Good morning! Hello! How are you? Oh god I have such a busy day I am slightly nervous. I have a two hour meeting, another meeting, then I gotta do another meeting, maybe, rescheduled from yesterday, and then I gotta do a lecture for two hours and oh man I am so glad I’m not leaving home at, like, six AM tomorrow I really did not think that through. WHEW.
I would like to announce that I finally got my long work document written yesterday. It was not that hard. But, then, I did not do that good of a job. But it is a draft, it is done, and now I can make that draft better, which is not actual work I can do that in my sleep. So at the present moment, incredibly long, busy day aside, I do not have any long work documents hanging over my head, which stresses me out. Looking back in the last couple weeks I’m realizing now I’ve written something like 40 pages for various work documents, so this is a very exciting development that I don’t currently have one outstanding. I wonder how long this will last. Fingers crossed.
Yesterday’s Why is this Interesting was about pipe organs, the history of pipe organs and the pipe organ in Notre Dame in Paris. It got me thinking about the pipe organ in the church I went to when I was a kid, First United Methodist Church, in Fairbanks. I was trying to do a little research about it, and discovered a pipe organ datanbase online, which of course, but is still pretty cool. One of the things I still love about the internet: the ability for obsessive cataloggers to share and collaborate. Anyway, seems thast the pipe organ in my church was installed in 1981, which makes sense, because I remember it vividly, I would have been nine. Behind the altar, there were Sunday School rooms, on two floors. The two upper Sunday school rooms were shortend to make room for all the pipes. They put a lock on the door, but that was no real match for a bunch of curious kids, and we pretty quickly bypassed the lock and got into the new room behind the altar where all the pipes were. It became our secret clubhouse in the church, among these giant pipes. The pipe organ database tells me that the pipe organ at FUMC had 892 pipes, 3 divisions, 2 manuals, 16 stops and 14 registers. I don’t know what that means, but damn, that is a lot of pipes. It was made by Casavant Frères Ltée. and it was their 3,257th organ. I wish I could find a picture of that room, it was so cool, just these giant pipes towering toward the ceiling. Some of them were huge.
Also the Pipe Organ Database has a picture of FUMC from the 1960’s, so before my time, but more notably, before they painted the thing white, and before the addition, which must have happened in the late 60’s or early 70’s. And the church looked so cool then! So scandanavian! Look at this:
That makes the church look so much cooler. Also those beautiful trees where there is now… just a second parking lot. And that hedge!
There is also a website catalogging all the pipe organs in Alaska. Seems that there are eight in Anchorage, one each in Chugiak, Petersburg, Sitka, Juneau, Ketchikan, and fort Greely and two in Fairbanks. There is one at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, which is sort of surprising to me since I have spent a lot of time in their arts building and can’t think of a pipe organ but maybe it’s in some sort of chapel? But in any case, if it weren’t for this mythical UAF pipe organ, the one at my church would have been America’s furthest north pipe organ. No such luck, alas.
Some other big news in the last day or so is that a Vietnamese electric car maker, called Vinfast, chose Chatham County as the site for their American factory. Four billion dollar investment. Seven thousand five hundred hobs. This is just slightly over 10% of the entire population of the county. If you have not heard of Vinfast you are not alone. I asked a couple friends in the auto industry no one had heard of it. They did make an appearance at CES this year with an entire lineup of electric cars — apparently they are one of the first automakers to offer an entire line of electric cars and no ICE engines. I watched a few YouTube vidoes about their CES appearance. Seems they had a lineup of prototypes there, but no test drives. Most of the Youtube reviews are just of specs and shots of the cars sitting in a showroom setting.
This would be an appropriate moment to highlight MKBHD’s video yesterday, “The Electric Car Preorder Problem” highlighting a giant problem that electric car companies are having, you know, actually shipping cars. I get the sense Marques Brownlee has a lot of deposits down on a lot of electric cars. It was kind of shocking to me that it’s been five years since Tesla announced the new Roadster and people paid two hundred and forty thousand dollars – the entire amount of the car — down as a deposit, thus giving Tesla a quarter million dollar loan. If you had put that money into Tesla stock, it’d be worth over $4 million now. And they’re not even one of the bad ones, they actually ship cars! So many electric car companies with pre-orders and no cars shipped. It really is just absolute garbage.
If Wikipedia and the follow-on sources are to be believed, Vinfast does actually ship cars. Looks like they sold about 20,000 cars in Vietnam in 2020, and a plant actually exists with a capacity of 250,000, so you know. Maybe this will actually happen? At any rate, the county is very excited about it. It’ll be one of the largest economic development deals in the state’s history. And the area is already a designated industrial park so probably none of the misery that is befalling Georgia with the Rivian plant or the crazy shit happening in Tennessee with the state taking over towns in order to help Ford with their new plant.
I’ve started a list of all the things I need to bring on this 2-and-a-half week to New England and, man, it is gonna be a lot. I’m glad we’re driving. I hope Jane doesn’t freak out in the car. I hope she is a road trip natural. I spent a lot of time driving her around when she was a baby and she mostly loved it, and Emma drove her to Atlanta once without too many problems. She seems very into her routine around peeing, though, so that is making us nervous. Not super looking forward to bringing her to rest stop bathrooms but I guess what are you going to do. Fingers crossed!
Well I didn’t have a mix ready today everything is, like, halfway done and I really gotta get some of these mixes done for you, but I just whipped up this one which is a certain mood that I guess you could call the mood that I am in at this exact moment. All I did yesterday was listen to The Seeds of Love on repeat for, like, three hours, and the day before all I did was listen to Enter the Vaselines deluxe edition for, like, three hours. The Vaselines do good stage banter (the deluxe edition contains a bunch of live tracks). Everything else here is what I’ve been listening to the last week or so, so I guess this is a mix capturing the moment and what else are mixes supposed to be fore except for, you know, meaningfulluy, longingly conveying crushes from a distance but I am sorry to say I don’t really have a crush on you guys. Not all of you anyway. Not as a whole.
Okay wish me luck on this absurdly long day! Ta.
How dare you talk about listening to Seeds of Love for hours on repeat and not include any of that on your mix?
I really enjoyed reading about pipe organs during a tense moment in CDMX. Thank you!
What about that weird pipe organ in the GSU? What's up with that?