It was a late night last night. This is how the TV sounds to me right now.
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As of now
While we wait for the votes to get counted and the final results to come in, let us all remember that we are all still Americans that need each other to make this country work. Your neighbor will still be your neighbor four years from now.
To keep us focused on what brings us together, here’s some stories about people with differences getting along.
“Once the election’s over, whether you win or lose,” she said, “you still have your neighbors.” – Trib Live
“In the end,” Williams said, “we need love for each other. We go to work with each other, to church with each other … it’s just not worth it.” – Abilene Reporter News
“We’re both mothers,” said Hancock. “This is to demonstrate to our kids that you can have different opinions, you can look different and still respect and love one another.” – KVUE, Austin, TX
Meet 2 Pittsburgh families who stay friends despite different political beliefs – Today
Harmony: Opposing Trump and Biden groups make music together – ABC News
Have a story to share? Put it in the comments.
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Folksy Database
Part of the charm of the greater Grateful Dead culture was that there was something for everyone. Like any good pastime there was some aspect of a Grateful Dead show to please everyone.
I often compare the sub-culture of Deadheads to baseball fans. There are those that go for the scene, the roar of the crowd or to see their heroes play. Others go for the party, the beer & hot dogs on the one hand or the recreational drugs and lightshow on the other.
Then there are the stat nerds which also exist in both cultures. Go to any ball game and you’ll see people with detailed score cards, recording every hit and at bat using their own custom shorthand.
There are stat nerds in Deadhead culture too. These are the people that can tell you the last time the band opened the second set with Saint of Circumstance or when they last played Red Rocks. There’s a special language of code to how they talk and a learned shorthand to normalize communication.
During the time when I saw the band, computers were not that widespread so a lot of the documentation was collected from memory and passed around on handwritten notes. Historic setlists were passed down as legend.
The photo above is something I found in a drawer as I was packing to move house. It’s a handwritten collection of every setlist from every concert the Grateful Dead played in 1985. Crib sheets like these were passed around like a folksy database of shared knowledge.
There’s endless detail in the notations that hint at a shared understanding of how a Grateful Dead setlist works. The capital “E” in the detail above ties Estimated Profit and Eyes of the World together as those two are often paired and segue seamlessly from one to the other. The “Gimmie Gimmie” scrawled above Gimme Some Lovin’ is a wink to the fact that Bob Weir was especially enthusiastic in his rendition of Spencer Davis that night.
All this was just to say that while the ever-connected phones in our pockets are wonderful for precision and recall, they don’t transmit knowledge and understanding as well as these folksy databases of handwritten notes. An illuminated manuscript from the medieval past, carefully hand-copied and embellished, is so much better at transmitting culture and passes on so much more than just the written word.
To listen to two Deadhead stat nerds get into the weeds, check out my post on Alex and JM Hart’s discussion about the evolution of Bob Weir’s playing style on Deadicated.
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The week that was
Times are a-changin’ in San Francisco. The last blinking billboard within the city limits, the old Coca-Cola sign that sat at 5th & Bryant since 1937, was taken down. Downtown a developer closed on the purchase of the Transamerica Pyramid building for $650 million, a $61 million discount off the price agreed upon before the pandemic.
Trump’s campaign website was briefly hacked and someone guessed the Florida Governor’s online voter registration password (his birthday) and changed his address “to a small apartment more than 400 miles away.”
A spat between the Pimco co-founder Bill Gross and his neighbor over a delicate Dale Chihuly glass sculpture devolved into multiple visits by the Laguna Beach police and allegations that the billionaire bond king “blared the Gilligan’s Island theme song on a loop at all hours to annoy his neighbor.”
A Scottish cancer patient had part of her shin bone removed, taken away and treated with radiation at another hospital, and then returned and replaced.
Floods from climate change are impacting famed guitar maker Fender’s access to Swamp Ash wood used in its Stratocaster guitars.
A police chief in the Philippines sent to break up an illegal cockfight was killed, by one of the cocks.
Poor QA and sub-optimal translations caused much embarrassment for Amazon at the launch of its Swedish site. Someone confused the Argentinian flag for Swedish one and products featuring cats were described with the lewd double meaning of the word “pussy”
People keep calling the East Dallas police on Steven Novak’s hyper-realistic, crime scene lawn display. While some people embrace Halloween hijinks, Novak gives them a bear hug.
All you news junkies out there can purchase a Newsroom Scent candle to keep you company on Election Night. It smells of late deadlines, stressed editors, free pizza, lukewarm coffee and democracy.
TWTW is a weekly collection of bits and pieces I run across each week while looking after things at SmartNews. Feel free to sign-up to get this via email, follow on Facebook, or forward to a friend.
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Democracy in Action
One of the final acts before changing our address to NYC was to mail in our ballots for the upcoming election. There was a bit of a hiccup because the post office didn’t automatically forward our ballots to our NY address so I had a pleasant conversation with Lisa at the Alameda County Registrar of Voters office and arranged to have our ballots mailed directly to us.
I had to do some online research to read up on the various issues and down-ballot races. If you’re in the same boat and haven’t voted yet, here’s my list of sites that I found useful:
- SmartNews voter’s guide – simple summary of state propositions
- CalMatters voter’s guide – a series of 1-minute videos gives you background on each of the state propositions. Alameda isn’t in any of the hotly contested districts for Senate, Congressional or Assembly races so they are not covered.
- League of Women Voters – recommendations on state propositions
- LA Times voter’s guide – list of their endorsements and why
- SF Gate’s voter guide – includes links for more information
- KQED voter guide – info on Alameda County measures
- Progressive Voter’s Guide – background on those running for State senate & assembly and local Alameda races.
- Alameda GOP voter guide – local Republican perspective
- Bay Area GOP – links to all the pages of Republican candidates and ballot recommendations.
- Familiar faces in November’s race for Alameda City Council – background on candidates for City Council, including Amos White who forgot his checkbook last time and missed getting on the ballot.
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Deadicated
Alex Wise is a professional musician (alexwise.com) and longtime Deadhead. As an accomplished guitarist, he listens to the music of the Grateful Dead with a careful ear for detail and can speak to the evolution of their style in a much more nuanced way than your average Deadhead.
Listening to Alex’s interview with Brokedown Podcast’s JM Hart is like listening to two baseball stat nerds get into the weeds on the specifics of the game. I love it. The cracks about Weir’s attempts at slide guitar are something that would make any member of this particular tribe smile.
If you have a passing interest in the the music of the Grateful Dead and wondered what all the fuss was about and how people can listen to so many different versions of Morning Dew, this podcast episode will unveil some of layers of that fan-hood.
The entire episode is above but the two get down to details at around 18:30.
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Walkin’ NYC
Did I mention that we’re walking the streets of Manhattan in order to get to know the neighborhoods? I use this iOS app called Trails to track where we go and then trace it old skool style with a sharpie onto a tourist map.
Log of our stroll on Sunday 
Total log of walks since we arrived
The nice thing about Trails is that it automatically logs everywhere we go so I can just put the phone in my pocket and go about our day. The location tracking doesn’t take as much battery on my iPhone XR as I thought but I do bring along an extra charged up external battery to top things up just in case.
One app that I also recommend is Urban Archive. They have a database of all the old buildings in NYC and using it, you can quickly lookup the history of buildings you see while walking around.
Here’s the master map with all the traces of where we’ve been so far since arriving on September 25th. Lots to still see (we’ve only spent a short time in Brooklyn) but it’s been a blast.
If there are particular walks you recommend, please add links in the comments!
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Talkin NYC
I can’t believe that New York City is my new home. We’re still nailing down details of a place to live (more on that later, don’t want to jinx it) staying in a furnished apartment in the meantime so it feels temporary.
But no. NYC is our home. Weird. I’m now one of youz guyz.
I’ve been trying to think of the best way to describe what living here is like, from a Californian point of view. Certainly people talk a lot more than back in Bay Area. Walking down the street is like an exercise in verbal river rafting. There’s no time to look down at your phone. Everyone has a quip or comment and you need to be fast with a witty reply to make a connection. Everyone is always, ON.
In this fast moving stream of conversations, whenever a group of New Yorkers gather for more than a few minutes, an instant community forms. This evening was a perfect example.
As you know, the pandemic limits the number of people that can be inside a shop at any one time. There is an amazing cheesemonger down the street, they’ve got cheeses from around the world and a chalkboard listing specials that they fly in each day for their customers. A sign out front that says no more than “two people or one group” at a time in the shop. Outside the store there are three people that don’t know each other, each waiting their turn to go in. As three individuals it’ll take more time to go in because that’s three separate groups.
A man is chatting with two women. Right as Izumi and I walk by I hear the man say,
Wanna be a group?
That phrase, right there, captured the perfect NY moment. A little eddy of inactivity shunted to the side of the overall flow of people walking by. Three people, milling around, waiting. There’s a problem. A restriction, a rule that is slowing their progress. A community forms – collective problem solving is put to work, they band together. Problem solved.
This is NYC. People of all types, strangers, reaching out to solve problems, together, with a laugh.
On a more serious note, we’re heading into what many are predicting will be a dark winter of the third wave. It’s going to be tough but that same resourcefulness from that vignette above gets force multiplied in times of crisis. The blackouts of 1977 and 2003, Hurricane Sandy, 9/11. New Yorkers rise to the occasion to meet the challenge, together.
NYC got walloped by the virus earlier in the year but they know what’s coming this time around and will face what’s coming with grit, camaraderie, and a sense of humor. I’m glad we got to experience the tail end of the Summer but am prepared for what’s coming.
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Kyrö Distillery
Friends from Finland shared this advert for Kyrö Distillery, a Finnish distillery, who gives us a master class at how to introduce the world to their unique line of products.
If you’re going to introduce a new Malt Rye Dairy Cream Whiskey to the world, there’s only one way to do it. With a naked man strolling around and staring straight at the camera in all earnestness.
Oh, and the story about five guys in a sauna dreaming up a business is true.
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The week that was
HBO host John Oliver traveled to Danbury, Connecticut to celebrate the renaming of the town sewage plant to the John Oliver Memorial Sewer Plant. The ceremony marked the end of a months-long playful spat with the town. Oliver remarked on his show “at the end of this awful, awful year, what could be more important than evidence that, if we want to, we can come together, overcome our differences and sort our shit out.“
A troupe of yodelers who held two sing-along concerts in a small town in Switzerland have been fingered for a recent spike in Covid-19 infections. The performers were unmasked so as not to impede their yodeling as they played to an indoor audience.
A Swiss couple named their baby girl Twifia so they could get 18 years of free wifi.
Online conversations at a virtual paleontology conference ground to a halt when discussions became disjointed and hard to follow due to an overzealous profanity filter. Automatically censored words such as bone, stream, and beaver made chatting amongst the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology attendees a comical game of charades. The vendor of the platform (ironically named Convey Services) was not available to convey their comment.
A rapper who boasted on a YouTube video about getting rich off of unemployment benefits was arrested for committing unemployment benefits fraud.
All eyes are on Georgia state Representative Vernon Jones who threw CDC cautions to the wind and crowd-surfed sans mask over a crowd of maskless supporters.
Commuters in Brooklyn were put out when the Greenpoint public ferry stop was taken out of service because the Australian developers who owned the surrounding land and pier blocked access. The mayor called it a “quizzical situation.”
The race is on to monetize parents with young kids by putting up paywalls around nostalgia. First to go were Ernie & Bert and the Sesame Street gang which moved to HBO, this week it was announced that Charlie Brown’s Great Pumpkin and Christmas specials will only be available on Apple TV. As far as we know, the Heat Miser and Schwartz, Flick and the flagpole will still be available for appointment television.
TWTW is a weekly collection of bits and pieces I run across each week while looking after things at SmartNews. Feel free to sign-up to get this via email or forward to a friend.