I became an uncle for the first time in January of 2006. For a variety of reasons — mostly, I suspect, because phones weren’t cameras and I didn’t get back into photography until a later — the earliest picture I have of her is this, when she’s about 13 months:
Erin just sent me a new picture of FirstNiece. This is her with her packed car, about to drive away to college:
Time, man. It’ll get you.
Godspeed, Caroline.
Something interesting came up the other day: in conversation elsewhere, I learned that Joe Biden is the ONLY member of his generational cohort (“The Silent Generation,” born between 1928 and 1945) to ever be President, and given the age of that group it’s likely none will follow him.
After Ike, POTUS was always a member of the so-called “Greatest Generation,” born between 1901 and 1927. They fought the war, hence the name. So, after Ike — a member of the prior “Lost” generation, born in 1890 — we had a parade of Greatests for thirty years:
Then we skipped the Silent folks entirely, and the Boomers took over for nearly another 30 years:
It’s only then that a member of the Silent cohort got elected, in what was really a black-swan electoral event in lots of ways — absent the very specific factors of the 2016 race, it’s easy to imagine a world where no Silent gets elected at all. Instead, Joseph R. Biden, born 1942, was inaugurated in 2021, and turned 79 his first year in office.
It seems clear he’ll remain the only Silent to ever sit in the Oval.
That got me thinking: Why?
Turns out? Numbers. The Silent cohort was comparatively small — especially compared to the groups that came before and after. There are lots of reasons for this, but the biggest ones are probably the Depression and the War depressing birth rates.
Pew suggests the Silent group was “only” about 47M births; compare that to the Boomers at 76M.
All this points me to an uncomfortable realization: my own cohort, GenX, is also a small group sandwiched between two much larger generations (the Boomers and the Millennials). That could lead to the Oval skipping us, too. :(
Oh well.
In 1977, we humans did something audacious. We launched Voyager 1 towards the outer planets, with an idea that maybe we’d get more. It was the second craft, after its sibling Voyager 2, to fly past Jupiter, and was the first to take close-up photos of Jupiter’s moons when it arrived there some 18 months later. By 1980 Saturn was in its sights, where it gave us the first images of Titan and Tethys.
By the end of 1980, it entered what NASA referred to as its “extended mission,” flying ever father from Earth. In 1990, just before its camera shut down forever, its operators pivoted it to take the famous Pale Blue Dot photograph, about which Carl Sagan said:
That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
Voyager was built in the 1970s, with the technology available in those years. Over time, the radioactive isotopes it uses for energy have decayed, as they are wont to do, and with that decay came a gradual loss of power. Systems had to be shut down, one after the other, including the aforementioned camera (though one wonders how much of a loss that was; where it is, there is nothing to see).
It left the Solar System 14 years ago, and kept going. They thought we might get a solid 3 years out of it, and yet here we are, four decades later, talking about it.
Voyager 1 is the farthest spacecraft from Earth, and the margin is not close. It is some 15 billion kilometers away now. Radio signals from Earth take some 22 hours to reach it. The reply takes, of course, another 22. That record is unlikely to be broken; as noted here, there are only two others in the race: Voyager 2 and New Horizons, and due to mission parameters both will likely die well before they exceed Voyager’s distance.
Voyager, though, is dying. In December the data stream back from it — data that spent 22 hours in transit — became gibberish. Nobody knows why; it could be a thousand thousand things, but there is no way to fix it. CrookedTimber continues:
Voyager Mission Control used to be a couple of big rooms full of busy people, computers, giant screens. Now it’s a single room in a small office building in the San Gabriel Valley, in between a dog training school and a McDonalds. The Mission Control team is a handful of people, none of them young, several well past retirement age.
And they’re trying to fix the problem. But right now, it doesn’t look good. You can’t just download a new OS from 15 billion kilometers away. They would have to figure out the problem, figure out if a workaround is possible, and then apply it… all with a round-trip time of 45 hours for every communication with a probe that is flying away from us at a million miles a day. They’re trying, but nobody likes their odds.
So at some point — not tomorrow, not next week, but at some point in the next few months — they’ll probably have to admit defeat. And then they’ll declare Voyager 1 officially over, dead and done, the end of a long song.
(See also: It’s Quieter in the Twilight, and excellent documentary from last year about the folks still working on Voyager.)
Of course, even dead Voyager will continue moving, forever, unless it hits something. It’s not pointed towards any star we know, but that could change in a long enough time scale. After billions of years (yes!), our Milky Way galaxy will collide with its neighbor, Andromeda. From this article:
After those 5 billion years, modeling is tricky. That’s when the Milky Way is due to collide with its massive neighbor, the Andromeda galaxy, and things get messy. “The orderly spiral shape will be severely warped, and possibly destroyed entirely,” Oberg said. The Voyagers will be caught up in the merger, with the details difficult to predict so far in advance.
Meanwhile, the vicarious sightseeing continues. Oberg and his colleague calculated that in this 5-billion-year model-friendly period, each of the Voyagers likely visits a star besides our sun within about 150 times the distance between Earth and the sun, or three times the distance between the sun and Pluto at the dwarf planet’s most distant point.
Precisely which star that might be, however, is tricky — it may not even be a star we know today.
“While neither Voyager is likely to get particularly close to any star before the galaxies collide, the craft are likely to at least pass through the outskirts of some [star] system,” Oberg said. “The very strange part is that that actually might be a system that does not yet exist, of a star that has yet to be born.”
Nick Cave is perhaps the pinnacle of the “if you know, you know” artist. He’s kind of been quietly there now for decades, producing a staggering amount of material; his creativity and work ethic are remarkable. If he’s new to you, the most likely times you’ve heard his music are perhaps this sequence in one of the final Potter films (“O Children”, from the 2004 double album Abattoir Blues/Lyre of Orpheus), or, in a very different vein, at the end of the long tracking shot sequence from the first season of True Detective (“Honeybee Let’s Fly To Mars,” from his side group Grinderman).
Cave started out as a loud, post-punk rock and roller — not for nothing is he considered something of a godfather to goth — but as time passed, his material became a bit more contemplative. He wrote prose and screenplays and film scores, branching out in a way that honestly middle aged musicians quite often do not. In 1999, he married the former Susie Bick, a fashion designer and model whom you’ve doubtless seen in record stores, since it’s her on the cover of The Damned album Phantasmagoria, from 1985. (Later, she’d appear on the cover of Cave’s own record Push the Sky Away.)
All of this is context.
A year after they married, Susie and Nick had a pair of twins, Arthur and Earl. Nick also had a son from a previous relationship, Jethro, born in 1991.
Eight years ago this July, Arthur Cave fell from a cliff near Brighton, in England, where they lived. Grief for Arthur is the through-line on the two most recent albums from Cave and his band, the Bad Seeds: 2016’s Skeleton Tree, already in progress when he died, and the 2019 followup Ghosteen. Both are achingly beautiful, searing portraits of grief, loss, and hope, with a depth and power that always leaves me complete stunned. They are the work of musicians at the height of their powers, inspired by a profound and elemental human state.
This is still context.
Cave has run, since 2018, a site called The Red Hand Files. People write in; Cave responds publicly.
Earlier this month, someone wrote in:
Not a question at all.
On Sat the 30 December my beautiful 16yo son Murray took his own life. He was contacted online by what he believed was a girl he knew. He was extorted and then panicked, hanging himself. He was a wonderful guy who drew beautifully, played guitar and was a straight A student. He was private person and hated being the centre of attention. His world would have crashed around him at the thought of sexual pictures with his peer group. Our hearts are broken, literally agony.
The song we have chosen for the reflection piece at his funeral on Friday in the Cathedral is Distant Sky. In that space it should sound magnificent. I certainly hope so.
In writing this it helps to feel the reality of where we are as a family. We will keep going but fuck me it’s hard.
MARK, SCOTLAND
Cave’s response is beautiful and perfect, and it closes with words I wish anyone struggling with grief would carry with them. You should go read the whole thing, but those closing words are:
Be kind and patient and gentle and merciful with one another. Stay close. Hold firm. Forgive. Grief prepares the way. Joy will in time find you. It is searching for you, in the impossible darkness, even now.
Love, Nick
Four years ago today, I shared this news story on Facebook with the comment “Isn’t this how Contagion started?”
We had no idea. It begins:
A never-before-seen virus that sparked an outbreak of viral pneumonia in the Chinese city of Wuhan has now killed one person and spread to Thailand via a sick traveler.
On Saturday, January 11, officials in Wuhan reported that a 61-year-old man died January 9. Testing indicated he was carrying the virus, which researchers have confirmed is a novel strain of coronavirus.
Patricia Lockwood meets the pope.
I posted on FB yesterday about a serious crisis a client company of mine. The short version is that a computer of theirs melted down, and only then did they discover that while the database WAS creating regular backups, those backups were stored ONLY ON THAT SAME COMPUTER, and were thus just as lost as the rest of the data from that system.
Oops.
I mean, I say “oops,” but in many cases this would also be a “please gather your things and leave your badge on the desk” kind of situation for whomever made that choice. It’s inexcusable in a professional environment.
But you know what? It’s also inexcusable for your personal data.
People ask me, so this is how I manage my personal and professional data security. Just accept that someday, something is going to go badly and irrevocably wrong, and take steps to protect yourself now — and this means more than one mechanism.
Basic Local Backup. I use a Mac, so I have access to Apple’s excellent Time Machine feature. A cheap USB drive is plugged into my laptop, and the Time Machine process keeps that drive up to date with a versioned backup of everything on my laptop. You can “scroll backwards” in time to recover a version of that document you want from today, or from last Thursday, or whatever. It’s VERY powerful, and to date the ONLY one of these mechanisms I’ve ever had to use in a crisis. I do not know what options exist for this on Windows, but if you’re on a Mac you are a FOOL if you’re not taking advantage of this.
Device Sync & Mobile Access. I use Dropbox a LOT. In fact, I have two accounts — one personal, and one with my company. All my active work files are in one of those accounts, and sync (encrypted) through the cloud so I can access them from my phone, or my iPad, or from my backup laptop. This isn’t precisely a backup mechanism, but it’s a powerful way to give you access to data in multiple places, and to make it easy to continue to work if your main machine fails or freezes up or whatever. There are now several competing tools for Dropbox-like behavior, like iCloud and OneDrive and whatnot, but I don’t trust ANY of them like I do Dropbox. Dropbox costs money, but it’s worth it.
Online backup. I’ve used many systems over the years for this, but the current one is iDrive. It’s a little technical; I’m told that Backblaze is a simpler choice for people who don’t do Computer for a living. With these services, you point the local software at a folder or folders, and it uploads your data to an (encrypted) online backup for you.
Periodic images. On a Mac, at least, it’s pretty easy to create a complete clone of your main drive, OS and all. I used to do this regularly, but I’ve fallen out of the habit. If you have critical data, though, and you’re going light on one of the other three methods, maybe fold this in, too. Be aware, though, that just keeping a recent copy of your data isn’t going to protect against file corruption that doesn’t show up quickly. I lost some photos this way about 20 years ago; this is why most real backup tools do versioned backups that allow you to recover files as they were in the past.
So, Chet, ever had to USE one of these?
Glad you asked. I’ve definitely used the versioning available in Dropbox and Time Machine to recover from a file level screwup of my own doing, but the only time I’ve needed a backup in a catastrophic way was when we were robbed in a smash-and-grab incident several years ago. Our backyard was unsecured, and my laptop was visible through the sliding glass door. They were in and out in probably a minute, and I was out a laptop — but they left all the stuff plugged INTO the laptop (including the charger, LOL).
I’m insured, of course, so I just went to the Apple store to buy a replacement. I plugged it in, and then plugged my Time Machine drive into it and told the Migration Assistant to treat the backup as the source. In an hour or two, it was as if nothing had ever happened — even my browser windows were in the same place.
Absent Time Machine, I still wouldn’t have lost anything — then as now, I was using several other mechanisms — but it would’ve been MUCH more hassle and taken MUCH more time and effort. Those paths need to exist, though — what if they’d taken the drive? Or what if the house had burned down? Or ….
Now, go and do likewise.
So I’m doing some biz travel this week, for the first time in a LONG time, and I was concerned my usual briefcase, iconic though it is, wasn’t going to get it done this time. I need to carry a few more things than usual, and it can get cramped.
But then I remembered something in a closet. I have an original Land’s End “square rigger” briefcase that’s basically the same form factor, but a little bigger — big enough, for example, to hold the collateral I need to carry. I pulled it out, and realized just how old it was — it was a gift from my mother when I was in college, probably in 1990 or so. I remember having it in the dorm, and I moved out of the dorm in spring 1991, so earlier than that for certain.
It’s got a reasonable but not unseemly amount of wear — especially for something this old — but then I found a kind of time capsule in it. The bag, like many, has a luggage tag that take business cards.
The one showing was for a job I left in 2001, but the card design dates from probably 1998 or 1999.
Behind that card is my business card from a job I held from 1994 through early 1997.
And behind THAT card is a handwritten one with my address from Tuscaloosa on it. I left Tuscaloosa in 1994.
Ten days ago, on 9 January, I showed up at Memorial Hermann’s Ortho Hospital at five goddamn o’clock in the morning, taking my last steps on a hip that looks like this. It was still dark.
I was no small amount of nervous. Sure, I had much more invasive surgery 8 years ago, when the initial repair happened, but it was on an emergency basis; I had no time to ruminate over it. This time it was a countdown for a month and a half, since we’d decided to push it off until after the holidays.
I can’t decide if it was disconcerting or calming that, for them, it was just another Monday. Total hip replacements are a dime a dozen now; the procedure itself usually takes less than 2 hours. So we were there, and we did a brief amount of paperwork, and then I went upstairs for prep.
I joke that, at this point in the process, I was probably cleaner than I had ever been, and this is because for scheduled surgical procedures in this era of infection, they have you scrub the bejesus out of yourself the night before with super-strong antibacterial soap and a sterile, hospital-issued sponge — and then get up on the day of the procedure and do it again. The stuff was harsh, and my skin felt weird, but I guess the weirdness tells you it’s working.
BUT WAIT THERE’S MORE, because as soon as I was upstairs in a prep area, my first task after stripping was to — you guessed it — wipe my whole person down AGAIN with antibacterial wipes.
I say that; ACTUALLY the first memorable task for ME in that moment was this:
For about 18 months, I’ve had a lift in my left shoe, owing to the gradual but serious bone loss at the top of my left leg. That’s why I’ve limped; that’s one reason I’ve needed a cane since Christmas 2021. And one key change on deck for January 9 was the re-levelilng of my legs, so this little bastard gets to go into a landfill somewhere. Good riddance.
What followed as the usual rigmarole of blood draws and IV lines and etc. I had few moments to myself, but it did seem proper in 2023 to commemorate with a final pre-surgical old-hip selfie:
Then? Well, then things get fuzzy. The anesthesiologist came in and started prepping me for the spinal block, and the main nurse came back and hit me with a couple things in the IV, one of which was Versed which, among other things, interferes with memory. By this point Erin was with me, and tells me I was saying I wanted to remember as much as possible, but nothing is really clear past the moment I expressed anxiety about the process of the spinal block. There are fragments. I think I remember being wheeled down the hall and into the actual OR, but it’s really fuzzy.
From my perspective, I blinked, and I was waking up in the recovery area, mildly confused. The same nurse saw me and said “Yep, it’s all over! You did fine!” I should note that, surgically speaking, it really WAS a blink, because as mentioned above a THR is now routinely a sub-2-hour process. That blows my mind, but I could see a clock from my bed and it was only about 10:30AM at this point, and by then I was lucid enough to, well, look at a clock and remember the time.
I ate ice chips for 90 minutes or so as they monitored me, & especially my blood pressure, and by noon they were wheeling me into a private recovery room where Erin was waiting.
Now the full court press started: a THR is now an outpatient procedure, so the goal was to get me out the door before EOD. However, for that to happen, a series of medical providers had to visit, and I had to meet certain postsurgical milestones.
I was visited by — in keeping with the happily-still-lingering season — THREE POSTSURGICAL GHOSTS:
BTW, let me tell you it’s super weird to stand up on a new hip joint and realize that, while you DO have pain — after all, they just CUT YOU OPEN AND EDITED YOUR SKELETON — it’s an entirely different pain, and the pain that’s plagued you for a year from the joint’s deterioration is now gone.
And the whole while the milestones loomed. I had to
I didn’t pee until probably 3:30, but once I had it was as if someone with a mighty clipboard had made the final tickmark, and the Great Medical Machine began the process of disgorging me back to the real world.
The chief complicating factor of this entire affair was the fact that, owing the scar tissue from the entry points of the initial 2014 repair, my surgeon had to do a posterior approach instead of the more modern and apparently less invasive anterior approach. This is all fancy medical jargon, but what it means is “where do you unzip Chet to swap out the parts.” With anterior, the incision would be just inside the relevant hip bone, and down into your groin, but, as stated, this was off the table.
Instead, we went posterior which was through, well, my posterior. (It actually wraps around to the outside of my leg, but that’s the term.) With this approach, enough of the muscular structure is disturbed that there is a real risk of dislocating the implant early on, so my main admonition is DO NOT BEND AT THE WAIST, TWIST, or OTHERWISE STRESS THAT JOINT for at least 6 weeks.
I follow instructions super well, so that’s what we’re doing. Plus, it comes with benefits, such as an insurance-provided long-handled claw grabber that I promise I have not goosed Erin with more than once or twice.
However, in the immediate surgical aftermath, when worries were highest, Erin realized that our sporty little VW was very low to the ground indeed, so she called our neighbor and local Taco Saint Mallory. They have two taller vehicles, so Mallory braved 5:00 traffic to drive over and pick me up in their Grand Cherokee, which was much more comfortable. Then, upon arrival at home, we realized that Mal had also brought a Giant Bag of Tacos in his capacity as a Taco Magnate — along with a paloma for Erin, which was well deserved indeed.
The long and short of it is that the whole affair lasted about twelve hours — the nighttime pic above was taken at 4:53AM; I was at home in my lounge chair by 5PM, taco and Athletic Brewing Free Wave NA IPA in hand. Hilariously, by about 6 I had nodded off in the chair and spilled about 15% of said near-beer, but on a day that could’ve had a shitton more unpleasant mishaps, I’ll take it.
My friend Tony kept a diary for ten years.
Kottke ran a re-run post today noting the ages of the American founding fathers on July 4, 1776.
This is less shocking in a post-Hamilton world, wherein we were all treated to a more vibrant, active picture of several of the Founders (even so: Miranda’s original cast had actors older than their characters for Lafayette, Burr, and Hamilton at least), but it’s still striking. Several others, of course, were more “adult” ages:
And of course:
This is fucking hilarious:
A Catholic priest has resigned after a church investigation found he performed invalid baptisms throughout most of his more than 20-year career, according to Bishop Thomas Olmsted of the Diocese of Phoenix.
Father Andres Arango, who performed thousands of baptisms, would say, “We baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” But Olmsted explained the words “We baptize” should have been “I baptize” instead.
Apparently, as a result of the incorrect pronoun, God doesn’t consider these folks properly anointed, and the “victims” will need to get baptized again. BUT THERE’S MORE:
The error also means that because baptism is the first of the sacraments, some people will need to repeat other sacraments, according to the diocese webpage for frequently asked questions. CNN has reached out to the diocese for comment on other sacraments.
Grown adults in the United States are taking this seriously. Jesus wept.
No, seriously. Read this and tell me different.
Please join me in wishing a happy 50th birthday to a truly OG Heathen & ersatz attorney, Edgar Acosta, seen here in a defining moment from (eek) 20 years ago:
Houston is a funny old town. People say that it’s the smallest town of 7 million they’ve ever seen, and they’re not wrong. I’ve got dozens of stories that prove the point, but none as good as this one.
I ride a lot. If it was anything else, Erin would’ve had an intervention by now. It had been a thing for a while, but after my second MS150 I had a taste of a level of fitness I’d never had before, and I decided to keep pushing at the same pace. (That pace — 100 miles a week, give or take — has turned out to be the pace of my cycling life ever since.)
As part of that, I joined a ride out of a local shop that ran every Tuesday and Thursday evening. I gauged my gains in speed by how long I could keep the front group in sight. At first, it was “oh, about 10 minutes,” but I got stronger and stronger and was eventually able to hang with them a pretty long way into the ride — sometimes, all the way to the cutoff between the short version of the route and the long one. I always took the short one, to get home and have dinner with Erin, and it seems like a minor thing but the very idea of holding on until Brompton was like winning the Tour for me at the time.
Then, as I guess most of you know, my crash happened, and I was out for a while.
The funny small-town part of this comes in now. I was at an Easter party thrown every year by our pals the Britton-Dansbys, in line for food, when a guy I didn’t recognize started chatting with me about riding. “You ready to ride again?”
Uh, what?
It took me a minute to figure it out, but my interrogator was Dan, a guy I knew from the Tuesday/Thursday ride. Dan is a gruff but profoundly kind guy, and a terribly strong rider, but I couldn’t figure out why he was at Andrew and Nicki’s house. Turns out, Dan was a Chronicle writer, just like our hosts.
And more than that: it wasn’t just Dan. It was Dan, and also two other guys from our ride: Dane and Andy. And it turned out that, unbeknownst to any of us, we’d been attending the same parties at a couple different Chronicle-connected homes for YEARS without realizing it. Dane was less regular, but when I got my legs back under me I rode with Dan and Andy and couple other guys twice a week, every week, for years.
Andy was a quiet sort, but like Dan unfailingly kind and encouraging — I was never on his or Dan’s level, but they’d hold back and let me catch up before putting the hammer down again. Cycling is suffering like that. It’s what we do. It makes you stronger, and at that time in my life the encouragement I got from these guys was priceless.
I remember, very clearly, the Tuesday ride after Bowie died and left us Blackstar. Andy was a fan, too, and at every stoplight we were chattering about how amazing the record was. Normally pretty reserved, his enthusiasm here was striking and disarming and pure — the kind of vibe that just makes you feel better for being near it, you know?
Time passed and I shifted my midweek rides to workouts — more time efficient, more impactful — and the Tuesday/Thursday ride petered out. I’d still see Dan and Andy and the other guys on other rides, but nowhere nearly as often as I’d have liked. We’d run into each other at the Odell parties, or Easter or Thanksgiving at the Britton-Dansby house, and every time I’d think to myself I should make more time to see Dan and Andy and oodles of other people that you meet, but never seem to see often enough. People get busy. It’s a thing. There will be time later.
There’s no more time, though, for Andy. He died on Saturday. He would’ve turned 47 in December.
Hug those near you. Reach out to those you wish you knew better. Sometimes, cliches are true: nobody knows how much time is left, for anything at all.
Andrew Dansby wrote the obit. If you feel so moved, Andy’s wife has asked that donations be made to the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, a cause already close to my heart.
Christopher Plummer died today. He was 91.
He’s been famous for a long time, and famous recently for some great older-man roles (e.g, Knives Out), but for me and people my age and older, this is who Christopher Plummer was: The Nazi-flag-ripping guy you’ve seen in memes these last few years.
World War II was never far from the public imagination when I was growing up in the 70s and 80s — I mean, the Nazis are the bad guys in Raiders, and were even in present-day pictures like The Boys from Brazil — but when they made The Sound of Music in 1965, it was barely 20 years ago.
That’s like the dot-com boom until today, say. Or 9/11.
Media was different in the 70s, too. I mean, I figure most Heathen readers are about my age, but imagine trying to explain to someone that you couldn’t just watch most any movie you wanted whenever you liked. So when Sound finally came to television, in 1976, it was a big damn deal. From Wikipedia:
The first American television transmission of The Sound of Music was on February 29, 1976 on ABC, which paid $15 million (equivalent to $67,394,737 in 2019) for a one-time only broadcast that became one of the top 20 rated films shown on television to that point with a Nielsen rating of 33.6 and an audience share of 49%.
I added the emphasis. Imagine 49% of the TV watching public all watching the same thing today. It’s impossible. But in 1976, there were only 3 networks — plus PBS, and maybe the commodities channel. People watched what was on for the most part. Woe betide whatever was programmed against it on NBC and CBS!
I actually remember this night. My sister was a fairly new infant, and my parents were still married. I was a month away from my 6th birthday, but they allowed to stay up and watch it with them. I remember them singing along, and I must have dozed, but then I woke up to them singing with Plummer and then with everyone in this scene:
My mother could sing okay, but my dad really not at all. Didn’t matter; he was singing along, too. To this day, the song reminds me of that moment.
Godspeed, Christopher Plummer. 91 is a good long life, but I sure wouldn’t have minded if you’d hung out a bit longer. Someone snarky on Twitter noted that maybe this time would could get Kevin Spacey to replace Plummer?
Here is a thing I do: I ride bikes.
I ride on the roads, not the bike paths, because we go fast. I ride in groups, when it’s not during a pandemic. We work together to cheat the wind, taking turns in front to poke a hole for the rest of us. It takes a lot of effort and time and no small amount of expense, but it’s immensely rewarding and exciting and fun, and as a side effect it’s good for you. I’m fitter at 50 than I was at 30. My resting heart rate is like 65, and my friends and I could ride a big two-day event like the traditional MS150 on any given weekend.
If it was anything else, someone would have an intervention. Probably Erin.
But it has risks, and I can tell you this from experience, because six years ago today, I had a pretty bad crash. I went down in a paceline on a rainy ride the Thursday before Thanksgiving, and broke my left hip.
44 year olds don’t break hips. It’s rare enough that they actually called what happened to me something different (“high energy fracture of the femoral neck”) based on circumstance and I guess bone density and, apparently, angle of break. But it’s the same bone that snapped when your aunt Millie fell off the couch reaching for the remote.
The “good” news was that, well, biomechanically, it’s an easy fix. It’s not like one of those joints like your knee or angle that has a bunch of complicated soft tissue stuff going on, and that once ruined is never right again. The “bad” news was that I was too young to do a straight replacement — which has a super fast recovery window, and often results in patients walking out of the hospital on the new joint — so they repaired me. Apparently, it’s better to have your own bone, and also at 44 and active I’d likely wear the joint out in 20 or so years, and then need a replacement replacement in my 60s, and that’s not something they want to set you up for.
So: I got scaffolding. It looks like this:
This also meant I wasn’t allowed to put ANY weight on the leg for three months, which necessarily means that once cleared for weight bearing I would be in Atrophy City. I used a walker through the holidays, finally was cleared to PT, and graduated to a cane by February. The cane was a companion through the following summer, really, before I was finally able to give it up.
I didn’t ride again until late March of 2015, and at that only 27 miles. But I rode. I wasn’t really “back” in any real sense until mid-summer, when I did a metric century with some friends at a real pace (20-ish), 9 or so months after my crash.
It was a long road, and I haven’t even mentioned the site infection, the PIC line, or all the added stress that Erin carried for the duration of the process. I honestly don’t know how I would’ve handled it all without her. Because she is awesome. But if you know me well enough to be reading this, you’re also nodding your head and saying “Obviously, you doofus, you married WAY the hell up.” I know, people, I know.
So now, six years later, I’m a stronger rider than I was then. I came back, with the help and encouragement of lots of people. The injury isn’t a total memory — I have some pain in the soft tissue of the joint on that side, sometimes. If I overwork it, I’ll ache and limp. I’m taking steps to work through that, but i suspect some left-side weirdness will be a companion as long as I’m active. I’ll take it, though, because I’m just happy to be here, healthy and happy and active, even in this weirdest of years.
Who wants to go ride bikes?
I follow, and have for years and years, a nerd-culture stick-figure comic strip called xkcd. It doesn’t stand for anything.
Ten years ago, the author posted cryptically about a family illness.
The following spring he elaborated: It was his fiancee, and it was stage III breast cancer. Both of them were very young — mid 20s — this was, as he notes, seriously bolt-from-the-blue territory.
One of his more famous comics, called Lanes, came not long after, in summer 2011, along with a more lighthearted take on the process. The following summer, he ran Emotion.
Then, in 2012, he published Two Years.
And in 2017, he followed with Seven Years.
This month, he wrote Ten Years.
Hope and joy and grace can be found, even in weird, dark times.
There are probably lots of dead bears available in bear-infested areas, but this one is mostly interested because (a) it’s been dead for more than 20,000 years and (b) it’s insanely well preservedhttps://boingboing.net/2020/09/15/scientists-find-preserved-cave.html). Like, soft tissue is relatively intact. Organs. Nose. Fur. It’s amazing.
(And is pretty clearly only coming to light because, well, the permafrost isn’t so permanent anymore. Still! Silver lining?)
However, beware the side effects.
Transmission modeling now shows that being in an enclosed and unventilated space with a person infected with COVID-19 is a terrible terrible idea, still, even with masks and even with reduced capacity.
Just don’t do it.
Please “enjoy” this story from former US diplomat Tianna Spears who was constantly harassed by CBP at the Juarez/El Paso border crossing despite carrying diplomatic credentials and a SENTRI authorization.
These people behave like this because they enjoy it, and because there is zero accountability. As with most law enforcement groups, the first response to reports and evidence of misconduct is to circle the wagons, blame the victim, and insist no wrongs were committed.
It is never convincing. But they don’t MEAN for it to be convincing, because they know that, unless something serious changes, no consequences will accrue to the organization or the individuals responsible. And in the meantime, they managed to hound a bright young diplomat out of the Foreign Service.
I swear to god, I really have no understanding why Black Americans would feel any warmth towards this country. It baffles me.
Years ago when I was doing more travel, I signed up for a State Department notification list. I get mails about whether or not State thinks it’s a good idea to go to country X or whatever.
There isn’t much activity on the list, so I forgot about it until this morning, when I noticed a message saying I maybe shouldn’t go to the UAE.
Well, first, thanks. Wasn’t planning on it, but good to know.
And second, it’s goddamn hilarious that State is telling us where not to go, because at this point the US is basically already on everybody’s no-go list due to our abject failure in containing COVID-19, so it’s cute they’re saying “don’t go to place X” when most places at this point are safer than staying in the good ol’ USA.
Sigh.
Hilton Als, writing in the New Yorker this week, will absolutely blow you away. Make time.
A marketing mail from a neo-trad menswear line I’ve bought from:
Let’s talk about working from home.
So the whole damn world is on lockdown, or should be, and those of us that can work from home are doing so. This is good! It’s better for the economy — which is absolutely going to take a hit, so having some portions able to continue to function and those employed in those portions able to keep spending money will help the recovery.
(And, let me just say this out loud: If you’re in a job that isn’t impacted, and you expect to keep getting a check, SPEND SOME DAMN MONEY at places that are hurting.)
But working from home is a new idea to lots of you. You might never have really done it before — sure, that one time little Sally Sue had the sniffles, and you “worked from home” to take care of her, but at the time it meant you called into a staff meeting and sent 12 emails. This, candidly, is not that.
I, on the other hand, have worked from home for most of the last 19 years, in a no-shit home office. Let me tell you a few things I’ve learned about being truly productive away from a communal office environment.
Work your regular day. It’ll be tempting to drift in and out; that just sabotages you. Try to get some shit done. Nobody’s gonna come by and chatter about some stupid reality show! There’s no big play to discuss from last night! You can be hella productive!
Use a chat tool. Doesn’t matter what it is — my company just uses plain old Skype — but by signing in and being available, you signal to folks that you’re In The (Virtual) Office. This is useful. There are lots of options for this; ask a nerdy coworker if one of them seems to mesh better with your office than others.
Get dressed. This varies — not everyone needs to do it — but I’d advise y’all that are new to WFH to go ahead and get up at your normal time, take a damn shower, and put on adult clothes. You don’t need to dress in full biz-casual, but do put on a pair of pants and a decent shirt. Then, you can signal to yourself that you’re DONE working by changing into lounge clothes after quitting time.
Establish boundaries. There’s a real tendency in new WFH folks to let the barrier blur a LOT between work-time and family/personal time. Don’t do this, at least not at first. Again, you’re new to this mode of work, so take care to avoid disrupting either home life or work life by allowing one to intrude on the other. (I do this by only RARELY taking my laptop out of my home office.)
Designate a work space, and keep to it. Not everyone has the space for a true dedicated home office, but everyone can establish a place that is Work. Don’t make it the couch. Use one end of your kitchen table, or put something together in a corner that is now Your Office. Stay there when you’re working. It’s waaaaaay too easy to let “I can work ANYWHERE” get in the way of actually getting shit done, so don’t vary from this rule until you have a pretty good handle on it.
If this becomes an ongoing thing, buy (or expense!) a desk. A chair, too. I’ve seen some WFH setups that made MY back hurt just looking at them. Ergonomics still matters if you’re at home; take care of yourself here. You don’t have to go nuts on this stuff; just get something that’ll work.
Buy a headset. Seriously, buy a damn headset. Don’t be the guy who joined the telecon on a speakerphone and introduces crazy echo into the call. They’re not expensive, and don’t have to be giant heavy affairs. Mine is super light.
Upgrade your home internet. Since I work at home full time in a major city, I have the fastest internet connection you can buy (1Gbit symmetric). This is probably more than you need, but if you’ve only ever been occasionally streaming Netflix and scrolling Facebook, you may find the demands of constant conference calls and screen sharing and VPN connections to exceed the capabilities of your package. Talk with your provider about a bump, especially if your office will subsidize the increase.
Bring your second monitor home, if you’re used to using one. This is self-explanatory — just do it. While you’re at it, grab your mouse and keyboard, too, if you prefer them to your laptop.
Close the door. If you’re not at home alone during the day, close the door to your work area if you can. I realize this may not be possible if you’re also juggling your suddenly un-schooled kids, but if you CAN do this it’s a good idea.
Embrace the flexibility. You’re at home! This means you can, if you want, get a load of laundry done, or put something in the slow cooker, or do something similar with your coffee breaks. Don’t slack off this way, but you absolutely can and should lean into this aspect of WFH — it can be a real game changer. (At our house, if I didn’t do some of the laundry during the workday, we’d DROWN in workout clothes.)
Finally, you CAN and SHOULD (if it bothers you) say NO to video. Video rarely adds much to a conference call, and makes many people feel self-conscious. It also clobbers your bandwidth. Your camera can be “broken” or “for some reason it’s not working” or, if you’re senior enough, you can just say no. Video is great for talking to your mom or other loved ones, but in a biz context it’s mostly sizzle with no steak except in pretty narrow contexts. Avoid.
So, this guy was curious why his workbench was getting tidied at night….
No greater honor has this humble blog ever received than the news from longtime Heathen Ear O’Corn that this site is blocked at Shell due to “adult content.”
A while back, the longstanding Mac developer and blogger Brent Simmons noted that his site, Inessential, was now 20 years old.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t note that, well, MiscHeathen hit 19 years on 29 November.
In that first short month, I posted only one other time; it amuses me greatly that this first proper entry is actually about Lindsey and her journey to Russia. Lindsey was then the (relatively new?) girlfriend of my longtime best pal Eric. 19 years later, she’s been his wife for 13 years, and is mother to Heathen Godchild E. B., with whom we trimmed a Christmas tree on Sunday.
Obviously, I post way less in these days of social media than I did before, but as folks realize what a cesspool Facebook is I’m endeavoring to share things here more often.
Time was, people kept squirrels for pets.
Longtime Heathen know I’ve had some hip work done, but mine is still mostly natural; we didn’t have to replace the whole joint.
However, hip joint replacement is fascinating. Here’s a pretty great article on the history and changes in hip replacements, written by a guy who got one in his 30s.
This Twitter feed will inform you when certain parties pass what they refer to as the (Wilford) Brimley / Cocoon Line, which means they are now as old as Brimley was when he starred, as an “old person,” in the 1985 film of the same name.
At that time, Brimley was 18,530 days old, which is about 50 years and 8 months. (You may be surprised he was that young at the time; I know I was.)
Some recent entries:
Also, Lenny Kravitz is 4 years older than Brimley was. Keanu Reeves is a year older than that.
(Before you ask: Quick match suggests I’ve got about 13 months; Mrs Heathen is even farther.)
The Atlantic has a 1989 retrospective up as its photo feature this week.
In January of 1989, I was a freshman at Alabama, and I had NO idea that I’d meet Erin in just a few short months.
In 1998, I went dove hunting with some pals from Dallas.
I wrote about it for my own amusement, and ran the piece on my web site at the time (the ancestor to Miscellaneous Heathen, which didn’t go online until two years AFTER this piece was written).
It’s fall again, and I realized that it’s utterly criminal that this little bit of fun has been offline for quite some time, so I present it here, again, for your amusement. Enjoy.
I am part Cracker, though you wouldn’t know it to look at me. I grew up in Mississippi, where my family has lived for generations. I hunted, camped, and fished; I drove a pick-up truck to high school; I owned boots. It was something of an oddball combination, though, at least – certainly – to outsiders. Weekends might begin in a field west of town shooting at birds and end with dinner at the Country Club, all with the same assortment of bankers, lawyers, doctors, and real estate developers. There’s an odd sort of gentility to these things in the South, so it never struck me as odd that Larry Foote would drive his Porsche to both dove hunt and dinner, or that Cadillacs matched pickups at most expeditions.
Somehow, I lost much of this in college. I left for Alabama at 18 and promptly became a tortured (okay, mostly just drunk) intellectual type, perfectly willing to discuss the meaning of life or the existence of God until 4:30 in the morning during the week as long as the other side of the conversation was cute enough or there were drugs enough to make it interesting. Both if I was lucky. I stayed in Tuscaloosa most of the time, venturing home rarely, and lost – to some degree – a bit of the old-school Faulknerian whiskey-soaked hunting ambiance of my youth. I should have known, however, that this wasn’t to be a permanent state.
By 1994, I’d moved to Houston. Houston is hotter, flatter, and more muggy than anything in Alabama or Mississippi, but I fell in love with it anyway. The combination of international business, flabbergasting amounts of eighties-style oil money, and old-fashioned Texas-dialect Southernism agreed with me, and still does. Slowly, I noticed I was becoming more like home than I had been in Alabama, and I didn’t mind. My drawl returned with a vengeance, particularly with alcohol. I bought boots again. I drank local beer. So when a pal from Dallas invited me on a dove hunt – my first since high school, easily – it didn’t surprise me at all that I jumped at the chance.
What follows is a rough chronology. The participants were Patrick, a college pal who has ended up in Dallas married to a local; Dwayne, his brother-in-law; and Richard, his father-in-law. Both in-laws are attorneys; Patrick is an administrator with a local college in Dallas. The events transcribed occurred over August 31-September 1, 1998, and are represented here more or less accurately. As best I remember.
12:30 Leave office. Drive to Academy Sports to purchase Hunting License I didn’t buy over weekend because wallet location became a problem; one must have photo ID for a hunting license in Texas.
1:00 Leave Academy. Express dismay to any listening deities at amazing process required to obtain state permission to shoot things from the air.
1:30 Arrive Hobby Airport. Attempt not to look suspicious carrying gun case into airport.
1:45 Check gun into loving arms of Southwest Airlines. Casually inquire as to insurance coverage for firearm.
2:50 Plane departs; order cocktail in response to somewhat exuberant toddler.
3:30 Arrive Dallas-Love Field. Encounter remaining members of hunting party. Wave goodbye to toddler with outstanding lung capacity.
3:50 Accidentally notice that my luggage – and gun – merrily riding the carousel for flight 119, not flight 34. Pounce on luggage while attempting to NOT step on aforementioned toddler.
3:55 – 4:15 Attempt, with 2 lawyers and a college administrator, to get shotgun, briefcase, and suitcase into already-capacity-loaded Pathfinder. Express wonder at the sheer volume of equipment required for 1-day hunting expedition.
4:20 Depart Dallas for wonderful downtown Brownwood, Texas. This will take 3 or 4 hours, so we stop for beer. Driver abstains. Lawyers and consultant do not, and continue to fail to abstain well into West Texas.
5:00 Remember, with college administrator, that Warren Zevon once sang of “lawyers, guns, and money.” Express pleasure that all three are present in at least token quantities, so no bad things can possibly happen.
6:00 All terrain for miles now visible. No meaningful trees present, though cactuses and scrub are plentiful. Toast landscape with beer.
7:00 Stop for restaurant suggestions at somewhat vague looking minute mart in Comanche, Texas. Elect younger lawyer to “work the clerk” for information re: culinary adventures in Comanche. Upon discovering all food in Comanche apparently unacceptable, purchase snacks at said store.
7:05 Convenience Store declared to be “lucky” by younger lawyer. All parties purchase Lotto tickets.
Dialog:
Younger Lawyer: “Has anybody won here yet?”
Karla-Faye-Tucker-lookalike-Clerk: “This is Comanche.”
This, apparently, explains it all.
7:45 Arrive Brownwood, Texas. Locate Tuesday’s rendezvous point (the Section Hand Restaurant and Boot Store). Select alternative cuisine for dinner.
8:00 Narrowly avoid Golden Corral dinner in favor of Blue Cactus. Everything is still fried, but at least a little spicier. And they serve beer. In theory. Waitress unable to serve beer for reasons unspecified but probably linked to age, so manager does. Several times.
8:45 Locate liquor store for purchase of after-dinner cigars.
9:00 Adjourn to Best Western poolside lounge area, still blissfully unaware of stock market gyrations. Enjoy cocktails and hunting stories. Return to hotel room for A&M v. FSU football. Note that all is right in the world, as the Trinity of Hunting, Football, and Cocktails are present. Express belief that this trumps earlier hat trick of Lawyers, Guns, and Money.
9:30 Channel change during commercial leads to discovery of stock market gyrations. Mix another drink. Remind self that investments are long term in nature.
10:30 Remind self again that investments are long term in nature. Advised by attorney to mix additional beverage.
11:45 Sleep.
05:00 Annoyingly cheery clerk delivers wake-up call. Stumble into clothing, gather firearms, and reload truck. A total of 7 degrees still required to shoehorn everything into vehicle. Collective need for coffee reaching fever pitch.
05:30 Arrive at Section Hand restaurant. It does not open until 0600. They are, however, serving coffee.
05:40 Purchase local newspaper.
05:42 Complete local newspaper. Opt for second paper.
05:50 Over discussions of market with other hunters, drink at least as much coffee as you did beer the night before. This is viewed as karmic balance, at least in terms of hangover reduction.
06:15 With addition of biscuits, sausage, eggs, and grits, begin to feel almost human despite the hour. Lawyers and administrator agree. More coffee administered.
06:35 Caravan of well-armed personnel leaves Section Hand restaurant for parts unknown. Guide wonders out loud which of 2 waitresses he should give his cell phone number to for late arrivals; another local opines “It don’t matter; they’re both stupid.”
06:45 Paved road ends. Caravan continues.
06:50 Now officially in the Middle of Nowhere. Gather ammunition (50 rounds) for first phase of hunt. Privately certain this is more than enough.
07:00 Discover Timberland boots not nearly as waterproof as advertised. Vow to never eschew more thematically correct Red Wings again.
07:10 Select position on east fence row under small mesquite tree.
08:00 Return to truck for additional ammunition with 1 for 10 record. College administrator by this point certain his initial stash of shells loaded with blanks, a theory shaky at best as same shell pool fueled aforementioned 5-bird hour.
09:30 Birds wisely decide field to be questionable. Appear to dining elsewhere. This, combined with additional supply shortages (e.g., shells) send hunting party back to hotel, 19 birds in hand (Sr Lawyer: 9; Jr Lawyer: 4; Consultant: 5; Administrator: 1). An average of three boxes of shells per hunter were consumed, however.
10:00 Return to hotel for much needed shower and nap.
12:45 Depart hotel for Wal-Mart for additional provisions. Attempt to not be stereotypes of city folk in Brownwood Wal-Mart almost certainly a failure, though markedly more successful than the prior year, when Senior and Junior Lawyers and Administrator made trip in Jaguar.
1:30 Return to Section Hand to sample lunchtime offerings and attempt to corner market on coffee. Chicken-fried steak deemed most appropriate meal.
2:45 Guide rendezvous at Section Hand; depart again for field after much discussion of temperature (now hovering in mid-90s). Provision check reveals almost certainly enough shells, beer, and Gatorade.
3:00 Arrive at same field. Guide informs hunting party that birds are probably 2 hours away, if tradition holds. Guide departs.
3:05 Upon hearing this news, junior lawyer strips to boxers and hunting boots and settles in the sun to drink beer and review Wall Street Journal.
3:30 Birds arrive, apparently hoping for a sneak attack. Junior lawyer continues mode of dress, perhaps not the best for running through tall grass and weeds to retrieve birds.
4:00 MORE birds arrive. Logistical problems ensue. Am unable to return to selected (and shady) post after bird retrieval due to continued bird overflights and subsequent retrievals. Crouching in weeds amid the field becomes de facto post despite lack of cover.
4:30 After taking a double, note that limit for group is likely looming large. Suggest inventory. Creative accounting brings group total to 59, though this fails to include the 9 birds total lost in brush and the 5 or so simply discarded as uncleanable due to unfortunate proximity to firearm barrel. Shotgun shell consumption at this point no longer worth examining. Express dismay at number of birds still eating in far end of field, occasionally fluttering up several hundred at a time.
5:15 Load truck. Again.
6:00 After gas, food, and beer, depart Brownwood. Consultant and lawyers resume lack of abstention.
10:30 Arrive Dallas. Purchase antihistamines to make up for squatting in weeds all day.
10:45 Arrive Patrick’s home. Collapse on couch after cursory hello to his lovely wife, who finds this all terribly funny.
So, as of now, it’s illegal — like, jailable illegal — to refer to burgers or hotdogs not made from animals as “veggie burgers” or “veggie dogs”.
More:
This week, a new law went into effect in Mississippi. The state now bans plant-based meat providers from using labels like “veggie burger” or “vegan hot dog” on their products. Such labels are potentially punishable with jail time. Words like “burger” and “hot dog” would be permitted only for products from slaughtered livestock. Proponents claim the law is necessary to avoid confusing consumers — but given that the phrase “veggie burger” hasn’t been especially confusing for consumers this whole time, it certainly seems more like an effort to keep alternatives to meat away from shoppers.
I have a longstanding fascination with regional dialects. I think it’s because in my own lifetime, so many are vanishing thanks to easier mobility and the ubiquity of mass communication.
Only a few places retain a clear local accent or dialect — several areas of Louisiana, for example, including accents that outsiders would probably place in Brooklyn. There’s still a real Boston sound.
And off the coast of North Carolina, we find the hoi toiders. There’s video.
This is pretty fascinating:
I mean, seriously.
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:
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.