blessingx

Or if your 2021 was similar to 2020...

💽 MiniDiscs are the future

Best 2021 photos https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2021/dec/27/the-best-photographs-of-2021-and-the-stories-behind-them

Avedon, 2000

Thanks everyone. Gifts (new Marin bike for Esmé) and holiday music at home and now jumping on the road to go to Mel’s parents. Birthday cake, apple pie, cheesecake, and who knows what else awaits (besides sugar crash). Hope anyone is having a wonderful Xmas.

Spotify's Christmas Time But Not Christmas Songs playlist

Hope everyone has a wonderful Xmas with family, friends, wine, book, and/or movie.

It’s probably been my favorite holiday album for a few years. Sample below (originally by Dolly Parton). And COH is great.

Evening drifting into more contemportary-ish holiday music... And continuing our favorite bittersweet holiday song for another year...

RIP giant Joan Didion. "I’m not telling you to make the world better, because I don’t think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I’m just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment." https://www.npr.org/2021/12/23/375431790/joan-didion-obituary

It's Burl Ives season

The solution I posted? That was iOS (unless I'm misunderstanding you), though there have been Android solutions for longer I believe?

Horrible as their sometimes use may be, after reading this pretty critical article I kinda want to try out "Second Brain" apps/services. Anyone try and have an opinion of Notion, Obsidian, Mem, or other? I'll likely dive in all three, but thought I'd use the collective first. I've gone years using some older software like DEVONthink, The Brain, and even Yojimbo, but generally they've been slow to move to the cloud, so I've dropped all along the way for more primitive organization.

Keep in mind you can also...

Nick Cave & Warren Ellis - La Panthère des Neiges

RIP architect Richard Rogers. If there's anyone currently in Paris, maybe a tip of the hat towards the Pompidou Centre. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2021/dec/19/richard-rogers-pompidou-and-millennium-dome-architect-dies-aged-88

Kinda interesting - How Kodak Exposed the Atomic Bomb

RIP Renay Mandel Corren El Paso, TX—A plus-sized Jewish lady redneck died in El Paso on Saturday. Of itself hardly news, or good news if you're the type that subscribes to the notion that anybody not named you dying in El Paso, Texas is good news. In which case have I got news for you: the bawdy, fertile, redheaded matriarch of a sprawling Jewish-Mexican-Redneck American family has kicked it. This was not good news to Renay Mandel Corren's many surviving children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, many of whom she even knew and, in her own way, loved. There will be much mourning in the many glamorous locales she went bankrupt in: McKeesport, PA, Renay's birthplace and where she first fell in love with ham, and atheism; Fayetteville and Kill Devil Hills, NC, where Renay's dreams, credit rating and marriage are all buried; and of course Miami, FL, where Renay's parents, uncles, aunts, and eternal hopes of all Miami Dolphins fans everywhere, are all buried pretty deep. Renay was preceded in death by Don Shula. Because she was my mother, the death of zaftig good-time gal Renay Corren at the impossible old age of 84 is newsworthy to me, and I treat it with the same respect and reverence she had for, well, nothing. A more disrespectful, trash-reading, talking and watching woman in NC, FL or TX was not to be found. Hers was an itinerant, much-lived life, a Yankee Florida liberal Jewish Tough Gal who bowled 'em in Japan, rolled 'em in North Carolina and was a singularly unique parent. Often frustrated by the stifling, conservative culture of the South, Renay turned her voracious mind to the home front, becoming a model stay at home parent, a supermom, really, just the perfect PTA lady, volunteer, amateur baker and-AHHAHAA HA! HA! HA! Just kidding, y'all! Renay - Rosie to her friends, and this was a broad who never met a stranger - worked double shifts with Doreen, ate a ton of carbs with Bernie, and could occasionally be stirred to stew some stuffed cabbage for the kids. She played cards like a shark, bowled and played cribbage like a pro, and laughed with the boys until the wee hours, long after the last pin dropped. At one point in the 1980's, Renay was the 11th or 12th-ranked woman in cribbage in America, and while that could be a lie, it sounds great in print... https://www.fayobserver.com/obituaries/m0028451

Watching old episodes I previously missed of Nathan for You (HBO). I forgot how good this is.

How about that season finale? Just watched a second time in 24 hours.

Might as well pile on. Watched this doc today (Netflix).

Feared this news, but still a bit of a shock. Thanks for conversations in the shared car rides Steve. Thanks for letting us know Al.