Good morning. Hello. How are you? #687
The Vet Shortage, Fabegé Eggs and civil asset forfeiture, a video with a bunch of my coworkers in it, a nice little OSX shareware app, Cent.co, Metallica's touring machine, Bruni in NC.
Good morning! Hello! How are you? I am good. I have already made five typos writing out the headline of this entry and these first 26 words, so it looks like it is going to be one of those days.
Programming update from yesterday: Roy is fine, Roy seems recovered, we are greatly relieved. Roy snuck out of the house to the back patio, that’s how well Roy is doing now. Roy is eating and purring and snuggling and it is making us all very relieved. These kitties are too young to lose one of them yet. When I was in New York I was talking to a friend about our kitties and how we wanted a third but we were trying to space them out so they didn’t all die at once and how that would be very hard on everyone, and I was kinda feeling like I might have jinxed Roy, so… whew.
Also my friend Bill sent this very interesting article about the roots of the vetrinarian shortage. It is a blog post from his place of employment, which is a company that makes software for vetrinary hospitals. Many of the causes are things we expected: people bought more pets during the pandemic. But some of them were things I hadn’t thought of, and actually kind of depressing! To whit:
Little discussed, but significant: being exposed to humans 24 hours a day is simply dangerous for animals. Without the normal break of 8 or more hours from us, there is more time to be fed human food, accidentally be hit by a car, eat toxins like raisins or grapes, raid a purse, be stepped on by a child, fall in the pool, get heat stroke, and on and on.
Good lord. We are poison to our pets well there is a depressing idea.
I saw Bill on my trip to New England a few months ago. And weirdly I saw another friend who works in vetrinary technology, at a large animal testing lab. Not like bad animal testing for makeup, but, like, the company who processes your animal’s test results from the vet. And I saw my vet friend on that trip! So many people in vetrinary sciences!
(In the voice of Gollum): Eggs! Eggs at Sea!
Important news in the world of Fabergé Eggs, delivered by my wife from the amazing Nastasha Bertrand (oh Natasha, I miss you so. We both left MSNBC but I will always remember our time together):
Now look. There are not a lot of Fabergé eggs, and more to the point, the gentleman who owned this yacht, Suleiman Kerimov, does not own a Fabergé egg as far as we know. There are only two eggs that currently definitely exist that are owned by people unknown: the Third Imperial egg (the one with the clock in it), sold by Wartski in 2014 to a private collector, and the mysterious Blue Striped Enamel egg, also in a private collection. The Winter Egg was sold in 2002, reportedly to the Emir of Qatar, though that hasn’t been confirmed, so I suppose Suleian, who is rich enough, could own that one.
Then we have Viktor Vekelsberg, another sanctioned Russion Billionaire and the owner of the most Fabergé Eggs in the world, having purchased Malcolm Forbes’s collection. He has since donated all of these to the Kremlin to maintain his favor with Putin and establish the Faberge Museum in Saint Petersberg.
The thing about Fabergé eggs is there’s only one of each, and it feels like every single timethat someone says “they have a Fabergé egg” or “we found a Fabergé egg” it is probbaly not actually a Fabergé egg unless they say which one. It’s like saying some rich dude owns a sports team but not mentioning which one. Because there really aren’t that many of them. A lot fewer eggs than sports teams, in fact.
So I await further detail from Lisa Monaco about which egg. If it’s the Third Imperial or the Blue Enamel egg, hey, fun! A mystery solved. (This would be doubly exciting if it were the Third Imperial Egg since that thing was basically the greatest thrift store find ever when it was found at a flea market in the Midwestern US, a topic I have written about too many times, but come on.) But if it’s one of Vekelsberg’s, this raises all sorts of other questions: are the Fabergé Museum and Putin trying to smuggle eggs out? Or did Vekelsberg lie and keep one or two that he bought on the DL and not donate to the museum (this seems difficult since, well, they’re all accounted for). Or did the Emir of Qatar not really buy the Winter Egg?
Oh hey I meant to post this like a week ago but here is a fun professionally produced video of my coworkers, done in partnership with AWS, since Amazon and Nimbus both give each other a lot of money, back and forth, Amazon and Nimbus just giving each other lots of money, like a strange perpetual motion machine. I haven’t actually been in this office since before the pandemic. I miss our office. I haven’t seen the faces of any of the people in this video in years, but I talk to them every day. They are goodp people:
And they really sound like they know what they’re doing!
While we’re (vaguely) on the subject of tech, I would like to tell you about this wonderful little shareware (lol) app I discovered this week that solved so many of my problems. It is called Choosy, and it basically lets you tell your computer to open different types of links in different browsers. So, for example, I can tell it to open any link from Calendar.app in Chrome, which is my browser permanently logged in to my work Google account, so the Google Meet links open up there and I can actually just launch a Meeting instead of having it open in Safari, and then copy the link then switch to Chrome, then paste it.
Another example is that I am a fan of this creator platform called Cent.co that my friends are building, where creators can easily and freely publish NFTs with their blog posts. My friend Katie is one of the founders and she publishes photos and I can collect them and it is fun. I will write more about it someday. But in any case, my “web3” browser is Brave, to keep it separate from the rest of my life, and because Metamask Wallet is better integrated there than it is in Safari. But whenever I get an email notification of a new photo from Katie, I click on the link to collect the photo and it would open in Safari, and I would have to copy/paste, and it was a giant pain. With Choosy, I can just tell it “hey open any URL that has cent.co in the URL with Brave.” Stuff like that. I am finding dozens of little use cases, and sure, in aggregate, they maybe only waste 3-4 minutes a day, but that is not nothing!
Also there is this guy on Cent who is publishing photos/NFTs of the graffitti in various bar bathrooms around Brooklyn and he has already done Saint Vitus and Clem’s, two bar bathrooms very close to my heart.
Anyway, Choosy is great. Strong reccommend.
Emma and I were talking about Stranger Things and Metallica and we were reading meme Tweets or some shit from people who were making fun of Gen Z kids who were just learning about Metallica from Stranger Things and while they were funny, I objected. Because this can’t be possible, can it? Metallica is huge. This is like saying you learned about Jesus from a TV show, and that is not hyperbole. Metallica is so huge. Emma was like “I mean, they’re big but I don’t think they’re that big?” And so I hit the internet for evidence to support my thesis that Metallica is fucking huge. Wikipedia has them listed as the 34th best-selling recording artist of all time, but I feel like that does not do them justice. So I found this very fascinating article, with a title that really supported my thesis: Tour & Destroy: The Case for Metallica as the World’s Biggest Touring Act. And yes, my god, they are so big.
But also, the article is super interesting! Metallica’s road crew has mostly been unchanged for, like, forty years. Metallica has a special day once a year where thousands of their fans staff food banks around the country and work them all, with Metallica donating giant sums of tour proceeds to food banks, and the fans do it in exchange for special, limited-availability Metallica food bank day t-shirts and other merch. As I just mentioned yesterday, food banks are very near and dear to my heart, so this is especially touching to me. In every city in which they play, they donate to the local food bank.
More than 22 million people have seen Metallica live. They have grossed over $1.5 billion in ticket sales. And that is not accounting for inflation, and they are getting bigger. The last tour grossed over $400 million.
The band and crew know over 70 songs at any time, Lars writes a custom set list for every show. This is unheard of.
This makes me even more happy that I got to see them at Stubb’s. I knew it was rare they played venues that small, but I didn’t realize it was that rare. They have, however, played smaller shows: Metallica has played every continent in the world, in a single year, including Antarctica, where they played a free show for the scientists at Carlini Dome. Here is the setlist for the one-show “Freeze Em All” tour. The whole show is in HD on Youtube:
Metallic is A-OK. Also Some Kind of Monster is the best rock documentary film ever, perhaps the best documentary film ever. OMG I’m gonna have to re-watch that ASAP.
Finally, it turns out that, oh yay, New York Times columnist Frank Bruni has moved about ten minutes down the road from me, and he is now writing long think pieces for the Times about North Carolina politics which sounds like it might be awful, but actually, I gotta say, this piece is actually a pretty great overview of the political situation in NC and the case for it being one of the most important political battlegrounds in the country. So, you know, if you want your vote to make a difference, come on down.
All right, that’s it for today, that was a lot of links, which are very time consuming, especially all those Fabergé wikipedia links.
Today’s mix is a punk mix, because I am reading a history of SST records, so basically, for the last week, my routine has been go to bed, read a chapter, add a ton of SST albums to my “to investigate” playlist on Spotify, wake up, listen to SST bands while I am working on my GMHHAY. Many of the bands I have heard before — the Minutemen, Black Flag, Hüsker Dü, Mudhoney, Bad Brains (fact: HR was seriously homophobic!) — but many of them I hadn’t: Dick’s, Saccharine Trust, The Stains, Würm. It has been educational. I’m only 2/3 of the way through the book, and I am a bit punked out. But we’re through the main punk era of SST and getting into the SST I know a bit better: Sonic Youth, Roger Miller, Opal, etc. So it should un-punk a bit. Just got through the part where D Boon of the Minutemen died in a car crash, it is really sad. Damn.
And then on top of that is some random, newer punk that I have been randomly listening to. Oh and Fugazi, but with Rollins and Bad Brains both being friends of Ian, yet on SST, they seem to count.