over. It’s a short month but I think I got a lot done. I was amusing myself the other day by asking Microsoft’s AI Co Pilot what it knew about me. The results were very strange and laughably incorrect. The lyrics quoted have absolutely nothing to do with the songs mentioned, and I mean nothing. These are words from some other songs written by someone else entirely. I have thus at this point, determined that in this case AI is very stupid indeed. The last thing I want is to get is someone else’s royalties from songs I didn’t write.
Coming up this week will be another band rehearsal/performance. I have so much archived performances that it’s probably time to start thinking about releasing a live album. Not that Spotify makes me any real money. In ten years I’ve made $1,000. That’s a hundred dollars a year, and nobody can live off that. Spotify went from a 2 billion market cap to a 14 billion market cap in about three years. Someone is making a ton of money, but it ain’t the creators of the product they sell. It’s disgusting, but this is where we are now. Corporate greed hasn’t gone away it’s just gotten more egregious.
The Pope isn’t feeling too good lately, and I did happen to watch the Conclave movie a while ago. The ending was fake and gay of course, but it nevertheless was an interesting insight into how they choose the next Pope. I suspect they’ll all be back at the Sistine Chapel fairly soon the way things are going. This morning it looks like he’s improved a bit, so he’s not ready to leave just yet. Trump and Musk continue to make Liberals heads explode, but that’s just a daily occurrence now. Even the weather has improved slightly. Things are looking good.
Over in Ukraine Zelenskyy is losing it, threatening to develop a new Nato himself. When you look at the Nato budget, one wonders where he’ll get the money from. It won’t be good old Uncle Sam, that’s for sure. This morning the Euro-cucks seems to be doubling down on their support for Zelenskyy. The newly minted German leader says he wants Germany to “separate from the US”. Good luck buddy. It’s a sobering reminder of how perma-fucked by Progressive Bolshevism Europe and the Commonwealth are rapidly becoming.
Uncle Joe’s piggy bank is closed now. Oh well..
Maybe the UK can waltz in and take over the defense of Ukraine against the evil Pootin? Starmer sounds crazy enough to do it. I dunno man, apart from Hungary and maybe Poland, I could care less what happens over there.
WTF is a “bias motivated” threat?
I don’t wanna talk about it. I’m sick of politics and all the hate. When I was coming back from the city on Friday I kept seeing signs and billboards talking about ‘hate”. For example on Garrison station I think it was, there was a sign saying something like “Hate doesn’t belong on our trains”. Who said it was there in the first place? There was some other poster in the train itself. All I could read from where I was sitting was “Hate” in big letters. What hate? Where? I was starting to hate seeing these signs. It was engendering hate, not stopping it. It was weird, but this is New York, full of crazy people seeing hate where it doesn’t exist. The train journey to NYC takes in beautiful vistas of the Hudson River as the tracks run along right at the water’s edge for a good part of the journey.
The picturesque Hudson line with no hate in sight
The Metro North Railroad is the least hateful place you could find. On the return journey the train driver was making up rhyming couplets to describe the various stops. “Ossining, Ossining, don’t forget a single thing at Ossining.” Ossining btw, is the home of Sing Sing prison. When in old movies you hear of someone being “sent up the river”, that’s what they’re talking about. In those days they went by boat.
The train tracks run right through the prison.
“Sing Sing is one of the oldest penal institutions in the United States. It is also among the most well-known in the country, especially notable for its harsh conditions in the 19th and 20th centuries. In 1901 the residents of Sing Sing village changed its name to Ossining. They wanted to distance, if not disassociate, the town from the notorious prison.” Charles “Lucky” Luciano, head of the Genovese crime family lived there for a while.
The hot seat – “Old Sparky”
High-profile executions in Sing Sing’s electric chair, nicknamed “Old Sparky”, include Julius and Ethel Rosenberg on June 19, 1953, for espionage for the Soviet Union on nuclear weapon research; and Gerhard Puff on August 12, 1954, for the murder of an FBI agent. The last person executed in New York state was Eddie Lee Mays, for murder, on August 15, 1963.
This is a song about that very railroad journey. (Brass section by mee)