Good morning! Hello! Happy Friday, what’s shakin? Emma is off to the hairdresser this morning and it is, like, an hour away since we live in the boonies, and it takes three hours or something, cuz it’s a complex job. Jane is at Grammy’s this morning but I will need to retreive her for lunch before Emma gets home. Exciting times. Maybe shoulda taken the day off. But I got some work stuff to do, super exciting stuff like SLA redlines, compliance questionnaires and the like. And the veerrrrry exciting drama today waiting to see if that one client will accept our SOC 1 L1 report in lieu of a SOC 1 L2 report. We elected to go with L1 because it encompases financial transactions but I swear everyone just wants an L2 and we’re gonna have to do both now. Debating trying one of those nifty services like Vanta or sticking to my old school do-it-with-human-auditors approach.
See? I work.
Also, I did not mean for that errant comment about a COO opening at the Long Now Foundation to imply that I am looking for a different job. I am not. Apologies for that red herring.
Going to Walmart after this. Very exciting, I know. I elected to write first so you do not get eloquent passages about Walmart on a Friday morning. Forgive me.
We finished The Sandman last night. God, that was ridiculously good. Way better than it had any right to be. Way better than I dared hope. The first episode was only pretty good. It was good enough that I felt some relief at the whole thing not being a train wreck. Next few were all good but of varying strength. I’d never been a fan of the Lucifer storyline it always seemed kind of dumb to me. But the episode handled it well. But god, from episode 5 on? Perfect. Just phenomenal. The casting. The pacing. The pacing. I’ve been thinking about the pacing all month because it is kind of blowing my mind. When I read The Sandman, I devour it. Like I cannot stop, and I read it waaaaay too fast. I just looked it up and it’s been six years since I last read the entire series. But when I did, I read all of it, all 75 issues, in about two weeks. I read them way too quickly. I cannot stop, I cannot slow down. So the forced pacing of the TV show is a revelation. It forces me to absord the smaller details, to linger over the plot nuances and emotions. It makes it so much better.
I will say, though, that I think the series suffers from being moved from the 80’s to the 2020’s. Only in minor ways, and mostly they cover up those differences. It does much a bit with the timing of Dream’s imprisonment, and there are certain events in the story that feel tonally off because of their placement in a different decade, little things, like diners don’t have TVs anymore. But most notably the convention, which felt possible when you were reading it in the 80’s. The 80’s just felt more lawless in that way, more unmapped, more un-surveilled. They kind of made it work with the Twitter angle but… yeah. But of course the whole thing also feels like a dream which sort of works.
Anyway, I intentionally didn’t re-read The Sandman before watching the show, because I didn’t want to remember it too, too well, and that totally worked, I am very pleased with it. Plot lines were only vague memories, and I could never say for sure what was going to happen, and when something felt different, or a surprise, I couldn’t be sure if it was my faulty eight-year-old memory, or because they made a change. Like Constantine. Legit wasn’t sure if I remembered that wrong or not. One time, in the last episode, I said a line before the character said it and Emma and I just laughed because I had literally no idea if that was from memory or inferrence.
Gave the whole thing an additional dreamlike quality, which I greatly appreciated.
However, now I am faced with a dilemma because I really, really want to re-read the whole thing immediately, it has been too long. But I loved that sensation. But the idea of not re-reading it for the, what? Eight more years while they produce the whole story for television? That seems absurd. Nah, my memory is so shit if I read it all now, I’ll forget it again by the time the next season airs. Okay I have convinced myself, thanks. Good talk.
Now I really regret not buying those Omnibus editions back when they were (semi-) affordable.
Now we await Rings of Power, Sept 2.
I went outside and looked at my tomatoes yesterday and they are very sad. All the leaves with septoria have died and withered, even though I have been spraying them with copper fungicide. They’re still producing tomatoes, but nothing like the rate they’ve been doing. I know part of this is that the hot summer is finally catching up wuth them, but it is very sad. I was starting to take five pounds of tomatoes harvested every week for granted, alas. Please pull through, little tomatoes! I love you little tomatoes!
I had a friend once who got a belly button piercing, and it got infected, and one of the things (not the only, mind you, but one of the things) she did to make it better was to grab her belly button in her hands, cradle it, and say, over and over:
“I love you little belly. Please get better, little belly.”
“I love you little belly. Please get better, little belly.”
I think about that often. Seemed so dumb at the time, and me and my punk rock roommate we made a lot of fun of her for it. But also even then I think we secretly knew it was probably doing some good. Not as much as, you know, going to the doctor to deal with the infection, but. Not nothing.
Last I heard from her she was anti-vaxing on Facebook and I unfriended her. That is sad. I hope she is well.
I feel like Robert Caro is almost done with his LBJ book. It has to be close, right? The intervals between LBJ books have been eight years, twelve years, and ten years, averaging ten years. It has been ten years since The Passage of Power came out. I don’t expect him to drop the thing out of the blue like Beyonce or anything. Though OMG wouldn’t that be hilarious if he did? Bob Caro doing a Tik Tok video announcing a midnight drop of Book five. BUT it would not surprise me if, in the next two or three months, we get one of those little passing mentions in the Times Literary Supplement or something of a publishing date, maybe mid-to-late next year. Is that optimistic? It is probably optimistic. Reading Perlstein’s Nixonland and reading all about how much Nixon shivved LBJ in the early days of the 1968 presidential campaign before LBJ dropped out. It just makes me want to read the other side of this. I want to read about LBJ’s secret negotiations with the Chinese. The secret war in Virtnam. All the secrets. I want to read about his decision to not run.
Someone mentioned Lansdowne Street in Boston yesterday and it made me go look on Google Maps what the bars were on Lansdowne Street. I suppose it makes sense that eventually they would put a Lucky Strike down there. But Lansdowne Pub in the Venus space? Cheeky Monkey in the Bill’s space. Come on. Does anyone go down there for shows at all anymore? I feel like no? But HoB must still have shows, right? It’s crazy how many new venues Boston has gotten since I’ve left, not having gotten even two new venues in the twenty years I lived there.
All right, that’s it, a short one today. Walmart beckons. Imagine the 4k UHD riches to be found there. I am going to buy Jane her first popsicle. One of her dolls has one and she knows the word but I don’t think she’s ever had one.
Got an ambient mix for you, all new, actually, every single song. And by “all new” I mean “made this century” which, you know, is an accomplishment for me. Brian Eno is up to some interesting new tricks these days I keep meaning to investigate more but have not yet. But I do like the tracks the algorithm has thrown my way.
See you Monday! Have a lovely weekend.
“I love you little belly. Please get better, little belly.”