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Beast

If you recall, back in December I acquired a new (old) CD player, the same model I’d owned from 1990 until it just disappeared from my memory as well as the photographic record.

When I started rebuilding my CD collection, I couldn’t find that exact model to replace it. I settled for its little brother that soon proved very reluctant to work consistently and I replaced that with a brand new Yamaha CD-S303 player and donated it to Goodwill.

I was happy with the S303 (I still am, truth be told), but I still longed to get another Yamaha CDX-730. As I’ve written several times, nostalgia is a hell of a drug.

When one in good condition finally showed up on eBay, I secured it. Initially very happy with it, but then one day I put on a CD and it refused to play the final tracks. I performed due diligence and popped the cover, doing a clean and lube of the mechanism. Unfortunately the problem remained—and strangely only with the discs of that particular two-disk set as well as come random self-burned CDs.

I finally gave up and removed it from the system and reinstalled my new player which played anything you threw at it.

What I’d forgotten about was that I set a trigger on eBay to notify me when any 730s came available. The eBay algorithm  casts a wide net on these searches so often I get a notification that doesn’t actually match exactly what I was looking for.

That happened about three weeks ago. I got notice that a CDX-930 (the 730’s big brother) was available. Now I have to admit I’ve kept an eye out for this model, but while they are available in abundance from Japan, the US 120V model is pretty rare. So when I got the notice that one had just been posted, I had to take a look. It wasn’t an auction; it was a buy it now listing, so I made an reasonable offer to the seller and he accepted. According to the listing, it was fully functional. There were the usual scuffs and scratches on the top case, but he said it was working.

I immediately listed the 730 to cover this expense. Lots of interest, but no takers just yet. (I just sold one of my other pieces of gear, so it’s covered in any case.)

The player arrived the day I went into the hospital. Because, you know everything is fucked these days.

I picked it up yesterday from the neighbors, who graciously removed it from our front porch to avoid losing it to porch pirates.

I got it unpacked and plugged in. I hit the open button and the tray slowly slid out—and then was immediately sucked back in. To its credit, if I got a disc in there fast enough it did play fine, but obviously this behavior was unacceptable long term.

Thankfully, over the past year I’ve watched more than enough YouTube videos that deal with this exact same problem from a variety of models and manufacturers, and I knew what was needed: replace the drawer belt and clean the limit switch that tells the drawer when it’s open or closed. It’s a task I knew I could handle without further fucking things up (as I am wont to do).

Sure enough, after some disassembly it was obvious the belt had gone sloppy. I didn’t have the exact size it needed in my belt collection, but slapped on one that was slightly smaller and it’s worked fine.  I ordered the proper belt today and will tear everything apart again when it arrives.

I squirted some DeOxit D5 on the limit switch and moved it back and forth to make sure the solution hit the contacts, cleaned the laser lens with some IPA, plugged everything back in and tested. The drawer now behaved itself.

I mentioned that the CDX-930 was the 730’s big brother. That was an understatement. The 930 is a completely different beast—and I don’t use that term lightly. Full metal construction throughout, including the disk tray! The 930 also has a different laser assembly than the 730 and uses magnetic rails to move that assembly—versus the motor-driven gear setup on the 730.

As you can imagine, the 930 also weighs substantially more than the 730. The 730 was also full metal contruction—albeit with a plastic disk tray—but of a much lighter gauge aluminum than the 930.

But I know you’re wondering: did my problematic disks play? Without so much as a hiccup!

The CD-S303 went back in its box and into storage. Not getting rid of that because I want to keep it as a backup—just in case. Because you know everything is fucked these days.

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MYST. Without Question, MYST.

I would stay up until 2:30 on work nights and then somehow manage to drag myself into the office the next morning. Ah, youth.

And then I discovered Obsidian. I never did make it all the way through that one. I know it’s available via Steam, and MYST can be purchased through Apple. And yes, I bought both of them. I’ve tried playing a few times, but I just don’t have the attention span or the enthusiasm I did thirty years ago to actually make it through either one these days.

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Farce is Dear Leader’s specialty.

Karl Marx referenced Hegel in 1852, noting that great historical events appear twice: “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”

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as another stupid week comes to a close here in America, let’s look back at the dumbest fucking shit that happened.

monday: respect? they have an odd way of showing it

lord help us, noises are once again issuing from Fox News found object Jesse Watters’ lips.

“Trump talks like a Persian strongman. that’s the kind of language that they understand. strength, respect, honor.”

look, we know that Jesse Watters has eternally fantasized that his big, strong ‘daddy’ Donny would at long last take off his belt and tan his misbehaving hide. fine, whatever the fuck turns you on, Jesse. who are we to get all judgemental and shit?

but I’d love to know on what planet Donny is regarded as a ‘strongman’ who is ‘respected’ — because I’m sorry to burst Jesse’s bubble here, but Dear Leader is an international laughingstock.

Italian PM Georgia Meloni, can you think of a single world leader who ‘respects’ Donny?

yeah, me neither.

there’s no fucking way that Iran has any respect whatsoever for the diaper-crapping piss-baby in the Oval Bordello. has Jesse Watters not seen the videos they’ve been putting up on Elon’s Nazi Bar and Child Porn Emporium? yo Jess, check this out.

yup, that’s some industrial-strength respect for Preznit Teletubby, all right.

here’s another.

nd here’s a third.

and that only scratches the surface. Iran is laughing its ass off at Dear Leader, along with the rest of us.

oh, and because I’m a responsible journalist and everything, I wanted to know exactly what a ‘Persian strongman’ is, so I googled it. here’s what I got.

yeah, I think any single one of these homeys could take Donny apart.

you might need a new metaphor there, Jesse.

tuesday: buh-bye

pour one out for the proprietor of the now-shuttered Trump Truth Store in Crystal Lake, Illinois.

apparently,

sales plummeted when conflict with Iran began, with the owner saying business went “dead as a door nail”

okay, my friends, you know the drill — because now comes the part where we throw our heads back in laughter.

look at the crap that was being foisted on shoppers.

On March 26, Fleischmann revealed on Facebook that her MAGA-themed establishment, which retailed $25 T-shirts displaying, “GOD GUNS AND TRUMP 2024,” “ICE ICE BABY,” and “DEPARTMENT OF DOGE,” will be “closed until further notice.”

oh, so the customers of the ‘Trump Truth Store’ were totally fine with all the fascist ass-clownery being perpetrated by Dear Leader’s goons, and it was only when gas became expensive that wearing Donny-branded shit became toxic?

well then fuck all those fucking fucks.

maybe the Trump Truth Store needs to rebrand. I’d wear the shit out of a Flippy McCrushnuts shirt. you would, too.

wednesday: to see if wut?

christofascist Stew Peters seems nice

“I told you on Day One that young American men would be sent into the meat grinder on the ground to die for Israel. it’s imminent. it’s guaranteed. right now, the White House and the Pentagon are reportedly working on plans to send in American troops along with heavy equipment to steal Iran’s uranium — if they even have any. and while all of that is in the works, Lindsey Graham is on television calling for the expansion of the ongoing air campaign, for the United States to continue committing as many war crimes as possible. we should drop Lindsey Graham right off in the middle of Tehran — to see if these people really do throw queers off of rooftops.”

oh sweet baby Jesus in the manger. Stew was almost making sense there for a while and then it went so hard off the rails right there at the very end.

does Lindsey Graham have any idea that this is what people on his own side think of him? Lindsey? Lindsey?

holy shit.

thursday: let’s shed some light on the subject

Wednesday was a bit intense, so let’s lighten this shit up.

what the fuck happened to Naomi Wolf? she used be a garden-variety ‘wellness’ crank who dabbled in vaccine denial — but then she become a full-bore a full-bore conspiracy loon.

remember this?

“I endorsed Pres Donald Trump yesterday. Today all day my phone froze, the cursor on my computer started wandering around the desktop, and my wifi continually disconnected. All coincidentally.”

well, Dr. Wolf’s back, with a burning question about photos of the moon taken from the Artemis II spacecraft.

all that light is coming from space lasers, Naomi.

we Jews have a fuck-ton of them, Naomi, and we’re happy to have done our part to ensure that the Artemis II mission was a roaring success. you need the moon lit up? we’ve got that shit covered!

and while we’re on the subject, can we just revisit the all-time greatest dogwalking of Dr. Wolf? it happened just last week.

that is perfect. chef’s kiss. ten out of ten. no notes.

 

friday: the further adventures of Some Fucking Idiot™

some fucking idiot’s Friday started, as so many of them do, with him raving incoherently at six o’clock in the morning into his crappy app.

excuse me, but what is the ‘WORLD’S MOST POWERFUL RESET’? is that what the fucking idiot calls having his morning diaper changed?

for the third consecutive day, the fucking idiot’s handlers tried their best to keep him away from the press — but they couldn’t keep the fucking idiot from shitting his delusional batshittery all over social media.

Iran holds no cards? I’m pretty sure that any country who can shut down a major shipping route at will — and trick the fucking idiot into agreeing to it — holds a shitload of cards.

oh look, the fucking idiot is promising to use the ‘full economic might of the United States’ to prop up the failing economy of his depot bestie Orbán’s Hungary.

I have an idea: how about the fucking idiot use the ‘full economic might of the United States’ to help Americans? isn’t the fucking idiot always going on and on about ‘America first’?

and there’s no way the fucking idiot wrote that tweet himself. there’s no chance in hell his rotting fingers know how to type the accent in ‘Orbán.’

now here’s a fun thing we learned on Friday about the fucking idiot. apparently he’s promised to pardon anyone who’s come with ‘200 feet’ of the Oval Bordello.

as one does, when one’s entire administration is made up of corrupt criminal fucksticks. am I right, Tom Homan?

Tom Homan knows I’m right.

oh, and the one time on Friday that the press got managed to get close enough to the fucking idiot to ask him questions — as he was headed to his Florida golf motel — he proved to be as befuddled, out-of-touch and ill-informed as ever.

and, despite that one, brief window of opportunity, not reporter stood up to ask ‘what the fuck is wrong with you?’

how fucking idiotic is that?

this is going to be my closing message for the foreseeable future:

practice self-care. do what you need to do to keep sane. if that means you need to disengage with my daily posts for a while, I get it. this community of ours will still be here when you return.

to all the people who have signed on in the days since the election, welcome aboard. settle in as we all try to deal with the shitfuckery that’s ahead of us.

we are all in this together, and we are all here for each other.

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Congratulations To NASA And The Crew Of Artemis II

What competency in government looks like.

Notice how the most celebrated and successful space mission in decades was run by at least 50% “DEI hires”—not all white men? And not even all Americans. Maybe diversity is strength…

And just so we don’t forget who actually helped make this happen…

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Photo by Quan Nguyen on Unsplash

The words Walter Reed showed up on my timeline over the weekend.

I confess that my heart fluttered, my spirit quickened, and I pulled out our corkscrew and put it on the counter, just in case.

A few hours later… false alarm.

Party postponed.

Humanity, still hostage.

Unfettered lunatic, still at the wheel.

Annihilation, still in play.

Hellscape, still fully ablaze.

While I would never wish anyone harm, I will rejoice the day he leaves the planet.

I feel no shame in saying this.

It would be disingenuous to pretend otherwise.

And I will be far from alone in my elation.

When he departs this mortal sphere, it will be an occasion of global jubilation, not unlike the passing of any of history’s previous monsters.

On that day, there will be a collective exhale that we haven’t experienced since the end of the Second World War.

Outside of all but a small, brainwashed faction of the population’s most cultic, human beings around the world, will break out in spontaneous celebration at the subtraction of a presence that has done incalculable damage to the course of humanity.

On that day, the messiah of the miserable will no longer be able to generate new nightmares for the rest of us. We will finally be freed from his nonsensical ramblings. He will be unable to pervert the truth, or bastardize the office, or stoke division, or murder the English language.

But I’m not foolish enough to believe that this will be the end of the nightmare.

His enablers will remain; those opportunistic, bottom-feeding hate-mongers, soul-auctioning political traitors, and armageddon-welcoming religious zealots will still all be here, rushing to fill the power chasm he will leave behind. They will devour one another trying to occupy the throne once it is empty.

And not only them, but the legion of his civilian foot soldiers, who carried him upon their shoulders.

These past 10 years have done irreparable harm to the sovereignty of our nation, to our systems of governance, to the relational connections between us, to the collective health of the planet.

But he hasn’t done this.

The people we share this country with have done it using him as their weapon of choice. Our family members. Our friends. Our co-workers. Our neighbors.

His departure will do nothing to undo all the evil that his now bruised hands have wrought, to erase every vile thing his presence has exposed as he ascended politically.

It will not rewind the years of those who lived in squalor and poverty in New York City, on whose backs he built his fraudulent, hollow empire.

His death will not bring financial restitution to the thousands of workers and contractors left abandoned by the many bankruptcies that emancipated him from responsibility.

It won’t give back wholeness and healing to the girls and women he violated in secret or maligned in public.

It will not reverse the irreparable damage he has done to a political party whose members individually and collectively abandoned every legal and moral expectation to fall prostrate before him.

It will not illicit repentance in a white Evangelical Church that parted ways with the compassionate, loving namesake of its faith tradition and fashioned a vicious, sneering, profane, God-mocking idol out of his antithesis and bowed down before it.

His passing now could not allow us to unsee the repugnant grievance cult he unleashed here; the historically hateful movement of miserable people who’ve spent the last decade reveling in an unrepentant ugliness because he gave them consent.

It will not remove the legion of incompetent, predatory, corrupt sycophants he poisoned our government with; people who have and will continue to dismantle and pervert our systems of care and legal oversight.

And his death, as much as it would feel like an initial reprieve from the chaos he has engineered and the suffering he has spearheaded, would do nothing to conceal the heart maladies he exposed within the people around us: the long-simmering racism, the scalding contempt for foreigners, the phobic hatred of human beings for their gender identity or sexual orientation.

Long after he has made his exit, we will be left with what we now know about our family members and friends and neighbors; about the people in our churches, about the parents of our children’s friends; about the pillars of our communities, about those we trust to govern us, to protect and serve us.

These people and the atrocities they co-authored, sadly, will all long outlive him.

He has merely been the symptom.

The hatred in the heart of his supporters is the sickness.

Even when he’s gone, they’ll still be here.

So, any celebration will be short-lived.

 

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So This Happemed…

Apparently the pneumonia from a few weeks ago didn’t fully resolve after all…

I’m in the ICU. Don’t know how long I’ll be here before I can go home. Posting may be spotty.

But hey, at least Cankles didn’t nuke Iran!