Apparently every January I decide that it's sad that I used to blog (20 years ago...) and I don't anymore (I blame social media) and that I really should blog. This year it's because I am realizing that with Generative AI there is not really writing any longer - the cool things I wrote pre-November 2022 are undoubtedly mine alone, but anything post-November 2022 is suspect. That bugs me. I don't like how Generative AI writing sounds - it's anodyne and ordinary and corporate and just not me. Sure, it's probably grammatically correct, but where's the fun in that? On one of my other blogs I'm going to apply a book to cybersecurity, but this one was designed for purely random musings. I could write about how awful it is that people who have a 10pm to 6am sleep schedule think they are somehow superior to those of us with 2am to 10am sleep schedules - but maybe that should go on the more or less "professional" (gaak - I hate that word) blog because what I'm more ticked about is the folks who work from 8am to 5pm thinking they are somehow better than those of us who work as many hours, but do it later in the day. I want to make sure I shake things up. That is my mission in life - to make the world a better place. To tell people things. To shake things up.
I'm baaccckk! I was showing my students some of my domains and realized I had this one and had forgotten about it. I've decided it's good practice to write in it.
Sometimes I live on the edge and listen to the radio in the car - I generally listen to podcasts or music playlists because I prefer to know what's coming next and the randomness of radio songs usually results in a bout of channel surfing to find the Something Better. Today, though, I knew I was going to be stopping the car frequently and it's a pain to have to keep restarting the podcasts so Sirius XM it was! Because I was born during the Johnson administrator (Lyndon, not Andrew) I appreciate 80s music. Billy Joel is always fun to listen to. This song was on:
That sent me down a memory path, because I saw Billy Joel perform this very song at a concert when I was in college! He joked at the beginning about needing to finish the concert on time because he wanted to watch his girlfriend on TV. We all laughed and thought it was so sweet that he and Christie Brinkley were dating and he seemed to be so much in love with her - grownups in love, what a concept! It was fun that she was taller than him*, too.
I was 19 back then. Back when I knew next to nothing about the world and was naive enough to think that this musician and his model girlfriend had found true love and would live happily ever after.
What was I thinking? I knew about Elizabeth Taylor**.
Joel and Brinkley split up about a decade after that. Apparently they remained friendly, so it was a civilized thing, but no fairy tale ending.
It's weird to think of being 19 and not realizing what the world was like or would hold for me. I've always been sarcastic, but not always so cynical. When I hear of celebrities pairing up these days I figure it's only for a short time. (Not that I really care, but I end up reading news to get my Bing Rewards points 😏)
I doubt today's 19-year-olds have any relationship illusions. Do they have illusions in general?
A few years after that, David Coverdale, of Whitesnake, featured his new girlfriend, Tawny Kitaen, in the band's videos. At that point Coverdale was 36. The song, "Here I Go Again", seems so perfect - and his delivery is amazing - you really feel like this almost middle-aged man (it's silly to think of 36 as middle-aged, but I suppose it is and it was more so back then - I remember thinking he was pretty old at the time...) is getting his second chance at real love - there's a remarkable caged intensity about him that doesn't seem to be merely playing for the camera***:
Coverdale and Kitaen divorced several years after the video. Perhaps they quarreled over hair styling products.
Maybe don't have the romantic partner appear in the music video 😃
*Not that I could do that myself (it's not my esthetic), but it was fun to see that it could be done.
**She was only on her seventh marriage at that time. I've also been married more than once. It happens.
***This is one of my favorite songs/videos, if you couldn't tell.
Today's Reality Check comic strip by Dave Whamond made me laugh because what pharmaceutical companies have been doing with drug prices is beyond the Pale unethical. It would be nice to see what goes around come around. I realize that companies need to make money in order to pay employees and keep the lights on and such - and have some money left over for research and development - but healthcare should not have a profit motive as its driving force. I wonder if the people who are making these pricing decisions realize that real humans are negatively affected by their decisions. I'm not begrudging someone who takes on the responsibility of a large company a decent salary - but I do think there's something morally bankrupt about an executive who rakes in millions in compensation on the backs of regular people who give up a huge proportion of their modest incomes just to stay alive.