Welp, made some decsions on the house, did some freelance work for actual money (well, sort of -- maybe enough for a tank of gas), hit the elliptical and got one episode less behind on The Walking Dead. Not bad for a Friday.
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If You Can Read This, You Can Read This
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If You Can Read This, You Can Read This
Hi, I'm Thad. I build websites.
This blog's been up in one form or another since 1999. In that time I've written about topics ranging from comic books to video games to copyright law to creators' rights to Frank Zappa.
I also write eBooks and narrate audiobooks. Here's where you can find them:
Another thing that's probably okay to reserve for one day a year:
Arlo Guthrie, Farm Aid, 2005.
Christmas Creep has bothered me since I was old enough to really notice it. Christmas starts earlier and earlier every year, and there's ever more pressure to consume! To buy shit, to go places, to be with family even if all it's going to do is stress you all the fuck out and make for a less-than-appealing family memory. Too much stress, plus too much traffic making for miserable driving, breathing, and shopping.
For a number of years I'd spend the week before Christmas out of town, out of the city, off at my mom and stepdad's quiet little home in Chino Valley. Unplug for a few days, though I don't think that expression was vogue yet.
Haven't done that these past few years but man it's tempting.
It should come as no surprise that I am not a huge fan of this "Let's have Black Friday -- on Thursday!" trend.
I don't shop on Black Friday. I sure as hell don't intend to shop on Black Not-Friday. I hold any company that tries to lure people away from Thanksgiving for holiday savings! in the same contempt they so clearly hold me. And their employees. And their customers.
I heard on the radio that last year showed a sizable dip in early-December shopping, theorized as "shopping fatigue". I hope that keeps happening. I hope it keeps happening until they learn. But unfortunately I don't think they'll ever learn -- any more than the airlines will learn that their business is dipping because they have made flying a fucking miserable experience.
I also heard there are folks saying people should support local businesses on Saturday. If that helps local businesses, hey, that's great -- but I don't really put much stock in "Everybody do X on Such-and-Such-a-Day to send a message!" as a strategy. You know all those "Don't buy gas on Saturday; that'll really show Exxon-Mobil!" forwards your idiot slacktivist friends constantly send you on Facebook? Do you recall any of them ever really showing Exxon-Mobil? No? Well that's because it doesn't hurt Exxon-Mobil's business when everyone just fucking waits until Sunday to buy the same amount of gas.
So while I wholeheartedly endorse supporting local businesses, I really think you should probably be doing it more than one day a year.
Fuck, the whole idea that people should only be encouraged to shop on a single specific day is the problem here.
So support your local business. Saturday, Sunday, whenever the fuck you feel like it. Friday, if you must, though I don't intend to leave the house that day myself.
But if you actually go out and support those turkeyfuckers at Wal-Mart and Target in making their employees knock off Thanksgiving dinner early to come in and sell you shit? Well, look, I know the economy's rough and beggars can't be choosers. But I don't think you need that new TV that damn badly.
On a more cheerful note: there's a whole lot in this life I'm thankful for (for example: not being a retail employee on Thanksgiving), and I hope there's a lot you're thankful for too. I hope you keep that in mind today and enjoy your turkey and gravy and cranberry sauce and what-have-you.
But that's just one more thing that shouldn't be confined to one day a year. Stay upbeat. Keep things in perspective. Remember the good things each and every day.
Now, cooking an entire turkey dinner, on the other hand? That's probably okay to confine to one day a year. That is a whole lot of work.
afka.net has a pretty solid selection of Zappa articles. Here's an early one: Frank Zappa the Incredible Boss Mother, by Don Paulsen, Hit Parader, June 1967.
"Top 40 radio is unethical, unmusical and it stinks. Classical music stations aren't much better. They all have very rigid, limited programming.
"The Mothers were created to fill most of the gap that exists between so-called serious music and the mass public. Really good music with advanced tendencies has been kept from the public at large. This includes classical and popular music. A filtering system of little old ladies selects the music played by symphony orchestras and on radio stations.
"Once some people get to the position where they own a nightclub or control the goings-on in a concert hall, they become critics and tastemakers.
"Usually they hate music. They love business and just want to make money. Whenever I have to deal with this kind of people, I always tell them that I hate music and I'm only doing this for the money. They slap me on the back and we get along fine. I tell them I wish I could drive a cab instead, but I can't get a license.
"The public knows nothing of what's really going on in the outer limits of music. There 'are kids writing music who think they've just made up the most fantastic things. They don't know that the best they can write today was already written and performed in 1912.
"A piece like Ameriques by Edgar Varèse, written in 1912, would scare the average teenager to death. Really scare him. Varèse lived and died in New York. The average American doesn't even know he existed, yet what he wrote has virtually changed the shape of all the music of the other composers who have heard it."
In later years, Zappa would come to believe that the younger generation of execs, the ones who thought they knew music, were even more dangerous and closed-minded than their square, mercenary elders.
But never mind that. I could pontificate on how things are different today (Top 40 radio ain't what it was) and how they're the same (American Idol ain't exactly much of an improvement) -- but the best thing I can do is demonstrate the kind of instant access to non-Top 40 music that we have in this here futuristic utopia of ours.
Here's Ameriques, by Edgard Varèse, performed by the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra in 1997.
Well, can't say that meeting was any more helpful than I anticipated, but at least it was short -- I was out within half an hour.
They want me to sign up for some website or another (currently down), upload my resume, and sign up for updates. I also got the paperwork to switch my unemployment over to deposit directly in my regular account instead of the Chase one they opened for me. I've been meaning to do that since day one but am much more keen on getting around to it since discovering Chase started charging me a fee for not using my unemployment account during the months I was employed.
Just so we're clear: I am the sort of guy who will close his bank account over six dollars in fees.
Because I fucking-well need that six dollars more than Chase does. As evidenced by the fact that it's the account where my unemployment checks go.
On the whole, though, it was a good reminder that, even unemployed, I'm not so badly off. I've got a family that supports me, emotionally and, when occasionally necessary, financially. I'm in better shape than a lot of the folks I saw who went in to DES just to use their computers to apply for jobs.
Anyhow, on the way home I found gas for $3.39 a gallon. I was pretty excited about filling up my tank for about $30. Up until a mile later when I saw it for $3.35. And then when I saw it for $3.38 a mile away from my house. Oh well; $3.39's still pretty good.
Tomorrow I need to refer to Reemployment Orientation, or, as I marked it on my calendar, Reeducation Camp.
It's another of those things, like the ill-conceived "look for work on four separate days each week" standard, that is a good idea in principle but which I'm not so sure is going to work out in real life.
I'm pretty confident I was selected at random, from a pool of everybody who's been unemployed for the past month.
There may have been other factors -- like how this is the second time I've been on unemployment in as many years -- I don't know.
But I'd be pretty surprised if my degree and work experience were considered in my selection. And there's the rub.
I've got a BS degree in a field that's not doing a lot of full-time hiring, and about a decade's experience in a related field that's doing more full-time hiring but still not nearly as much as it was a few years ago. My needs are kind of different from somebody who hasn't finished college. Which isn't to cast aspersions on anyone without a degree -- to the contrary, there are lots of very smart people looking for work who just need some training.
And hell, maybe I will end up meeting with somebody who knows who's hiring programmers -- or at least migration techs. Maybe they'll have some good tips on punching up my resume, or hook me up with another temp agency, or have a site that gives me a better ROI for my search hours than CareerBuilder. I'd be grateful for any of those things.
But I can't help thinking that anybody who knows all that stuff is probably not going to be working for DES telling a random sampling of the unemployed how to look for a job.
But I'll go in with a smile and say please and thank you and be grateful for my unemployment check. Anything else on top of that is just Thanksgiving gravy.
I'll let you know how it goes. Probably.
Ike Willis and Ray White with Project Object, ZAPPAnale XXII. Mislabeled by the uploader as Joe's Garage; that's the album, not the song. Great upload otherwise!
Hammer out car insurance (whose website is broken), hammer out health insurance (whose database is broken), decide where furniture's going in new house, hit up everybody I know for addresses to send "Save the Date" announcements to.
All with mother-in-law visiting and trying to wrangle 18-month-old nephew. Mostly successfully, I should say; she was a whole lot more tired by the end of the day than I was. But I was still plenty tired.
A few months back I shared a video of Alice Cooper talking about Frank Zappa.
Here's Frank Zappa talking about Alice Cooper: