Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #1575
Fascism exhaustion, teachers with kids in school, roadside mysteries, Jane takes a fall, EA, Ek, an inappropriate baby corn story.
Hi there good morning hello. Wednesday woo. Slow week for me, buncha my employees are at a conference, so most of my meetings have been cancelled. I nailed those insurance applications, though. Banged ‘em out in three hours. I have to say, our corporate insurance broker’s application portal is a phenomenal bit of software, perhaps the most well-designed and usable bit of B2B software I have ever encountered. Really amazing. It is called Indio. Like the town where Coachella is. Like the song from Sharon Van Etten and the Attachment Theory. They are based in SF. I am shocked. Woulda pegged ‘em for a midwest company. Didn’t know SF was capable of making anything so usable and humdrum and non-AI these days.
Hello my name is Rick Webb and I would like an award because three times in the last week I have seen teenagers in Nirvana shirts and I did not say anything to them about having seen Nirvana live. Now, did I do this to some teenager in a shirt of a different band a month ago? Yes. But it was GBH. That seems allowed. Anyway give me a medal I am a good human being.
Driving to drop Jane off today, through the giant weird neighborhood that sits between our house and her school. Last week the neighborhood has added these little white poles, with little white chains between them, sorta like the things you see in line at the cinema, except white and thin, along the sides of the road entering the neighborhood. I have no idea why they did this. There is no posh landscaping along the side of the road. There are no tire tracks indicating that people are having a hard time staying on the road. They are not sturdy enough to actually stop a car, like the cool giant barrels of sand you see on freeways. An inexplicable expense.
And wouldn’t you know it, less than a week later, they have been banged up and ruined in at least three places by cars clipping the shoulder. Because the road is windy and narrow, and people are careful and when two cars are passing on a narrow road, it is the correct instinct to try and move to the right and give the other car some more space.
This seemed entirely predictable. I am at a loss as to why anyone would bother.
Speaking of inconsequential suburban mysteries, do you have a kid in elementary school? Have you noticed that, like, more than half the staff of the school has a kid in the school? As longtime GMHHAY readers know, Jane and I get to school early, play in the car and chill and chat and whatnot. And we watch all the teachers and staff head into the school. And I am being conservative when I say that well over half the adults who go into the school in the morning have kids with them, students in the school. Jane’s first grade teacher had a kid in the school.
This… was not a thing when I was a kid? Is this a thing these days? Is it a “nowadays” thing? Or maybe a geographic thing? Or maybe a new school thing? Jane’s school is only like four years old. Maybe new schools attract young teachers and young teachers are more likely to have kids? Anyway, it’s weird.
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We are listening to Songs from the Suicide Bridge by David Kauffman and Eric Caboor. It is a second listen. I have started the process of clearing out the “To Investigate” playlist again. Gonna take forever. It has 45 hours of music in it. I like this album a lot, though I seem to not star too many tracks from it. And I don’t know anything about them. Let’s Google! Oh interesting! Neither Kauffman or Caboor have Wikipedia pages but the album does. It was recorded in 1984. Cult classic. Re-released ten years ago by Light in the Attic records, which is a label of which I am quite fond. He’s a really good Bluesky follow, the Light in the Attic guy. Retweets a lot of musicians. This must be how I found this cult classic I never heard of. Well. It is very good.
Sorry for the Spotify links. Their CEO quit. Well, he quit the CEO job, still gonna be chairman so, you know, company’s not off the hook for his killer drone investents or anything. More and more artists are taking their music off of Spotify. Could this be the next Twitter internet heat death where we all have to migrate? Gawd. Apple Music please just get your UI together.
Saudi Arabia, fresh off the heels of bribing all of the woke anti-free speech comedians to come do censored shows in Saudi Arabia, is now buying Electronic Arts for fifty billion dollars, the largest take-private deal ever. Just dandy. I mean, Saudi Arabia and their private investment fund is directly managed by the same guy doing the comedy festival who is the same guy who, you know, killed a WaPo journalist, no big deal. It is terrible and awful. But also! Their fund is $200 billion and if we have to endure these turds, EA is maybe a pretty benign place for them to lock up a cool quarter of the fund for the foreseeable future.
And it’s not like they’re gonna bring back Sim City.
So, okay. Just ignore, Rick. Does not rank high enough in the litany of modern horrors to get too bent out of shape about.
(PC question: Can we say “panties in a bunch” anymore or is that cancelled?)
Fascism fascism fascism. Arguably a worse week than last week, what with the generals and the “all liberals are terrorists” order and the “gonna wage war on Americans” stuff. Every Tuesday after dinner Emma and I take Jane to a playground off in the other creepy modern suburb. It’s a good playground. Has a zip line. We sit on a bench and talk while Jane runs around and plays. Last week I was borderline comatose from fascism overload. Just absolutely dysfunctional. This week, I was sitting there and I felt a sliver of happiness, because I like playground time, it’s one of the times Emma and I get to catch up and chat without Jane interrupting us. And I was sitting there thinking “huh I am not as existentially terrified and comatose as I was last week maybe I can make it maybe we will make it.”
But then I noticed that this week Emma was existentially depressed about things and I realized nah, things were just as bad this week. I was just handling it better.
Maybe because I started taking my expired duloxetine again. I was prescribed it for pain, but, you know. This is pain.
Playground time. Time to compare your fascist angst to the previous week.
Yesterday I was doing one of my chores and loading up the dishwasher to run for the evening. And I picked up a Pyrex bowl (new style, no borosilicate) in which I had been storing baby corn in the fridge. I had used up the baby corn in my stir fry at lunch. But the bowl still had water in it. So I dumped the water in the sink before loading the bowl in the dishwasher.
Except I missed the sink in a fit of clumsiness and the water got all over my shirt and dripped down my belly.
And let me tell you reader, baby corn water smells.
And that baby corn water dripped right down my belly into my shorts and onto my junk.
BABY CORN DICK.
Smelly wet baby corn dick.
May never eat baby corn again.
Speaking of dumb accidents, just now while I was dropping Jane off at school she was being a monkey and she was hanging upside down from the oh-shit bar on the passenger side.
And she messed up her landing and hit her arm hard on the center console, and on my soda can and on the markers and man it looked super painful.
Through tears, she said: “This is gonna be one of those bad memories that crowds out the good memories I hate it when that happens.”
I tried to give her some pithy parental wisdom, but…
Huh.
Volume four of our 1991 revue today. The gothy one. This one’s awesome. Lotta good goth in 1991. No Sisters of Mercy, though. I tried, but Vision Thing came out in 90 and the new version of Temple of Love didn’t come out till 92. Still though. This is a solid mix.
Talk to you tomorrow. BABY CORN DICK.
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Thanks for reading.
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Good Morning, Hello, How Are You vol 1.