2023.December.Sneezes
The final month in 2023: 79 sneezes.
2023.December.Watched
40 shits in December.
Warriors-Clippers (MacBook)
Pelicans-Kings (MacBook)
Lakers-Suns (MacBook)
Warriors-Blazers (MacBook)
Suns-Warriors (MacBook)
Clippers-Warriors (MacBook)
Warriors-Nets (MacBook)
Warriors-Blazers (MacBook)
The Gold (S01E01-02) (MacBook)
Invasion (S01E01) (MacBook)
Warriors-Celtics (MacBook)
The Gold (S01E03-04) (MacBook)
Invasion (S01E03) (MacBook)
The Gold (S01E05-06) (MacBook)
Invasion (S01E04) (MacBook)
Barbie (MacBook)
Invasion (S01E05) (MacBook)
The Holdovers (MacBook)
Invasion (S01E06) (MacBook)
Warriors-Wizards (MacBook)
National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (TV)
Warriors-Blazers (MacBook) 25
Invasion (S01E07-10) (MacBook)
Nuggets-Warriors (MacBook)
Invasion (S02E01-4) (MacBook)
Mavericks-Suns (MacBook)
Invasion (S02E05-06) (MacBook)
Heat-Warriors (MacBook)
Mavericks-Warriors (MacBook)
Nine to Five (TV)
2023.December.Albums
Just these:
A Neil Diamond Christmas – Neil Diamond (iPhone & HomePod)
Ella & Louis Christmas – Ella Fitzgerald & Louis Armstrong (iPhone & HomePod)
A Jolly Christmas from Frank Sinatra – Frank Sinatra (iPhone)
I ended up listening mostly to shuffled Christmas playlists all month (most of the month). And I basically missed Christmas entirely because of the flu.
Next year I'm gonna start wearing masks in fucking July....
89 albums for the year, including some with multiple listens.
I'm 47
I'm older now, which is new. I'm tempted to say "jesus fucking christ!", but, in all honesty, it is what it is – and increasingly so.
One year near the end of high school, furious that I had to spend my birthday with a buncha hayseeds, racists, and dipshits, I promised myself that, as soon as I could swing it, I'd never do anything responsible on my birthdays again. And, almost entirely, I've maintained that. This time, too.
I love birthdays in theory, but less so in practice. I'm always childlike-excited that my birthday is near, but never really know what to do or how to celebrate when it comes. But the last few have been fun enough, and that's better than no fun enough.
Forty-seven. Zoom.
Bumbling and fumbling
Back when blogging first started, someone pointed out that inane shit (a day's anecdote, say) often made for more-interesting reading that did fully formed essays and such. In that vein, here's one of mine, about a day 19 years ago, that I enjoyed reading again because, inane as it was, it shows an eye-blink of my life I'd forgotten and I'm glad I took the time to write up:
I went to Oblation [...], but they were closed, which provided me a lovely trying-to-open-a-clearly-locked-door idiot moment. There's a sign, a good-size sign, that reads "The door sticks. Push hard" (or something close to that) near the painted-on store hours. After giving the door a good damned try three or four times, I noticed a small pink sign down in the corner of the door's window that said, "We will be closed January 11th for inventory." I walked away in embarrassed shame.
I also went to the post office to mail [a previiously-purchased gift for my aunt and uncle who'd just had triplets]. As I was standing in line, I noticed that they have a new Moss Hart stamp. When I got to the teller – who either had to pee or was on some stimulant, because he could not stand still (think: Rodney Dangerfield on speed) – I asked if I could buy a single such stamp, and he told me that one has to buy them in sheets because the sheets cannot be broken. "Okay," I say, "How much are the sheets?"
"7.40"
Figuring I could always use stamps, I said, "Okay, I'll take one of those, too."
"Who is Moss Hart?"
"He was a playwrite."
"Okay. That's what I thought. You're the first person to ask for only one of his stamps so I figured you'd know."
This is what I get for asking an extra question. I thought to myself, "Self, I could get one of those stamps, and stick it inside my copy of 'You Can't Take It With You'." I didn't realize it'd send Hoppy McCantnotmove into a spasm. Seriously, yes or no would have sufficed.
Anyway, he walked over to the wee stamp drawer where they're all kept, and came back holding a single Moss Hart stamp. Someone, it seems, has been breaking the sheets. This made Holy McGodIgottapee unhappy, but it suited me just fine.
Now I see they have a César Chávez stamp. I wonder if I could buy just one....
Surprising Fact
You can milk Arabians (the horses, but also some of the people) and Bactrian camels.
So... something to think about there.
Good Names
In ages past, I had a list of nominative deterministic names/jobs examples. I no longer have that list, nor have I attempted to rebuild it, but I should, because there are so many examples and they're always fun. I'm reminded of said missing list by this, from the past:
My paternal grandmother's dermatologist is called Dr Profitt.
When I was a beautiful boy child, I, my father, and sister used to go to a doctor named Dr Herz† (pronounced 'hurts'), and while in the waiting room I heard frequent pages for Doctors Paine and Savage‡.
† Whoa.
‡ These are not exactly fitting examples, but fun.
Resurfacing this
From just under 20 years ago, this remains brilliant:
I was writing Christmas cards a short bit ago, and I said to [Ex-wife], "I don't have anything to say to my mother." To which [Ex-wife] responded, "Tell her thanks for the Christmas presents she sent in lieu of a happy childhood."
Wikiwackiness
Some time ago, after exposure to cats for the first time in all my born days, I'd been wondering what the purpose of purring† is, if there's some evolutionary advantage in it. I finally remembered to look it up and found this: Purring also "was a popular English folk sport practiced from at least the 16th century and likely before" whereby two opponents fought by kicking each other in the shins.
The British, man.
† Likely a sign that the cat is contented and is no threat. (For whatever it's worth, kneading, a similarly cat-distinct behavior I was baffled by, may serve an overlapping purpose: to show contentment – but to also prepare a surface for comfort, a partly retained but not-exactly-still-needed action, a "remnant instinct".)
What's good for the market, is good for America™
After John Kerry's defeat for President in 2004, Terry McAullife, then head of the DNC, gave a bland, platitudinous interview saying something on the order of Bush will need to work with Congress and we have to work together, etc., etc. I complained to my father that this statement may have been politically expedient for John Kerry to give, it didn't speak to the moment at all – that McAuliffe seemed not to get it. The failed candidate can say such things, but the head of the opposing party cannot – someone has to provide a clear-eyed and frank assessment of what had been lost and what was at risk.
My father replied:
"Sure they already have an agenda. Republicans have been planning for this since FDR. Remember that when Roosevelt came into office he had to break the stranglehold the rich had on the country to keep people from starving to death. Everything he managed to do with the New Deal will be reversed or relaxed. What we're going to see is the Anti-New Deal. […] There are two basic views of governance. They can overlap in places but their extremes are perfectly opposed. One is the view that governments have a responsibility to soothe the brutality of nature; that the reason we form governments is to provide a safety net and for that we agree to pay taxes. The other view is that governments should be limited in their abilities and the market should be left to function on its own. The second extreme - pure monetary greed - will now be allowed to function freely. Workers' ability to unionize will be limited; punitive damages will be arbitrarily limited (as has already happened in this activist Court, regarding, for example, a person's ability to sue over first-time excessive discrimination [long example excised]); tax-laws for companies, which are already anemic, will be further relaxed; and everything will be commercialized, including and especially Social Security - which will disappear as we know it. You're right McAuliffe doesn't get it; Bush's handlers now have no limits. And they all agree so there's no hope of repeating Clinton's first two years. Bush is better than Coolidge for the Rightist elite - well, that's redundant - for the elite in this country. Coolidge at least had an understanding of economics. Bush knows nothing, so he'll do and say whatever Cheney et al. want. He's too stupid to think things over first."
I added, elsewhere: Call it the Old Deal, watch the country slip back into our ugly, plutocratic past, and remember: What's good for the market, is good for America™.
This was taken, give or take verbatim, from a conversation with my dad, which is a dumb skill I have: reciting lengthy quotes from memory. (Someone I kinda online-knew seemed to not believe me, that this was spoken and then written from memory, which is the primary reason I remembered this at all, once I'd posted it. Still don't really understand that reaction, but perhaps she was impressed? She was some type/form/fashion of a journalist – I think. Anyway, odd.)
A key factor neither my father nor I knew at the time, but has become startlingly and increasingly evident with Republican administrations since (W's second, the election of which preceded this conversation, and Trump's in the meantime) is their level of incompentence has, to a non-zero-degree, scuppered the full-enactment of these plans. W, almost immediately after Election Day, failed to enact his plans to privatize Social Security, and his second administration never accomplished much else afterward.
And yet we can see the bones of my father's argument, built and standing, evident in today's USA. They have a long way to go, the Republicans – and have since re-focused their agenda on dismantling American democracy itself to move it all along faster – but what he predicted, while not entirely fulfilled, is evident, about 20 years later, a steamy, festering pile of restrictive and retrograde shit the rest of us have to dig our way out of.
A thing I'd forgotten
I know I knew this because I wrote about it. But I'd since forgotten it completely. From Keith Olbermann, in a long-ago deleted post on MSNBC's website:
One further historical curiosity missed by The Record [perhaps defunct] and others researching the Red/Blue phenomenon. Before World War II, when there were only about five national radio networks, NBC owned not just one, but two of them. They were each identified as NBC, with the only differentiation being that the one originally owned by RCA was called the NBC Blue Network, and the one purchased by RCA from AT&T was called the NBC Red Network. The government later forced RCA to sell one of the networks (Blue) to the man behind Life Savers candy – he re-named it ABC in 1946.
A long entry
Been reading an old blog (hence the uptick in posts: things reposted) and it's almost totally embarrassing. The (like-me-dammit) tone is off-putting and the jokes aim but miss. The below is my longest post (to the point at which I've paused reading, chronologically) and... it's not that bad. It's clumbsy and needs editing, sharpening, but the points I was trying to make I made well enough. (This may be a case of expectations: when I started reading it, I expected to be fully embarrassed by the end, but I mostly made it thru unscathed, which surprised.)
I think America's greatest (endemic) problem is that we're so strongly capitalist. There's lots to admire about capitalism, but it does lead to the choices of the masses dictating everything. And dictating it into a kind of pure-form Darwinism: What sells rules; what struggles dies. This affects everything from movie stars to popular music to plastic surgery to home styles to clothing to news stories: That which the masses favor becomes the sole option (and the cheaper it is to produce - think reality TV - the better it is for those who are uninventive enough to pander shamelessly).
There are still true artists making true art – and probably to the same degree as before – but unless they're popular at the start, they're likely to remain cult hits to the finish. Mix Oscar Wilde's comment that The people will forgive anything but genius, and Emerson's Every hero becomes a bore at last, with capitalism's inherent distaste of anything erudite or esoteric and you've got a great chance for special people/products getting marginalized; and the outlook being less than brilliant for everyone who wants something transcendent – or at least novel. There are exceptions of course, but in this way, I will concede that things don't seem to be improving. (But is this new? How often has a truly great anything been popular? Remember: Van Gogh never sold a painting; Beethoven was ridiculed as a crazy old man; Kafka died unknown; Richard Strauss was a Nazi.
Sorry - it sounded better with four examples.)
All this is true, but it is also true that time passes: the leadership will change, the current crap fads will fade, Pontiac will one day stop producing the Aztek. Things will improve.
Remember also that what gets reported is always the result of some agenda. Either an editor wants to see an article on a subject that interests him, or a company wants to push a new pop singer they've signed. Nothing makes news without someone first deciding it should. And in this way (at least), the media distort what is really going on. I listened to a radio show tonite where a lady from India spoke of the growing (Indian) opposition toward most things related to globalization and the abusive World Bank/WTO. Then she commented about how little of this growing opposition is making news in India. I assume that's the way it is in most nations of the world now. The people aren't bad, when you get right down to it, but their governments and forms of big-business media aren't representative of their better sides. So things continue to look bad – even increasingly bad – even when they might be improving. (But again, is this new? Think Hearst's papers pushing his agenda, and those of his friends.)
Or at least this is what I must tell myself so that I can get from day to day.
20 years later, I'd write this entirely better (wasn't then, still not, a writer), but my view hasn't changed a whole lot, and I'm not ashamed of the, as we say now, take. For whatever that's worth.
About that Art Fair
I mentioned below, I remembered this:
A cousin and I were standing under one of those mist-ers they have so people at fairs/festivals don't overheat and die. She's nine.
I go, "Y'know why they have these things?" She goes, "It's a mist-tery."
Check and mate.
Regarding regret
From a former coworker of my father's, a couple of decades ago:
I thought of you today and how you would laugh at the funny things my daughter said so I have to tell you one that happened today.
She is in summer camp and today they are performing in a little play. She's been telling us the last week that she doesn't want to be in this play because she feels silly but we still feel she needs to be there with the rest of her class. Today she put up a real fit and didn't want to go to camp because of the play but Tom [her father] took her there anyway and this is what she said when she arrived "I am going to regret this the rest of my life, and I don't even know what regret means".
Art? Fair.
20 years and 6 months ago today, I wrote this:
There's a University-sponsored fair this weekend in town [In the years since, it was killed by Covid], and my aunt asked if I'd like to join her and her kids in a sidewalk-chalk contest, for 4$. I said sure, thinking it might be fun. So this morning we all go down, get our boxes of pastel chalk, and our designated square, and we go to work on our pictures. I had no idea what I's going to draw, so I started with colored squares in what turned out to be the middle of my... well, I hesitate to call it art. Mine looked so bad after the first few squares, that I wrote "First, I'm sorry." above it, so people wouldn't be too harsh in the "Ohmigod - and [sic] adult did this" vein.
A lady just called me and said I won first prize. FUCKING SHIT! FIRST PRIZE! I've never won anything before! I'm freaking out!
I get a 75$ savings bond, apparently. [It's a 30-year bond that I still have; just nine more years!]
This is cracking me up.
The drawing - which looks extra shit in this picture because of a tree which blocked lots of sunlight, and created that dark pattern overlay - is really vibrant, and that isn't clear in this image. But there it is. [If I can locate the picture, I'll link it.]
––––
I may be in tomorrow's local paper! Or, anyway, a photo of my chalk-art may. [I have no memory of this part. Maybe it/my name was in the paper, but I sure wasn't.]
This cracked up my father and he would occasionally bring it up. He, for whatever it's worth, liked the drawing. I... did not.
Surprising Update
Related to my McGovern and McCarthy post below:
Looking thru a folder of old and random shit, I found a Word.doc I made for my dad (he understood Word.docs and had folders filled with them; some with similarly labled photos – we like what we like) of photos taken of each of the speakers on these nights: George McGovern and Eugene McCarthy, mentioned above, and former Senator Mark Hatfield (R-OR), unmentioned above, who hosted both men (and perhaps others in the series). I've screengrabbed and posted it as a picture here.