The Day After...

How's that for a head-fake? After what? The Debate? The 4th? - yes!

The Debate Debacle

I have studiously avoided writing on the Presidential debate last Thursday, apart from a quick take upon surveying the media and the socials after the event, I have remained silent. Yes, occasionally, I have dropped comments, some nuggets of witticism to counter some of the shit-takes that I have seen.

Alas, the mainstream media is amongst the most shitty of takes, whereas there has been a daily deluge of articles from their pundits, the editorial board, and by “guests” all united in their demands that Joe Biden exit the race and open it up to a contested convention¹.

But, as Greg O’lear noted in his newsletter today (no, not the podcast, read further for gold, and subscribe to Greg, he’s totally worth it)

Debate This!

The relevant paragraph resonates:

The public figures calling loudest for Joe to step down are Never Trump Republicans, the Pod Save America douche-bros, obscure Democratic Congressmen, the founder of Netflix (which didn’t stream the Kavanaugh documentary), and the editorial boards of various newspapers, including the disgraced New York Times—which yesterday, on the fucking Fourth of July, ran a column by a radical Catholic weirdo calling for people to not vote.

Yeah, there is evidence² that multiple senior members of The Bulwark visited with the Biden administration last weekend to argue for Biden to either step back from the campaign, or to resign, and pull the Band-Aid.

Just fucking insane if true. But totally believable by reading their landing page articles.

Look assholes, if you are successful in your Pundit-Veto, and Biden resigns, leaving the presidency to Harris, and a traipse to victory by Trump in the fall, you will have blood on your hands. ALL OF YOU.

The Fourth, groan

Look, I like holidays as much as the next man. A day off of work? A reason to fire up the grill? A feeling of patriotism whilst watching an America - Fuck Yeah movie³?

No, it is the fact that I live in a region that is plagued by cyclical droughts with a Mediterranean climate where we pretty much get not a drop of rain between late March and November, so all the terrain here is bone dry, covered with dead grass and shrubbery, a tinder box in effect.

Private fireworks are strictly illegal, but that doesn’t prevent literally tons being sold and fired off. Seriously, last year there was a fire in a local “Self Storage” site that blew off, destroying an entire building, but in the unscathed units in this same site, they found almost sixty thousand pounds of illicit fireworks.

That’s a lotta spaghetti my friends.

But what this means is that there are hours and hours of fireworks being fired off, freaking out my dogs, and I get to sleep on the floor with them to help calm them during this onslaught. Finally, about 11:30PM it tapered off and we all got to the serious business of sleeping.

Not a good day.

We did have grilled hotdogs, potato salad and baked beans, washed down with an outstanding bottle of rose that was light and fruity. Yummy.

The new guitar

I spent enough hours over the last two days playing it, and it is a pretty sweet git-box. Yeah, it was made in Mexico, but I have another guitar made there (the Charvel on my wall was made in Mexico at the Fender plant, and it is killer) so it doesn’t worry me. In fact, the fit and finish is spectacular. No, it’s not built with top shelf woods and components, but it is well made, it uses a mahogany like wood (Sapele), the neck is comfortable in the hand, it uses Martin’s “Retro” strings (they are nickel not phosphor-bronze) that feel and sound just cool.

It does have a Fishman piezo pickup under the saddle, so I dropped a 9 volt battery in and played it amplified. Sounds good. I will remove the battery, because I just don’t care for the electronics in acoustic guitars. It’s a “me”
thing.

I will do a full review, but so far it is an amazing piece of wood and wire, a “real” Martin, and its price was quite good. I love the 000 shaped body (auditorium style) and the short scale length is super comfortable to play. The perfect partner to have at hand while watching 1980’s cheese on the boob-tube.

It already feels like an old friend.

That’s gonna do it for today. I hope you had a good holiday and are not suffering too much from over-indulging yesterday.

1. As if the last contented convention, the Democratic convention in Chicago in 1968 surfaced Hubert Humphry as a seriously damaged candidate, paving the way for Richard Milhouse Nixon to be elected, and many more years of carnage in Vietnam. Be careful what you wish for, assholes.

2. This was mentioned in the comments from a post on The Bulwark that was not confirmed, but it sure tracks with their wall of calls to Biden to drop out and their preferred candidate (Whitmer/Warnock) then waltz in and trample the tangerine shitgibbon in November.

3. We clicked on Top-Gun: Maverick. I did not see it prior, and hoo-boy, it is a fucking awful movie, but my wife loved it, so I will not make any more fun of it.

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