Time for everyone’s semi-favorite semi-regular feature: TotD clears his desktop! I’ve had these tabs open for what seems like eons and none of them are of particular interest to me, but I’ll pass them along just so I can hit the Close buttons with a clean conscience. Here we go:

1.

Garcia made a record with a guy named Harold Whales; the album had an inscrutable name and the two of them held up a copy of Scientific American on the inside cover. It looked like this:

First of all: this looks like the first thing you’d see when you came to, chained to the bed, in an abandoned cabin somewhere. Second: a diligent writer dug into the archives of SA and found out that the reason Garcia was most likely promoting the magazine was an article in it about “marihuana.”

There you go.

2.

Phil is moving. Well, not really: he’s selling his house. Kind of: he’s selling a house. It’s in Ross, California, which is a tiny town in between Larkspur and San Anselmo, which are also pretty small. It’s near San Francisco, basically, but nothing at all like San Francisco: no bums, no techies, etc.

Sure, that drunken legacy pledge Irsay owns Tiger, but for a cool ten million, you can own Phil’s old toilet. (They’ll throw in the rest of the house for free.) Houses are usually cleaned pretty well between owners, but there’s gotta be a little DNA lying around. Maybe you could clone Phil?

A NOTE: Please do not clone Phil. Leaving aside the surely-nefarious reasons for why you’re doing so, Clone Phil will almost certainly escape and find Real Phil and try to take his place; this will lead to thrilling setpiece in which Jill is trying to shoot Clone Phil, but she doesn’t know which one is the clone and which one is Phil.

“Shoot him, Jill! I’m me! Phil! Phil Lesh of the Grateful Dead!”

“No, I’m Phil! Phil Lesh! Of the Grateful Dead!”

And Jill’s pointing the gun back and forth.

“SHOOT HIM!”

“NO! HE’S THE CLONE!”

The music is blaring:

BAAAAAAAMBAM BAM! BAAAAAAAAAMBAM BAM!

And then Bobby wanders in; he is eating ice cream straight from the carton.

“Why don’t you, um, just have ’em take their shirts off? Clone doesn’t have any scars.”

…

“That’s an excellent idea, Bob.”

“I try.”

And so on. This is what the house looks like:

It is called the Bridge House, because when a property costs a certain amount, you’re allowed to name it. If you live in a three-bedroom split-level in Roseland, NJ, and you call your house Barnswallow Manor, then people are going to laugh at you. There are more details here, but be warned: this is one of those articles in which the author jams Dead lyrics into sentences they clearly don’t belong in.

ANOTHER NOTE: Obviously, Phil and Phamily aren’t moving into a tiny house they’ll be parking in the back of TXR; they’ve got a new place. I think I saw an article about it, but I also think that people and sites who give out anyone’s current address are complete assholes. You know I enjoy playing Man Of The People as much as the next comrade, but here I have sympathy for the rich: just because a house cost a few million (or way, way more) doesn’t mean it needs to be in the fucking paper.  The only people who need to know where anyone–not just the rich–live are the people who need to know.

So don’t go posting that bullshit in the Comment Section.

3.

I found this on Reddit and it’s the most tragilarious object, story, and backstory I’ve ever read. A guy mononymically (and perhaps pseudonymically) named Andy customized Zippo lighters for the discerning drug addict: there was a little bowl in the top with a telescoping stem, so the whole thing turned into a marihuana pipe, plus more bullshit. It looked like this:

Which is where it gets sad: this is a terrible object. First of all: if you need this, then what you really need is to stop doing drugs and find yourself a nice church girl. The doohickey on the right that looks like an Allen wrench is a coke spoon; it fits in a little slot on the bottom.

Andy has also managed to misspell “Greatful Dead.”

Garcia got it in ’84–whether given to him personally or just sent to him–and sent it back ten years later to fix the typo, but died before the lighter could be returned; he was not thinking of it on his death-bed, I’m sure. He chucked this thing in a drawer, if he saw it at all. I can’t imagine Garcia would have thought this to be at all cool: it looks like something a fat kid who hates his step-father made in shop class, and then burned down the school with.

I am also fairly sure that Garcia would not have carried around a lighter festooned with charms bearing some dude’s name, or this piece of incriminating evidence:

“That’s not my lighter, officer.”

“Then why’s your name on it, Mr. Garcia?”

“Fuckin’ Andy.”

Zippos are quality products, durable and American and classic like Stratocasters or Colt M1911s: they got the design right decades, and trying to make them better almost always makes them worse. You can paint them, or inscribe them, or chrome-plate them, but you’re not going to improve on the standard model. Plus, Zippos make the best noise and fit into the right-hand change pocket of Levi’s 501 jeans so perfectly.

Don’t do this to them.

Anyway, I promised not just comedy, but also tragedy; I would never lie to you. (I totally would, and do all the time.) This is from the page I linked to about Andy, and it is the saddest sentence I have ever read:

Apparently Andy lived in Los Angeles, Laurel Canyon in Hollywood / West Hollywood, Venice Beach, Ventura, and then committed suicide in Bakersfield some time in the 1990s.

Do you see how the vague (“apparently”, “some time in the 1990s”) combines with the specific (and there might be no more specific a phrase in the language that “committed suicide in Bakersfield”) to produce a maddening gestalt? Could there be a better way of reminding us all of the world’s attention span, and how quickly we’ll be forgotten? Is committing suicide in Bakersfield redundant?

So many questions, all of them so dumb.

4.

Rich ladies need something to do with their days. Mostly, they choose to fill the time by being rich at other rich ladies: rich ladies have figured out how to weaponize their rich ladyness. Some of them try to throw the best parties, and others try to win Instagram, and others try to get the biggest stars in the world to sit ringside at their fashion shows.

(In keeping with the evening’s cessation of class warfare: rich ladies are just people with too much money. Give a broke dude some money; he’ll be a rich lady in a week, writing cookbooks. Humans gonna human.)

My point being that a near-critical mass of rich ladies assembled for designer Stacey Bendet’s  Alice + Olivia “see now/buy now” show featuring clothes from their new Grateful Dead-licensed line. It looks like this:

If you’d like to purchase a piece, you could go to Bergdorf Goodman and pick up this sweater for $400, but it’s sold out. so you can’t:

I was unsure as to why a shirt would cost that much until I read the copy on Bergdorf’s website, and then it made sense.

Alice + Olivia

Grateful Dead® Bear Cropped Intarsia Pullover Sweater, White/Multicolor

BGS16_TCJVG

• Alice + Olivia cotton-blend sweater features Grateful Dead® dancing bear intarsia with sequin embellishing.
• Round neckline.
• Long sleeves.
• Relaxed fit.
• Hem cropped at waist.
• Pullover style.
• Cotton/nylon.
• Imported of Italian material.

Intarsia is a way to knit colors together, so the bear isn’t an iron-on; also, the nylon is “imported of Italian material,” which is not English. Does the writer mean “material imported from Italy” but wanted to say it all fancy?

(Also: is Italy really where they grow the nylon? Is it still a family business? Old guy in a hat with a mule patrolling his ancestral nylon fields? Plus: is nylon a seasonal crop? Is there a harvest, or does nylon get picked? Should I be worried about GMO nylon?)

Anyway, they had a fashion show and some very important rich ladies showed up. They looked like this:

Kim was unavailable. (L to R: two socialites with ridiculous names, Pretty Lady Doctor from Dr. House, M.D., my bae, Not-Kim, blonde woman, Anna Paquin with a lamp growing out of her face.)

As for the clothes: I’m both biased and unqualified to opine. As you know, I hate those fucking bears; plus, I agree with Garcia’s view of fashion: ten black t-shirts, two pairs of jeans, drawerful of underwear and socks; call it a day.

Designer of the line Stacey Bendet’s husband is Eric Eisner, who is producing the upcoming (and upcoming and upcoming) documentary about the Dead along with Martin Scorsese; he is a big Deadhead and Stacey became infected by the Dead’s music, as opposed to the old days, when women used to be infected by the Dead’s penises. (Penii? Penes?Purim?)

I mention her husband for only one reason, and that is to challenge this canard of him being a Deadhead. How can one be a Deadhead without reading my site? And–if one were a big Hollywood mover and shaker–dropping a production deal into the Donate Button? Are you going to sit there and tell me that someone from Hollywood doesn’t recognize talent?

But there is no production deal in the Donate Button, not even a holding deal. Ipso fact: Eric Eisner is not a Deadhead.

And those are the things that I had nothing to say about.