Last Friday’s NYT crossword hit me like a sack of bricks. Looking back, I only spent 12 minutes on it before bailing, but it felt like an eternity and I got nowhere.
That feeling bled into Saturday and I didn’t even open the puzzle, I just spent more time reading instead. I finally got back into the groove on Sunday, which has become reliably solvable as long as I set aside the time.
At some point before solving Sunday’s I decided I had had enough of Thursday, Friday, Saturday and would just do old Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday puzzles in their place. But here I am, back on a 7 day streak and everything seems possible again.
Also, going back to 10 year old Monday puzzles is not that easy! It’s like playing old editions of Trivial Pursuit and trying to remember various geopolitical changes over the last 30 years.
We watched the Aaron Paul episode of Open Door on Hulu last week mostly because I thought that I always have fun watching other people show off their houses. Either the vibe of the show was way off, or I just don’t really enjoy the flaunting of extreme wealth anymore. Anyhow, that’s not the point.
Toward the end of the episode—we fast-forwarded pretty heavily—there’s a brief shot of them loading some dishes into a dishwasher. It hit me that no matter how great your kitchen is or how rich and famous you are, the dishwasher is still a dishwasher.
Then a few days later, up pops a headline about how Halsey fractured her ankle while loading the dishwasher. See!
I saw the Zeros and they looked like me
Alejandro Escovedo, Sonic USA
This is the America that I want to be
Anarchy and Hollywood, the land of the free
I saw the Zeros and they looked like me
I listened to a lot more Escovedo this week after gushing so much last week. I went through his 2018 album, The Crossing, a few times and the lyrics in Sonic USA made me go hunting.
The Zeros were a punk band in the mid-late 70s fronted by Javier Escovedo, Alejandro’s younger brother. I enjoyed this LA Weekly piece from 1999 on the band as a guide to how heavy of an inspiration various music can have on people.
And we don’t take requests
Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit, Be Afraid
We won’t shut up and sing
Tell the truth enough
You’ll find it rhymes with everything
I listened to Reunions again this week and looked up the line above only to find out I had already done so back in February. This was funny to me because I looked up the lyrics to Elton John’s Levon last night after an exchange with Rich on Twitter only to find I had already done so back in January.
Lyrics, they’re great!
“I dislike Man City because it is Oasis’s club. Noel Gallagher is the most overrated songwriter in the whole history of pop music. They were perfect for the Brit press because they behaved badly and got all the attention. Blur were really great. That guy Damon Albarn is a real fuckin’ songwriter.”
Steve Earle, on being an Arsenal fan
I know maybe 2 people that will enjoy this quote. I love it. 😂
I agree with the Damon Albarn part; I’m not invested in Man City vs Arsenal; and while I might at one point have thought Oasis is a bit overrated, I’ve generally stopped carrying opinions like that around. I do like Steve Earle.
I’ve been grabbing more and more albums through Bandcamp and listening to them via the Sonos app rather than through Spotify. The quality is often noticeably better and playing music that you’ve paid an artist for just feels better. How strange to be back at this point after so many years of streaming!
My spam detection rate is still at 99.6% after almost 1000 spam comments. I think my next task for Self Sustaining Spam Stopper is to assume that anything caught with the honeypots is spam and can just be deleted.
The last week has been yet another heartbreaking week.
The murder of George Floyd over twenty dollars added fuel to a righteous anger in people all over the country and there are now protests in every major city and many small towns. Police, in what has become a standard approach in the US, have reacted with violence and made a sad situation worse.
In times like this I default to trying to read everything and find some sense of understanding. I’m not always sure of what to say. For the moment, it’s helping to find pieces written by others that align with how I feel. I need to sort out what active steps I can take next.
After reading through Jake’s recently updated post on using thermodynamics to explain why riots and stampedes occur—he uses the equation provided by Gibbs free energy, I’ve been thinking through how this applies to the protests in an age of militarized police forces.
My take: The military gear worn by police when responding increases the stress of a situation. The task as commanded of the police—wear this riot gear and contain the protest—reduces the amount of empathy they can afford to have for protestors. The change in energy is drastic. What would we expect other than chaos?
The Marshall Project is a “nonprofit news organization that seeks to create and sustain a sense of national urgency about the U.S. criminal justice system.” Their site has plenty of curated material on a variety of topics, including police abolition. I reached Matt Taibbi’s article from 2014, “The Police in America are Becoming Illegitimate”, through that page and I’ve started to think through what a future without policing could look like.
I also connected with Paul Butler’s opinion piece from Saturday in The Guardian, “Policing in the US is not about enforcing law. It’s about enforcing white supremacy”.
We can’t expect things to get better without making drastic changes. We can’t expect groups with systemic power to forfeit that power voluntarily.
Black lives matter. ❤️
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