Interesting…
We’ve been on the road since Wednesday, moving from rented minivan to hotel to restaurant at a pace that has us all pretty exhausted. Someone who has been an absolute rock through this whole anxiety-ridden trip is this goofball, who has weathered the new environments like a veteran traveler. She’s a ball of energy, an expensive pharmacological experiment, a confused mixture of competing instincts, and a bedhog, but she’s also the best dog in the world.
I’ve had this fucking song stuck in my head for the past five days now, and it’s probably one of my least favorite songs this band ever produced. I had a cassette of Louder than Love in high school and played it until it wore out, but found that my appreciation for Soundgarden’s last two albums fell off sharply, minus a few songs. I didn’t pay much attention to Audioslave even though it was a mixture of two of my favorite 90’s bands; the styles and genre didn’t mesh as well as I had hoped it would even though they gave it everything they had.
RIP, Chris Cornell.
Update: The same day I posted this, I learned that a group of excellent musicians—William DuVall, (Alice In Chains), Bill Kelliher (Mastodon), Charlie Benante (Anthrax, S.O.D.), and Mark Menghi (Metal Allegiance) among others, formed King Ultramega to do covers of Soundgarden tracks during COVID, and just started releasing them, beginning with one of my favorites, Rusty Cage. All proceeds go to support the MusiCares Foundation.
It’s been quiet around these parts mostly because we’re busy with camp and travel and family commitments and work. Somehow not planning a major family vacation has made this summer busier than ever, or so it feels. Finn is off at her first week of sleep-away camp, and we are praying she is having herself a good time. We got back yesterday evening and got to bed early, but I still feel pretty wiped out. I hope the next two weeks go smoothly.
I’ve got a ton of open tabs in two different browser windows right now, so that’s my sign to offload them here. In no particular order, here are a few:
- An excellent writeup on Hagerty about car alternators, and the differences between one, two, three, and four-wire versions. This explains a lot about the three-wire alternator in the Travelall and the one-wire in the Scout.
- With the passage of the Big Stupid Bill in Congress, all incentive credits for EVs are now gone. Which means that $40,000 EV will now be north of $47,500. Not that I was ready to buy an EV, but this will change the math for millions of people and fuck up the EV market for years.
- This is a really good video by a guy tuning his carburetor to run better; there’s a lot of basic knowledge that’s just good to absorb for future use.