Category: Generic

Trump is a Fascist Idiot – 3/18/17 Edition

So rather than back down from the wiretapping bullshit unfounded false accusations this moron made against Obama a couple of weeks ago, he actually pulled other countries into the discussion.

Want to know what this is?  This is one of those movies were the 10 year old kid tells a lie to get out of something silly and then compounds the little lie with a bigger lie and a bigger lie until he ends up getting grounded for a decade because one of this relatives died or something and we all feel better because the kid learned a valuable lesson.  That’s exactly what this story is.  It’s the fascist spray tanned cheeto prick who cried wolf.

Except there is no valuable lesson to be learned in this case because half the friggin country believes this fascist piece of shit is telling god’s truth.  Every time I think we have the orange idiot over a barrel I have to stop and realize that HALF THE COUNTRY SUPPORTS HIM.  We are not a democracy with a fascist president, we are a country that is half fascist with a fascist president.

The mid term election is our only hope of getting out of this shit hole we have dug ourselves into.  It’s like Obi-Wan Kenobie, it’s our only hope.  But how can you still have hope when half the country thinks all of this nightmarish fascism is just us being great again?

So Much for That

I told myself that I was going to keep this new account clean.  I was going to start from scratch and forget about past stuff.  Then I was poking around the settings page and saw that they had a function for importing Medium blogs.  I didn’t know that WordPress could do that.  So I popped over to Medium and found the export function and then popped back to WordPress and imported it.  So much for a clean start.  If I was going to do that, then I had to pull in the last WordPress account too, and that account includes all of the Blogger posts and a bunch of Myspace posts too.  It took a while, and a lot of it is littered with broken image links (thanks a ton, Posterous) but it’s all here.  Again, so much for a clean start.

So it’s St Patrick’s Day.  Are you having a Happy St Patrick’s Day?  My go to line is always that I don’t have to wear green because my red hair is proof enough of my Irishness.  Har har har very funny.  I don’t drink, so I don’t really celebrate outside of eating some boiled dinner.  Corned Beef and Cabbage, hold the cabbage please.  Today though, I did something fitting.  Netflix released the new Marvel series, Iron Fist.  The traffic was light enough that I got into work over an hour early, so I watched the first episode on my iPhone while sitting in the car.  The jury is still out on the show.  I don’t really like marshal arts stories.  This feels like that kind of thing after one hour.  The interesting thing though was when I went looking for podcasts that cover the show and found one that seems to cover all of the Defenders series.  They published an episode today that discussed the first episode of Iron Fist.  That was exactly what I wanted for my evening commute.  The cool thing?  It was three Irish guys.  They wished us all a happy St Patrick’s Day.

My wife and my step daughter are going to the movies tomorrow.  My step son and I are on our own for the afternoon.  We have to come up with something interesting to do.  I have no ideas at this point.  I’d be up for an Avengers movie fest, but we should do something that doesn’t involve melting our brains in front of the tube.  I’ll let you know what we come up with.

Know What I Hate?

Do you know what I hate about this time of year?

Everything.  Absolutely everything.  That’s not what I am talking about though.  I mean something specific.

I’m working from home today.  I’m taking my lunch break, eating a sandwich and sipping some soda, checking my work email so that I don’t find myself 50 messages behind when I finish my lunch.  I look out the window and the sky is blue and the sun is out and the reflection of the sun off of the snow that kicked our ass two days ago blinds me.  That’s what I hate about this time of year.  Snow blindness.  Looking out the window at the sunny almost-Spring day should not hurt, but it does.  Now my eyes hurt and reading those work emails is painful.

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again:  Screw you, Mother Nature.

Why did I start this blog?  Can anyone tell me?  I can’t remember exactly when it happened.  It was either Monday night just at the moment when I was dropping off to sleep, or Tuesday morning just at the moment when I was coming out of sleep.  The thought popped into my head, I should go back to wordpress.com.  By the time I was up and about on Tuesday the idea was solidly in place and would not go away.  Damn it.

I posted on myspace and then myspace went away.  I posted on blogger for years and then suddenly switched to wordpress.com for no apparent reason.  I posted there for years and then switched to medium.com, again for no apparent reason.  I think I lasted about a year or so on medium and now I’m back to wordpress.  Why?  What’s wrong with me?  Why do I have this need to start over?  Why can’t I just start an account and stick with it?  I drive myself nuts sometimes.  I feel like such a tool, bloggily speaking.

I will get this page up to speed, it just might take me a while.  Last time I did this I was full on psyched about a new blog account and I was throwing widgets and crap onto the screen like they were goin’ out of style.  I was a madman.  Now?  I’m just gonna take my time.  I’ll have a set of links that might include the old blogs, and Flickr, and Alonetone.com and all that stuff.  Maybe a list of podcasts that I have been listening to.  I’m all about podcasts right now, because how can some one who is an insufferable nerd start doing things that could make him even nerdier?  Right now I have a hockey podcast playing and they are ripping the NBC hockey broadcast team with a ferocity that is almost but not quite frightening.  I agree with every word.  In other words, podcasts are good.  I’ve been thinking… if I start a podcast, what would I talk about?  Nothing work related, obviously.  Cover band behind the scenes stuff?  That topic would dry up in seconds for me.  Guitar gear?  Only if I could get free stuff to review.  Yeah, I’ll be a shill if it gets me new fuzz pedals.  Oh yeah.

Back on topic.  New blog.  Do I want to do anything different this time?  Based on the last couple of paragraphs, maybe I should go all stream of consciousness and just throw out disjointed word associations…

Naw, I’ll just post pictures of my cat.

Go Away

Go away.  I’m  (probably temporarily) done here.  New posts (for the time being at least) are here.  So don’t keep hanging around here, there won’t be anything new (for now).

I feel like such a nerd.  I should just stop this stupid blogging garbage all together.

Getting Tired of This

November 2008 to December 2012.  Four years.  That’s how long I used Blogger before I got tired of it and wanted something different.

December 2012 to August 2016.  Almost four years.  That’s how long I’ve used WordPress.com and I’m really starting to get tired of it and want something new.

I want something different, but I don’t know what, and I’m starting to think there is nothing out there that is going to get me excited about all of this again.  I tried ghost.org today and their editor absolutely RULES.  Unfortunately it’s a paid service and their cheapest tier is $29/month.  Yeah, thanks but no thanks.  I want a personal blog, not a full blown business site.  Give me a break.  

I like medium.com a lot.  It’s just… I don’t know.  It’s more like creating a magazine than just a goofy ideas blog.  For some reason it seems really wrong to me to just post a photo, even though they look so good on medium.  I feel like anything smaller than an essay that takes 5+ minutes to read is missing the point.  I hate to say it, but if I want free hosting and a bit of social interaction, and I’m through with both blogger and WordPress.com, then tumblr might be the only viable option left.  I’ll be damned though if I’m going to put any more of my eggs in a yahoo basket.  Or should I say, a Verizon basket.  Ugh.  I am already up to my eyeballs in Flickr.  Marisa Meyer, I had such faith in you.  Now look at things.  What a mess.  No, I’m not moving my stuff over to tumblr.  That ship has very much sailed.

What else is there?  What other options do I have?  I don’t want to write a platform myself, I just want to post goofy shit.  Do I need to go back in time to the late 90s and use live journal?  What was the other one, typepad?  I don’t know what to do.  Maybe I should just give it up.  The whole idea of a personal blog is ancient history anyway.  This sucks.

Two Firsts

This morning I experienced two things for the first time ever. I will now share, because that’s what oversharing nerds like me do.

First: It was really muggy in the house this morning. The temperature was okay (low 70’s) but the humidity was off the scale. There I was, trying to get dressed but sweating so much I couldn’t stay dry. I did what I usually do on days like this. I cranked the air conditioner and stood in front of a vent until I could get dressed. We have a new thermostat that is internet connected. It has a function that lets you set a low temp and a high temp and it tries to keep the temp in the house in between. It was set with a low of 70 and a high of 73. I wanted lots of cold air so I changed the range to a low of 64 and a high of 67. It worked. The cold air came out in full force.

Then I left for work without changing it back. DAMN IT! I was at the gas station filling up the Nissan when I remembered. I tried using the new Apple Watch app but it wasn’t working. I was standing at the pump and my phone was inside the car and the connection was kinda weak so I wasn’t able to fix anything. Once I got in the car I used the iPhone app and set the range back to 70-73.

I set the thermostat in my living room while I was at a gas station half a mile from home. Yeah, that’s a first for me. Welcome to the 21st century!

Second: If the thermostat is a 21st century thing, then this is more like a 1920’s thing. It wasn’t anything I did, just something I saw.

Traffic on route 93 South was a little slow today, but not too bad. Once I hit route 128 South though it gummed up pretty bad. For those of you who don’t live in the Glorious Land of Eastern Massachusetts, when I say MA route 128 I am referring to what the rest of the East Coast calls US 95. You know, the road that runs all the way from Maine to Florida.

The junction between US 93 and MA 128/US 95 is a little north of Boston. Ten miles or so, give or take. As I was getting to the end of the ramp onto 128 I saw something that I have never seen before. It was like something out of a Life Magazine from the Great Depression. There was a guy standing in the breakdown lane. He was holding a piece of cardboard, probably torn off of a box, with “New York” written on it. I kid you not, there was a guy standing on the side of the biggest highway on the East coast trying to bum a ride from Boston to New York. That’s better than 200 miles.

Seeing a hitchhiker is pretty rare these days. Seeing one on an Interstate highway with a sign denoting his destination is so rare that I am sure I’ve never seen it. When I was a kid I knew a couple of guys who would hitchhike from their homes in South Tewksbury all the way to the bowling alley near the Lowell line (near where the Home Depot is today). I thought bumming a ride that far was a death wish. This dude today put that to shame!

Band Practice Recap

Last night was the first band practice since the July 1st show. We didn’t plan on taking a whole month off, it just sort of happened. We planned on learning a bunch of new songs. One went okay. The others were weaker than usual. We also tried learning something at the practice. Not sure how that worked out. I can say that one of the new songs is a Beatles song, so hopefully my beloved wife will be happier out our next show. (love you sweetie!)

None of that is out of the ordinary. One other thing was. It was weird. Very weird. I brought my Strat. Every now and then I feel the need to bring it to practice to sort of justify the fact that I payed money for it. You know, see wallet? I’m using it with the band. It wasn’t a waste of money. The weird thing was how it felt. It felt… good. It almost felt natural. I’ve always said, since the day I bought the thing, that it is so different than the two Gibsons that it never really felt right to me. Last night though… it felt good. The action is still a little high, and the bridge is much harder to mute with the palm of my hand, but otherwise. It felt good playing it. I can’t believe I’m saying it, but playing a Fender Stratocaster felt good.

What’s wrong with me?