The blog of Luther M. Siler, teacher, author and local curmudgeon
I can literally hear my students whining “When am I gonna use this?” right now.
Also, Duolingo, I think it’s fair to suggest that an American English speaker will never say “Ghassan a is very hungry,” and while I admit that that would be a genuine PEBKAC* error, it would be super cool if you could just fix it and move on.
*we may need a more phone-appropriate version of this acronym.
I commented to my wife last night, on the eve of the release of Slash’s Orgy of the Damned, that I was super psyched about the album coming out, and I felt kind of odd about it. She asked why, as she does, and I pointed out that he’s had quite a few solo albums since his Guns ‘n’ Roses and Velvet Revolver years (this is number six, as it turns out) and as I own exactly none of them I couldn’t explain why I was so excited about this one in particular. Nonetheless, I’d found out it was coming out a couple of months ago and had been checking on a regular basis since then to see if it had magically come out early.
I genuinely didn’t remember what had gotten me so hyped about it. Then it came out this morning, and I bought and downloaded it immediately. As it turns out, Billie Eilish also has a new album out today, also downloaded immediately, and I chose (poorly, as it turns out, because Billie’s music doesn’t really lend itself to highway driving in my car) to listen to the Eilish album on the way to work. I queued up the Slash album on the way home, and the first song hit.
Oh.
Oh.
Slash– yes, Guns ‘n’ Roses Slash, Velvet Revolver Slash, sexy faceless top-hat big-hair yes-that-Slash, fucking Slash Slash, released a blues album.
Motherfucker.
Yeah, that’s why the fuck I was excited, because some of you with similar tastes as mine are already flailing around and happydancing and spending money, and how I managed to discover that Slash had a blues album coming out and then forgot it was a blues album while still somehow intensely anticipating its release anyway is an open question,(*) but now that it’s here I might actually listen to it more than Dark Matter this week. I mean, maybe not, but it’ll at least come close.
As far as I know the album is entirely covers, mostly of blues standards, although Chris Robinson of the Black Crowes does an absolutely stunning fucking version of Steppenwolf’s The Pusher, which is definitely bluesy as hell but maybe isn’t quite a standard. But he does Hoochie Coochie Man with Billy F. Gibbons, and Born Under a Bad Sign with Paul Rodgers, and Papa Was a Rolling Stone and Stormy Monday, and did you know Iggy Pop was, if not actually still alive, at least still recording music from beyond the grave? Because he does a version of Awful Dream that probably doesn’t live up to Lightnin’ Hopkins but is definitely sung by a corpse while Slash is playing guitar.
Okay, every track’s not amazing. But then there’s Key to the Highway, sung by someone just named Dorothy, who I need to know more about, and Demi Lovato is on here for some reason? And if you haven’t gone out and bought this yet, I’m probably not going to talk you into it, but I really need to go back and check out the rest of Slash’s solo releases, because he truly is one of the most amazing guitarists alive and this album is an absolute delight and there’s no reason to think the rest of his solo work isn’t similarly amazing. Go get it.
(*) It is possible that the fact that the thing is called Orgy of the Damned might have something to do with it, as there are approximately 92087346181 titles available in the English language that are going to immediately scan as more blues-adjacent than “Orgy of the Damned.”
After I finished yesterday’s blog post I browsed around on that hat website for a little while, coveting many of the hats and wondering how many hats is too many hats, when I noticed that the bottom of their main page claims to “find your perfect hat” in less than 60 seconds. Well, hell, I want my perfect hat! They made me give them my email address, but whatever; I just had Safari make one up for me, which is one of my very favorite features of that app, and then jumped into the process.
This was the first question:
… as God is my witness, I have no fucking idea. I need a z-axis. I don’t fit on that scale at all and I have no idea what even the middle point between the Pope (which Pope? The Jesuit current guy or the previous dude, whose shoes were made from baby seals and dyed with the blood of virgins?) and Elton John, and Christ, which Elton John?
I chose a 5. I couldn’t justify any other number. I don’t know what the fuck a five even means here; I thought the pain scale didn’t make any sense but this is so much worse.
At any rate, I didn’t particularly like the three hats they suggested. None of them are my perfect hat. I’m considering going through the test again and answering that question with a 1 and a 10 to see what changes. The really inexplicable part is that I’m pretty certain that neither the Pope nor Elton John would be caught dead in any hats being sold on the site.
The weirdest thing? This image appears elsewhere on the site:
I think four of those people look great and one looks amazingly, uncharacteristically dorky. Guess which one?
Anyway, how many hats can I have? That was a real question.
Allow me, if you will, to show you a picture from a few weeks ago of one of my bookshelves:
Direct your attention to the upper left of that picture. Now look at this:
I’ve made this distinction before: my wife reads a lot too, right? Not as much as I do, but more than most people. My wife and I are both readers, but I have a second hobby, which is that I collect books. My wife distinctly and definitely does not collect books. We would be in desperate trouble if she did. She buys perhaps a couple a year and most of the time exists off of rereads and reading books I’ve bought.
I feel like I’ve crossed a line lately.
I’ve never really liked the covers to the Red Rising books, particularly the specific ones I own. If you look really closely at the dust jackets in the top cover you’ll notice a couple of small tears in Golden Son and a rub mark in the bottom of Iron Gold, both signs that I got the books from Amazon, because I wouldn’t have bought them from a physical store with flaws in them. Those awesome covers are not new books– I actually special-ordered custom dust jackets from Juniper Books to replace the original dust jackets on my hardcovers. Which I’m keeping, of course, although I’m not entirely sure why.
I’ve found myself really tempted by special editions of books I already own lately, too, especially if their original covers annoyed me in some way. For example, I think whoever is responsible for this abomination should be literally pilloried:
…and, as it turns out, there’s site called the Broken Binding that offers these fucking beautiful bastards, at the low low cost of $150 for four books I already own:
And, Goddammit, I’m tempted. Sorely tempted. I just kicked ass at work and I feel like I can justify rewarding myself, but shit, that’s a lot of money, for something just to look better on a shelf, which … feels unreasonable, even to me?
I dunno. My birthday’s July 5?
(I also keep almost ordering this hat, not because I think it would look good on me but because the model in the picture is rocking it, and I feel like maybe ordering clothing I can’t wear because it makes a different human look good is maybe a sign that having a small amount of discretionary money is starting to get to me. Can I just shift into Saves Money Guy for a few years, please? Enough for a decent emergency fund, or at least to pay for the new fucking computer I’m probably going to need soon without putting it on a card?)
(We won’t talk about how much of my money Lego is currently trying, and failing, to take from me.)
Sigh.
Today was awful; I had to put a kid out in five of my six classes, which is fucking ridiculous, and I got asked if I qualified for a fucking senior citizen’s discount while attempting to buy a whole rotisserie chicken and two boxes of cookies at the grocery.
No I do not shut the fuck up.
So yeah. Gonna go crumble to dust in my bed now.
I have had my current desktop for just a noodge over five years, and I am starting to think that I might need to replace it sooner rather than later. It is the most insanely aggravating tech problem I have encountered, in that it isn’t one tech problem. Shit just Keeps Going Wrong, and I can’t for the life of me isolate what the problem might be beyond a vague suspicion that my dedication to Apple products is about to bite me in the ass. If this were a home build, I could start replacing parts– I mean, that would be expensive and insane, but I could do it. I could keep replacing bits of the computer until this random fucking series of crashes, application hangups and hardware shutdowns — my trackpad, for God’s sake, keeps shutting down, and it has a physical on/off button– stopped, or I’d managed to create the iMac of Theseus and just gave the fuck up.
The Music app crashes. Chrome crashes. Safari crashes. The monitors are going wonky. The trackpad shuts down randomly. The entire computer keeps hard restarting in the middle of the night and when I first wake it up after a hard crash it takes a good ten minutes before everything starts behaving, and then it’s fine for an unpredictable amount of time– anywhere from a few minutes to a couple of days– until it’s not anymore.
I don’t know how to diagnose this. I thought a Safari patch had cleaned it up but that only lasted a few days and now Music is crashing, and there are 65 fucking gigabytes of music on this damn computer, so moving to another one is going to be a huge pain in the ass. Also, just to make it worse, Apple isn’t making 27″ iMacs any longer, so I can either move to a smaller main monitor or a Mac Studio, and those start at two fucking grand before you buy a monitor to go with it. I mean, I can spread that out, and truth be told I can afford it, but I really don’t fucking want to right now. I want to fix this, and normally “fix my computer” is included among my skill sets, but there are enough things going wrong that I’m starting to suspect it’s either the motherboard or the hard drive, and … that’s a new computer, since I can’t replace either.
I mean, I could go back to Windows, but I could also shoot myself in the fucking face and not have to worry about it, and those options are of equal attractiveness right now. I loathe Windows and I’m not interested in going back into that ecosystem when every other piece of tech in the house has a picture of a piece of fruit on it. If Apple was still making 27″ iMacs this wouldn’t be that hard of a decision, because $1600 is a lot more palatable than $2000 plus a monitor. But even if I stuck with the two I have (and remember, I’m running a supervillain lair here)* it’s still $400 more than the iMac I’d probably end up with, which is pushing it.
Anyway, I’m off to spend three hours Googling “everything is wrong with my computer” until it crashes again. Wish me luck.
*Three monitors and a standing desk, and how the fuck is it possible that I can’t find a picture of my desk on this website anywhere? NO way.**
**EDIT: Found one, and added the link.
My wife and I went to Best Buy last night– I tell you, date night has gotten really lazy lately– not because we particularly needed anything from there but because they’d sent me an email that I hadn’t used my card in a long enough time that they were going to close it out soon if I didn’t use it again. I don’t have any particular need for anything from them right now, but that card has come in handy plenty of times and there’s no reason to take a credit score hit in six months if we decide we need a dryer or a new TV or something. She wanted a new paper shredder, which we weren’t sure if they even carried, and I went in just intending to find literally anything I wanted, buy it on the card, leave, and immediately pay the card back off.(*)
This should have been easy.
I considered a few random things and then Bek found paper shredders and we decided to just grab one of those and call it a day. And we walked to the front of the store, where the registers have been for as long as this store has been there … and there were no registers.
We eventually noticed two signs hanging from the ceiling that said “Checkout,” both located in the middle of the fucking store, like we were in a fucking department store or something. One had no employees anywhere near it. The second just appeared to be a sign dangling randomly from the ceiling, with nothing at all to indicate where one might make a purchase. No kiosk, no computer, no self-checkout, nothing. And, again, in the middle of the fucking store. Why? Why the fuck is checkout in the middle of the store and not up by the doors?
The customer service desk was still there, clearly labeled for returns and Geek Squad and online pickup and such, but no signs for purchases, and the couple of employees behind that counter looked straight at me, a customer, clearly carrying a rather unwieldy box with the intent of purchasing, and didn’t, like, wave me over, or point me at where to go, or anything like that. We probably walked around, again, carrying merchandise, for five minutes, unable to figure out where to buy something in a fucking retail store that only exists to sell things, and at that point I decided I’d had enough, left the paper shredder on a random shelf and walked the fuck out of the store. On the way home we stopped at Target and bought a different paper shredder.
And, I gotta tell you, I didn’t believe any of this was happening while it was happening and I only barely believe it happened now. If it had just been me on the trip I’d just assume I was some variety of idiot and not worry about it. But my wife was with me, and she couldn’t figure out how the hell to give someone money in exchange for goods either, and that tells me I’m not fucking crazy. That said, I’ve been scouring the internet since then trying to find other people complaining about this and I can’t find any– there are tons of complaints about their website having issues but no one else saying I went into the story to make a purchase and couldn’t find the registers, which just … God, that just sounds insane. Selling things is the only reason the store exists. This cannot possibly have just happened. This isn’t an “I couldn’t find someone to unlock the case” situation. I had the thing I wanted in my hands and could not find a place to get someone to sell it to me.
What the fuck, Best Buy.
(*) The punch line to this fucking ridiculous story is that after hitting Publish on this post, I went and looked for the email, wondering what the deadline was and also trying to decide if I wanted to still keep the card (surely I can just order something online without drama, right? A PS5 gift card?) or just let it go … and I can’t find the email. My personal email is through Gmail. I have never deleted an email. So maybe I am completely nuts.
My favorite moment at my kid’s Spring Concert tonight was realizing I recognized a piece of music they were playing, asking my watch to recognize it basically for no reason at all, and being greeted with an error screen I had never seen before– “No Music Detected.”
No Music Detected being tossed at me during a middle school band concert is a little on the nose for a smartwatch music app, don’t you think?
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