Good morning. Hello. How are you? #713
Doll fashion shows. Goodbye free Heroku and the dreams of my rock book ever getting written.
What up homies. Good morning. Happy Friday. I am just returning from the recycling/Walmart run. It was… okay. I got the plastic bags recycled, which is always very exciting. During the pandemic, all of the local grocery stores stopped accepting plastic bags for recycling, because I guess they had cooties or something. They kept at this for waaaay longer than necessary. One grocery store still hasn’t brought it back. Walmart was the first to bring it back and I swear they didn’t bring it back until late 2021. At one point we had like three large 30 gallon trash bags filled with plastic film. Emma was obsessed. She really did a great job. Did you know you can also recycle bubble wrap, plastic film, and plastic envelopes (like those annoying blue and white Amazon envelopes) at grocery store bag recycling stations? It’s true. We use cloth shopping bags at the grocery store like any decent American, but the stuff still piles up. But it can all be recycled.
Here is my dream: You recycle 500 plastic shopping bags and in return you get a garden container, a planter, made from recycled shopping bags, in the shape of a grow bag with handles, made out of your recycled plastic bags. There is nothing scientifically impossible about this. I want to do this so bad.
Had a revelation in the Walmart parking lot today (sounds like a late-period Craig Finn song). I had forgotten to wear my baseball cap and the sun was in my eyes and I was musing, as I often do, at how it’s so weird that suddenly in my 40’s I just needed to always be wearing baseball caps because I fundamentally could not tolerate the sun in my eyes it just annoyed me so much. I have been wondering about this for several years now and could not come up with an explanation. My eyes are a bit worse from a myopia standpoint, but nothing to do with light.
And then it hit me. After all these years. I am just living further south. This is further south than I have ever lived. The sun is in a different place. It is lower in the sky in the summer, it is in the sky more in the winter. Yes, in Alaska, in the winter, that low sun on the horizon bugged me, but the sun was out for, like, twelve minutes (okay, one hundred and sixty-one minutes) so it did not bug me as much.
I can’t believe it’s taken me, like, eight years to figure this out.
Emma and Jane had a fashion show for all the dolls. A runway show in the ballroom of one of their dollhouses and my god it was the cutest thing ever. Only problem was that the dolls were walking the runway to Depeche Mode and it seemed very obvious to me that they should be walking to Right Said Fred’s “I’m Too Sexy,” so I changed the music. Emma was not pleased, but the runway show continued. I mean, look at this:
Ridiculous. Glorious.
Star Trek Lower Decks is back and that has to be the greatest show ever made my god it gives me so much joy. The easter eggs are relentless and unending. Just amazing.
Heroku, a tech company that does an app-engine thingy, so you can make web apps without having servers, essentially, I am dumbing it down here don’t at me, is shutting down all its free plans. People on the internet are like “oh well I will just move to this other app-engine thingy company that still has a free plan” and I guess that is an option but it is interesting to me we all still mooch all the free stuff off of internet companies and then abandon them when they try to make money while we all make fun of the internet economy and how none of the companies make any money. I don’t have a solution here I like free stuff too. And in fact I had a free app running on Heroku forever (thank you, Doug) and I am shutting it down. I am not moving it to some other app-engine thingy company, but that’s mainly because I can’t coe anymore in any language cool modern internet people need (though if you need your 80’s accounting software patched I could maybe take a stab at it) so who am I to judge.
It’s sad, though, because the app I had running was so great and while that project looks like it will never be completed, it makes me sad. While the app was still running, there was a theoretical chance the project could be completed. The idea was this: I made a giant list of all the bands I had seen perform in my life. It’s not 100% complete, and in the five years since I made this list, I am still thinking of bands that i forgot to add to the list. But it’s pretty comprehensive. Maybe 95%. It totals 3,757 different live performances. It’s a bit higher than that now since I haven’t updated it in a few years. I made a spreadsheet out of this, and included some additional columns for the year of the show (I profoundly regret not doing the exact date as my friend Conrad did in his list), the venue, the other bands who played that night, and any notes I might remember.
Then Doug made me a Heroku app that made a single web page that gave me a show name, the additional info for context (especially important since I’d seen so many bands more than once) and a giant blank text field wherein I could write my memories of the show. Then I could hit submit, and it would save all that info in the database. Then I would bookmark that app page as my home page on my computer, and every morning I would get a writing prompt for a show, and I would write about that show, or anything else that seemed relevant, into the text field. Then, in some years, I would take it all, compile it, get my amazing editor Lisa to whittle it down, and I would have “my rock book” since every writer worth their salt needs at least one book about rock and roll.
It was great and I was really into it for a while but I never did finish. The site loaded pretty slowly, since it was on the free Heroku plan. And whenever I was opening a new tab, I was usually doing so because I needed to get something done, so it ended up being more of an interruption in my life than anything else. What i should have done is set up some cron-like job so that I was texted a link to the app every day at some time I had a little free time, like right before bed or something. But I never really did that.
Doug sent me the entire database yesterday, since Heroku is shutting it down. I just opened it up. Looks like I wrote about 300 entries, so a little under 10%. That is sad. It was a good idea. I would expend the energy into trying again, but I know now — parenting while working — is not the time to take it up again. Yet the memories, they fade. Time passes.
Sadz.
Doug said I could maybe use some of them in here, as fodder, and that is tempting, but I don’t think I’m quite ready to give up the idea yet. We shall see.
I’m in a real slog part in the conservatism books. Got all caught up on Reagan’s mini-bio in the middle of the book before the Reagan book, with a sense of dread I’m going to have to read Reagan’s bio again in the Reagan book. Nancy is being gloriously hypocritical out there talking about how bad pre-marital sex is when their first kid was born seven months after their wedding. Reagan is just being this little… like ridiculous carp, bitching and moaning about Ford no matter what he does. Classic “man in the arena” type stuff, Ford has to actually make decisions, Reagan can just criticize. He is clearly under the impression he can snipe the nomination from Ford, and most people in the Republican party are like “dude we gotta rally behind the president this is dumb. Stop.” But he does not stop. You get the strong sense, though I am not to the general yet, that this is a big part of why Ford loses, carping from the right. Also he is totally whining about the RNC spending money on Ford because the RNC is assuming Ford is the nominee and Reagan is butthurt about it, which sure sounds familiar. History, man. Same shit over and over again. Maybe that ending of Battlestar Galactica ending wasn’t so dumb after all.
Finally got to the fall of Saigon and, man. What a mess. And in the Ken Burns doc I’m watching right now, it is ten years earlier and Saigon almost fell then, and LBJ decides to send in the first ground troops, so it does not fall. Ten years we propped that capital up. Insane. And poor LBJ. Literally every quote, every soundbite of him in this documentary is “this Vietnam thing is horrible and stupid and there is no good solution and it is going to ruin me and I am trying to build a great society here I have other things to do. We should not be there. This is the worst.” He was againt the coup when he was VP, he inherited this thing, and yeah, he radically expanded it but he knew the whole time that it was awful. I can 100% understand why this guy was like “fuck it I am not running for re-election.”
These two anecdotes are related, because the carping, the criticism. LBJ was only in Vietnam, 100% only because of the conservatives, the John Birch Society, the war hawks, the anti-communists. He knew that if he let South Vietnam fall — and it would have fallen, instantly — he was going to get a ton of shit about the spread of communism and him being weak on commuism. And of course they were not wrong! Communism was bad! The problem, of course, was that our man (or string of men — at one point South Vietnam has eight different rulers in eighteen months) was just as bad.
Man I am so ready for Caro’s book. Come on, Bob!
The inspection dude is out there right now, taking a picture of my car, I can see him on the Ring Doorbell. He is not ringing the doorbell he’s just taking the car and man, this sort of interaction is one of the greatest gifts of the pandemic. People just want to do their jobs, they don’t want to converse and neither do I. The talkative electrician is coming today, gonna do some work in Janet’s crawlspace. I have my follow-up eye appointment to get a prescription for my computer glasses, because my eyes are so brokedown I need three different prescriptions. Some dudes are coming to pick my car up so it can get its inspection. Busy day! Busy day!
Justa mix today. 90% new stuff, though the Cure and Bowie remix/demos are new versions of old songs. And the Jesu track is a year or two old. I spent an entire day this week listening to every release by Justin Broderick from 2021 and 2022. It amounted to seven albums across five bands. That guy is so prolific it is ridiculous. Jesu and Godflesh are still my favorites, though I have a pretty deep respect for his noise drone outfit Final. Meh on JK Flesh and not a fan of Tech Level 2. The Gnod JK Flesh collaboration is awesome. Anyway, I digress. New Beths is awesome, new Duran Duran is good, I am very into this new National song. There’s a video this week on the Pitchfork Youtube channel of them doing “London” at Pitchfork and it made me wish I could see them again. I think I might like them more now than I ever have previously. Weird.
Okay! Have a lovely weekend.