Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #1423
Questlove's SNL doc, a big leak in our ceiling, Planning for my Casiotone for the Painfully Alone recurring paranoia,
Good morning! Hello, there, friend. Super early in the morning. My god. Hate it hate it hate it. Getting up at 6:30 in the morning is insane. No one should have to do this. Everyone, break your leg or some shit after 9 AM so all ER employees can get some sleep. You don’t really want a tired ER employee working on you do you?
Thank you for all your kind words about the AI edition. I regret to inform my new readers that that is a rarity and I will probably not talk about AI again for quite some time. Though I am lost in a bit of an AI thicket at work, trying to figure out exactly how a competitor “uses AI” to “achieve the highest revenue.” I have poured through a lot of their publicly available information and no dice, of course. I am mostly convinced it’s a lie and it is all just some good-old-fashioned 2021 “Machine learning” and 2015-style “algorithms” but I am trying to be, what’s the word… open-minded. It is somewhat frustrating to me that I do not yet have a solid plan with which to approach this mystery. But I am getting there. It would have been nice if DeepSeek blew this whole thing up and I did not have to do this work, but, alas, that did not happen.
But semi-relevantly:
Attention Facebook readers: GMHHAY is leaving Facebook, migrating to Slack. This will be over a few months, and we’ll be completely off by March. I love you all. Please come join us in Slack. The invite link is in the comments below. If you’re an email reader, reply to this email and I’ll get you the link.
The GMHHAY Slack is really coming into its own. Despite my personal skepticism, we have made an AI channel in the slack — for a couple reasons:
After working on this internet thing for, like, oh, I don’t know, thirty years, I have a fair number of friends who are professionally employed in this AI world and they could teach me a thing or two
I am trying to not be an old dog as I get older, and even though I think this whole thing is doomed to failure,
It is a loosely held opinion, that I am (trying to be) willing to abandon if proven wrong
I would like to be versed enough to argue this point convincingly
There are a bunch of people in GMHHAY slack who do not want to talk about this so I thought I’d get it off main for them (you’re welcome, Emily)
See work issue above.
We also made a #pets channel, which is a lot more rewarding.
Ping me for the invite link.
One more housekeeping item, regarding yesterday’s music, TheBabeGabe. I learned about this because friend and former bandmade Aug Stone told me about it in his newsletter. Aug and I are both fans of the amazing Kansas City outfit BLACKSTARKIDS. Though Aug has kept up with them better than me, and it transpires that they have broken up, and TheBabeGabe is one of the members gone solo, and now I need to listen to it again because my god BLACKSTARKIDS were an amazing band.
Yesterday mid-day I was on a Zoom (well, Google Meet, Kleenex, etc) call with my coworkers when I heard what sounded like a fountain raining down onto my floor in my office behind me. I turned around, and sure enough: a fountain of water was cascading onto my office floor from the ceiling.
“Fuck. Gotta go.” I said to my coworkers, except I forgot to hang up, turn the camera off, or put them on mute.
I ran upstairs and discovered that Emma had filled the bin with dirty rags and bleach, and left the faucet hose in the bin to fill it, like she does every week, except this week she forgot about it and went off to the woods to “work on the stream” (a topic worthy of its own GMHHAY entry). So the bin was overflowing onto the laundry room floor, seeping through the floor, into the space between floors, onto the drywall that makes up my ceiling, and out onto my floor.
Panicked, turned the water off, found every towel in the house, started soaking things up, remembered to text Emma, she came and helped. She got the wet vac out while I started cutting into my ceiling with a drywall saw to get the water out faster and get some air up there.
All the while, I got to listen to the coworkers discussing whether we deprecate iOS 12 support while they got to listen to us yell “fuck” and such. Good times. They were all pro, I am impressed. No mockery whatsoever. Shit maybe they’re scared of me maybe I am a “scary boss” shit maybe I’m a capitalist nooooo.
Mostly sorted an hour or so later, had three small-ish oscillating desk fans delivered from Amazon same day because nowhere around here had fans that both oscillated and fit inside our joist cavern.
(As an aside, wow is our house well built. Not often you get to peek into your house’s guts. No joist 2×12s here, 14” engineered LVL trusses for this house. Fourteen inches!)
Got the fans in there, one pointed in each direction for 180 degree, ish, oscillating fan coverage, one laying flat, venting out into the main office to get the humidity out of there.
Two amazing things in all of this:
1) The water hit the ground, missing basically everything in the room. There was about $700 of old WiFi equipment sitting inches away, about $1,000 of new Unifi equipment sitting a foot or two away, my workbench, and my record collection all within inches. Missed them all. God. Had it hit the records… woulda called the insurance broker about that one (we are not going to call the insurance broker). Got a separate “media collection” policy with them. Because I have problems.
2) I did not yell at Emma because I am an decent human being. I will now accept all your applause.
The only thing that was damaged was that I got a slight amount of water on about half of my amazingly curated, 4AD-heavy 90’s setlist collection: Ultra Vivid Scene on Rev, Cocteau Twins on Heaven or Las Vegas, Wolfgang Press on Queer, Miranda Sex Garden, Pixies on Trompe Le Monde, Cindytalk, boy it is a great setlist collection. But I spread them out and they have dried nicely over night and today you cannot tell.
The end.
The other day I was driving to the bank and “Scattered Pearls” by Casiotone for the Painfully Alone came on, and I have decided it might be the greatest song ever. Also I am obsessed with completely memorizing the lyrics and the cadence of delivery.
I am so obsessed because back on the Ettiquette tour, Casiotone for the Painfully Alone played in Boston Cambridge at the legendary TT The Bears. Great show. But what I most remember is a girl shouted out requesting that song, and Owen, the solo member of CFTPA, agreed to play the song. But. “Scattered Pearls” has a guest vocalist, Own does not sing it. It is sung a woman whom I believe to be Jenn Herbinson.
So Owen told the lady in the audience sure, he would play it, but she had to come up and sing it. To which she readily agreed. Absolutely no fear.
She may have been a little tipsy.
And then the song started, that perfect song, and she totally butchered it. Because the lyrics are fucking hard to deliver!
She seemed absolutely unembarrassed about it and had a great time, maybe was a little drunk, I wonder if I know her now. But I was mortified and I think ever since then I have lived in fear that I may be required to sing “Scattered Pearls” at a moment’s notice and, damn it, I want to be ready.
And I am so ready. Right now. I have been this ready in the past. But the skill fades with atrophy. But after a 20 minute drive to my pool company’s bank in Pittsboro on which I listened to the song on repeat, it is back.
This is the trickiest line: “for two entire songs we knelt and felt along the place where we had stood”
Also the change of subject from “we” to “I” in the dream line is rough: “as we took the bus home I thought surely I’d wake up…”
Anyway, I got that shit down. So, come at me, Owen Ashworth. Come play the triangle, play your old band’s music, have me on stage. Who doesn’t want to see a 50+ year old man sing out of tune.
This morning we are listening to a new album from Kathryn Mohr, on vinyl, because prior to the great vinyl pause of January 1, 2025, last year I purchased a year-long subscription to the Sacred Bones Record Club, and they are still delivering. I have, thus far, kept my resolution and not purchased a single new record in 2025. I haven’t even used my loophole: sell one to buy one. Mostly because no one has bought one the three records I currently have for sale on Discogs. I have maybe another 50 duplicates, but I can’t be bothered.
I also received a new piece of vinyl from Rose McDowall, the vocalist ingenue behind Strawberry Switchblade and, in a quite opposite direction, later, Current 93. It is a solo album, a new Strawberry vinyl edition of her 2004 solo album, Cut with a Cake Knife, which I ordered back on her birthday in ‘24, though it is occurring to me right at this moment I may already own a copy of it. Yes. Discogs informs me I already own the 2015 black splatter edition. Whoops. This is why I stopped buying records.
Finished Questlove’s Ladies and Gentlemen: 50 Years of SNL Music! and it is as good as everyone says. The editing deserves an Oscar I hope someone screened that thing in a theater before, gawd, airing it on NBC broadcast.
I could never make anything so good so I feel kiiinda bad about saying this but the one critique of the film I had was I wish it spent maybe 5 minutes on the negative case? That SNL has stopped being a musical cultural epicenter in around 1994, that they’ve gotten lazy, booking the same acts over and over (Maroon 5 has been on the show like 5 times, Kanye even more) and yes, booking Capt Beefheart and Fear and Sun Ra and Zappa was all amazing but you haven’t booked an avant garde act in thirty years.
(I do think the last few years have been a bit better though.)
That part where Lee Ving of Fear shatters SNL’s self image as some sort of progressive tastemaker by casually dissing their audience as “Mr and Mrs Normal America” was just great.
I also would have liked to see a segment on The Ones Who Got Away: even a minute: who did you try and book that you couldn’t, in hindsight who do you think you should have booked. You could call the segment “Why wasn’t Johnny Cash or Nick Cave ever on.”
But still. Just fantastic film. And, of course, a monumental legal accomplishment, Questlove using his own personal gravitas to get people to sign up for this and the mashup. Just a monumental accomplishment.
That’s all I got this morning. I am now going to adjust the fans in the hole in my ceiling, then either nap, go to the dump, or continue to work on this sprawling, endless company meeting “big think” presentation I have been working on for weeks and is getting away from me. I have blocked the whole day out for it. I am scared.
Wish me luck.
Got a club mix for you today. Apparently been building since… October? Wowzers. Added a bunch recently as I got through the backlog: new Hot Chip, King Kong Company, Jamie XX, Aphex Twin, Water from your Eyes. Mandy Smith was the underage bride of Charlie from the Stones, big scandal, went on to get a record deal with Stock Aiken and Waterman, a remix from that record proved to be a hit in the clubs of eastern Europe, some people lead strange lives. Shit Jamie XX is on here twice well how am I supposed to remember he had that song with Robyn like four months ago cmon man. Quite like this Sleaford Mods Hot Chip romp even though I do not normally love Sleaford Mods, musically (lyrically a different story, of course). Givin Friday’s new album is very clubby, which is just fine and good at because he is very talented but it is now Virgin Prunes, but nothing is, there will never be another Virgin Prunes, alas.
Okay take care. Gonna go adjust my new friends the ceiling cavity fans now.
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Thanks for reading.
And hey! Maybe buy one of my books!
Good Morning, Hello, How Are You vol 1.