O, Lord, sometimes a fella feels like he’s barefoot navigating a carpet spotted with hairballs in the dark.
Warner-Discovery bollixed its big switch from HBO Max to Max, forcing subscribers like Your Humble Narrator to dash hither and yon across the Internets, trying to figure out how we could enjoy “content” we were paying for but suddenly not receiving. Handy Household Hint to W-D execs: As error messages go, “Something went wrong” is just a wee bit vague.
E. Lawn Mulch stepped on his own dingus (yet again) with a rapid unscheduled disassembly of Ronald DeSadist’s pestilential campaign on Twatter Spaces. I expect various minions, varlets, and knaves (if any remain) were promptly laid off and escorted from the Twatter offices (for which rent is not being paid). Look for DeSadist to ban Twatter in Florida.
At Verizon, which is shedding customers, employees in “customer experience, loyalty, and technology positions” have been advised to prepare for “transition to the next stage of your career journey.” Your call is important to us. Or not.
Meanwhile, in the vast retail/services landscape, there is at least one happy customer. Miss Mia Sopaipilla got an A++ in her most recent visit to the vet and gives the chef’s kiss — muah! — to her bedcave.
Is there a Meow as well as a Yelp? I’m looking forward to a glowing review.
Mad Blog Media 
I’m behind on the news …y’all see how warmly Texas is treating their new tenants? After leaving the People’s Republic of California for greener, less socialist pastures, the Gubbinor of Tay’haas is now adding a green tax to e-vehicles. That’ll learn ‘em.
But in Texas you can legally buy and AR-15, a nice new bump stock for it, and a 100 round drum magazine when you’re 18 years old. Freedumb, as Patrick says.
JFC. Even my conservative friends find this shit ridiculous.
This group of guys I ride with once or twice a week leans a bit more to the right than Your Humble Narrator (shit, Che was more conservative than I am). On Wednesday one of them noted the general lunacy in Florida and Texas and grumbled, “I’d like to be a Republican. …” The “but” was left unsaid.
Aside from looking silly, I don’t think even cheap 5.56 ammo is much less than about 50-60 cents a round. Last time I bought a couple boxes of HPBT Match ammo I spent about 90 cents a round, so I tend to shoot about a round or two a minute and check point of impact with a spotting scope.
Pissing away that many dead presidents in a few seconds offends my fiscal sensitivity. Might as well go to a gambling casino or cat house and blow the bucks. At least there you have a one in a million chance of winning something besides a pile of empty brass. Maybe some money or the clap.
I think the point is how they vote not what they think. If they are single issue, guns, voters then the shit show in DC and our schools will continue. The ammo for a 100 round mass shooting is $60. You can buy the AR on credit approved right in the gun shop. Is the cost going to stop the next mass murderer? The murderer in the Vegas shooting had multiple large magazines and multiple assault weapons with bump stocks. Maybe he was a murderer with means. We know what the answer is. I just fell off the soap box.
My comment was aimed at the Beavis and Butthead act shown in that video. Sure, sixty bucks worth of ammo and a six hundred buck gun is not gonna stop a mass shooter who knows the final act of his madness is a bullet to the brain, either self inflicted or from the local SWAT team.
I met for a couple hours with my legislator this past Sunday and we talked about possibly requiring a license to own one of those things here in the Land of Entrapment. My rationale was if it takes fingerprints, mug shots, a couple days of training, and a couple hundred bucks, it might thin the herd of idiots who want these things. Thin it down to idiots like me, I suppose.
I have a friend in Pennsylvania who owns an old Tommy Gun machine gun. Ownership of it involves jumping through all the hoops, registration, finger prints, bending over at the waist, etc. Since he’s an honest responsible citizen understanding the need for such control, he has no problem with all the legal appurtenances. He’s not really a gun nut (he’s probably about like you Khal – well educated lab director), but he enjoys being able to own some unique history. I suspect he counts the brass when he takes the gun out to the range.
Myself, I find guns slightly fascinating but I find bikes more fascinating and my funds only reach so far.
And: That’s great news to hear about the Queen of the abode. I hope she is happy in her feline dreams relishing that thought of the treat she gets when she howls out at zero dark thirty and a half.
That’s too bad to hear about the Warner HBO Max f-up. Do you want to borrow some DVD’s?
The safe, like the bike corral (I think I have one bike under fifteen years old), is largely made up of older stuff, such as the rifle I inherited when my uncle died, several firearms my old man passed down to me, a Mini-14 I scored when a former post doc here was relocating to the People’s Republic of New York. In the last case, a couple of us who were all in the DoE’s Human Reliability Program bought his semiautos to make sure he didn’t sell them to someone else prior to moving. But like you, I spend far more time with bikes and sometimes wonder why I even own all these damn things. Seems at times I can’t resist shiny objects, even if I know damn well I don’t need them. In my previous life I musta been a crow.
No idea about TV. We are without cable TV. We use an Apple TV, brand new one, for our TV and movie viewing.
Will the last twitter employee leaving please turn off the lights and lock the door behind them.
Florida can keep both of their fat bastards.
Yea for Mia! A critter can do no better than putting down roots with the O’Grady clan. Just ask Mr. Boo; he knows.
We use an Apple TV HD, and stream all manner of stuff — HBO Max (now Max); Netflix; Hulu; Paramount; PBS; Amazon Prime; Apple+; AMC+; and maybe another one or two or three that elude me. It’s almost like the bad old days of cable — you need a different channel for each show that’s worth watching.
HBO Max became problematic when the Warner-Discovery eejits changed the name to Max and buggered the app. They told us the HBO Max app would magically remake itself into Max with no human intervention required … either that or when launched it would prompt users to download a new Max app.
Neither was true. Launching the HBO Max app yielded only the WTF? error message “Something went wrong” with no explanation as to (a) what that something might be or (2) how to resolve the problem. The Max customer-service people were soon overrun and torn to pieces, as in episode five of “The Last of Us.”
Happily, I’m familiar with a couple online wiseguys who had already run the gantlet with Max-WTF? and managed to get things back on track fairly quickly. First World problem, I know. But we like to watch a bit of TV while eating dinner.
We just bought the latest Apple, like I mentioned above. The apps used most here are iTunes movies, PBS, TED, and Youtube. I also bought a new TV, 55 inch Sony full array LCD, 4K disc player, and floor standing speakers, Polks. Then I gave them my wallet and told them to take what they need. Just in time not to get paid next month.
It’s amazing how many deep pocketed corporations can’t figure out how to build a website or product thinking about the customer first. I’m starting to sound much older than I am, but the internet is a dumpster fire and no one seems to care.
Having watched a few vulture capitalists gobble up newspapers and magazines, shit all over the working stiffs, and flap lazily away in search of the next meal, I’ma go out on a limb here and posit that investors — not customers, and certainly not employees — are the only segment of society that matters to these people.
19 year old Maile got a pretty good review last week at her annual vet visit. And Bike Santa Fe got a pretty good turnout at its re-invention this month, pulling in nearly a hundred people at its renewal blastoff. We had a packed house yesterday at Sincere Cycles, which is on Water Street, so I pedalled over and showed the city Bicycle and Ped Advisory Committee flag since the shop is only about ten minutes from my house. So let’s all cheer for the little things and try to ignore that massive Clown Car trying to get its engine started in Florida.
More on cycling in the City Indifferent here:
Good to hear Maile, Bike Santa Fe, and the advisory committee are ticking right along. Good on ye for doing The Work, K.
Local politics can be a very smelly swamp indeed. Just ask Herself, who is Ward 28C chair for the Bernalillo County Donks. She had to teach herself Mailchimp the other day and the language that floated out of her office would’ve made a sailor blush.
That’s because she has been coached by the best. Probably learned it when you were ranting about punctures only happening on the back wheel after applying chain lube.
Swearing is good for the soul.
Back when I was in grad school, our Ph.D. advisor, Gil Hanson, had his senior grad students run his mass spec and chemistry laboratories and fix things when they broke rather than calling on instrument company technicians. His rationale was that if any of us were going to go on to have our own labs, we better know how they work. So there was a lot of cussing that went on when things broke. Gil was right, though. All his students, even Yours Truly, knew good data from crap.
One year we had an undergrad work study student in the lab doing routine tasks while my grad buddy Steve and I were fixing a mass spectrometer and making the usual exhortations to the Underworld Gods. She complained to Gil, who talked to us. He said to tone it down when she was in the room, but then commented “you can’t run a mass spec lab without cussing once in a while, and that’s when everything is working well.”
Back in the Day™ a newsroom was a noisy, profane, smoke-filled environment, awash in drunkards, druggies, and adulterers. Not unlike Hell, but with more devils. H.L. Mencken meets H.P. Lovecraft. If any of the readers had ever spent a day with us seeing how The Daily Sausage was made they’d have gone stark raving mad.
We’re in Richmond VA for a wedding, stumbled onto this in a copy of Blue Ridge Outdoors, which I was glad to see is still in print.
Recently retired Ben King is turning nature into pixels into prints for a living
https://www.bknaturephoto.com/home
How was the trip out? The news says the airports are supposed to be insane this weekend. But you know how the news is.
Flew out early, leaving late, so missed the holiday shenanigans. Did stumble through the DC monuments on actual Memorial Day. The rain kept out the casual locals, so you could walk right up to Lincoln’s size 54 brogues, the wrought iron outside, Uncle Joe’s hooch, and the steps that our SCOTUS justices walk up as their morals, consciences, and self-awareness leaves their bodies. Maybe a handful of high school tours here and there, but mostly empty streets.
Now that I think about it, even I-95 wasn’t bad, so I’m guessing the weather kept folks off the beach as well.
“(T)he steps that our SCOTUS justices walk up as their morals, consciences, and self-awareness leaves their bodies.” Hoo hoo hoo. He shoots, he scores!
Siri continues to make me look like I’m in English as a second language mode, so glad you got the gist of it.
If this don’t look like a fine summer read … here’s your assignment: pick up a copy and let’s see where everyone goes with it!
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/670253/how-to-write-one-song-by-jeff-tweedy/
Kinda obvious even without an MBA that HBO is still around despite its execs constant fumbles and solely because their creatives and worker bees keep bailing them out with content. And that can be said of 90% of US corporations.
A few observers, Your Humble Narrator among them, wonder why any exec, no matter how stupid, would think it a good idea to paper over a legendary marque like “HBO” with the ridiculous “Max.”
“Max” what? Headroom? The Grinch’s dog? Aggravation?
Remember the slogan, “It’s not TV. It’s HBO”? Now it’s not even that anymore.
Speaking of stupid, Rumor Control hints that the nitwits running the Inside Outside Sideways Down Endorphin Mine & Currency Furnace, LLC, want to combine all the bicycle “brands” they’ve assembled — including VeloNews — into some low-rent, dime-store, junior-varsity version of The Avengers called “Velo.”
This was tried once by a previous gaggle of vulture capitalists, who couldn’t have cared less that there was already a French magazine operating under that name. It didn’t work then either. I still have some of the kit they were passing around instead of regular paychecks.
I will be stealing “currency furnace.”
My father in law referred to his daughter’s horses as “hay burning sons of a bitch.” And I worked with an aviator who described most Nat Guard training as “turning JP8 into noise.” But “currency furnace” might be my new all time fave in the worthless, oxygen thief category.
Every time I hear the term “burn rate” I picture a couple dudes in polo shirts and chinos shoveling greenbacks into a furnace.
“Gosh, Chip, wherever does it all come from?”
“Who cares, Thad? Just keep shoveling. There’s more where this comes from.”