Josef Slygazhvili

Dude trying to get it from first principles!
Which is what I also lean towards. Give it to me step by step and I need to clearly map out each one… then the mind wanders and when I snap back to attention, I’ve lost the plot already, my mathematical surroundings are unclear, disorienting.

Add to this an erratic series of math teachers - some of them good, some of them blah - and this day trigonometry to me is a jumbled mess, but I loved calculus and was pretty good at probability and statistics.

5,000 International units of D3 with 50 mcgs of K2, in gel tablets, baby!

Hold it right there, buddy, what’s the matter, didn’t you read the sign at the entrance of this instance? It clearly says CAT, not CATSssss…

A chronic compulsive content-stealer creature like gallowboob might have encompassed that 15% all by himself.

Wouldn’t it be a lovely sight to see these social media companies paint themselves into a corner with their shiny, flashy new tech, mindlessly thrust out into the world, not because of any true functionality (as of yet) but because “new!”

Fifteen comically chaotic, bumbling, self-defeating henchmen, at that.

Back when Australia was still remote and exotic, before Crocodile Dundee even, a lot of people back in the day thought he sang:
“He just smiled and gave me a bit of my sandwich”,
which would have also made for a fantastic lyric in a very silly way.

Ooh la lá!
Zoot allors!

I can almost hear Major Kong (Slim Pickens) from Doctor Strangelove:
“Shoot… a fella could have a pretty good time in Vegas with all this stuff.”

This hits the spot on so many levels, flies through a narrow canyon of being meta without being annoying about it, specific without being obscure, absurd without being outlandish.

On some National Geographic article in the 90s about the Los Angeles area, there was a photo of a gym class, maybe Tae Bo or spinning, can’t remember, with a gloating caption from the instructor - “We get a lot of very driven, type-A people around here”, and I cannot for the life of me imagine anything other than being bored half to tears and maybe death, in that… intensely shallow environment.

Imagine all those SUVs and BMWs in the gym parking lot. Yuck.
Hot! Core! Power! Yoga! “We get a lot of very driven, type-A people around here.”

I thought you were supposed to till across the incline, not down it.

Taco Tuesday Tom

Not in the United States, on Fridays it was Dukes Of Hazard then Incredible Hulk on CBS, while Love Boat and Fantasy Island was Saturdays on ABC.

Edgelord politics

While some tech people behind the scenes are overwhelmed and scrambling to keep all kinds of electrical infrastructures up and running, or at least safe until the solar storm blast passes.

Plus they were expecting it, have been low-key preparing for weeks or months - knowing there’s a solar maximum - then much more actively a few days and hours before the event arrived, thanks to solar weather satellite forecasts being a reliable thing now.

That’s true! It must have been “Ashes To Ashes” then, because I clearly remember Bowie that night.
“Shock The Monkey” must have been on the first recorded VHS tape of MTV I got my hands on, probably a year later.

Don’t forget millions upon millions of low-information, low-empathy voters and non-voters who let it happen, many who still lazily believe that corporations are our friends, that “what’s good for walmart and Exxon is good for 'Murica”, that they are still the client and not the product, and the far-reaching implications of this.

I remember the first time I saw MTV.

Back in spring of 1982, traveling down the Baja California peninsula with my parents and brothers, we stayed a night at the La Pinta hotel in Guerrero Negro, a coastal town right on the state border between Baja and Baja Sur.

During dinner, I asked the man in charge if there was any chance of putting MTV on the hotel atrium television. He enthusiastically said yes, but they had to look it up, they’d never gotten such a request before, didn’t know where to point the large dish out in the desert garden, which satellite MTV was in.

After dinner, I sat on the couch, a lone figure in the atrium, as hotel guests opted for the garden or their rooms. The VJs that night were JJ Jackson and Martha Quinn, played things like “Girls On Film” by Duran Duran, “China Girl” by David Bowie, “Feet Don’t Fail Me Now” by Utopia, “Goodbye To You” by Scandal, “Escalator Of Life” by Robert Hazard, “Shock The Monkey” by Peter Gabriel, “Demolition Man” by The Police.

The ambiance created by this channel in this setting, was like an exciting shock of cool water, like being pulled from ancient times into a modern, more connected world. From my small-city, sheltered perspective.

This experience lasted for three or four hours, then at midnight it was lights out at the lobby and atrium, time to go to bed, and it was over.
I didn’t see MTV live again for years, although 6-hour VHS taped recordings of MTV made the rounds among friends, the way tapes of recorded KROQ from LA did, our main connection to a larger world of music.

It was perfect, just enough to get my juices flowing at that age, like Harry Haller in Herman Hesse’s “The Steppenwolf” - For Madmen Only, but for a teenager - but not enough for the rotation of videos to kick in and become repetitive. Right at that sweet spot that seared a mystique into my memory of the moment.