Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #1587
No Kings, Benioff brouhaha, Emma's and my 20-year meetaversary, a cute fun run.
Morning morning hi hello. Happy Friday. I am off today. Very exciting. I have hit that part of the year where I use up all my unused vacation time and take every Friday off for the rest of the year. A+, would recommend.
Just back from Walmart. They played “Where is my Mind” and “Uptown Girl” and were in the middle of KC and the Sunshine Band’s “Celebration” when the Sensory Friendly Hours” started. There was a sign in the liquor section extolling the virtues of “Wine Night” and that keeps making me chuckle I think I could get into Wine Night. They did not have any copies of Life of a Showgirl all sold out.
The announcement said “less sound and more comforting lights” and I got really excited, but nothing changed with the lights. Alas. Imagine being in a Walmart with dim lights that would be so fun man my life’s idea of fun has really reduced huh.
Hitting up, if all goes well, No Kings protest tomorrow. You should too! I used to think it was necessary to go to some big city to go to the protest, but after being in Fairbanks, AK for the last No Kings, I think the smaller, Republican-ish cities are where it’s at. They get annoyed but they are the ones that need to see who the majority really are. So we are going to nearby Pittsboro, rather than schlepping it to Raleigh.
I am excited — depressed and appalled, to be sure, but also excited — that potentially the single largest protest in the history of the United States is happening in my lifetime and we get the opportunity to go. Whatever happens with the future of this country, it will be good that history can record how many people were against it. Maybe they were impotent or dumb about how to stop it, but at least they were against it. That is worth the world knowing.
Update: Of course it would happen, I knew it would happen, but in yesterdat’s issue, one period was outside a parentheses (shit what is the singular of parentheses) when it should have been inside. We regret the error. Our non-existent editor has been reprimanded. Thank you Mr. Gatti for alerting me to this injustice.
Before I do the Slack Blurb this morning we have to talk about Slack, or rather, their owner. Slack was founded by one of the few good liberals in Silicon Valley, Stuart Butterfield. Alas he sold it to Salesforce in 2020. Now, at the time, Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce was a supposed-liberal, at least as liberal as billionaires in the valley can get. So I can understand why Stuart did not really think it was problematic to sell to Salesforce. I mean, Benioff was never more than a centrist liberal in the Clintonian third-way vein, but, you know, Stuart is roughly my age and we all fell for that shit hard. Cuz really, what else was being realistically offered to us as an option in the Reagan years. My friend Peter is reading this right now and getting his hackles up, but Peter, I am saying you were right and we were wrong. It was all a farce. Alas. But I digress.
What I have recently realized, however, is that all of the supposed Silicon Valley Clintonian/Blair liberals were really just looking for a party they could co-opt, and they thought they could pull it off with the Democrats. And they kinda did! We probably have Louis Rosetto, the founder of Wired to partially blame for this, who took Stuart Brand’s (the name Stuart seems to provide you with some sort of immunity to Silicon Valley kleptocracy) idealistic hippie Whole Earth Catalog vision and turned it into a lust for money. Interestingly, his compatriot in this whole affair, John Battelle, Wired’s original EIC, seems to have kept his head on straight. Nice job, John. Hope you’re well. John does not read this newsletter but we were once friends but I digress.
Anyway, eventually Trump came along and was obviously winning and obviously way more amenable to giving them what they want and very obviously vindictive in a way the Dems never were.
So now we really have two groups of Silicon Valley plutocrats. The die-hard true believers in Fascism, the Lonsdales and Theils and Musks and all the other South Africans.
And then we have the people who think they deserve our sympathy, it’s not really their fault, maaan. Because they are billionaires who are, basically, being blackmailed by Trump and have to give in. Marc Benioff falls into this camp. And boy has he been going giving in with gusto this last week. First he told a reporter during an interview on his private jet that he hoped the National Guard and ICE would add SF to their list of cities to invade. Then yesterday he unsolicitedly offered up Salesforce’s (absolute garbage, also-ran, joke of an) AI to Trump to speed hiring for ICE.
Marc is doing this first because you will get good headlines for your AI shit if you do it and second because as a relatively (supposedly) liberal SV plutocrat, he was more in Trump’s crosshairs than the others who had already bent the knee and kissed the ring. He probably thinks he is a victim.
Now, any of you reading this cannot, of course, imagine being worth (checks notes) eight billion dollars, and not just quitting your job, selling your stock, and fucking off to Tahiti if Trump started blackmailing you. But no, these guys, these fucking guys. They fold so fast. So fast.
SO. Now Slack has been compromised, I suppose. I mean, I always knew Benioff was kinda a turducken, and his politics weren’t mine, but you know, the left is a big tent, yadda yadda… but when I spent all that frickin time deciding what messaging app to use for GMHHAY’s lovely bustling little community, I thought the politics involved here would be okay. Now I gotta, like, go read the Tweets of the boy king founders of Discord or some shit. I ain’t got time for that man.
Fuck.
It’s everything, man. Did you catch in that Jon Oliver Bari Weiss takedown that the CEO of Kind Bars is a turdified as well? That is a bummer. Now I also gotta, like, research Clif from Clif Bars and whomever owns those stupid RX bars and whatever the fuck until I can find a fucking granola bar that isn’t fascist this world sucks and for that matter who the fuck owns Quaker Oats these days is it actually the Quakers I doubt it. Aww fuck they’re owned by Pepsi. Hrm but their CEO seems okay. All right then I guess Quaker it is fuckin fuck fuck.
Semi-related: RDU airport has not started airing the Starship Troopers parody of a security announcement where Kristi Gnome tells everyone that the shutdown is the government’s fault. They are hemming and hawing about why they’re not running it, rather than calling it blatantly illegal but at least they are not running it. I’ll take what I can for a drop to drink in this desert.
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We are listening today to the new Cate Lebon, Michelangelo Dying, came out last month I didn’t realize. It is kinda nice, mellow, synthy, loungy, a bit spacey, pretty. I like it, even if it is a bit meandering. Gonna give it a B.
ANYWAY. On a more positive note, today marks twenty years exactly since I met my wife, me popping into her job interview for like two seconds, saying hi, and leaving. Neither one of us remembers much about it, it was a very unremarkable event, we didn’t really start talking much for several more months, didn’t become friends for maybe a year after that, didn’t start dating for a few more years after that. But it’s been twenty years today nonetheless. Being married to Emma is awesome. She is great. We still talk all the time, as much as we can with a little one interupting us, but now we’re getting slowly to a new phase where Jane can talk with us too and that is nice too. She is passionate about justice which suits me excellently my god I cannot imagine being with someone who didn’t care about other people and the downtrodden and whatnot.
This also means that Emma and I have lived in North Carolina for roughly half the time we’ve even known each other, we’ve been down here longer than we were in Boston or New York together. That is fuckin crazy I still am barely convinced I even live here and am not just passing through the world is not my home, etc.
Anyway HAPPY MEETAVERSARY, wonderful wife. I love you so much and I am very happy that this whole marriage thing lasted substantially longer than the ten years you thought we could pull off.
Yesterday was Jane’s fun run at school. Emma and I left our jobs at noon and popped over to the school and watched Jane and a bunch of other kids run in circles for a half an hour. One lap they acted like airplanes, one lab everyone gave them high fives, one lap was a red-light-green-light situation. There is a professional crew who hypes everyone up. They do one grade per hour so this professional crew is hyping everyone up all the livelong day. It is a job. This one guy gets slimed once an hour. Or maybe they take turns, I don’t know. The kids walk and run and hold hands and do congas and take so many water breaks and it is all so cute. Just the cutest. And because it was at noon a lotta parents couldn’t go so Emma and I cheered on all of Jane’s friends, and one of them kept waving to us every lap and it was so cute. Just the best.
Kids are cute.
Lotta love for yesterday’s Diane Warren playlist, that was nice. Tempting to do another one, but rather we are gonna do a moody and quiet one today. All new stuff. Not sure what is up with this new Howe Gelb collaboration I have lost track of Giant Sand must investigate. Mostly ew stuff otherwise I swear eventually some day we will stop posting tracks from Springsteens Tracks II. But there was just a lotta good stuff on there, you know?
All right well I am gonna go start my weekend now. Pay pool bills and start working on the OSB layers of the subfloor in the studio.
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Thanks for reading.
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Good Morning, Hello, How Are You vol 1.