Look, people can think whatever they want about how Zohran Mamdani is either going to save NYC or destroy it. It's not for me to say, because I don't live there.

Personally all I care about is that he wields his power with compassion, makes good choices, and doesn't give in to the temptation to take resources for himself and other powerful people at the expense of people who are struggling. I wish only the best for New Yorkers and hope they give Mamdani a chance and work with him to make their lives better. I hope we all win.

THAT. BEING. SAID.

I believe that to understand a language is to understand the people who speak it. It also gives you a better understanding of people whose languages you don't speak because you know that other peoples and other cultures exist, and they are all uniquely beautiful in their own way. Because Mamdani speaks seven languages (Arabic, Hindi, Kiswahili, Urdu, Luganda, Spanish, and English) I think it reflects very well on him, and gives us a big clue that he's going to to truly represent all the people of New York City. Not just the people who voted for him. Not just the party he runs in. Not just those who shares his faith. Everybody. New York City is everybody...

As a side note, dang do I love seeing the passion he puts in when talking TO people instead of THROUGH people or AT people, as so many politicians do. Best of luck to you sir. Best of luck to New York City.

After dinner I was still hungry.

So I went through my refrigerator and my cupboards trying to figure out what I wanted to eat. Eventually I landed on a bowl of cereal. Except I was out of my all-time favorite for forever, Captain Crunch Peanut Butter, and had to grab the box I got on sale in my last grocery order, Cinnamon Toast Crunch. This is a cereal that I can eat, but it's never been the home run that other people tell me it should be. This is everybody's favorite breakfast cereal, but to me it's kinda just okay.

So I chowed down on my kinda just okay cereal while watching YouTube videos, where I ran across this gem...

Which lead to this gem...

Which lead to this gem...

And now I want an otter.

Or a pizza, because the kinda just okay cereal didn't do it for me.

Yesterday my website was accessible. Today it's not. I cannot get to it via SFTP or login or nothing.

I played around with it for an hour before bed, got nowhere, then decided to just put it off until I have time. Which is basically never, but my hope is I can find some time this weekend or something.

In the meanwhile, I'm just going to keep writing entries with the expectation I will be able to post them one day.

UPDATE: Well... half the battle won. I can get to my blog. What I cannot do is get SFTP working, no matter what I try. Which means I can't post photos. I mean, I can attempt to post photos using my hosting company's "file manager." But it's so terrible because it mostly refuses to work. Want to upload a 32K file? It can take 15 minutes and even after it says that it was transferred, you can look at your files and not find it there. Blergh.

Last night I was looking through my photos to send one to a friend who was asking for travel advice. While digging through the archives, I noticed something strange... before 2008, my photos were a lot less personal. Sure, I had photos of me and my friends when we're together, but so many things in my day-to-day life along more casual moments went undocumented.

It took me all of two seconds to figure out why.

The iPhone was released on June 29, 2007. I got one a month later.

Before iPhone, I was usually using a digital SLR as a camera which was (mostly) only taken on trips. I was never hauling it around with me everywhere I went. I also had a pocket camera, of course, but it was just one more thing to carry around, so I mostly didn't. On top of that, a lot of places... like concerts, shows, and such... wouldn't allow you to take a camera in with you anyway. You had to be a professional photographer with a permission card to take photos.

Then iPhone came along, and I had a camera with me wherever I went. And everything changed. It wasn't a great camera, but it was good enough. Far better than the cameras on the phones I owned before (which I never used because they were so bad).

It took a few months before my brain was suitably programmed to remember that I had a camera in my pocket, but by 2008 I was very much in the habit of whipping out my iPhone to snap a photo when something fun or interesting happened.

I didn't have cats yet, but suddenly my iPhone was filled with photos of all the cats I met...

And occasional selfies, which I had never taken before (note I'm off-center because a front-facing camera wouldn't appear until iPhone 4)...

And mundane moments, like the food I was served on a plane...

And of course food in general. I rarely photographed food before... only when it was incredibly special... but now? From 2008 onwards, food photos were everywhere in my camera roll and on my blog...

Yeah, yeah... the photos I was getting were only ever decent when the lighting was perfect (I took seven photos of that cat trying to find the best angle and position to get the best detail in the fur), but even drab, low-res, blurry shots were cool at the time! Documenting the stuff I did and saw became second nature.

Back then, like now, people were telling me that I was spending too much time taking photos instead of enjoying the moment... but they were (and are) wrong. At least when it comes to me. Unlike traditional photos which required planning and camera choices, iPhone photography was just pressing a button on an object you already had in your hand. It was seconds of your life captured forever.

And I loved that.

Every one of the moments captured in photos above would have been easily forgotten if I didn't have photos. But instead I remember the cat that sat in my chair at a photo shoot I was at in Seattle... I remember everybody wearing cracker crowns at my sister's house for Christmas dinner... I remember how disappointed I was that I was in First Class on a flight and feeling Last Class because all they had was Pepsi instead of Coke... I remember loving Chicago-style veggie dogs so much that I didn't eat anything all morning so I would have room to eat two of them at lunch... I remember the Key Lime pie I got for lunch at Universal Studios Florida right before I rode the Incredible Hulk Coaster three times in a row... and I remember how my life changed when I ordered extra cashews on my cashew-caramel-frozen-custard sundae on a work trip to Wisconsin. Little moments preserved in time that I probably wouldn't have given a second thought if I wasn't able to scroll through them over and over whenever I want.

I'm sure as I get older and memories are more difficult to recall, I'll be very glad to have so many things digitally captured to help me remember the life I lived.

Including that time I had to chisel my car out of a hotel parking lot while working in Maine after an ice storm hit the night before...

Who wouldn't want to vividly remember that?

It isn't even 8:00pm which means that it's actually 9:00pm when you remove Daylight Saving Time bullshit, which explains why I'm exhausted, but not to the point in giving up... because an all new Bullet Sunday starts... now...

   
• Translate This! "Do you love me?" =cat shakes head no=

When I was talking about my talking to my cats in yesterday's post, this is what I was doing... but without the translator.

   
• Galaxy Girl! Does anybody else consider it utterly bizarre that I can't remember what I did two days ago, but a Schoolhouse Rock video shows up on YouTube and I know every word?

Interplanet Janet is not the most memorable, but the song sure is a bop.

   
• Happy! I am digging the first two episodes of Plur1bus on Apple TV. It's a bit plodding, but you can just feel that it's going somewhere interesting...

The trailer does a pretty good job of letting you know what the show is about without spoiling anything...

I'm not exactly sure where the show will end up landing (though I have my suspicions), but I trust Vince Gilligan to have that figured out.

   
• In Love and War! I tuned in to Kim Kardashian's new legal drama All's Fair for two reasons: 1) The reviews were so bad I was wondering if the show was truly bad or just getting review-bombed... and 2) The cast has some phenomenal actors in it, like Glenn Close, Naomi Watts, Teyana Taylor, and Sarah Paulson... plus Neicy Nash, whom I love.

And, yeah, it truly is that bad.

I could barely make it through the first episode. To see actors I enjoy in this horrific pile of shit with such awful dialogue was unbearable. I am fully willing to admit that my problem with the show may be on me because I don't understand the tone. But either way, it just... fails. If it's supposed to be camp, it doesn't go far enough and feels like serious matters are being trivialized. If it's meant to be serious with camp beats, it is completely sabotaged by moments so cringe that you can't take the show seriously. Which is to say that I honestly don't know what the fuck to make of it all. A show which is assumed to be a monument to women's empowerment feels an awful lot like mocking women's empowerment. But I'm a guy, so maybe I'm missing the point. Good Lord I hope I'm missing the point.

   
• MoonBase Alpha Revisited! Full episodes of SPACE: 1999 are on YouTube thanks to Shout! Studios. When I was a kid, I thought this show was so frickin' bizarre. Decades later, nothing has changed! Though I still think the special effect were darn good for the day and the costumes were some of the best ever made (Paramount must have thought so too, since Star Trek: The Motion Picture copied the general idea two years later)...

What's hilarious is that the excellent special effects shots we got must have been very expensive, because there are episodes where they have the characters stumbling around in the dark instead of inside an alien space ship or whatever. It definitely saved money! The writing in the first season was very smart. And one of the few episodes I remember in good detail was the fifth one (guest starring Christopher Lee!). What makes it so memorable is the ending, which is pretty brutal...

The show, which was always scientifically dicey, is ripe for a reboot. One day.

   
• NEWSFLASH: Teen Who Raped, Strangled and Brutalized 2 Girls Was Facing 7 Decades in Prison — Then a Judge Let Him Walk Free. "Violent criminals threatening American lives will be immediately deported! — Oh... he's white? And his dad was a beloved football coach? Never mind." — Amazing what passes for "justice" in this toxic shithole country. Between horrific bullshit like this and criminals being pardoned left and right not because they were wrongly imprisoned or their sentence was too harsh... but because they will be loyal to a politician... Justice is getting harder and harder to find. Read that headline again and tell me how even 70 years was enough time?

   
• Science Denial In Action. Just like Steve Jobs ignored science... at first... when it came to treating his cancer, so has Dilbert comic creator Scott Adams. And now that it's too late, he wants his buddy the president to intercede and get him the scientific treatment he needs, despite the reason he's likely being denied is because he wasted time thinking Ivermectin would cure him and now it's too late...

I don't get why people who reject science for curable diseases suddenly abandon all their "principles" when death is looming. I mean, you didn't think it would work then, but now you do? And when you've waited too long for science to work any more, then you're back to science being "bad." In the meanwhile, you've convinced other people who could have been cured to abandon science with you. That's incredibly shitty. Bad enough you let yourself die, worse you're taking others with you.

   
I guess that's all I got for the day. Good night.

Whenever Jenny has had enough of me petting her or holding her feet or whatever... she just starts kicking at me to get away while she makes her escape. It's a hilariously cat-like. They manipulate you into getting what they want. And if they don't want you around, they leave.

I can't help but feel I should be learning from that.

In other news... Jake puked on the warming pads I had put on the bed. Both of them!

After I took the covers off the pads to toss them in the wash, I went back upstairs and Jake was sitting on the warm spot left by one of the pads. I crawled back into bed to work for a while, at which point he plopped down next to me and fell asleep...

I think I mentioned how my cats are "talking" a lot more as they get older.

I've decided to talk back.

Jenny was hanging off the cat tree looking at Jake running down the stairs. I was on the couch and started meowing at her. She turned her head to look...

I kept talking to her, at which point she shifted her body more towards me... still hanging off the cat tree...

She doesn't talk back like Jake does. Instead she just looks at me like I'm a moron.

Which is also hilariously cat-like.

On Facebook I learned that Morrissey had canceled the remainder of his US tour, including Salt Lake City and Seattle (on October 7th). It seems a perfect time to revisit my only time seeing him live, which was my third attempt (the first time I couldn't make it, the second time Morrissey canceled). But anyway...

As a massive fan of The Smiths, I had long wanted to see Morrissey in concert because it's the closest I was going to get to seeing the band play live. After the cancellation of the second concert I tried to see, I had given up because he always seemed to be canceling, and it's too expensive to book airfare, hotel, and tickets when he does.

But finally in 2014 I said "fuck it" and flew all the way across the country from Seattle, WA to St. Petersburg, FL and hoped for the best.

He actually showed up.

HOWEVER... After being disappointed in the crowd for not responding enthusiastically enough to his political rants, Morrissey declared the show "dead" and left the stage with only three songs left to go on his setlist. Ten days later Morrissey canceled all remaining dates in the tour due to illness (shocker). Apparently he caught a respiratory infection in Miami the day after the concert I attended.

The tour itself was wild. And although I'm disappointed I got shorted three songs (one of which is my very favorite: Everyday is Like Sunday)... I wouldn't trade the experience for the world, because now I have my own Morrissey story. And for that I'm grateful, because he's always been a bit of an ass, and he just gets worse as time goes on. I would never pay money to see the turd now.

Not that I could... he canceled Seattle, after all.

APPLE NEWS: Apple to use Google's AI model to run new Siri, Bloomberg News reports.

So... when I bought my Apple iPhone with the promise that they would make their stupid-as-shit Siri voice assistant smarter with it... this was a crock of bullshit all along? They NEVER had the ability to fix Siri. I've been waiting OVER A YEAR for something that was never coming.

And now they're going to have Google fix it for them? Why the fuck wouldn't I have just bought an Android phone if that's what I was going to get? That way I would have had a working voice assistant all this time.

Remember when Apple wouldn't talk about something until it was ready to release? Apple doesn't... BECAUSE NOW-A-DAYS THAT'S ALL THEY FUCKING DO! It's all lies. The company has billions of dollars and yet they still have to use OTHER COMPANY'S TECHNOLOGY to get shit done? How fucking embarrassing. I guess Apple's done.

This seems like a situation that's ripe for a lawsuit.

Because this was my morning with my iPod mini as I was going to take a shower...

ME: Hey Siri, play Opalite by Taylor Swift.
SIRI: Playing music by Taylor Swift.
ME: Hey Siri, STOP! — Hey Siri, play Opalite by Taylor Swift.
SIRI: Playing Elizabeth Taylor by Taylor Swift.

And it's not like you can tell Siri that they're a flaming pile of shit that's terrible at their ONE job. They'll just say "I won't reposnd to that" and go back to doing whatever stupid shit they were doing.

Which should be Apple's slogan now-a-days.

I've mentioned dozens of times how I love a really good ad. The problem is that most advertising is utter shit. Television ads are mostly done on the cheap and are so brain-dead annoying as to make me actively want to not purchase the product being shoved at me.

Last night I ran across the old commercial from 2015 which made me laugh. It's not like Fiat spent a ton of money on it... instead they were just really, really clever...

If you can't make an ad which gets some kind of reaction... ANY kind of reaction... then you've failed.

This Fiat commercial is going to stick with me a while. Meanwhile, I couldn't tell you what ads I watched today.

Josh Johnson is fascinating to me.

The thing that's so brilliant about his comedy is that he can take these wild tangents that make you think he's losing his train of thought... and then BLAM! He brings it all back around to punctuate his point in a brutal cut...

Anybody can be observational of the absurd. Josh isn't telling you anything that anybody who paying attention could say. But it's what he does with the observations which makes him rise above.

This is a really great piece.