Hmmm. Try shift-F7. No good? Okay, wait. Isn’t there a big red button somewhere that gets you out of this shit? No? Huh. I must be thinking of the clothes washer.
Oh, yeah … hi. Well, as you might have guessed, your friends in Big Green are struggling to make ends meet, like most bands these days. It’s not easy. Frankly, it’s downright discouraging sometimes. This week, we spent at least three days trying to get the ends to meet, only to discover that the metaphor apparently doesn’t involve bringing ends together into a kind of loop, but, well … something quite different, it seems. There goes another three days! We spend time like company scrip at a Massey coal mine. (Which reminds me …. sixteen tons!)
Okay, so, a lot of bands are now doing digital performances in order to comply with social distancing guidelines related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Some are passing the digital hat, and that’s all good … very much like the sound of that. This whole thing has prompted a brisk discussion here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill – should we start doing live performances via YouTube, Facebook, etc.? Should we record performances and just toss them up there? Or should we run around in circles, waving our arms above our heads and yelling “Catastrophe! Catastrophe!”? If we do that, maybe Marvin (my personal robot assistant) can hold up my smart phone and send it out on YouTube, Facebook, etc. Yes, a brisk conversation … brisk as Lipton Tea.
Trouble is, nearly all of us are technically challenged when it comes to the internets. I’m not even sure how this blog works. I type shit into, press a button, and hey-presto, there it is, on the internets. Simple enough, right? But when it comes to broadcasting something into the ether, something that requires cameras, microphones, digital input devices, modems, routers, CAT6 cables, tin foil hats, clown shoes, cardboard backdrops, etc., we start getting into areas that are less familiar to us simple country folk. Sure, our mad science advisor Mitch Macaphee knows a thing or two about the internets, but every time we ask him for advice or assistance, he comes back with some claptrap about inventing an alternative to the internets. Always has to start from scratch, that Mitch. (God help us if he encounters that itch he cannot scratch.)
So, short answer, we’ll see if Shift-F7 gets us anywhere in the short run. Got better suggestions for magical key commands? Send them our way!
I think, personally, that he missed an opportunity to make a point here: namely, that we all have private lives – that we all do things that are not illegal but that we prefer not to make known to the entire world. What Weiner was confessing in front of the ubiquitous blue curtain of shame is probably slightly less compromising than the secret online activities of most of the people in that room. He’s a sexting addict. There is a growing population of middle-aged people who are fans of sexting. It’s not an obsession I share (not at my data rates – every time I get a freaking text weather alert it costs me 30 cents… and I get a lot of alerts) but I may be in the minority. What Breitbart and his minions have done is just “out” the guy, not because they have some overriding conviction about fidelity and niceness, but because they disagree with him politically on a range of other issues, and Weiner has always been outspoken.