Good morning. Hello. How are you? #773
Weekend puttering, Disney coups, Rockhall induction, the only three people who can beat Trump in the Republican primary.
Good morning! Hello, there, happy Monday. How are you? Feeling good about this short week? I love Thanksgiving so much, it is my favorite holiday. It is the favorite holiday of many a well-adjusted, infinitely lucky individual. I’ve been teaching Jane how to make Thankful lists, it’s a good time, she enjoys it. She is very thankful for Hello Kitty and parkour. I’ve got my Thanksgiving dinner shopping mostly done — should be completely done by today. I have a bad habit of buying a fresh turkey, so I stall until Monday or Tuesday. Dry brine for me, I am done with those big liquid brines, total pain in the butt, and dry brines work just fine. Grammy is making a blueberry pie and homemade ice cream. I did a survey and it looks like I’ll have some potatoes from the garden, but not enough for all of the potatoes to be from the garden. Ditto the carrots. But I do have enough beets, and herbs, and the fact that anything from my garden is making it onto the table is an accomplishment for me. Baby steps. One day it’ll all be from the garden. Except the turkey I am not raising turkeys ever.
Got a lot done this weekend. Pretty much done with fall gardening, as the pepper plant finally gave up the ghost after 5 or 6 days of repeated deep frosts. The slanket, it seems, has a limit. I saw a guy on Youtube who said you could last even longer if you put a string of incandescent Christmas lights in your bed under the slanket, but even I have limits. So I cut up that plant, harvested the last of the bell peppers — got five good ones, but they’re still green who likes green bell peppers when you could have red ones. Did a lot of composting. Drained the irrigation system that was sad. Put away the hoses and tarps and netting. The garlic and wheat and winter lettuce are all still going. And a fennel bulb. Oh there’s a ginger I need to harvest, though it’s leaves look okay. Saddest thing was taking down all the tomato plants. Jane helped. Took about an hour. The compost bin is so full right now. Added a lot of shredded cardboard to give it all some carbon. Have a good winter, compost bin. I will check on you periodically with some kitchen scraps.
Continued the project of rearranging the garage so my Lightning could fit in there if we had a storm. We are almost done! Both cars fit! This invovled moving two massive, giant shelves that were completely full. Mounted a lot more pegboard, couple 2x4’s across the wall horizontally for mounting a lot of hooks. used inferior 3” wood screws cuz that’s all I had on hand I have some lag screws coming today. Loaded up the truck with a ton of shit for the giveaway pile at the collection center. The worst part was moving a ton of ceramic tile. It’s all old and we need to give it away but to do that I needed to spread it out, catalog it, photograph it, which is done now. And then I had to move it back onto the shelf when it was moved. And now my back hurts. That is unfortunate.
An excellent weekend of household chores.
Emma and I watched the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony and I had a tiny wine and I had a grand old time. I have a soft spot for it after having worked for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for several years doing their website. Carrboro solidly represented with Elizabeth Cotten being inducted, and James Taylor being mentioned a bunch during Carly Simon’s induction. There is a James Taylor bridge just up the road, which is great. As far as I know, Carrboro has not named anything after Elizabeth Cotten. Oh wait, it seems that that big Elizabeth Cotten mural on Merrit Mill is public art. Well that is awesome, she deserves that.
Was very excited to see the Eurythmics inducted. Not too long ago Emma and I were talking about Annie Lennox (we recessed from our redding to an arrangement of an Annie Lennox song) and how we’d love to see her or the Eurythmics live. We looked up on Setlist.fm and discovered that she played Boston in 2008 or so, when we knew each other and lived there, and I have zero recollection of this and I am so, so bumnmed to have missed it. What a horrible mistake. It was nice to see them on the Rockhall induction but it’s not the same, medleys and 2-3 songs only. They were great though. Really solid lineup of inductees pretty much everyone was great.
Emma does not understand my love of Lionel Ritchie. Pat Benatar was awesome (I am listening to her remastered 3-CD hits compilation right now). I had no idea about Neil Geraldo. All those years. Pat Benatar was one of my earliest crushes. They were doing one of those history montages and I was so into all those 80’s do’s she had. Emma was unimpressed with all of them.
The In Memorium segment ended with a photo of Mark Lanegan and Mimi Parker and I cried again and even now as I’m writing this I’m getting teared up again.
Seeing Rob Halford sing a stanza of “Jolene” with Dolly Parton was amazing and hilarious. Dolly Parton has an impressive ability of leaning back from a creepy bloke but not making it look like it’s complete revulsion. I have a newfound respect for Sheryl Crow I swear her voice sounds better.
So it seems there has been a coup at Disney in the battle of the Bobs and former CEO Bob Iger ousted his chosen successor and fellow Bob, Bob Chapek and returned to the CEO seat because, like, their stock is doing what every other stock in the world is doing and went down a bunch this year. Seems a pretty flimsy excuse to me. I have been aware of the analyst and shareholder grumbling about Chapek’s performance this year and Disney being in peril but honestly that seems hogwash to me. With the giant caveat that I don’t know shit about the theme park business and all that but whenever I the aforementioned news reports they typicall lead off with grumbling about Disney’s streaming strategy and costs and that’s just dumb. Disney has executed phenomenally well and yes, there’s more to be done and it should be making more money but I think that is a misunderstanding of what’s going on in the media environment.
The pivot to streaming is not the pivot to a new elysian field of unrivaled prosperity. It is a pivot from death to survival, at significant cost. A media company’s pivot to streaming should not be judged by the expansion of revenue it should be judget by the fact that the company is no longer dying and can live to fight another day. Netflix, it turned out, was not so much a pioneer as a party pooper. From a consumer’s point of view it can be argued they brought about something good (I would debate that) but from the media company point of view, the changes they brought about were utter chaos. Chapek has done just fine.
Then again, I just looked in my Schwab account and my $1,918 of Disney stock is now worth $1,009, so fuck that guy I guess.
Then again, here is a list of companies in my “portfolio” (lol) that are doing worse: Warner Brothers, Weber, Buzzfeed, Rivian, Shopify, Zevia (poor Zevia), WeWork (lol), Didi, Backblaze, Twilio, Universal Media, Coinbase. Man. Some clunkers in that list. But some gems. Also my Netflix holding has barely done better than my Disney holding - down 43% to 47%.
I did a bunch of thinking, hours of thinking, and I could come up with only one human being who could beat Trump in the Republican primary. I told Emma this and she was keen to guess and while she did not guess my candidate, she did come up with two others I agree with her could probably pull it off. These are, I am fairly confident, the only three. You’ll note that Ron DeSantis is not among them.
They are: Chris Pratt, Tim Allen (Emma’s guesses) and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson.
I think those three have a chance. Chris Pratt’s loony religious stuff would endear him to the Republicans, ditto Tim Allen’s occasional cancel culture gaffe-slash-manpout. The Rock would have to rely on his sheer charisma and ability to connect with the common man, as well as his Atlassian shouldering of the all-too-important conservative rival to the MCU, the DCEU, with his stunning portrayal of a complex antihero in Black Adam.
You think I’m joking. I am not joking about any of this.
No politician, I fear, has an actual chance. You need a level of fame to rival Trump’s. You need a fortune that’s large enough you can at least bicker about who’s more rich and make fun of his bankruptcies. You need to be able to speak like a human being to the camera and make it feel real. You need to be good at witty comebacks. White men need to feel like you understand their pain. Because what is the Republican party these days than an outlet for aggreived white men.
I can’t think of a single Republican politician that can do these things. Youngkin? Lol yeah right. Media sominex. I’m convinced DeSantis will just wait it out, he’s 44 he has time, why tangle with a rabid, lunatic tiger. Emma disagrees with this, she thinks there’s something to be said for momentum and seizing your moment and contrasted Obama with Chris Christie and boy she makes a good point. I may well be wrong here. But I don’t think he will beat Trump. Even in his wounded state. Trump will burn this party down as he goes and you need the healing power of a celebrity’s big doey eyes to re-unify it.
Jane peed the bed. I forgot to “make” her go pee before bed, she never mentioned it, exhibited no signs of needing to pee, I was hesitant to force the issue and so she went to bed without peeing. When Emma was readying for bed around 3AM, she went in to check on her and noticed. Had to get her up, clean her up, clean the sheets, change her jammies. Jane wasn’t particularly happy about being woken up but was generally indifferent to having wet the bed. Her supreme indifference to these events is a gift, I suppose. I’d be even more stressed about this pee problem phase if it was stressing her out but she doesn’t really care. I thought we were making progress too. She’s been more willing to pee lately. I guess this one’s on me.
Got a moody and quiet mix for you today. All new stuff except the first and last song, because just five seconds ago I realized this mix had three songs by Jay Jay Johansen on it and that is a bit much. Very into the new Skullcrusher and Will Shef.
All right let’s enjoy this short week. Mine is only two days long but I have so much to do at work in those two days. Vaguely stressed about it. Wish me luck.