Good morning. Hello. How are you? #581
God I love the winter Olympics. Vicky from Fairbanks. Reading books about the Family. More keel stuff and more Spotify ranting.
Good morning. Hello. How are you? I am okay. Week is not off to an auspicious start. I lost my Wordle (so close, would have had it in one more and I wasted one guess cuz I was dumb and rushing) and I’m going to have to admit this to my wife when she wakes up, and she probably got it in, like, two or something. I didn’t lose any weight yesterday. And it is cold. Bah. I had a dream where Anny Delvey and Tiffany from Adventure Time became domestic terrorists and took over an entire airport terminal and I had to save it by blowing it up with blocks of cheese. It was so dumb. I am so cold, it’s so cold.
Can’t say I had a particularly productive weekend. It seems to be one of those years where I’m completely obsessed with the Winter Olympics. I can barely work up an ounce of enthusiasm for the Summer Games, but the Winter ones? Sign me right up. Can’t get enough of if. I almost boycotted the whole thing because my favorite skater Evgenie Medvedeva is not in the Olympics this year, apparently she was injured and got COVID and said “fuck it” and retired and is just doing announcing for the Olympics in Russia now, which I can respect, but I miss her. Also there are no wacky old Korean women in the stands wearing giant curling hats, which makes me sad. Barely anyone in the audience, really, cuz, you know, COVID.
Man, I thought that old Korean lady with the great curling hat was a big meme or something, but I can’t find it anywhere on the internet. Good thing my photo filing technique is unstoppable. Here you go, one from the archives:
I have rallied, however, and now I am all-in on the Winter Olympics.
Watched the qualifiers and finals for the women’s slopestyle — good news, I am a slopestyle expert now, really just brilliant. I can predict the judges’ scores with shocking accuracy, including their biases. Watched the men’s qualifiers too but they were not that interesting. Women’s moguls, Women’s grand slalom and watched the famous American wipe out, I feel bad for her. There was a featurette on her and it talked about how her dad fell in their house and had a fatal accident while she was outside doing a Sports Illustrated shoot and she had to rush to the hospital to say goodbye to him, and that had me bawling, not gonna lie. So did the interview with the American Luger who had a baby and has barely seen the kid while he’s been on the world cup circuit trying to qualify for the Olympics. And NBC did a Facetime with him and his wife and kid and he just turned into a 100% dad and was like “watch how he can do the wave thing now” and stuff like that and basically just ignored the interviewer after that. Watched all the 500 qualifying heats for Women’s short track, the 1000 qualifying heats for men’s, and the 3000 medal runs for Men.
I watched the mixed doubles American curling team lose over and over agin, which was sad, but it was cool because the woman on the team Vicky Persinger is from Fairbanks, which means she probably learned to curl at the same place I used to curl when I was a little kid and my dad would take me there for Curling Lions meetings. Also I love that Fairbanks had a Lion’s club exclusively dedicated to Curling. Anyway, I looked Vicky up on Facebook and even though she’s, like, 19 years younger than me, we had one mutual friend which was kind of cool. She works at Yukon title. I assume she comes from the Persinger’s Marine family, but, you know, they all went to Lathrop. I just looked it up and Vicky is not on the women’s team, which makes me sad. Team Fairbanks, etc. etc.
The other brilliant thing I watched was part 2 of the fantastic keel-pouring saga with the peeps in Port Thownsand, Wa, rebuilding a 112 year-old sailing yacht, the Tally Ho, of which I have talked many times. They are working on re-pouring the keel now, it is just amazing. About a year ago, they attempted to repair the old keel by pouring new lead onto the old lead keel, in a mould. It failed spectacularly and they spilled lead everywhere, and then they just ignored the keel problem for a like a year, but it had been lingering like a big baddie over their whole boat rebuilding. But apparently this master keel maker — hrm I am thinking now I already wrote this hold plz. Oh hrm, yes, I have. Well you can just consider this paragraph one of those recap/quote paragraphs people with newsletters love to do when they are re-visiting a topic. Anyway, episode 2 of the keel drama came out, and it as fantastic. All they did in this episode is make the mould and it was just so great. My god I love keel building. I want to be a keel-builder’s apprentice.
Tune in next weekend for the thrilling conclusion.
What else this weekend. Um… got my taxes done, well, not done, they won’t be done till, like, October, but I got all the parts done I need to do. Got all my crypto shit sorted, hooked up with CoinTracker and stuff. Pretty straightforward for me since I haven’t really sold yet. Wrangled my 1099’s. made a spreadsheet of all my charity donations. It’s all very easy now that I keep a proper accounting of my life in Quicken. I took out the compost. I mailed a bunch of Discogs sales. I got this replacement foot warming matt all set up beneath my desk and it is just great.
OH and the other thing I tried to do is migrate to Apple Music, again and it didn’t work again, so I am trying to wipe my entire icloud music library, and it is basically impossible. I wiped it all from my computer, and it seemed wiped, but there was still 2 gig of data on my iPhone from Apple Music that persisted even when I deleted the app and re-installed it. I turned off and then on again sync on the phone, and now it’s just been cranking away with a progress circle for two days. Insane. So we are still stuck with Spotify now, even as the Joe Rogan thing gets worse, they’ve pulled a hundred-plus episodes, because Joe Rogan apparently loves saying the N-word, and Daniel Ek keeps telling employees that it’s not his fault and Andrew Yang weirdly stuck up for Joe Rogan saying he couldn’t be a racist cuz he has black friends and that, my friends, is what a calculated centrist position looks like. At this rate, it will prove easier to take-down a founder-CEO of a $30-billion company and to cancel a one hundred million dollar syndication deal than it will to migrate from Spotify to Apple Music.
And to clarify: that’s all I realistically want. I want Spotify to stop paying Joe Rogan a hundred million dollars to say stupid shit. If Joe Rogan wants to be like the rest of us and syndicate his podcast to Spotify for free, and Spotify wants to give him exactly the same amount of help they’d give anyone else, I could live with that. I mean, I belive Spotify has the right to do more, they could kick him off if they wanted, but every platform has awful shit on it. It just galls me they are paying for the awful shit.
I started reading a book called Our Home is Wasilla about a couple named Pat and May Carter, who were my grandparents’ best friends in Wasilla for, like, fifty years. Pat and my grandfather Gene came up to Alaska together on the same steamer from Seattle in 1938. They enlisted for WWII together. I have all these books about family history—well, like, three—that I am always meaning to read but never get around to it, and I thought now is the time. The longer you don’t read a book, the longer you don’t know the information in that book, and I figure I need to get all these read while the Boomers, the authors of these books are still alive so I can ask questions. My uncle Jack wrote a book about my paternal grandparents, and my uncle Skip has written a manuscript about my maternal grandparents, and while I know the basics, I want to know it all a bit better.
One thing I realized I want to do is I want to add an Appendix to the Jane book. I am, as you may recall, writing Jane a book where I write her a letter once a month, every month. And at some point, when she’s an adult, it will be a gift to her. But I realized it should have a nice appendix that is a sort of basic family history, easy to find, all in one place. Back to, at least, her great-grandparents, with some basic history of each branch of the family, little bios, maybe a simple family tree. Don’t worry, I’m not gonna go all geneology-nut on her, but I think that would be a nice gift. To have it all in one, easy-to-reference place. Something she (hopefully) wont lose. I haven’t started that yet—I do have like fourteen years to get it done. But I figure reading these family books lying around is a good first step. It is time. I have procrastinated on this for too long.
Playlist time! This has been really hard the last two weeks as I keep making these abortive attempts to migrate, then I add an bunch of stuff to the new versions of the playlists in Apple Music, then everything gets messsed up and I have to revert back to the Spotify ones and it really is starting to bring me down. But I persevere. For you, the audience, cuz the show must go on, etc. etc. So we have a W Hotel playlist today. That Spiritalized song, “Electric Mainline,” is exactly the song I hear when I picture going up the escalator at that hotel… um… the first Schrager hotel in, like, Flatiron-ish? What was it called? Anyway, that one.
All right, have a lovely Monday, or at least an endurable one. No way man, crush it. CRUSH IT. Be all aggro and write a bunch of unironic, embarrassing tweets about how you are killing it at work or something. Those people seem to be really happy.