Good morning. Hello. How are you? #771
A long explanation of the perils of men sitting down to pee man this is a lot, A declaration of doubt abou the merits of CZs bailout fund, teenage myths about the Smiths and New Order revisited
Good morning! Hello there! How are you? Happy Thursday. It is cold. I am cold. I am wearing sweaters and warm socks and the butter I keep in the butter dish in the kitchen is much harder than it was a week ago which is sad and it makes it harder to put nice, soft butter on mine and Jane’s morning waffle. My luffa has wilted away from the frost. I am putting a blanket on my peppers every night and taking it off in the morning and it’s a pain.
The dishwasher repairman came and fixed our dishwasher. He arrived at 8 PM. Hardest working appliance repairman in the triangle. He may have been stoned. He was fun. And he liked to over explain things, which Emma loves, cuz she loves to learn about appliances. I’m very excited. I wouldn’t say that washing dishes was hard the last few days. You really do enjoy it when you don’t get to do it very often. But, then, you know, we cheated and got takeout for dinner.
A couple updates from yesterday:
Thank you Grace, for not giving up in your quest to find a foot-activated toilet seat pedal. The first few she sent me were the usual Amazon suspects — out of stock or made of plastic. But Grace had the idea of checking Etsy, a thing everyone should do more often (last great internet platform, Etsy, squeaked under the wire and gave ought’s NYC tech a win, thank you). And they had one made out of metal. And I bought that thing so fast, I am so excited. It was like $80 shipped, but if it fulfills its promise I will buy two more so fast. So fast. Actually, this is worth using up one of the coveted GMHHAY photo slots. Look at this thing!
Now I will explain something to you that is horribly mortifying, and I do not think it applies to all men, but my high school friend mentioned it happens to him too, and it is a critical factor in the discussion about Trump’s campaign — er, the standardization of installing urinals in the home and tiling around toilets. That being the question “why don’t you just sit down?” And so I have to tell you something that really should not be put into print, and has probably never been put into print anywhere but that very transgression really is kind of thrilling you really don’t get this sort of content from your average daily Substack.
But I am here to tell you that it is entirely possible for a man sitting on a toilet to accidentally pee through the crack between the toilet seat and the toilet bowl and pee all over the floor, their legs and their pants, thus making things even worse than if they had not sat (sit?) down in the first place.
Does this happen often? No. I feel like it’s happened less than a dozen times in my life. But it has happened. Through a combination of absentmindedness and another factor that I neglected to mention yesterday, but of which we are all aware, thanks to George Castanza. This second factor is that penises are constantly in varying states of flaccidity (is that a word) or, we will use the word firmness here since it’s not really erectitude (is that a word?) But essentially, it’s possible to sit and not think about the fact that your johnson is either a little bit stiffer than usual (thus pointing up a bit more and need of a stronger push down into the correct direction) or, as Costanza suffered, suffering from a bit more shrinkage, thus pulled up a little bit more than usual, thus pointing in a different direction than normal, even if you’re applying the same amount of force (imagine pulling a hose through a tube and when you get to the end of the hose imagine the change of angle as the end nears the hole).
This is a vital point: you might do the same thing every time, apply the same amount of pressure, but this absolutely does not mean your member will point in the same direction every time. And while I think most people know this regarding standing at the toilet, it’s also true sitting.
Now look. Do I want a poll of all the dudes in my Facebook comments exposing to the world that it really is just my friend and I that have this problem and it never happened to you? No, no I do not want that. I desperately want company in this brave admission. But company or no, it is the truth, and while I did not specifically mention it yesterday, or even, perhaps, consciously realize it was part of my decisionmaking calculus, it most certainly was. I already gotta play with fire once a day or so when I sit to do my other business. I don’t need to be adding additional opportunities to pee all over my own pants and legs here.
And yes, you could just pay attention, but the thing about going to the bathroom (and I’m pretty sure this is universal here) is that there’s no correllation between when you gotta go and how attentive you are at that moment. We are humans we have things on our mind! And just one mistake here can be devesatating! Especially if you’re not at home! Easiest, safest way to avoid it is to just avoid the risk. Zero tolerance. It has been 800 days since our last accident.
Isn’t it a relief that the news is calming down this week? Elon’s (mostly) back to his normal levels of redpilled-crazy (but don’t let it fool you, there’s no going “back to normal” for Twitter under his “stewardship”), FTX is mostly turning into a humdrum mega-bankruptcy case, which is, of course, devastating for those who, you know, kept all their money there, but for the rest of us it seems to be cooling off as a news story. Aside from SBF’s weird-ass Tweets and the slow, lumbering infection of the rest of the crypto market.
Ugh actually I guess I’ll say one thing about that: CZ’s “recovery fund” is a disaster waiting to happen. You cannot have a TradFi-type recovery fund in crypto, everything is too linked, opaquely, without a real bailout mechanism. Indiivduals cannot replace central banks. The very act of CZ passing on saving FTX proves this. A single-person-led recovery fund that is qualifying assets by some metric — be it a public, quantitative one (and let’s face it, everything in crypto pretending to be public and quantitiative is turning out to not be right now), or their own personal whims — is going to fail. Because they will, by necessity, pass on certain things, based on the financial condition of the target, as proven with FTX. And they’ll do this regardless of the centrality of the target to the greater crypto ecosystem. Which means plenty more important players could fall. Just to take it to the extreme, Tether is the obvious example here: if Tether falls, crypto’s in for a bigger fall than they are with FTX. Can USDC even absorb that? And we all know Tether’s murky balance sheet. CZ’s bailout fund passing on rescuing Tether would make Tether’s fall more rapid, more fatal. This is not what you want from a bailout fund. It’s like the Fed and Treasury passing on AIG. The company might be fucked, but you need it. I feel like this is going to click for people if that fund becomes “a thing” and it will do more damage than good.
So, in one way, SBF was right on this. Gotta prop up the whole thing, warts and all. Except he wasn’t rich enough, wasn’t a central bank and printing FTT and Serum ain’t the same as printing government-backed greenbacks via QE.
Okay sorry. I am suffering narrative fallacy. I want CZ’s hubris to be punished. I am looking for narrative closure in the real world and this is probably not going to happen. Except it might, because CZ’s taking down of FTX almost certainly but Binance in a worse position than a better one. And once you’ve proven yourself to be a foot shooter, well. We all have two feet.
Anyway.
[Trigger warning: suicide here skip this paragraph]
Reading volume 2 of the autobiography of Stephen Morris’ the drummer of Joy Division and New Order, and he disputes two legends of New Order: They did not lose money on every copy of “Blue Monday,” (he even prints the accounting of the first pressing, they made about £130,000) and it is not the best-selling 12” of all time, at least they don’t know that for sure. So, you know, two lifelong myths busted. Relatedly, I was talking with Emma last night about a high-school memory I had where I was explaining to a teacher how obsessed people were with the Smiths. Not me, you know, but other people. Cuz I’m cool. Anyway, I was explaining how traumatic their breakup was for a certain group of people and told her it was rumored that several people committed suicide when the Smiths broke up. Now, did I explicitly say this was apocraphyl? No, but I mean, I read it in Rolling Stone or some shit, not like I got it off of an internet forum in 1988. And she just scoffed! And that really stung. And I’m still kind of irked by it! So anyway, I just Googled it and obviously, why people do such things is varied and multifaceted, and concrete stats are hard to come by, but here is Andy Rourke, an obvious first-party-data source, repeating this as fact as late as 2013, so… yeah. That teacher should not have scoffed at me. Man I have thin skin.
She was pretty cool otherwise, though. Good teacher. I should ask my mom what happened to her.
Here’s a goth playlist for you. Important programming note: I have merged the “Goth” series and the “New Goth” series into a single playlist series “Goth.” I feel like this is the correct move. I recently did this with the synthpop playlist as well, and of course the shoegaze, metal, industrial, post-rock, W Hotel Lobby in a better, alternate universe, club, smooth, psych, world, punk, drone and ambient playslits were already like this. So it onluy makes sense. We used the higher number of the two, which I think was the new goth number, as the volume number. So here we are at Goth vol 14. New and old. So much good new goth out there. Veyr into Thus Love, a queer band from Vermont. Very into True Faith, of whom I know nothing. Ditto bootblacks. Yeah, just good shit. Oh also, special bonus image since this is just too too good:
Righty-o. Jolly good. Let me just pop off to the rest of my day and see you in the morrow. Cheerio.