Today the UPS man left me my prescription for next week’s festivities and a large insulated box Karean sent with a chicken pot pie, which Finn and I promptly ate for dinner. NOM NOM NOM. I also had a friend stop by after dinner with a growler of the Belgian Dubbel we brewed a couple of weeks ago, and we stood around the kitchen and drank beer and caught up, and that was really great. Renie sent me a lovely gray hat just in time for all of my hair to fall out (or me to shave it off, whichever comes first) that is warm and comfortable. A couple of days ago another friends’ mom stopped by to drop off some soup, a book for Finn, and a copy of People Magazine from 1989 which is some of the most hilarious reading I’ve done all year.
This situation sucks, and I don’t want to do this, but everyone we know has been amazing, truly supportive, and I often don’t feel like I deserve it. But I am thankful and humbled and can’t imagine how we could do this by ourselves.
Interesting...
- October 18
Jen and I have been talking for years about how we can't understand the white evangelical embrace of the Great Pumpkin and his predecessors. A new book goes into the history of evangelicalism and traces its roots back to the beginning of the previous century, and the racism, misogyny and intolerance at its foundation.
Instead of theological criteria, what comes to define evangelicalism is instead your stance on issues of gender and sexuality, the embrace of patriarchal authority, belief in female submission. That’s how you determine who is in and out of the fold.
There's an excellent interview with the author in the Jacobin; I highly recommend reading it for the overview.
October 7
Oh fucking hell. Apparently the asshats that run AT&T are super-conservative and have been funding and supporting OAN, the right-wing propaganda outlet our departed Pumpkin loved so much. Which means I've (through my wireless bill) been supporting this whole mess since 1999, when I got my first cellphone.
“If there was any story involving Trump, we had to only focus on either the positive information or basically create positive information,” said Marissa Gonzales, an OAN producer from 2019 until she resigned in 2020. “It was never, never the full truth.”
October 4
I've been slowly traversing the archives of a blog called Last Stand on Zombie Island, where the author does a weekly post on different warships from the post Civil War era up until the present day. He's very good at the context of the time and place, and is able to find all kinds of fascinating examples from periods in history I wasn't ever aware of.
September 30
Six Colors has an excellent upgrade guide for the new iPhones based on your current model; you choose the one you have and it tells you what new stuff you'll get with one of the new models. I'm not ready to upgrade yet but I'll keep this handy for when we need to make the jump.
September 10
A long time ago, I worked with a bunch of guys who were hired from a Name Brand Consulting Firm to take our dot-com public. I was enlisted to build the pitch deck for the roadshow, which meant I was making edits to Powerpoint slides at all times of the day and night with these guys (they were all guys). One late afternoon, two of them were talking about catching important flights, and one of them claimed he'd called in a bomb scare to hold a flight at the gate until he could make it. This was before September 11, but I remember thinking how sociopathic that sounded, and revolted by how proud of himself he was.
Apparently this tactic doesn't work anymore.
