Morning morning morning. How are you? I am okay. Couldn’t fall asleep again. But don’t feel that tired. Mildly tired. The kind of tired people in denial experience every day and pretend they are not tired and can get along just fine on 5 hours of sleep every night. It could be worse. It could be worse. It could be…

Talked to an old Alaskan friend yesterday. He got in touch to tell me his mother died. His mother was one of my babysitters. My mom would drop me off at her in-home day care and she would take care of me, and her son my friend, and three or four other kids. I loved it there. She was so nice. I have the fondest memories of that house. I will miss her.

Got a minor domestic crisis brewing. My wife has recently started using those blue cleaning flush thingabobs in the toilets. She had previously resisted these as they can damage and corrode the seals on the flap. But then she learned how to replace those and now she doesn’t care because she can just fix toilets herself. And those flaps aren’t expensive. Think of them like ablative armor, like the USS Enterprise had in Enterprise before they developed deflector shields. So now she uses the blue flushy things. And they are dark blue. So now I can’t see my dumps. And I am a man who likes to inspect his dumps. Keep an eye on his health, you know? I launched a real shiver-me-timbers this morning and I couldn’t even look at it.

What is the point.

Went to the grocery store this morning for no reason, because I am a sad old man who wanders around pretending to be Kurt Vonnegut. They were playing Boyz 2 Men. This reminded me that the world still does not have a super-deluxe, five-LP box set of the MowtownPhilly/New Jack Swing/Philly Soul sound of B2M, BBD, NE, BB, etc. The world needs this. I cannot convey how much the world needs this. Immaculately curated, nice, thick, forty-or-so page book accompanying the box with a 50,000 word essay on the whole movement. Matte finish on the box. Ideally released by Numero group or some white-person hipster label to give it an sheen of fine art, get that shit in the Smithsonian and stuff. Well, next administration, if there still is a Smithsonian.

I have wanted this thing for half my life.

Imagine the legal challenges. Boyz II Men were on five labels in their career. New Edition three more.

But the world needs it. We need it.

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Listening to a band called Oranssi Pazuzu this morning and reader they are bonkers. Kinda metal, kinda trip hop, kinda nutso. An old goth friend recommended them to his Facebook friends and I, I am embarrassed to say, still occasionally peek at Facebook because I am old. But this band is awesome. Album is called Muuntautuja. I don’t know what any of this means. I will Google them hold please. Oh yeah this shit is great. They got a guy in the band named Evill. They are Finnish. Look at this description from their label’s page about them:

Drawing inspiration from eclectic sources ranging from Boredoms, Death Grips to Portishead’s Third album, ORANSSI PAZUZU mold their psychedelic alchemy into a potent brew where a tripped out Godflesh creates an alien being with Nine Inch Nails (Downward Spiral era), Beherit and My Bloody Valentine. The result is that Muuntautuja is electronically charged, both organic and inorganic in origin.

This is so up my alley. Great album.

So the iPhone Duo came out yesterday. Well, it didn’t. It won’t be available for order for another six weeks or so. But they announced it and showed it. Looked like the leaks. I am 100% a foldable adherent from here on out. I love my Galaxy Fold 7. Except for the Android software. I mean, there’s a lot to like about Android, but there are a few features that, after a year, I still miss from iOS. Most notably the “Hide Distracting Items” functionality in Safari which is one of the greatest inventions of the last decade. I also miss being able to use Apple Notes but that’s just me. The biggest, of course, is I want my fucking texts on my Mac again and it is BS you have to use an iOS device to get this but so it is.

So I will be buying this thing on October 26th. And I am relieved. But I am not super excited. Because it is the wrong aspect size. Apple made a different shape than other foldables just for the sake of being different. They are wrong. My Galaxy zFold 7 is the same width, when opened, as the iPhone Duo. But it is something like two-to-three inches taller. It’s screen is so much bigger than the Duo. And in some uses, well, actually in only a single use case – video watching – this is fine. Most of that screen is giant black letterboxing.

But I am telling you that in every single other use case, the extra screen real estate is awesome. It is better. It is phenomenal in Instagram, it is amazing on the Kindle or any reading app, it is way better in a messaging app or a Twitter-like app. There’s no contest.

I do concede that the z Fold 7 is slightly too tall. But just barely. Maybe a half an inch.

The perfect size for a foldable screen is a screen about as wide as the new Duo, but an inch-and-a-half to two inches taller. No contest. Hands down.

So it is difficult for me to predict the future here. I suspect that this screen will be “big enough” and I’ll stick with the Duo. But I also originally left Apple because they were being dictatorial snobs and telling me I couldn’t have a foldable until they decided I could have one. And now they are being dictatorial snobs and telling me it’s great to buy a foldable for a big screen but whoopa the screen’s not actually that big.

(that was a typo but hrm, “whoopa” seems like a pretty great word)

But I can fairly confidently predict that by, mmm, let’s say Duo 3 or 4, Apple will have realized this and they will make the screen a little big bigger. They will not, of course, admit this mistake.

We had the first Girl Scouts meeting of the year over at Chore House. I decided to attend. The kids were crazy but not as crazy as last year. The woman who runs the troop has the patience of a saint I would lose it on these kids I swear. Sometimes I think they’re worse-behaved because all of us parents are sitting around watching and if we just left them alone with the troop leaders they would be better behaved. But man that is a dice roll.

They are working on their hiking badge so they hiked through our woods for a while to get some practice in and learn about trail marking and whatnot. Then they took a vote for where they should go hiking. One girl said “Yosemite.” I like the way she thinks.

I kept offering the parents Thai Basil, take a ton, please. No takers, alas.

Jane and I talked about Phil Elverum this morning, and while “The Glow” played for eleven minutes this morning, we talked about how Phil lost his true love wife just after they had a baby, and the strange surreal detour of Phil and Michelle Williams and their year together, both suffering the loss from loved ones. I told her about how I saw the coroners taking Heath Ledger’s body out of the building in SoHo when he died. I don’t know why I told her that. Because it was sad and it has effected me for many years I guess.

Mainly she was concerned about the daughter. She asked how old she was, I guessed and said 12, looks like she’s closer to 10 or 11. She said she hoped that girl was doing okay. I told her that Phil seems happy now, he’s seeing another woman and she seems very nice and I’m sure they are both trying their hardest to take care of the daughter.

Got a noise and metal playlist today. It’s 8 minutes short of an hour but we’re gonna roll with it because it’s always nice when there is a little bit of symmetry between the “playlist” section of GMHHAY and the “we’re listening to this morning” segment. So here you go. Let’s see. Nick got me into a Crass revival a month or so ago and they are so much better than I remember and I guess I need a Crass shirt now. Been enjoying this live Ministry album it really is a masterpiece. The new Melvins/Napalm Death is magnificent. And Jenna Humphrey from Gossip Girl remains committed to putting out highly-competent normcore metal for, like, fifteen years now. She means business.

Until tomorrow, fine feathered friends.