Good morning. Hello. How are you. #615
Fat lip, a take on takes about takes, broken social media platforms, Save the Bees license plate program audits, "County Fair" by Van Morrison is ruined.
Good morning! Hello. How are you? Happy tuesday. I hope things are going swimmingly for you. My daughter gave me a fat lip yesterday. Just a little one. We were doing bedtime and I was holding her doing “one kiss two kiss,” which has sort of evolved since we last talked about it. Now I have to say “one kiss, plus one is two kiss, plus one is three kiss,” etc. This is a vestige from when she was first learning math, which is old hat at this point (well, at least addition and subtraction are). And then on top of that, now I have to move her around and kiss a different part of her for each kiss. She sort of wriggles around and points to a different place I have to kiss. She is four now, and getting bigger, and her wriggling is very hard to wrangle (wriggling wrangling) and always a bit fraught with peril because she has no real personal space limits and doesn’t seem to grasp that my face is fragile. Up till now I’ve managed to avoid harm but that streak ended yesterday. It has been zero days since your last accident. I have a nice cut on my lip and they suck and ice packs get warm so quickly. Oh I should take more Advil for the swelling. Hold please.
Will Smith finally apologized to Chris Rock, the discourse seems to be dying down, we can all slowly get back to our lives, yay. One thing I think is weird are the “meta takes” about takes. Like to me this seems a very classic game-not-the-player situation? I do not espcially think it’s terrible that people have opinions? I suppose I would prefer them to have wise opinions and not bad opinions, but “the takes” do not seem to be, in the abstract, “the problem.” I would posit the bad thing is that we have global communications systems that dump every human’s opinions into our brains all at once and that makes us feel terrified, confused, absurd and vaguely insane all at once. But I’m realizing I definitely do not want everyone in the world’s opinion injected into my brain all at once. You’d think this realization would mean I don’t spend several hours a day on Twitter but nope.
For example I have plenty of bad “takes” in here, and you subscribe to this and you read them sometimes. And it all works generally fine because this is a format where we are spending some time together and getting to know one another and a bad “take” is in context and generally speaking a drop-in isn’t going to see one random issue of GMHHAY and read a “take” and get all butthurt because they don’t know me and can’t evaluate that individual “take” in the larger context of a human being. Which is why GMHHAY is so much better of an outlet for me than Twitter. Social Media is bad!
Emma said something interesting the other day, basically like “Lots of people are still on Facebook but no one posts on Facebook because it is a giant hassle and the comments sections can be a nightmare and you have to deal with crazy people,” and I thought that was very true. I notice it very much in the cross-posting of these daily emails to Facebook. Lots of friends comment but most of them rarely post themselves. Or if they do, it is something like GMHHAY — a regular “feature” like film reviews or travel updates. So then I was thinking how sad that is for Facebook and how they definitely don’t want people to think about this and probably 90% of Facebook’s problems are self-fulfilling because they made the platform so toxic that no one wants to post on it anymore, and so now the thing is dying. And how wouldn’t it be funny if charity somehow got involved. “Think of the poor people who just want to read some basic normal friend updates on Facebook. They are hurting!” And people posted boring normal friend updates to Facebook out of charity. People wore “save Facebook” shirts and put it on water towers. Also I was thinking about how Instagram doesn’t have this problem. As badly. yet. but it will, because that’s what Facebook does. It took the lyrics to Ladytron’s “Destroy Everything You Touch” seriously. You can already see the problems creeping into Instagram it is kind of amazing. But they’re only like 10% of the way there vs Facebook’s 70% (hrm that is an interesting question how much worse can Facebook get). So I was thinking it’d be hilarious if one day Meta just gave up on Facebook and when you went to Facebook.com or launched the app… you just got Instagram.
Buh dah bump.
Yesterday morning I went to the recycling center which is a huge accomplishment man I had so much recycling to dump. Then I went to Charles Schwab do deposit Emma’s SEP check. There was a car there with a Save the Bees license plate. North Carolina has a bunch of “special interest” plates but they’re all mostly garbage like guns and republicans and sports teams. There are a few college alma mater ones if you went to school around here, but for the rest of us, the only really good one — like seriously, the only one out of, like, fifty — is the Save the Bee plate, which has a little honeybee on it and gives money to some organization that saves honeybees. Although, now that I’m looking at it, the whole thing seems to be a scam? The money seems to go to an org called Bee Aware NC, who has a Facebook page that hasn’t been updated since 2016 when they were doing the plate drive, and the URL listed has been taken over by a spammy beauty blog. Hrm. Maybe I just discovered a very sophisticated grift. Is there an audit on these things? Mysterious. Well it’s still a cool license plate.
While I was driving to Schwab my big random playslist of favorites picked out and played “Country Fair” by Van Morrison off of Veedon Fleece which is a real hot jam except it turns out that modern-day Van Morrison has ruined old-skool Van Morison for me and even though Country Fair slaps I could not listen to a song by a man who made a song complaining about paying for welfare, amongst other wacky things. He has gone the way of the Smiths, to whom I can’t listen anymore thank you very much late-period bigoted Morrissey. Like I’m sitting here listening to “Country Fair” and thinking how awesome it is and then I’m thinking “maybe it’s not awesome at all maybe this whole genre, this whole millieu is an early symptom of bigotry and paranoia and you should just sort of steer clear of it,” and I know that’s not rational at all but there is intolerance all over Van Morrison now and I don’t wanna accidentally catch it by getting too close to it. Maybe that lyric “We were too young to really know” in “Country Fair” was a warning!
Man this is all like a Good Place episode or something. Save the Bees plates? Seems good. Actually bad. “Country Fair” off of Veedon Fleece? Seems good, actually bad.
Speaking of half-hour comedies we finished Our Flag Means Death last night and I gotta say, for a show I thought was kinda weaksauce and had no real potential to go anywhere in episode 1, it really evolved and became quite a moving thing! Impressive. Lotta layers to Our Flag Means Death, I for one did not see that coming. Completely coincidentally, we were looking for a new half-hour comedy to consume, and came across Wellington Paranormal which is a What We Do in the Shadows spin-off send-up of The X-Files, so, you know, right up our alley. Our life is run by comedy filmmakers from Wellington now.
I’m seriously on the fence about going to Boston this Friday. Actually, I am leaning toward skipping it. I really want to see Mercury Rev but I looked at the setlist and it was great but nothing I haven’t seen a million times and it turns out I am still totally fucking sick of airplanes and airports and all their bullshit and I don’t especially want to deal. Still very excited about our May trip to Boston because we are driving. I am kind of thinking I might just avoid airplanes for the rest of my life because they’re annoying as hell and polluting as hell. I had a vague thought I should drive Jane to Alaska this year but I suspect I won’t get that hard core about the whole thing, and Emma seems very not into the idea of taking the Queen Mary 2 to Europe when we finally head back. I dunn. This is not rational. Maybe it’s just not enough of a reason to put myself out to visit a place I’ll be spending a bunch of time in just six weeks later when I can actually see people. Hopefully. Covid asterisks and caveats.
Or maybe I just don’t want to leave the garden quite yet.
Finally, for five days straight, I have gotten all my countries right on the country flashcards I am still doing: every morning I do Europe, Africa, Asia, Central America, South America, and the Carribbean. Five days in a row, not a single mis-click. Watch how now that I have written this I will immediately break my streak.
Got a wee psych rock playlist for ye this morning. Runs a little long but, you know, psych songs are long, it’s only 8 songs even if it’s over an hour. All the old bootled Les Razille Dénudés seems to have been kicked off of Spotify, which is a bummer, but the good news is a bunch of “official” (however that works) LRD pieces are showing up, so that is a silver lining. New BJM song is really good and that would factor into my decision-making about going to Boston for this show except a) you can never be sure BJM will actually play a show decently, and b) I have tickets for their show down here, which was supposed to have Mercury Rev on the bill as well but then they dropped and I am so bummed. So bummed. But at least the possibility of that show got me through a few very dark weeks of the pandemic, so I guess it had value even if it doesn’t happen.
OMG I am so behind schedule this morning this took forever. Bye!
With Van Morrison I'm very much trying to separate the artist from the art. I listened to Poetic Champions Compose last week (pure bliss) and found it was easy. I wonder if it's because I never gave much thought to him as a person ever. Unlike, say, Morrissey, whom I admired and thought of often and had posters of.