Notices by Dave Mandl (dmandl@mastodon.social)

DOGE staff using their advanced technical knowledge to redesign the country's Top Secret databases.

@watchpocket I love it. And IMO there's no way it's a mistake. It's "sick."

@watchpocket I was talking about McLaughlin. i didn't mean he made a mistake, I was talking about the aesthetics of it, and it's a compliment: "I played a totally fucked guitar solo on that song!" See also: "sick."

@watchpocket It's intentional, not botched!

1. The utterly f'd guitar chord by John Mclaughlin at :51 in this Jack Bruce song. Hearing this at age 16 was a musical revelation for me. https://youtu.be/WfUa1-3LO6w

Over the years I’ve been keeping a list of great “musical micro-moments”—unusual chord changes and other fleeting musical oddities that I like. The list is probably too music-geekish for me to ever publish anywhere, but here are a couple of random items from it:

I will never stop being annoyed by this: the superfluous use of auxiliary verbs ("We do believe that...") by petty-bureaucrat types like cops and military personnel. AFAICT this started in the '70s. #sociolinguistics

My theory on the CEO killer is that someone knows who it is and has been trying to get through to a human being on UnitedHealthCare's phone tree to turn him in for the last three days.

Christian Marclay's 24-hour video "The Clock" (at MoMA) is everything it's cracked up to be, a meticulously edited film collage perfectly sync'd to the real-time clock. Incredible piece of work. Also at MoMA: a Robert Frank photography/video retrospective and these fuzzy sculptures by Mike Kelley.

For Bandcamp Friday, Emergency Group has a new release, recorded live at TV Eye this summer. Also included: a bonus track recorded in Chicago on our Midwestern tour in May. (Gently) ass-kicking live improvisations and more. https://emergencygroup.bandcamp.com/album/live-at-tv-eye

Adam Bohman's billboard for Cafe Oto, London. Holy cow. (Photo: Clive Graham.)

@watchpocket Hahaha. The WSJ has always seemed to me to have excellent copy editors.

In my experience Brits tend to use too few hyphens rather than too many, but "Chrysler-owner" here (in the FT) seems kind of weird. I think even something like "Chrysler parent Stellantis" would read better. #Copyediting

@watchpocket @noirlover @gloriousnoise A little while back I heard about some looming problem with mastodon.social where people said, "Oh, OK, just switch to another instance." Completely unacceptable. Fortunately the problem never seemed to materialize.

I think the recent raging success of Bluesky points to a failure in Mastodon/Fediverse. IMO people touting Bsky as a permanent democratic replacement for Twitter are living in a fool's paradise: Bsky is owned by the same sorts of people Twitter was and will likely end up, five years from now, in the same place that Twitter did. If the vast majority of online civilians feel that Mastodon is "hard to use" that means it *is* hard to use (not purely a perception problem). I wish that could be fixed.

@watchpocket Upper-claas twit.

From novelist Jilly Cooper in the FT. I'm not class-baiting or trying to be punk-rock, I swear, but having Brahms on the stereo at a time like that (I assume she was pretty young) is something I can't imagine.

#NowReading Gilbert Sorrentino, "Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things," a merciless critique of the '60s New York art scene. Excited about this one, which seems to have been unjustly forgotten. Thanks @watchpocket for the rec.

@watchpocket I wasn't using it. It volunteered that information. I haven't bothered trying to turn it off.

"AI" features like this are not only useless to me, but are a tremendous annoyance. Apps are constantly constructing intrusive (usually faulty) reminders that they think I need from my emails and texts.