happening a lot in crypto these days it really is something.
It strikes me as maybe the best outcome of the situation. There were a lot of questions about how the purchase would exactly work, since Sotheby’s has to conform to KYC (“know your customer”) laws, and that wouldn’t work with a DAO (“Digital Autonomous Organization” sort of a virtual company set up in code), so they set up an LLC, but it was unclear how the DAO would control the LLC or whether that would be legally binding. There could have been a whole brouhaha and fracas and ringomorale and whatnot and the whole thing could have ended up looking quite badly for crypto. And that’s even without the organizers, you know, running off with the money.
BUT I will say: there is such obvious economic power here. For me the obvious real-world, real-time comparison would be #teamseas, where a bunch of the most influential, famous, big-name YouTubers like Mr. Beast and Mark Rober are trying, right now, to raise $30 million to clean up our seas. They’ve been at it for, like, two weeks now? They’ve only gotten to $16 million so far. Which is very impressive! Except when you compare it to the crypto community raising $30 million in a week.
I wonder if Mr. Beast is getting into crypto.
Let’s do a mix. “World” mix. I don’t know if that term is problematic anymore, I kind of feel like it might be. I wonder if it is better to just call this particular mix series, like, “JAMZ” or something. I should dig into that. But there’s some good music here. Thank you to Todd for Mdou Moctar. He got to see them live recently that sounds amazing.
Okay! Have a lovely weekend. I am off all next week, and, like. I don’t know. I kind of want to sleep in a bit? Till, like 8? But that would mean that this email wouldn’t go out until, like, 10:30. Which is maybe fine? But it seems kind of weird to wake up early just to send an email on your vacation. I am not sure what I’ll do. Just know that for the next week or so, these might be a bit more sporadic. Or not. Who knows!