David Foster's Divorce--Encountering Bad Faith for the First Time

We've been abused by AirBnB several times recently, and we just locked in apartments for late fall 2019 (so we don't miss our favorites which are already largely booked for that period). This gives us some expertise on all the anti-renter policies. The worst one of course is the handling of cash.   If you rent now, AirBnB charges 100% of the rental and their fees.   You pay.   It doesn't matter when the term starts or ends.   Even IHG and Marriott and the rest of the bricks and mortar hospitality industry don't have the balls to do that! It puts AirBnB up there with only one similarly lousy group:   the airlines!   Now for the next injustice--penalties start immediately.   If, for instance, you've rented a place for a month, on day 2, the penalty is 30 days.   In other words, AirBnB took my money yesterday, claims 100% of it now, and I have to stay alive and healthy long enough to show up November 15, 2019 for a full month to benefit from this transaction.

Send your suggestions...these are some of mine: To Kill a Mockingbird Catch-22-- Joseph Heller Cloudsplitter --Russell Banks--you think your father was strict?  Try living up to this one! Sometimes a Great Notion-- Ken Kesey A Prayer for Owen Meaney-- John Irving.   For pure humor in the face of dire pain, it's almost impossible to match Irving-- Garp still stands up there in the thin atmosphere of heroic laughter too) Sacred Hunger --Barry Unsworth Fall on Your Knees-- Ann-Marie MacDonald--you don't get multi-generational drama richer than this--even better than Sometimes a Great Notion) The Shipping News --Annie Proulx (and don't miss Wyoming Stories) Middlesex-- Jeffrey Eugenides Mother Night --Kurt Vonnegut Richard Ford--both the four novels of the Frank Bascombe series, and Rock Springs The Life Before Us-- Romain Gary (in translation from the French--also called "Madame Rosa" in literature and film) Corelli's Mandolin (1994) -- ‎ Louis de

All in all, it's been a decent year for films, commercial or otherwise, though we suffered through unusually thin gruel for the first six months of 2015.   My favorite films of the year, in descending order... 1001 Grams --Bent Hamer, of Kitchen Stories  fame, does it again--a loving look at characters literally trying to find the weight and balance of life as they lose parents and partners.  Hamer should really be on the list of smartest directors--with Mark Duplass, Lars van Trier, and a handful of others who actually care about their stories and characters.   Your soul does, in fact, weigh 21 grams--and you'll value every dust particle after watching this one. Embrace of the Serpent-- this is actually a 2015 release but no one saw it in the US until 2016--when it lost the Best Foreign Film award.  It shouldn't have (no comments about the surprise that a  holocaust film won out over a true original gem with radical environmental and racial politics).   The movie tells

Bright-shiny-object of the second: Guiliani says truth is not truth.   Every since Rudy reemerged from the dustbins of celebrity, he's been short a few brain cells.  But, since he's a celebrity, he can't stop sharing his impairment. Recall that his first effort to ride on Trump's celebrity machine was his insipid and manic assertion that he represented Don in the Stormy Daniels' non-disclosure fee.  It's hard to know.   Trump had corrected Guiliani three times by tweet in the first 24 hours of Rudy's cool new client engagement (has the White House actually written any checks to Rudy?   Wow, that's pretty low value for taxpayer dollars.   He's senile!).  I've never loved the Guiliani brand.   Most people forget about his admirable U.S. Attorney career where he really did get some bad guys (remember the Pizza Connection RICO trial?   No one outside Guiliani's office ever used RICO as effectively since, as the Galahad's sword it was i

Apparently, there are now millions of extortion emails circulating.   These are called crypto blackmail, and like other scams, they're bothersome but meaningless.  If you're receiving them (I started getting them every day on July 17)  Chris Hoffman at How-to Geek wrote a great article that should give you comfort.   What is CryptoBlackmail? As Hoffman says, "CryptoBlackmail is any sort of threat accompanied by a demand you pay money to a cryptocurrency address. Like traditional blackmail, it’s just a 'pay up or we’ll do something bad to you' threat." He offers these examples of CryptoBlackmail: Physical mail saying “ I know you cheated on your wife ,” and demanding the equivalent of $2000 in Bitcoin sent to an included Bitcoin address. Emails saying “ I’ve got an order to kill you ,” followed by a demand to pay $2800 in Bitcoin to call off the assassination. Emails claiming an attacker has placed malware on your computer and  recorded you watching

Colin Kaepernik's career was ruined because he sat down twice for the National Anthem two years ago. Trump joined in on the debate back then--if the mob has an idea, Trump will repeat it on Twitter. So, the NFL owners had a problem:  highly paid players they needed to get rid of.   Two years later, they decide on a policy to stop this.   As of today, every one must stand if they're on the field when the music starts. Kind of like a junior high school dance!  In a gracious bow to free speech, the NFL decided dissenters can avoid the embarrassment of participating in a silly ceremony they don't support by staying in the locker room. I love the thought of an empty playing field once the recorded bugles start to pound.  Build some bigger locker rooms, guys--it's gonna be CROWDED in there! Here's Roger Goodell, summing up the wisdom of two years of what must have been painfully stupid discussions among a whole lot of rich-ish white men: "We want people to

I want to celebrate this cultural essay by Zach Webb , writing for thebaffler.com.   Webb is incensed that a bunch of entrepreneurs are charging more than the Louvre so that millennials and others can photograph themselves with ice cream, or in one of eight pre-editted dreamscapes. To make matters more commercial, most of these "look at my picture now" rooms are sponsored by web brands.   The noose of selfie celebrity tightens beneath our chins. The good news is Webb sees what's happening clearly, and he can write.   Starting with the quote in the headline above.   Yes, we are, in fact living in "populated meme-crap."  Over 150,000 repostings from The Museum of Ice Cream, late of Miami and elsewhere, sponsored by Dove, Tinder, and American Express (swipe right on that shit!).   What does Webb have to say about this?  He quotes Jonathan Crary, author of 24/7, to build up steam: “[W]hatever remaining pockets of everyday life are not directed toward quantita

I own two gorgeous but more-than-15-year-old Yamaha Clavinovas.   One's a CVP 209.   It's old enough that it has a floppy drive.   The over is a CLP--slightly newer with an original generation USB port.   Both have MIDI, fortunately. My partner asked me to record a few pieces of original music to be used as intro and outro on her webcasts.   I tried saving to the USB but the firmware is so old the move and copy functions don't work. So...how to use Garageband with these two digital/acoustic pianos. The first suggestion are headphone out to headphone/MIC jack on my MacAir.   To date, I've not been able to get Garageband to see the Yamaha this way. The second suggestion is to download the Yamaha drivers to the Mac.   This suggestion has failed me in two ways---first, all of the current drivers are USB-MIDI, and of course my old keyboards only have regular old historical MIDI.   Second, every one seems to agree that Garageband has entered the modern world, so, like

Gary Cohn is some Goldman Sachs guy.   He took the Economics job in the Trump administration and lasted 14 months before he resigned yesterday.   That's a long time--he must be pretty determined. Many journalists have commented that he was supposed to get the job of Fed chief, but it wasn't offered to him--many think it was because he appeared to not support Trump's support of the white supremacist movement last summer.   Here's Slate's great epitaph for this indistinguishable banker : Gary Cohn: The man who swallowed the president’s racism and personal humiliation in order to guide tax cuts for his old employer at Goldman Sachs, and then quit over some steel tariffs. Wall Street is sure to welcome him back as a hero.

Trump gives any one with a brain something new to contemplate every day.   I know this makes him happy.   He's definitely a guy from the "any attention is good attention" school of adolescent behavior. Today, it's his announcement that he'd rush in to any school to stop violence and save every one. Donald, you are an affront to yourself.  You-- now --sitting in your office chair this very moment --COULD rush in and save children by doing something.   You could.   Instead, you do diddlysquat, and talk about a hypothetical future you'll never experience. You will never  save a child.   You don't have what it takes to "rush in."   You're too out of shape, and it would take you too long to get your pants buckled up after playing with yourself if another armed guy showed up on your doorstep.  Even if he (it'll always be a he) sent you a Facebook message first, like this last guy.   You're a disgrace to being male. First, I'd li

My Mac has been a clean playing field, but for the first time in six years, I've got spam from Advanced Mac Cleaner...I wonder who these miserable sad sacks are. Here's the guidance I found on the Apple User Group sites that allowed me to clean this horse dung off my login profile. Be advised this procedure applies only to the "Advanced Mac Cleaner" version available as of this writing. Like all similarly categorized Mac "cleaning" products, "Advanced Mac Cleaner" is a  scam  whose only purpose is to coerce you into spending money. To remove it read below. If you have questions regarding a file you're not sure about removing, ask. Quit the app it if is running. Select "No Thanks" when harassed to purchase it. Open your Mac's  Applications  folder, and drag the  Mac Adware Cleaner  icon to the Trash. A popup window may open when you do that, pleading for you to reconsider. Just close it. Do the same if a browser wind

Bored of Valentine's Day?   Disinterested in celebrating or contributing to the world of overpriced flowers and silly commercialism and mediocre fixed menus of food you don't want to eat?   Here's a great quote from Brian Kurtz to get you back in the game: Of all the “Hallmark holidays” I love Valentine’s Day the best. We eat much better chocolate than we eat at Halloween…it reminds us of the gratefulness we all celebrate at Thanksgiving…the generosity (and love) that surrounds the Christmas season…and then we can add hearts anywhere we like…and of course we all have an excuse to wear red and pink. And rumor has it that sex may be part of the deal under certain conditions…in addition to the chocolate.

Today's mini-drama is about the use, by Dodge Ram, of part of Martin Luther King's "drum major" speech during the Super Bowl yesterday. A few people have noticed it, or complained.   In the media, this is called "a social media disaster."   All three of those sad people.   I did note that the New York Times complained, but then they also hated the Justin Timberlake half-time show.   I think the journalists at the Times were just having a very very sad day. As I see it. the concern is that the Dodge truck line brand is pretty aligned with white undereducated men.   (In one recent ad during the playoffs, Dodge positioned itself for viewers as "raising the bar."   To make sure their intended buyers didn't miss the point, they had a truck next to a big I-beam with the words 'The Bar' etched into it.) Wait...maybe that was a Ford truck ad.   Whatever.   Same difference. Under this "white-only companies should not be able to li

I can't express my feeling about the Davos Economic Summit, currently performing it's annual circus, better than Joseph Stiglitz: “They are now licking their lips,” said Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel laureate economist. “Davos Man has been able to overlook Trump’s ‘America First’ rhetoric, his anti-climate-change action, his protectionism, nativism, racism, bigotry, narcissism, misogyny, for the lucre that seems to be the true motivating force behind Davos Man.” Indeed... I'm trying to imagine a policy level definition of some of the economic chaos generated in the last weeks.   There isn't one, not that the Dow Jones isn't loving every minute of it.   But what sort of policy combines: bonuses paid by Walmart based on some tax change-- tarifs slapped on random goods (this week's list includes foreign-made washing machines and solar panels. I assume Trump played golf with some one in the roofing and some one in the appliance industry last week.)-- random s

  I ran volunteer networks for Planned Parenthood, and attended founding meetings of women centers and academic meetings ranging from the National Womens' Studies Association on down.  I've marched in every major women's march since the 70's—and a bunch of great local ones (I still get teary-eyed on Broadway in NYC recalling the excitement at some of those Take Back the Night marches in the 80's).   I even got arrested at the women's peace encampment at Seneca Falls.   I'm the real deal…a feminist man.   My resume is great! So why the fuck don't I want to go to the march this weekend?   My habits are so strong that I've been planning sign painting events and group meet ups, blithely ignoring my honest feelings.   I'm not interested. What happened?   Did I get bored?   I don't think so…maybe I'm numb to my heart here too, but I feel like I've been getting more animated about my politics in all spheres rath

Ah, Denver, or Texas recently.   Or NYC.   Add them to the list.  This violence made my partner recall a paraphrase of the Margaret Atwood quote:    “Men are afraid women will make fun of them.   Women are afraid men will kill them.” Wife- and pet-beater kills people.   Feels kind of like slipping on an old shoe, doesn't it.   Indeed, it's the core US myth.  It’s our national story. It isn't enough we have the bully who authorizes all U.S. bullies, Trump, mouthing off like a crybaby.   The rest of the world already recognizes that he's representative of our joint narrative.   Guy who can't keep a relationship going.  Gets angry.  Takes it out on the women closest to him first, then every one, randomly.   We're going to let this pass too.   Mass Violence Incident 10, 850 (this is only the 2017 file we're reviewing so the numbers only go into the mid-five digits). Since violence against women (and animals) is protected, and these guys appears to b