Good morning. Hello. How are you? #900
Dishwashing bonding as a service, Martin Amis made a mistake, plumbers being reasonable
Good morning! Hello! How are you? Happy Friday! That is nice. I lke Fridays. We are going to Wilmington this weekend to see our friends. Very exciting. However, we can’t figure out exactlky when we’re leaving. Gotta get on that.
Wow. Issue 900. That is crazy. I guess I have… 20 weeks until issue 1,000. Which would be… October 20. Got a while. We should do something special. Got any ideas?
I would like to thank all the people who contacted me about their dishwashing organization neuroses. We are legion. You are not alone. This is the vital service that GMHHAY provides. Aside from that one subplot in that Fred Armison “I am Dead” comedy (what was that called anyway), where else are you going to get this kind of content? Seriously GMHHAY is doing more vital and productive work for humanity than every Silicon Valley AI company combined. Those SV visionaries are not serious people come on. Anyone with more than $10 million who spends their work time on anything other than cleaning up humanity’s messes or making people healthy is not a serious person.
Productive day yesterday. Did my actual job, which was blissfully free of meetings, so I caught up on emails and deliverables and lawyer stuff so much lawyer stuff always so much lawyer stuff. And insurance stuff. And potential vender stuff.
I did a call with a friend of a friend advising about their new startup, which is a thing I don’t do very often anymore, god, that used to take up half my week I swear to god. But this one was interesting and the guy seemed smart.
In the evening I got my workbench finally assmbled. The top is on the base, the base is on the casters. The two layers of the top are screwed together tightly. Three of the sides are planed smooth, the fourth is not. The bottom is sanded, the top is not. The edges are not routed yet, nothing is finished, but we are making progress, making progress. I got covered in sawdust doing this work. Luckily this time I was prepared, unlike a week ago when I was still in the paint-stripping/grinding phase and I was covered in metal and paint dust and had no other clothes at the new house and I had to take off all my clothes, put them in the washer, shower, then sit around the house naked for two hours until my clothes were clean. That was… well I am glad no one stopped by.
Then my “boss” from the pool contracting company came over to the new house and dropped a bunch of pallets off for me to make new composting bins, not that I know exactly where I’m gonna put them yet. Then we went through the books and got all the checks and expenses categorized so we could actually see our profit margin on jobs and things look pretty good! Not a terrible business, pool contracting. Then he walked me through how we could get my greenhouse to where I want it while keeping things in code. It is a bit close to the septic so I gotta work out setbacks, and I’m running up against my impermeable surface limit for a lot of this size but it looks doable. Now I just need to pick out a greenhouse kit. Man. Greenhouse kits are expensive. I think I need a good overhead drone shot to really plan things. Anyone got a drone I can borrow for a few days?
When Aug was here he read a bunch of my signed copy of Martin Amis’ book about Space Invaders. One of my prized posessions, my signed copy of Martin Amis’ book about Space Invaders, though I must confess I have never actually read it.
So yesterday Aug emailed me and offered a bit of a summation of the part he had read. He said it was written in Amis’s style, which is a weird thing to read when reading about video games. Aug then reports: “Then he gives pagelong summaries of all different video games towards the end. The Pac Man one is wild. He calls PacMan 'The Lemon' and the ghosts 'The PacMen'.” This is bonkers! “I don't know where he ever got that,” Aug rightly reports.
And then! Apparently after I went to bed one night, Emma and Aug were discussing this quandary and Emma pointed out that this was, in fact, impossible. The subsequent existence of the game Ms Pac Man lays to rest this fallacy. Obviously Ms Pac Man is related to the eating entity not the ghosts. So. Did Martin Amis make an error? Or did Ms Pac Man, along with massive cultural confusion, cause Namco to retcon things ex post facto of the publication of Invasion of the Space Invaders? There is no mention of this alternate history in the Pac Man Fan Wiki, and, it should be pointed out, Pac Man is a play on Paku Paku, “a Japanese onomatopoeia for eating.” Also his shape is apparently a simplified version of the Japanese character for mouth, kuchi (Japanese: 口).
So. We are left with the inescapeable conclusion that Martin Amis fucked up.
Oh how the mighty have fallen.
Plumber came by yesterday to replace the AAV valve — a redundancy since AAV stands for “Air Admittance Valve” — under the sink at the new house cuz it was clearly broken. He quoted me nearly $500 to replace the part and we both agreed that was insane. I asked him if he would sell me the part. I said I am a lazy man and I am content to throw money at the problem but there reaches a point of absurdity. I could do maybe $200. He called his boss and his boss said they could throw in the part —which totaled $33 — for free. I said yeah, I’m gonna pass. Asked him where I could buy one of these parts. He said, “look, my boss said you could have the part, so just take it.” Then he wrapped the teflon tape on it and pointed at the sink and I replaced the part while he stood there tapping out a receipt on his iPad. Took five minutes.
As he was finshing his invoice I said “man, that took five minutes. $300? Do you make like $5,000 an hour? Do you make more than my lawyers?”
“That’s sure not what they’re paying me.” he said.
Pretty unremarkable Release Radar today. Too many remixes and fake artists and bands I have not actually listened to before in which you know that, somehow, involves payola. Mix of new and old. I gotta say this “More Lana Del Rey” mix still does not have enough Lana Del Rey, but props to Taylor for taking a criticism of a song to heart, fixing it, and turning the whole thing into a plus instead of some weird admission of a mistake. Kinda genius. Also this mix has two tracks on which Lana guests. “More Lana Del Rey,” get it? And new Samia! As a guest, and it’s short, but it’s pretty awesome.
OK Jane’s at Grammy’s and work doesn’t start for an hour so I am off to Walmart and the collection center. Have a lovely weekend.
i like “more lana del rey”. feels more like a duet ala nothing new with phoebe 😁