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National Potato Day 2023
Of all things, today is National 🥔 Potato 🥔 Day. Sadly, they’re largely off the menu for me.
Mashed 🥔 Brains
I went through a phase of eating dinner in the shower because I thought, ‘Why don’t we do that?’ Then I realised, ‘Because it doesn’t make any sense.’ It doesn’t save any time, and you can’t really get into a steak and baked potato when there’s water pouring on you. ~Brie Larson
I had a real brain-sucker of a week, but at least I’m not that dumb.
You really have to wonder about people.
What you have to wonder even more is, how do daft people wind up in positions where we have to endure their stupidity?
I mean, it’s bad enough when you’re driving down the highway and you chance to pass someone wearing a mask, alone in their car with the windows up in 2023. That’s a bit painful to see.
However, we have congressmen who believe that Guam could capsize due to overpopulation. We have corporate executives who think that “democracy is messy” and think that totalitarianism is a better form of governance (as long as they’re in the privileged class). We have newspaper and TV reporters who still think the dossier was legitimate, and we have Hollyweird actors who think that it’s a great idea to spout the latest thing and whatever other vapid notions dance through their addled brains.
How do these people get out of bed without hurting themselves?
What’s more puzzling is how any one of them isn’t laughed out of the limelight. Being conspicuously daft in public seems to boost their social credit.
And it’s not just the fame and notoriety. A lot of these people are getting paid top dollar to be idiotic in public.
Actors are paid millions of dollars before they even begin work are led to believe they’re all that while they spout nonsense that is guaranteed to undercut the market potential of the movie or show they’re working on. And yet, they’ll get more work and more opportunity to diminish the value of the projects they’re picked up for.
Unbelievable.
The rest of us shake our heads and live our lives, cognizant of the ramifications of our words and actions in the workplace. It’s up to us to decide whether we bump up the box office numbers of someone who’s being conspicuously moronic. It’s up to us to decide whether to vote for someone who seems barely qualified to tie their shoes. It’s up to us to direct our investment managers into or out of hedge funds run by communist sympathizers who are forcing ESG and DIE on the corporate world.
That’s why they remain in place. A lot of us are just as dumb as them. Is it any wonder civilization is swirling the drain?
Spud Sugar Level
Diabetes and Potatoes 🥔 How to Consume Them Without Raising Blood Sugar
I miss potatoes, but not enough to be bothered by it. I’m down another 8 pounds since my last weigh in at the doctor’s. Mostly, it’s because Ozempic helps me to have no appetite whatsoever.
Literally. I used to hoover up food and now I can barely be bothered to eat most days.
So much the better.
Fortunately, squash is not off the menu. Cubed butternut squash makes an excellent substitute for the little potatoes I crave with roasts. There’s always a work-around.
🛋️ 🥔
I’m a couch potato. I love to stay in and just watch a DVD with the missus. Or we all go over to Louis’s house and watch ‘X Factor.’ ~Zayn Malik
I’d love to have the leisure to be a couch potato on purpose. When it happens, it’s generally due to mental exhaustion. What’s the fun in that?
When I’m not at work or shagged entirely out from having been at work, I occasionally get a few hours to engage in couch potato-ness.
On the weekends, I either do catch-up work from work, do some writing if I’ve got the mental clarity to do so or I go down a bunch of research rabbit-holes.
I guess some people would qualify that as being a couch potato, but it doesn’t hold the same sense of relaxation.
I find writing to be relaxing when I’m in the zone and really cranking out the pages. Unfortunately, I’ve been off balance for a while due to being so busy at work.
There should be a clean break between work-time and not-work-time, but it’s been hard to draw that line and stick to it. Even when I’m not actively working, I’m still actively or passively fretting about everything that needs to get done and the lack of hours available to do it.
It makes me want to go back into manic, 24-hour sessions.
I don’t want to do that. I really don’t. It’s not good for my physical or mental health to do that.
One of the topics I’ve been researching lately is the use of AI in writing. Since it’s one of the hot-button issues in the current Hollywood strike, it seemed apropos.
At the moment, ChatGPT and other AI services do a decent job of responding to requests.
Sadly for Hollywood, a back-levelled version of the current large language model would do a better job of pitching movie ideas than a gaggle of six or seven figure screenwriters.
Based on the last few years (decades, actually) of movie ideas, it seems like any producer would be better suited to hire a prompt wizard to teach them how structure a request for movie ideas that would actually entertain audiences, make money and put the tinsel back into Tinseltown.
Meanwhile, a bunch of self-righteous nutters picket out in the scorching California summer sun trying to preserve an entertainment industry that was already over when the pandemic hit.
This is an inflection point and, frankly, none of them get it.
The age of the blank check is over. The age of people gobbling up anything and everything that Hollywood puts out is over. The age of people of moderate mental capacity to make insane gobs of money just for being pretty and somewhat good at pretending on screen is basically over.
Nothing lasts forever, kids. The trick is to be the genius who comes up with the new paradigm.
The major point in the current strike is that both sides want something for nothing. The producers want to cut the cost of production by shafting the performers. The performers want a piece of the pie, not realizing the pie is an illusion.
One of the issues is that back in the day, actors made an ongoing income from the residuals that came from having their shows syndicated. They’d get paid for making the shows or movies in the short term and they’d get residuals when those shows were shown as repeats on the original networks as well as in syndication on UHF channels or cable networks. Why? Because UHF channels and cable networks have commercials. They’re paying for the right to broadcast those shows and movies. That payment is split between the companies and the performers according to contracts that worked under that paradigm.
Streaming services have been operating at a loss for most of their existence as what retailers refer to as loss-leaders. Walmart doesn’t make money on the flag cups, party supplies and patriotic tchotchkes they sell from the end caps on Memorial Day, Independence Day, Labor Day and Veterans Day, they use those seasonal frivolities to draw you further into the store where the staples (food, clothes, cleaning supplies) and the bigger ticket items (TVs, microwaves, vacuum cleaners, guns, automotive goods) provide actual revenue. The same thing with the streaming services.
Disney+ is great for a couch potato to binge the catalog of Star Wars, Marvel and Disney properties, but it’s really meant to maintain brand loyalty and draw you off to the theaters and theme parks. The same is basically true of Amazon Prime Video, Hulu, Paramount+ and a bunch of the others. You’d think the subscription model would be profitable, but from what I’ve read, it isn’t.
They’d need to charge a lot more to actually be profitable, but then they’d lose subscribers because few people would be willing or able to subscribe to all the different services.
Ultimately, we used to subscribe to cable in order to have access to a zillion channels of whatever the channels felt like playing, whenever they decided to play them.
We traded that in for a variety of services that let us watch whatever we want whenever we want to watch it. So, pay in bulk for hundreds of channels that play stuff on their own schedule and have commercials to make that supplement the subscription price or pay in pieces for the streaming services that show what you feel like seeing when you want to see it with or without commercials. I prefer the latter, but they don’t seem to be sustainable as currently structured.
We’ll see how that shakes out and what the landscape of entertainment looks like going forward.
That’s all. I had a long week. I’m tired. I don’t have much to say today. I’ll see you Wednesday.