General

I never remember what SMH means

I know, I am typing this on a blog, which means I have the vast collected knowledge of the web available to me and even with Google flailing and AI slop overrunning everything, it’s still pretty easy to search and find out that SMH is short for Shake My Head (expressing mild disgust, disbelief).

But for whatever reason, my brain refuses to remember this, and I don’t want to search every time the term pops into my head, because it reminds me my brain can’t remember this specific abbreviation. I can remember LOL and IANAL (lol anal) and IDK and lots of others, but this is one that just never sticks.

But instead of wondering what it might mean, my brain always offers up the incorrect, unhelpful, and weird: Smell My Hand.

I want to say it still kind of works, but it really doesn’t. It’s just weird.

I am weird.

Aw, Clem Burke, the drummer for Blondie, has died

Clem Burke, one of the original members of Blondie, a favourite band of my youth (and still today), has died at age 70 after battling cancer.

Burke was always fun to watch in concert footage or music videos, because of his maniac style. I will be listening to Blondie tonight and checking out some of his spastic moves in various videos.

Vintage Burke in the clip below.

I can ease your pain

A few years back I had my ears tested and the guy who tested them, a professional ear-testing guy (I forget the term and I know I could look it up, but I have posts to crank out, and I’m falling behind), had kind of a grave look on his face during the test. I probably did, too.

You know how when you’re taking a multiple choice exam at school and you have this feeling that you’re getting all the answers wrong somehow?

That’s what this ear test was like, especially when he moved to my right ear.

My left ear was rated not great, definitely some hearing loss.

My right ear was basically terrible. Like, you can hear things, but everyone below the age of 20 will be like they’re talking inside a cone of silence or something. Just a huge swathe of my hearing range gone.

Why? I was in my 50s, which I have been assured is not old and is, in fact, the new 30s. Thirty-year olds don’t have bad hearing.

But I did listen to loud (and often terrible) pop music on headphones when I was young. Was the volume too high at times? Probably.

More recently, in 2010 I dated a guy for a while, and we went to a club that was having some kind of contest and there were judges at a table, plus very bug speakers pumping out music at very high volume. We were standing near one of the speakers. My right ear was the closest part of my body to it. I remember after leaving the club, my right ear rang for a long time. It felt like my hearing had been permanently damaged. Probably because it had been.

Then the guy said he wanted to break up. This admittedly had nothing to do with my ear (as far as I know).

The worst part of this loss of hearing was I could tell how bad it was by listening to some of my favourite music. For example, in the song “Comfortably Numb” by Pink Floyd. It features Roger Waters singing the line, “Just a little pinprick” followed by what sounds like a triangle going PING. I could no longer hear the PING. Where once was a PING, now there was now nothing. It made me very sad.

Tonight, I did an experiment where I reversed the left/right channels of my earphones (by cleverly wearing them backwards) and played the song, because this would make the PING go to my left ear, which is not completely destroyed yet. I nervously waited for the song to get to that part, noting (not a music joke) that the song so far actually sounded pretty much the same, indicating that the mix was, as the professionals say, balanced.

When it got to the PING…I heard it! It was faint, but I definitely heard it. So now I can still hear the PING, as long as I listen to music in reverse stereo. Or maybe when I get some sort of hearing aids, which I am totally too vain and silly to do.

Anyway, in a world where so much seems to be collapsing all around us, it was nice to know the PING has not completely vanished for me.

Looks like I’ll be spamming a lot of posts soon

I am way behind on my two-posts per day minimum (which is an arbitrary number I made up, but my blog, my rules). Let’s do the math:

  • There are 31 days in March, so two posts per day = 62
  • As of this post, I have written 31
  • This means I must write 31 more
  • After today, there are four days left in the month
  • If you divide 31 by 4, you get 7.75

I must write 7.75 posts every day for the rest of March.

I’m not sure if I can do it this month, for reasons.

But I’ll try.

The first day of spring, 2025 edition

It’s the first day of spring!

The weather is a bit cool, with clouds and a little sun occasionally poking through. It will probably shower at some point. Such is March. (Edit: It started raining before I finished making this post.)

But I went for a walk and touched trees. Here are a few photos.

Greenery starting to get green on the river.
The world’s smallest beach booby trap (with my foot for scale).
Fresh wood chips at Hume Park
River with bonus guy fishing. Or maybe just standing there.

The last day of winter, 2025 edition

It’s around 10°C, which is seasonal, and we’re getting intermittent light showers, which is also pretty normal for mid-March.

Winter 24/25 was a bit odd, weather-wise. We got very little genuinely cold weather and the only snow, which spanned a few days, didn’t happen until early February. Late fall and early winter were more notable for a repeated number of storms blowing through, then not much after for the rest of the season.

It was like winter could never commit to itself.

I’m okay with that, because winter ranks last in my pick of seasons. Ice belongs in the freezer, not on the sidewalk, where it can meet with my butt when I slip on it. We are now one day away from my second favourite season of the year, spring!

Unlike winter, where it’s cooler and wetter throughout, spring gets a little weird, but more on that later–maybe tomorrow!

Here’s the Brunette River yesterday, nearly the end of winter:

The slow return of greenery. It’s like going from Quake to, uh, a game with colour.

“Creep” has 1,143,126,864 views and 202,075 comments

At the time of writing this post, of course. Presumably, both numbers will continue to go up.

I saw a mention of the song on the interweb, so checked out the video again. The video is fine–I like the colour and lighting, and Thom Yorke looks appropriately weird. The song is one of those quiet-LOUD-quiet numbers that is predictable, but extremely well-executed. I can see why it has so many views.

But 202,075 comments. An average novel is around 80,000-100,000 words. Even if every comment was a single word, that’s more than double the word count of an average novel. That is a lot of words.

It makes me wonder how long it would take to read every comment. It makes me wonder if anyone has tried. And what they felt when they were done, assuming they were still conscious.

Also, here is the video in question:

Close

Somehow this tooltip for…something…got stuck on my desktop. I actually restarted Windows Explorer hoping it would clear it and it did not. It now taunts me.

I’m hoping that by sharing it will somehow go away. Or I could just reboot and use Linux Mint for a while, where this probably won’t happen.

Anyway, that’s my Monday, although technically it’s Tuesday.