Good morning good morning oh my god that sun is so bright. Streaming right into my eyes. I can handle it. I can handle it.

Reader update 1: Caty writes in reminding me that Disney/Fox does not actually own all of the properties I listed. She is right, of course: TV networks do not produce everything that airs on them. Spelling entertainment owns the 90210/Melrose Place/Models Inc universe. Bill & Ted is owned by Amazon/MGM now and Fantasy Island is now owned by Sony. The important question is who owns Kindred: The Embraced, isn’t it? Probably need IMDB pro for that. If I am ever rich again I am going to subscribe to IMDB pro and a Bloomberg Terminal. Life goals.

Reader update 2: Also thank you to everyone who reminded me that Starbucks breakfast sandwiches are gross. I think we are safely on the other side of that chasm and I am no longer tempted to become a Starbucks guy.

Reader update 3: I will not be writing tomorrow. We are doing our 13-hour (fingers crossed) drive to Boston tomorrow. Wish me luck.

Cesar Chavez. Well that’s a bummer, isn’t it? Growing up in Alaska then living primarily in MA, NY and NC, I have not lived anywhere were Chavez was a big hero. Familiar with him due to my reading, of course, and lived in SF and frequented Austin enough to have a grasp on how plastered his name is on so many things in the south and west. God. That’s gonna be a cleanup job. BUT at least this time we won’t have a bunch of republicans whining when we take down the statues and rename things, amirite? Buh duh bump.

And Dolors Huerta. Holy shit. And those two kids. Jesus. You’re like 40 and someone says “well, I have good news and bad news. Your dad was famed labor activist Cesar Chavez. but the bad news is…”

I wonder if you spent five years — wait, just to be clear, I am not saying this to diminish the horror quite the opposite — I wonder if the Times spent five years investigating literally any other famous dude from the 1950’s and 60’s, they would discover the same thing. Probably right? More evidence that great man theory sucks, heroes aren’t worth it, etc. etc. I saw a tweetskeet that said something along the lines of “there is a reason women activists have demanded intersectionality from the getgo” and… oof.

$200 billion the Department of Shamwow wants for the Iran war. Two. Hundred. Billion. For a few months, presumably. What would universal healthcare cost in America? OH RIGHT. NOTHING.

Two hundred billion.

I mean money isn’t real I am not generally a guy who thinks that the federal government need to worry about the money it spends, hail Stephanie Kelton heroes can still be women maybe. But I do think about the effects of the money spent, the bullets, the guns, the bombs, the genocides, the massive humanitarian crisis that will inevitably be emerging in Iran as 90 million people, living in rubble, run out of water. I would prefer $200 billion does not contribute to that, that would be swell.

SAVE ACT, some stupid Crypto bill, $200 billion supplemental illegal war request, confirmation of Marky Mark for DJS, Congress really does have its hands full with a lot of stupid shit. Oh yeah the DHS battle and the Republicans holding the TSA hostage —

You know, I was looking at my daughter last night and I thought “I am not going to teach this girl she needs to keep up with current events. I am not going to burden her with that neurosis.” Feels wrong. But feels right.

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 to Lisa Gerrard of Dead Can Dance this morning. Her 2006 album The Silver Tree. It is fucking gorgeous. Bought it on vinyl about six months ago, this is its… sixth or so listen? I keep it in the heavy rotation bin. I mean look. Do I love Brendan Perry’s weird-ass album of 1930’s Greek revolutionary drinking songs? Yes, yes I do. But of the two Dead Can Dance members, Lisa’s solo stuff is more my speed.

Speaking of Dead Can Dance, they have a Bandcamp page now with the vast majority of their discography — at least the main albums — available for sale.

Hey important question for you regarding yesterday’s listen to Anamanaguchi: if I listened to all 4 CDs, 73 tracks, of their Scott Pilgrim soundtrack, but somewhere in the middle of disc 3, I had to go take a shit and I missed like 3 tracks… Did I really listen to the Anamanaguchi Scott Pilgrim Soundtrack box set? Did I? Really?

Go ahead and learn that spelling of Anamanaguchi, Apple spell checker. We may talk about them again sometime.

You know what occurred to me last night? You know what a thing is that Americans, as a whole, rose up and culturally changed, embedded and normalized? A courtesey that all Americans exhibit save the worst of the worst offender trolls of the internet? Shit I think even the orange turd probably respects this cultural moré, not that he… well never mind. It occurred to me that over the last thirty years, really basically since The Crying Game in 1992, Americans almost universally respect not spoiling things. I mean, people forget sometimes, people fuck up, they are thoughtless, but even in all of those situations, they know they messed up, they generally wish they they hadn’t messed up. Avoiding spoilers is built into many of the largest products we use on the internet – Reddit, Threads and others have built-in spoiler text functionality. It is crazy! Respecting spoilers crosses political divides. Respecting spoilers (more or less) crosses generational divides. Fox News respects spoilers.

We can do a thing! We did a thing!

I wonder if the Chinese respect spoilers.

Am I making too much of this?

I want to vibe code so bad. At work, we need a decent sample app at work to test our ads in, and I have an idea for an app that I personally want and these are two separate things but man wouldn’t it be fun to take, like, a week and sit there and chat with an obsequious robot and make myself the ultimate mix-tape music player that only has a single playlist and only plays in shuffle and shows you the cover art real big in Carplay and all the metadata? That’s what I want. I want it so bad.

Why does AI have to be so immoral why can’t we power the thing from green energy and pay creators and have it all be open source and not touching the toxic stew that is Altman and Musk. I bet it is so fun to vibe code. Why do I have to have stupid morals and ethics why can’t I just throw them out like all those people did in the 1800s who pretended slavery wasn’t their problem. Like I do with meat and plastic. Except I don’t, of course, I am wracked with guilt, constantly, about plastic and meat. I don’t need to add another thing to be wracked with guilt about. I have learned from my past mistakes I never should have started eating meat my sister had it right when we were kids.

But my god I bet it is so fun to vibe code. I suppose I could put a layer of abstraction onto it. “Pay” an “engineer” to make me my app and they can just vibe code it and I will “never know.” Like the jews with their elevator operator gentiles. I gotta remember the name for those people we have been down this path before. Oh hey conveniently I am going to a Bar Mitzvah on Saturday maybe I’ll just awkwardly ask everyone if they have a gentile electricity operator friend I’m sure that’ll endear me to everyone oh my god I bet vibe coding is so much fun.

Fuuuuck.

I thought for a while I could just do it all at home from home local models on my solar power not feed the thing anything IP’d, and someone did say they are cool with vibe coding because unlike LLMs that try and make art or writing, most code-LLMs are trained on open-source data and I am willing, provisionally, to buy that argument, ish. But they still talk to you, don’t they? And I would still need to ask them plain language questions and I don’t think they learned to speak plain language from open-source GitHub repositories.

Also this whole thing has serious music-at-the-Bronze vibes. I mean, the nightclub in Buffy where all the bands played. You know how the music at the nightclub was different in the aired episodes than it was on the DVDs? Because when bands licensed their music to Mutant Enemy they licensed it for broadcast. And Hollywood, unlike Silicon Valley, has robust labor protections. So when DVDs came along, they protected the licensees from just letting the studios re-use their music on the DVDs without new licenses. So we have shows that made heavy use of music, like Buffy, that couldn’t afford to license all of the music for the DVDs, because they’d have to pay people again, and they didn’t pay people much the first time around, maybe $5k, and I know because I brokered one of these deals, but I can’t prove it to you without a time machine because they’re not on the DVD because, well, now you know.

Lotta Buffy talk this week.

SO ANYWAY, IN THEORY, all those Github open-source contributors did not know what they were signing up for when they open-sourced their code. Were they really opening up all their code for machines to devour and replace them? Maybe! Maybe not! Maybe we should still get licenses from them all over again! Hollywood would have!

Jane had a meltdown in Gymnastics yesterday, hates the bars. In a maybe-not-coincidence, they were training new coaches and very few of her regular coaches were there. Is this a coincidence? Do the regular coaches know how to handle the kids’ setbacks better? Is that what you actually have to learn to go from being an elite college gymnast to a teacher of kids gymnastics? How to handle the meltdowns? Or was it a coincidence that Jane’s first major meltdown ever in gymnastics just happens to be that day? Why do gymnasts all have to do every type of gymnastics that is so weird you don’t make the kicker be a linebacker.

She’s over it, though. Lovely car morning this morning. She’s excited to head to Boston.

And she is STILL BRUSHING HER TEETH my god that app is magic.

Thirteen hours in the car with her tomorrow. She is very good in cars but it’s always a bit nerve-wracking. Fingers crossed.

Man this Lisa Gerard album is so good. Every time I Listen to it, I mean to re-file it in the record library but instead I just put it back in the heavy-rotation crate to listen to it again. Here you can too:

Have a lovely weekend. I will return on Monday, with no stories from the attic, no Walmart stories but hopefully some other interesting stories of travel and Bar Mitzvahs and whatnot!