Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #1385
Wolf coyotes, ranking tape, garbage Instagram ad timers, help me find these widgets somewhere other than amazon, Blackstone Jersey Mike and brand equity, a terrifying highball, Elon won't let me delete my Tweets, Swans, Julie Christmas, really all over the place today.
Good morning, good morning. Wednesday. How are you? My neck hurts. But at least I did not miss all my meetings yesterday. Made them all. A few months ago, I bought a piece of Instagram garbage. It is a small, black, round desktop timer. It looked so cute in the photos, in my head it was about the size of an Oreo and made out of metal. But no, it is the size of a hockey puck and made out of plastic. And despite its giant size, it was so lightweight it failed at its actual job, which is to sit in place on the desk while you rotate it and set the timer. I was so pissed off at myself for falling for garbage Instagram ads that I just ignored the problem for a few weeks.
(But yesterday, out of desperation, I realized I could maybe salvage the thing by affixing it to the desk with a piece of the world’s greatest tape, 3M foamy double-stick tape. Hrm, wow, world’s greatest tape. There’s a real contest. Is 3M foamy double-stick tape the world’s greatest? Is it really better than, say, black gaffer’s tape, or duct tape? Teflon tape? Tough call. But I digress, great tape.)
So now the timer is stuck on my desk and I can actually turn it and set it. And this has helped. Because my biggest time management problem is that if I have ten minutes left between meetings — which is, as ever, about half my day spent in this condition — I will instantly start a large new project and get completely absorbed within those ten minutes and then completely miss my next meeting.
I had, for a while, used a nifty little Mac OS app called Gestimer. It is kinda cool. It sits in your menu bar, and you can drag a line from it and it and set a timer. And that interaction is very, very satisfying. The problem is that it relies on the MacOS X native notification system which is a crime against humanity and should be destroyed and I will never use it for anything because it’s spammy AF and I am endlessly bitter there is no way to completely turn it off for all time without meticulously going through every app and turning off notifications and it fucking sucks. You can put your Mac into Do Not Disturb mode, but it’s not the same thing, because that kills the sounds too, and the sounds are actually useful.
But I digress. Got this stupid-ass timer working again, using it again, hopefully it will stop making me late for meetings.
Listening to the new Swans live 4LP box set this morning, Live Rope. It is… It’s a nice package, aside from the ugly T-shirt, and I love its luxuriousness. But I think maybe I did not need a 4LP Swans live box set in my life, I like the current iteration of the Swans live but a) I am annoyed they don’t play enough (any?) old songs, and b) it kinda feels like the live recording does not capture the intensity of the actual experience.
Oh hey let’s start an ongoing series about “things I have to buy at Amazon because I can’t find anywhere else.” Today’s entry is these shelf hooks. My life runs on these hooks I own like 50 of them now I use them everywhere. You can see them in action in the photo below, though I have like 10 more at the potting bench now, and they have expanded to other rooms in my life. Anyway, for those of you invested in Amazon de-investment, do some good in life and help me find a trustworthy alternate procurement means for these doohickeys.
Jersey Mike’s is being bought by Blackstone Group so, you know, sorry to disappoint the fellow Jersey Mike fans amongst us. Blackstone paid the same amount for Jersey Mike as someone else recently paid for all of Subway, even though Jersey Mike’s has one-tenth the number of stores as Subway, and if anyone ever tells you advertising, branding and brand equity don’t matter, here’s your counter-factual. Man, Subway was pretty uncool already, but Pedo Jared really did a number on that brand.
Pedo Jared, some day some future version of Ryan Murphy is gonna make an amazing Tik Tok Doc about this weird corner of capitalist absurdity.
This morning I spent a full 60 seconds on Bluseky closely examining a mirepoix made by famed avant garde musician, artist, author and feminist Cosey Fanni Tutti, of Throbbing Gristle. The modern world is fucking weird.
Two nights ago, I just want you to know that through a series of small mishaps (it was “mistake day” after all) I drank a highball that consisted of Bombay Sapphire, tonic, Sugar Free Red Bull and Brasilburg, the Brazillian WWII-era family spin-off of Underberg. It was exactly as great and as bad as that sounds.
52-year-old Rick. Still has it.
While drinking this concoction, I learned from Rocky the pool partner that several years ago, a decade or two, in NC and other nearby states, it came into fashion amongst a certain set of people to own a certain cute, very cute I am sure, type of actual wolf as a pet. But then the wolves got big, because they’re fucking wolves, and people gave up on them and let them go. And they bred with the native indigenous coyote population, so now we have really fucking mean wolf-coyote hybrids around here. Which is… terrrifying? Me, being raised elsewhere, know coyotes as mainly a nuisance but not a threat (except to your chickens) but apparently the ones around hear are mean AF. Rocky says that as the years go by and the wolf pet craze ended, the species is slowly becoming more wolf than coyote and, thus, less violent, but that they are still a problem and now I never want to go outdoors again because I know we have a couple coyotes in the neighborhood and I thought they were harmless but nope, wolf coyotes, and the run-on nature of this sentence is my terror symbolized.
It strikes me that this is a metaphor for modern conservatism and libertarianism: do what you want, yes, and then let other people spend actual fucking decades cleaning up your mess while you forget all about what you did to cause it.
About a year ago, year-and-a-half, during a Covid-related quarantine over at Chore House, I spent three nights watching the Chinese adaptation of Three Body Problem (time has made me increasingly confident it is the superior adaptation but I digress) and while I did this, I deleted all my old Tweets. I had been off Twitter for nearly a year by then, but I didn’t want to give up my account: I maintain hope Elon will eventually give up on Twitter, and my god do I stand ready to resurrect it from the ashes, my unique set of skills, etc., etc. But also I do not want anyone using my account name. Anyway, I meticulously, one-by-one, deleted every Tweet o mine. Some real bangers, too. But admittedly mostly dumb.
There are (were) automated methods but they mostly cost money these days and those days because of Elon’s changes to the API pricing, and they’re mostly complex. There’s still a couple free methods but you gotta download “scripts” (scripting what, I have no idea) and run them in the debug console of your browser and yeah, I am an executive man I ain’t got time for that. In any case, it’s just more fun to get slightly high, watch Chinese sci-fi that you’re not sure how it got made given what you know about Chinese politics and idly wonder whether maybe you don’t know as much as you thought you did about Chinese politics while repeatedly doing the same three-click combination for four hours a night for three nights. Way fun.
Anyway all this is to say that the Tweets have supposedly been deleted forever. But lol. nope! Twitter won’t delete my Tweets! I mean, most of them are gone, but there is a batch of, like, 300, from 2019 and a bit of 2018 that just won’t delete. Seriously. Twice this week I have run tests and deleted 50-100 of these lingering tweets, and they just pop right back up.
There are, of course, a few explanations for this, but I choose to believe that this is another manifestation of Elon’s pettiness.
This guy needs to move to Mars so fast.
We need an Elon honeypot, some stupid project or thing that he can be petty and neurotic about and it is literally no skin off of the back of the rest of us. Tesla was kinda that. Maybe the Department of Government Efficiency will be that. He says naively, doe-eyed optimistically.
I am finished with the Swans box set now (I was on side 8 when the morning started) and now I am listening to the new Julie Christmas album on blood red vinyl and the liner notes tell me that it was produced by my old (casual) friend Andrew Schneider, formerly of Boston-based New Alliance and Slughog fame. That is awesome. Great record.
Yesterday at the Mexican restaurant, we were given table tent number 69. Jane said “I do not like that number I want a different number” and the 20-something woman employee kept an absolutely straight face about this, even when I said something like “yeah that’s not a good number for kids.” Nothing too pervvy, just an acknowledgement of the weird situation all of us were now under. Completely straight face. I was very impressed.
Post rock playlist for you today, decent sampling of the last couple days of streaming listens for yours truly. We talked about Gregor Samsa — many of you emailed to point out that this is the main character of a Kafka novel which I guess I technically knew back in college. Annie wrote in that she actually knows the band too. Well, not personally, but their music. I think she’s even seen them? I am jealous of Annie’s post-rock rock tourism. ALL HANDS_MAKE LIGHT is so so good. I am deeply tempted to buy the record. It’s a collab between members of Godspeed and Broken Social Scene, so… come ON. I don’t know anything about Tarentel, Sympathy Pain, or Cerebrus Shoal, all are products of algorithmic recommendations which is mildly embarrassing they are probably all Russian ops to convert post rock fans into fascists or something.
All right let’s all have a great day okay? Just fucking great. Don’t look at the news. For one day.
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Thanks for reading.
And hey! Maybe buy one of my books!
Good Morning, Hello, How Are You vol 1.