Good morning good morning good morning. Ça va? Bien? Bien. Jane and I are just back from the dentist for a quick checkup on her teeth reconstruction. I give us an A-. Some small pain but nothing to be too worried about, nothing sharp, which is apparently the bad pain. Another check-up in a month.

Then we went to the yummy breakfast place up the road, Breakaway Cafe. Some of the ex staff say the owner is mean, but they seem to have decent retention and have all the right political signifier signs in the windows, so, you know. Best not to dig further. I had a turkey sausage breakfast scramble meat is murder. This is what I’m gonna do the rest of my life: talk about how awful meat is and keep eating it and seek penance from the animal welfare gods. Best to live your entire life in guilt.

Went through the ordeal of buying Daisy Chain Fields tickets yesterday and succeeded in scoring three tickets. Will we go? Maybe? Maybe not? Hard to say. We’ve been meaning to go to LA for a long time but it is absolutely dumb to go for one, maybe two nights. Absolutely the least ideal weekend of the year for North Carolinians. Alas.

Ticket-buying sucked, but not as bad as using Ticketmaster to endeavor to get tickets to the actual Olivia tour. Or at least, I thought so, but then upon reading the mega thread in the Olivia Subreddit, seems to me the only difference is this time I lucked out and got in on the lottery, whereas most people did not. Even with the crappy site, I was in and out in about ten minutes. Three hours later, some people were still in the queue for an obviously sold-out event. I really do not understand why ticket companies do this. Just put a sold-out sign up and be done with it.

This ticket sale was done by Front Gate tickets, which I was (very) tangentially involved with the founding of back when it was a C3 presents endeavor. But now it’s owned by Live Nation just like everything else: basically Ticketmaster in disguise. Everything seems to be owned by Live Nation. It is sad. Well, not AXS, which is owned by AEG, so, you know, same diff. Etix, the company that Cat’s Cradle uses her in North Carolina deems to be independent. Ish. Owned by management but “backed” by PE. At least as of like ten years ago. Difficult to say now. Whatever happened to Brown Paper Bag tickets? Hrm. Seems they got bought by a company called Events.com, who went public in the SPAC craze. I guess that’s better? Though they seem to have stiffed a bunch of people during COVID cancellations. You don’t see people using them much anymore. We used TIXR for the Human League show. Seems like they’re still independent?

Alas.

Clarification: when I said a segment of my readers were ICE-lovers yesterday, when talking about mobility, I was referring to Internal Combustion Engines, not the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Unfortunate double-use of the same acronym.

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We are listening to VoX LoW today. My friend Nicky got me into them like a decade ago, but I did not keep up with them. Then their hot jam “Something is Wrong” came on in my automobile the other day and I thought “this band is great I wonder if they have done anything else” and I went and looked and low and behold, they put out a second album, five years later, in 2023. Which means we can expect a third in…. two years? That’ll be cool. Anyway, this one is called Keep on Falling and it is good but it is more sophisticated in the way many droney bands become once they learn to play their instruments and compose songs: a phenomenon I am not super fond of. Drone bands should keep on droning. But don’t get me wrong, it’s good, it’s good.

And there are still a few drones on this one.

What else what else. Had a dream last night about Scottish World Cub fans in Boston and it was just great. I’m not even in Boston right now but these people sound like my kind of people. In my dream the Football fans included all sorts of post-rock bands I love from Scotland, and Jim Reid from the Jesus and Mary Chain was there, and several of the Scottish members of the band I road managed in the 90’s were there too. It was lovely. Scotts are just dandy. They can invade my town any time.

Couldn’t fall asleep again last night as I kept thinking of all the EOs a new Democratic president should sign immediately upon entering office. I mean immediately. Like… take the pledge, look at the audience, the giant audience on the mall with its algae green pool, hold up a finger telling them to wait just a second before you give your inauguration speech, and sign like 100 pieces of paper in two minutes, an absolute barrage of EOs that no one is ready for and the Republican spin machine is ill-prepared to handle. Some of them just batshit illegal like shutting down fox and defunding the supreme court. Stuff to get em really outraged while you also pardon a bajillion people, take over SpaceX and OpenAI using some emergency powers thing, deporting Elon and Melania and do a mass citizenship conferring to every dreamer or something. It was a very satisfying line of thinking, this fantasy of having a single fucking Democrat presidential hopeful who will actually try anything. Biden sort-of tried to do this but half-assed it, alas. Gotta 10x that shit.

Also at the end of every EO, kinda like Cato’s Carthago delenda est, will be a paragraph that says “if you’re pissed about this EO, and think the president shouldn’t have this power, I agree. Please pass a law or amendment taking this power away from me. Until then, too bad suckers.”

Oh important stir fry update: when all our friends were here, one day for lunch I made my normal stir fry to see if Emma was just wimpy or if, in fact, my stir fry was very difficult for people to endure while I’m cooking. Apparently the fumes can be a bit much to take. Well, Emma has been vindicated, every single friend all said it was too much. Four people supported Emma’s (and Jane’s) position and not one backed me. Very sad.

The current stir fry ingredients are: ginger, garlic, thai chili peppers, shallots, olive oil, sesame oil, bamboo, baby corn, water chestnuts, mung bean sprouts, broccoli, celery, carrots, snow peas, low sodium soy sauce, dark soy sauce (low sodium when I can find it — not easy), fish oil, black vinegar, rice vinegar, xiaoxing wine and, occasionally, sesame seeds. Sometimes I add brown rice, chicken, or peanuts, depending on how hungry I am. Jussi left some veggie chicken behind so I will be using that for a few days. I love love love the Quorn Meatless Diced Chiqn Pieces but they are hard to find and you gotta prep em in advance, so it’s been a while.

Emma and I finished SNL UK and it was pretty great and I am slowly learning a thing or two about UK politics and I am sad Kier Starmer didn’t resign until the season was over because they woulda had a lovely time with it.

Jane is very obsessed now with dedicating every song that we listen to in the car. This one’s going out to Emma, this one’s going out to Jane, etc. She is getting an amazing amount of joy from this. It is super cute. I am not quite sure why she finds it so fun but I’m gonna roll with it.

It was super fun sitting there with her at breakfast today at the cafe on a workday morning. The restaurant was about 50% remote workers and 50% old people catching up with other old people. Jane and I were just like the old people. I hope Jane and I sit there and have breakfast in silence all the time for the rest of our lives.

Also she didn’t complain at all about the dentist today — bribery was involved, but I will take it.

Eight is a pretty great age have I mentioned that?

Hey look I actually have a mix done today. Justa mix. It’s a good ‘un. All new stuff except Lou Reed. Love the Freezepop rip-off song on the new Olivia, probably my favorite tune on there. New Modest Mouse is surprisingly good. People like the new Death Cab but upon my single listen, I am thus-far underwhelmed. Love this weird new Mekons thing. Some of these bands are new to me and haven’t done a second-listen yet, so I don’t even remember Yes You Are, Ray Bull or the Red Clay Strays. Golumb was very Velvets, iirc, so that pairing should go well together.

I have off tomorrow, very exciting. Might not write. Might go straight to STUDIO WORK. Didn’t get to do a lot last week so I am excited for (hopefully) three days in the studio. Plus a little gardening and… WALMART WOOOOOOOOO.