The weather was nicer in January than it is now. And it snowed in January. April showers may bring May flowers, but no one will see them BECAUSE THEY WILL BE UNDER 2 METERS OF WATER.
And they’re still teasing this in the forecast:
Oh, I’ll be back in eight days to verify that it was actually 4C with snow showers on the 28th, believe me!
I had some too-ripe-to-eat bananas and in times past, I always swore I’d use them to make banana bread.
After vowing this approximately a million times, that day finally arrived today.
Being 2023, I did what any person with a connection to the web would do: I asked an AI chat program to give me a banana bread recipe. It did, but it was for a pan larger than the one we have, so I asked it to modify the recipe to account for this. It did.
The bread is now baking in the oven. Will it be good? Will it be a bananatastrophe?
Pics and the verdict later today!
In the meantime, enjoy this dancing banana:
UPDATE #1: The banana bread is baked! A photo:
It looks fine, but a little runty. How will it taste? The taste test is coming soon, in the exciting banana-flavoured UPDATE #2.
UPDATE #2: Despite being runty, AI banana bread was declared a yummy success. We’ll double the recipe next time and see what happens.
The link below was stolen from Austin Kleon’s Friday newsletter (if you are in any way a creative type or just a voracious reader or lover of art, I highly recommend subscribing):
R.E.M. reflects on ‘Murmur’ on its 40th Anniversary
Guitarist Peter Buck nails the time span: “If, on the way to the first day of recording Murmur, we had chanced upon a radio rebroadcast from exactly forty years previous, we would have heard speeches from Franklin Roosevelt, news about World War II, and the swinging sounds of Tommy Dorsey and Glenn Miller. Forty years is a looong time.”
Murmur is a rare(ish) example of a great debut album1On reflection, I realize a number of bands have great debut albums, then spend the rest of their career trying to live up to them, usually with mixed success, something that was not the case with R.E.M. . These guys were in their early 20s and delivered a terrific mix of songs on their first try, making Murmur a genuine classic (I still rank it as #3 on my list of R.E.M. albums). I came to R.E.M. late, with their fifth album, Document, after hearing “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (and I Feel Fine)”–a song I later came to realize wasn’t really typical of them. Like any good-but-late fan, I went back and got their previous (four) albums, in chronological order because I’m a purist or something, so Murmur was the second R.E.M. album I dove into, and I liked it even more than Document. I was hooked!
And yes, I will be listening to Murmur today. It’ll make me feel old, sure, but more than that, it will make me feel good.
UPDATE: I listened to Murmur on my 5K run. The run ended partway through “Sitting Still” so I listened to the rest on the walk home. The album is so clean and uncluttered, shifting from ballad to bouncy and back without missing a beat (say that three times fast).
I was 18 when this album came out (and did not know R.E.M. even existed at the time). Obligatory list of things I could and could not do when Murmur debuted in 1983:
I could:
I could not:
A few days ago I unsubscribed from two well-written, timely and informative newsletters.
Both focused on covering politics and the news, mostly in terms of how politics often is the news. Both were American-centric, but the U.S. does have a rather lot of influence on the world.
Over the past few days, I found myself starting to read the current edition of each newsletter, then stop. A few times I just straight up deleted them, unread. I thought about how I stopped checking the news on a daily basis and how every time I have checked the news since then, it reinforces what a wise decision that was.
These newsletters were making me feel pretty much the same way as ingesting the news on a daily basis had: bad.
If I want to feel bad, I can just step on the scale. It’s quicker, costs me nothing and fifteen minutes later I’ll have either forgotten about it or rationalized it in some way (“Focus on the long term, not daily fluctuations”). The bad feeling does not linger.
Reading bad or unpleasant news–especially political news–lingers. It burrows into my psyche. I don’t like that. Is it a me problem? Possibly.
But I have an easy me solution–just don’t read that stuff! I can still stay informed without soaking in it, as it were.
And so my email inbox grows slightly slimmer. Now if I can just do the same.
April Showers A refreshing rain Everything is lush and green You are getting soaked
And the ChatGPT version:
AI-pril Showers Raindrops on petals April showers bring new life Spring's rebirth begins
One of us perhaps appreciates the rain more.
I have clicked Never ask again roughly five billion times.
Bonus points if you get the reference in the title (which also means you are old. See the end of this post for a link to the source).
I got an email from Kobo, which sells eBooks and eReaders (I’m using the spelling they use, which the LanguageTool extension in Firefox is insisting is horrible and wrong):
So, this is riffing on the famous line Tom Hanks utters in Forrest Gump:
Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.
Forrest Gump, Esquire
Except it completely reverses the line because that’s cute? Funny? Just kinda dumb?
Just kinda dumb.
I’m actually trying to be more positive these days, but I am compelled to point out this kind of lazy nonsense when it is expressly sent to my inbox on a Monday morning. Don’t do this to me, Kobo!
Also, here’s a link revealing the source of the title, from an SNL episode in 1992. How is it possible 1992 was 31 years ago? I was 27, which feels like being a newborn now.
I thought it would be fun to list things I miss from the 1970s. Then I realized I couldn’t think of any.
I went from 5 to 15 years old in the 70s. I can’t say I recall a lot from being 5, but what if I could go back to my 15-year-old body with my current adult mind? Wouldn’t that be fun? Or would it be horrifying? Maybe horrifyingly fun?
I will explore this in a future post.
For now, here are three things I miss from the 1970s, for real:
April Fool’s Day would be better if more people had better than Dad-joke levels of humour. Or maybe not.
In any case, enjoy! It’s funny, but also just a joke, see?
Now carry on with your day.
I’ve had a lot of dreams the past few nights, and I’ve actually remembered several of them. They are both silly and weird, as all good dreams should be. Given the stress I’ve gone through lately, it almost seems like my subconscious mind is trying to offer a calming balm of sorts. I’m good with that.
Dream #1: The cat and the keyboard
This dream involved one of my internet gaming pals, Circuit. It played out over some kind of webcam he had set up. He was showing off a couple new things: a shiny new black keyboard with a knob (like the one I have). For some reason, the keyboard was on the carpet. I remember the carpet was yellow. And he also had a new black cat, though I never got the name. Circuit mentioned that one issue is the cat seemed to barf a lot and just as he said this the cat barfed on his new keyboard. That’s where the dream ended.
I laughed when I woke up and remembered the dream.
Dream #2: Mom and the duck device
The second dream featured my mom, who is now 88. In the dream, she looked like she was in her late 40s or early 50s, but I couldn’t tell if the dream was in the past or if she was unnaturally young in the present. It started in a booth of what I think was a McDonald’s. I don’t recall seeing anything to positively ID it, but that was the vibe. The scene abruptly changed to outside, near a tree by the road that went past the McDonald’s. I think it may have been the McDonald’s in my hometown of Duncan, so the road would be the island highway, though due to its location, traffic does not go roaring past here. My mom was talking to a man who was down low by the tree, dogging or something. He apparently had something controversial to report, and she was acting like a news reporter, complete with audio recording device. She promised not to use his name and turned the device on to start recording their conversation. The device was disguised as a duck and to turn it on, she had to squeeze the duck, which caused it to open its mouth and quack. She then held the duck to him and started the questions. That’s where the dream ended.
I not only laughed when I woke up and remembered this dream, I laugh every time I think of it. My mom was holding the duck like an Uzi, too.
I don’t discuss politics much here any more (one of the perks of generally avoiding news sources), but I was amused by this YouTube comment made in response to a video covering today’s announcement of former President Trump’s (first) indictment:
