Can you please stop naming your album collections of demos/outtakes/alternate takes /etc with any version of "The __________Sessions", please?
I remain,
Saturday, June 06, 2026
An Open Letter to Musicians
Dear Musicians,
Can you please stop naming your album collections of demos/outtakes/alternate takes /etc with any version of "The __________Sessions", please?
I remain,
Can you please stop naming your album collections of demos/outtakes/alternate takes /etc with any version of "The __________Sessions", please?
I remain,
A Documentary I'd Like to See
Friday, June 05, 2026
A Note on the President's Speech Today at the American Agriculture Roundtable in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin
Moi Say Moi back in 2020:
One curious thing about Trump is he seems incapable of pronouncing the word “industry” correctly.If any reporters wanna see Trump's head pop right off his neck they should ask him on live tv why it's June 5, 2026 and he still doesn't appear to know how to pronounce "industry" correctly.
Thursday, June 04, 2026
Xmastime Multiple Choice
I've gotten this text two days in a row; if I get it again how should I reply:
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A. You walked in on me banging your mom
B. You told me you invented anilingus?
C. Cheers it’s me, Prince Andrew!
I will keep you posted - thank you, Earth!
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XMASTIME: Always Learning, Always Optimizing
ONE THING I'VE LEARNED AFTER TWO TRIPS TO THE DC IMPROV OVER THE COURSE OF A MONTH:
Whether a lower-tiered comic is 25, 35 or 105 the odds of them starting a sentence with "I'll tell you something about getting old..." are exactly 100%.
100 Songs That Shaped Alternative Rock
I usually find myself screaming at these kind of things like a fucking lunatic but found this to be worthy of my time - I like 41 of these songs, and if you can guess the exact 41 then you win "41 SECONDS IN THE CLOSET WITH XMASTIME"!!!!
Good luck! Win or lose, you'll need it!
In America
It's becoming pretty obvious that even amongst the Boomers there is a Civil War raging: Clinton’s election in 1992 appeared to celebrate the maturing of the class of Boomers who actually enjoyed the 60s, maybe smoking a little weed listening to the Stones and celebrating people being free to be themselves, and Trump’s election seems to be the crowning achievement of the class of Boomers who spent the 60s bitching & moaning about the Boomers who were enjoying themselves and can now exact their revenge on them; they’re the guys in school who wanted to take names whenever the teacher left the room but now they’re the teacher.
Wednesday, June 03, 2026
The Incredible Luck of Being
Like me you’ve probably seen the countless “do you know how insane the odds were against you even ever existing?” articles out there, and they’re all great/spot on and go like this:
But the article does have a nice little add-on I’ve rarely seen:
The writer goes on to (lazily) mimic the old standard trope “you have a responsibility to make your life mean something!”, which actually flies directly in the face of its overarching sentiment of how vast both our cosmos and histories are.
In general I try to not be ruled by “make this life means something!” and instead try to live in reverence of any moment I can pause to remind myself how lucky I am to even be sitting here typing this; when it comes to questions about LIFE!! and what it all means I prefer to alternate between amusement and bemusement as much as possible while remembering what I said a few years ago:
In the end your life will mean absolutely nothing to anybody and anything; what is important is what it means right now.
Each human female has about 300,000 eggs during the fertile period of her life. Each male ejaculation has about 300 million sperm. Thus each conception contains about a hundred thousand billion different possible combinations of DNA. In other words, there are a hundred thousand billion unique and different human beings that could result from each procreation event. Only one of those possible combinations led to each of you reading this article at this moment. Here’s a way to visualize that extremely tiny fraction. If you took a very long ruler that stretched from here to the planet Pluto, one inch of that distance would be you. The rest of the distance would be other possible human beings that could have been, but never were. Each of us has won a lottery with a hundred thousand billion different players.
But the article does have a nice little add-on I’ve rarely seen:
From the distant past, billions of years ago, to the distant future, billions of years ahead, the universe will never see another one of you.
Usually I’m comforted by the vastness of the Universe rendering my very being literally meaningless, but then sometimes I can’t help but wonder if maybe I really am the center of the Universe; why else would I even be here?
Tuesday, June 02, 2026
America Will Continue to Get Worse Because We Refuse to Have the Stomach to Make It Stop Getting Worse
I’m hearing rumblings re: IF Trump does ever go away, what will we do with MAGA? It’s interesting because the whole Trump/MAGA thing feels new, but it will be 13 fucking years by the time 2028 rolls around and 13 fucking years is not chump change – 13 years is 37% of my adult life – 13 years of having to stand there and hope to NOT hurt their feelings, since that’s why we’re in this endless race to destroy the Earth in the first place, 13 years of gently brushing their hair and making sure they know they’re being “heard”, even though it turns out what they decided they wanted was to destroy themselves in the name of crushing libtards.
These are the same people who think it makes them look smart to bray “the government should be run like a business!” and yet we already know that if they’re presented with endless rows of factual data that clearly shows “Everything You’ve Chosen Has Ended Up Being the Worst Possible Decision” they will only double down on more terrible decisions no matter what, which from what I can tell is the exact opposite of how a business runs.
The two historical parallels in treating losers of conflicts are startlingly dissimilar in their executions: after the Civil War we decided to make the Confederacy feel as little pain as possible – if any – and stood by silently to let them run amok with their Lost Cause bullshit and it’s a fair point to say that 161 years after the Civil War we’re still paying the price for not dropping the hammer, as state-sponsored racial discrimination is on the rise and getting worse by the moment.
On the other hand, pretty much the second Hitler died, Naziism in Germany disappeared. It’s never spoken about in reverent tones like we do the Confederacy, there’s no version there of an entire industry based on promulgating Hitler’s fantasies the way there is in the American South & the Confederacy. Hitler failed and so Germans moved on with their lives while renouncing Naziism, but The American South has not done the same with the Confederacy and neither will MAGA, and the reason will be because we decided not to, that “the American people don’t have the stomach” for atonement.
But they do have the stomach for more self-destruction? Again, 13 years isn’t nothing – a coupla 13-year runs strung tother is all you’ll ever get in this life & that’s only if you’re lucky, so how many of them do you wanna spend spiraling into the same hole of despair over & over again waiting for some magical reward from Trump to appear?
MAGA needs to disappear like the Nazis but that’s not as easy to do when it's 100% based on feelings and daddy issues, and I’m *GUESSING* that a lot of time amongst liberal circles will be spent trying to figure how to incorporate MAGA into a different way of doing things without them automatically screeching about elite condescension etc etc & running right back to Daddy, who will tell them that THEY’RE the special ones and that their great reward is coming in just two short weeks; meanwhile, their absolute obsession with being victims will not release them back into the wild without a pathetic fight.
Which means that even if we ever do get done with Trump and settle back into a “normal” presidency, it will barely be a matter of months before we start hearing again about all the people in Rust Belt diners who are angry at being “left behind”, “forgotten” etc etc etc by elitist liberals (also, remember how quickly people went from being relieved to get back to a normal, boring president before starting to grumble about being bored?), even though it was their own Orange Daddy who spent 8 years happily swimming in the very swamp they pretend to detest, stuffing cash into his already-stuffed wallet as they repeatedly vote their own bank accounts into despair; no endless stream of impervious data will make them admit that they were wrong and convince them to be a part of the solution rather than the problem.
There needs to be a national humiliation, a “we fucking told you so, now shut the fuck up and let the adults run things again” moment, but we know that won’t happen because we’ll let ourselves believe that it’s more important to just move on without consequences, meaning we’re pretty much guaranteed to still be talking about these motherfuckers in the year 2187, only we won’t be in a country called the United States of America.
These are the same people who think it makes them look smart to bray “the government should be run like a business!” and yet we already know that if they’re presented with endless rows of factual data that clearly shows “Everything You’ve Chosen Has Ended Up Being the Worst Possible Decision” they will only double down on more terrible decisions no matter what, which from what I can tell is the exact opposite of how a business runs.
The two historical parallels in treating losers of conflicts are startlingly dissimilar in their executions: after the Civil War we decided to make the Confederacy feel as little pain as possible – if any – and stood by silently to let them run amok with their Lost Cause bullshit and it’s a fair point to say that 161 years after the Civil War we’re still paying the price for not dropping the hammer, as state-sponsored racial discrimination is on the rise and getting worse by the moment.
On the other hand, pretty much the second Hitler died, Naziism in Germany disappeared. It’s never spoken about in reverent tones like we do the Confederacy, there’s no version there of an entire industry based on promulgating Hitler’s fantasies the way there is in the American South & the Confederacy. Hitler failed and so Germans moved on with their lives while renouncing Naziism, but The American South has not done the same with the Confederacy and neither will MAGA, and the reason will be because we decided not to, that “the American people don’t have the stomach” for atonement.
But they do have the stomach for more self-destruction? Again, 13 years isn’t nothing – a coupla 13-year runs strung tother is all you’ll ever get in this life & that’s only if you’re lucky, so how many of them do you wanna spend spiraling into the same hole of despair over & over again waiting for some magical reward from Trump to appear?
MAGA needs to disappear like the Nazis but that’s not as easy to do when it's 100% based on feelings and daddy issues, and I’m *GUESSING* that a lot of time amongst liberal circles will be spent trying to figure how to incorporate MAGA into a different way of doing things without them automatically screeching about elite condescension etc etc & running right back to Daddy, who will tell them that THEY’RE the special ones and that their great reward is coming in just two short weeks; meanwhile, their absolute obsession with being victims will not release them back into the wild without a pathetic fight.
Which means that even if we ever do get done with Trump and settle back into a “normal” presidency, it will barely be a matter of months before we start hearing again about all the people in Rust Belt diners who are angry at being “left behind”, “forgotten” etc etc etc by elitist liberals (also, remember how quickly people went from being relieved to get back to a normal, boring president before starting to grumble about being bored?), even though it was their own Orange Daddy who spent 8 years happily swimming in the very swamp they pretend to detest, stuffing cash into his already-stuffed wallet as they repeatedly vote their own bank accounts into despair; no endless stream of impervious data will make them admit that they were wrong and convince them to be a part of the solution rather than the problem.
There needs to be a national humiliation, a “we fucking told you so, now shut the fuck up and let the adults run things again” moment, but we know that won’t happen because we’ll let ourselves believe that it’s more important to just move on without consequences, meaning we’re pretty much guaranteed to still be talking about these motherfuckers in the year 2187, only we won’t be in a country called the United States of America.
Monday, June 01, 2026
Sunday, May 31, 2026
HEADLINES THAT WARM THE HEART, with Xmastime
RETURNING SOLDIER STICKS IT TO EX-WIFE BY SURPRISING DAUGHTER WITH EXTRA SCREEN TIME
Xmastime So Sayeth, So Sayeth Xmastime
People who believe aliens are secretly visiting us treat aliens the same as Christians treat God, as some mysterious being/non-being who surreptitiously gives us riddles & hints instead of just showing up & saying “hey everybody it's me, here’s what’s going on…”.
Saturday, May 30, 2026
Bass at 66
Paperback Writer b/w Rain was released 66 years ago today. It's the A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving of mid-period Beatles, sandwiched & somewhat overlooked between the much more heralded singles that came immediately before and after (We Can Work It Out/Day Tripper & Penny Lane/Strawberry Fields Forever) but Paperback Writer/Rain kicked off an explosion of sound innovation that the band would continue to push until their final breaths together, changing the way rock & roll bass was both recorded & listened to ever since.
From legendary Beatles engineer Geoff Emerick's Here, There and Everywhere:
From legendary Beatles engineer Geoff Emerick's Here, There and Everywhere:
Fortunately, as Paul and John turned to George Harrison and began showing him the chords to "Paperback Writer," inspiration struck. It occurred to me that since microphones are in fact simply loudspeakers wired in reverse (in technical terms, both are transducers that convert sound waves to electrical signals, and vice versa), why not try using a loudspeaker as a microphone? Logically, it seemed that whatever can push bass signal out can also take it in—and that a large loudspeaker should be able to respond to low frequencies better than a small microphone.
The more I thought about it, the more it made sense. I broached my plan, gingerly, to Phil McDonald. His response was somewhat predictable: "You're daft; you've completely gone around the twist." Ignoring him, I took a walk down the hall and talked it over with Ken Townsend, our maintenance engineer. He thought my idea had some merit. "Sounds plausible," he said. "Let's wire a speaker up that way and try it."
Over the next few hours, while the boys rehearsed with George Martin, Ken and I conducted a few experiments. To my delight, the idea of using a speaker as a microphone seemed to work pretty well. Even though it didn't deliver a lot of signal and was kind of muffled, I was able to achieve a good bass sound by placing it up against the grille of a bass amplifier, speaker to speaker, and then routing the signal through a complicated setup of compressors and filters—including one huge experimental unit that I secretly borrowed from the office of Mr. Cook, the manager of the maintenance department.
With renewed confidence, I returned to the studio to try it out for real. Paul wasn't as nontechnical as John, but this was pretty way out, even by Beatles standards. He looked at me in a funny way as I set up the big, bulky loudspeaker in front of his amp instead of the usual microphone, but he didn't say anything, and neither did George Martin, who by now was getting used to my Rube Goldberg approach to recording. They returned their attention to the rehearsals, giving me the opportunity to cautiously raise the fader carrying the bass signal. Paul's distinctively fluid bass line in "Paperback Writer" consisted mostly of notes played high up on the lowest string, which helped round out the tone further still. His playing was also more melodic and busy than on previous tracks. It sounded absolutely huge, so much so that I became somewhat concerned that it might actually make the needle jump out of the groove when it was finally cut to vinyl. But Paul loved the sound, and it was eventually left to my mate Tony Clark to cut the master lacquer. I was glad Tony had gotten the assignment, and he did a brilliant job. If it had been one of the older guys, they would have either slashed all the bass out of it, or sent it back and told us to mix it again.
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