Good morning. Hello. How are you?#448
Youtube Channels, The Villages, Images of Heaven by Peter Godwin, Yacht building YouTube, Impeach Brett Kavanaugh, imagine if your business was threatened so you say "eh, I'll fix that in three years"
Good morning. Hello! How are you? Doing all right over here. It is a Timehop “recharge day,” which means the whole company gets the day off. Lovely. I’ll have some of that, thanks. I am going to recharge. I am, after this writing, going to go to the doctor’s office and get my blood drawn, and then I am going to go to the pharmacy and pick up my pills that CVS is incessantly pinging me about, even though I have not asked for them and I’m not out of anything yet, and I have turned off automatic refills. Nope. Too bad. Our stockholders have revenue expectations and we need to meet them, so we have tied our refill system into our financial system I don’t know if this is actually true but it certainly wouldn’t surprise me. It would be clever. The shareholders should applaud them for it. Then I’m going to have breakfast. I don’t know what I’m going to have for breakfast, but I do know it is not going to be the exact same thing I have every other day with Jane. Fantastic.
Hey could you do me a favor and subscribe to the Timehop YouTube channel. We’re just starting it, and we need to get to 100 subscribers.
Thanks.
And I guess while you’re there, feel free to subscribe to mine.
I finished listening to all the old music in the “to investigate” queue. It took about 15 days to get through 54 hours of music. There’s still about twenty hours of music in there, but that’s all stuff I’ve added since I started trying to clear it out. Really is a never-ending challenge, clearing out the “to investigate” queue. But it’s satisfying. I like music. People are always telling me to listen to podcasts, but I don’t know how I could manage that since every waking minute possible of my life is spent listening to music, unless I’m, like, conversing with other humans or watching a bit of TV. Music music music.
Has anyone been to The Villages? That place seems insane. I wonder what it’s really like. I kinda want to go there. Just drive around and stare and point at things and at people. Maybe they have tours, you can get in an open-roofed tour bus and sit there and gawk and point and take pictures of them like they do when they come to New York. I mean, seriously, this place seems weird:
The racial makeup of The Villages CDP was 98% White, 0.4% African American, 0.1% Native American, 0.9% Asian, 0.1% Pacific Islander, and 0.5% from two or more races. Hispanics or Latinos of any race made up 1.2% of the population.[24]
As of 2019, persons under 5 years accounted for .1% of the population, persons under 18 years accounted for .8%, persons 65 years and over accounted for 81.6%, and 53.6% of the population was female.[24] Median household income in 2019 was $63,841.[24]
In 2018, the median age for both sexes in The Villages metropolitan statistical area is 67.4, with this being 29 years older than a typical American, and five years older than the median age of residents in the next-oldest county in the United States, which is on the Hawaiian island of Molokai.[25]
Sixty-six percent Republican. Not a terrifying place at all nope.
I sure do like golf carts, though:
In a way, though, the Villages just proves the feasibility of the Indie Rock Retirement Community. I mean, they’re not the greatest musical acts, but many bands have played the Villages: Frankie Avalon, Willie Nelson, The Beach Boys, Jerry Lewis, Felix Cavaliere, Little River Band, Bobby Rydell, Ray Stevens, The Spinners, Kenny G, and Chubby Checker.
I would totally go see Kenny G if he came and played my neighborhood.
Yesterday I started singing “Images of Heaven” by Peter Godwin while I was making lunch. I got to the part of the song where he sings “you don’t exist” and I love that part of the song, it’s just great it’s a love song to someone who isn’t real really takes things up a notch artistically. So I mention this to Emma and she’s like “which song is this now?” And she doesn’t know “Images of Heaven!” And I’m like “this is not possible they play it all the time on XM First Wave” and she’s like “no they do not,” and she definitely knows XM First Wave a lot better than I do. And I play her the song (which is a whole nother thing because the original version is not on Spotify wut) and she’s like “nope.” And I’m thinking “well we have ourselves a Sinbad Shazam Polybius moment here. And she’s like “I mean, it’s an okay song but it’s a little repetitive. Seems like it could be okay to dance to” and I’m like “oh that’s so weird because Chris Ewen DJs this song all the time” and it’s not like Emma hasnt’ been to ten thousand Chris Ewen DJ nights. Very strange. The end.
Also, I don’t know if this is the actual original video for “Images of Heaven”, but it’s really good:
Hey do any of you remember recommending the Yacht YouTube guy to me? The guy Liam who is renovating the Tally Ho, a hundred year old sailing yacht? I remember I was on the phone or zoom several months ago with some friend and he said he was friends with the guy, and I subscribed, but it took me a while to start watching. Anyway, it’s, like, the greatest thing on YouTube and I am not a yacht fan but I have been riveted the last few episodes. The last one actually brought me to tears. And all these young, earnest volunteers who help him, who are monumentally talented in the trades. It’s just fantastic. Gives you hope for humanity. The one where they tried to add lead to the keel? Insane. Fantastic.
But I can’t remember who told me about him and I’m so fascinated I’m only one Kevin Bacon away from the guy and he said that someday they might letting the public come visit them and I so want to bring Jane and check this out, even though the guy’s in Oregon but that’s okay, I suppose Jane should go see her ancestral roots sometime.
I’m seriously considering going back and watching all, like, 90 videos I haven’t watched yet.
Nick Cave’s newsletter was really good yesterday. Like I said I am not quite the giant, unmitigated Nick Cave fan I used to be — I am super bummed at his knee-jerk, completely non-creative, boring-ass and closed minded opinion on “PC Culture.” And his music is still good but it’s getting repetitive and I miss instruments, but still. This one’s a doozy. And there are some truly sublime moments on Carnage, I have to admit.
Luke’s was too. Luke has this brilliant ability to write about the contradictions, paradoxes, miseries and uncertainty about the pandemic in a clear and concise way in a way that I just can’t do. Usually I can read a Hell World column and just drink up the misery and get properly outraged and recharged and not deflated or depressed, but yesterday’s column, I could just feel my happiness draining as I read it. It was so powerful it was just shifting my worldview to something way more grey and bleak. Like in that Pixar movie about moods. I don’t think that’s Luke’s intention? I mean, I know he’s bleak and angry but there’s something about it that usually makes me feel energized, fired up as Obama would say (Luke would love that). Not defeated. It’s hard to explain, and a big source of the brilliance of it all. But yesterday, god. I had to intervene and take action to not fall into a depression just from reading that column. This is a compliment. I swear.
Big news, Mercedes Benz will shift its focus to electric vehicles by 2025 and will be completely electric by 2030. I’m kidding, this is not big news. Imagine having your existence threatened and thinking “eh, I’ll get around to doing something about it in three years.” Proper. Give those fuckers an award and a newspaper headline.
I did read a pretty clever article in Bloomberg about how solar and wind power companies, plants, generators, whatever, are facing NIMBYism about their transmission lines, and they have come up with a pretty great solution which is to buy old coal-powered plants that have been decomissioned, disconnect the coal plant, but keep using the same substation and transmission lines, and connect that way, so they don’t have to bay a bunch of new high-powered transmission cables. I am into it. Pretty clever.
And, winner for the most enraging article I read yesterday, it seems that the FBI got 4,500 tips from its Brett Kavanaugh tip line when they were supposedly “doing an investigation” and they did absolutely nothing with them except passing on the most potentially damaging/plausible to the White House only, to let them do what they wanted with them. Totally cool, not at all enraging. I say again, Brett Kavanaugh should be impeached.
I sold an Apes of God CD the other day: Solitaire You Own The World. This probably means nothing to you, as I have been living in my own little world of solo Apes of God fandom for, like, thirty years, since I received this CD as a promo copy. It is a great album, they are a weird, fantastic, surreal band in the Negativland vein. It was very exciting to sell this, so I wrote a long note to the buyer along with his shipping confirmation and he said he’d never heard them but he was an avid collector of 80s experimental cassettes and he had a bunch of them by one of the guys from Apes of God so he wanted to check them out. Now I desperately want to hear these 80’s cassettes, since they don’t seem to be on Discogs. Maybe the Apes of God fandom is heating up. Like Batman says: “Now we are two.”
Okay let’s do a mix. W Hotel lobby mix. Some of these have made mixes recently — like this weird new remix of Heart’s “Alone” that I am oddly obsessed with because I loved that song so much when I was a kid. But I like this mix. It has some panache. Mostly newish stuff except I guess that Recoil Talk Talk cover. Still very into this new Insides album and I am really enjoying the new Matthew Dear lost “country” album it’s just great. Emma says it doesn’t sound very country and she has a point but also it does.
OK let’s go get our blood taken that’ll be fun. Have a lovely Friday! Three day weekend woo! Lots of gardening in my future all my anti-deer/anti-squirrel technology has arrived so I’m going to go pretend I’m Bill Murray in Caddyshack all weekend.
thanks for the sweet daddy-daughter pic (i'm feeling the need to take my own very, very soon). and good luck with the new anti–ravenous wildlife technology—don't forget to wear your bucket hat as you set it up!