For many months now, I’ve been seeing advertisements for a company called Masterworks. Here, for instance, is an ad from my Twitter feed:
Master Baiter
Slope of Hope Blog Posts
Slope initially began as a blog, so this is where most of the website’s content resides. Here we have tens of thousands of posts dating back over a decade. These are listed in reverse chronological order. Click on any category icon below to see posts tagged with that particular subject, or click on a word in the category cloud on the right side of the screen for more specific choices.
Carlin Copy
Most of you know that George Carlin is the patron saint of the Slope of Hope, and I’ve listened to his routines and specials countless times. I noticed something odd about the one below, however. From time to time, I would notice a little extra phrase – – just a few words – – that I hadn’t remembered from earlier viewings of the special. I assumed that maybe they trimmed the video special a little bit for purposes of time.
Eventually, though, I figured out that it wasn’t editing – – the audio recording is literally a different performance than the one recorded for HBO. What astonished me is that the two were 99.9999999% identical. The pacing, the timing, the tone, the inflections, the pauses. Believe me, I notice this stuff, and while I realize that doing a “show” means repeating the same thing, Mr. Carlin’s ability to create an almost indistinguishable facsimile from one performance to the next is yet more proof of his incredible genius and skills as a performer. As if he reputation needed to be ANY better.
Tonight’s Biggies
Tomorrow (Wednesday) is going to be one of the biggest trading days of the year, but even before then, we’ve got plenty of action cooking for this afternoon. Here are some of the more important earnings releases:
Intraday H&S
Pretty interesting, the kinds of head and shoulders patterns appearing, even on intraday charts…….
Maskspeak
Since the next 24 hours are going to be mostly waiting around for Jerome Goddamned Powell to speak, I thought I’d mix it up with a little personal observation instead. For almost two years now, the people of Earth have been putting on (and throwing away) literally billions upon billions of surgical masks in this bizarre new world of ours. It occurred to me at the grocery store that there should be some new words coined to describe some of the new situations we’re dealing with. Please offer your ideas in the comments section.
- Auto-eroticism– The completely unnecessary act of keeping your mask on while driving your own car with your own family or, even more freakishly, all by yourself. WTF, people?
- Finger-licking-good– You’re in the grocery store and want to buy some produce. You tear off one of the plastic bags to do so. You know it is physically impossible to actually open the bag without employing the same method used for thousands of years by humans, which is to lick the tips of your fingers and thereby open up the end of the bag. Therefore, by subterfuge, you sneak your thumb and index finger under your mask, give ’em some quick tongue, and do what you need to do. Sounds like my wedding night.
- Self-fog-ulation– You have your mask on (such as on an airplane) and want to read. You slip on your reading glasses. In approximately seven seconds, your exhalation has shrouded your eyeglasses with an impenetrable layer of fog. Enjoy your book!
