Is that the instrumental? If so, yeah, it was good.

I actually haven’t listened to any other Zappa albums, but probably will at some point.

I love the titular track, so I was excited to listen to the whole thing, but I think I found it 30 years too late. I get he was trying to go Reefer Madness style with his Central Scrutinizer telling a parable of how rock music leads to self-destruction, but the jokes just fell flat for me.

Obviously the nice girl who ended up having to do wet t-shirt contests to get home, the gay prison sex, the robot sex, saying Africans don’t have record players, etc. were all supposed to be absurd, but it’s very 70s humor that nowadays feels more denigrating than biting satire. I also didn’t really get him corpsing in the voiceovers: I’m guessing it was supposed to be a reminder not to take the story seriously, but I personally found it distracting.

I did find it cool that he mixed solos from his live shows into his songs, but it wasn’t enough to save it for me. It’s like when you go back and watch older movies or tv shows, and suddenly something just blatantly racist or sexist just pops up and immediately dates it way more than the technical aspects do.

In short, it feels like Zappa is trying way too hard to be edgy, and it sucked the life out of the album for me. The opening song still slaps, though.

Joe’s Garage by Frank Zappa

Ok Computer by Radiohead

I’m still not sure if I liked Tommy by The Who or not.

Why wait all the way to Turn 1?

Let the newbie go first, and kill them in their first upkeep with Hulk Flash.

I’ve always taken it as they’re tabulating the gifts:

“Wow, today he gave me three french hens! Plus I have the two turtle doves from yesterday and the partridge in a pear tree from Christmas day!”

The Senate does not have a filibuster-proof majority. They could potentially end the filibuster, but given that it’s the Republicans’ favorite tactic, there’s a decent chance they might not. Especially since the less extreme Republicans can use it as an excuse to let bills they don’t like die without having to vote against the.

The House margin is likely to be thin enough that the moderate Republicans will vote down the crazies. So even if the Senate ends the filibuster, the most egregiously stupid laws should still be stoppable.

Trump still has the ability to do a lot of damage, and he probably will. But if the Republicans piss off people too quickly, they’re likely to tank in 2026, with there being a decent chance to turn both the House and Senate blue and lame duck Trump for the rest of his presidency.

It’s going to be rough, but do not abandon hope.

I showed up to vote. But not enough others were excited to do so.

Nothing

You got it right. Poor thing was just getting a drink and the hunter staged it as a monster.

“Enrolled PCs will continue to receive Critical and Important security updates for Windows 10; however, new features, bug fixes, and technical support will no longer be available from Microsoft,” explains Yusuf Mehdi, executive vice president and consumer chief marketing officer at Microsoft.

Don’t threaten me with a good time.

Started using it today, it recommended Green Onions. Very nice album and I likely wouldn’t have listened to it otherwise.

Kerbal Space Program (with mods) and Assassins Creed Mirage.

No, redundancy is fine. It’s the proprietary backend and Ubuntu forcing it on users that people don’t like.

Well that’s one way to stretch out a joke.

For those not aware, The Girl from Ipanema is a song from a Brazilian artist popularized by Frank Sinatra in the 1960s, and there was a later 1980s song called Girl from Ipanema Goes to Greenland from the B52s. The joke here seems to be purely based on the title.

LLM completely whiffed on this one:

• It’s not a poorly implemented app. It’s a well-implemented app that in the early stages is not monetized
• The issue is not that limitations and costs are becoming apparent. The issue is that after the honeymoon period ends, developers seeking return on investment start locking features critical for business behind a paywall, and charge a very high premium fee for services that used to be free.
• It’s not the restrictive nature of freemium software that becomes the issue. It’s the increasing enshittification of platforms to squeeze business customers for as much as they can before the platform collapses, betting on the established dependency making it too costly to switch to another platform.

Yes, and they’re encouraging people to throw it out. At least some users think to sell on the secondary market, but third party buyers can only get so much out of EOL Windows machines and there are only so many linux users with an interest in buying up old hardware.

I myself have a couple of used laptops, but don’t need any more hardware for a while, so it’s not like I’m able to buy up any. I fear much of it will rot in a landfill.

Big company recommends users turn functional hardware into e-waste so they can boost quarterly profits.

It was still alive and well in the 90s, but in my memory it died out pretty quickly in the 2000s.

Lol, that’s an expression I haven’t heard in a while.

Luckily between Amazon and ESPN+ I can meet most of my sportsball needs. For those not on the apps, there are websites that can assist.