Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #1485
Twin Peaks, Jill Sobule, Apple's YGR smackdown and Tim's culpability of getting them into the China mess, vitally important information about the longest-lasting Sharpie sub-brand for outdoor use, griping about memes.
Hi hi hi. Oh my god I want to be in bed so badly. Every weekday morning these days, the only way I manage to get out of bed at 6:21 is to tell myself that as soon as I drop off Jane I will go straight back to bed. But then I immediately confronted with the issue of caffeine: do I have any, which I desperately want but which will complicate any return to bed, or do I skip it, committing to this plan? Every day I consume the caffeine. Every day I end up not going back to bed. But man, I wish I were going back to bed. But what am I going to do? NOT write to you guys before work, then go into my work day where the first free hour is at, like, 3PM? That will not do!
GMHHAY is such a burden.
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All right well I have a backlog of topics for you so we will just get right to it.
I am listening to Uniform, Brooklyn noise band. I own their most recent album but I am listening to 2018’s The Long Walk because there was a song from it on Twin Peaks The Return aka Twin Peaks (2017) aka Twin Peaks Season 3. Finished my re-watch of Twin Peaks last night. I’ve seen seasons 1 and 2 so many times where wasn’t much I had forgotten, and I actually skipped from episode 10 to 20 of Season 2 because I do not need to see James Hurley get caught up with that dumb-ass couple and their “chauffeur” again. Also Windham Earle is boring.
But Season 3, man. So much I forgot. Whole sub-plots! It really is exceptionally good. I mean, not without its problems. David Lynch woefully over-uses the visual of driving down a night-time road and I do not need to see a dude sweep the floor of the Roadhouse for over two solid minutes straight that is just some pure unadulterated BS.
But all in all it is a TV season like no other, and is pretty amazing. It is far less neatly tied up than I recalled, and I am somewhat irked at all the open-ended items. I know there’s a book but I don’t think it answers much? But still. Shit. So good.
Things I forgot to write about on Friday:
Jill Sobule. RIP. I mean come on dying in a fire? That fucking sucks. And by all accounts she seems like she was an amazing woman. I was never an “I Kissed a Girl” fan, until of course Katie Perry came along and ripped that shit off then I was in Jill’s corner. What is in my personal heavy rotation and head-cannon is Jill’s great country romp “Where is Bonny Gentry?” which is a song about two things very near-and-dear to my heart: Celebrity drop-outs and Bobbie Gentry. Giant star of the 60’s and 70’s, still out there, married to some normie dude in, like, Charleston or something, just living a totally normal life Bobbie Gentry freakin rules, Jill Sobule knew it. The 33 1/3 about Ode to Billy Joe starts with Jill Sobule. Because she is awesome.
It was my friend Megan Young, RIPs, birthday Friday. That was sad. I did not forget it or her on Friday but I forgot to mention it to you. Though I guess if I go around telling you about the birthday of every dead friend, jesus, things will get even more morbid around here than they already are. Still, I think f her often. Have this picture of her and Liisa that I got from the memorial sitting right here by my computer. She was a force of nature. Miss her.
Read the recent smackdown of Apple by Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers castigating them for violating the sanctions applied to them in the Apple v Epic trial. Apple mostly won that trial, by all accounts, and just had to do some basic shit allowing apps to link out to other payment methods. But they were so petty and petulant and lazy they decided to basically ignore it. Lazy because there were a few new laws in other countries like Korea so they decided to try and do one thing to follow all of these laws, except, they also decided to try and do as little as possible and continue to fuck over developers as much as possible.
I think if they had tried to do one or the other of these two things, or, you know, put some effort into it and endeavored to be as shitty as possible according to each new law, it could have worked. But that would have been effort, so they lumped them all together and then tried to make it as onerous as possible on devs.
I’ve never been the biggest Phil Schiller fan but to his credit he was the one dude at Apple that was like “hey I went to every day of the trial and I actually read YGR’s ruling unlike the rest of you jokers and this is not gonna fly” but Tim Cook listened to his pitch, and listened to the pitch by a bunch of finance dudes and chose the finance dues over Phil. In the words of YGR: “He chose poorly.”
Tim really comes off as a rube in this decision. And Apple comes off as malevolent and shitty. She is pissed. It is a VERY FIRM decision.
Mind you, Apple has already appealed this case, lost, took it to the Supreme Court and lost. On a case they supposedly mostly won! Sore winners!
Except it always seemed to me, who also read the original YGR decision, that Apple did not win, and it seemed pretty clear that they were going to have to make major changes to the app store. Eventually. Once they bothered trying to comply.
But instead they just fucking cheated and stalled — outright accused of perjury buy the judge and referred for criminal investigation.
And what is Apple’s response to this new blistering decision calling them liars and criminals? Do they shape up?
Nah. They appeal.
Then Tim gets on an earnings call and is asked about it and he just doesn’t answer. Nor does he answer anything about Tariffs, or AI, or the Siri debacle. Just utter contemptible stonewalling.
I suspect Tim is a very good leader by several measures, and Apple is in a hellacious position on several major geopolitical fronts and, look, you can just juggle so many plates.
But boo hoo being the CEO of the world’s largest corporation is fucking hard, that’s why you’re paid a ton, and if you’re not up to it fucking find someone who is.
It is additionally ironic since Tim’s rise in Apple was all about his “pivot to China,” getting Steve out of a very American mess of his own making with his American factories.
Tim is basically why Apple makes everything in China, which is now arguably Apple’s biggest liability and fuckup.
Speaking of Apple my Notes app is not syncing between my phone and my computer and it is a giant fucking pain in the ass and is half the reason why I forgot to tell you these things on Friday.
OH ALSO: Epic was ready for this ruling, and so was Stripe. Weirdly, the one place where I think many people will notice the benefits of this ruling is Amazon. Being able to buy Kindle books on your iPhone without doing a whole song and dance. It should be allowed now. But Amazon is not ready, or not willing to rock the cart, or something. I am somewhat surprised, but also not.
Hey question: what is with all these people making fun of Zuck for saying that the average American only has three friends? Do they think he’s making that up? Do they think it’s not true? Do they just want to glom onto a boring-ass meme and do their own version? Are they bragging that they have more friends than most people? Do they think that’s funny that so many people are lonely? Do they think we live in a world where you can still make harmless memes on the internet? Do they think they’re mocking Zuck instead of… lonely people? Why why why? If I make one with Spacemen 3 am I being clever?
Jesus.
I mean it’s pretty obvious it’s true most Americans only have three friends. Look at Trump. He doesn’t even have enough friends to fill a cabinet and has to keep giving jobs to Marco Rubio because he doesn’t know anyone else.
I would be a great archivist of the United States. Just saying.
I have two more pieces of very important information to impart to you this Monday morning and then we will be on our way:
1) Installed a new garbage disposal for my mother-in-law this weekend. It is, it turns out, super easy to install a replacement disposer of the same brand because you don’t have to do any of the water-tight stuff with the actual drain whole.
The keen-eyed amongst you will notice I used both the word “disposal” and “disposer” in the above paragraph and I am here to tell you that apparently both are acceptable as both were printed in the manual of the item in question. It has always been a “disposal” in my life but I think I’m going to say “disposer” now to make people vaguely uncomfortable like when people make memes about three friends.
2) I cannot tell you exactly how long this experiment has gone on — we could all look it up in the GMHHAY archives — but I am here to tell you that if you are looking for the best Sharpie to use in an outdoor, sunny environment, it is not, in fact, Sharpie Extreme, but rather Sharpie Industrial. Behold:
I guess actually it’s not super obvious in this photo but across like 20 bins, I did half-and-half and the results are very definitive.
Tell me you are going to find anything as useful as that information on the internet today.
Jane was a bit tough this morning, Monday’s are always a bit tough. Seven years old and Mondays are already tough. More punchy than sleepy. Forgets her glasses, just wants to play instead of getting her shoes on. Almost didn’t hug me as she left the car that was really sad. Wouldn’t brush her hair. Was very angry at how hard the Wordle was this morning, which we got but only barely. We also had a pretty miserable Friday night bedtime.
BUT the rest of the weekend in between those bookends was really quite pleasant. She lost her screen privileges for Saturday owing to Friday night’s debacle and she is always so much more pleasant on no-screens days it really is depressing.
And! She spent Saturday morning over at Chore House and usually when she’s over there sans screens she plays with the Theramin. But this Saturday she spent the whole morning reading Gary He’s McAtlas book and my god. She loved it. Also got her grubby paws all over it so I’m probably gonna have to buy another copy but, man.
I love it when she reads a book without prompting.
Justa mix for you this morning. Definitely a few Twin Peaks-derived items on here: Annie Hart, because her old band Au Revoir Simone ends two episodes. Chrystabell because she plays Special Agent Tammy Preston. Not enamored with the new Samia which makes me so sad because her last album was one of my favorite albums. I do like it though. It’s just not obsessing me. Laele Neale is playing in Brooklyn with Entrance and it reminded me of Entrance, whom Aug and I met a decade or two ago in London had some nice drinks with him after ATP. Checked in on him he makes some great music these days still. Love the new Panda Bear/Cindy Lee even though I don’t love the new Panda Bear. I have previously mentioned CLOAKZ and Shriekback. Oh and Miya Folick need to look into her I starred like five songs from her new album.
All right well I guess I’ll tell you about gardening and stuff tomorrow. Peace out.
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Thanks for reading.
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Good Morning, Hello, How Are You vol 1.