Gerry Rafferty, 1947-2011

The Day the Seventies Died: Stuck in the Middle with You? Baker Street? Oh, now you remember.

Gerry Rafferty dies aged 63 [Guardian UK]
41 Comments

Could people barely younger than my dad please stop dying? Thanks.

@mellbell: I approve of Mellbell’s post. I’m 60.

@mellbell: NojoPop is 78, NojoMom will be 77 in a few weeks. I’m gonna be sucking down your Medicare taxes a long time.

@nojo: Well, in 10 years or so, you may be fighting with your siblings (if any) about why they aren’t doing any of the goddam work of caring for your parents. I’m just sayin.

@nojo: Dad’s folks are 96 and 93, still living in the house he grew up in. With any luck he’ll be around another 40 years.

@Dodgerblue: NojoBro lives north of Seattle, within a day’s drive of Eugene. He also has space when the folks finally decide to leave the…

@mellbell: …ancestral home. Presuming 1964 counts as “ancestral”. Can’t claim RML lineage for these things.

I liked “Stuck In the Middle With You” even though for me it was the soundtrack of a de-earing.

Hard life, shorter lifespan.

@nojo: Good for him. My feckless younger brother did not really step up to the plate when our Mom was in decline.

@Dodgerblue: I think I’m the Feckless Older Brother. Although to be fair, I was catsitting up to the moment I left town twelve years ago.

Which reminds me: My porn name is Spooky University.

Now I’m ashamed. I have never heard of this person or his works. I have heard of Glasgow. And his youth there sounds not unlike my mother’s own salad days.

@nojo: My porn name is Spooky University. Are you sure you’re watching the right porn?

@Dodgerblue: This has been a holiday season/stateside vacay full of that, less the fighting. I depart with both parents out of immediate medical danger and mostly independent, but my own appreciation for mortality in sharp relief.

Oh, and modern ” healthcare” is an oxymoron. Moms was in a rehab place where the average licensed medical professional could barely read Garfield strips and which was not even as clean as a public clinic in NotTibet. All because her Medicare plan wouldn’t pay for anything better.

@Benedick: The question is whether I’m participating in the right porn.

@Nabisco: That’s not rehab, that’s a football factory.

@nojo: I didn’t know there was a market for hamster porn.

The Stumbleupon widget is making my computer sad.

@JNOV: [Insert obligatory Richard Gere joke, emphasis on “insert”]

Have we heard from Catt since he was stuck in the Target parking garage?

@JNOV: How so? And which system/browser?

@nojo: Something is making my iPhone sad where I can’t log in. Don’t know if that goes back to the latest “improvements” or not.

@JNOV: He said it was some good hash. Guess so.

@nojo: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.2.13) Gecko/20101203 Firefox/3.6.13

Page won’t reload because it’s waiting for Stumbleupon. Sometimes I get the SPOD.

@SanFranLefty: It’s some frigging INSANE hash. $60/g

ADD: Plush he sprinkled it on kush. Jesus. He does it right.

@JNOV: Well, you got me there. I just logged in with the same version of Mac Firefox (but on Snow Leopard), and I’m not seeing anything wrong. At which point, I start blaming plug-ins.

@SFL: Got me there, too — I’m finger-stabbing this on my iPhone. Are you on 4.whatever?

@nojo: Thanks for trying. :-)

It doesn’t always happen. It’s just that those times the page isn’t loading, it’s usually waiting on the Stumbleupon site. Once upon I time I had the plugin, so part of it might still be lurking causing trouble. I’ll check.

@JNOV: Well, just to get really geeky…

I’ve been using things pretty thoroughly (laptop, iPad, Domination HQ, Remote Offices) since Saturday’s Upgrade Madness, and I haven’t encountered any problems. But I lead a charmed life.

Specifically, I haven’t seen any StumbleUpon delays on cable or coffeehouse DSL. But since you’ve had Net Hassles of one sort or another recently, it’s quite possible that the bits from Philly to StumbleUpon and back are getting sidetracked.

If that proves to be a broader problem, I’ll have to kill the button/counter and rig up something visually similar that doesn’t use live data. Right now mine’s the only click that registers anyway…

Time to blast off. See youse guys later.

@nojo: I’m on 4.2.1. Come to think of it, I’ve had the problem since I updated the OS for the iPhone.

@SFL: Same here, so let’s log out, turn off wifi, and log in over 3G…

Everything still works fine. But I do live a charmed life.

@nojo: Yeah. I messed around with SU for a week maybe? Is it growing, or is it kinda going the way of Digg? Maybe a Reddit button or group?

@JNOV: You don’t hear about SU much on the geek blogs — Digg, Reddit and whatever Yahoo’s dumping get all the attention.

However, a year ago we had a burst of traffic from an SU link, so I’ve been including SU since then. And Saturday I set up an SU account to promote links directly, and since then pageviews have been more robust.

Of course, I’ve also been Liking every post since Saturday, and the pageview plug-in might be playing better with the WordPress upgrade than it did after a previous upgrade, so there are too many variables to credit one source. But for now, I’m pouring SU part of the champagne.

@nojo: Haha! I added a link to SU about a year ago in Feb. ’09 to some Batman thing.

ADD: I’m following you now.

@JNOV: Right on cue, a geek reference to SU:

“In terms of new visitors to TechCrunch, StumbleUpon sends by far the most (percentage-wise), followed by Google News.”

That validates my hunch (too soon to make definitive calls in our own stats) — soon as I started promoting posts on SU Saturday, our pageviews bounced. And since I’m hours late promoting the morning doorstop, I can watch the SU Bump in real time — I really doubt my own Likes have made much of a difference.

But SU visitors are also fleeting visitors, since SU is basically speed-dating for websites. Maybe, over time, a few will stick around.

@nojo: Shorter version for civilians: StumbleUpon doesn’t provide the Glengarry leads. But it’s all the same to Google ads.

@Dodgerblue: Translation: More peeps are sniffin’ the Stinque.

Baker Street, released in 1978, was still netting him £80,000 a year more than 30 years later.

Holy shit, I went into the wrong business. Well anyway, godbless him; that song was worth the money.

Mr Cyn loves StumbleUpon. It’s like a substitute-remote (since we have no teevee) for constantly changing channels. I shudder to think what it’s doing to his already ADD attention span.

i’m clicking on nothing. i took a FB quiz (and i totally blame cynica for this) revealing to me what my last words would be:
“hmm, let’s see what happens when i push this button”

@Nabisco: Glad your parents are out of danger.

That no one here in the US seems to be aware of what it means, or costs, to require long-term care, or even nursing care, is beyond me. With all the palaver about what the HCRA is and isn’t no one talks about being stuck in a nursing home without the $180,000 a year it can easily cost. This is the greatest transfer of wealth out of the hands of middle-class and working people into the hands of corporations. And it’s a transfer that has been going on for years. First you have to exhaust all your savings, sell your house, and then Medicaide kicks in when you’re destitute. Given my own circumstances being left alone without the money to pay for care should I need it is my nightmare but I simply cannot afford long-term insurance for myself. It’s fantastically expensive and when you need it there’s no guarantee the company you paid into will still exist or pay your claim.

We all pretend it isn’t happening because we live in the other America, the one in the TV ads, the one in the movies. I can’t think of another western nation that forces children to nurse their parents or go bankrupt.

@Benedick:
the best option, that i’ve seen come to pass in my own family, is stay home. the cost of in home nursing care is expensive, but much less than a decent long term care facility. have you considered or researched this?

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