Author: Mark Alexander

Posted on

Giving Up On The Gumstick

I love this R900 that I got a few months ago. The seller indicated that the internal battery wasn’t working, but the unit came with the AA sidecar (the black thing connected to the player in the photo above) so I wasn’t too concerned. I figured it would just be a matter of cleaning the internal battery contacts and it would be good as new. When I received it, the internal battery contacts were a hot mess (the original Sony gumstick battery was stuck inside the unit), but I got it out and cleaned the contacts with vinegar and IPA. Afterwards, it worked with a new gumstick, but performance (i.e. how long the battery actually lasted) was less than satisfactory. A lot of the gold plating had been lost from the contacts on the battery door (the end where the leakage occurred) from the corrosion, so I tried re-tinning the contacts on the door, hoping to restore a bit of that conduction. No matter what I did however, it seemed the full charge segment on the battery indicator would never stay lit for more than a few minutes (not normal operation). After months of dicking around with this I finally threw in the towel a few nights ago and removed the gumstick battery, attached the sidecar, and put a drop of super glue on the door (because it wouldn’t stay closed) and called it finished. The sidecar is obviously not as elegant a solution as just using the gumstick, but it works. The new AA battery I put in it last night has been in use nearly all day today and the full battery indicator stayed lit for nearly 10 hours.

I’m inclined to believe that the majority of the R900s out there suffer from this same internal  corrosion because nearly all the working ones you see for sale are shown with the sidecar attached. Ideally I’d like to find a working, non-corroded unit of any color and swap the guts into this one, but then I’d also need to find another red unit with a door that latches properly to harvest, so I think I’ll just live with this as it is.

Posted on

last week, as the world’s richest burnout and the world’s most erratic imbecile were distracting us with their pig-wallow slap-fight, Republican fuckfaces were fuckfacing up a storm.

let’s catch up on some of the clownholery that might have flown under your radar.

granny-starving Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick can fuck all the way off.

Congresswoman Madeleine Dean: “what’s the tariff on bananas?”
Lutnick: “generally 10%”
Dean: “Walmart has already increased the cost of bananas by 8%.”
Lutnick: “if you build in America, there is no tariff.”
Dean: “we cannot build bananas in America.”

this smug fuck has just one stock answer that he shoehorns into every situation, even if it makes no sense: build it in America.

yeah, let’s do that. let’s open dozens of banana factories all across the land, with hundreds of thousands of workers screwing billions of tiny little screws into millions of bananas as they roll down the assembly line. fuck you, Guatamala! eat it, Ecuador! bananas are American now!

lord save us from these out-of-touch idiots.

wouldn’t you like to see one moment of honesty from Howard the Lut?

“don’t you think I fucking know we can’t build bananas? my boss is a moron, and I have to say shit like this to keep my job. do you think I enjoy lying to you?”

wait, no — strike that last bit, because yeah, actually, I do think that Granny-Starvin’ Howard enjoys lying to everybody. that’s the way sociopaths roll.

wait, what’s Lutnick doing back? didn’t we just tell him to fuck off?

“the idea is to automate that, to put it on the cloud, so that the 2,100 meteorologists and the hundreds of hydrologists can forecast the weather from central locations, and back up each other, and be more appropriate.”

that’s Howie, buzzwording at a mile a minute, explaining why it was totes cool for the Space Nazi’s merry band of pimply DOGE incels to walk into the offices of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and fire everyone in sight.

it cannot be overstated just how much Howie has no fucking clue what he’s talking about. all he’s doing is mindlessly parrotting the incoherent gibberish that Kid Ketamine yammered at him whilst in the middle of a ten-day bender.

 

…and then all the spoons and the forks will be up in the cloud which will be so much more appropriate to the hydrologists…

meanwhile, the National Weather Service has been gutted to the point where it can’t even predict a fucking tornado.

awesome job, Lutnick. why don’tcha go out and starve a few more grannies. you’ve earned it.

White House energy vampire Colin Robinson Kevin Hassett can fuck off— but before he does, could he please wipe that annoying smirk off his face?

 

“the federal government workers, they’re hard-working, a lot of them are highly-skilled, but they’re sitting doing government work that isn’t much value.”

oh, please piss straight up a rope with this “not much value” horse shit. it’s all fun and games until your food stops being inspected, and planes start falling out of the sky.

I can think of one government worker who adds ZERO value to our country: Kevin Hassett. does he even have an office? in every single interview, he’s on the lawn in front of the White House.

here’s some rando ‘economic advisor’ who apparently also lives on the lawn. he can fuck off.

Stephen Miran: “there are a lot of deals in the works. I expect a flurry around the deadline.” Fox host: “I’m sorry to interrupt but every time we do these segments, I’m just looking for the name of a country. can you give me a name?”
Miran: “I cannot.”

bro, if you can’t give us a name, can you at least tell us if any of these countries are in the room with us right now?

another day, another round of dissembling from one of the Mad King’s ass-clown stooges. look, on April 12th, we were promised “90 deals in 90 days,” as the Greatest Dealmaker of All Time was going to astonish us all with bang! bang! bang! one amazing trade deal after another.

the reality is that we’re getting 90 fuckwits on the White House lawn in 90 days — because it turns out the dipshit in the Oval Office isn’t the Greatest Dealmaker. instead, he’s Taco Donny, and he has no fucking clue what he’s doing.

by the way, mad props to Matthew Budman on bluesky, who reminded me that I tweeted this six years ago today.

in six years, not one fucking thing has changed. Donny is still praising himself for imaginary accomplishments — and now, even Fox News is getting fed up with the constant dog-and-ponying.

before we get into this next clip, let me remind everyone that Louisiana Senator John “Not The Good John” Kennedy is an actual Oxford-educated Rhodes Scholar who pretends to be a moron in order to pander to the rubes who vote for him.

keep all that in your mind as the Esteemed Senator does his Mushmouth McYokel act.

oh, and Senator Kennedy can fuck all the way off.

Kennedy: “Harvard is in many respects violatin’ federal law.”

Morning Joe: ‘what federal law is Harvard violating?”

Kennedy: “Harvard practices ideological capture.”

now, I’m not a fancy-shmancy Rhodes Scholar like the esteemed senator here, so I had to google ‘ideological capture’ to find out what it is — and what I found were a shitload of right-wing thinks tanks all whining about universities that are — to put it in terms that Senator Kennedy would understand — ‘they’s teachin’ things ah don’ like.’

but you know what? whatever ‘ideological capture’ is or isn’t, there’s no federal law against it — so Senator Marblemouth can stick a fucking sock in his performative-nonsense grandstanding. that shit might impress his dumb-as-rocks constituents, but we’re not buying any today.

here’s your hero of the day: Patricia Eguino, who used both a bullhorn and an air-horn to disrupt an attempted press conference by Proud Boy Enrique Tarrio. she completely derailed that shit. enjoy

Posted on

A Great Series

Highly recommended. Well known renditions, but definitely not just “greatest hits” albums.

Posted on

Michael C. Hall & Adam Scott
Six Feet Under — 2.05

Posted on

The Week In Stupid

as another stupid week comes to a close here in America, let’s look back at the dumbest fucking shit that happened.

monday: twice as nice

when last we checked in on pig-castration aficionado and noted philosopher Joni Ernst, the Iowa senator was being royally roasted for having told a town hall audience to basically shut the fuck up and stop complaining about people being thrown off Medicaid, because — and I’m quoting here — “we all are going to die.”

not content at having shot herself in one foot, Joni reloaded her rhetorical shotgun, took careful aim, and began blasting away at the other.

“hello everyone. I would like to take this opportunity to sincerely apologize for a statement that I made yesterday at my town hall. see, I was in the process of answering a question that had been asked by an audience member when a woman who was extremely distraught screamed out from the back corner of the auditorium, ‘people are going to die’ — and I made an incorrect assumption, that everyone in the auditorium understood that yes, we are all going to perish from this earth. so, I apologize for this, and I’m really, really glad that I did not have to bring up the subject of the tooth fairy as well.”

ah yes, the tried-and-true “I’m so sorry … that you people are fucking morons” tack.

holy shitballs, get a load of where Joni Ernst is recording herself. she’s actually walking through a cemetery while shitting on the heads of her constituents. the arrogance is off the charts.

I would love to predict that Joni’s condescending video will be the end of her political career. I’d love to go on about how the Democrat who runs against her in 2026 will turn her own words into a devastating campaign commercial, and that Ernst will be crushed in the next election.

never forget, however, that we live in the stupidest possible timeline — and Iowa voters are gluttons for punishment.

Iowa’s the state that has re-elected Chuck Grassley to the Senate a record three hundred and sixteen times. dude’s been in office since before the Revolutionary War. so I’m not holding out any hope for Iowa’s voters to come to their senses any time soon.

tuesday: a mind is a terrible thing to not have

when they build the Stupid Hall of Fame, Marjorie Three Toes Greene will have her very own wing. imagine having one of the most important jobs in America and sleepwalking your way through it.

“Full transparency, I did not know about this section on pages 278-279 of the OBBB that strips states of the right to make laws or regulate AI for 10 years. I am adamantly OPPOSED to this and it is a violation of state rights and I would have voted NO if I had known this was in there.”

that’s a stunning confession. ‘I would have voted no if I had bothered to read what I was voting on.’

good job doing your job, Marge.

this is how we ended up with all those space lasers, by the way. Marge voted yes on the Jewish Space Lasers Act Of 2022 without even glancing at the title of it. so she has no right to complain about any weather-related incident.

the thing about this current budget bill, however, is that Congresswoman Sporkfoot is not wrong about AI. it’s an environmental disaster, it steals intellectual property, and we need to heavily regulate the shit out of how it’s implemented before it’s too late.

so fuck every Republican for making me agree with Marge Greene.

we’ve sure been getting a lot of use out of the “worst person you know” meme lately, haven’t we?

wednesday: how about taking a vacation from being horrible, Tom

leave Tom Homan alone, you monsters.

“I had over a thousand protestors at my lake house just a month ago.”

OH MY GOD, NOT THE LAKE HOUSE.

look, self-styled “border czar” Tom Homan didn’t sign up for any of this crap. all he ever wanted to do was kidnap innocent immigrant families off the streets and deport them to who the fuck cares, just get them out of my sight. and you people have the nerve to protest about it — at his lake house.

I have to confess that when I heard Homan whining about a “thousand protestors” in some small upstate NY town, my bullshit detector started clanging — because the whole deal sounded like a big bowl of yeah, right. so I decided to investigate. guess what—

fact check: true.

after ICE goons kidnapped a mother and her three kids from their house in Tom Homan’s home town, about a thousand protestors marched from the center of town down to his beloved lakefront property.

do you know what? the protest worked. the mother and her children were released.

A mother and three children who were “snatched” from their home by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and detained for 11 days were released Monday following an outpouring of community anger — including a protest outside the house of Donald Trump’s border czar.

so boo fucking hoo, Tom. for once, justice prevailed. stop whining about it.

eat binky, creep.

thursday: wut

good lord, he’s so fucking stupid.

“I’ve uncovered the human mind, I was in a debate with the human mind.”

gee, that’s nice.

but let’s set aside President Yap Yap’s tapioca-filled head for now, and focus instead on his administration’s latest abomination.

that’s right: to get a civil service job in the Royal Kingdom of Donnyland, it’s no longer enough to merely have a cool nickname like “Big Balls.” you now have to sit down and compose a love letter to Dear Leader.

One of those “assessments,” the memo explains, is four 200-word essay questions each applicant must answer in order to prove that they would be a good fit for the Trump administration.

here’s one of the questions.

“How would you help advance the President’s Executive Orders and policy priorities in this role? Identify one or two relevant Executive Orders or policy initiatives that are significant to you, and explain how you would help implement them if hired.”

I’ve been thinking of applying for a job in the Mad King’s royal court, and I’ve been working on my essay. here’s what I’ve got so far.

“dear shit-for-brains,
what the fuck is wrong with you? this is America — and in America, government employees are loyal to the Constitution, not to some syphilitic megalomaniac.”

friday: dessicated corpse speaks!

now let’s check in on the world’s oldest living human fossil.

Chuck Grassley: “my hunch at the moment is they’re gonna come up with a lot of things President Biden did not sign, maybe thousands of things signed by autopen.”

Fox: “It’s not illegal to use an autopen, is it?”

Grassley: “I can’t answer that question for you. maybe I should be able to, but I can’t.”

here’s a fun fact: at one hundred and sixty four years of age, Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley is twice as old as Joe Biden. he’s been in government long enough to know that there is nothing illegal about a president using an autopen to sign documents.

for fuck’s sake, Mad King Donny uses an autopen. do you think he actually sat there and personally signed over one thousand pardons for Jan 6 insurrectionists? his tiny little fist would have fallen off.

there are two possible explanations for Chucker’s insistence that he “can’t answer that question” — and both of them suck. one is that Grassley genuinely hasn’t a clue how his own government functions, in which case he’s a disgrace and needs to resign yesterday.

the other (more likely) explanation is that Grassley has to pretend to be an idiot in order not to anger Dear Leader by giving the honest answer, in which case he’s a disgrace and needs to resign yesterday.

welcome to America 2025, where one entire political party tiptoes around their Mad King, pretending it’s perfectly normal for a country’s chief executive to accuse his predecessor of being a crime-committing robot — while the rest of us are left to gape incredulously at how fucking idiotic it all is.

stupidest. possible. timeline. ever.

Posted on

Remember When CDs Used To Be AWESOME?

Well apparently they are again! I thought that I’d been whistling past the graveyard for the last two years with my purchasing, but apparently CD sales are actually on the rise again. It seems GenZ is discovering them for the first time and everyone else is rediscovering them.

Despite my current obsession with MiniDiscs, CDs are still “where it’s at” as far as I’m concerned, and—when I really want to get into my music with no distractions—my preferred method of listening. (See: Japanese Jazz) Still, I was surprised when I went down to the library a few weeks ago and discovered that yes, Virginia—they still have those shiny plastic discs available to check out.

Back in the 00’s when I found myself out of work and undergoing cancer treatment, the library and it’s music collection was my refuge. It afforded me a cost-free opportunity to explore music that would never have crossed my path otherwise. And yes, while I did rip everything I liked onto MiniDiscs or CDRs at the time, when funds allowed I did buy copies of what I’d checked out because I wanted the complete experience including owning the original discs themselves and enjoying the liner notes that accompanied them (something the library did remove from their offerings).

And I find myself in the same position now. Not undergoing cancer treatment (knock on wood), but exploring new musical venues via the Phoenix Library. Yeah, I still rip the CDs to iTunes and onto MDs, but I also end up buying the original CDs for the same reasons I did twenty years ago. (And it’s not like the library doesn’t know what you’re doing; when you check these out your receipt says, “You just saved $13.99 by checking this out.”

 

Posted on

Friday Madness

let’s cut right to the chase: this is the part where we throw our heads back in laughter.

anyone with any sense saw this coming a mile away. the first time Mad King Donny and the Space Nazi formed their fucked-up alliance, we knew it was only a matter of time before the whole enterprise went tits-up.

you can’t put two broken-inside man-babies — each of whom believes they hold a divine right to all the money, all the power, and all the attention — in the same room together without creating the kind of atomic chain reaction that culminates in a ginormous smoking crater.

the only question is: what the fuck took so long?

here’s how it all went down. the Space Nazi had been shit-talking Donny’s ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ all week long.

“I’m sorry, but I just can’t stand it anymore. This massive, outrageous, pork-filled Congressional spending bill is a disgusting abomination. Shame on those who voted for it: you know you did wrong. You know it.”

which, by the way, was heartbreaking.

the Space Nazi has his own selfish reason for hating the bill: it would end government subsidies for electric vehicles — the very thing that makes his janky Swastikar business viable.

nonetheless, Elon violated the Prime Directive: there must be no criticism of Dear Leader — and so it was throw-down time!

“he’s upset. remember, he was here for a long time. you saw a man who was very happy when he stood behind the oval desk … Elon and I had a great relationship. I don’t know if we will anymore.”

“the oval desk.” everything that Donny says makes so much more sense if you imagine it coming out of the mouth of a two-year-old.

“hey Donny, what shape is your desk?”
“oval.”
“good boy Donny.”

here’s another thing the Mad King said during that q-and-a with reporters:

“I would have won Pennsylvania regardless of Elon…I’m very disappointed with Elon.”

and also:

“I don’t know what it is. It’s sort of Trump Derangement Syndrome, I guess they call it. But we have it with others too. They leave and they wake up in the morning and the glamour is gone.”

and with that, it was go time! on with the battle of the paper-thin-skinned egos!

I mean, what’s even the point of having more money than god if you can’t throw a childish tantrum on your own Nazi-bar website?

“Without me, Trump would have lost the election, Dems would control the House and the Republicans would be 51-49 in the Senate.”

that was all Donny needed to launch into one of his favorite kinds of lies: one where he boasts that the person who quit their job, didn’t really quit — because it was actually Donny who shitcanned their unwelcome ass.

“Elon was ‘wearing thin,’ I asked him to leave, I took away his EV Mandate that forced everyone to buy Electric Cars that nobody else wanted (that he knew for months I was going to do!), and he just went CRAZY!”

Donny can’t even lie without slathering another lie right on top of it. there was never any “mandate” that “forced everyone to buy electric cars.” what the fuck is Donny even gibbering about?

that not-tweet was quickly followed up with this beaut.

“The easiest way to save money in our Budget, Billions and Billions of Dollars, is to terminate Elon’s Governmental Subsidies and Contracts. I was always surprised that Biden didn’t do it!”

fuck you, Space Nazi, for making me agree with Mad King Donny — because once again, hearbreaking.

this caused the Space Nazi to threaten to take his bat and ball and spaceships and go home.

“In light of the President’s statement about cancellation of my government contracts, @SpaceX will begin decommissioning its Dragon spacecraft immediately”

(spoiler alert: Elon’s already backed down from this threat.)

then it was time for the Space Nazi to go thermonuclear.

“Time to drop the really big bomb: @realDonaldTrump is in the Epstein files. That is the real reason they have not been made public. Have a nice day, DJT!”

that’s your ‘big bomb,’ Elon? tell us something we don’t already know.

nonetheless, how fucking awesome is it that Elon not-tweeted that to his 220 million followers?

next, Elon endorsed an Ian Miles Cheong not-tweet calling for Donny to be impeached and replaced with Couchfuck McGee.

JD spent the next six full hours running around his house, punching his fist in the air, and going ‘fuck yeah, President Vance,’ before finally, at 10:23pm, calming down enough to pretend to support his for-now boss.

“President Trump has done more than any person in my lifetime to earn the trust of the movement he leads. I’m proud to stand beside him.”

oh, look! Rotting Stevie Three-Shirts is calling for Elon to be deported.

Stephen K. Bannon, who has been one of the most vocal critics of Musk for months, said he is advising the president to cancel all of Musk’s contracts and launch several investigations into the world’s richest man.

“They should initiate a formal investigation of his immigration status because I am of the strong belief that he is an illegal alien, and he should be deported from the country immediately,” he said in a phone interview.

COULD EVERY ONE OF YOU ASS-CLOWNS PLEASE STOP BREAKING MY HEART?

natually, Elon reacted in the most Elon way possible.

let me remind you that these are all fully grown adults.

now let’s pour one out for MAGA. let’s keep the cultists in our thoughts and prayers as they navigate this difficult moment.

nah, fuck it. let’s just laugh at their confusion and despair over mommy and daddy fighting.

imagine the frayed, sparking wires inside every MAGA head right now as they watch the two dipshits they worship the most tear each other apart.

for Pizzagate Jack Posobiec, it’s just a thrill to watch the most manliest men ever go at it in the most manliest way possible.

“Some of y’all cant handle 2 high agency males going at it and it really shows This is direct communication (phallocentric) vs indirect communication (gynocentric) I understand you aren’t used to it”

can’t handle it? bro, we’re overdosing on schadenfreude here. we’re about to deplete America’s Strategic Reserve of Microwave Popcorn.

perennial election-loser and Republican found object Joey Mannarino is another honcho who just can’t believe his good luck in getting to watch the Battle of The Biggest Balls Ever.

“Trump and Elon aren’t attacking one another in a way that won’t be fixed. People forget how men with testicles spar. You’re watching two people with balls the size of the moon debate an issue. This is what masculinity look like.”

jesus, Joey — go take a cold shower.

the cognitive dissonance in the MAGAsphere is off the charts. Dinesh D’ipshit wants so much for all this to just be some kind of ten-dimensional kabuki between Donny and the Space Nazi that somehow ends up with … Democrats in prison?

Is this some sort of perverse scheme to force the release of the Epstein files? How great it would be to have a horde of bad guys publicly exposed. Then Trump and Elon break out the champagne. Elon says, ‘Told you I could get Democrats to scream for that list.’ Laughter!”

go home, Dinesh, you’re drunk.

one immediate result of all this childish fighting is that the Space Nazi lost billions of dollars as shares in his companies plummeted.

Tesla’s shares dropped by about 14.2% on Thursday at market close, wiping roughly $152bn off the value of the company as a feud between Elon Musk and Donald Trump erupted into public view. The former political allies traded threats and insults through posts on their respective social media platforms throughout the afternoon as the company’s price fell.

oh man, you just hate to see it.

ok, I lied. I fucking love to see it.

Elon is just the latest in a long line of arrogant, delusional hubris-monkeys who thought they would be the one who could finally control Donny, and make him dance to their tune. we’ve seen this play out over and over. that shit only works for a short time. sooner or later, it all goes sideways. Donny is too erratic and too literally out of his fucking mind to be corralled.

everything Donny touches, dies.

now let’s celebrate the memesters.

and let’s give the final word to Gianmarco Soresi, because this not-tweet wins the entire internet, forever.

Posted on

Too Good Not To Pass On

From All Hat No Cattle:

Elon Musk Drops Nuke on Trump: He’s ‘In the Epstein Files’

Musk and Trump both pulled no punches on Thursday in launching scathing attacks on one another as their very public breakup escalated.

This messy Trump-Musk breakup is truly the gayest thing about pride month. – Josh Sorbe

The World Is A Safer Place Without Trump

Why couldn’t these two f**king losers have started this sh*t back in October. – JoJoFromJerz

The funniest possible outcome is definitely Trump deporting him. – Franklin Leonard

Wow.
 
This is turning into an all out war in MAGA land. 
 
For the record, the GOP Tax Scam has been correctly characterized as a disgusting abomination. – Hakeem Jeffries

Trump Really Thinks Like A Nazi

A meeting between President Donald Trump and German Chancellor Frederich Merz took a bizarre turn…“May I remind you that we are having June 6 tomorrow,” Merz said while speaking about Ukraine’s bloody war against Russia on Thursday. “This is D-Day anniversary, when the Americans once ended a war in Europe.”

The entire world looks at the US now and just laughs.
 
No wonder no one wants to make trade deals with us anymore. – Alex Cole

Musk Wants To Start His Own, Err, A New Political Party
Billionaire Elon Musk seemed to suggest support of a third political party as he escalated a growing fight with President Trump that boiled over Thursday.
“Is it time to create a new political party in America that actually represents the 80% in the middle,” Musk wrote in a post on social platform X to his more than 200 million followers on the site, which he owns.

I assure you had we elected Kamala Harris we would not be sitting here witnessing  the president of the United States fighting with one of the most well-known CEOs of the world, as healthcare for millions is on the line. – Victor Shi

Rock The Voter News

The big beautiful bill led to the big beautiful breakup. – Aaron Parnas

At least this isn’t embarrassing for America. – Douglas A. Boneparth

If Trump and Musk break up, who gets custody of Scott Jennings? – JoJoFromJerz
It’s just awful when you buy a guy a perfectly good election, and he won’t even do whatever you want. – Justin Wolfers