Good morning. Hello. How are you? #829
Womens 3XL Hot Topic light blue Care Bear cardigan, talkin' Boston Rock with the boys, the "Shadows of the Night" video, a belated discovery about the Ting Tings, RIP Hopkins Covid tracker, Quickbooks
Good morning! Hello! How are you? I am good. I just went outside to put a 4K UHD Blu Ray in the mailbox that I sold on eBay. I was wearing the Women’s 3XL Hot Topic light blue Care Bears cardigan my wife bought me as a joke on Christmas because I freakin love Care Bears. I was appalled when she bought it and vowed to never wear it but then Jane loved it too and it’s so so comfy and when I get Jane in the morning she sits on my lap and asks me to wrap the sweater around her too and who could pass that opportunity up. And every single time I make a quick mailbox run in the sweater, some neighbor just has to drive by and catch me wearing a Women’s 3XL Hot Topic light blue Care Bear cardigan. Every single time. It is a serious problem in my life.
Also every morning there is a very small bug flying in front of my monitor when I wake up and I do not like that one bit. Where is he coming from?
Did a Zoom last night with a couple old Boston rockers. Actually, it was a Gather, which is a thing we used to do. Kind of a little virtual world, it can be fun. We sat around talking about old Boston rock clubs and getting up to date on new Boston rock clubs and old Boston rock bands and it was deeply, profoundly satisfying. I bet I’m not the only one who, now that some time has passed, kinda misses those Zoom calls of early Covid, huh?
I would like to start out by saying that the Pat Benatar “Shadows of the Night” video is just incredible. Now, I was a giant Pat Benatar fan at the time and I remember “Shadows of the Night” coming out and thinking it was another incredible single from the amazing Pat Benatar, and I even remember watching the video. Multiple times. And I remembered it involved a P-51 Mustang or something like that. But I have absolutely no recollection of the completely over-the-top plot of the video. I guess we were just more used to videos having plots in the 80’s but my god this plot is just incredible. Two lovers who happen to be in the same air force squadron fly behind enemy lines in WWII Nazi Germany and stage an incredibly daring armed assault against some Nazi headquarters. There are multple actual Mustangs, there is actual Flying footage of these Mustangs just for this video, not, like, cheesy stock footage. There are many actual Nazis. And swastikas n shit. There is an ingenue used to seduce the Nazis.
All of this for what is a love song, with no lyrical reference to Nazis or war or even flying. Magnificent.
While I’m on the topic of music played during Daddy-Jane dance parties, last night I discovered that the Ting Tings are not, in fact, an all-girl band but rather a duo of a man and a woman and I had no idea about this for fifteen years or so. This is somewhat upsetting to me. And then as Jane and I are dancing to “Great DJ” and “That’s Not My Name,” both of which she loved, suddenly I can hear male backing vocals in both songs that I had never heard before and I am starting to question reality and whether I’m having one of those Sinbad or Bearenstein Bears or whatever moments. Was there always a dude in the Ting Tings? Or are all those live videos on Youtube, in fact, doctored? Mysterious.
Hopkins is shutting down their COVID tracker which makes me very sad. Every day I still go to it and I type the US and worldwide cases and deaths into my 750 words and take a moment and think of the monumentality, the scale of the pandemic and its devestation. Never mind that the numbers are probably low. It’s still just… overwhelming and awe inspiring and we are totally repeating that old WWI flu thing and there will never be a monument to this seven million dead worldwide and well over a million dead in America. We’re going to just pretend it didn’t happen. It’s so obvious. It feels like at this point our only hope is that the long Covid cohort of America get together and flex their political muscle to the point where we as a society have to confront it. But of course even that will be politicized and people will tell them it was their fault. The ramifications of this pandemic will reverberate through the society for decades, while millions of people studiously pretend that’s not happening. I cannot say I’m looking forward to that.
Woah off topic. Ish. Sorry. Anyway, Hopkins is shutting the tracker down because we have “moved into a different stage of the pandemic with a different data flow.” At first I was gonna get my ire up about that but then they went on about how the CDC and the WHO have their act together now and are properly tracking cases and deaths and Hopkins doesn’t need to spend millions of dollars on it now. Fair enough I guess. Like all good old school newspapers, WaPo does not provide actual links in the article to the CDC and WHO data trackers because why would we revisit a bad decision we hastily and ignorantly made at the dawn of the web about outbound links. But if you are looking for replacements for the Hopkins dashboard, here is the CDC dash, and here is the WHO dash. The two combined and you can sort of get there.
In my ample free time I have agreed to help my neighbors with their contracting business, by doing their Quickbooks. I made this offer as a joke at a neighborhood bonfire as a joke a while back, because I’m deeply jealous these two dudes are in the process of quitting their tech jobs and starting a pool and landscaping company. I mean, I like my job in tech a whole lot but also do you know how to properly build a retaining wall? Because that is some useful information. Anyway, they took me up on it and I thought “Well this will be easy I’ve been using Quickbooks my whole professional life,” which is true but also not true in the sense that I’ve always been using it with someone else. Also at Timehop we do not have projects, per se. We have advertisers who bid on a bunch of ad auctions and then pay us for the ones we won. So the whole part of Quickbooks where you assign expenses to individual projects.. well, I hadn’t even thought about that part of Quickbooks in over a decade. So I spent most of Presidents day watching every single Quickbooks tutorial video that Intuit puts out. And now I am a Quickbooks expert and the hilarious thing is that all of this has radically expanded my possiblities of what’s possible with Quickbooks at work too so in the end this new sideline gig profoundly improved my operational efficiency at work so, you know. Kyu, if you’re reading this, I am sorry.
I have all these new logins for stuff for their contracting company, and I hate managing logins so I thought I would just run it all in another browser, but I seem to be running out of Mac browsers to use. I use Safari for personal and Chrome for Timehop and Firefox for a bunch of work dashboards and Shift for Monday and Brave for crypto stuff not that I do much of that and Orion for my old Stodgy account. So I decided to try Opera for contracting stuff but Opera doesn’t seem to work very well with legacy 1Password and it doesn’t seem to remember passwords on its own so it’s kind of a mess. Also the Javascript for certain features in Quickbooks doesn’t seem to work properly, like the auto look-up clients and projects. So I don’t know. That doesn’t seem to be working. I guess I’ll try Microsoft Edge? I signed up for the Arc beta from The Browser Company of New York ages ago but still got nothing. When is that thing coming out? I need more browsers!
Jane is on a five day streak on DuoLingo. Probably ten days or so total. Her Spanish is already on the verge of outstripping mine. I’m gonna have to find some time (lol) to do a streak every day to keep up.
Ambient mix for you today. As good a time as any to tell you that I recently discovered that Concrete Blonde lead singer Johnette Napolitano has a massive amount of soundtrack and solo work after Concrete Blonde. This recent album is put out by the record store in Chapel Hill and Raleigh, Schoolkids records. It is really good and I am super into it and you will be seeing a lot of tracks from it in coming days. Also a good time to remind everyone that Pan·American’s late work is very country sounding and not electronic and it’s a radical departure from the Pan·American I knew in the 90’s and I had no idea this happened and I’m psyched to discover this. So hard to keep track of every band’s career. Tindersticks, too, have been doing a lot of very mellow sountrack work, some of it outright ambient, such as the track here. Excellent working and writing music.
Talk to you guys tomorrow!