Good morning hello howdy-hoo kids. It is Rick, your friendly neighborhood graphomaniac. It is surgery day. I am having surgery on two fingers on my left hand this afternoon. Gotta say, so far the experience at this surgical center (UNC Ambulatory) vs last time (the punk-named Panther Creek surgical center) is a lot less patient friendly. One random phone call yesterday letting me know the time. No texts. No friendly calls or chats. Very brusque. I like this doctor more, but I do not like this surgical center. I will tell them. After they’re done so, you know, they don’t botch the anesthesia in revenge or something. Can’t be too careful. Petty lot, anesthesiologists.

Primaries! Looks like Talarico pulled it off in Texas against Jasmine Crockett. I did not have a dog in that race but will note that Talarico generally polled 1-2% ahead in any polls against Cornyn and Paxton, and those two are gonna blow a bunch of money in a runoff against each other. So this is about as good an outcome one could hope for if their sole metric was winning the seat for Dems vs ideological purity.

Here in our own district, Nida Allem trails Valerie Foushee by exactly 1%. We like Valerie, but we do not like her donors (AIPAC, Anthropic), and her slowness to coming round to abolishing ICE. But she is fine. That was what her endorsement said in the local paper: She’s fine. She’s old, she’s been mostly good, no need to unseat her. Nida’s strength against a mostly fine Dem is a strong sign from the left, as is the fact that three Dems who vote with the Republicans too often got primaried out of their seats. ALSO the evil Republican President of the senate Phil Berger is currently losing his primary by two votes. Will go to a runoff. I’m sure the guy he’s losing to is no angel, but you always love to see such manifestly evil people go down. Fingers crossed.

Even closer to home, in our county, the megalomaniacal, power-mad sheriff, who runs as a Democrat but I am convinced is secretly a Republican but also maybe it doesn’t matter, he does play the part so well. Anyway, he is trying to become a county commissioner and he won his primary. It was a decently close race, with a challenger way less known than him, he only won with 52%. But I am still kinda sad about it. It’s ballsy to run against the sheriff. People are scared of him.

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What am I listening to what’s going on here? Some band called voyeur (sic), from a split single with untitled (halo). I don’t recall listening to this previously but Apple Music tells me it is a second listen. It sounds like Kim Gordon in “Bull in the Heather” era, and the music of, ummmm, I dunno. It is jangly and dissonant. I like it. It sounds very 90’s. This is a cool song. I will investigate this band more. Their Bandcamp page has a picture of a dude but there is a woman singing I am confused I hope it’s not some weird svengali studio thing or something.

Hrm what else do I have to ramble on about today? My topic list looks a little too political for my liking today. Do I feel like ranting about Polymarket and them trading off of death and war and nuclear destruction and them doing a partnership with Substack and how gross both those brands are and how its funny how some people are leaving Substack because of Polymarket and not the Nazis? No, I do not. Online betting is boring. Trying to get rich is boring. Pretending you can predict the future is boring. God I hated it when I was a Famous Business Dude™ and reporters would always me “what’s coming next” and I’d just want to scream that no one knows. Too many people like pretending they can see the future. Drives me bonkers. The thing about the future is its basically a stopped clock situation where everyone is right once in a while because anything and everything can happen and the average person spends too much time thinking of all the different things that can happen, and sometimes those match up. Look at all those Big Short dudes have any of them been profoundly right since? No.

Take it as it comes baby.

Or do I feel like ranting about Anthropic and OpenAI and the military. God no. Doug sent me a one hundred page email about that situation — not one that he wrote but one that some smart dude wrote. And then things changed a lot with OpenAI winning the contract but the military using Anthropic anyway and then the same dude wrote another one hundred page newsletter about the situation and I mean I am academically curious in the evil and misery that these three entities foist upon the world but no one’s got time to read two hundred pages about a fast-moving event.

Speaking of which Ed Zitron is always bragging about how long his anti-AI screed emails are and I find it deeply weird why would you brag that your message takes 40,000 words to convey? I guess I don’t find it weird I used to do that I recall writing some Op-Ed in Business Insider or something entitled something like “20,000 Words about Bubbles.” But I have moved on. Now I have a rule: do not brag about word count.

Oh man the music machine is playing the new Springsteen protest tune and we all left Minnesota in the lurch didn’t we? Shit’s still going down there isn’t it? This fucking world. Too much happening at once.

I am sad I didn’t get Springsteen tickets.

OH. Important update from, like, oh, I don’t know, seven years ago when this email was (god help me) a podcast: I no longer support the thesis of Adam Jentleson’s book about getting rid of the filibuster. Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy the book was called. Goodreads tells me I read it in 2021. Jentleson says that it’s fine to kill the filibuster because conservatives are, well, conservative, and they don’t really want to pass laws and reform. And you know, that made a lot of sense in a pre-Trump world, but it’s not true anymore. I mean, Trump will often go ahead and issue a BS executive order and do it anyway, but he would obviously rather have laws passed to further his fascism. And the filibuster is useful for hindering that, as we see right now with this absolutely unacceptable voting bill.

But I still think we need serious reforms. But it is a bit more of a quandary, I think, now. No point passing a bunch of reforms with a one senator margin and no filibuster only to have them undone next time round. But what other option is there? It is complicated. I am conflicted.

But I do think conservative and fascist are two different things I guess and the filibuster is a lot more important against the latter group. That is my new insight. The end.

Has anyone heard of Clear Lens Exchange (or Extraction)? It is apparently cataracts surgery for people who don’t have cataracts, and I can get it done electively and have eyes that work again? I would have to pay for it, insurance wouldn’t cover it. Should I do this? I am tempted. I can’t even imagine what it’s like to have eyes that work. LASIK has never been an option for me. Do I want to throw away a few small parts of my body, spend a small fortune and be able to see myself in the shower?

What if I find out I look stupid without glasses these days and end up wearing fake glasses anyway?

I would deserve that, I suppose.

We took Jane to the childhood rheumatologist yesterday. Mostly good news. She probably has some hyperextension, but no childhood rheumatoid arthritis. That is reassuring. And Jane was great at the doctor. It was down on the main UNC medical campus where they have like eight hospitals crammed together in a single loop and there is like ten billion dollars of medical infrastructure crammed into one place it really is insane. It’s like if Longwood and Mass Ave East and Harvard Medical all jumped into a puppy pile. The room had fun decorations in it including this giant moose and I wish all hospital rooms had decorations like that. There was a trompe-l'oeil of a hanging avocado that I could not bring myself to believe was painted on the wall it looked so real.

That art will make some good photo fodder for GMHHAY through the coming weeks.

At dinner time Jane got mad at me for some reason, I think I asked her to put her shoes on or something. She started yelling, I picked her up, she headbutted me and I swear for a moment I thought she broke my nose. I said OW really loud and moaned partially out of pain and part-theatrically. And that made her feel bad so she yelled at me “DON’T DO THAT” and I snapped “well I wouldn’t if you hadn’t just headbutted me.” And she got angry too and then things were about to spiral BUT THEN WE GOT IT TOGETHER. I said “don’t you want to say sorry” and she stopped in her anger for a second and said sorry and then we both calmed down and the whole thing was so quick like less than a minute and we were cool again. And I said “yay good job daddy and Jane for getting our tempers under control” and she was very proud but said I shouldn’t tell mommy about this whole thing even though I wanted to brag about her. So I didn’t. Until now.

All in all it went pretty well that little incident. I mean. Why did she get so mad at me for asking her to put her shoes on? Who knows. Actually I didn’t even ask her to put them on I asked her IF she was going to. I am trying!

Justa mix for you today. Lotta new stuff I’m working my way through. New Sheila Divine, very exciting. New Trashcan Sinatras! Hard to process that one. New GBV, as always, new Bonnie Prince Billy who seems to be trying to give GBV a run for their money on the prolific scale. New Iron & Wine, and a new Voxtrot album is here after nineteen years. I have only given it one listen but there are things to like on there. Thank you Jess for Blackwater Holy light. Thank you morning drive for Emile Hayne and Speck Mountain. And I put that voyeur song on here I was writing about earlier even though I think I put it on a mix pretty recently.

And here is a blurry photo of Justa Store for hommage to the Justa series of mixes. Find myself kinda missing Fairbanks this week sad I am not going up there this summer.

Ok byeeeeeee.