Good morning. Hello. How are you? #688
Walmart run, all four 9/11 news broadcasts at once, Jan 6 hearings, Meta's doing dumb stuff again, my fridge is disturbingly well organized, Sonic Youth's first drummer.
Good morning, friend! Sorry I am late. I decided to mix it up and go to Walmart this morning before doing my GMHHAY. It is this kind of wacky sponteneity that makes life so worth living, let me tell you. Hold plz I need to fire up my influencer account and post an insta of my glamorous adventure.
Two important updates:
Roy was fine, still is, but the wrap-up to that story is that yesterday he pooped out about an inch-long piece of tulle from Emma’s sewing workstation. Perfectly intact tulle, pooped out. Emma texted me a picture of this tulle before I woke up, but she had also texted me about Natasha Bertrand and the Fabergé egg story, and so I missed the earlier text. She also helpfully posted a picture of poopy tulle in the comments of the Facebook edition of yesterday’s GMHHAY if you are dying to see such things, you weirdo.
Lisa Monaco, the Deputy AG who reported about the seized Fabergé Egg, actually said “alleged Faberge Egg” (emphasis added). So, a) apologies for trusting a single article without looking at the direct quote but also b) my suspicions were confirmed! I am willing to bet a few bucks that when this story is concluded, it will almost certainly not be a Fabergé Egg. And we will probably not hear about it at all ever again, even with my trusty “Fabergé Egg” Google Alert. But props to Monaco for not jumping to conclusions, even if everyone else did.
I wonder if someone from Wartski is, like, hounding every US government official they know in order to cut a deal and buy the egg off of them.
Not much to report from Walmart, they still have not renamed the “hispanic foods” aisle. They had a good supply of my favorite coat hangers but I think I’m all caught up. Top Gun Maverick still not on 4k UHD yet. No Peach Iced Tea Ice Breakers but I just ordered more from eBay yesterday, which is what I have been reduced to, and I have pretty much bought out eBay after this order, so… this obsession will be ending soon, I guess.
I am in the market for a vegetable and fruit air dryer and they did not have any. I guess I’ll have to get one from Amazon, alas. Any recommendations are welcome. I had a spare bottle of cayenne pepper from last year’s squirrel battles, and I poured that out at the perimter of the hoop house and that, along with some fake rubber snakes I am moving every day, and some squirrel corn seems to be (for now) keeping the squirrels at bay. And it occurs to me I have about 10 pounds of frozen thai chili peppers from last year, and more are on the way in the garden, so I may as well dry and powder my own much hotter chili powder. If I can grow my anti-squirrel arsenal, I could get into that. Also I totally need to defrost the chest freezer, so, double-plus.
(Oh man “double-plus” made me think of the Eurythmic’s 1984 soundtrack which I have not listened to in decades I’ll have to give that a listen this weekend).
So, last night I watched a good chunk of a documentary called Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project about a woman (named Marion Stokes, natch) who recorded to video tens of thousands of hours of TV news, 30 years continuously across many channels. She was a phenomenally intelligent woman, a known communist, tracked by the FBI, then she did a fascinating talk show in the 70’s in Philly, then married her rich co-host and convinced her husband’s estate to invest heavily in Apple at $7/share so, you know, made them a lot more money. She was 100% a hoarder, which is interesting, because, like, most hoarders live alone? I feel like? I mean, I don’t know much about hoarding but I feel like it is a solo endeavor or, as in the case of Stokes, her husband was so in love with her he pretty much let her do what she wanted, plus rich enough to, you know, get more space (she filled nine houses with her shit). So that was interesting. But it was also interesting that almost all of her hoarding was either technology (she bought, like, a dozen of every single Apple release ever) or media — she had over 45,000 books. So, you know, there but for the grace of god and a large fortune go I, but also, it was almost as if her subconscious was trying to invent the internet. This woman wanted massive amounts of information at her fingertips at all time, and before the internet, this is how you had to do it. I wonder what her hoarder tendencies would be like if this all happened in the modern era.
Anyway, the film was very well edited, and at one point it did a 2x2, 4-up video split of all four major broadcast networks on 9/11. I did not need to watch this yesterday, it was hugely emotionally harrowing. It was also intensely fascinating, though. CBS was the first to cut in, when a single plan had hit, and almost right away. It was several minutes before the next network cut in, ABC. NBC was doing something kind of interesting and sad. Ted Koppel was on and he was apologizing for the network’s complete lack of coverage of the Congolese massacres, vowing that this week they were going to right that wrong and provide an in-depth retrospective of the First Congo War and accompanying massacre of Hutus. I wonder if that ever aired, sometime later, after 9/11 calmed down.
And Fox news was on, and it was carrying a performance by Babyface. Which went on a really long time.
“Where were you on 9/11, Babyface?”
“Um… performing live on Fox news?”
But, eventualluy, all four networks cut away to the exact same feed, in time to watch the second plane hit.
And the editing was going audio of all four networks overlaid, a jumble of talking heads, and then just, a single gasp and then silence.
It was super intense.
So then I decided to follow this up by watching the January 6th committee investigation wasn’t that a great idea?
The hearing was as horrifying as the other ones, if somewhat less revelatory. It was less revelatory, of course, because we all already knew that Donald Trump didn’t do shit for three hours while the world burned. This is not to say there weren’t horrible revelations: The most damning is that Donald Trump filmed and aired his batshit, horrible “go home in peace we love you” Rose Garden speech only after it was clear to him that the crowd was going to fail in its mission, that many more police and soldiers were on their way, and Mike Pence was safe. He did not stop the insurrection until it had failed. I mean, I could have pieced that together, and it does not surprise me, but. My god.
We have a clause in our constitution that says:
No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof
It does not say how this person needs to be find guilty. We assume the rest of the constitution applies, so there needs to be some sort of trial. But where? Does it matter? I don’t understand why some enterprising DA somewhere doesn’t just take the 1/6 committee info and try Trump for treason. There are innumerable venues where this would be a trivial affair, the evidence is comprehensive and damning. And then… you just bar him. That’s it. Who would stop it. Would this batshit supreme court dare intervene? Yeah, probably. But the DOJ could just ignore it. And even if the Supreme Court intervenes, it seems to me that several state supreme courts — including ones in battleground states — would probably bar him from being on the ballot, and you only need, like, ten states to do that.
Ideally with the conviction you’d also just lock him up for the duration of the campaign, as a backup to a Supreme Court decision, because then they’d also have to overturn the jury conviction of treason itself, which is an even bigger stretch. Again, this court is corrupt so not inconceivable, but another hurdle.
All of this could be done even with Milquetoast Merrick as AG. That’s my new nickname for that guy. I hope he proves me wrong, but, lol. Someone pointed out that when Obama picked Garland he was intentionally picked as a choice paletable to the Republicans. Maybe that’s okay on the Supreme Court, but he is turning out to be so, so tepid as AG. Alas.
Oh also there were two new witnesses confirming Cassidy Hutchinson’s account of Trump getting into a fight with his secret service agents to head to the Capital after the riot had already started so, you know, so much for that who argument.
The two in-person witnesses were mostly useless though. I get the political necessity of making it clear these are stalwart Republicans but god, they’re just so loathesome. These talented, hot blonde go-getters who decide at the age of, like, eighteen that the accomplishments they want to dedicate their life to is, like, stripping women of their bodily rights. Terrifying. Terrifying. Pottinger going on about the close election.
I am not going to question the committe though. There has been a fifteen point drop in support for Trump amongst those 65 and over since the hearings started. There is more and more open talk about people running against him. But, gawd, someone just prosecute him.
(Also, anyone who finds themselves saying that Dems are useless, as I often do, look to this committee. Some dems seem to be pretty effective.)
Next, I would like to alert you to this report by WaPo that Meta is going to elevate content from “creators” over that of your “friends” on Facebook in order to better compete with TikTok (lol yeah right). So, you know, if you read these GMHHAYs on Facebook, you should go subscribe to the email version because there is a chance you’ll never see them again. Here is a handy subscribe button for you. Oh wait, never mind, that won’t show up in Facebook anyway. But still, buttons! Haven’t stuck a button in here in a while.
I was making breakfast for Jane yesterday and I was putting everything back in the fridge and thinking about how I just knew exactly where every single thing was supposed to go back in the fridge, humming “Everything in its Right Place” by Radiohead as I sometimes do when this thought passes through my head. And then I started thinking, huh, you know, I did not used to be this way. My fridge used to be a battleground. An adventure park. An uncharted wilderness. When did this change? Did it change because of cohabitation? No, I don’t think so, because it was never exactly orderly when I had cohabitated any of the previous times, either with a girlfriend or roommates. Is Emma a fridge-organization fetishist and I just fell in line for marital harmony? No, absolutely not. This is me. Something changed. Kid maybe? Nope, happened before that. My best guess is it’s just a circumstance of… getting boring? old? Healthy? One of those three. Maybe all of them. Oh, and maybe drinking less. Which is weird cuz I don’t keep booze in that fridge. But, you know, sober mind ordered mind or soemthing.
Anyway, the level of organization in your Fridge as a metaphor for a less exciting life. Were I a fiction writer there could be the basis of a single great sentence in there, but, alas, I am not.
Last night I learned that Richard Edson, the actor who got his start as Eddie in Jim Jarmush’s Stranger in Paradise but is perhaps best known as the garage attendant in Ferris Buller’s Day Off… was the first drummer for Sonic Youth.
Okay we got a W Hotel Lobby in a Better, Alternate Universe mix for you today, though if I am being honest this one is pretty close to an actual, this-universe W Hotel Lobby, but what do I know actually I’ve not set foot in a W Hotel in, like, six years. It’s all new stuff except I was a bit short so put a personal classic at the beginning and end. That Warpaint Bravery collab already disappeared from Spotify even though it was new last week, myserious. Just gonna leave it on here maybe it’ll show up again who knows. This Robert Smith Ride remix is… weird. I am thinking this Hayden might be fake still gotta listen to the whole album. There was a fake Stars album on Spotify this week too. Just a totally different band named Stars that Spotify stuck in my Release Radar even though it was the wrong band. They do that a lot. They are not good at making this playlist. They miss things. They keep bands in here way too long. It is sloppy.
Okay have a lovely weekend. Gonna go spend today in the garden planting corn and harvesting tomatoes and then shredding cardboard should be fun. Talk to you guys Monday!