Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #1410
News roundup, Walmart run, the return of Walmart Radio, what's with old people hoarding distilled water, we want Babkas.
Hello hello hello. Good morning. Brr. Gonna snow here. Two inches. We haven’t had two inches in this region of the Carolinas in.. mmm… four years? Five? No one is ready. People panic shopping. Went and did my weekly Walmart run a day early cuz I knew it would be mayhem today. Places absolutely crawling with the elderly. They seem to be more into prepratory grocery shopping than other people. Just thousands of them. And all the distilled water was gone. Not the purified water, not the spring water — full shelves of both of those. Just the distilled. What do old people do with distilled water, I wonder? Very odd.
Jane is out of school early today, all three counties around here sending the kids home early to avoid the snow. Gymnastics is, sadly, cancelled. Man, I love going to her gymnastics class and watching her do little kid tumbles. Just the best.
We are listening to the new(ish, I am behind) Advance Base album, Horrible Occurrences. It is more of Owen Ashworth proving his mettle as a great American songwriter, in the… Dylan? vein, no. I am gonna say in the John Prine vein. Recommended. We have 44 hours of music in the To Investigate queue at the moment. We are behind because we had to plow through all that vinyl. But now we turn to new music in earnest.
Went to Walmart yesterday. Mid-day, so it was not like my usual time, so it was not during the “reduced distractions” neurodiverdent-friendly time I usually go. Which meant… Walmart Radio! Was so happy to hear my old friend, and they welcomed me with the greatest song ever made, “Heroes,” by David Bowie. They also played Gary Numan’s “Cars” and the DJ even said “the best DJ and the best tunes” or something like that and a) not wrong but b) a bit hubristic for… Walmart? But then the whole thing disintegrated into boring modern shit-country and he really negated that brag. Maybe it was a new shift, new DJ.
And no distilled water.
I went to check, on a lark, if they had my brand of eggs because I didn’t really want to make a second stop. They never have in the past, but hey, you never know. But no, they did not have my posh eggs. And in fact! They no longer had the second-most posh brand of eggs, Eggland’s Best, which historically have been a Walmart staple, providing organic eggs for the organic Walmart shoppers (n.b. Walmart is actually pretty good for organic). But they were gone. And I don’t mean, like, they were out of them due to the mass of old people panic shopping. Nope, there was not even a spot for them anymore. Like… has the massive “inflation in eggs” made Eggland’s Best simply too expensive for Walmart? Is it flush times in the Egg Industry so Eggland’s Best feels like they no longer have to suffer Walmart’s insanely, shall we say, enthusiastic procurement department? Is there an intrepid beat reporter on the grocery market scene? Because boy would I subscribe to that trade pub.
So, yeah. No chance for the Cadillac of eggs, Vital Farms.
I will visit a Vital Farms farm one day, mark my words.
And for the longtime readers, yes, I am still collecting every edition of the Vital Times. Sixth year running. One day I will sell the entire collection on eBay for, like, six dollars.
I have had in my notes several “current events” stories from the Christmas holiday that I was going to comment on. They all seem so stale now, the world moves at such a rapid pace it really is something. But I feel compelled to comment on them all regardless. We will keep it brief, just want to “register my thoughts on the topics of the day” as Horace Slughorn says oh god whoops I made a Harry Potter reference it is absolutely insane how malevolent and hateful JK Rowling has gotten lately. The fundamental flaw with Jo is that even if everything she says is true, it is not, but even if it is, even if all trans individuals are “fake” and “pretending,” they still deserve love and respect. Woman has lost the plot. But I digress.
To whit:
Hats off to Blake Lively for turning the tide and exposing the hateful, mysogynistic, manipulative smear campaign against her. It is very satisfying to see these turkeys’ downfall. I did not notice the campaign prior to her exposure of it, but it is, of course, the same tactics that we saw with Amber Heard and boy did I see even kind, normal people pile on to that one. It says a lot that the only difference is that Blake was not going through a divorce. Reader, look within, I guess.
The two truck terrorist events over new years: that is fuckin crazy. Two separate individuals both rented electric trucks from the same car rental app and drove them to a second location to commit a terrorist act? Independently? Both had weird right-leaning politics and, of course, you had to dig deep to find that out but boy you sure would have heard it from the rooftops if they were Muslim or “liberal.” I must confess I am slightly disturbed about the NOLA attacker using a Lightning. Read an article from a terrorist expert about how clever this person was for using a car rental app and using an electric truck because of their silence and weight and I gotta admit it did not make me feel great about my vehicle. Still chewing on that one.
Apple settled a class action lawsuit wherein they “inadvertently” recorded Siri conversations for ten fucking years. The suit and most of the articles around it said it was advertising related. An industry reporter I respect, Eric Seufert, asserted it was not ad related. I have a decent grasp of Apple’s ad ecosystem since, you know, that’s been a huge part of my career for, oh, twenty years, and yes, I think Eric is broadly right but I also suspect he is a little bit wrong. I can imagine no path wherein the data from these conversations was passed to third-party advertisers so that, for example, you mention Le Crueset in an elevator and get an ad for it. Or, rather, I can imagine plenty of paths and I 100% believe that is happening, but I do not think it is happening through Siri or Apple. So I think in that sense, Eric is probably right. BUT I would be shocked if Apple didn’t use this data in its own, hypocritical internal ad system for the app store, sorry App Store, gotta capitalize it Apple freakin loves boring-ass descriptive nouns for its products. In any case, it’s been a week now since Apple admitted to inadvertently listening to your conversations for a decade and has not, like, put out a blog post explaining how this mistake was made and who is getting fired for it, because, of course, it wasn’t inadvertent and they can go fuck themselves. I still believe Apple is the “least evil” big company but boy, that’s like being the best Jeepers Creepers film. He says, writing this on a Mac.
We’ve bitched about Meta plenty but the hits keep coming yesterday it was reported that Zuck personally said “yes, it is totally fine if you train our LLMs on copyrighted material.” Of course everyone else did this too, but just a reminder that they suck and GMHHAY is going to leave them soon for Slack.
Oh also Spotify sucks too. Oh, yes, they do suck cuz of the Rogan thing but this is in addition to that. They are, in fact, commissioning fake artists to put on their playlists and supplant actual artists getting paid. Another conspiracy theory confirmed with the really magesterial, ace reporting article by Liz Pelli in Harper’s that has re-visited the ongoing issue and added a ton of new reporting to pretty conclusively prove this is true. Awesome. Great. Crap company, he says, as he listens to Spotify.
The Global Plastic Treaty failed, because Saudia Arabia shot it down. This issue gets almost zero press int he United States. The Biden Administration was in support of a halfway-decent version of the treaty. I mean, not near enough, but meaningful. Saudi Arabia has, for years, been operating in all global environmental treaty negotiations in bad faith. Years ago they succeeded in getting a veto vote — these treaties could have been done by a majority vote but they killed that. So now they just pretend to participate then kill everything off. They even host fake environmental conferences and panels and shit it is just great. We had a chance. It is gone. Obviously the new administration will not provide US support to the treaty now, the American press acts like this entire endeavor wasn’t even happening, even as it could have been one of the most profound acts humans ever made to save our ecosystem. Awesome, awesome.
Isn’t that just the cheeriest bunch of news stories? Woo.
But it’s Friday. In the immortal words of Jello Biafra: “But who cares! Let’s go get wasted man! To the 7-11 to the liquor store! Let’s party all night and party some more!”
I should end with something cheery huh.
In my giant photo-sorting system, in the “Scrapbook” folder, where I keep all the photos not of people, I recently renamed the LOTR/Tolkein folder to “Tolkien,” as a sign of both a) properly learning the spelling of his name, and b) rectifying what is 1st age/Beleriand erasure. I would like to apologize for my past insensitivity.
Since last summer, Jane had been thinking about the Ukrainian coffee shop at the end of the block from the Somerville apartment. They had great breakfast sandwiches and babkas. She loved the babkas. She talked about them for months. And when we got back to Somerville, we walked to the shop and asked for babkas. They did not have any. Next week, they said. After a week of us going to the store every day, they finally had babkas again. At one point, Jane made a flag, on a paper-towel-roll handle, a purple construction paper flag on which said: WE WANT BABKAS.
And for the last week we got babkas every day.
And now she misses babkas again.
Babkas are delicious. Plaited, braided, layered bread with chocolate, I mean, come on.
We want babkas.
Justa mix for you today, mostly new. Man, right after I left Boston the Sheila Divine played I would have tried to stay. Except I could not stay. But it sucks. Haven’t seen the band proper in ages. Also the only place you ever get to see famed doomwriter Luke O’Neil in the flesh. Oh look a Tolkien song for relevance to today’s post. Very impressed with the new Father John Misty, finally got around to listening to it that fellow is quite talented. So is Laura Jane Grace, man, that new album super solid should I give Against Me another chance I was never a fan.
Well, fiend. Have a lovely weekend. Xoxo Gossip Girl (also relevant!)
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Good Morning, Hello, How Are You vol 1.