I Hate This Timeline
365 Days Of UNF: April 29th
Freshly Returned From Service
If you recall, I won this orange nugget from my first-ever foray into Japanese auctions a little more than a month ago. It had some battery issues when it arrived, but I’d seen enough YouTube videos on how to clean the battery contacts on these things I thought I’d try doing it myself. I mean, how difficult could it be?
It turns out cleaning the contacts on the battery door are easy as fuck. It’s the internal ones that are a little more challenging. I took the rear cover off, and with a combination of cotton swabs, vinegar, isopropyl alcohol and most importantly nerves of steel, I cleaned off most—but not all (because it would require a degree of disassembly that I most definitely was not comfortable with)—of the extensive green corrosion that had been caked on the internal contacts.
After reassembling, I slipped in a new gumstick battery and was genuinely amazed that it actually worked and that I hadn’t destroyed anything in the process. As weeks passed however, I knew I wasn’t getting as much running time between charges that I should have been getting, and when charged, the battery was never charged fully.
While all this was going on, my baby blue 910 started screeching when recording. I did the basic clean and lube (again, something I learned from YouTube), but it didn’t alleviate the problem. Once again, it looked like it was something that was going to require a level of disassembly that I wasn’t comfortable with. So I took a chance and reached out to one of the YouTube guys who effortlessly works on these antiques to see if he took on outside work and what it would cost.
To my surprise, he wrote back within minutes of me sending the email, quoted a very reasonable price, and I sent the unit off to him the next day. A week later he returned it, cleaned, lubed, and now the mechanism made only a normal amount of noise. No more screeching! I wrote back to him and asked how much he’d charge for battery contact cleaning in addition to the standard clean and lube. Again, he quoted much less than I was expecting and the orange 910 was sent off.
I got the nugget back today. The mechanism is silent and the battery has now lasted me nearly 8 hours of continuous use and shows no sign of giving out any time soon; only the end-most battery indicator has gone out, indicating it’s still comfortably at 80% capacity. Thanks, Shawn!
The blue 707 is still my favorite, but the 910s (either this orange one or the baby blue) are the ones I take with me when I’m out and about.
Guts
I’ve loved this stuff since I was a teenager and first got into HiFi. Those shiny manufacturer brochures touting the advantages of their design over the competition, resplendent with cutaway diagrams and photos of the inside of the gear they were selling were an endless source of fascination. When my buddy who got me into this initially would return from the Chicago CES each year, laden with shopping bags full of brochures, we’d sit in his room and pour over all of it for hours, daydreaming that one day we’d own some of it.
I was kind of surprised that a cursory internet search for photos of the inside of my new Tascam deck were nowhere to be found. Fuck it, I thought. I’ll make my own. So I disconnected everything, popped the cover, and snapped a photo worthy of a product brochure.
Even though I already knew (from having the Service Manual) that there was no audiophile-grade CD mechanism in this deck, but instead just a standard Teac (parent company of Tascam) IDE CDROM drive like you’d find in a desktop or tower computer of the era, it was still kind of surprising to actually see it. And the 2015 date stamp on the drive was another surprise, confirming that I’d gotten one of the units from the last year they were in production.
BRING IT!
Vomiting It All Up…And It’s Only Monday ????
Trump: ‘I run the country and the world’
President Trump shared his thoughts on how his two terms as president have differed, saying in a new interview with The Atlantic that this time around he’s leading “the country and the world.”
“The first time, I had two things to do — run the country and survive; I had all these crooked guys,” Trump said in the interview published Monday. “And the second time, I run the country and the world.”
Quote Of The Day
I keep thinking of Donald Trump seething with jealousy over the rapturous reception Zelensky received at Pope Francis’s funeral, the one Donald did not get, and I smile.” ~ Mrs. Betty Bowers
Impeach The Daughterfucker!
“It’s up to Congress to do their job, defend the Constitution, and impeach and remove Donald Trump from office for his grave abuses of power,” said Free Speech for People’s campaign director.
New polling shows a majority of U.S. voters support Congress impeaching U.S. President Donald Trump a third time, which would break a record the Republican set during his first term, when he was twice impeached by the House of Representatives but never convicted by the Senate.
Specifically, a polling memo published Friday by ASO Communications and Research Collaborative shows that just a few months into Trump’s return to the White House, 52% of likely voters across the ideological spectrum somewhat or strongly support impeaching him—including 84% of Democrats, 55% of Independents, and even 20% of his fellow Republicans.
The survey was conducted from April 18-21 by Data for Progress. The polling firm also asked the 1,171 respondents, “Thinking of an impeachment effort led by Democrats in Congress, which of the following comes closest to your view, even if none are exactly right?”
The largest share of respondents (46%)—including 80% of Democrats, 52% of Independents, and 9% of Republicans—said that “Democrats in Congress should attempt to impeach Trump because they have a duty to remove a president that has violated Americans’ constitutional rights and the law.”
And The More I Looked Around
“Fine Art Prints”
Up To No Good
Not Entirely Untrue
Forever The Victim
If That Makes Me A Bad Person, So Be It
shh! don’t wake the elderly golfer. funerals make him sleepy.
From Jeff Tiedrich:
way to represent America, dumb-ass
think back to those super-fun days of last summer, when Donny Not-Yet-A-Convict was on trial for having cooked the books to make hush-money payments to a porn star look like legit campaign expenses.
remember what would happen every morning? Donny would take his seat at the defendant’s table. he’d glower at the press, then immediately close his weary eyes and begin snoring, as he filled the courtroom with the pungent aroma of narcoleptic farts.
well, guess what: Sleepy Don is back, baby.
there’s a book I’d like to recommend to Donny. it’s called The Art Of How About Not Falling Asleep At A Funeral, You Stupid Fuck — because Sundowning Grandpa Fascistpants gone and done it again. right in the middle of Pope Francis’ funeral, the deteriorating dumbshit once again closed his peepers and started sawing logs.
who does that?
spoiler alert: nobody. no one else among the assembled mourners felt the need to drift off to beddy-bye land and let rip some aromatic ass-music.
not even Joe Biden — the guy everyone said was too old to president.
let’s compare and contrast the dude America kicked to the curb with the one they elected to replace him.
oh good fucking lord. try not to drool on yourself, grandpa.
hey Donny — remember how you never shut the fuck up about Sleepy Joe this and Sleepy Joe that? well, who’s the sleepy one now, you barely-conscious old coot?
hey, did you notice anything else about Donny?
that’s right, in a sea of somber black and dark grey — the dress code dictated by the Vatican, by the way — Donny’s decked himself out in one of his hideous blue suits.
oh look, The New York Times is still failing us.
President Trump, it seems, is fully committed to going his own way when it comes to international relations — even during the funeral of a pope.
nice framing, New York Times. they want their readers to know that Donny isn’t dressed like a sore thumb because he’s a belligerent asshole who does whatever the fuck he wants. oh, no, Donny’s a rugged individualist. a rebel outlaw. President Hombre doesn’t play by your rules, squares. he’s “fully committed to going his own way.”
did Donny falling asleep get a mention in the press? I haven’t seen one yet.
imagine if President Biden had fallen asleep while representing America at a state funeral. the worthless scribblers of the corporate-controlled media would have had a fucking field day, and turned it into a weeks-long scandal.
but Donny, open-mouthed and snoring up a storm? crickets.
hey, let’s watch Emmanuel Macron take Donny on a one-way trip to snub city.
check out the warm handshake Macron gives Zelenskyy. it’s not a perfunctory ‘good to see you again’ shake. it’s a hearty, extended ‘we’re brothers’ handshake.
now here comes Donny for his handshake — and he doesn’t get one. Macron ignores Donny’s outstretched hand — because fuck you, that’s why.
let’s gif that shit for posterity.
sorry, Donny. no one respects the rodeo clown.
Macron was surely tired of that asinine Battle of the Alpha Bros handshake that Donny tries to pull on him every time they meet. you know the one: if you go to shake Donny’s hand, he’s going grab yours and roughly jerk it towards him, in an attempt to get you to stumble and fall. it’s a childish I’m the dominant dog thing.
Donny got away with that shit during his first term, but now everyone knows it’s coming, and prepares for it — and no one more so than Macron. now, every time they meet, Macron grabs Donny’s hand and does not let go.
no one’s putting up with that shit any more, Donny. everyone’s hip to your infantile dumb-assery. it’s a wise old saying: ‘fool me once, shame on me, and also, you’re a tiresome asshole. stop playing silly dominance games, you broken-inside child.’
good going, Donny — you’ve turned yourself — and America — into an international pariah.
(yes, I know — Donny and Manny eventually shook hands later that day, during a ceremony called the Sign of Peace, where everybody shakes the hand of the person next to them. Macron couldn’t opt out of that one.)
let’s talk a walk down memory lane, and revisit a few of Sleepy Don’s greatest hits.
there were the aforementioned impromptu courtroom slumber parties.
fun fact: uncontrollable day-sleeping is a common sign of dementia.
Dr. John Gartner, who spent 28 years as a professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University Medical School, has an explanation:
“To uncontrollably fall asleep during the day is something that’s very common among patients with dementia.”
A defendant falling asleep in court is “literally so uncommon, it’s basically unheard of.” Gartner said he’s spoken with several lawyer friends who each told him that they’ve never seen a defendant falling asleep in court during their entire careers.
here’s Donny last October — three weeks before the election — at a campaign roundtable event in Michigan.
Donny’s handlers had a ready-made excuse for this one: he’s “exhausted.”


here’s what I wrote about it at the time:
that’s so sad. but also it’s a stunning admission from Team Trump, less than three weeks from the election. sorry, our guy is pooped. can you imagine the media feeding frenzy that would result if Kamala bailed on an interview, and then her people explained it was because she had to go nappy-nap?
hey, can someone get grandpa here a bowl of applesauce and then take him to bed? the poor old guy is plumb tuckered out. he just can’t hack the rigors of campaigning any more. I mean, look at this dilapidated old dipshit.
my god. why is Team Trump torturing this tired old duffer? at this point, putting Donny on a stage night after night is elder abuse. what he needs is a mug of Ovaltine and his favorite blankie, not a microphone and a podium.
Donny wasn’t up to the rigors of campaigning last October, and he’s not up to the rigors of being president right now.
I don’t even know where this one is from, but my god — Donny’s Slovenian trophy wife sure hates his fucking guts.
finally, can I just confess how completely jealous I am of Molly Ploofkins, because she thought of this quip, and I didn’t?








































































































































