I'm gonna level with you: it has been a very long day.
Everybody is fine. But I am very tired and can't muster the energy to dig up some bit of Zappa ephemera tonight.
But on the subject of music, I did just see McCoy Tyner and Joe Lovano tonight. It was amazing.
Still sitting up in the ER with my wife. She's sleeping and I've nothing else to do, so here goes, a post about my ongoing Mint experience that I mostly banged out yesterday:
I've got KDE running under Mint, behaving mostly the way I like my desktop to. There are a lot of fiddly little things that just don't work quite right for some reason -- Alt-Tab works, but Alt-Shift-Tab doesn't; the taskbar is just slightly too big and I can't drag icons to reorder them even though it's explicitly set to manual order; the themes are all slightly off from what I'm used to (Oxygen is too bright and Oxygen Cold is too dark); and I'm typing this in gedit because Kate won't let me type in documents where the lines go above a certain number of characters. I'm sure all these problems are fixable -- and hey, maybe if I'd just installed Mint KDE from scratch instead of starting with Cinnamon and then adding KDE, I wouldn't have had them in the first place --, but it sure has been a fiddly pain in the ass.
In short, despite the problems I've had with it, I'm inclined to believe the hype that OpenSUSE really is the best KDE-based Linux distribution.
So for now I'm keeping it installed, running updates from a chrooted YAST every day, and hoping one of them will eventually fix the damn thing.
Wife's back in the ER. I'm sure she'll be fine but don't expect any other posts tonight.
I do have one I wrote yesterday that I might put up if I find myself with some downtime while sitting in the hospital. But don't count on it.
Feels like it might be a little early to be posting another Tributo a Zappa recording, but what the hell, I dig this one too. It's performed by Joni Kontrol Band.
Heading south on the 17 tonight, I passed not one but two billboards exhorting me not to sign the recall petition for Sheriff Joe Arpaio. (Too late, asshole.)
This is a good sign. It means he thinks it's a real threat.
Hell, he seems to be taking it more seriously than I am. I signed the petition but I still expect him to wriggle out of this one, just like he's wriggled out of all the other attempts to hold him accountable at the ballot box or in the courts.
Obviously he's not really expecting anybody to choose not to sign the petition based on a billboard. He's just getting his ads in early so he'll be prepared for the real fight when it comes.
Still, seems like it might backfire -- how many people didn't even know about the petition until they saw one of those billboards?
And, not to put a fine point on it? The billboards are just south of Guadalupe, a town populated entirely by people who would vote to recall him. Seems like it might not be the best idea to put a reminder of the petition right in their backyard for them to see every day.
Not Cocaine Decisions the song (though that's what I was looking for when I found it!), but Frank discussing the corrosive force of the drug. And then a segment where he says classical music is as formulaic as pop music.
Uploaded by hazzaroonee, who doesn't give a certain source but says it's UK TV 1983.
You know, I like Grimm, mostly. I like its oddball setting and I love its supporting cast.
But it's got the Star Wars problem: the dullest, most tedious, least charismatic person on the show just so happens to be the main character.
Actually, the two dullest, most tedious, least charismatic people on the show are the main character and his girlfriend.
So really that makes it more like Episodes 2 and 3, I guess.
They've spent, what, twenty episodes now on this fucking amnesia plot? But they forgot the part about giving it any kind of stakes or giving me any reason to give a fuck. Oh no, Juliette might leave Nick? Oh no! Because I am so emotionally invested in their characters and their relationship!
She can leave on a bus or get hit by a bus for all I care, and take Nick with her. I'd watch the hell out of a show that made Hank or Wu or even Captain Renard the main character. And if Monroe and Rosalee were the leads? ... honestly, why aren't they? There's a couple I've developed some genuine affection for.
That one the other week where Nick, Hank, Rosalee, Monroe, and Bud all pulled off a caper together was really Grimm at its best, for reasons Les Chappell at AV Club pretty much nailed. The show diverts itself from the monster-of-the-week formula for a bit to acknowledge that oh yeah it's already got a whole bunch of monster races to work with already, and it ropes in most of the best members of the supporting cast to generally be charming and clever. Even Nick is pretty inoffensive, and Juliette...well, Juliette is barely in the episode, which I guess also counts as a win.
I really like parts of the show. I just wish they wouldn't pad them out with so much bullshit.