^H

Free-Write

Circling into the NFL after missing pretty much everything since last week.

It’s okay. There’s not a lot to be optimistic about when it comes to the Saints. Guess I could try to get excited about the RedskinsCommanders. If anything, what I’ve seen so far is at least interesting. I still haven’t quite figured out the offense the Commanders are running.

So many other teams are running the exact same stuff. Let’s look like the Chiefs and Niners. yawn

Otherwise, I’ve just been trying to assess what happened with the election Tuesday.

I feel like What Happened??!? was a 2016 thing.

Fair, expected, amount of despair from the left-leaning outlets I follow. Not a lot of satisfying self-reflection yet, but there’ll probably finally be some after the shock abates.

In spite of paranoid MSNBC bits coming into the house, I’m trying to figure out if there might be a small place for me to contribute. While I might not see a direct path, if it’s something I could do while maintaining my safety valves, why not? I think I have to update my CV for work, anyway. Maybe the updates will feed multiple uses.

But I was kind of struck by President Trump’s description of Elon Musk during his acceptance speech was great.

Musk is doing the sorts of things that the authoritarian state say he can’t. Then he has to rescue people stranded in a conventional spacecraft.

What I don’t know is whether he’s doing any of Business School stuff of “That’s proprietary information” stuff. I do see bits of it, but I also see what he seems at least willing to share information with competitors when it comes to compatibility. Can’t find the story I saw a few days ago about how they’re making other manufacturer’s vehicles compatible with Tesla’s “Supercharger.”

Electricidal Engineering isn’t rocket surgery.

So, maybe I have a bit of sunny optimism about all this?

I don’t know.

While I may not particularly like the upstream beneficiaries, at least something might get done.

In so many cases, what’s in place isn’t what anyone with half a brain would built today.

So, a bit of optimism? Maybe.

I do have a lot of other stuff to do this coming week. We’ll see how it goes. I’m gonna go watch football.

Travel Recap

Sunday. We flew to NOLA without many issues. While I do like the direct to MSY from DCA, the ride from New Orleans seems a lot longer these days, even if the rides are remarkably smooth. I would say that the roads are actually the summation of all the things that have been done since Katrina, but it’s something I’ve noticed all over the place. Check-in at the hotel was generally uneventful. Room wasn’t great, but it did work. Dinner at the place across the place across the parking lot.

Monday: We went over to see my mom for a bit. Installed the rails to help her get in and out of bed. She’s in a thoracic brace after her last fall. Figured out her phone, but she’s still mainly at the point where she can’t use it. The chargers were missing. Thankfully, I still had one in my laptop bag that we could use to charge it once the staff finally located it. Tried to show her how to use Siri for voice command, but she still has problems seeing well enough to do much of anything, or hold down the button to activate much of anything. Her TV isn’t working. This is the flat screen my brother and I got in something like 2009. I think it’s like 32 inches, which was the biggest thing that would fit inside the giant cabinet that my parents had bought for their big CRT. My wife was bothered by the disarray in her closets, and set out to buying organizaers. Back to the hotel a bit, then out for my grandfather’s birthday dinner. My wife had some sort of stuffed fish that was absolutely amazing. I wasn’t terribly hungry, so I got the Cajun shrimp tacos. Fried pickles, etc. But it was nice having a nine-person party there to celebrate my grandfather’s birthday.

Tuesday: W0w-oh-wow. I was kind of keeping my thumb on the pulse of what was going on with the election results using X and various websites. After a nap, we went to Gen Z’s favorite fast casual restaurant, Chili’s. As with the situation the night before, I couldn’t come close to finishing what I’d ordered. Draft Bud Light, shot of Fireball. When we got back to the hotel, in to watching the election results roll in. While there was a TV in the room, I watched pretty much of all of it at first on The Free Press‘s livestream, and trying to follow the results in Virginia. Obviously, I knew that there was basically no chance of winning. Jerry Torres for the House in a district that’s been “blue” since the Northern Aggressors finally left in 1877. Hung Cao in the Senate. With the endorsement of Trump from some of the people who’ve destroyed the Libertarian Party jumping over to endorse Trump, I decided to vote for the candidate they’d ended up with after their Jersey Dave replacement was too stoned to speak even halfway coherently during the convention. After the TheFP livestreams ended with it appearing Trump had won, I went to BlazeTV for a few more hours.

Wednesday: I went to my mom’s house so I could do landlord tasks. Generally in good shape, and the the guy who’s been doing the lawn. My wife was really suffering from the effects of whatever allergy/sinus issue she was having. The arrangement can continue as it currently is. Back to the hotel room to spend some time with the girls. Dinner delivered to the hotel.

Thursday: Over to the home to have lunch with my mom for her birthday. The dog was a hit among the staff and other residents. My wife installed the closet organizers, and my mom got to hold the leash to keep the dog from investigating furniture assembly too closely. Had lunch delivered from a local Po’Boy shop run by one of my parents’ high school classmates.

Friday: Trip home. There was a traffic issue on I-10 in New Orleans. The nav app my wife was trying to get her to get off the Interstate, and take back roads to get around….because staying on the Interstate was going to have about a seven minute delay. Stay on 10, or go through stop-and-go local traffic. The logistics of returning rental cars at MSY is not good. If you’re looking for how COVID really fucked an industry, look no further than the rental car industry.

Overall impression? In so many aspects of life, things are much better today than they’ve ever been. The Intertubes at my mom’s house in Biloxi, Mississippi are actually a bit better than what I get inside the Beltway. Highways are in amazingly-good shape. I will probably write more about my mom’s health, but that’s not going to be for general consumption; check OD.

Birthday recap

So, was down for my mother and grandfather’s birthdays.

Dinner for my grandfather’s birthday went incredibly well. Will drop the link to Cafe New Orleans in case you’re ever in South Landmass.

My mom couldn’t go after an incident last weekend, and a brace that’d keep her from getting in and out of a car.

Obviously, there’s still a lot coming out with election reaction; The stories of the incompetence and excesses of the current Administration just keep coming. Like this about an agency refusing to help houses with Trump signs.

I understands for the protections against retribution, but the people who did this should not work in government.

And I’d be absolutely okay with a boycott from private industry.

Really?

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No writing early today because I was trying to get home. I’ll write more tomorrow. After I work out, and do the sorts of thingss I’ve neglected this week.

Write About Substack

This one is even more applicable after Tuesday night.

I didn’t flip on any of the the cable news companies. Much of what I consumed wasonlimne content. I mentioned that I watched The FP’s livestream until they’d pretty much called things, then watched BlazeTF after they’d stopped.

Early yesterday morning, I flipped on Morning Joe for a bit, not so much to even in their pain, but…. No. I’m a horrible person, so I was looking to see them react with shock when it became obvious exactly how much they’d missed.

There a few things I subscribe to. Things I’ve supported in the past I’ve let lapse.

If I’m liking you, or what you’re putting out, I’ll probably throw you some money.

Maybe I just haven’t explored as much as I should, but I do wish it was simpler to let support die automatically.

Locals is pretty good letting you buy blocks of credits, and, once you run out, you can choose not to renew.

For Substack, it’s split a little differently. You can use a CC, or credits from your Locals account.

I actually can’t remember who was the first thing I subscribed to. Substack allows you kinda allows you to hide what’s underneath.

I had all sorts of issues when I was actively trying to avoid using the Totes-Didn’t-Used-To-Do-Evil company’s email.and had problems with some of the spam-prevention features in use on both ends. Inbound mail would get caught by aggressive spam filtering. Outbound mail gets caught up by things like SPF.

Things like live chat under video streams allow instant interaction with presenters. I’ve not presented anything, and would have trouble reading comments, but I can only imagine how this would have changed audience interaction when I was in radio.

Instead of waiting from the phone board to light you, you can see someone call you on your shit in the chat immediate.

Even the comments allow interaction with the audience in ways completely unseen in the past.

But, who’s my big Substack reads?

My first was probably Numlock.news.

I do read stuff like Cocktails With Superman. I somehow got on Blocked & Reported. I really like both Katie and Jesse’s writing, though their politics has the assemblage has become nearly intolerable during the election; I’m probably not going to renew.

Obviously, The Free Press is a real change from what’d been done in the past. Thank you, woke interns for edging the people out.

You got what you wanted, y’all. Hopefully nobody will ever hire you.

But the biggest thing is still The Fifth Column.

And I’m stopping for the morning. Off to do birthday stuff for my Mom.

Will get into the election real after the prompt I’d written:

Likes and dislikes, plus things you thought you wouldn’t like, but have come to very much appreciate

Schadenfreude

The thing that rest came to mind when thinking about what’s happened since 2021 is this:

Never Do It

I think the Party of Harry Flood Byrd did just that in 2021 and 2022. The Dobbs ruling stopped the reaction to that in 2022, but yesterday was that delayed by a couple of years.

Whatever.

I’ve not ventured to watch things like Kennedy’s reactions; what happened?!?! *sniff*

As I said, I voted for Chase Oliver. Looking at the vote totals, he’s looking more like Browne 2000 than Marrou 1992. I’d said that an unwritten goal of the Moses Caucus was to garner fewer votes than 1992. Looks like they might fall short of that.

There’s still nothing showing that President Trump will be able to fix any of the problems that exist.

The Federal Government has spent recklessly for nearly a quarter century now.

Maybe there’s something Trump can do to breathe a few more breaths into the again-reinflated equity bubbles, but I’m not at all confident.

If things do, as I think, collapse hard, it’ll be Trump’s fault.

Even if Kamala had won, and the Republicans hadn’t retaken the Senate, it’d still be Trump’s fault.

Oh well.

Last night, I watched TheFP’s livestream until it ended, then witched over to BlazeTV.

I did look some more at Cable News this morning to see some of the kvetching from “Morning Joe.”

I’m sure I’ll have more as the week progresses, but so many people did “go full…”

Incredibly odd. I didn’t have anything in the draft folder for today.

Maybe I was going to write about my brother, and happy birthday to him, but I don’ know.

Obviously, today is Election Day. I did send off my absentee ballot on Saturday before I left.

I don’t know what’s going to happen. I have a hunch, but I’m right there with a lot of the The Fifth Column folks.

The issues the country is facing are incredibly deep. It’s not culture war stuff. It’s some really serious fiscal problems to which neither of the major candidates has an answer.

There is a lot that can be learned from Javier Milei, and Argentina, but neither party is really in doing anything to address the problems.

Bubuhbut Kamala is going to give first-time homebuyers a $25,000 credit!

Which will be a small patch to something that’s still a bubble.

Trump is going to eliminate Income Taxes completely!

Income taxes that the majority of taxpayers don’t pay anyway.

I think there’s a strong argument that your “FICA Taxes” really aren’t taxes.

I guess we’ll see what happens.

From my archives, November 5, 2000:

I really hate mainstream politicians.

I don’t know that I’d throw around hate is readily today. But the overall idea really hasn’t changed.

Perhaps I was a bit more hopeful around 2012ish, but my underlying suspicions continue to ring true — government doesn’t work.

I don’t know what I’m going to do today. Might go do something for lunch/dinner.

We’ll see.

But is there something I can do to switch off the breathless coverage of the election?

I don’t know.

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Football might be as much of a disaster as politics.

Will the Saints win another game this year after firing Dennis Allen?

No idea.

Is there someone coming out of college who could be the next Jaden Daniels?

Don’t know that, either.

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That’s about all the Good Morning America I can take. So I’m going to move onto something else.

Write About Loss

Doing this because I’m remembering my uncle, whose birthday would have been today. But i wanted to write about things you’ve lost, or you’ve left behind. Kind of goes to my oft used You Can Leave. so, what’s gone away that you miss? How about things that are gone, and you don’t really care are gone?

Speaking of this, this morning, I was invited by a community I’d abandoned on Locals. It might have been a please-come-back-here’s-a-free-month thing, but I actually dismissed the alert before I could read it.

It’s kind of what I do when I leave. I rarely look back. When I say I’m finished, I’m finished.

And there I of again starting to type out something about how “maybe I shouldn’t do that,” but my reaction is always that it’s my fault. If I’d done something differently, maybe I wouldn’t be in this s situation.

But, no, really, my judgment isn’t that fucked. When I get to the point when I decide it’s necessary to depart, I should just stick to that.

Thinking about it, though, I can’t think of a single instance where I’ve been really regretful about not rekindling something I’ve left.

That was a period of life. It’s over now. Move on.

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On the issue of loss, I think that came up because I’m pretty sure today would have been my uncle’s 65th birthday.

I knew him, but the physical separation maant we weren’t really close. He was my dad’s youngest brother. My two uncles weren’t terribly close while I was alive for a variety of reasons, but had reunited for a couple of years after my dad died.

He did not have a fun life. It sounds like it was tough from an early age. I didn’t have a lot of insight into it, and there was a reason my old man was in such a rush to get out of where he grew up.

I don’t know. We never really talked about it that much. But now they’re all gone.

Things here, now, are, though, better.

A Lot better.

My wife was telling me that there was an out gay guy working as a greeter in one of the national chains she visited yesterday.

I seem to remember a story of one of my uncles getting in a fight after being accused, not being gay, but being an airman.

Sorts of things that people outside Air Force towns will never understand.

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I forgot to set my Out-of-Office message before I left.

Oops.

I was looking back at what I’d written back in 2017.

On that day, I was writing about the reaction to the 2016 election.

Looking back at that, I have no absolutely no idea what connection I was trying to connect to with that. I think, maybe, I was thinking it was something to do with the 2016 election.

By the time I wrote in 2017, the morass that would have been the first bits of the Trump administration were already starting to swirl.

I could go back through to see if I can find some of the most egregious examples of overreach.

But, why?

Maybe I’d be smart to just forget most of those overreaches. But that’d require separating out what many of the same people excused with regards to the 2020 riots, and COVID.

But my reflex is simply to refuse to associate with the worst examples of overreach on either, or both.

Yeah, I’m just not going to associate with you, much less do business with you.

Maybe that’s unfair, but it’s all I can do in my position.

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I’m subjecting myself to more Joe Rogan because I wanted to hear what JD Vance had so say, even though I voted against him.

Guy can speak. Can’t say that same of any of the other people on the major parties’ tickets.

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I’m really following things at a distance. I’ll elaborate more in a few days.

Similarly, I’m glancing at the NFL scores. Fire Dennis Allen? Um, okay. But it looks like Mike McCarthy should probably go first.

*looks around for the entry where the Mike McCarthy offense-coordinated Saints beat the St. Louis Rams*

Um, yeah, I can’t find it right offhand.

Will I be long-appreciative to the coaching staff that finally brought a playoff win to the Coonasstrodome? Yep. Am I bored as hell by the string of teams that all look like it’s 2000 again? Yep.

Write about things that really bother you

A friend of mine once talked about a job interview he had. This wasn’t for any sort of really-professional job, and it was in Texas, so it makes a bit more sense. The anticipated parts of the interview had gone well, and it looked like he had a good shot at getting the job.

After the HR troll questions were finished, the interviewer thanked him, and said something along the lines of, “I’ve got just one more question, and it’s kind of a personal thing — What really pisses you off?”

This isn’t quite that, but, I’m sure there’s a nails-on-a-chalkboard thing for almost everybody out there.

When it comes to me at work, it’s the oft-proffered, “we have a requirement.”

Oh, yeah? Which one? Where’s it documented? Who approved it? How does it fit into solution design? What are the test cases that demonstrate its satisfaction?

I ended up working more yesterday to finish the ton of yearly training stuff for work. Of course, it’s due right after I’m supposed to get back, while I’m still technically “off.”

And I couldn’t get through it. But I did finally get into the benefits site so I can adjust the bits that are coming out of my paychecks.

Maybe I should do this by levels of annoyance.

1. Human Resources. It’s transformed over the past twenty years or so from a position of trying to get employees what they need to do their jobs to one of creating labyrinth processes to keep employees so busy that they can’t be individuals. Yeah, we’ll help them get what they’re after. After they do these 98 courses that make them into exactly the sort of people we want them to be. During my workout, I got Creep by Radiohead. I’m thinking Fitter Happier might be something that’s on repeat for a lot of these folks.
2. “Negative Impact.” This is an outgrowth from Dr. Santoro in college. In addition to whatever GE class he was teaching, he was really intent on making sure that his students could express themselves well. An “impact” is a collision. Learning to use “affect” and “effect” really improve your writing. With that in mind, “negative impact” started bothering me when I was writing mainly broadcast copy. Several years later, I was working with someone trying to “sexy up” language in something I wrote. He rewrote something, and used “negative impact.” My response was something along the lines of, “A negative impact is a vacuum; it sucks.” That was back when using such language in polite company, much less on TV or radio.
3. Catastrophizing. Sadly, this is in overdrive until Tuesday. I listened to this yesterday, and found myself disagreeing with pretty much all of the guests. I did sent my absentee ballot yesterday.

I probably could continue pounding things out, but I’m tiring of trying to think of things.

I also need to go fill out more paperwork.

I’m not supposed to be doing this again, but I figure it’s something that gets me into the mood for the holidays, and next year.

Things this year aren’t as jam-packed as last year, but I still do have a few things on my plate. I do have some travel the first week of the month, but why am I doing this? Well, some of the things in the Ep. with Susan Cain on EconTalk kind of spoke to some of what I do.

Even after a disgustingly-long day, it’s something I can do to kind of even out my head, as well as stay on track.

A lot of what I’m going to do this year is really recycled stuff from a particularly-low point in life, 2017, but I do have a few other things I want to write agouti.

We’ll see how it all goes, I suppose. There are a few blank spaces left, so I’m soliciting suggestions.

But, off we go. Let’s see what happens.

All that said, I really ought to consider not doing this next year. Fifteen straight years is a bit of an accomplishment, I suppose. Maybe I’ve stuck to this to keep some connection to what life was before everything went to hell.

Obviously, that started immediately after I finished the first month; my dad died. But this was something I did right after getting married, so that, too, fits into major life milestones.

Do I miss having things better set out for me before I started? Yeah, a bit. But I’m not trying to go back to then.

A particularly uninspiring politician is running on a general saying of “not going back.”

Okay, but when what you’ve got is completely screwed up, you do need to review how you got to that place.

I understand, Lessons Learned aren’t good Agile practice, along with things like proper engineering, but…..

Do I apply lessons from previous years to the next effort? Yes.

Let’s see how it goes.