This was about a year’s worth of growth
Doesn’t look like much, maybe enough to make a kitten.
Great! I found the chin I misplaced last Spring.
The new year started off with one ugly realization…the weight I’ve put on during the Pandemic and probably going too far during the Holiday Stretch. Talk about a stretch too, I couldn’t fit into my standard jeans easily so I had to make an emergency trip to Old Navy. There I bought my temporary fat pants with an extra four inches on the waistline until some interim jeans arrived from All American, my preferred brand, still made in the States and cost just as much as overpriced Levi’s from Pakistan, Levi hasn’t made shit in America for 20 years thanks to Sprawl-Mart.
I’ve managed to bring my average down by 10 pounds! Yes, I was well over 270 on New Year’s Day. The objective is to be at least a pound lower every week and/or one lower than I was a week ago via the app Lose It! I gambled on the interim jeans (two pairs) and they were fine. No struggle. No need for help. Most importantly, no pliers required if you recall a certain scene from Dazed n’ Confused.
Now if I can get back to the gym at my job! I really miss my morning routine with the stationary bike and stair master. There’s only so much I can do by eating less and filling up on water.
On to the 250s.
Hmm. I must be too self-involved. I was rejoicing my refinancing finally going through on this date last year. The UN-led body made it official on this day while Orange Foolius and other GOP morons kept trying to downplay its severity. The only thing positive factor I also recalled was the cancelling of SXSW, the annual asshole invasion of industry people (mostly Californicators) telling us what we should be liking for the remainder of the year. Long ago, it was supposed to be a showcase of Austin’s music scene. Thanks Kapitalism.
Speaking of Kapitalism and failure, someone posted a very true fact on Twitter:
Socialism gave us the vaccine
Capitalism fumbled the distribution
Given that a hospital in Florida was ordered by the state government to redirect doses to a wealthy neighborhood is all the proof we need.
Meanwhile, I need to see what Colbert’s sources were when he claimed that over 75 million doses have been given and/or if it was people.
Music fans throughout the decades have this man to thank for developing two major formats.
His first was the cassette. Before them, tape was a reel-to-reel setup. Great quality for production and editing. Crappy for the average user: the machine was about the size of a portable TV, heavy and took a some effort to set up. Lou pushed to make tape recordings small enough to fit in your pocket. His prototype arrived in 1962 but had to endure a standards war between his employer Phillips and the Japanese giant Sony. However, by the Eighties, cassettes outpaced LP sales. OK, they did anecdotally in my world. When I was a teenager and college student, friends who were not diehard music collectors bought their tunes that way. Fidelity nerds like me clung to vinyl until we could afford CDs. Cassettes were my preferred format for other means: mixtapes, saving my WMUR shows with Sheila and José (all lost sadly) and portability (my several Walkmans, cars).
Lou didn’t stop there. He was later involved in the development of the CD which debuted in 1979. As expected, another standards war followed until everybody agreed on 12 cm in diameter with about a maximum of 80 minutes of material; earlier ones capped out at an hour. The CD became a format which unified the casual fan and the obsessed (my camp). It had both portability and fidelity. I bet many of us remember those people with binders filled with CDs of their music in their cars. The music industry loved it too since it locked customers into buying the whole record after vinyl 45s went away and CD singles were just plain stupid.
Despite the rising dominance of streaming, my crowd is returning to vinyl with a subset trying to bring back the cassette. I don’t buy the “warmth” argument regarding vinyl. I think it’s just young hipsters trying to rationalize why they’re paying too much. Besides, if you read the obit, Lou said the CD is superior. He should know and he settled the fake debate for me.
Thanks for everything Lou. Your inventions helped me on long, long, boring solo drives, especially when I was working for DG (Bloomington to Peoria and back, five days a week); my favorite long treks to move to Austin and lastly, it was vital to the first draft of KMAG.
Singer/Songwriter Jason Isbell joked that if he invented the tape, he would have it in his will ordering the pallbearers to flip him over at the halfway point of the funeral. Knowing my luck, my corpse would get jammed and an altar boy would use a pen or pencil to rewind what escaped from the coffin.
Although it will require the International Astronomical Union to make it official, the brilliant people at NASA have named/dedicated Perseverance‘s landing site to Sci-Fi author Octavia Butler. It’s a shame she didn’t live to receive this, she passed away in 2006.
I need to get off my behind and read more of her material, William Gibson is a big fan of her work which is a huge recommendation. All I’ve read is Kindred, an amazing time-travel novel examining the complicated relationships between Black and White Americans through the years. My friend Helen gave it to me as a gift and I couldn’t put it down. It’s finally getting made into a series. I forget who is producing, etc. They better make it a miniseries, not an ongoing, spread out the material until the only thing they share is the title series. For example, The Man in the High Castle. In that show’s defense, the Nazis winning WWII is an old premise just wrapped around an old Phillip K. Dick novel.
Anyway, if you haven’t heard of Octavia, it’s sadly no surprise. She was the first Black American woman to win the Hugo and Nebula awards for her Sci-Fi writing. The community was quick to reward Octavia’s talent but we need to better to promote her works since the genre remains pretty dominated by White men. Not very Utopian of us.
Here’s what I will do in her honor and I suggest you all give it a try. I’m going to re-read Kindred, it was that damned good! You all start from it, tell me what you think. I will move on to a couple other works of hers. The Guardian mentioned her scary predictions in Parable of Sowers (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998) will be my likely choices. Meanwhile, if you hate Kindred, I will pay you a refund.
I’m now only about half way out of the woods! Since I received the Moderna vaccine, I need a second shot between four and eight weeks. Did it hurt? It smarted like all sharp needles in the upper arm do! Not getting a cookie or lollipop stung more.
I take back some of my griping about APH over how well the Delco operation was. TSA in Austin’s airport should take a lesson from this; they were was well-oiled as TSA through Las Vegas’ airport. Yet you had to get in line for another line which led to another line made this resemble a typical Disney theme park.
There were people of all stripes present which was nice.
Now comes the waiting game for the second dose and if I develop side effects. I’m pretty doubtful with the latter.
Oh, the trim my beard camp is winning thus far.
I registered with Austin Public Health’s site, jumped through the hurdles which was their questionnaire and qualified on several fronts I wasn’t proud of: obese (but I’ve lost 10 pounds since New Year’s Day!), asthma (dammit!) and high blood pressure (this one I know will go away once I get to the gym regularly). The good factor? I’m dating a nurse who is now fully immunized. Yes, I played CV-19 roulette yet we took precautions since Jennifer was regularly tested at her workplace. In other good news, Jennifer’s facility is completely immunized!
For several weeks, APH has failed to update me when there were openings as they claimed. Foolish me, I thought they would send out Text messages to my phone or e-mail as I often do with severe weather, Amber alerts and the recent snowmageddon. HA!
Nope. You have to guess when the openings happen, log in at the right moment and get into a giant queue. As somebody criticized American policy, it’s practically the Hunger Games without Jennifer Lawrence’s enormous ego and stiff excuse she calls acting.
I gambled wisely today, after my shift I logged in and discovered APH had 10,000 doses of the Moderna solution slotted over this week. The official queue would start at 6 PM. I waited, figured I’d still get screwed because I’m not wealthy or a bigshot Republican. Woo hoo! I got spot 450 so I got my second choice within 40 minutes.
Tomorrow I have to haul ass to East Austin, get jabbed and repeat this crap in at least four weeks, but I think no more than eight, I’ll double check.
The next question. Which part should rein in? My beard or finally get a haircut? You tell me via poll.
What to trim/cut first? Total Voters: 4
This would definitely not be a vending machine at my alma mater Marquette even though I’m sure it could’ve come in handy. Let’s face it, college students are full of hormones and not good sense. I know. I was one!
While writing my little post, I just noticed that the M&Ms are cockblocking the Snickers bar from teaming up with the condoms. Not cool M&Ms! Is it because your nuts are bigger?
It happened this morning way down on the south side of the city, but tents under Austin’s major overpasses (35, MoPac and 183) are a common site since we have a lack of affordable housing. Demand is outstripping the supply and this being Texas, there are numerous shit-bag landlords who like it that way. They also weasel their way out of providing anything for the poor. So I expect more of these accidents to happen. Hell, I was surprised this didn’t occur sooner with the deep freeze.
America needs to get over this crappy strategy of building out, we need to build up.
I grew up with him being a rather constant presence on TV, especially when visiting my Grandma’s house, preferred him over the competition…I think Barbara Wah Wah on ABC and John Chancellor/David Brinkley on NBC. Walter definitely had a pretty distinct voice since comedians loved to do impressions of him: The Muppets, voice actor Frank Welker is pretty spot on in Futurama.
Not until I moved to Austin did I learn about his Texas roots. His family moved to Houston when he was a kid and he attended high school with Marvin Zindler (if you’re not Texan, he was a Houston-based TV crank that pre-dates Faux News). Although UT loves to go on and take credit for him, he dropped out proving how their Journalism program as is helpful to getting a job as their Film degrees; they love to plug/promote Linklater, who never attended.
Years later when he was an employee of CBS, Walter and the stage manager (unknown who) pioneered how TV broadcast news was presented in 1951 by having him sit at a desk and read off the stories. Doesn’t sound too terribly different how they did in radio, other than the audience being unable to read the newscaster’s face.
Sixty years on, the presentation hasn’t changed much, just the channels, personalities and the growth of bullshit being legitimate as corporations gobbled up the media. He’s somewhat missed because Walter Cronkite didn’t suffer fools gladly and he managed to keep LBJ (a very manipulative guy) from sidelining him after the 1964 conventions.
This picture made the rounds days ago but it made me think about the scenes from Futureworld when Blythe Dinner and Peter Fonda were allowed to see the ruins of Westworld. So in many ways, Chuck E Cheese and Showbiz Pizza alongside Disney’s super boring Hall of Presidents are precursors to a robot-hosted vacation! It’s a stretch. Imagine the distant future when archaeologists dig up this junk! They are really going to be confused. I wish I could read/hear their theories on it, then I could tell them the truth like a pre-evil Woody Allen does in Sleeper.
Yesterday, the day after our asshole governor decided to create more super spreader events (upcoming Spring Breaks filled with dill holes), my favorite movie theater chain has declared bankruptcy. To add insult to injury, they shuttered their premiere location in downtown Austin, the historic Ritz Theater. Another reason for going into the city removed, the biggest annoyance is the highway-robbery rates for parking.
Although the Ritz wasn’t their first location, it became their greatest thanks to its stage and when it was packed, it was awesome. So many memories made there:
It was a fantastic chapter for one of Austin’s oldest movie theaters. When I first moved here in 1994, the place was a pool hall/bar, I think. Now I wonder what the owners will do with it next. Given how crappy Sixth Street has become, trust me, it’s filthy and what MTV would resemble if it were a street.
Farewell Alamo Ritz. Fingers crossed the Village, Lakeline and other locations survive this horrendous economy.
The animation from The Simpsons is a pretty accurate representation of how fucking dumb and willfully ignorant the Texas government, namely the executive branch, is. It’s also spot-on impression of this douchenozzle we have named Sid Miller, he’s the Agricultural Commissioner. He has a history of moronic tweets proving that people like him happen when cousins marry too often.
Why, why, why? We’re nowhere close to having a significant portion of the state vaccinated and 200 people a day are still dying. Major draws to Austin will remain virtual: SXSW 2021, ATX Fest; or just haven’t been scheduled: Moontower and my TMBG tickets were pushed back to 2022. The popular conclusion is greedy, careless assholes wanting to host Spring Break in Corpus and other beaches. We all know how this will end, new super spreader events.
Yet why should the NeoConfederates in charge care? They’ve been vaccinated from a virus they cast doubt on. Before I die, my biggest wish is to see Texas turn blue and throw these shit bags out to the boonies where they belong. Eating clay with the fellow hillbillies.
Not exactly. The recent probe Perseverance utilizes what was state-0f-the-art in the first iMac in 1998, the G3 processor with its blazing speed of 233 MHz (most processors are in the single-digit GHz range or at least a thousand times faster). No luck getting NASA to color the probe bondi blue or the other cool colors Apple rolled out later.
Years ago I once asked, why the heck isn’t NASA using contemporary processors when they had a chance to update Hubble and went with an Intel 386? Older designs are easier (or more successfully) hardened against the nasty conditions outside Earth’s atmosphere. Mars has only one percent of the atmosphere we have so radiation has nothing to stop it if you’re on the surface. So your brand new iPad or slick portable will be transformed into a doorstop within a few seconds on the ISS and don’t even think about it surviving the trip to the red planet. This will also pose a huge problem when we start getting closer to people landing on Mars. How will they explore, return safely and not die of cancer in a few years.
For those who didn’t get the reference, Ocean View is the fictional city Bob’s Burgers is set in. As for which state? I’m going to go out on a limb and say New Jersey. I’ll need to check harder on the episode which showed a map when they drove to Florida to see Linda’s parents at the whacky retirement community.
Meanwhile, the picture is a nod to the food-truck episode involving Bob’s lesser, on-off-again secondary nemesis Randy (Jimmy Pesto is the primary). This one is very clever and on par with others I recall: Soy to the World (Randy’s) and Genghis Flan. I did share with Bob’s creator Loren Bouchard via Twitter, got a like back in 24 hours! Thanks Loren, big fan of all your work and congrats with The Great North, great to see you paying it forward with the Molyneux sisters!
We didn’t have time to check out what they were offering, or the other nearby vehicles because we had a reservation at Bangers (sic), an excellent, joint beer hall and sausage restaurant. They serve individual beers by the liter!
