Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #1438
Weta is ripping me off, so's the trash company. Fruit game, Wu Tang, Concrete Blonde, Barcelonan egg prices.
Good morning good morning good morning. Jane is at school. No one is sick. First normal morning in a week. I got up at 6:30. It sucked. It sucked less because I gave up on having a life and went to sleep at 9:30. So then I got plenty of sleep and starting having nightmares about oversleeping at around 4 AM, that was sweet.
Before that I was having a pretty swell dream where I lived in a ramshackle old apartment in the Lower East Side that was covered with Ivy on the interior and had its own private connection to the Essex St stop. It was awesome. Better yet, it was next door to the Tanana Valley State Fairgrounds in Fairbanks. It is shocking how often I dream about the Tanana Valley State Fair, one of my high school jobs where I was an admissions ticket seller known for balancing my books and facing my cash. The weird part is I always dream of the ag hall, and I hated the ag hall as a kid. Smelled like poop.
We are listening to Concrete Blonde’s Bloodletting this morning, 2024 IRS Black Vinyl re-issue. I have the blood red original pressing and it is paper thin, but a thing of beauty, even if I would honestly grade the cover at GF at best. But the vinyl is gorgeous. But this one sounds better. The only M/M copy of the red vinyl in the US is going for $500 now. Seems reasonable. Anyway I was just about done with this current Concrete Blonde obsession, having bought cheap CD versions of Group Therapy and Mojave, since I had never heard them. They were both very good. Let me know if you want the files. But then on Sunday when I was working on the attic, the extended french version of (the song) “Bloodletting” came on while I was working, and in the first second I thought “well, this could either be that remix of “Kingdom of Rain” by The The or the extended French version of “Bloodletting.” Then by second three of the song, I thought “nope, this is definitely the extended French version of “Bloodletting.” And I was very proud of myself, even if I did not quite get all the quotation marks correct in that previous sentence. And then it made me want to listen to Bloodletting again. Honestly, every cut on this album is solid. “Darkening of the Light?” Awesome. “Tomorrow Wendy,” of course. But “Sky is a Poisonous Garden” is a banger. Seriously. Every track.
Wu Tang is coming do I need to see Wu Tang? Or, I guess Wu Tang again, since I saw them at Stubb’s once. Except that was not the correct combination of Wu Tang members, I understand. I have also seen RZA, GZA, Method Man, and Ghostface. Though I guess I never saw Raekwon. Or ODB natch but I guess we’re ignoring that. Seems unlikely I can get Emma to go to Raleigh for this. To an arena, no less. Though I recall she kind of enjoyed the Liquid Swords performance we saw at an English holiday center once. Hrm. TBD.
My trash company, that I fired last July, has taken to charging me again. They put two $100 charges into my bank account a couple weeks ago. Which, mind you, would be six months of garbage collection. I emailed the lady with whom I personally emailed, actual human in Durham, named Karen, and said “you WTF stop charging me.” Perhaps surprisingly, Karen did not answer me. Unlucky for her, I also reversed the charges at the bank (look at me reversing ACH charges just like Trump in his pettiness against new york) and put a block on the account and filed fraud charges. The bank refunded me.
So today GFL is trying to charge me again. I have used their online submission form to tell them to stop charging me. It will not work. I am going to have to call them. But I do not want to call them. I mean, I do no want to call anyone, ever, but I certainly don’t want to waste a call on a trash company I don’t even use.
I will keep you apprised. I know you are waiting on the edge of your seat. But honestly, I got a pretty thin notebook of topics today and I don’t feel like descending into political recriminations this morning.
Is Bluey still popular? I feel like it’s past? I mean maybe some parents still stick their kid in front of it? We don’t, it feels like Jane has completely forgotten about it her poor Bingo plushie has not left the shelf in yonks (she is currently obsessed with Aurora the cat I bought her in Alaska and I am very proud of this). And definitely parents are done watching Bluey with their kids thinking damn this is a good show, right? Maybe because there hasn’t been a new season in a while. Shit wait did we even finish the last season? How many seasons are there? Anyway I saw Bluey diapers at the grocery store this morning while trying to buy grapes but really just battling with the self-checkout machine. And it made me wonder. Bluey movie… next year was it? Wonder what the world will be like then.
Nope nope nope.
My Spotify Release Radar had absolutely no bands I have previously listened to in it. It was all obscure bands with, like, 3,000 listens. I do not know whether to be proud of this or convinced they’re all made-up Spotify bands. Also I should note that there was new music this week by artists to whom Spotify knows I listen Suki Waterhouse (guilty pleasure or singular multi-hyphenate TBD), Gracie Abrams, Fontaines DC, Mike Posner, Youth Lagoon, Blondshell, Avalon Emerson — it didn’t give me any of that. C’mon man. Everything on the internet is gonna enshittify but do you have to make it so obvious and such a parody? Sheesh.
Look at these cheap fuckin Barcelona eggs my friend Jenna showed me on a video call. Those are euros, so, you know, pretty much parity with the dollar at the moment. TRUMP TAKE EGG.
When I was in Boston over Christmas and I was a younger Rick who was only on volume 3 of The History of Middle Earth, unlike the older, wiser Rick of today who is deep into volume 8, I went to the Weta Digital site and ordered an official prop version of the Middle Earth map, because I wanted an “official” one and the Tolkien Estate is currently run by sloths and that is the only place to definitely get an official one since Amazon, even though they put out a Middle Earth show can’t be bothered to get rid of all the piracy, ditto Etsy, etc. Anyway, I ordered the thing on my phone from the Weta Workshop site. Here it is. Nice, right? I know. $29.99.
Except! Speaking of enshittification, somehow, upon checkout, I must have clicked — or they just decided I clicked — the “pay in installments” option.
So the map never showed up, it’s late February and I have noticed three charges on my account for this map. I have paid about $60 for this map. With shipping (which was extortionate because apparently Peter Jackson does not have his shit together enough to have a domestic warehouse shipping this shit and so I gotta get this thing flown over from New Zealand or something) the map should have been $52. So, you know, someone stole like $10 from me.
Also I should put out as I endeavor to recreate my purchase path, though this time on the computer, there is no pay with installments option on the site:
Also I really want to know what Weta dollars are. Sorry: Wētā gotta have those macrons over the vowels for some reason.
Also I just learned that you can, on the Mac, now hold down a letter for 2 seconds and get a submenu of accent options (like on iOS) instead of using the option-key commands that have existed since the 90’s. I pride myself on having memorized these key commands, but now I guess that is just one more useless skill. Lasted a good 30 years, that skill. You will be missed.
But back on track. So. The question is:
Did they remove the “pay in installments” option since December?
Does it only show up on the phone, because, I dunno, poor people use phones?
Do they just do it and lie, and commit fraud?
Who knows!
Spent the bulk of the day with Jane yesterday on her sick day while Emma was at Grand Jury Duty. She caught me playing the fruit game in a 30 minute break from work calls I had and my god she was so excited. We got a big watermelon. But now I want to get two big watermelons. Can it be done? What happens if two big watermelons touch? Does the game implode? I hear that people have gotten like 10,000 points in this game. We have only gotten 3,800. I would like to break 4,000 but I think I need to delete the game and pretend I never saw it because I am already tired of fruit dreams. It is too much. It is the perfect dopamine rush of a game and it should probably be banned. OR maybe an enterprising hacker could get this game onto everyone’s phones in the White House and they could save the republic.
We had to ban iPad use today because she was awful about stopping iPad for dinner last night. She threw a big fit for a few minutes, but as Emma went and got takeout (since we gave up on the idea of going out), she calmed down and came and sat with me and we talked about my childhood and my tantrums and what my mom would do when I threw a tantrum and I taught her the “nobody likes me everybody hates me I think I’ll go eat worms” song and she just loved that. And we looked at pictures of Baby Rick and Baby Emma and she loved that and she just loved hearing all the ways I misbehaved as a kid. And she eventually accepted her punishment? I mean, she probably will throw another fit today when she remembers, but I think it might be the quickest we ever got her to reckon with her actions.
So, you know, I feel like a pro parent today. Give me a medal.
OMG “Tomorrow Wendy” is on. I timed this perfectly. No mix today. Let’s just put “Tomorrow Wendy” here. It was written by Andy Prieboy of Wall of Voodoo. It is about the Aids Epidemic. it is a perfect song.
Until tomorrow. Wendy.
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Thanks for reading.
And hey! Maybe buy one of my books!
Good Morning, Hello, How Are You vol 1.