Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #1557
Tech titans going to dinner with Trump, Bill and Ted are doing Godot, new Saint Etienne, mystery Ukraine signs, de minimus ending and record pre-orders.
Hi hi hi omg I almost overslept. I mean, I didn’t, I woke up, but 20 mins late. And I had gone to bed early! I got nine and a half hours! Eventually I was like “man I have slept forever maybe I’ll pee and take pain killers and go back to sleep” and I looked at my watch and it was 6:50. CRAZY TIMES IN THE WEBB HOUSEHOLD.
For your educational purposes, here are all the asshole tech leaders who went and had dinner with Trump and told him how great he was last night. Wouldn’t want you to think that Tim Cook giving Trump a Special Boy Golden Plaque was a one-off or anything:
Sam Altman
Mark Zuckerberg
Tim Cook
Sundar Pichai
Bill Gates
Alexander Wang
Lisa Su
Chamath Palihapitya
David Sacks
Cameron Wilson
Satya Nadella
That’s the order that Business Insider put them in their listicle article (long live the listicle), so I guess that’s BI’s current power rankings, lol.
So, you know. When we fire Chuck and finally get our act together and start winning again, they can all head off to New Spandau on Johnson Atoll with Trump and his gang.
What a way to start the morning. Fucking Tim Cook.
Man sorry about yesterday’s edition, the Buttondown editor was all sorts of fucked up. Seems to be okay again today, though. Here, let’s try and put one of the photos in that I was trying to give you yesterday. I will put it above this paragraph to serve a photo’s usual purpose in GMHHAY as a topic break slash palette cleanser.
Oh yeah that’s a good photo. That sign was inexplicably placed outside a Cookout — NC’s version of In-N-Out but way better but also worse. No explanation, and obviously not the hours of the restaurant. Maybe there is some sort of Ukrainian party every weekday afternoon at the Cookout in Chapel Hill. Not sure.
Join the GMHHAY slack! Reply to this email and ask for an invite if you’re a human who likes chatting with other humans about topics such as these within!
So after like nine months or whatever, Slack won’t let me renew the universal invite link I have been using lately. Someone tried to join yesterday using that link and the invite link was expired. I have made a new one. Drop a line and I will give you the new one. You can just hit reply to this email.
We are listening to the new Saint Etienne today, International. It is their last album ever, they are going to break up after this. They have not announced their tour plans. I would love to see them one more time. It is not clear if they will weather fascist America for one last tour: they came for the last couple albums but only to a couple cities. But still. I would do my best to make it work. Would be good to see them one more time. Farewell, Saint Etienne, you have been a part of my entire adult life since WFNX drilled your cover of “Only Love Can Break Your Heart” into my head in 1992 or so. I have purchased every album. One of the most valuable records I own is a Saint Etienne record, where you could give them money and they would have Sarah sing your name into a song and, hoo boy, was that worth every penny.
Unfortunately, Trump fucked up their shipping and the vinyl is not arriving at my home for another week or two. I have been wondering about this. With the end of de minimus shipping, what’s going to happen to the 1-2 dozen records I have on pre-order from the UK and Europe, where I have already paid for the record and shipping, but now we are expected to pay the tariff on top of it. Seems that Saint Etienne are going to eat the additional cost, and one other vendor emailed me to tell me that’s what they’re going to do, too. But I expect a few records will be held hostage until I pay a bit more. We shall see, we shall see. And since it’s not here, I can’t put a photo of the vinyl in now for editorial coherence. But, you know: 1) the vinyl photo almost never matches the words in GMHHAY anyway, 2) I can’t remember if International is even coming out on colored viny.
So instead you get this new Orcutt, Shelley, Miller record. It was pretty good.
Went to the allergist yesterday and was pretty ready to be an absolute pain in the ass as a patient. The nurses there are absolute Nazis about how and when they let you buy your allergy drops and I am sick of it. They never answer the phone, but then call you. Won’t email. Only formulate drops on Friday, don’t move that to Thursday when Friday is a holiday, you have to give them like three days notice to get in the mixing queue it’s all just so arbitrary and shitty.
And the allergists of the world have not really been that helpful to me. A septoplasty, a CPAP machine, two sprays and the drops and I still have shitty sinuses, and I am fucking sick of it. It’s been 30 years.
(All of this is true about my neck, too, and it’s been baaad the last couple days and it’s sending me into a pit of despair being in such constant pain, but I already got my neck shots scheduled so I am trying to put a pin in that, har har, for the next week).
So I was really to be fatalistic and cranky and treat him like an eye doctor where you’re like “no I don’t want to buy glasses from you I just want my prescription so I can go buy them online from someone who knows how to email.”
But then his nurse admitted me and she was this gorgeous Indian woman and so kind and so funny and we had a nice chat.
And then the doctor came in and I forgot how great he was, human and funny, and also he had a new idea for a thing I could do to make things better. It’s an outpatient surgical procedure, general anesthesia, two days recovery, but so fucking what. Best part? He said “If Afrin works for you, this basically has the same effects so go take a bunch of Afrin the next couple days” and, I mean, come on. Aside from, you know, the addictiveness and massive damage Afrin overuse will do you, Afrin’s the greatest thing ever. Permanernt Afrin effects? Sign me the hell up.
So I went to Walmart and immediately bought some Afrin and sprayed that shit into my nose in the parking lot no shame.
And immediately got a headache. A bad one.
BUT it fucking worked wonders on my sinuses, as it always does.
So I’m just gonna assume the headache isn’t part of the surgical procedure’s results, fingers crossed.
Into the breach!
Did you hear Bill and Ted are doing Waiting for Godot? On Broadway! I mean, come on, that is fucking hilarious and awesome. Me and a bunch of friends went to see Ian McKellan and Patrick Stewart do Waiting for Godot on Broadway and it was great. They did another play too but I can’t remember what the second one was. It was awesome. I want to go to this one. I am very into this enduring Keanu Reeves Ted Winters friendship. Maybe the play run will line up with the Saint Etienne farewell tour a boy can dream.
I don’t have a pithy Jane anecdote for you because I barely saw her yesterday because she had girl scouts. Well, I saw her in the morning. She brushed her teeth yesterday morning, that was nice. She did not brush them this morning. We are not doing Wordle at the moment, she is very into this Tetris rip-off game built into the Ford onboard entertainment system. She did give me my morning hug this morning, though, that was nice. She is definitely an improved human being now that screens are limited, but you know. She is still monomaniacally focused on getting more screen time: that game in the car is a perfect example, she never cared about those games before. But now? She’ll take what screens she can get. It makes us keep indefinitely extending the screen ban, which is probably unsustainable. And I was telling a friend yesterday that this whole thing feels so hypocritical, what with me having been addicted to screens since I was her age, and those screens providing me my means of employment and source of my wealth. But also probably the bulk of my unhappiness, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
In honor of Saint Etienne release day here is a synth pop playlist for you. Bangin’ new Nation of Language I am very into them and I just found out I can’t go to their show because it is when I have to go west for my set grammy’s 90th birthday alas. The Allison Goldrapp album was way better than the advance singles so I am relieved. VERY into this KUNZITE/Ratatat record it is just great. And cutouts. And Molly Nilsson I don’t know anything about her but love that record.
Happy Friday to you. We are going to see NIN tonight, probably not Pulp in DC because martial law, sad, and then if all goes well… CHORES. But I’ll tell you all about that on Monday.
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Thanks for reading.
And hey! Maybe buy one of my books!
Good Morning, Hello, How Are You vol 1.