Good morning. Hello. How are you? #587
Hello please pre-order my book. And other stuff. Like sports and TV and whining about the vaccine for Jane.
Good morning! Hello! Happy Monday! Hells yeah! Monday! Woooo! Did you have a lovely weekend? Mine was pretty swell, gotta admit. Watched that Super Bowl thing, I wanted the Bengals to win, but once they scored that ill-gotten touchdown where the refs failed to call that mas pull, I felt bad that they were gonna win, and decided if they were gonna win, it was going to have to be by more than seven. I am, as ever, disappointed there was no safety. The only football games worth watching have safeties in them. That new field looks amazing and ridiculous. The halftime show was very good. I particularly loved the fake mixing desk and Anderson .Paak’s drums. And Eminem taking a knee after being told not to. Good for him.
I spent all day Saturday watching TV. It was 70 degrees out. Emma kept trying to get me to go out side and I was like “nah. Shit on TV.” I watched all my YouTube videos, and I watched like four hours of Olympics including both half pipe finals, which were very good, women’s x-cross snowboarding finals, and some men’s 10k biathalon. Women’s skeleton, that stuff is so gloriously crazy. I tried to watch some men’s skating to watch Nathan Chen’s gold performance but men’s skating is very boring to me, and I could not finish it. I watched some Women’s Short Track speedskating, and it was complete BS, Kristen Santos was fouled out in the final, and they disqualified the person who knocked her over, but there was absolutely no recourse to Kristen, who had a very good shot at winning. Like what the hell kind of sport is that? What does that teach anyone about sportsmanship? Screw that.
Then in the evening—all three evenings, actually—Emma and I watched curling because curling is just the best. We both kinda have a crush on the Korean skip.
Then I watched two episodes of the new Shondaland in association with Shonaland Media production Inventing Anna, about the New York socialite grifter Anna Delvey aka Anna Sorokin and it was very hard to watch because I was not particularly sure what I was watching. I kinda have a hard time with these “this is all true but some parts aren’t” liminally fictionalized biopics. Like… what is going on here? If the actual story isn’t interesting enough to hold up an 8-episode series, maybe don’t make it an 8-episode series? Like I’m sorry, Shonda Rhimes, if your half a billion dollar deal requires TV series and Anna Delvey didn’t complay and be quite interesting enough to hold that up? Also… Purple Magazine is real and they use their real name, but they fictionalize New York magazine. They weirdly fictionalize the one hotel that decided to go public ad press charges, 11 Howard, but not all the hotels that didn’t. But the weirdest thing was the choice to fictionalize the boyfriend, who seems, after two-and-a-half episodes, somewhat complicit? Like in the real world this dude seems to have very successfully evaded scrutiny and attention for his part (if, I suppose, that’s not the fictionalized part, who knows!), so it seems odd to then fictionalize him, because he’s not newsworthy enough to be protected by the first amendment newsworthiness protection.
And then there’s just the reality of the situation, like, me and all my friends were obsessed with Anna Delvey before the first court bail hearing—the one where she wore that fantastically killer outfit. But in the show, the intrepid reporter smells a good story that no one else cares about, and attends that selfsame bail hearing, in an empty courtroom where no one cares about the case. That is just not how things were, and it annoys me. And two episodes in we’ve got more about this reporter than Anna, and I don’t care. And they’re portraying this reporter like she’s some down-and-out, I-need-this-for-my-career desperado, when in actuality, she had already bounced back and optioned a story that became the movie Hustlers.
I dunno, I just am not quite sure what I’m watching.
We should also throw in an honorable mention here for part 3 of the thrilling adventure of pouring a lead keel for the 112 year-old sailing yacht the Tally-Ho, man, watching people pour a lead keel is just the greatest thing, especially some handsome old gentleman that looks like Paul Newman that has been pouring lead keels for 30 years and goes into a long tangent about the time OSHA came to his keel shop and stuck lead fumes indicators everywhere and how he passed with flying colors.
But the big news is that Sunday I got my act together and did not watch TV all day, and I got a ton of stuff done for GMHHY. To whit:
Widows and orphans re-flowing for one-point-larger text size got done. Man, that really messes with your brain, took four passes on a 700-page book. But when youi’re in the zone, it’s so fun. It’s like tetris. When you tighten up the chracter spacing by 1% and, like, six lines and two entire pages re-flow and you got three more lines on the same page? Magical. It’s like winning at Tetris. The best.
I got the second proof of GMHHAY sent off to the printer, with the larger type size, slight revisions, and slight adjustments to Emma’s cover. Should be back this week.
I got the Kindle version made and submitted to Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP). Making Kindle versions of books is so hard it takes so long and so many efforts. It took me ten tries to get everything right, and that is a record for my books. I also got the Amazon print-on-demand paperback version submitted, but that was easier it just required shifting both margins 0.1 inches to the outside. So those are both almost ready for pre-order and you’ll be able to pre-order the book on Amazon in a couple days.
BUT right now you can pre-order the book on my own website! Go buy your copy of Good Morning. Hello. How Are You? straight from the author! It is not shipping till March, but still! What a great gift for that glutton for diaristic punishment in your family.
By next weekend, I’ll have gotten around to making a banner for the top of this email extolling you to purchase a copy, and I will be just like a real grown-up Substack author.
Also getting the old rickwebb.net site updated to get GMHHAY in the store was a giant pain the ass, my Squarespace template was, like, seven years old and broken, and I had to pick a new one, which was a huge pain because there’s this fucked up thing on Squarespace where they have functionality to have a page description — i.e. a block of text at the top of the page, that I used extensively to put text at the top of gallery pages, but almost no templates support it, because reasons. I mean who knows. They made a feature then don’t use it, so now there’s this giant support page about it, because people are annoyed and the whole thing hasn’t been fixed in seven years. But I mostly got the thing fixed, but there are things I still don’t like about it, like you can’t put any links on the Podcast page to, like, iTunes or Stitcher or anything, which is stupid, and suddenly the individual podcasts now all have like buttons, which no one ever used because they weren’t visible, and no one will ever use because they’re dumb, and I’m sure you can remove them with some custom code but who knows and why are they there anyway. So that whole thing took, like, three hours.
I also got my podcast done if you prefer your Webb Chatham Reports in aural form. This episode’s topics include: Day 705, Pandemic and under 5 vaccine musings, Country flashcards, Olympics Olympics Olympics, HOA Treasurer duties, Wegovy, diet, oral fixations, Jane, drawing, writing, Spotify migration to Apple Music, early gardening planning, GMHHAY book proofs, Jane book. family history research, Papillon (2018), Ghostbusters Afterlife, Wim Wenders: Pope Francis A Man of His Word, Every Thing Will Be Fine, The American Friend, Love and Rockets, Rick Rubin’s Studio Fire, Dead Can Dance, Mac DeMarco, Angel Olsen, Arcade Fire, Brian Eno, Orbital, RevCo, DGC Rarities Comp, Mass, UVS, 4AD Promo coincidences, Test Dept, Mitski, Microphones Box Set, Sonic Youth’s In Out In, Loretta Lynn, Unbunny, Amusement Parks on Fire, Mø, Diavol Stráin, Lionel Ritchie, Whitney Houston, As Lonely as Dave Bowman, Broken Social Scene, Anaïs Mitchell, Palace, The Dream Academy, Chumbawamba, Kathy Heideman, Delphine Dora, Cate Le Bon, Caterwaul, Book of Boba Fett, Peacemaker, Cheer, The Woman in the House Across the Street From The Girl In The Window, The Olympics, Nobody, We Are but Your Children: An Oral History of the Club ManRay by Shawn Driscoll, A Short History of Financial Euphoria by John Kenneth Galbrait, Our Home is Wasilla by Dominic L Carney
Oh on Friday morning, after I wrote this post, I did my once-a-week venture out of the house and among other things, Emma wanted a McDonald’s visit, so I went and got us breakfast and when I pulled up the window, as I was handing over my credit card, the guy was like “the dude in front of you paid for your meal.” And I said “oh, okay, well I will pay for the one behind me then.” My meal was $7, the guy’s behind me was $14, so I lost out on that one. I asked how long this meal chain had been going and he said about eight cars now. So, you know. Heatwarming story of the day. Maybe leaving the house isn’t always so bad.
Also on Friday we got the depressing news that the FDA or whoever is giving up on getting us the vaccine for kids under 5 until at least April. They were supposed to meet Thursday, and emergency approval was widely expected. But in the end, they cancelled the meeting at the last moment, the whole thing is a giant shitshow, no one is sure why. The information they offer is nominally true, but not super helpful, and Emily Oster and other people who follow this think that the whole thing was just a bit too messy and they weren’t sure they’d even get approval from the whole committe, so here we are. Emma likes to point out that this is all about Pfizer, and plugging along slowly is the Moderna vaccine, which is expecting initial results in March, so I guess there’s still a shot (pun intended), but I’m not holding my breath. At the point, March or April, even if one of those happens, let’s assume two shots minumum, Jane’s not getting fully vaccinated till late April at best and more likely June. Emily Oster and everyone else is like “well I guess we just accept this, the risk is low, time to just start doing things with our kid again,” and I do think that is a possible moral, ethical decision one can make, I am not dissing it, but it is not the decision for me. Saying “it’s about as likely as the flu or a car crash” is not reassurance to me! We vaccinate for the flu! We have giant huge strong car seats! The flu doesn’t kill you! And cars are super unsafe and we know it! These asre not reassuring statements. I think, sure, if you have to go out into the world to provide for your kid, to live your life, then yes, you can morally play the statistics. It is fine. But… I don’t. So it’s a different calculus for me, because it doesn’t start with “well, we have to leave the house. How do we minimize risk?” For me it starts with “we don’t have to leave the house, is this trip from the house worth it? If Jane get sick from this trip, was it necessary?” And yes, occasionally the trip is worth it, but.. usually not?
One thing I keep saying that a certain cohort of armchair epidemiologists forget is that operting within risk factors is not the only rational approach to safety. Zero tolerance can be rational within certain frameworks, especially when human life is involved. Think of the factory floor. When my sister worked up on the Slope, the oil companies were like “safety is everything, we stop anything and everything for safety, we have zero tolerance for risk to himan life.” This is the whole “200 days since our last accident” approach to safety, and it is every bit as rational as risk riding. In some cases, like a factory, it is more rational.
Anyway.
I would like to finish up by noting that the May 19, 2021 GMHHAY entry ended with me saying “chin up, chin up.” Not only do I say so again here, I would like to note that that phrase was an inside reference specifically directed at Ashley Serotta and no one else. They were a pretty good band thank you for introducing me to them.
And finally, happy valentine’s day! To celebrate, here is a mix of songs about love, death, angst, and pain. It’ll do you right in for the day. Man. New goth is so great. Really broken out of its “we’re secretly just techno” mould of the 90’s. So much good goth shit going on these days. Also Lustmørd and Godflesh did a collaboration in 2021, my 1992 self is psyched.
Okay let’s crush this week and grind. Grind so hard we’re killing it. Dead.