Suck Sessions and Non-Suck Sessions

Some of each kind of session to get to, not really having anything to do with the Succession series that just ended. (I did wonder at some point whether anybody had ever made a porno called "Suck Session." Ohhhh, yes they did. Many of them. None of them up to usual HBO standards.)

I’ll begin with the suckiest part of the last 24 hours, after a brief mention of some earlier news I forgot to report here. Remember the trivia question that took me down a rabbit hole leading to "Mombasa" and eventually to relistening to Warren Zevon? Well this is Wabbit Wevel Thwee. I wound up listening to the entire album that one song is on, and it begins with a nice jaunty tune called “Johnny Strikes Up the band.“ Here, have a listen:

 

 

Watch on YouTube

There’s a repeated line in the song that goes, “Freddy get ready, rock steady.“ That sounded familiar beyond the song, as well it should. Because I have known a musician who goes by the stage name “Rock Steady Freddy“ since at least a decade before Zevon wrote that song. We both started out in the clarinet section at Prospect Avenue  Elementary;. I got switched to the riser in the way back and eventually gave it up. Freddie picked up the saxophone and never let it go, turning it into a lifelong basis for a career. I saw him four summers ago playing at Les Paul’s legendary jazz club on Broadway and stopped for a selfie-




-he also did an amazing job tooting the flute.



I haven’t seen him in person in the years since, and have no plans to, mainly since his group does most of their gigs out of the country. But we keep in touch, and he just posted a few weeks ago that his father passed away earlier this month at the age of 95. That alone is quite the accomplishment; then add in the memories, and the legacies. I don’t remember ever meeting Harold, but I’m honored to share in the talent that he has left with us.

(Quick detour, if I forgot to mention it: Warren did NOT get into the Rock Hall of Fame on his too-delayed first ballot, despite consistently ranking in the top three of fan voting. All that box stuffing from hundreds of thousands of clicks counted as merely one ballot alongside the chosen few from prior inductees, industry honks and Jann Fucking Wenner. Not going to even bother participating or caring next time.)

----

 

My more recent encounter with DEATH led right into some visits from FAIL, big and small.

When I got back to my office for my single appointment of the day, the client told me he had tried emailing documents ahead of time, but that they had bounced back to him because my email was full. This has been a long running problem with Speculum and Microshit. The former cuts me off when, and only when, the email messages on the server go even a dribble over 5G, while the latter no longer offers any automatic ability to clear messages off the server once they’ve been safely stored in the version of Outlook I keep on my computer. My usual fix for this is the fire up an ancient Outlook  version on an old laptop at home that still has this option. I then download the months worth of crap that of constipated my space on the server, which then magically deletes them from Roadrunner territory by offering them FREE BIRDSEED. But I couldn’t do that with a client waiting, so I took a second route: I went to my email provider’s webmail site, selected about ten screen listings worth of incomings, and deleted them from both the inbox and the Webmail trash to get me safely below 5G.  Mail then began to come in, but so did the headache: Imagine my surprise when, an hour or so later, I discovered in doing that, I had also deleted that week of material from the computer itself.


I’ll spare you the details of what I learned over the next 3-4 hours with support personnel from both of these wonderful companies. There were references to POP and IMAP and quite a few to FUCKOFF. (Those were from me.) But in the end, we figured out that the only safe way to deal with this problem is to make a weekly ritual out of storing the entire contents of my current email on my computer to an external drive, and then doing the drill through either their Webmail  or the old Outlook version, to make sure I don't go over quota again. It could’ve been much worse if I had gone further in the process before doing that save the first time, and I ultimately got the week of lost material down to just over four days, since some of the missing emails had been retained in my phone through Monday afternoon (I turn off that email coming into my phone when I'm not on the road, so I’m not constantly distracted by it when I’m home), but I had turned it on during Ray’s terrible horrible no good very bad Monday so it didn't connect to strip them from there, so I’m able to forward those back to myself. Also, quite a bit of a lost material is still there, in the form of reply emails that I sent that included the content of what I replied to. So this all wound up being much ado about very little, and that’s a very good thing.

----

My smaller FAIL with tech came at the bank.  I appear to have many newfound superpowers: in addition to being able to snap a rubber band with my mere eyesight, I have recently acquired a death ray that destroys staplers as soon as I touch them (happened again at the arbitration finale), and now, apparently, my magnetic personality interferes with ATMs.  In addition to the money order snafu from last Monday, now we have this. I went to deposit a routine check from my business account to our joint account at Key Bank. I KNOW the check is good, dammit, and I'd joked with Eleanor about the latest new thing they're pimping on the ATM screens:



"Let's get MyKey!," I snarked. "He won't take my check, he hates everything!"

Ha ha ha.  I got this:



So, basically, their kid didn't program the VCR for them.  The one inside the branch took it just fine, though. My power source on Krypton must not pass through walls.

----

And thus endeth the reading of the suckage. Thanks be to gods.

I promised more detail on High Desert, the series that took Patricia Arquette away from starring in the true legal drama of my arbitration of the past three months. She plays Peggy, just a girl from Syossssitt Lawn Guyland who now lives out in the desert town of Yucca Valley, California. Her "bosses" come in two flavors: her real job is at a tacky Wild West joint called Pioneertown run (for his mother, with whom he has "Electra issues") by Owen, played by Eric Petersen, the eponymous Kevin of the Kevin Can Fuck Himself series. She also "works" for a PI named Bruce, played by Raymond's Brad Garrett (also now seen in Bupkis with Pete Davidson). He drives the same make and model Firebird as Jim Rockford did on his namesake 70s show.  They are surrounded by too many other quirky characters to mention.  It involves real and fake paintings, Mafiosis running a tanning salon/brothel, a kid with a drone, an Asian with leaky fake boobs who's in love with a guru-once-local-tv-anchor, a foul mouthed parrot, and Peggy's mother. She's played by Bernadette Peters entirely in flashback because she's dead, but she also plays a doppleganger for Peggy's mother who was a day player in every 70s show you ever saw.

It's an acquired taste.

But Peggy, once, was married. To Denny, played by Matt Dillon, seen last time in the Cornell t-shirt.  He wears it, despite his alumni connection only coming from a "three week summer session," because the school is "highly regarded" and is good for his business reputation.

I lived in Ithaca for three summers and got to know the regular attendees of "Camp Cornell" in the summer. They ranged from stoners catching up that one remaining required course to overprogrammed high school kids from the likes of Syossssitt Lawn Guyland padding their resumes for their eventual college applications to better schools than ours.  One kid once told me they lost the record of her Camp Cornell summer course which she took again as an undergrad and got an A in. The missing grade? B-plus.  Asked to explain this to me, owner of a perpetual 3.3 GPA there (B-plus, for you scoring at home), she replied, Well, when you're pre-med, B-plusses just don't cut it.

But such experiences came back to mind for me the other day because of something I heard on the radio.   NPR ran this story and I was sickened- that fancypants unis with billion dollar endowments like UChicago are baiting and switching transfer students by denying them transfer credit from their JuCos and making them take those courses all over again to get their BAs.

Mind you, I have a fancypants BA from one of those fancypants unis. I was an English major with a faculty that had some of the finest writers and scholars one could ask for, several of whom became my advisors for my major and thesis. Two of those remaining with us are Diane Ackerman and Robert Morgan, both of whom we've enjoyed books from since those dino days.

But you know where the best collegiate English course I ever took was? At Nassau Fucking Community College in the months between my freshman and sophomore years with fellow student Dennis from East Meadow, since I was unemployed and carless for the summer.  I can't remember who taught it, but it was a Shakespeare 200-level that was down-to-earth, detailed and interesting, and not full of grade-grubbing pre-meds taking their token humanities course.  That same prof also taught a poetry class that began my love of that genre; I still have the collection we used for it.



Fancypants Cornell gave me full credit toward my BA for those. As well they should have, and as well these greedy bastards should be doing now.

(Since I'd like to remember the name of that Nassau faculty member, I just ordered a copy of my Cornell transcript, which might have it. They do those electronically for free, though 1982, the year after my graduation, is apparently the cutoff for when the grades were still inscribed on stone tablets with hand-held chisels.  I've always retained a pack-rat copy of my law school one, because you never know when you might have a need for that information..... TEASER ALERT!)

----


I thought I had some other post-indictment dirt to dish on Former President Voldemort, but I forgot what it might have been. Other than today being the 51st anniversary of the Watergate break-in, reminding me of the good old days in this country when a Republican president's commission of a crime appalled everybody, even Republicans!

----

Today is also the birthday of kouredios, who I cross-connected with a week or so ago in discovering she is a fellow Learned League player recently reshuffled, as I was,  in our very own new branch of the organization. Two final things to share from those recent events (we don't compete until the final day of the current season):

If you don't know an answer, you are welcome to make something up. No points deducted for wrong answers, after all. And the sole grader of the entire mishmash also selects any of the "best wrong answers" he sees for their humor or other quality. Think QI's basic premise, where clever is always much more important than right.  Any player can see the accumulations of these "Best Wrong Answers" at some random point during a season and then all of them at its end. But this goround, I spent a princely 15 additional dallahs to become eligible to vote on the best of these wrongest.  There is also chitchat about some wrong choices on various message boards on and off their site. Here are three of my more recent contributions. As with QI, the real answer barely matters:


Stared at this one up and down, even zeroing in on mental lists of percussion instruments and on NBC shows I remembered from around then. It was both (The GONG Show), but I never got it; when I gave up, I went Rocky And Bullwinkle style with alternate titles: Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sax But Couldn't Remember, or, Cello, Larry.



"Branch Davidian Compound" just cried out to me, though the better variant of it came from someone else who answered BRUNCH Davidian Compound. (The real answer: MAGNOLIA.)

And then this one almost got me in trouble:



Paparazzi schmalz like that is of no interest to me, so my answer of I DON'T KNOW and I DON'T CARE was at least grammatically correct, but when the answer turned out to be two K-pop groups (BLACKPINK, BTS), it was perceived by some as a little bit racist.  Since I DIDN"T KNOW what genre, much less origin, "Jennie" was, or V for that matter, I DIDN'T CARE what people thought about it.

Anyway, leave a comment if you want to come join us for more nerd prom fun in October:)