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4 star:
* Ugly Nasty Commie Bitch (Carsie Blanton)
Funny song by and for liberal women
* One (Aimee Mann)
Great cover
* Fed Up (Earl St Clair)
had to steal this from youtube, from the great Australian show "Colin from Accounts"
* Plate Glass Apology (Apes of the State)

3 star:
* Lollipop (Charlie Curtis-Beard & EARCANDY)
* Rock Shit (Hush)
* On The Good Ship Lollipop (Shirley Temple)
* Not About You (Haiku Hands)
* End of Beginning (Djo)
* Things You Left Behind (The Nails)
* Daydreamin' (feat. Jill Scott) (Lupe Fiasco)
* Portions for Foxes (Rilo Kiley)
kinda sexy song Lynette put on a mix for us

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Speaking of Good Ship Lollipop:

Doing On the Good Ship Lollipop at Cincinnati ARC Christmas 1977

"Maybe this is part of a bigger plan! You know maybe the reason we didn't adopt another baby after Lily was because God wanted us available for Sammy..."
"Who is this God that denies us a baby, then gets a party girl pregnant, only to have her desert the baby so we can finally get one?"
"The same God that impregnated a virgin, set Moses down the river in a BASKET, and commanded Abraham to stab his own son! God ONLY does weird baby stuff."

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"Department of War". JFC. This is what happens when you get ruled by folks who learned history from The History Channel (i.e. during its endless WW2 specials.)

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"Well I'll tell you the funniest is that I'll go backstage before a show, and everyone's getting dressed and ready, and everything else, and, you know, no men any­where, and I'm allowed to go in because I'm the owner of the pageant and there­fore I'm inspecting it... You know, the dresses. 'Is every­one okay?' You know they're standing there with no clothes. And you see these incredible-looking women. And so I sort of get away with things like that."

Cool deep dive into the various musical "modes"/scales as applied to a well known song...

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Sometimes my inbox feels like that art project with the robot arm desperately trying to sweep its own hydraulic fluid back in to keep functioning. The Catchiest Songs According to AI

Happily, the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens in giving it on all occasions their effectual support....May the children of the stock of Abraham who dwell in this land continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other inhabitants-while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree and there shall be none to make him afraid.

Yeah, we just watched the in-cinemas replay of Hamilton today :-D

Everywhere I go, I find a poet has been there before me.

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I should think it would be the easiest thing in life to write a poem about a couch. I never see a couch but my heart moves to poetry. The very buttons must be full of echoes.

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I've got to stop getting obsessed with human beings and fall in love with a chair. Chairs have everything human beings have to offer, and less, which is obviously what I need. Less emotional feedback, less warmth, less approval, less patience and less response. The less the merrier. Chairs it is. I must furnish my heart with feelings for furniture.

I just noticed that in certain fonts
';'
looks a bit like the Edvard Munch "Scream" painting guy from a FB post, from the original Star Trek episode "Charlie X"... the petulant overpowered teen erases the face of people who were laughing at him... sticks with a viewer!

This weekend we all went to see "Hamilton" - the filmed version, but on the big screen.

I found the book "Hamilton: The Revolution" (helps to have a big iPad; it was readable on my iPad mini, though, but the Mac Kindle client shows each page as a tiny thumbnail?) It was exactly what I was hoping for - some making of, the text itself, footnotes and references, some chat about where small liberties were taken from the historical record.

Man, such an amazing musical. You can really see the connection to Shakespeare when you read it on the page - especially when one character steps on another's line to finish the meter of the line.

The coolest find in the book was a deleted third Jefferson/Hamilton "rap battle" about whether to act on the Quakers attempt to end slavery in the USA. You can see the lyrics at Genius or hear a rough demo on youtube

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You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.

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November. It's a way of affirming the very American view that Benjamin Franklin offered in 1786, when someone asked him how the new Union was getting along: "We are, I think, in the right road of improvement, for we are making experiments."

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WASHINGTON: If I say goodbye, the nation learns to move on. It outlives me when I'm gone. Like the Scripture says: "Everyone shall sit under their own vine and fig tree And no one shall make them afraid." They'll be safe in the nation we've made. I want to sit under my own vine and fig tree. A moment alone in the shade. At home in this nation we've made. One last time.

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"My view is that Hamiltonians existed until Teddy Roosevelt," says Brooks. "Hamilton used limited but energetic government to create mobility, but after Roosevelt, the debate became big government versus small government, so the Hamilton tradition got caught cross-ways." Neither party has room for him now, [David] Brooks believes. Republicans have become allergic to government, and can't see what Hamilton saw: that government can let more people into the system, and help capitalism solve the structural problems it is facing. But Democrats balk at embracing somebody whose programs would create more opportunity for gifted upstarts at the expense of creating more misery for the people who can't excel.

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Alexander Hamilton [...] spent his life defending one idea above all: "the necessity of Union to the respectability and happiness of this Country."

So, get ready to know about "Groypers" and other semi-obscure but absolutely hateful internet crap.

At this moment in time, it seems a lot more likely that this was a kind of intra-fascist gang war than this guy being a trans anti-fascist. cracked.com has a pretty good interview with Drew Carey. Cleveland Rocks!

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Heh. You might be able to test this for yourself ChatGPT Goes Completely Haywire If You Ask It to Show You a Seahorse Emoji. I got about the same result with "show me the seahorse emoji" and "is there actually a seahorse emoji or no?" - but when I said sure to "Do you want me to show you how it renders across different platforms (Apple, Google, Twitter, etc.)?" it righted the ship.

Thinking about the argument "well it's also probably an argument that there SHOULD be a seahorse emoji", though the idea that LLM points us to what should be rather than what is is kinda scary.

My current descriptor of ChatGPT et al is that it's a blender and remixer of commonsense. Crazily useful sometimes! But that blender makes some bizarre misinformation smoothies at other times. Saturday hit the Big E w/ Lynette and Kyle. Mostly it was a food tour, though we didn't go quite as crazy as we might have thought (things starting with - are just samples)

-cheese and jerky
cream puff
truffle parmesan poutine
-soups, dips
maple creamy
steak sandwich w cheese and peppers
cider slush
-salsas
smutty nose pumpkin beer
giant turkey leg
lemonade
canoli

(compare with me and Melissa and Liz in 2015)

The ultimate goal of the Trump administration is seemingly to turn us into the colonial Williamsburg of internal combustion. Right now, Beijing is offering cheap, clean power, employment, trade, and a route to prosperity. Washington is offering tariffs, policy chaos, White nationalist memes, and South Korean workers in shackles after a raid on an EV battery factory. This is no way to win the grand strategic contest of the 21st century.

A sunny disposition is worth more than fortune. Young people should know that it can be cultivated; that the mind, like the body can be moved from the shade into sunshine.

I reran into that quote the other day (along with some other great quotes, many about dealing with fear and angst.)

I've been thinking a lot about how it's like there's a separate part of my mind who really wants me to worry... who sounds alarm bells all the time, who doesn't realize triggering a fight or flight response will too often lead to the "flight" of angsty procrastination...

Like, I think that quote is right. More often than we realize we have some level of control of the spin we are putting on our view of life, and you might as well try to nudge things to be content and productive, as much as you can. I haven't listened to the whole thing but the summary of America's political divide is psychological, not ideological: "American politics has become divided along epistemic and psychological grounds between "intuitionists" who think with their guts and "rationalists" who prefer science and logic."

Which Colbert nailed with
"We go straight from the gut, right sir? That's where the truth lies, right down here in the gut. Do you know you have more nerve endings in your gut than you have in your head? You can look it up. I know some of you are going to say "I did look it up, and that's not true." That's 'cause you looked it up in a book."

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Concord MA is a great place to argue against authoritarians.

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Cancelling Hulu/Disney+ because of the authoritarian Jimmy Kimmel censorship.

One of the things giving me any hope in this time has been, it was still ok to talk crap about the president and republicans. FCC Chair Carr (you know, the guy who wears little golden Trump in profile pins) makes it clear, if you want your billion buck merger to go through you have to suck up to Trump. Amusingly he claims to be in favor of free speech.

I was yesterday year's old when we realized the Sundance Film Festival was made by Robert Redford, who played The Sundance Kid.

We watched 2/3 of the movie last night... I had forgotten I had seen it like 9 years ago.

It kind of drags, to be honest? And the whole flirting on a bicycle scene with "Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head" is pretty incongruous.

(Randomly, I just noticed the movie was written by William Goldman (most famously to my crew as author of The Princess Bride) and I'm reading his old summer read smash "Boys and Girls Together")

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An actual quote from the [UK] Secretary of State for Business and Trade [Peter Kyle]
Too often people go to university to 'explore research and knowledge'

Look forward to Wes S saying 'too often people go to hospital to have operations'
or Heidi Alexander saying 'too often people go to the station to catch a train'

(photo by Mia Merideth)

President Trump on Free Speech:
===
"They'll take a great story and they'll make it bad," he said, speaking to reporters in the Oval Office. "See, I think that's really illegal."
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Between this and like, firing people telling him the job numbers suck, or ending the U.S. Department of Agriculture's annual report on household food security, as inflation kicks up and jobs go down... you do the math.

November 5, 2006

Dear Xavier High School, and Ms. Lockwood, and Messrs Perin, McFeely, Batten, Maurer and Congiusta:

I thank you for your friendly letters. You sure know how to cheer up a really old geezer (84) in his sunset years. I don't make public appearances any more because I now resemble nothing so much as an iguana.

What I had to say to you, moreover, would not take long, to wit: Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what's inside you, to make your soul grow.

Seriously! I mean starting right now, do art and do it for the rest of your lives. Draw a funny or nice picture of Ms. Lockwood, and give it to her. Dance home after school, and sing in the shower and on and on. Make a face in your mashed potatoes. Pretend you're Count Dracula.

Here's an assignment for tonight, and I hope Ms. Lockwood will flunk you if you don't do it: Write a six line poem, about anything, but rhymed. No fair tennis without a net. Make it as good as you possibly can. But don't tell anybody what you're doing. Don't show it or recite it to anybody, not even your girlfriend or parents or whatever, or Ms. Lockwood. OK?

Tear it up into teeny-weeny pieces, and discard them into widely separated trash recepticals. You will find that you have already been gloriously rewarded for your poem. You have experienced becoming, learned a lot more about what's inside you, and you have made your soul grow.

God bless you all!

Kurt Vonnegut

Also just the other day I found out Daniel Dennett died, he's one of my favorite thinkers, and his "Consciousness Explained" really got me thinking about how my own mind works.

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Trumps UN speech was a Festival of Self Delusion
AI is killing the web. Can anything save it? would be interested in reading this if anyone has a giftable account. But mostly I like how the colors are so recognizably Win95.

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Update - here's a link to the full article but it's about what you might expect: AI conversations and Google AI summaries are further removing people clicking through the root articles, and so people making that content have no chance at seeing ad revenue.

It probably pushes a little too hard going all the way back to "1989" - the fundamental idea of the web - an addressing and protocol setup such that anyone can put up stuff that anyone else can get to - is still alive and well.

Discoverabilty - at its height in the early Google era - is back to being a problem, of course, and the AI status quo threatens anyone trying to make a living via content, so I don't want to underestimate the threat AI makes (And I mean there's this sense of overharvesting; at some point information services are cutting off their seed corn.) Oh goodie. Powerful billionaires using religious end times wackiness to justify doing whatever the hell they want to do.

"experts say"

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Just finished William "Princess Bride" Goldman's "Boys and Girls Together" - Tom the Actor's favorite book, and like 1964's hottest summer read. It starts almost as a collection of short stories, dramatic biographical sketches, but then iterates to weave them together until you get the author, director, producer, actor, and actress working on one new play in NYC. A lot of difficult relationships and witty banter.

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Philosophy is what you study when you desire to increase your ignorance.

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Good times he thought of. Not good times gone, but good times as they happened, for the conjuring of past pleasures was the secret of long life. He heard his father's laugh, his mother's song; he tasted duck for the first time, and chopped liver lightly salted, and beer; he rolled in snow, he kissed a breast, he raced the dog to water, rode the horse, won from his sister at checkers, lost to his brother at chess; he talked on a telephone, listened to a radio, saw Toscanini, walked beside Casals--and held his breath as his grandchild said "I was wondering" from the delicatessen door.

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"So I'm in the fields plowing and all of a sudden God came up to me and He said, 'Hello there, Joel Turk,' and I said, 'Hello there, God,' and He said, 'How are things?' and I said, 'You mean, *You* don't know?' and He said, 'Of course I know. I know everything. I was just making conversation, that's all. Let me tell you something, Joel Turk. This business of knowing everything, it doesn't leave much room for surprises. If I didn't make a little conversation every now and then, I think I'd go *meshugah*'."

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Y'know, whoever told you you were funny did us all a vast disservice.

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"Clichés," Blake said. "To hell with 'em."

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The happiest day is that day in the past that you always run back to when the present proves unendurable. [...] You see--and here you must pay attention--we all get to pick our day. But we only get one pick. One time to choose. And the worst thing in the world, Jenny, the saddest thing is to choose the wrong day. You've got to pick a day that won't go bad on you; if you do, you'll have no place to run.

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Located on the nineteenth and twentieth floors of a new glass-and-white-brick (what else?) building on Madison Avenue in the 40s, it was sterile enough to double as a hospital. The receptionist's desk was Danish modern, the lighting indirect, the rug one of those bloodless pale colors adored only by designers, the twin waiting sofas clean, new, armless, almost legless, practically backless, defiantly uncomfortable--hostile modern.

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"She said that when her patients had confusions, what they were doing, most of the time, was ducking reality."
"I can't think of anything better to duck."

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Every marriage needs an excuse in case things don't go well.

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"All it takes is time."
"Thank God for that."
"We'll have to have patience."
"Do you know what love is? Love is supplying what's needed. Right now I've got all the patience in the world."

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Repression is the better part of valor.

*That* is the heart of what makes this series awesome: this isn't two teams that hate each other, or two fan bases that hate each other, or even two cities that hate each other. These are two *ideas* that hate each other, having transcended the field of actual reality and morphed into a half-spiritual desire to beat each other in baseball games.

And hey, between Yankees being the best baseball team of the 20th century, as well as the general asymmetry - NYC is unique on this part of the continent while as Kurt Braunohler put it "Boston is Philly that thinks it's Paris" - I always thought digging the Yankees was like being way to happy with late stage capitalism.

Oh, and yay Guardians who clinched their division with a walk-off home run. Hope to see Red Sox or Guardians in the world series.
AI hype as asbestos

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I should keep in mind this tumblr post about how triangle trade chattel slavery was uniquely cruel. People on the right might admit it's bad but they like to downplay - white folks didn't invent slavery, neighboring groups were complicit, we put a stop to it, blah blah blah - but its synergy with early capitalism made something uniquely vastly cruel and grueling and horrible.

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The Far Side's Cow Tools was a prophecy now fulfilled!

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