Thing of the Week: LJ's Boyfriend's Birthday, Meeting Kristin Hersh, Seeing Mary Timony

LJ'S THING OF THE WEEK: My Boyfriend's Birthday (& Snoopy)

My boyfriend's birthday was on Tuesday. He spent his birthday and the two days preceding it at his parents' house up north. At first I didn't mind terribly that he was away; I did exercise videos involving burpees in my kitchen with no fear of another human being seeing me do a burpee, and watched the terrible romantic comedy Celeste and Jesse Forever on Netflix. It was extremely bad, but I loved it anyway. I love every romantic comedy, even the one where Reese Witherspoon returns home to the deep South and falls for a straight-shootin' sparkly-toothed blond man, reflects upon her fast-paced big city life and crappy relationship with dead-inside Patrick Dempsey whose mother, Candice Bergen, is the mayor and wonders "What is it all for?"- I literally think that movie is better than, like, every other movie that isn't a rom-com.  

On Monday morning Celeste and Jesse Forever ended and I went to work and came home from work and had nobody to talk about work to. I felt sad and alone and ate a sad little apple at my kitchen table and played Candy Crush on my phone until my self-discipline caved in upon itself and I spent money on Candy Crush. I bought myself a new set of lives and one of those chocolate truffles covered in multicolor sprinkles that eliminates an entire style of candy from the level. Soon after, I deleted Candy Crush, just as I always swore I would the moment I ever spent money on Candy Crush. It's crazy how short of an amount of time it takes for "absence makes the heart grow fonder" to kick in. 

After work on Tuesday I was so excited to see Mark on his birthday that I drank a margarita while closing up my restaurant. Well probably I just drank a margarita because margaritas are delicious and I love them, but used Mark's birthday as an obviously solid excuse to justify my disobedience. Then I went and met Mark at a bar by my house that has a picture of Bob Dylan's face graffitied on the building's facade. It's not really the best-case-scenario graffiti of Bob Dylan's face that I could imagine existing, but I try not to judge it too hard because really a shitty picture of Bob Dylan's face being painted onto the building you are drinking in is still preferable to no Bob Dylan's face being painted on the building at all. Which happens quite often.

At the bar I drank two bottles of Heineken. Mark and I were being very affectionate with each other, which is something I value a lot about our relationship. Mark and I make out in public, and we don't care that we make out in public. What's the big deal? I really like kissing my boyfriend- he's hot, and I'm in love with him. It's not 1875 or whatever. The Industrial Revolution is not going on outside our front doors. Why is this crazy world of ours so obsessed with their own obsession with loving gross surfbort Drunk in Love but simultaneously so prudishly offended by my boyfriend delicately kissing my forehead on public transit? That sentence is dedicated to the frumpy teen who sassed my boyfriend for kissing my forehead on public transit last November and probably loves Drunk In Love. (And while I'm here, please let it be known that I personally think Drunk in Love is silly and uncool. All my friends are so in love with Beyonce and it weirds me out; I always thought a really nice thing about being smart is how it prevents you from buying into mainstream culture. She's not actually our Queen.) 

I gave Mark this card and then nicknamed him "Kangaroo Man" for the rest of the night, because I think those little illustrations are probably kangaroos. We ran a whole lot of the way home from the bar because I'm really into fitness these days and it was cold. While he was at his parents', he found out from his mom what time he was born at (1 in the afternoon), so when we got back to my apartment we consulted my astrology book and discovered that his Rising Sign is Leo! Same as mine! Additionally, Mark is a Pisces with his his moon in Pisces. After reading about Leo Rising and learning that we're both very ostentatious and have nicely-shaped heads, I read him a bunch of information about being a Pisces. It all wrung very true, and we had a nice little mini-celebration of his Pisces-ness, and of Pisces-ness in general, which is definitely something worth celebrating. Pisceans are intricate like a crazy tapestry or sand underneath a microscope. They are complicated and don't care if you know they are complicated. My boyfriend is what people mean when they say "still waters run deep," the most selfless and giving human I've ever known, and really weirdly smart in an unexpected and unpredictable way. At the end of the night we were lying in bed being cutesy and in love and Mark asked me, "Since animals are nice things, do they get to have astrology too?" Awwwwwwwwwww! God I fucking love that guy. 

PS: I found that chill & gorgeous Snoopy-Pisces illo this morning after watching the preview for the new CGI Peanuts movie coming out next year, which is just like okay cool but Seriously?!? Can we maybe not make every single thing that ever happened into CGI? Like, could we maybe just keep Peanuts sacred? Peanuts?!?!? Just Peanuts, guys. That's all I ask. But anyway, after watching it I zoned into this weird head-world where I actually teared up a little bit because I am so endlessly charmed by how cute Snoopy is. And then I was like "What's Snoopy's Zodiac sign? Is Snoopy a Gemini?" I Googled it, but no dice. As it turns out, Snoopy is no Zodiac sign, at the same time as being all the Zodiac signs.

Sometimes he's a Capricorn, like Liz Barker: 

Sometimes he's a Scorpio, like Jen May:

 And sometimes he's a Cancer, like me!

LIZ'S THING OF THE WEEK: Meeting Kristin Hersh

This is actually Thing of Two Weeks Ago. On March 4th I flew home to Massachusetts so that I could see Throwing Muses (with special guest Tanya Donelly!) at the Sinclair in Cambridge. Tanya Donelly's always been one of my favorite songmakers, but my Throwing Muses obsession is mostly new. It didn't happen until last year; it came on fast and furious, and was intensified by my interviewing Kristin for Popdose. I read Rat Girl twice and the Purgatory/Paradise book twice and they each changed my life, a total of four times. For 2014 my new year's resolution was to stop jerking off, metaphysically speaking, and Kristin Hersh is absolutely my hero in that. In Kristin's hands I always know exactly what to take seriously and what not to take seriously, because hers is a world that's both magic and no-bullshit.

So yeah, the show. Tanya opened and played "Honeychain" and "Acrobat" and some Belly stuff ("Slow Dog"! "LOW RED MOON"), and toward the end of her set Bill from Buffalo Tom came out and sang a couple songs with her and it was gorgeous. And then the Muses happened and I don't want to write about it; all I can say is that resting my chin on an amp and drinking a borrowed beer and watching Kristin Hersh scream and play guitar is probably my natural habitat. Afterward I went up to Kristin to say hi - I was all, "Hiiiiiiiii...I interviewed you a while ago? It was Halloween? I live in L.A.? We talked about L.A.?", and then finally she remembered me and told me I wrote cool stuff, and then I died and asked her to sign my t-shirt like a 14-year-old. It was the best. I don't know how you get up in front of thousands of people and sing songs like you're ripping your own skin off, and then get off stage and just be totally nice and chill and lovely, but there you go. Kristin Hersh, guys.

Besides meeting Kristin, my fave part of the night was when Tanya came out during the Muses' set and they played a bunch of songs, including "Red Shoes" and also "Green." "Green" was entirely worth my flying across the country, all on its own: I would've flown around the world 10 zillion times just to have that. I took that picture up there of Kristin and Tanya playing "Green" and Tanya really singing the hell out of it, but the whole thing was definitely a dream.

JEN'S THING OF THE WEEK: Seeing Mary

Last night I saw Mary Timony's new band Ex Hex. They were so fun. Mary shreds. She's the best. And, you guys, they covered a Slant 6 song!!

Watching Mary Timony Eat All Different Foods in the Video for "Hot and Cold" by Ex Hex is Total Heaven

BY LIZ

Mary Timony's new-ish band Ex Hex just premiered the video for their song "Hot and Cold" and it's everything I could ever want from a rock video: Mary Timony, cake, cookies, pizza, Ian Svenonius being handsome/boring, a jello mold that looks like a sea monster, a lion, pineapples, cherries, flowers. The basic premise is Mary's out on a date with Ian and it's not going so swell (he's the "cold" in this equation), but then the other Ex Hex babes show up and save Mary and suddenly it's a party. Here's a bunch of gorgeous screenshots; for additional heavy thoughts on loving Mary Timony you should read my book I Wanna Be Your Man, from our new little series of Beatles zines. There's cake in that too.

Here's Mary at the start of the video, with her rad orange nails and martini. What do you think's in the goblets? I want it to be Coke. I want Timony to be a weird little fourth-grader drinking soda from her parents' wine glasses and pretending to be grown-up and sophisticated. "Fourth-grade Mary Timony" is something to think about.

And here's Ian and his glorious hair and scowl. Right now I've got a crush on a guy with serious Ian Svenonius vibes; it's working out relatively well.

Aforementioned sea-monster-ish jello mold. I don't understand what it's made of, but I appreciate that there appear to be green pimento-stuffed olives suspended inside. That's so gross/inspired.

And the beautiful cakes. Candy on top of cake is one of the best looks.

What is she eating? Where'd she get that flower crown? I mostly don't believe in flower crowns, but I fully support Mary in her flower-crown-wearing here.

Mary's shy dancing. It's funny her posture's so bad cuz MARY TIMONY IS NO SLOUCH

I Want To Live In A Wine Cellar

BY LJ

I am moving to England in the summertime. In England, I am going to do a lot of things, and a very important one of them is: become a “chill sommelier.” A chill sommelier is basically the same as a regular sommelier, only the chill sommelier is not an asshole. For the past ten years, since the very day I first saw Sideways, my #1 goal in life has been to make sure I am the exact human opposite of Paul Giamatti's character, AKA the worst grossest human being ever to have fake-existed, whose gross name, it turns out, is "Miles." Of course his name is Miles. 

Unfortunately, now that I am becoming a sommelier, it is no longer possible for me to be "Miles"'s exact human opposite. We'll just have too much in common, wine-wise, though I don't think Miles was even a sommelier. I think he was just a (barf) "wine enthusiast." But I can still strive to be the least Miles-y sommelier there ever was. The least douchey dickbag sommelier with a chill fun-loving spirit this world has ever known. I'm even going to make business cards, or get somebody else to make me some, that literally say “LAURA JANE FAULDS: Chill Sommelier.” And then people who want a chill sommelier will know to hire me and not some uppity uptight old-timey sommelier who looks like the candelabra from Beauty and the Beast. I mean can you even begin to imagine how many sommeliers there are out there who aren’t chill? Like, all the seventy year old man sommeliers in Paris who wear waistcoats? Or any French city? That’s where I come in. The sommeliers need me, to lighten up their rep. 

The other day, I bought my boyfriend some really shitty wine. Obviously I wasn’t intending for it to be shitty. It just was. I’m not a sommelier yet. We were watching the penultimate episode of Breaking Bad (ew- saying "penultimate" was so not chill sommelier of me. I bet douchey Milesy sommeliers say "penultimate" soooo much. Sorry about that) when Mark asked me, "Should I make myself a cup of coffee, or should I have another glass of wine?" I had another sip of the shitty wine to confirm whether or not it was worth drinking another glass of, and I said his shitty wine tasted like the shitty dregs of coffee you would find at the bottom of one of those clear brown-handled coffee pots, which has been sitting around for hours at a truckstop diner in the middle of, like, Kentucky, and there’s still smoking allowed in the diner because it’s, like, 1987, so it also tasted a bit like cigarette smoke. I guess my point was maybe that he shouldn't have coffee. Since I detected notes of coffee in the wine. There’s some romance in that!” I explained, earnestly. 

The moral of the story is that Mark had a cup of coffee and another glass of wine, and that the process leading up to his decision was a great example of my future chill sommelier style in its nascence. Imagine if you went to a restaurant and the descriptions of all the wines on the wine list were winding and verbose and heavy on the metaphor? And written in my insane narrative voice? You'd have to be either boring or an idiot to not be all the hell over that, so welcome to London wine culture circa 2017 starring Laura Jane Faulds as London’s great pioneer of the legendary "chill sommelier" movement.

I love white wine more than I love red wine. I want to get a tattoo that says WW>, which means "white wine over everything." I also want to open a white wine bar called WW> that only sells white wine and cute snacks such as beet salad or a clever little take on a peach cobbler. There have been two unforgettable moments in my life when taking my first sip of a glass of white wine did something insane and gorgeous to me, something that changed me forever, having felt so blissful and isolated inside of those tastes and those smells and even those chilled, physical glasses. I have always wished to devote my time on this planet to frivolity and ephemera. And so I have decided to center my professional life around chasing down more and more of those moments. I want to trap myself inside of those sips and I want to live in them forever. And I want to be drunk all the time. 

When I was a little kid I had an L-shaped desk that slotted into one corner of my bedroom. I liked to sit in the nook under the desk and peek out from behind my desk chair. I have always loved existing in nooks more than I've loved existing anywhere else, except maybe by the water. And wine cellars are the ultimate nooks: they are nooks that have wine in them! They are dark and dank and probably smell weird. They're like the grotto where Ariel keeps all her kooky treasures in The Little Mermaid (2 Disney refs in this guy; cool), except instead of dinglehoppers they have wine in them! 

Once I was lying in bed, and I was very stoned, and started reciting the Hare Krishna mantra to make myself fall asleep. I was high enough to feel connected to how powerful those words were. I thought about how many millions and billions of times those words had been recited been recited by human beings over the course of thousands and thousands of years. It occurred to me that perhaps every time those words were spoken, the actual physical words as blank, faceless objects, were imbued with extra power. And so to recite the Hare Krishna mantra in 2014 meant more than it did to recite the Hare Krishna mantra in 701 or 1865. And as I whispered those words over and over I started to feel like those words were not the words as I was saying them. They were every time they'd ever been spoken at once. I certainly didn't fall asleep right then. 

Wine makes me feel the same way. It is the ultimate nostalgia, the taste of the passage of time. There's a bottle of champagne that sank on a ship in 1907, they found it underwater, that today a person can buy. I know if I drank it I could taste the ocean. You can teach yourself to detect notes of lychee and oak and roses and currants but I know if I drank it I could taste terror and the ocean. I think if I worked hard enough, I could teach myself to taste a person's life. 

Nicole Kidman in 'The Paperboy' Makes Me Want to Wear Canary-Yellow & Fake Eyelashes at the Same Time, Forever

BY LIZ

Basically I'll watch any movie with Matthew McConaughey in it, and one of the few McConaughemovies streaming on Netflix is The Paperboy, which I kind of hated but also loved a little. It's set in Florida in 1969 and it's directed by Lee Daniels; it's gruesome as hell and it gave me awful, insomnia-triggering nightmares on Sunday night. But then there are also some Paperboy moments that are so beautiful - mostly because of Nicole Kidman, whom I'd never thought to care about before. She plays a woman from Alabama named Charlotte Bless who gets her kicks writing love letters to prisoners, including a convicted murderer named Hillary Van Wetter, who's played by John Cusack and so hideously scary that I'm pretty sure my John Cusack feelings are now fucked for life.

After watching The Paperboy I read a bunch of reviews of it, and a lot of dude reviewers were whining about how there's so many shots of Zac Efron in his underwear. But I really hardly even noticed that; I was too busy loving Nicole Kidman. A lot of the reviews also make a deal about stuff like her blowjob-pantomime scene and the part where she pees on Zac Efron at the beach, but I'm more fascinated by the way Charlotte's got a fucked-up heart and lust for darkness but she's also the brightest thing. She's always in canary-yellow and hot-pink and crazy florals and dreamy blue, and all that swirly-girliness is a cool contrast to her infatuation with exceptionally bad men. She looks like Brigitte Bardot and a trashy Barbie doll, and she makes me wish the word "sexpot" weren't stupidly obsolete these days. But then at the same time there's this mystical/groovy quality to her: like, she talks about how people in love have telepathic powers and she ends a lot of sentences with the word "dig," used interrogatively, in her tough Alabama accent. I don't want to be her, but I could watch her talk and walk around for hours on end.

Mostly I wish I could take her character (along with Matthew McConaughey's and Zac Efron's and Macy Gray's), and put them in another movie with a storyline that's more indulgent of my excessively romantic temperament. That movie could keep a lot of actual moments from The Paperboy and use them to make something more uniformly dreamy, like the part where Charlotte and Jack dance in the rain:

It could also have a bunch of these other shots of Charlotte being amazing. I don't know, I just think tiger print + baby-pink lipstick is a pretty smart move.

And those sunglasses are so fly. And I love her headscarf. The beach scene has this really gorgeous shot of Zac Efron swimming really far out into the ocean, maybe some of the best movie-swimming I've ever seen, and then there's an equally gorgeous shot of some jellyfish floating up to him underwater (which then turns terrifying, and ends with the aforementioned Nicole-Kidman-peeing-on-Zac-Efron bit, which I'm just not that high on).

Hurray For John & Yoko! Cries Bob Dylan

Yesterday in the middle of walking home from running errands and listening to Love Minus Zero/ No Limit it occurred to me that Bob Dylan has penmanship, and that it inevitably must look like something. I swear I've never been so grateful for the Internet as I was last night, walking in the front door of my apartment and Googling "bob dylan penmanship" before I even took off my shoes. It's such a bummer to think about all the poor people from the 1980s who walked home listening to Love Minus Zero and wondering what Bob Dylan's penmanship looked like but then had to wait for Rolling Stone magazine to print an image of it or whatever.  

Bob Dylan writes cute, sassy little As. I feel like here you can definitely tell that he's a Gemini: 

And this is sweet:

But clearly the John & Yoko letter is the kicker here. Its coolness obviously goes way beyond the novelty of seeing what Bob Dylan's penmanship looks like. I think so much about the Bob Dylan lyric Name me someone who's not a parasite, and I'll go out and say a prayer for him- that sentence is literally one of the top five things I think about, ever. I like how Bob Dylan is always kind of bummed out about his own having to be an asshole. He wants not to be an asshole! But the cruddy old world makes it so darn tough. 

John and Yoko, however, are not parasites! So he's so sweet and gorgeous about them! "They help others to see pure light," he thinks. Me too, Bob Dylan! I think so too. 

-LJ

We Have New Little Beatles Books For Sale

A few years ago LJ and Liz started a writing project based on taking Beatles songs and retelling them as stories or essays or story-essays. We named the project Let It Be Beautiful, and eventually turned our stories/essays/story-essays into little books and began selling them on Etsy.

Now we have four brand-new zines, our first new Beatles books in almost two years. LJ wrote While My Guitar Gently Weeps and Birthday, Liz wrote Sexy Sadie and I Wanna Be Your Man, and Jen illustrated all four zines. The zines cost $4 each or $15 for all four, and you can buy everything in our Etsy shop. Here's a little sneak peek at each book: 

i. WHILE MY GUITAR GENTLY WEEPS

While My Guitar Gently Weeps is about the time LJ fell down the stairs at work and landed chin-first on a piece of shattered margarita glass, and about LJ locking herself in the office at work to eat dried papaya and read a J.D. Salinger quote, and also about wanting to drink a glass of aggressive white wine with notes of pineapple.

ii. I WANNA BE YOUR MAN

I Wanna Be Your Man is a valentine to some guys in some rock bands. It's about Mick Jagger and self-possession, Neil Young and being sick/free, Alex Chilton and graceful bitterness, Jonathan Richman and sweetness/responsibility, and Richard Hell and self-transcendence. 

iii. BIRTHDAY

Birthday is about being the moon, finding a copy of Franny and Zooey in the street, wanting to shoot a gun boredly at the ceiling, and not being indoctrinated by anything but the Beatles. It's also about colorstrology and kissing.

iv. SEXY SADIE

Sexy Sadie is a short story about a girl who looks like Joni Mitchell but wants to look like Chrissie Hynde, and about her best friend who possibly looks like Ray Davies. It takes place on the night of the day after Christmas and there's a lot about eyeliner and eyelashes and records and hair, with a little bit of alcoholism and semi-unrequited love.

So yeah, buy them all! We'll probably also throw in a Strawberry Fields Whatever sticker, because we are so sweet. Happy day-after-George Harrison's-birthday to everyone xo

Low is for January, Obviously

BY LJ

David Bowie named his album Low Low because he was feeling low when he wrote and recorded it. It came out on January 14th, 1977, which is perfect. Everything about Low sounds like January. It is sharp and sparkling like an icicle, like sunlight reflecting over snow that fell a week ago. Snow that's just been sitting there, hanging out and being gorgeous but annoying you, the air's too cold to melt it since it's January and so a skin of thin, crisp ice forms across the top. When you step into the snowscape with your boot it cracks the ice and sounds crunchy like the sound of cutting paper on TV. Low is that layer of ice. It's glitter, yellow-white and light blue. 

David Bowie recorded Low at a place called the Chateau d'Herouville in France. It was built in 1740 and is a dirty colour white like a dapply horse who's been running through the mud. It looks like it's probably haunted, but let's be honest with ourselves- nothing is haunted. You associate Low with the city Berlin but I like that it's from somewhere more ornate. I've never been to Berlin but based on everything I've ever heard about it, it seems like it's the exact opposite of every kind of thing I like. 

You can hear the sadness in Low if you strain for it, but it's very faraway. David Bowie at his saddest still reads as peppy from mostly anybody else. He says there's "oodles of pain" on it but there you go, right? Low's pain is one that's been modified by the cuteness of the word oodles. It's not an album about a fucked up human bleeding his "issues" all over his audience like an "oodles of pain" album by John Lennon or Kanye West would be. It's just slightly more morose and less danceable than your average David Bowie record. 
I Iike that about David Bowie- it's a very rare and endearing trait in an artist, being happy more often than you are sad.

This January, I have been sad only marginally more often than I've been happy. Most of the time, I'm neutral. I work so much and my job is so involving that I feel like I only really exist two days a week, on my days off. The other five I slip into a coma of general management and don't have time to think about anything else, though lately I've been starting to figure out how to be more "real" as a general manager, getting a little rowdier and punchier with my staff, though that winning attitude's more of a February thing. In February at least there's hope. In January you're trapped inside of something, a season. You are at the very bottom of the canyon. In February, you've started climbing out of it. 

My commute to work is stupid. I have to double-back two blocks the one way and then another three the other, and I hate double-backing, but in the wintertime I have no choice. It's either: 1) walk to work in the freezing cold, 2) take a cab there, or 3) double-back a little bit. I'm sure you feel me on this one. My commute's about the length of the first four songs on Low if you listen to Speed of Life and Breaking Glass twice, which I always do. It took me maybe thirty-five listens of Speed of Life before I realized, "Hey, there's no singing!" It doesn't need it. It's like a really great steak that a really good sauce would only ruin. 

Breaking Glass is my baby, my pet. I like how you can hear the Brian Eno in it. When Brian Eno shows up a song it's like running into somebody you're actual friends with who you haven't seen in forever on the street. Like today I ran into my boyfriend on the streetcar, and it made me feel like God for sure is real. Brian Eno sounds always remind me of waterfalls made of light, but on Breaking Glass they're like waterfalls made of light that have frozen. Just hanging there, hanging out.  

In January business at my restaurant was very slow, because in January business at every restaurant is very slow. It's cold and people want to eat take-out under blankets at their houses. Plus they feel fat as a hangover from Christmas and the last thing they want to spend all their post-Christmas no-money on is food. So on weeknights I would have to cut all my staff to save the restaurant from going bankrupt, and then I'd have to busser-close the restaurant myself, which means a ton of things but mostly is a bitch because of sweeping and mopping the floor. I'd sweep and mop to this song and just kind of dance around in a way that felt really cool and David Bowie-y to me but probably wouldn't call David Bowie to mind in anyone else's opinion. 

My restaurant has four floors if you count the basement and sometimes once we're all closed up I'll run from the bottom to the top of it five times as cardio, which I think says a lot about who I've been this January- "You're a wonderful person, but you've got problems," David Bowie might tell me, very democratically. Crazy things go on in a person's head when they're not allowed to spend time outside. Time spent out in nature, underneath the sun and moon and sky, should be the best thing any one person's life has got going, and in January that time is ripped away from you. It becomes your enemy. 

Sound and Vision is my favorite David Bowie song. It's usually the exact length of the walk from my streetcar stop to my restaurant, and on days when it isn't, I just don't even have it in me anymore. I don't want to bother with my day. I feel like the point of living out a day is to find out if anything interesting happens over the course of it and if I don't get to start out with at least hearing David Bowie sing "Blue, blue, electric blue, that's the color of my room," well I quit then. I'd rather just burrow out beneath my comforter and never know. 

One Friday I woke up feeling gruff as hell but fifteen minutes into dinner service I paired a tempranillo with the octopus ceviche to a fat old man who looked like a gargantuan toddler, and I mean that as a compliment, and then I found out he was crazy-rich and owned a vineyard in Serbia and deeply approved of my wine pairing, which made me feel like I'm on the right track in a deeply important way- and that's why I show up. For anything. Everything's so fucked this time of year and yeah, I wonder all the time about sound and vision, and how these days are all for nothing, the winter: it's all because of nothing. We whine and moan our nights and days away, nothing to read and nothing to say, slips of paper inside our parka pockets reading Ways In Which The Winter Inconveniences My Human Life, "my cuter boots are also slipperier" and so on, when all it really means is that the Earth is further away from the Sun. It means nothing. It's only the Sun's fault.