HELLO. Hi! Late again. Another snow day. Sleeping in RULES. Man it would be amazing if I got to wake up at 8AM every day forever. Just the best. Says the guy who used to show up at his own company at noon.

COOKIES. I suppose it is unrealistic of me to pimp cookies every day from now through March when “cookie season” ends. Maybe I’ll reduce it to once a week next week. I had some Lemonades last night. Sleeper hit, the Lemonades. On paper a shortbread cookie with lemon icing doesn’t sound that great but my god. Muy delicioso. Buy some cookies here!

I have amazing, important Waffle House griddle intel that you can only get here at GMHHAY, the pre-eminent reporting source on lowbrow affordable American restaurant and retail outlets. A GMHHAY regular wrote into the slack explaining the situation with the griddles:

“the logo ones were more expensive. The ones without the logo can be sent back re-Teflon and reused and so they just stopped using the new ones. I mean maybe some of them have them in the back. But most of them got sent back for refunds.”

It seems that eventually the employees of Waffle House figured out they could add the old plates to the new Waffle makers, “So once they figured out they could get the plates that could be refurbished unlike the logo ones they switched to them,” our source continued. “But not all waffle houses are the same. Corporate and franchise stores all run a little differently.”

Now how much would you, stock analyst, pay for such amazing intel? $100, $200 quarterly? Not only can you get great retailing and merchandising insights about Waffle House, but you can also get our ongoing coverage of Walmart. Coming soon: Ace Hardware.

The concept of “re-tefloning” a griddle plate is not something I ever considered. Fascinating.

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!

We are listening this morning to the seminal 1997 album The Moray Eels eat The Space Needle, a copy of which I have recently procured on vinyl for an (almost) reasonable price. The album notably features a new, custom painting by Roger Dean, the painter best known for his sci-fi, fantastical album covers for the prog rock titans Yes and Asia. But the album is so much more than that. My god, it is so good. I don’t think I’ve listened to the whole thing in, well… Actually it hasn’t been that long I went on a deep dive of all the music by the assorted members of Space Needle not too long ago: Anders solo, Varnalaine, Reservoir, all very good. Side one of this album could be a Sun City Girls outtake. Side 2 is hypnotic and beautiful. God, it’s such a good record. Oh man “Never Lonely Alone” might be the best Space Needle song. And that Roger Dean art in beautiful vinyl gatefold: lovely.

I got a new ceiling it is very exciting. You may recall about nine months ago, Emma overflowed the sink in the laundry room above my office and flooded my office. We acted quickly and I attacked the ceiling with a drywall saw and drained all the water, stuffed a bunch of fans up in the ceiling cavity and dried it out to prevent mold. And it sat like that for oh, six, eight months. But we finally got it fixed. And that necessitated re-painting my entire ceiling. I kept it white. Tempting to darken it up, but that will come someday in the future when the studio is done, and I am old and retired and not working in here all day. The team who repaired it are great — my third time using them at home and we use them at the pool company a lot. But they cheap out and use smelly paints. Solved problem, smelly paints. Just gotta pay more. Took about a week for the smell to dissipate, but it’s all better now. My ceiling is lovely and new. But also looks exactly the same as it used to. Without wires and fans and holes. Simultaneously very exciting an very boring.

My truck is fucked, the electrical system is going haywire, my back right tail light is flickering, the tailgate has failed, the car occasionally gives of BSODs on shut down, and yells at me every minute about the tail gate with unnecessarily loud beeps. I have an appointment to fix it next week, I strongly suspect it’s the 12-volt system, an annoying thing for EVs to have. I wonder if this is a thing the Chinese have fixed. Do BYD or Xiaomi EVs have 12-volt systems I wonder? They’re like a freakin appendix, 12-volt systems in EVs. Useless.

Read an article by Noahopinion, whom I usually do not enjoy because of his showily “common sense” yet ultimately heartless politics. The article was about how America should allow Chinese EVs in, and I gotta say it made a case pretty close to what I’ve been thinking. The US car companies are basically in full retreat with EVs, and America needs EVs. May as well let ‘em in. Force the American companies to adapt. We could let them in in small numbers, we could let them in on the condition of giving Americans jobs, building battery technology here in America. It’s a risk, but also potentially a nice inflation antidote, on top of everything else.

Watched Train Dreams last night. Beautiful, loved it. I guess in one way you could say it’s thematically a similar movie to If I had Legs I’d Kick You and Die My Love except with a man being kinda crazy. But he is slow and contemplative and, well, I’m a man. I would like to revise my comments about those two movies from yesterday: I commented that it would have been nice for those movies to give similarly suffering viewers hope, but I did not acknowledge they give them sympathy and understanding, which is, of course, nearly as powerful. Anyway Train Dreams was gorgeous and slow and contemplative and sprawling but also small and it brought a tear to my eye more than once because I am sensitive.

Jane was better about her remote learning assignments yesterday, and she drew some cute portraits of herself, and her friend came over again and they did not fight again and I think Jane is getting into school from home. “I like remote learning days because you get to sleep in,” she said. Maybe we should seize the moment and take her out of school before they start teaching her about the great American Hero Charlie Kirk or something. Ha. Our school would never. By choice. For Now.

She did throw a giant fit at dinner, in public, about a lemonade, though, because I didn’t buy her one. She kept whining louder and louder, but also getting embarrassed, blaming me for “making people look at her,” and the whole thing was so dumb. “I’m so thirsty” but “I won’t drink water.” The whole “I won’t drink water” thing comes from her friend, who called water “boring” and asked if we had any Yoohoo. As if. Jane loves water. We tried to explain to her that if she was really dying of thirst she would be psyched to hav —

God the whole thing is so normal boring parenting. Another day in parent live another day in paradise. I am grateful. Ommmmm.

Justa mix for you today. It is mostly new stuff that I have been listening to in January of twenty-twenty-six except for a song from the Space Needle album to which I am currently listening, and songs by the Cocteau Twins and Murder Inc. Not the Murder Inc hip hop group but the Invisible Records/Wax Trax-adjacent Murder Inc. that came first and were kindly not litigious toward Legend Man and MC L. Both of these tracks came on random recently. My truck stereo has been playing a lot of Heaven or Las Vegas lately, weirdly. Not gonna complain. Of the new stuff, Belair Lip Bombs are great (thank you Suzy). Not amazed by the new Mitski but remain optimistic. Love Austra and the new Viagra Boys. Thank you Adam for Skull Practitioners I liked it a lot more on second listen, exactly why every album deserves two listens. No idea about Spacey Jane, Cheekface, Great Grandpa or Dear Boy they have not gotten their second listen yet. Probably sometime this week.

All right keep the faith. Stand with Minnesota. Shit’s still going down. Just because I didn’t write about politics for a single day doesn’t mean I forgot about it.

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