“Be a giant or grain of sand / Words of wisdom, “Yes, I can.”
I overslept this morning and was rewarded for it.
Shambling drowsily through my morning chores, which include unburdening Miss Mia Sopaipilla’s litter box and removing the contents to the trash bin outside, I glanced up at the banana moon — and saw a shooting star.
Wow! Bonus! A Geminid meteor putting on a show just for me. I tipped Herself to it, she brought Miss Mia outside, and we saw a couple more before the gradually swelling morning light overwhelmed the zippy little fireballs.
Could this be an omen? Is the Lizard Portal finally closing? Maybe. I haven’t seen a day coyote lately. Like my fellow Burqueño Marc Maron I’ll go mystical if I’m terrified.
“And this is what he said on / his way to Armageddon. …”
I have no idea where or when I made the acquaintance of Tom Lehrer, who has gone west on us at the ripe old age of 97.
But I was immediately enthralled. What a mind!
I couldn’t do math at gunpoint. What few resources I possessed were directed at trying (and often failing) to make people laugh.
But Tom Lehrer could do both, and seemingly with ease. Numbers and words alike danced to his merrily sardonic tunes.
In the end, he chose academia over comedy. I expect his GPA was a wee bit more impressive than mine. At the age of 18 he received his bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Harvard; at that age I was a freshman on drugs and academic probation at Adams State College in Alamosa, Colo.
His music was ultimately just a momentary detour in an academic career that included teaching posts at Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of California, and even a stint with the Atomic Energy Commission.
I never caught his mathematical act at those venues. But I saw him perform on TV a time or two, and heard him now and then on FM radio, both freeform and public. My faves were “Wernher von Braun,” “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park,” “The Vatican Rag,” and “A Song for World War III,” which I suspect may have inspired Randy Newman’s “Political Science.”
And five years before he left us on Saturday, he remembered us in his will. Well, on his website, anyway, where he announced that:
[A]ll the lyrics on this website, whether published or unpublished, copyrighted or uncopyrighted, may be downloaded and used in any manner whatsoever, without requiring any further permission from me or any payment to me or to anyone else.
In other words, he relinquished the rights to all his songs, except for the melodies of a few that used his words but someone else’s music.
The curtain may have rung down, but his satirical legacy survives. So long, Tom, you never dropped a bomb.
Scanning The New York Times today I recalled the words of the late, great George Carlin of Manhattan: “Here’s another pack of jagoffs who ought to be strangled in front of their children.”
First up for a vigorous and final throttling: Whoever coined the abominable “polyworking,” which sounds vaguely sexy, like “polyamory,” but actually describes the need for more than one job to cover the payments on the used Ford Focus in which one sleeps between shifts in the barrel(s).
Erin Hatton, a sociology prof at the State University of New York at Buffalo who studies the labor market, told the NYT that the practice can be “a way to take back ownership of work and one’s career in a meaningful way, pushing back against the sense that you are identified by one job, one employer.”
But Hatton conceded that not being identified “by one job, one employer,” is … not always optional.
“There is an element of gloss to it that minimizes the hardship and economic need that forces them to cobble together a variety of subpar jobs,” she said.
Will this be on the final exam? Doesn’t matter, I’ll be working that day, and all of the others, too.
Next: Come on down, Matt Schulz, chief consumer finance analyst at LendingTree!
Matt told the NYT — in a story about people who have to finance their groceries — ““If you’re living paycheck to paycheck and you’re on a tight budget and you have several of these loans out at one time, it can be very easy to get over your skis here.”
“Over your skis?” You need a short-term loan to buy your Hot Pockets and you’re over the skis you don’t have? I mean, shit, dude, read the room. The room that looks a lot like a Ford Focus without a (duh) rooftop ski rack.
And as George reminds us: “Try to pay attention to the language we’ve all agreed on.” It probably won’t help you understand the kids on TikTok, but at least you’ll be able to read your job(s) application(s) and the fine print on that buy-now-pay-later deal.
Some Seattle crosswalks are playing a tune you can dance to. | KUOW Photo/Monica Nickelsburg
As all old comrades know, the political mantra around here is, “Remember, kids, when you’re smashing the State, keep a smile on your lips and a song in your heart.”
So, today’s Hero of the Revolution medal goes to whoever hacked a few Seattle crosswalk signals to play a deepfake of Jeff Bezos’ voice urging caution … not when crossing the street, but when taxing the rich.
Instead of the little robotic voice that tells you to wait until it’s safe to cross, at least five intersections in Seattle last week played something like this: “Hi, I’m Jeff Bezos. This crosswalk is sponsored by Amazon Prime with an important message. Please don’t tax the rich, otherwise all the other billionaires will move to Florida, too.”
Too bad there isn’t a video component to these easily-hacked signals. Someone could add a clip from Monty Python’s sketch “The Ministry of Silly Walks,” with deepfakes of Bezos, Musk, Zuckerberg, et al., screeching about how they’ll all goosestep off to Epstein’s Island, submarine bunkers, or Mars if they’re not left unmolested to use all us little people as household help and/or fuck-puppets.
Man, they really do it in the road at their West Gomorrah location. Let’s just look at the extras on this fabulous car! Wire-wheel spoke fenders, two-way sneeze-through wind vent, star-studded mudguards, sponge-coated edible steering column, chrome fender dents, and factory air-conditioned air from our fully factory-equipped air-conditioned factory. It’s a beautiful car, friend, with doors to match! Birch’s Blacklist says this automobile was stolen, but for you, friends, the complete price, only two-ninety-five hundred dollars, in easy monthly payments of twenty-five dollars a week, twice a week, and never on Sundays. …
Mad Blog Media 