I fight off the snow
I fight off the hail
Nothing makes me go
I’m like some vestigial tail
I’ll be here through eternity
If you want to know how long
If they cut down this tree
I’ll show up in a song
Not a lot of snow or hail to fight off in these parts lately.
Christmas brought a record high temperature — 65°, eclipsing the old mark set in 1955(!) — and it wasn’t even The Duck! City’s first record high this month.
Herself and I went out for a little pre-feast hike in the Sandia foothills with a couple hundred of our closest friends, their extended families, and their dogs. Only saw two cyclists in just under five miles, and their rigs didn’t look new to me, so, maybe not a festive holiday season for the local IBDs.
The good news is, we’re delivering the teachings of Jeebus to the Nigerians in the usual explosive fashion. So, at least the Military-Industrial Complex is ticking along nicely, if only in terms of supplying shiny objects to the news media, since it’s a little late to carpet-bomb the Epstein files.
The bad news is … well, not all that bad. I couldn’t locate any crosscut beef shanks for my beef vegetable soup, so I had to call an audible and run with another recipe that proved to be not quite as good as our favorite, which is from a “Better Homes and Gardens” cookbook with a 1981 copyright. After a week’s worth of chile-infused dishes I was striving for mild, and overachieved for a change.
However, Herself’s cornbread was superb, as was her salad, and thanks to exchanges with neighbors and colleagues we had an extensive menu of possibilities for dessert.
With the second season of “Fallout” finally available, we’d thought to revisit season one, since we’d forgotten what all the fuss was about. Alas, our Amazon Subprime Video membership is not ad-free, and the viewing experience was peppered at random with multiple sales pitches for depression meds, Range Rovers, and other shit that we don’t want, don’t need, and/or can’t afford, some of them running more than two minutes at a stretch.
Which was really a stretch. So this morning we decided to bring capitalism to its knees by signing up for the ad-free tier, then binge-watching both seasons before finally canceling the service entirely.
¡Venceremos! You’re welcome, comrades. Just crawl out through the fallout, baby.
Mad Blog Media 
We started season 2 of Severance yesterday and we were completely lost. I’m hoping what happened in season 1 will be rehashed a bit for us dull witted viewers.
I went out for an MTB ride with some old friends I used to ride with. I was the slowest but I knew the trails better so they made me lead. I’m paying for it now. The trail is located on the site of an old lumber mill right next to the river and there are two old cemeteries on the property. One is where the white people are buried and it’s fenced in and maintained. The other is the old black cemetery that is overgrown, vandalized and mostly forgotten. There is a fellow buried there that served in WW2. The local university went out and cleared it and did some ground penetrating radar on it and found a lot of unmarked graves. It’s all overgrown again. Some things never change.
Happy New Year!
You’re not alone. We walked away from “Severance” halfway through season one, then after people kept raving about it we dove back in and toughed it out. Really good performances but damme if I have the faintest idea where the hell it’s going.
Have you been watching “Pluribus?” That’s another oddball. Love the acting, and the off-the-charts weirdness of it all. But I’ma need my Vince Gilligan Secret Decoder Ring for that one, and I think Bob Odenkirk broke in while I was out on the bike one day and lifted it.
I liked Pluribus but as I told someone the other day I think Apple TV is stringing us along the way Zosia is string along Carol.
I liked the surreal opening credits of Severance season 2. That shit would make Dali say WTF?
You can almost hear the ghost of Steve Jobs saying, “But there’s just one more thing. …”
The design overhaul is so bad, folks are noticing the boring everyday stuff that no longer works. Shit that used to take one click now takes three. Frozen touchscreen, unresponsive scrolling.
I use a PC at work, and pretty much every day, I say out loud, how can you people just accept this as good enough?
But now I weigh it against all the crap I go through at home on a daily basis, and we are damned if we do, damned if we don’t, clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right …
Can’t even be smug about using a damn’ Mac anymore. So much random bullshit going on. The Dock keeps leaving my external display for the MBP’s internal, and sometimes it refuses to return. The Safari toolbar greys out and the only solution is a restart.
The iPhone regularly shuts off the camera’s shutter sound for no good reason I can think of. The Watch occasionally insists on a manual unlocking, refusing to recognize the usual wakeup-by-iPhone. The Fitness app regularly gives me “Effort” evaluations that bear absolutely no resemblance to the difficulty of the workout performed.
Little things. “Boring, everyday stuff,” as you note. But still, damn, etc.
I’m no marketing guru but when Ted Lasso is still at the top of your leader board, nearly two years after the last episode was released, it might say something about the quality of the rest of your inventory.
Apple let Alan Dye go after a nearly universal pan of the last round of updates, but it seems to me that for 30 years, everything Eddy Cue touched was either broken, late, or performing below its industry peers. Not only that, but everything they’ve ever taken away from him instantly performed better.
ATP discussed a rumor that Apple Fitness might go away. After increased storage, it is the only reason to have an Apple One subscription. News is a train wreck, Arcade is a joke … but Apple has 100 deputy assistant senior vice president with Duke MBA’s, who are looking at the fact that nobody subscribe solely to Apple Fitness. The damn thing is bought and paid for. The entire platform has been built, you could recycle old videos, randomly and forever, and compared to software engineers, the salaries of the dozen or so fitness gurus has got to be a rounding error.
I don’t know why it bothers me so much that this company is going down the shitter.
Yeah, I hear you. The thing that drew me to Apple in the first place was the simplicity of the Mac (this was back in the SE days).
Flash forward 36 years and it’s “One Battle After Another,” to steal a line from Hollywood, which stole it from the Weather Underground.
Just check out this post from Joe Rosenteel at Six Colors, which is up to its boot chime in former Apple employees.
I used to be pretty comfortable wrangling hardware and software in the Apple environment, but anymore I’m inclined to reach for the Universal Irish Tool (the ball-peen hammer). I’ve put off or canceled plans to replace old tech or add new stuff to my Apple Orchard because I just don’t want to navigate those troubled waters any more than absolutely necessary.
So, the 2016 iPad Pro loiters unused on a shelf (no storage remains) and will not be replaced. The iPhone 13 Mini will remain in harness until it drops stone cold dead. The 14-inch MacBook Pro I bought last year was frankly not worth the money I spent on it, not for my purposes, but my two 2014 MBPs were both bumping up against various dead ends, OS/app-wise. The 15-inch with its dead display (croaked by a “Genius” during a battery replacement) is now a desktop/archive, tethered to an external display. The 13-inch is the MBP I use during road trips.
Like you, I’m disappointed. Incremental improvements are one thing, but I’m not certain we’re even getting that much from Apple. And the obsession for making everything thin as a credit card boggles what remains of my mind. Give me a thicker, modular MacBook I can actually troubleshoot and repair and I’ll be a happy chappy.
After our hike rainout, we had our chicken chile prepared toe day before with some sourdough bread with real butter. Then, a Guinness while watching “ August Rush “ on blu-ray. Finished up the TV time with an episode of “Poirot” on PBS.
No new wars, heh? Complete release of all Epstein files, heh? Peace in Ukraine in a day, heh? Lower prices, heh? Great health care system, heh? And, the beat goes on. How stupid are the MAGA members? Pretty stupid, heh?
Don’t forget talking to children on the NORAD Santa Tracker Hotline about clean, beautiful coal, Bad Santa, and how well he did in Pennsylvania. Cheeziz Aitch Keerist, his golden escalator don’t go all the way to the lobby no more, is what.
He is still stuck on that broken escalator (metaphorically speaking) at floor 13. And, wait for it, there is NO floor 13.
Thus we shift gears from Steve Jobs to Rod Serling. “There’s the signpost up ahead. …”
I’m OK with a certain percentage of the population being stupid. Mathematically, half of us have to be below average. What bothers me as we don’t have the guard rails that we used to have. There are no watchdog on Congress, no checks on the president, a rogue Supreme Court, and a press that cannot attract enough eyeballs to keep the lights turned on, so they are chasing clicks instead of stories.
I’m asking for a favor here. Can you sou’westerners keep your record breaking temps to yourselves? It’s supposed to hit 61 here tomorrow in the Mitten State. And a few years back our license plate slogan was “Winter Wonderland “. Just ain’t right. Jeezus one day it’s Stormy Kroners, the next unpack the shorts. How’s a fella supposed to keep the hall closet organized?
Sorry ’bout that, Hoss. We’ll try to stick to chile exports and quality TV going forward.
Not much in the way of winter sports out thisaway, that’s for sure. We’ve had that one small snow, and it looks like we may get a bit of rain today, but the phrase “snow drought” is getting tossed around by the press.
I’m surprised that shop is still open. Ain’t it all like “woke” or sumpin’?
80° on Christmas™️ down in tri-state/dual-panhandle corner of Colorado. Santa he usually has to worry about carrots for his reindeer. This year he had to make sure they were sporting CamelBaks and had plenty of SPF 50.
Sou’Westerners? I think we’re all stealing weather forecasts from the Sudan or maybe the Great Victoria. Let us all know if you see dingos or kangaroos up in the Great White North.
Being “woke” is a good thing. I am woke right now and will stay that way. Being completely aware of the environment and people around you is necessary in a potentially dangerous situation. It is not a comfortable place to be for a long time. Jeff Cooper called it condition yellow. I would prefer the whole country and the people in it were in condition green.
I believe the rain that is falling on us from the loose tubular sprinkler in the white house is creating condition orange.
The old “situational awareness” is sure getting a good workout lately, que no? I got my head on a swivel and I’m an old white guy, f’chrissakes.