Scratch Pad: Concerts, Spiders, Glaspy

At the end of each week, I usually collate a lightly edited collection of recent comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. I find knowing I’ll revisit my posts to be a positive and mellowing influence on my social media activity. I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. And I generally take weekends off social media.

▰ Afternoon trio for two air filters and a ceiling fan

▰ I’m seeing Marc Ribot on Friday, Nick Lowe on Sunday, and Autechre the following Thursday — it’s the mid-1990s all over again.

▰ The start of October in San Francisco is when you traditionally sweep away the actual spiderwebs in order to then put up fake spiderwebs

▰ An under-appreciated feature of Apple’s Find My Phone service is that after using it to play a sound on your lost phone you are left with an earworm of Depeche Mode’s “Just Can’t Get Enough”

▰ I briefly thought the shutdown might mean a quiet Fleet Week, but no, there still will be jet fighters (Canadian ones) LARPing WWIII (see: sfgate.com).

▰ Most of the time in an interview, if the interviewee says, “That’s an interesting question,” what they mean is “I don’t have a prepared answer for that, and so I’m gonna buy myself a few valuable seconds of thinking time by instinctively complimenting you.”

▰ I don’t need to put Bandcamp Friday on my calendar. I can tell it’s Bandcamp Friday first thing when I look at my inbox that morning and there’s a 100 more emails than usual.

▰ Current status, Hardly Strictly Bluegrass 2025:

▰ Read a bunch, finished nothing. In the middle of many books.