Good morning. Hello. How are you? #716
Jane, ZZ Top's 1976 Worldwide Texas Tour, vending machines exploding oil trucks, old people building RVs, Taco Bell and the elusive Sugar Free Baja Blast Mountain Dew
Hey there! Greetings sportsfans. Whatta Wednesday amirite? How’s tricks what’s new.
Jane is really great these days, I gotta admit. She’s clever. Wily. Last night it was bedtime and I said “Jane time for bed.”
And instead of whining she said “No… come play with me. Daddy I love you.”
And I came over and said “I’m very proud of you for learning to convince me to let you stay up longer by using cuteness instead of screaming at me. That’s what you’re doing, isn’t it?”
“It’s just something I’m trying out,” she said.
It’s almost like talking to an adult a lot of the time. I mean there are still concepts she doesn’t understand, but we tackle them one by one. We did the difference between sympathy and empathy recently. I take back anything I ever said about her not having any empathy, she is overloaded with it. Can’t stant to see us sad or in pain. It’s like that Sylvester McCoy-era Doctor Who episode “The Happiness Patrol” where you couldn’t even exhibit a scintilla of sadness or the planet’s governmental goons would drag you away. Must. Look. Happy. All. The. Time.
(Aside: One thing I learned from Perlstein is that when Nixon and his cronies contemplating sending goon squads to, like, kidnap someone or rough them up, they literally referred to them as goon squads, which makes me appreciate them for at least calling it like it is).
We’ve also been practicing our pratfalls, which is very fun maybe she’ll be a physical comedian like Chevy Chase in those early SNL seasons.
Last night we talked about how one day she probably wasn’t going to live with us, she was going to go away to school or two get a job and the whole thing fascinated her so much. “Tell me more” she kept saying. We talked about jobs. It is a challenge thinking of a PC-appropriate list of jobs on the fly. Not too elitist. Some requiring college, some not. No sterotypically gendered list. Jobs of social good. Jobs of the arts. Jobs public and private. Her ears pricked up at “teacher” or “dancer.” She was very interested in the fact that you could dance, to music, for a job. I was a little surprised by that, she doesn’t dance very much.
Finished book three of Rick Perlstein’s history of conservatism books, so for those of you tired of my anecdotes of the 70’s or Republicans, the end is in site. Twenty-four hundred pages down out of thirty-six hundred. We have now entered the carter administration.
There was this weird anecdote, though, that… I just don’t believe? Carter was down in Plains, Georgia — his home town where he headquartered his presidential campaign cuz “outsider” etc. — and his hilarious brother Billy was holding court, drinking beer at his gas station. Then they head a loud book — Perlstein spends a lot of time chronicalling loud booms that happen near Presidents and Presidential Candidates because they always flinch because people are so assassination happy in the seventies. Only this loud boom turned out to be a giant explosion at a different nearby gas station caused by a “spark from a vending machine [that] caused a 3,000 gallon oil tank to blow.”
I… don’t believe this? I don’t believe this is physically possible. There has to be more than that to the story. It’s painted in the book as an assassination scare, and then everyone just laughs it off when they realize it is… only a truck exploding because of a vending machine? I mean, WTF? I feel like that would be happening all the time if it were possible. We gotta get Mythbusters on the scene on this one. Jamie and Adam, reunite one last time, for me. For politics. For science.
By far the craziest thing I learned about in yesterday’s bout of reading though was about the ZZ Top Worldwide Texas tour, which is so crazy I think it’s best to just wholesale quote from Wikipedia here:
…Whereas ZZ Top had previously used simple productions, the tour stage was an elaborate setup designed to "bring Texas to the people". It included a 63-by-48 foot (19-by-15 m) stage that was tilted at a four-degree angle, which resembled the shape of Texas and weighed 35 tons, costing a reported US$100,000. The stage was constructed in a seven-hour process with the help of 40 crew members. The set's backdrop was a 180-foot three-dimensional panorama that used five scrims measuring 36-by-20 feet, which were hand-painted and individually lit to show dawn and dusk effects.
The presentation also included live animals such as a longhorn steer, black buffalo, two vultures, and two rattlesnakes, and plants such as yucca, agave, and cacti. Over US$140,000 was spent to ensure that the animals were healthy, traveling under the supervision of an animal expert and veterinarian. The set used 260 speakers and 130 light fixtures, using over 136,000 watts of power. A crew of 50 people traveled in a series of 13 vehicles to transport 75 tons of equipment. The entire production and crew were insured for $10 million.
A live steer! A buffalo! I spent a good chunk of last night watching documentaries about and from the ZZ Top Worldwide Texas tour and it is as batshit as it sounds. Highly recommended. Imagine doing an entire show with two giant buzzards looming over your head.
YouTube is now recommending a lot of ZZ Top videos to me and I am 100% okay with that. Man, I wish I saw them live. Preferably on the Worldwide Texas tour, but since I was only five, a later tour would have been fine too. More relevantly, in 2013, when I lived in New York, Billy Gibbons reunited Moving Sidewalks for a reunion, played NYC and Austin at Levitation, which I have been to. That was stupid, I should have gone. I have regrets.
The weird thing about this last conservatism book, Reaganland, is that Reaganland the book seems to take place entirely within the Carter administration. This is good because I really want to learn more about Carter and I’ve read a bunch about the Reagan administration and not enough about the Carter administration, but it’s also… weird? I would think a book called Reaganland would at least include the Reagan administration? I wanted to read about Jello Biafra and stuff (these books are very good about documenting contemporary counter culture). Maybe I misread the table of contents, but I don’t think so.
I also watched an hour-long video about a retired couple who built their own RV from an old Eucerin promotional van and it was deeply satisfying, highly recommended. Dude is eight feet tall, so they hand-built a bi-folding murphy bed and also invented… the murphy shower, which is really pretty genius. It is so, so slow, this video, but the couple is so cute and the RV is deeply satisfying. Kristen Dirksen is a very satisfying YouTube subscribe, by the way. Lots of weird houses all around the world. She travels around with her husband and kid and just… films them. I have no idea how they make enough money to do this. It really is pretty amazing. Hank Green said last week that YouTube is the best platform because it is the one that pays creators the best. I believe it.
One of my pharmacies is right next door to Taco Bell, so after having resisted for, like, two years, I went to Taco Bell yesterday for the first time since before the pandemic. I’m very proud I didn’t descend into Taco Bell addiction during the pandemic. It was time to reward myself. They now have kiosk ordering, you can’t talk to a person to order at all, which is fine I suppose. But more upsettingly, the fountain which disburses the Sugar Free Baja Blast Mountain Dew was malfunctioning. This was deeply, profoundly disappointing. Taco Bell is, as far as I know, the only place on earth where one can obtain a sugar-free variant of any of Mountain Dew’s special flavors such as Baja Blast. It’s half the reason to go to Taco Bell. They do not sell Sugar Free Baja Blast Mountain Dew in stores, at least no store that I’ve ever been to. Maybe Sean Drinkwater can correct me on this, but the stuff is at the very least hella rare. Some people spend their lives trying to find rare Swatches or PS5s or Nike Kicks at retail establishments. I try and find sugar free versions of Mountain Dew specialy flavors. To no avail.
The meal was still pretty satisfying but I swear to god it has been 21 hours and I’m still full, which is weird, cuz I thought fast food’s whole thing was the illusion of saiety.
Been thinking alot about people who get mad at windmills ruining their scenic vistas lately. It is truly astonishing the consistency with which these people exist, launch lawsuits, complain. I mean, I personally very much like a scenic vista with a few windmills dotting the horizon? Vast vistas need smaller items in them to illustrate the scale of the majesty. But i get that that might be a personal idiosyncrasy. But, man. It never ceases to amaze me how often you read about these people, how consistently they turn to the courts, how uniformly they seem to believe they own the land that they can see outside their window, and how they actually win in their lawsuits from time to time. It is so universal, consistent, I can’t help but think it is something deep within human nature. That maybe we can overcome it through quirks of other learning and conditioning (like me and a quirk of appreciation of landcape art or something) but it seems… primal? It is disturbing. Humans are messed up.
That’s all I really have to say about that. Except that if I were ever in a Fight Club scenario, and I needed one of those speeches about the reason I kept hitting someone (this should probably be a question on dating apps), one of the things on my list would be “put windmills in the middle of every scenic vista a plutocrat thinks belongs to them.”
Here’s a playlist in that fake, condescending, imperialist genre “world music” that I need to do better on but am still learning but I am trying, trying. I don’t know much about any of these bands or artists, except people tell me to check them out, and I do, and they are swell. Except Ak Dan Grang Chil, which I discovered on my own and love love love they are hilarious they are like a Korean Golden Dawn Arkestra except they do not have a wizard who just stands there banging his staff the whole time. Man I miss that band. I think I might have to go to SXSW next year just to see Golden Dawn Arkestra again. Oh and Rosalia, I know Rosalia well I even own two of her albums.
Anyway, Substack’s being real finicky about image uploads this morning and it keeps harshing my flow so Ima gonna stop here for the day. Until tomorrow.