I mean, seriously.

DRUNK CLOWN AT A WEDDING!

ZOMG.

When I woke up on the 10th of January 3 years ago, for a minute things were pretty okay.

Then NPR came on, and it told us that Bowie had died, and in retrospect I’m pretty sure that’s when things started going to shit.

I mean, think about it:

• Bowie died on January 10
• Alan Rickman on January 14
• ABE FUCKING VIGODA died on January 26
• Prince died on April 21
• Muhammad Ali in June
• Leonard Cohen, November 7
• Carrie Fisher, two days after Christmas

Even Scalia finally shuffling off this mortal coil in February didn’t help, because of how absurdly, disgustingly craven the GOP would be in outright denying Obama his SCOTUS pick.

Oh, and then something happened in November.

But when I woke up, for a few minutes on the 10th of January in 2016, things were at least a little bit better, weren’t they?

But, uh, be careful.

(The original & non-paywalled Twitter Thread is also available.)

Holy CRAP I just got the most salesy-bullshit email EVER from VMWare.

GAZE up on this, together with my translation back to actual english:

Hello,

I’m reaching out to introduce myself and to ask for your guidance. I’m responsible for the Commercial customer segment at VMware, and Forproject Technology Inc is currently aligned to my team. We’re in the process of finalizing our resource coverage for 2019 and before we make any changes I figured I’d ask directly about your preferred coverage to ensure we’re on the same page.

“I just got assigned your account.”

Our charter is to help lead our customers through secured cloud and business mobility transformations, which includes periodic overviews of the entire VMW portfolio of solutions. A lot has changed in the past few years, including our role in the largest technology merger in history (with Dell/EMC), several key acquisitions (Wavefront, VeloCloud) and our joint offering with Amazon Web Services – VMC on AWS. We’d love an opportunity to walk you through the current VMware roadmap and to understand your top priorities to see if there is an opportunity to expand our relationship.

“You’re on our customer list and we want to see if we can get more money out of you pitch you some other products.”

If you’d prefer continued coverage from our sales, engineering, and specialist teams, my ask is for a 30-minute roadmap and discovery meeting with Brecca Hansen from your VMW account team.

“Can we waste half an hour of your time with a sales pitch?”

If you’re happy simply maintaining support, we can align you to the renewals organization who’ll be more than capable of facilitating support quotes moving forward.

“We have no idea if you’re currently under support, but we can put you in touch with those people if you want.”

Please let us know which option suits you best, or if there is someone else in your organization you’d like us to contact regarding this decision.

“Can we have some more email addresses to spam?”

I look forward to hearing from you.

“This is not my real email address.”

Over at GQ, of all places, there’s a really lovely set of remembrances of Anthony Bourdain by folks who knew him and worked with him. Worth your time for sure.

“The Peruvian surfer Domingo Pianezzi rides a wave with his alpaca, Pisco, at San Bartolo Beach in Lima, Peru, on March 16, 2010.”

(From [The Atlantic’s “blue wave” photo feature today.

Via Kottke, here’s a live, 24×7 feed from a train in Norway. Enjoy.

With this memory from Facebook, we enter Broken Hip Advent!

Reader, we did in fact book that trip, but we never saw either show, because 48 days later, on November 20th, I did this, which well and truly starts the 128 day Cursed Holiday Season:

It was more or less a parade of Suck from 20 November until 21 January, otherwise known at this house as End of PICC Line Day.

We got a little reprieve in the Joco Cruise (30 Jan through 8 Feb; you can rent wheelchairs on cruise ships!), and then the real fun started on Glorious PT Day, 16 February.

Walker Liberation Day is 25 February. I wasn’t done — I needed a cane, which I bought at Southland Hardware — but we were definitely on our way out of the woods.

Finally, 128 days after my injury, there was this:

The whole saga, from the preamble of the potential two-plays-in-Chicago trip through the first time I rode my real bike again, is 176 days, or almost half a year.

It’s basically immoral to be rich:

Here is a simple statement of principle that doesn’t get repeated enough: if you possess billions of dollars, in a world where many people struggle because they do not have much money, you are an immoral person. The same is true if you possess hundreds of millions of dollars, or even millions of dollars. Being extremely wealthy is impossible to justify in a world containing deprivation.

Tony Hawk tweets about being not recognized, and it’s hilarious.

“When Dani came to buy my Porsche, my car washer was astonished to learn that the bruise on her arm came from sword fighting.”

….and let ol’Chet tell you about the late eighties.

(Seriously, don’t miss this photo set.)

ON THIS DAY, 214 years ago, Alexander Hamilton was shot in a duel by Aaron Burr.

He died the next day.

Here is an elk calf, playing in a puddle. Enjoy.

Lifehacker: You’re Probably not Allergic to Penicillin After All

I went through most of my life thinking I was allergic to penicillin. I’d had hives with a dose of the stuff as a child, and an also-allergic family member taught me to look for an allergy section on every medical form I filled out, and make sure to write “penicillin” on the line.

But the reason I’m telling you this story is that it turns out I’m not allergic to it after all. About 10 percent of us have a penicillin allergy on our charts, but less than 1 percent of us have a legit allergy to go with it. And if you can take that fake allergy off your chart, you’ll likely have an easier and cheaper time in all your future dealings with the medical system.

I have my own tale about this, which longtime readers of Heathen know: Four years ago this November, I was in a pretty ugly bike crash and broke my hip. One of my surgical sites contracted a postop infection. It was NOT the very-scary MRSA; it was just garden variety staph, which is usually quashed with a cycle of garden variety penicillin.

Except I’ve lived my life believing I was allergic to it, which I dutifully explained. Well, sucks to be ME, because when you have a postop staph situation and can’t take penicillin, the next option is something called vancomycin — which cannot be taken orally. I had to get a PICC line and take it intravenously.

Three times a day, for about 90 minutes at a crack.

For seven weeks.

My mother, who was a physical therapist in her working life, had been following my medical misadventure very closely. When we got to this point, she commented, offhand, “well, you know, we’re not actually sure if you’re allergic to it or not. It’s just that your father was, and so we just assumed you were.”

DAMMIT.

Middle-class people are taking MDMA wrapped in cheese in a new trend called ‘brieing’.

So for reasons known but to God, some Internet rando just favorited a picture in my Flickr stream from 2007. It’s from a then-current meme about what we carry in our pockets. Click thru, because the picture is annotated, but here’s a smaller version:

I’m amused at what’s changed, and also at what’s the same.

• I still carry a Swiss Army Knife, but it’s a smaller model, since I never have to take computers apart anymore.
• I still carry that coupon.
• After years off the road, I quit carrying a Bluetooth headset — until this year, when I bought some Airpods, which are kind of crap for real listening but GREAT for phone conversations and online meetings. What interesting is that the Plantronics in the picture also did the “case is also a charger” thing that the Airpods do, if I remember correctly.
• Same ring. The annotation on the ring notes our “days married” count at the time, which was 662. It’s now 1,293.
• There’s always a book.
• The current flashlight is MUCH SMALLER, much brighter, and much cheaper.
• I never carry a USB drive anymore, probably because online storage is more viable with better bandwidth, and also because our phones are so much better.
• Same money clip. Different money, though.
• I still HAVE that watch, but for the last 2 years I’ve been wearing an Apple Watch pretty much exclusively. I got a series 1 watch in the spring of 2016, to support training for a half marathon I was doing that fall, and the overall utility was so great I wore it pretty much all the time. When the S3 was introduced last year, with real waterproofing and on-board cell, I upgraded.
• Yup, still notebook nerd, and I still use a Vanishing Point, though several years ago my brother gave me a nicer iteration of that pen.
• I never leave the house, so keys are in the hallway.
• No more contacts. I stopped being able to tolerate them several years ago; oh well.
• It’s more about Burt’s Bees now than Carmex, but life goes on.
• That Microsoft/HTC phone lasted like 6 months. Pretty soon, I was too frustrated with how unremittingly DUMB it was about so, so many things. For one thing, you needed a 3rd party mail client for IMAP, which is hilariously stupid. For another, it would do astoundingly silly things like continue to refresh web pages with the display off, so if you were reading CNN and put it back in your pocket, odds are the phone would be dead when you tried to use it later. I replaced it with a first-gen iPhone, and I’ve been on iOS ever since (OG -> 3GS -> 4 -> 5 -> 6 -> 6S -> 8).
• The wallet finally gave up the ghost; current version is a Saddleback I’ve had for many years now.

You oughta read this.

It begins:

William Eggleston first tried peyote one summer in the early 1960s while visiting a friend in Oxford, Mississippi. You can find the story in a memoir by University of Mississippi football star (and later Dark Shadows actor) Jimmy Hall, who was there at the time. Eggleston had invited Hall to join him and his friend, and the three men puzzled over the green-blue cactus in its cardboard box, purchased via mail-order from a nursery in Laredo, Texas.

And later:

The house in the photograph belonged to a man named Tom “T. C.” Boring, a dentist born and raised in Greenwood, whom Eggleston has described as the best friend he ever had in the world. He was the scion of a well-respected Delta family, a sharp and promising Southern archetype who glided his way through the University of Mississippi, Loyola University, and the Navy before coming home to Greenwood and gradually, ungracefully losing his mind.

[…]Boring had a penchant for exotic plants, younger women, and corn whiskey. In public, he often wore tweed suits and turtleneck sweaters, and smoked a pipe. But more often than not, he wore as little as possible; at home, he preferred to avoid clothes altogether. At the height of summer, he’d keep his air-conditioner cranked up to full blast so he could always have a fire going in his living room, for ambiance.

He slept odd hours. He made cryptic jokes. He owned a number of iguanas. His prized possession was his pet capybara, which he’d walk around the neighborhood on a leash.

Keep the South weird.

(Astute readers will of course note that the photo mentioned in the title is also the album cover for Big Star’s Radio City, though the edition you probably own is a combo CD with #1 Record that has a different cover.)