Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #1394
Girl Scout cookies are coming, maaan. turkey bone broth ramen, ramen packs, CVS Aetna can fuck right off, BRMC, Spotify Wrapped is BS, Walmart stuff, more griping about AI.
Good morning, good morning. Hello. Hi. How are you? All well? Happy Friday. Holding up okay? Not too many familial issues? I hope not. You don’t need them anyway. Chosen family 4 life. Except the ones that are great. You need them. You are great, great family members.
We are listening to Black Rebel Motorcycle Club’s Baby 81, which I have finally bought because I love this band more and more as the years go by and I wish they would come by and tour again man they are so good I think I’ve only seen them… three times? First tour at TTs, second in Austin somewhere and then the last album at Cat’s Cradle. Why did I think they were poseurs or bland or something for all those years in between? So dumb.
Last track side one is the banger.
Did my Spotify Wrapped and it sucked, and it was absolutely wrong, I mean not absolutely but I know for a fact that the song it says was my second-most listened to (“Frogs” by Nick Cave), I listened to exactly four times. I couldn’t even sing it to you. Whereas I have listened to the top two songs sitting in my “to investigate” queue — “Guess” by Charlie XCX and "“Lucky Number” by Lene Lovich, I have listened to dozens of times each. It just sucks. And I know I am liable to mis-remember because I don’t use spotify very much compared to Apple Music and vinyl, but still. Bullshit.
(also I have made significant progress this year on getting off of Spotify completely. I have a plan. I am about 30% of the way through it. It is so complicated. I could write a whole thing This Could Be a Think Piece™ and maybe that will finally happen when I am done).
For the record it says I listened to 659 new artists, which I don’t believe for a second. I mean, I listened to all 52 release radars, they have a good 10-20 new artists on every one. I just looked at this week’s, it has 12. And then we have the, oh, I don’t know, FIVE HUNDRED NEW ALBUMS I have listened to this year. Bullshit, bullshit. 1,120 songs is also clearly bullshit, give each album 8 songs and that is 140 albums. I am not gonna bother counting all of the year just yet — that’s a task for wrap-up season and I save that for January like a non-psychopath - but I listened to 78 new albums in November, and maybe 10 of those were Bandcamp or vinyl without a Spotify re-listen. Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit.
42,281 minutes might be about right — that’s three hours per work day and I only use Spotify while working.
Anyway, fuck em, they suck.
I was gonna do a big ole gift guide entry today, and it’s coming but a) it is way more work than I envisioned, b) I have more work than I expected today, which is a bummer given that it is my day off, and c) I have things I feel like writing about!
Like… GIRL SCOUT COOKIES. Oh man i am all in. Starts January 18th. We got our COOKIE TRAINING yesterday and it is just amazing. There are so many weird-ass facts about it. Such as:
The troops themselves make $0.60 to $0.95 per box, depending on how much they sell. More they sell, more they get per box.
You can get cookies delivered or you can get GIRL DELIVERY which is amazing they call it that.
There are SO MANY BADGES (Patches?) for different things about selling Girl Scout cookies. Badge for selling 15 boxes the old fashioned way, like walking around and going door-to-door. Badge for selling various amounts of boxes. Badge for selling a certain number of Girl Scout boxes “for the troops.” I can’t remember what it stands for, but the
acronyminitialism for the program is OCD which is pretty great.All the awesome places to sell Girl Scout cookies at, like, big box stores and stuff? Controlled by the “council” and you get a shift by lottery, which is actually pretty clever. You also get shifts by just signing up and going where they assign you. I assume the more of the latter you do the more likely you are to win a plumb assignment in the lottery? But it is not explicitly stated.
But you can find your own turf, stake something out that they have not yet covered at the council level. I was right, there is definitely some opportunity for clever placements there.
No "late night” restriction was mentioned — though I don’t think we got all the rules yet – but you can’t sell GSCs outside of any venue that wouldn’t let the girls in, so I guess no venue outside of strip clubs or dispensaries (depending on the state, I suppose). BUT joke’s on them because my favorite live venue is all ages.
Looootttta rules about payment, orders, gotta pay the council every week for the cookies you sold, or no more cookies for you. I love that they are like: it does not matter if your car got stolen or your house got robbed, you are on the hook for these cookies and the money for these cookies. Most of the rules give you a strong sense that the Girl Scouts have Seen Some Shit.
The online app and portal to handle all this is called COOKIE CENTRAL, great name, and they swear up and down that this year “all the problems from last year have been fixed.” It is 2024. How to the Girl Scouts still not have a reliable digital situation? That seems crazy to me.
Then there is the basic stuff all good GSCs know, like that there are two bakeries in the US for GSCs, and they slightly name their products differently and have slightly different products. But in the end, 50% of the volume is thin mints, samoas, and carmel delites. It is kinda stunning how much of the GSC cartel runs off of pure nostalgia cuz lets face it the only reason anyone eats a Thin Mint is for nostalgia’s sake.
Anyway I wonder if we’ll get kicked out before we can even sell a cookie because I am EXPOSING the TRUTH about GSCs. Hahaha look it me I am a slightly deranged mommy blogger now, who you once read for interesting parental insights but as the years go by, slowly went off the deep end about Kitchen Aid lead and black plastic in your coffee maker.
The meeting was at the Pittsboro public library which is just lovely and right by the food pantry two which Emma and I donate muchly. I wore my Timehop Three Wolf Moon-inspired shirt which is really three Abe-the-Timehop-dinosaurs, and it is probably my greatest contribution to that company, the nostalgic irony works on so many layers. I mean, aside from, you know, keeping the company alive and all that.
Hrm just looked online. No more Timehop store. That is sad.
Just back from Walmart. Limited Sensory Stimulation hours, so no Walmart radio, I already miss it. The shower puffs were placed in the wrong aisle in the app, a rare digital miss. $11 for three feet of wall-mount cable conduit, sold in the electronics section instead of home improvement. This stuff, that you can get at any hardware store, eight times the amount for the same price. Shame, Walmart, shame.
On a ramen-for-lunch kick as I work through about 9 quarts of turkey bone broth from the thanksgiving turkey. Trying to sort of “do it quick” but also good tasting, doing a quick sautee of garlic and shallot and ginger before adding the broth, adding soy, fish sauce, black and rice vinegar, xiaoxing wine, mirin, and chili crisp (don’t get me started on that term), giving it some umami and complexity. Adding a lot of vegetables. It is going great, and it is delicious, but the turkey gameyness of deep-boiled-for-18-hours bone broth is still a bit much. Maybe I should water it down. But I am already looking at 12 days of this for lunch.
BUT I am excited to get through all the assorted packs of asian noodles I have bought and not eaten in the last few years. Really clearing out the pantry.
Which is a good thing because last night I watched this great Youtube video where chefs rate store-bought ramen packs and today while shopping I bought, like, god, seven different new ramen noodles packs. No instant noodles, all gotta be boiled but, yeah. Way too many. So I guess after the turkey ramen, home made ramen run we’re going to have a pretty long-ish instant ramen run. Interrupted by Christmas and our Boston trip. Though hey maybe I’ll bring them all to Boston that is not a bad idea.
Emma showed me the first draft of the holiday card and it is so good and I think we’ll be ready to ask you for addresses by Monday. But also people are totally going to think AI made the card and that bums me out. I told her she should put a “made without any AI” notice in small type on the card. She very reasonably said that people who use AI in their art should be the ones who have to mark it. But I suspect that is not going to work because honestly which of the two parties would have more propensity toward dishonesty. Kinda think she should make a “certified AI Free’ seal for it.
And I am more and more thinking I need to get off my but and formalize an anti-AI religion so it can start spreading and people can insist on AI-free products and they can get a special symbol on them like the K on Kosher products. Because I don’t want that shit anywhere in my life, and the existence of a “religion,” especially one with any scale, induces at least a few companies to make a version for you.
CVS Caremark has now called me 9 times in the last 12 hours. They just keep calling. They keep calling so I can pick up the phone and they can tell me what I already know: that they are rejecting coverage of my medication that my doctor and science knows I should have. They won’t leave a message, but it’s not like it’s a human on there. They are insisting I use my human time to listen to their robots, since they can’t be arsed to pay a human.
In five or so days I will then get six to ten letters in the mail all saying the same thing.
This happens every month.
For one denied medication.
And people are surprised.
While the adults were getting trained on COOKIE CENTRAL last night, the kids had a meeting about what they should do with their money. I like Jane learning about all this non-profit committees and fundraising and shit it is good American shit that needs to live on. One girl said they should use the money for a field trip. Jane claims she said they should use the money to buy needy kids food and shoes so I either have a saint for a daughter or a brilliant, manipulative psychopath that knows exactly what I was hoping she’d say.
Tough to say.
Got a W Hotel Lobby in a Better, Alternate Universe playlist for you, volume number 86. Is the conceit of this playlist series expired after five years? If I walked into a W Hotel now would the music be… good? Would it be good because I have gotten more normcore in my tastes? Or have they gotten better? Or is it still depressingly bland? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Anyway Nulifer Yanya cancelled her Chapel Hill show so that was bad. David Ross Benson is an old Fairbanks friend of mine who still makes, to this day, an amazing album every year or so. yes, this ends with an eleven-minute Arthur Baker/Pharoah Sanders jam, but also, holy shit this ends with an eleven-minute Arthur Baker/Pharoah Sanders jam that is awesome.
All right have a lovely weekend. Peace bro.
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Thanks for reading.
And hey! Maybe buy one of my books!
Good Morning, Hello, How Are You vol 1.