Good morning. Hello. How are you? #710
Cass McComps surprising steam count, Trump v Nixon, dreams of personal tunnel boring machines, what is up with Restoration Hardware these days.
Good morning! Hello! How are you? All well? There was a dead robot on the transom of my office door this morning. Poor guy must have gotten stuck. Gave up the ghost. Harrowing. I took him back to his cradle and maybe he will survive. Carnage, carnage. This is our future. Homes littered with dead robot slaves.
Had a dream that Elon Musk (grrr) decided to make small, Ditch Witch-sized (er, sorry, “stand-on skid steer”) personal tunnel boring machines from the Boring Company. Now that I have had this dream, I am somewhat shocked this thing doesn’t exist. We got Colin Furze blowing up the YouTube charts with his home tunneling project. We got a bajillion Elon fanboys. Seems like he could do this and easily make a cool bil. Who doesn’t want to dig tunnels on their property? Dude is off his game.
Oh cool today is officially the time of year that the sun shines in my window and blinds me in the morning while writing GMHHAY. I am here for it. Like sand through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives.
There’s another 2006 Old Navy 10-inch Brown Bear for sale on eBay this week (they have it marked as 2007 but they are wrong). $65 minimum. I am starting to feel eternal guilt for the disruptions I have caused in this market. These poor sods. They think there’s… a market. It’s just one girl. And she has learned to be much kinder to her stuffy friends. And if we’re being honest, Brown Bear is really sliding down the ranks these days. He’s been supplanted by dolls whose clothes can be changed. Big dolls and small dolls and dolls in houses and dolls with rubber bikinis and big removable head. Jane hasn’t taken Brown Bear out of bed with her in over a week.
It might be time to flood the market by listing all of the backup 2007 Old Navy 10-inch Brown Bears on eBay at once. I hate to do this to this proud, noble eBay sellers, but that’s capitalism.
“Bum Bum Bum” by Cass McCombs has 32 million streams on Spotify and I am somewhat stunned. How and when did that happen? I mean I definitely heard that song once or twice in hotels or restaurants, but… wow. If I had to guess I would have said… 2 million? Must have gotten on some playlists. I hope Cass made some bucks off of it. He has a good new album out - the most streamed song has 253,000 streams.
Anyway, still cranking away on this Rick Perlstein history of conservatism books, on book 3, The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan. Nixon’s just about to resign. Hasn’t done it yet. Just did the Saturday Night Massacre. I am mostly of the opinion that Watergate was “worse’ than Trump in the sense thast the crimes were worse and the plotted crimes were worse. But.. barely? Trump (as far as we know) did not plot assassinations of journalists, plan to firebomb the freakin Brookings Institution, kidnap people or frame ex-presidents for murder. I don’t think he even did any lightweight breaking and entering. Then there are the things both of them tried to do, but Nixon got away with that Trump didn’t, because the news media, despite protestations to the contrary, has a bit stiffer of a spine these days. Nixon had zero problem purging the government of 2,000 “libs” to replace with croneys at various levels. He had no problem compromising the IRS and using it to audit his enemies. And I don’t mean “had no problem” morally, because obviously Trump and Nixon both had no problem morally with these things. Trump tried to do both of these things too but he had far less luck, because the media caught him in both of them. There was a bunch of really awful stuff Nixon did that Trump tried to do and failed, cuz he got caught quicker. More notably, though, Trump did not get caught bcause of any sort of laws or reforms instituted after Watergate. Mostly I get the sense that afterward, everyone gave them a pat on the back and said “the system worked” and let it be. But we will get to that in a bit.
And then, of course, there were the tapes. It doesn’t seem clear at all that Nixon would have gone down without the tapes. Trump, sadly, did not have tapes. (“Lordy, I hope there are tapes.”)
Another thing that was interesting was Spiro Agnew’s corruption, Bag Man, as Rachel Maddow called him (prolly gonna read that soon), just taking big ole bags of cash bribes left and right. But what struck me is when they caught him and he went down, they did a prosecution agreement which said, basically, “resign and we’ll go easy on your sentance,” and man. That would never fly now. Because they left the giant loophole of letting him run again. It was just assumed that no one would try to run again in that situation, and if they did, no one would vote for him. Both of those assumptions would not hold now, nosiree.
The bribes. Where is the line between bribes and normal political operations. Is there any? I was explaining to Emma last night Nixon’s bribe operation. The ITT bribe — ITT gave Nixon, not the government in fines, but Nixon’s campaign, a half mil to make its antitrust problems go away. The Milk Money affair: milk producers bribed Nixon to keep milk prices artificially high (he had price control authority back then). Nixon croneys would go to airlines and say, explicitly, “give us a couple hundred grand or we’ll take away your license to fly. They would go to other companies and say “give us money or we will audit you.” Over and over, just outright exctortion.
And Emma says “is this why these days companies just pay candidates of both parties? Because they used to just get extorted all the time?”
And, you know… maybe? Where’s the line, where’s the line. If those milk producers just gave the money and didn’t write “for managing price controls” on the memo spot on the check (lol, all these people paid cash), and just winked… would it even be illegal?
What’s the difference.
The oil embargo. So, the Egyptians and Syrians invade Israel, by surprise, on Yom Kippur. They really do a great job kicking their ass. Israel is on the ropes. They come to America for help. America’s obviously nervous about getting into another Vietnam, but, you know, they can’t let Israel fall. Kissinger is, weirdly, who knows why, briefing Reagan about the situation, even though he’s just governor of California and Kissinger has called him a lightweight. But anyway, Reagan, to his credit, is like ‘just announce you’re gonna give Israel as many tanks as the arabs destroy,” which of course, gives the Arabs an incentive to stop exaggerating their losses, and makes the whole thing feels pointless. Pretty clever.
Eventually the war turns, and everyone is warning Nixon that the Arabs are gonna use oil as a weapon and he’s just like “lol nope.” But then they do. Jacking prices up and up and up, strangling the American economy, gas lines and riots and on and on. And this is on top of some insane inflation. 1974’s inflation rate was over 11%. Nixon goes on TV and tells everyone to stop buying stuff, to drive at 50 miles an hour, for gas stations to close, the whole bit we remember from History.
Except of course we all remember this as being under Carter. Of course I know about the oil embargo and inflation, but what I knew about was the second oil embargo under Carter, the inflation — just as bad but not especially worse — under the Carter administration. Man. The Republican party sure never lets us forget how bad these things were under Carter. The fact that they were just as bad after seven years of a Republican Presidency? Never ye mind.
Republicans are very good at that.
This, incidentally, is the situation under which the Merle Haggard Christmas tune “If we Make it Through December” recently covered by Phoebe Bridgers was written. Only learned about that tune last Christmas. On Christmas day 1974, OPEN jacked up oil prices, again, 500%.
As if in retaliation for me saying she’s been pretty good lately, Jane had a giant tantrum last night after our walk. She just started screaming, while in the garage, that she wanted Daddy, who was waiting for her in the living room. Over and over, “I want Daddy I want Daddy.” Then Daddy comes and she screams “noooo!” Emma comes upstairs with us. It’s Daddy bedtime but she is clingy and screaming. Emma gives it 20 minutes or so of effort, then eventually saves herself, as one does when it’s not your bedtime and Jane is throwing a tantrum. I got her calmed down, I cheated using Cardboard World on Youtube and it was so hilarious cuz Jane was basically saying “I am upset, I want Mommy (it switched to Mommy once she had Daddy), I know you’re using Cardboard World to make me happy and I like Cardboard World so much but I want to be sad I want to be mad I want mommy” but it was seriously just like injecting her with opium or something (n.b. not that I would know I do not inject my kid with opium), and against her will, over the span of about thirty minutes, she just calmed down and settled in and enjoyed Cardboard World and snuggled with me and then eventually went off to play. Magic, man. It won’t last forever, Cardboard World, and of course the books tell us it is terrible parenting, but man, whaddyagonna do? The rest of bedtime was lovely. She went to bed very excited about her new reading light and making bagel sandwiches in the morning.
Oh man I am excited about my bagel sandwich. My god they are so good. Bagels.
Been thinking about Restoration Hardware lately. Anyone been there recently? Do they still exist? Did they survive the pandemic. I have an odd desire to go to Restoration Hardware and buy some idiotic oversized display item. I still feel some measure of regret for not buying their oversize Scrabble set — seriously, the thing was like… three foot square? — eight years ago. I wonder what absurdities, what treasures, are for sale in this post-pandemic world at Restoration Hardware. Did they double down, or did they scale back, becoming more… subdued? And.. god, now that i think about it, what was Restoration Hardware like in late 2020/early 2021? What was their height-of-pandemic bestseller during the phase where all of America nested? I should have gone to Restoration Hardware during the pandemic. I have regrets.
All right, a new goth playlist for you. New goth is so great. Unshackled from the chains of 1990’s new goth where it all had to sound like techno. So much diversity, so many tortured souls out there making great art. I am hear for it. Hear for it. Get it? Get it? Bah dum bump.
Man I am hungry. And vaguely nauseus. Just took my Wegovy, a day late, whoops. Shit isn’t doing anything for me anymore, I should probably stop. I lost 50 pounds. Nothing to sneeze at. I would stop but I’m scared my hunger will be ravenous then. But man, I am so tired of this low-level nausea.
Anyway, until tomorrow!