Scratch Pad: Weird Alarm, Audiobook Synchronicity
I do this manually at the end of each week: collating (and sometimes lightly editing) most of the recent little comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. And I take weekends off social media.
▰ Numerous folks in the neighborhood peeking out their windows ’cause some car has the weirdest alarm going off, just plain peculiar — not just like they made it themselves, but like they didn’t even know what they were doing
▰ There are moments when an audiobook eerily aligns with with your current situation. As I walked home at dusk, I was informed by Alan Furst’s novel Dark Star of the Russian term “besprizorniye,” or “bands of children orphaned by the purge who attacked and robbed solitary walkers”
▰ I leave the amp on for a while after guitar class. My working theory is that the longer its hum lingers in the air, the longer before I forget half of what I’ve just learned.
▰ I certainly don’t want there to be a US government shutdown, but then again, if it meant we’d be spared the airborne noise of Fleet Week …
▰ Nice way to start the day: New York Times Wordle in 2 and Mini in :29. It’s kinda all downhill from here.
▰ Stop Making Sense is truly great. I saw the tour that became the movie (in Forest Hills) and I saw the film when it first came out and several times after, but in many ways that Rome concert on YouTube is the live Talking Heads I find myself going back to regularly and marveling at. And speaking of the Rome concert, we should all be fortunate enough to find someone in our lives who looks at us the way Tina Weymouth looks at Adrian Belew.
▰ Yow, it looks like the entirety of John Zorn’s Tzadik Records label is now on music streaming services. I’m listening to Quatrain, with guitarists Julian Lage and Gyan Riley, right now, after revisiting The Big Gundown. It’s Zorn’s 70th birthday, but listeners get the presents.
▰ Generally speaking Hardly Strictly festival traffic is chiller than Outside Lands festival traffic. It’s still traffic, and still noisy, but it’s a little more chill.
