Phthursday Musings: Here She Comes, That Rainy Day Sun

or, Conspicuously Cold No More?

Let’s get right to it, kids:

Yes, yes, I could have picked a different song about the impending arrival of that great celestial ball, but… I picked this one.

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Wednesday, I jogged to the gym and back. I told my wife this and she thought that I meant that I had jogged to the gym, touched the side of the building, and returned home. The point here though is that it was nice enough to justify spending actual time outdoors, basking in the wonderful glow of that bright orange fireball sun.

There, uh, is no video of any sort online for the song “Bright Orange Fireball Sun”, so I guess I have to post this instead:

Number One Cup’s Wrecked By Lions is a really great album start to finish, by the way. I was lucky enough to see them twice.

The point I was trying to get at was how nice it was for it to be nice to be outside. The extender point was that, wow, what a lot of bullshit is going down right now, and at least maybe we can go cry about it in the out of doors.

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I had intended to write at great length about baseball. But I’m shelving that. Decided it was best saved for a full META-SPIEL instead of Musings.

I had also thought about diving more into Ukraine but I wasn’t sure what else to say. If I wasn’t clear enough before, though, let me be perfectly clear now: I am 100% with the people of Ukraine as they try to repel the invaders, and you should be too.

Oh, one more thing. The Sky / HBO miniseries on Chernobyl, it provides a lot of context for what’s happening in Ukraine. It’s well worth watching generally. I was not expecting it seem so current though.

The one ticklishly fun tidbit this week has been the indictment of Michael Madigan for racketeering. Oh, those of you outside of Illinois, you have no idea. No idea. Even you lucky saps in Louisiana and New Jersey have no goddamn idea.

Madigan is never going to spend a day behind bars, though. The legal process will drag out and drag out and drag out and then he’ll be in his 80s and… he’ll just never wind up in jail. Alas.

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My office is on a side of the house with no HVAC. Two years ago I had Mitsubishi mini split systems put in. They work well. I have them programmed though to automatically shut off at 7:00 each night, since I don’t want to heat areas where we’re not. Oops, it’s past 10:00 and I’m still in the office. Friends… I am cold.

I am cold and I am a little slappy. Seem to get slappy by Thursday, then try to summon the energy to write. I find that if I don’t do it all same day I wind up throwing away anything from before Thursday anyway. Can’t pick up quite where I left off. Different when it’s not Musings, maybe, because these are more stream of consciousness, and, well, sleep, that kind of breaks that whole consciousness thing up.

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There was a ‘zine a while back, I don’t know why I’m thinking about this now, I feel like it was called Conspicuous Consumption but I may be badly misremembering. They had a section, or maybe this was the whole thing, they reviewed CDs, but reviewed them based solely on their spines. As in, yes, the entirety of the review was based on what could be gleaned from the side of the case.

If I look at my shelf now there are some CDs which certainly seem to be more interesting than others based solely on the quality of their spines. Others, maybe, are a bit sketch. Sus even.

Look, I’m joking, OK? If the spine was terrible I never would have bought the CD in the first place. What kind of animal do you think I am?

Here is a question though. I have a CD here, Fish Tales / Swarthy Songs For Swabs, by the most eminent Dunedin band the 3Ds. Here’s a typically noisy jangly selection, live in Auckland from 1990 (!):

Questions.

First, does anyone still make music like this? Maybe just in Dunedin?

Second, not only do I have this, so does my father, and for the life of me I can’t figure out how that ever happened, though I suspect it might be because of the spine, because something saying

3Ds Fish Tales / Swarthy Songs For Swabs

Well, that’s the kind of thing he’d probably have bought without regard for what it sounded like.

I did that once, I think toward the end of high school, though maybe it was during college? I was at the used CD store in Rockford, Mad City Music, so named because it was an outpost of a store from Madison, and I found the album Bait and Switch by the Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments. I had no clue what it was about, but the name was enough. The next album, as it would so happen, was named Straight To Video, which may still be my all-time favorite album name, and which includes this gem:

I mean, maybe you shouldn’t listen to that, it sounds like complete crap.

Which is okay.

Somehow even though I lived in Columbs for three years and talked to Ron House well over a dozen times I never actually managed to see the Slave Apartments live!

Ron House, you see, managed the most excellent Used Kids Records on High Street. His recommendations were impeccable. He convinced me to get Hefner’s Breaking God’s Heart not long after it came out (though to be fair I was already convinced enough to ask about it) and, well, Hefner was the greatest British band since the Beatles. Yeah, I said it.

Oh my god does Darren look young:

There’s a good chance that by time you read this, it’s Bandcamp Friday. Would you believe that there’s two new Hefner releases!? I don’t even have a turntable and I think I need these.

I had the incredibly rare privilege of seeing Darren Hayman shortly after my wacky kid was born. Hefner hasn’t toured the U.S. in 20 years. Darren has never toured the U.S. solo. But he did do two shows in 2013, one in New York, and one in Chicago, in the basement of the Chopin Theater. There couldn’t have been 50 people there.

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YouTube thinks I want to watch 90 minutes of The History of Iron Maiden - Part One.

I might.

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YouTube also thinks I want to watch 16 minutes of Johnny Carson sitting with Merritt Heaton, Illinois Oldest Farmer. What the hell is with these algorithms?

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Seriously, though, I very much do look forward to being outside, maybe more than usual. I’ve worked from home for almost 7 years, and we’re coming up on 2 years where I couldn’t even duck out and work from the coffee shop. I just want to be outside. Except that, more so than any time I can ever before remember, outside feels really, really, really, really cold, even when it’s 40 degrees.

When it gets warm enough to literally just sit outside and stare, by all means, come and join me.