there’s still no clear decision about what’s going to happen next. my guess would be nothing will happen to him, and he will go about his normal life without a change, and that would be wrong, but, unfortunately, it’s what i forsee happening… 😒
ETA: the sentencing is on my birthday. 😒
the presumptive GOP candidate for president has 34 felony convictions…
WHAT KIND OF CRAZY UPSIDE-DOWN WORLD IS THIS, ANYWAY??? 😖😖
that didn’t last long… 😒
here i started my reddit profile, and here i deleted my reddit profile.
there are just WAY TOO MANY people who don’t know what they’re talking about, who give expert advice like they DO know what they’re talking about, and who DOWN-VOTE anybody who DOES know what they’re talking about, who tries to clear up the rampant and uncontrolled misinformation.
i’m not JUST talking about me, in this case. 😒
in the past 24 hours i have received 3,500 more-or-less identical spam messages from “Magalu”, or “Magalu Ofertas”, or Magalu Recomenda”, or “Ofertas Magalu”, with “Queima de Estoque Magalu: Televisores 4k a partir de: R$ 698,99 – APROVEITE – [ SOME-RANDOM-NUMBER ]” as the subject line. however they all have slightly different “From:” email addresses that end with @SOME-RANDOM-SHIT.magazineluiza.com or @SOME-RANDOM-SHIT.magazine-luiza.com or @SOME-RANDOM-SHIT.magazineluiza.com.br
my host provider (which recently sold out to a large, foreign corporation, but, in the past, has built a considerable reputation for responding to tickets within an hour) has not responded to my REPEATED ticket updates concerning this spam. 😒
i have taken the unprecedented (for me) step of setting up global filters that actually DELETE these messages, instead of forwarding them. 😠
it’s unprecedented for me, because i am painfully aware of the fact that filters that are set up to DELETE messages frequently delete “false positives” as well as spam, but this sender has been CONSISTENTLY sending me DOS mail-bombs of anywhere from 5,000 to 500,000 spam messages, for a number of years, and i’m as sure as i can be that i have narrowed down the filters to the point where i’m PRETTY sure they’re only going to delete spam, and NOT false positives.
😒
SPAM IS BAD! END SPAM ON INTERENT! (for all the good it will do… 🙄)
i got my check in the mail on saturday.
i didn’t even get a printed letter this year — or a check, they’re “direct depositing” them, this year, which is another layer of paperwork — just an email from victoria, the new executive director, with the standard “don’t consider this a paying gig” and “you are likely to get a token amount of money, but it will be more of an honorarium than a fee” horseshit.
some rant, huh? 😒
it has now been five days since i posted that we busked at the market and made $115 a piece, but we STILL haven’t received the $100 a piece that we were promised. it sounds all too familiar. 😒
i remember another snake suspenderz gig we played, at some retirement home north of the university district, a few years ago, where we signed all the paperwork months in advance, and we were assured that we WOULD BE paid on the day of the performance, multiple times, by multiple people, and i STILL had to follow this lady around, harassing her, for 45 minutes, before she relented, and took money out of her personal checking account to pay us, because “the checks had been held up” by some incompetence somewhere.
this time, we were supposed to be paid on the day of the performance, but on that day, (five days ago), the person who was supposed to give us checks, checked to make sure she had our addresses correct, “in case she had to mail them”, and said that she would have the checks no later than wednesday… wednesday came and went, we saw no checks, and the lady DIDN’T show up when she said she was going to, wasn’t answering her phone, and didn’t even try to contact us… ALLEGEDLY the checks have been mailed, but i do not understand how, if i behaved that way towards a professional client, i would not have that client for very much longer, but she thinks that it’s okay to behave this way towards us because we’re “ONLY” buskers. 😒
recently i’ve been hearing a lot of what boils down to “if you support the palestinians right to exist, you are anti-semitic”…
which REALLY puzzles me…
because…
originally, the term “semitic people” INCLUDED “arabs, jews, akkadians, and phoenicians”… the term “semitic” comes from the biblical sons of noah; ham, shem, and japheth. it has only been comparatively recently (i.e. around 1930-ish) that the term “anti-semitic” has come to mean “hatred of jews” in particular…
as an aside, originally “semitic” people were from what we now call “asia”, “hamite” people were from what we now call “africa”, and “japhethite” people were from what we now call “europe”… which brings up a whole different miasma of biblical nonsense concerning “japhethite supremacy” which i am not addressing, primarily because it is biblical nonsense. 😒
does use of the term “anti-semitic” in this way mean it is expected that people will intuitively understand that what you are REALLY saying is that it is OKAY to hate arabs?
or do the people who use the term “anti-semitic” to mean “hatred of jews” really not know that the term originally included arabs as well? considering the state of education these days, it wouldn’t surprise me that much. the only reason I know this is because i looked it up when i was in my teens… i certainly wasn’t taught that the term “anti-semitic” meant anything other than “hatred of jews”…
for that matter, apart from language (which is similar enough already, apart from the orthography), and culture/religion, what really IS the difference between a middle-eastern jew and a middle-eastern arab? if you removed all visible cultural markers (i.e. primarily “clothing”), and had them stand side by side, could you REALLY tell the difference?
it is questions like this that inevitably make me wonder about the possibility that i am some species other than human… 😒
okay, since the last entry, in reverse order…
today, thaddeus and i busked at the pike place market, under the clock, for an hour, and made $115 a piece… that takes into account the fact that we were amplified (which isn’t normally allowed at the market) and playing on the back of a truck for the “flower festival”, and we were being paid $100 a piece by the PDA to be there… the extra $30 was from tips, because of course we set up our tip bucket, because we were busking at the market. for some reason (probably the fact that he was being paid by the PDA) the busker who was on the stage/truck before us did not have a tip bucket out. 🤷
yesterday, i finished the pea gravel to the west end of the house project that i started earlier in the week. yesterday was also a “category 5” geomagnetic storm, caused by sunspots, which made a “visible” aurora borealis across most of north america, so of course moe and i went out to a “light desert” near salmon la sac, and took pictures. it was the first time i have ever actually seen an aurora… i have PROBABLY “seen” other ones, but they weren’t anywhere near as spectacular, and, significantly, i didn’t have the technology to actually “see” what i was “seeing”: what i saw with my naked eye was lighter grey stripes that were, basically, indistinguishable from clouds, which, very occasionally, had slight hints of colour… but apparently cameras these days take in A LOT more light than our eyes do, and the photos that came out of monique’s phone were phenomenal:
thursday was my circus class, wednesday was busking without amplification or the extra $100 a piece — we made a grand total of $6 ($3 a piece), which qualifies as one of the 5 WORST days i have ever had busking at the market. also i cleaned the furnace filters that i forgot to clean on monday. tuesday and monday i started adding pea gravel to the area behind the fence at the west end of our house. monday i forgot to clean the furnace filters.
last sunday was my unicycle class, where i may actually be making some progress, in that i am free-mounting pretty regularly, and i just discovered that if i do it right, i can actually idle, rather than riding away after a free-mount… but everything is still sort of tentative, and i’m not sure whether it’s an actual improvement, or whether i’m just doing fine this week and i’ll go back to not being able to do it next week… which is sort of what i’m expecting. 😒
last saturday was may 4th, which is bongwater day, and world naked gardening day, as well as the more conventional star-wars day. last friday was international tuba day, national paranormal day, and world press-freedom day. last thursday i had my circus class, may 1st (wednesday) we busked at the pike place market, under the clock, with interference from the “pike place drummer” who sets up on the corner opposite the market, so that he is NOT “on market property”, sets up a trap kit and an amplified, pre-recorded MMO tape, and drowns out all other buskers in a three block radius… and we STILL made $20 a piece, which was more than the drummer made. 😉