Good morning. Hello. How are you? #782
Simema sick sick sick, Walmart as a metaphor for COVID America, the dream of the perfect holiday card/address book app, Google Alerts list
Good morning! Hello there, how are you? Happy Friday. I am good. Just back from Walmart. BUT before we get to that, reading the news here. Grr. Someone asked me just yesterday why I wasn’t yet basking in the shadenfreude of Manchin and Sinema and… well here you go. Now is a good time to go Sinema bashing. Your state just elected Democrats up and down the ballot and you decide to leave the party. Sure, there’s four years before your next election but… yeah, screw her. She is, however, faced with a tough choice now. Caucus with the Democrats to keep her committee assignments, or don’t promise to caucus with the Dems, lose your committee assignments and open yourself up to (very valid!) criticism in your next campaign that your grandstanding is costing Arizona. Also I hope a good chunk of her staff quits. Also this pretty much negates any shadenfreude for Manchin cuz he’s back to his kingmaker status, and this time solo. Fucking great. Way to take the bloom off a rose.
Anyway. Walmart. I feel like Walmart is a metaphor for America here. I mean, in lots of ways, but today I mean that, you know, three months ago, the COVID tests were ample and on an end cap display. Nowadays, they’re not just off of the end cap display, moved to some back aisle, they are gone. Like they just… disappeared. Like America wishes COVID did. It’s really something. I asked a pharmacy dept dude where they went and he just ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
(Fun fact: Apple has text replacements on the Mac under system preferences —> keyboard —> Shortcuts. They sync with your iPhone, too. You can make a text replacement that, say, turns “hyphen/shrug/hyphen” into ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. It is nifty!)
Walmart has a bunch of new movies — that darling movie with whats-his-name and the Aubrey Plaza crime caper and stuff — but none of them in 4k like WTF maaaan. That is annoying. And they still have not gotten a second 4k copy of Nope in for me to buy since my unnamed competitor in the Chatham County Walmart UHD purchasing department got the first one like two months ago. Very frustrating.
I also took the recycling to the collection center, unloaded the dishwasher, re-stocked the hippie soda in the fridge, and labeled my nifty new router bit collection that comes in an awesome aluminum case and is very exciting.
Important New Order update: They have recently posted a higher-quality video of their 1985 performance on Whistle Test of “Sunrise” live at the Haçienda. I have long maintained that this is one of the best New Order live performances out there, and at the very least counters the conventional wisdom they were always a boring live band. They weren’t. They just got boring live when they stopped liking each other and liked playing live. It was depressing. And look, sure, Bernard’s guitar playing is hardly virtuostic here, but the whole performance has an energy, an excitement, still has a feeling of punk, and the crowd fucking loves it. So good.
I think we’re about ready to send out these holiday cards, it’s always such a production. On Monday Emma gave me this giant list of names of people to check in with. She went through the Postable list and gave me every name of anyone whose address was more than two years old and for whom she did not have an email to ask them herself via postable. It was a bit daunting of a task so I procrastinated for a couple days, but I got it done Wednesday. And of course it was fun because it meant dropping a line on a bunch of old friends I don’t talk to enough and I got to chat with a few of them, that is nice. I wish the software was better, though, I still feel like there’s an opening for an integrated address-management, card-sending site, maybe combined with event invitations. One thing that’s annoying about Postable is it has an “activity” feed, but it only goes ten events back and does not time stamp, so, when you email like 20 people and ask for their updates, you can’t tell if they all did it or not, which is annoying. It’s also crap and making a “TO:” field that handles the reality of the world: spouses with different last names, pet names, kid names, etc. You can hack it but it’s not great.
Two other interesting things about this: First is that as my friends get older, people are moving less, that is nice. For a while there it felt like everyone on the list was moving every year and anyone who stayed put was a weirdo. Now that has definitely reversed.
And secondly, I am realizing how few friends for whom I have an email address that I know is current. That isn’t an old work address, that I know they stiff use. Which makes a service like Postable difficult, because you can’t use the “ask everyone if they moved” feature if it doesn’t have an email address. It doesn’t do phone numbers, and I’m not sure that would work/is a good idea anyway. So I find myself relying on Facebook Messenger to get in touch with a large cohort of friends, which sucks and I don’t like that lock-in at all, so I made a point this year to try and ask people for their email addresses (thank you to those who answered!). I would really like to get my “staying in touch” with friends completely off of Facebook, or at least have a backup. Because I messeged, oh, I don’t know, like… 20 friends on there? And a sizable chunk haven’t answered. Were I a lesser man I’d assume this means they hate me, but I suspect it really means that more and more people have left Facebook. Which is fine. But I need their email addresses.
That whole bit about Faberge yesterday got me thinking more about Lisa Monaco wow what a career what a fascinating individual I would read a biography about Lisa Monaco. I mean, not one written by a MagaQ lunatic but a real, actual one. This whole seizing-an-oligarch’s-yacht thing is just a grace note on her career. If she ever sat down, in her 70’s, to write her autobiography, she might not even bother mentioning it. Enron. Islamic Revolutionary Guards. Visa Warrants. Trying to shut down Guantanamo Bay, fighting Al Queda and ISIL, Ebola, very Forrest Gump of national security.
Not too psyched about consulting for Exxon, though.
Question: Can anyone tell me what the top two buttons on the left, the mirror related ones, do? I have zero idea.
My friend Kellianne asked yesterday to see all of my Google Alerts, so here they are:
"archenemy record company"
"barbarian group"
"carbon sequestration"
"frank heath" "cat's cradle"
"harry potter" "chapel hill"
"jill simonsen"
"josh bryce newman"
"rick webb"
"rockets burst from the streetlamps"
"secret clubhouse"
"staley wise gallery"
"third imperial egg"
"urban airship"
750words.com
Anais nin
bitdefender Silver Sparrow
brother arnold shaker
Cédric Delsaux
cerrone
cerrone -ufc
discogs delicious library
Fabergé egg
facebook giphy uk
foursquare
frrvrr
global plastic treaty
gotenna
itunes match limit
Laguardia airport
Marc Edwards Virginia tech
Marfa
mashape
meow wolf
nestio
percolate
Port authority NY
robert caro
Robert DePalma
Seismic inc
Semaglutide weight loss
soundcloud
Spacex
Sydney West
TAE Technologies
tesla motors
timehop
tumblr
zynga
It’s too much effort to explain each one of them, but if you’re curious about one, ask! And of course a lot of them the dedicted student of GMHHAY will recognize. Underrated tool, Google Alerts.
Okay, well. I have today off, I’m gonna get going. I have to hang a plant and clean out the freezer and do all sorts of other glorious, satisfying, home puttering projects. My luffa are dried out and it’s time to see if I successfuly made any sponges. Rip a couple blu rays. My friend Paul sent me a box and I think that one’s almost done but I still have to rip Alan Partridge and tag it. Gotta listen to my new Underground Lovers vinyl, see what came out new this week. Probably just a bunch of live tracks and remixes. There’s something else I gotta do too but I forget right now but that’s part of the fun of a semi-directed weekend of productive puttering.
Jane picked out such a good outfit yesterday. She was also very hard to photograph yesterday, so this is the best I got:
W Hotel Lobby in a Better, Alternate Universe playlist today, volume 58 of this epic series. Starts off strong with two personal classics, one of which just came on random in the truck while I was headed to Walmart, and, man, “Japanese Gum” is still such a great tune. Her Space Holiday. Hottest fans in indie rock. Miss those guys. And then Chris Connelly, of Ministry et al fame, with a great drony groove from his first solo album that I’ve always really loved. Oh I guess the New Order/Iggy Pop collab is “old” too. Everything else is new, very into all the new Samia stuff, I know she’s a rich girl child of Hollywood, but I really dig her style. Both tracks on this new EP are great as are their paired videos.
Have a lovely weekend, friend.