Mental Notes & Random Musings

Here we are at the post-midlife part of “As Jeremy’s World Turns” the audiobook. Over the last 20 years or so, I have had a steady stream of old classics, new classics, fantasy, science fiction, and history lectures from the great courses. They have all molded my free time in the car, airplane rides, as well as the insanely long amount of time you must hang out in terminals and of course the long walks through town. Music gets stuck in my head, but audiobooks get stuck in my heart. It is impossible to cover everyone I have listened to, but these are the ones I hope nobody misses. Most of them are a hand-arounds at work, as there is a dozen of us who are audio book listeners outside of work, and audiobook discussers at work. I will also talk about the readers of the audiobooks as they really do make the book better, or worse.  Brandon Sanderson: Stormlight Archive – Read by Michael Kramer and Kate Reading  I wouldn’t have known Brandon Sanderson at all had I not decided to star...

Ok, can we get one thing straight right now. Will Smith hasn’t crossed the point where he should put himself out there yet. To be clear, Tupac's girlfriend’s cuckold husband really should just stay in the basement until his very presence doesn’t remind us of his failed parenthood, and fake marriage. Yes, he was very talented in the day, and he may even still be talented now, but the slap heard round the world where he tried to be a bully instead of a cuckold, is still fresh in our minds. The vision of him talking about his wife’s affair with his son’s friend on his wife’s podcast is still fresh in our minds. The vision of his son walking around with a black foam castle wrapped around his head is still fresh in our mind. His newest music video reminds us that we haven’t been throwing tomatoes at him lately.  The fact that his video is one of those traditional 90s style videos with the girlies dancing around, dressed like club hos, while Will da Pimp bounces in and out of the frame. ...

First day back to work and I was expecting a pretty hectic day catching up with my backlog of work as well as all the month end paperwork. It was slightly more complicated because I was going to be spending four hours of my day in the classroom training a new employee on how to be safe. You would think that this would be the perfect day to not get music stuck in my head but that would make you wrong. My age fatigued brain and decades of impressionability can get all the background music in the horrible safety instructional videos. Most of which are bad after school specials probably made by a government agency. I wouldn’t be surprised if there wasn’t some indoctrination tactics in the music to begin with.  No matter which class I leave I always have that dopey piano tune from the heat stress video stuck in my head. The video itself talks about someone dying after falling off a roof with a drawing of a foot hanging out of a body bag with a toe tag in it, but my head just has “dum du...

As I had rambled on about in Only the Young and Dumb, the books I read as a pre-teen were pre-modern, and the books I listen to now are post mid-life, with a nod to a lot of the in-between. I wanted to take a moment to highlight a lot of these better, and here we are.  Pre-Modern: Anything that I enjoyed that was written before I was old enough to read. This includes the classics like JRR Tolkien, CS Lewis, Philip K Dick or Isaac Asimov, as well as the ones that were being written around the time I was born like Roger Zelazny.  The Hobbit: All fantasy should start here. Tolkien's linguistic artistry was not confined to English. The fact that he created an entire language out of whole cloth to back up his vision of Middle Earth, was what installed permanence of a mildly veiled epic of Christianity. Many would say it is overtly veiled, but trust me, when you read CS Lewis, you understand how amazingly subtly the Christianity was in this book. It may have gotten more righteous wi...

My cell phone split in half this week. It was strange to see what a Pixel 6 looked like with the screen detached from it. It still worked but the battery was getting so hot that it burned off all the glue, which means I was basically carrying a firebomb in my pocket, so I shelved it. This means that I had to grab my old Motorola 5G Ace that I keep for times like these. Unfortunately, it no longer is supported by the Xfinity Mobile Network, meaning, no phone. It’s times like these when I realize how dependent I am on my cell phone for my musical needs, and how it is vital for getting songs out of my head. I’m impressionable after all and with the new algorithms that the streaming companies use to target ads at me, I can tell you it picks a lot of tunes that get stuck in your head and suck at the same time.  Don't get me wrong, there are a lot of songs that get used constantly in commercials that are sometimes a welcome change to your mood. “It’s Raining Men” by The Weather Girls (Ma...

Amazingly enough I didn’t start watching Will Trent this last season because I was too busy. I had every intention of binge watching the season when everything else went away for the summer, and that just so happened to start yesterday , while I was on the elliptical for an hour. Holy smokes the show somehow got better, and this is despite the full ownership of this IP by Disney now . Yes, I was generally concerned , that a great show that had a lot of WOKE features would have leaned harder into the WOKEness , dump the good story writing, and acting, and become a dumpster fire. This is me, admitting that I was wrong so far. The first episode of season three was a rollercoaster of excellent writing, amazing cast chemistry, and believe it or not even more WOKEness . Again, WOKE stories are trash because they are trash stories. If you write a good story and it happens to be WOKE there is a difference, and this is the proof.   Goodwill goes a long way in a TV series. I say this wi...