Good morning hello. It’s Rick, coming at you live from Chatham County, NC. GMHHAY, where we look for answers to the most fundamental questions in the universe: is everyone an idiot? Does everything suck?

Was in a pretty dark place last night. Taskmaster helped. That shit is funny. Odd feeling to be laughing hysterically while feeling existentially depressed. C’est la vie.

What do we god. We got an absolutely idiotic trade war with Canada. No more Canadian whiskey. I saw a photo of the most popular Canadian whiskey brands and I swear to god it looked like my dad’s bar. I mean look at this photo. My god, it takes me back. Was this just an Alaskan thing? Or did all boomers prefer Canadian?

This trade war is so fucking dumb. Imagine your past self from even like ten years ago coming and telling you about a Canadian trade war.

Then we have all the AI stupidity of the last 24 hours and reader, it has been a real shitty-ass 24 hours in the world of AI. First OpenAI totally secretly read the chats of an esteemed mathemetician when they got wind that he was about to solve one of maths hardest puzzles and win the $1 million prize. So they freaked out, read his chats, threw twenty-two million dollars of extra processing power at their stupid-ass chat machine, fed it his chats and beat him to announcing the solution, just so they could brag that AI solved the problem, not a human. Tried to work with him at first, denied it. Denied reading his chats but then changed that denial a bit to… oh never mind. The machines read the chats, not us! Super cool, super cool.

So, you know, if you were planning on using AI to make any discoveries in your life: they are not going to be yours. You will be paying a company to usurp you and steal your credit.

Have at it!

And then!

Then some dude quits working at Anthropic, saying basically that these people are fucked, they know this is dangerous work and they just keep doing it because they think things will be even worse if OpenAI does it first. Which, of course, they are probably right, because look how much OpenAi sucks! Sam Altman is a sociopath. But also, god, can you imagine how much you much hate someone to build a whole multi-billion dollar company that is building something you fervently believe will end the world but you’re doing it anyway because you don’t want that guy to do it first?

And then!

That guy quit, said all that publicly, and a dude who still works at Anthropic, specifically on AI safety was like “yep, he’s 100% right, we kinda think this stuff we’re working on will probably kill the world but oh well what are you gonna do.”

I mean… I do not think this stuff is going to kill the world in the next few years. It might kill computers but fine, fuck up. But they do! And they just keep at it.

It is Star Trek’s 60th birthday. Might have been yesterday? Somewhere around there. Le Creueset is making the most hilarious, wonderful brand partnership shit ever made, including Shuttlecraft baking pans and, get this shit, a Star Trek Communicater-shaped cheese grater called The Communi-grater.

THAT is something you could be doing with your life instead of AI, Dario Argento Dario Amodei. Communi-grater. You will never, ever do anything as great in this stupid-ass hubristic martyr vision quest than invent the Communi-grater.

Couldn’t fall asleep last night, just sat there doomscrolling in my mind, once I managed to stop doomscrolling on my phone. Speaking of Star Trek, in the (slightly paraphrased) immortal words of Kevin Timeline Spock, “I need everyone to perform admirably.” Why can’t everyone just perform admirably.

A trick I have learned about myself is when I am in a place where I think everyone is being an idiot and I am very confused how everyone could be so dumb, I remind myself that I am just like the rest of them and I am being dumb too. And it does work and it keeps me from being so dumb, but also! No one else seems to do this! So are they dumb? Or am I dumb for not just blindly having faith in myself. It is a paradox that will eat me up.

But, alas, none of this self-recriminating, recursive thinking helps other people in my life perform admirably. And I could really use some of that right now. Looooottta negativity and anger coming from other people in my assorted pursuits these days and it is wearing me down. I am exhausted. I just want people to be nice.

Nathan Fiedler go become a therapist.

Oh wait. Bad idea.

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We’re listening to the newish album by Medicine this morning. It is their fourteenth studio album, and I have them all. Medicine sounds nothing like the Medicine you may remember from your time in the 90’s as a noise head or a goth watching The Crow my god that movie is so good how is that movie so good. They sound nothing like that but I keep buying their albums anyway. They sound sorta like the Beach Boys with feedback, which I guess is what the Jesus and Mary Chain were doing in the 80’s, so hey that is kind of cool. This album has a very sexy bikini photon the cover that is apparently a photo of one of the band members. It is all rather confusing. But I persevere because seeing them live at TTs on the Shot Forth Self Living tour in 1992 was an absolutely transformative experience have you ever seen a band use a Tascam 4-track as a distortion pedal I bet you haven’t.

Normally I’d put a photo of the vinyl here and it is a very nice pour, called “Translucent Sea Blue w/ Hot Pink & Black Splatter.” Maybe I will post that tomorrow. But today I’m gonna roll with the album cover because it’s so weird to me that a band that did 13 abstract album covers, no humans on them, no discernable objects, decided to make this their 14th album cover. But as I listen to track three, “The Lonely Sea,” it kind of makes sense. This is a very pretty, noisy surf album.

In other record-related news after about six months, the vinyl of the recent (ish) Tom Waits and Massive Attack collaboration, Boots on the Ground, showed up. I seem to have gotten somewhat over-eager in purchasing it, or ANTI- is slipping in their shipping operations, and I received two copies. The B-Side is a Tom Waits spoken word piece.

If you are vinyl collector and a fan of both of these bands, drop a line and I will send you my spare. I do not have the fortitude to put it on Discogs. Oh shit. Hold please. Discogs says there are FOUR color variants of this thing. Let me see if mine are different or not. Okay whew. They are both blue. I did not think I had crossed that bridge into neurotic vinyl collector who buys individual color variants but let’s be frank it’s only a step away. But yes, they are the same. If you want one, you can have it. Drop a line.

Man, last night I manically wrote this really good rant for todays’ GMHHAY in bed. This is another tragedy of GMHHAY, I am a vastly better writer in the evening than I am in the morning, but what are you gonna do, kid’s gotta school. It had so may current events I was going to bitch about, but I guess I forgot about them all except the trade war and the AI shit. Trump 9/11 stolen valor, $100/barrel oil, the impending heating oil crisis in Alaska and Boston, Evolution, revolution, gun control, sound of soul
Shooting rockets to the moon, kids growing up too soon
Politicians say more taxes will solve everything
And the band played on oh wait sorry I have started quoting Ball of Confusion. The original version. I prefer the Undisputed Truth 11-minute version to the Temptations version.

Oh hey actually. In the Love and Rockets version, they change some of the lyrics. They change it from “Evolution Revolution, Gun Control, the Sound of Soul” to, I am pretty sure, “Economics, Reganomics, Birth Control, the status quo.” I like it when covers change the lyrics.

AND I WAS JUST THINKING, this morning, I was listening to “Clay Pigeons” by John Prine in the car and, you know, wanting to cry about it like middle-aged men do. And I was thinking how great it would be to cover that song. Except I feel like that whole bit about wanting to get away on the bus and ride around is great but no one would appreciate the sitting in the back and chain smoking part anymore because let’s face it, chain smoking on a bus is a douchebag move. Was then too but, you know, they were really mainly talking about that yearning for oblivion and adventure, conveniently blocking out the selfish part of it, like middle-aged American men like to do. And so I was thinking of covering it but thinking about some other self-annihilating activity you could do in the back of a bus while rambling the interstates that would capture the same restlessness and confusion but not have the negative externalities on the other bus passengers BECAUSE I AM NEUROTIC.

Maybe drinking Diet Coke.

Or self-scarring.

Or, god, I don’t know, reading Gone Girl.

Also this is irrelevant but ironic: it turns out Clay Pigeons by John Prine was already a cover. By a dude named Blaze Foley, whom I have not heard of but seems to have had an interesting life. Got shot dead in his 30s. Was besties with Townes Van Zandt. His master tapes kept getting stolen or lost. Reissues in the 21st century on labels like Fat Possum and Sacred Bones right up my alley how have I not heard of this guy.

Speaking of which, again, Jane and I were driving to school this morning and I was happily teaching her about Labi Siffre. I came to Labi Sifre much too late, only like 7-8 years ago, thank you Todd Kreiger. And Jane was into it, and we were both pleasantly surprised to learn he was still alive, Labi Siffre still kicking it at 81. Was a good time, she was into it.

AND THEN, get this. Nina Simone came on next on shuffle and I got all amped and ready to teach my daughter about Nina Simone this was going to be some high-quality, bad-ass parenting shit.

And she’s like “I already know about Nina Simone I read about her in my Daisy Chain Fields zine.”

So thank you, Olivia Rodrigo. Fuck yeah. I owe you.

That Zine is already selling for $80 on eBay WTF. It’s a zine. You could Xerox your own copy. Not that kids know how to use Xerox machines oh shit am I going to become a zine bootlegger in the 2020s?

Oo better yet: IS JANE?

Music today, hrm. Well, I watched a ton of Youtube Music last night. So much good shit. What was best? Ah here we go. Ethel Cain at Primavera. I was talking to you a couple weeks ago about how I don’t see how Ethel Cain can play giant festivals to adoring teens. But after this Primavera clip, I get it. Man I should have gone to Primavera. I am sorry Jenna. I miss you.

Okay I’m gonna go do work now hahahaha that is a lie I just had a one-hour call with lawyers in the middle of this and you didn’t even notice.