Good morning. Hello. How are you? #812
Love and Rockets memories, HOA duties, Too many vacuums, DoJ v Google, Oscars, teaching Jane physics
Good morning! Hello, there! Exciting! Wednesdays! Hells yeah. Wednesdays. Too right. How exciting.
Uh oh. I’m feeling a profound desire to not write this today. Got a big work presentation in a couple hours. It’s ready but boy, I’d sure love this time to go through it once in advance. Crap. I have such a good list of topics for today, too. Welp. Nothing to do but power through.
Just tried to register for the Cruel World pre-sale against my better judgement but the text confirmation thingy isn’t working so I suppose that is a sign from god. Emma and I toyed with the idea last night of making one, long, West Coast trip so we could hit the festival and see a bunch of friends and make that wedding and I wanted optionality. Did this texting thing work for anyone else?
And yesterday when I talked about Siouxsie I did not mean to belittle the excitement about Love and Rockets playing. Love and Rockets has been one of my favorite bands since I was a kid. The cool older kids in my church, of all places, got me into them before Earth Sun Moon even came out! I remember I was like 12 and this much older, so hot, so hot girl from another school and another church was at some ecumenical youth gathering at my church and she would literally carry around her gatefold vinyl copy of Seventh Dream of Teenage Heaven to convince people to play it. She would hug it. She looked like Aly Sheedy in the breakfast club, i.e. like an angel. Don’t know who she was, to this day. Slightly too old to be part of any of my Fairbanks friend groups, even the older ones.
Also another great thing about Love and Rockets is that everyone in the band is still really freakin good at being in a band and playing and singing because they’re all still doing it for a living and just came off what was universally praised as a fantastic, albeit cut short, tour with Bauhaus. You know they’re gonna be good.
It’s that fun time of year where I have to assume my role as treasurer of our HOA and send out the annual financial report and start nagging the neighborhood to pay their annual dues. I wrote up the report on Saturday and sent it out. You’ll be happy to know that our HOA is financially solvent, slightly increased its balance last year, and paid all its bills. Also it’s insurance rates haven’t gone up for years, which is so, so different than my experiences at work where every year the insurance goes up a double-digit percentage. Maybe every tech company should masquerade as an HOA or something. So, then, Saturday afternoon I sent the report out along with the request for payment and offering four different ways to pay. It is now wednesday. There are 22 lots in the neighborhood. One guy owns two, and I’m not counting myself, so there are 20 people that need to pay. As of today, a whole eight of them have paid. Eight!
I tell ya, man.
Eight.
Okay okay! It was me! It was me! I confess! We have so many vacuums! And I would still consider buying more vacuums, if the circumstances were correct. You know what kind of vacuum I would pay for? A robot that can vacuum your stairs. Ideally it would be very small, and a sort of satellite add-on vacuum that used the same base station and emptying chamber as one of our Roombas so there was almost no maintenance on it. Man that would be great. I don’t even vacuum the stairs that is an Emma chore, but I would still love this vacuum.
It’s crazy how vacuums add up. Also floors of the house. Back when I lived alone I had one vacuum. I looked up on Consumer Reports the best vacuum and it was this big Hoover thing and I bought it. And then I think I bought a second one for Secret Clubhouse? That part is fuzzy. Then we moved here and vacuuming fell into Emma’s chore bucket and the thing was too heavy to move from floor-to-floor so we got another one, or there was a repair and it ended up with two or something like that. Then we eventually made the switch to Roombas and that took time and also eventually you’re like okay well it’s much easier to have a roomba on each floor. Then stick vacs or whatever for places where spills happen like kitchens. They just proliferate! So many vacuums! It seems absurd.
Someone start a support group.
The DoJ brought a case against Google yesterday. Antitrust case. Said that the remedy is that Google divest its entire adtech business. I assume they mean their non-search business, but I haven’t read it yet. I have the PDF and sent it to my awesome PDF reader but I haven’t had time to read it yet but it is very high on my agenda and will keep you apprised. There have been similar cases winding through the courts for the last couple years, most notably the states’ attorneys general case that was brought in Texas, I believe. A small part of that case has been thrown out but the courts have allowed most of it to go forward.
The current FTC and Lina Khan have said they are willing to try novel arguments in antitrust cases, not just explicitly tied to higher consumer prices. And they are willing to try these cases even if there’s a chance they will lose. I support this approach, the courts have overly-narrowed the clear intention of the mid-century anti-trust laws. In this case, however, I do think it’s probably more straightforward and Google has raised prices for advertising both on the publisher side and the advertiser side. Very excited to read this argument.
Now, DoJ, do Apple. Come on. You know you want to.
Oscar nominations yesterday. Very excited I’ve seen almost all the films on here. Never even heard of To Leslie, though. Have zero interest in Elvis, just can’t bring myself to do it. Hadn’t seen All Quiet on the Western Front yet, despite Duncan Jones raving about it, because literally no one else mentioned it. But it did really well! So I started it last night. It is… a lot. Dark. But yeah, that’s some solid work. Oh and The Whale, haven’t seen The Whale. Or Wakanda Forever because I don’t go to theaters but that’s on Disney+ next week so we’ll watch that. Actually no idea when Avatar will be streaming but I just… whatever. Oh god and I still need to see Women Walking cmon man! I have been waiting for that film for years! Shit, okay, here I am thinking I’ve seen most of these and… there are three best picture nominees I haven’t seen.
Seems pretty clear Everything Everywhere All at Once is gonna clean up, huh? I’m okay with that. It was a great film. Man, actually, all the nominees I did see really were good. Except Triangle of Sadness that thing was good but needs a pretty severe edit.
Jane is learning about physics and it’s very fun. We did gravity, inertia, momentum and friction over the last few weeks and then at breakfast yesterday she said she wanted more. So, in the course of the morning yesterday we did atoms, molecules, compound & chemicals, then light and photons,then we did solids, liquids and gasses. We also did the physical world vs the spiritual because she kept asking how love fit into things. She was very into that. It was probably too much for one day but she kept wanting more. She was very into gasses. It was somewhat confusing because she knows about gas as in a thing daddy doesn’t like and daddy’s car doesn’t use gas, but then I’m like, well, that gas is not a gas its a liquid but we got through it. We’ll stick to these new concepts for a few weeks until it seems like she’s got a handle on them. I’m pretty sure there’s a physics for kids book somewhere in the house? I need a nice periodic table and a drawing of atoms and molecules. Then we’ll go inward to protons, neutrons, electrons and quarks. But that’ll be confusing because I knee-jerked myself into a sort of classical physics, Bohr-model kind of thing and told her Atoms were the smallest thing that everything was made out of. I suddenly worried I ruined her as a physicist forever by clouding her mind with antiquated theories, but I’m pretty sure we can still sort it.
She’s also had a couple more peeing incidents in the last week. I think we’re back on track, though? Hopefully? It’s hard. You want to talk to her about them but you don’t want to give her a complex. But with the last one I asked why she didn’t go to the potty before peeing and she said simply “that’s what I should have done,” and I’m like, welp, yelp, good talk. Seems like you have a handle on this, then.
Also I gotta say all the inertia talk has had a great unexpected benefit where now she understands why she says no all the time when it’s time to do something. Now, when we ask her to come to dinner or put her phone down, instead of saying no, or outright ignoring us, she said “I can’t I have inertia” and, I mean, yeah, checks out.
Don’t we all.
Justa mix today. Almost all new except Material Issue and Tribe. Hadn’t thought about Material Issue in years and they just popped into my head and I said to myself “I bet that whole album is good,” so I listened to all of International Pop Overthrow and yeah, it was pretty good! I kinda wish I paid more attention to that band when they were around. There’s a new Iggy Pop album and it has a song on it that is a love song to Miami. That guy is really committed to Miami. New Ladytron. Only given it one listen so far it seems… happier? I’m okay with that.
Whew. That wasn’t so bad. Once you get going. Man. I almost skipped today. Glad I didn’t. Thank you, friends.
thank you for powering through and not skipping! i need my GMHHAY 😁
also, i love jane’s drawings.