Good morning. Hello. How are you? #593
Another rant about Trek and a yearning for plotless sci-fi. More Grandpa territorial Alaska antics. Sebulba's henchmen.
Good morning! Hello! How are you? Getting through the week okay? Is the weather okay? We have rain but it made it into the 70’s yesterday that was nice.
I have a long list of disparate topics on my notepad today, and normally I would take this list and dole it out slowly over a few days so I don’t have to face the horror of writing to you without some topics in my back pocket, but instead today I’m gonna YOLO it, as the kids say, and blow/shoot my load/wad all at once. Starting with my beef about that exact metaphor, which started off as a metaphor about spending all your money at once, a big night on the town and all that, but has turned into a metaphor for ejaculation, even when you just want a non-sexual metaphor about spending all of your money, and there is no combination of blow/shoot and load/wad thast doesn’t sound gross anymore and that’s just a shame we have pottified a perfectly useful metaphor.
So, as they say on every single YouTube video, ever, “Let’s jump right in.”
I miss curling already, life is sad without curling. Congratulations to Eve Muirhead and the English team for a stellar game against the much cooler and far more fun and cute Japanese team. Really like the Japanese skip’s hand written notes of affirmation on her hand: “I am a good curler. Have fun.” Curling is better than 90% of all television. Curling – actually sports in general – are the most ubiquitous evidence we have that people are yearning for “plotless” TV. If you took curling and put it in Space, I would watch the hell out of that. And actually that’s an interesting question—has anyone made a fictionalized sports series? LIke it’s just a bunch of games of a sport, but the sport, teams, or scores are entirely fictionalized? I wonder how this genre would do.
Now that there’s no curling we are reduced to watching actual fictional serial television programs again, and we have picked up Star Trek Discovery after its mid-season break and I hate it so much. Emma doesn’t mind it, because she is, quite healthily, focusing on the good things about the season, and there are good things. But I am just so angry, so bitter that they took Star Trek a thousand years into the future and decided to make it… wait for it… dark and dystopian. Give me a freakin break. It is a complete dereliction of duty, a complete lack of imagination, an abdiction of everything that makes Star Trek Star Trek. It tells the audience you don’t care about Star Trek’s power of inspiration. It tells the audience you have no new ideas. The new season of Star Trek Discovery could be any other sci-fi show and I would probably watch it and like it just fine. It would have made a pretty solid next season of The Expanse, for example, because The Expanse’s view of the future is so bleak that a dystopic Trek future still makes for a somewhat optimistic Expanse future.
Remember when you first watched TNG after TOS? Remember the first time you saw the genius and bravery and inevitability of the Klingons being our friends? During the cold war? Remember the technolgical marvel and leap that was the holodeck? I mean, just, in general, TNG is sitting there as manifest evidence that people want Trek to be in a Utopian future. Utopias are not boring! They are not static! They can still have drama! TNG proved this! Sure, sometimes they cheated, but not really. Because Utopias are fragile! And they face challenges that sometimes is hard for them to adapt to! Imagine the possibilities of seeing a strong and prosperous Federstion a thousand years into the future! Has no one read any Iain Banks??? Disgusting. The show isn’t just a failure, it is an abomination of Trek. And it didn’t have to be this way! It used to be good!
Been thinking a lot about the Yosemite volcano and how it’s probably going to kill us all. It really is a perfect encapsulation of this dystopia problem. A Yosemite volcano is a huge problem. Huge. The Yellowstone volcano would still be a huge problem in a utopia. And it would be insanely interesting to watch a Utopia grapple with the potential for massive natural disasters. They would mostly succeed, through innovation and dedication. They would sometimes fail. Things would still happen! Why can’t we watch that! A sci fi show about a 24th century public works manager overseeing disaster mitigation projects around the galaxy. Sort of Parks and Recreation meets one of those engineering shows meets Ice Road Truckers in space. It would rule.
I am very sad about Mark Lanegan’s death, and I am not gonna lie, I shed a few tears. Also thinking of my freind Ben Hass today. On one of our pandemic Zooms, Ben was like “Mark Lanegan is one of my favorite artists and I love everything he does,” and he got me so inspired I spent a good solid month listening to every Mark Lanegan album last year, and Ben was right, Mark was awesome. I always loved Screaming Trees, and loved loved loved his collaborations with Greg Dulli. Speaking of which, just hours before the announcement about Mark, Dulli released a new Whigs song and announced an album and tour and they are coming to Cat’s Cradle, so I am very excited about that. But yeah Mark. Sad. He lived hard. But he tried, you know? He lived. He tried. He made us feel alive. His voice was majestic. I’m sad I’ll never hear it live again.
On a completely different note, Nick Laudadio introduced me last night to a vitally important avenue for insight into the Russian mind and what they may be thinking about the Ukraine situation. And that is the Russian Hardbass stylinds of DJ Blyatman, who has a host of insane, absurd videos on YouTube, many of which are collaborations with other artists. When Blyatman is solo, you see his face. When he is collaborating with another artis, he tends to wear a facemask and let his Blyatman logo signify his presence. Many of the songs have very explicitly pro-Russian, or perhaps ironically pro-Russian titled, it is hard to tell. “Party like Stalin.” “Motherland”. “Made in Russia.” “Slav King.” But the paradigm of the genre is definitely the first one Nick sent to me, “Gopnik,” which seems to translate to something like “delinquent.” Sorta a Russian thumping techno equivlant of the Grebo rock movement in the UK in the 80’s.
Their commitment to making these videos, even while obviously so drunk they can’t even do the dance moves, is admirable. The scene where he lights his cigarette off of the gas burner really took me back twenty years. Nick pointed out that right before that, he lit the burner with his lighter. He did not light his cigarette from the gas burner because he had to, he did it because he wanted to.
Our federal covid tests arrived yesterday, two whole tests, but they are our brand, the BINAXNOW ones, so that is nice. On to the pile I go. I guess that program was useful? It doesn’t feel like it, right here, to me, but I assume it was useful to other people? Also got the factories rolling again. Should I, like, donate these or something?
I started re-watching The Phantom Menace last night and I have zero regrets so far, which is not to say that it is good. It is to say I would consider cosplaying as one of these two “Henchmen of Sebulba” if I ever go to DragonCon again and I would be very excited, and perhaps worried for the person, if someone came up to me and said “are you cosplaying as a Sebulba henchman?” The only question is which one, though. The one on the right is in all black, so, more goth, but look at that eye shadow on the one on the left. Majestic.
Read more about the book by/about my grandfather last night. At this point in the book he is the president of the Chamber of Commerce of Nome, where he works as the regional head of Wein Air Alaska, which was a big Alaskan airline all the way through my childhood, really took Alaska Airlines on, but was done in by deregulation and the first wave of private equity buying up companies and saddling them with debt. Anyway, he attends this special dinner the military is doing in appreciation for the city, and he is seated right next to… General Dwight Eisenhower. This is about 1946 or so, so, War’s over, but Eisenhower is not yet president. Household name. Anyway, they sat and chatted through the entire long dinner, my grandpa said he was quite nice.
He also gets his pilot license, buys his first plane, which is promply crashed in the same chapter. In one year, Wein air loses ten planes to crashes in the bush, flying back then really was absurdly dangerous. There’s one scene where a legendarily reckless (non-Wein) pilot takes off from Kotzebue when no one else will, and immediately crashes and strews his cargo — including a woman and a baby — all over the frozen ice pack, and the next pilot sees the baby bundle just sitting there on the ice pack, lands, picks it up, and walks it over to the woman, who is laying on the ground with a broken arm. The woman and baby were fine.
There’s another scene where my Uncle Jack, who is four-ish at the time, sneaks on board a plane while my grandpa is reueling it, and stows away on the flight to Fairbanks, where the crew has to take care of him for a week until the scheduled flight returns to Nome. And another where my dad just casually pierces his entire hand with a piece of glass. Actually two interesting things about my dad, one I had forgotten, one I don’t think I ever knew: he always tested positive for TB, even up through old age, it was a big thing in my childhood they kept always trying to quarantine him. And they didn’t let him into Kindergarten because of it, so my grandma and his nanny had to home school him for a year before they could convince people he didn’t actually have tuberculosis. I knew that part but also my grandfather got a few negative TB tests, so maybe it was herditary? I didn’t know that part. I also didn’t know that my dad’s lifelong eye problems started at birth. The details were light, but my grandpa said the birth was hard, they almost lost dad and Millie, and his eyes were injured. Maybe forcepts? And I knew he had a few surgeries later in life on his eyes, starting in his teenage years, but I did not know about the one to “fix his crosseyes” when he was about six. That was news.
But yeah, jesus. Being a kid in territorial Alaska was fraught with peril. Both dad and Jack have had broken bones, several injuries at this point (the doctor called Jack’s broken collarbone “the tinyest broken collarbone he’d ever seen”), and neither is even ten.
Speaking of dads, last night on our walk I realized and told Emma that I am very bad at Dad jokes and I’m not sure I’ll ever be good at Dad Jokes and it made me a little sad. I only have a year, maybe, until Jane is ready to start groaning at a really good (i.e. bad) Dad joke, but I don’t feel ready for the task. I’m not sure what to do about it. I was really looking forward to descending into dad jokedom.
The printing company just let me know that the copies of Good Morning. Hello. How Are You? have shipped, and I chose the express shipping, at dumb expense, because I am impatient, so they will be here in 3 days or so, and I will start shipping them out this weekend, Monday latest, and that is very exciting. So you should order yours today to get in on the initial order.
Every day lately when we get downstairs after breakfast, Jane goes over to my couch and snuggles and asks me to come snuggle and it is impossible to resist, so even though this photo is almost exactly the same as yesterday’s, it is from a different day, and come on. It is too cute.
Okay let’s do a mix. Covers. Starting off with Mark, of course. The classic. The first of his solo covers, the arrangement of which Nirvana famously covered on MTV Unplugged in New York. The new Doja Cat cover from that Taco Bell Super Bowl spot is great. Thank you Stacy Lynes for introducing me to David Soul, aka Hutch from Starsky and Hutch yesterday. Rosalia covering Bonnie Prince Billy is perfection. The Microphones one is mayhaps a stretch to be called a cover, but we’re rolling with it cuz it’s good advice in general.
Thank you for letting me indulge in this hodge podge of topics today. I guess in the end it really doesn’t read that differently than any other edition of GMHHAY. Maybe this was all in my head. Never mind.
i feel like our forefathers/mothers led much more interesting lives. which is fine—i like comfort!
we got our tests yesterday too, but they were those generic-looking ones with the orange packaging. funny.
that photo of jane IS maxcuteness for sure!
I expect the Dad jokes will come to you naturally when the time is right. That’s what happened in our house anyway. It seems that life with kids brings so many opportunities for dad jokes you can’t avoid them.