No Goings On

Most times, when I read The New Yorker, I skip, or at best, skim, the opening section, Goings On About Town. I feel mildly guilty about this, as though I'm a boor who waves off all of the culture available to me, just a short train ride away, not to mention a spoiled brat who ignores the work that went into reporting on it all.

Sometimes, I take comfort in the existence of this section, thinking that if I have had the foresight to bring an issue of The New Yorker with me to a place where I'm going to have to wait, and I have read all of the articles in it, and my waiting time is still not up, then I'll always have Goings On About Town to fall back on.

Yesterday, around 1pm, I called my regular place to ask if I could bring my car in for a while-I-wait oil change. Ralph, the owner, said, "Uh, I'm actually not there. I forwarded the phone to my cell. I sent my guys home and closed up at noon. I only sold sixty-eight gallons of gas all morning."

Turned out he was fine with my coming by this morning, so I did, and even though I had to be there at the ungodly hour of 9am, I had had just enough coffee to remember to bring the latest (Mar. 23, 2020), as yet unread, issue of The New Yorker. Got to the station, handed over my car key, settled in to wait. Opened the mag ...

Okay, not to worry. How long could an oil change take, when I was the only customer in the place? The Talk Of The Town was good. Thoroughly enjoyed the first of the long articles, by Jill LePore, on the census, But Who's Counting?, and the second, by James Somers, on the study of avalanches, Cold War. Had just started the third, Emily Nussbaum on Fiona Apple, Skin In The Game, when Ralph came into the waiting area. Oil change was all done. HOWever. I did need an air filter. And a new belt. And a brake job. I asked if they could do it now. He said, sure, and that it would take about two hours.

As is usual with this fine place, he offered to give me a ride home and then come pick me up when the job was done. A small part of me felt like social distancing ought to apply (why be in an enclosed car with someone else, if you don't have to be), and a large part of me did not want to take him up on his usual generosity: since there was a skeleton crew in place, just Ralph and one mechanic, I thought it might stress him out to have to be away, even for ten minutes. So, I said, "No, thanks. Appreciate it. But I don't mind waiting." I went outside for a cigarette to go with the complimentary cup of coffee and contemplated time spent reading so far, approximate number of pages left, odds that I was going to like any of the rest of the articles, having totally scored on two already, thought about the missing Goings On About Town, and tried to remember if I had seen anything else to read in the waiting area. Aside from signs on the wall and hanging bags of snacks, I could not think of anything. Not even a tube of toothpaste [1]. I suppose anxiety would be putting it a bit strongly.

In the end, all the work was done before I got to the end of the magazine, and it only cost me $700 for an oil change! #winning

P.S. Weird thing when I got home and checked the snail mail. When I opened my box, I saw a new issue of The New Yorker. Dateline? Mar. 16, 2020. Well, it is the Styles Issue. I suppose it's appropriate that it's fashionably late.

Sign of the day: 2019-03-18

Just found this on my phone, from last spring break:

Your moment of incongruity

In the parking lot, man with a Lord and Taylor shopping bag says to his wife, "Do you want to go to the Dollar Store?"

So, a Christian, a Jew, a Muslim, and an atheist walk into a bar ...

Ah, sorry. There's no punchline.

But it was a great way to spend Christmas Eve. Thanks y'all.

And praise god for diversity.

I might even say.

Because vernacular, of course.

Txt spk

But don't worry. The tomatoes are laughing WITH you.

[ + ]

Yeah? Well what if I bring in two at a time? What about that, hengggh? HENGGGHHH???

While halfway through doing my bit to keep the landfills a little less full, I was accosted by some uniformed twerp who told me that I could not have the grocery cart I was using in their precious bottle room. This is a bottle room I have been in about four thousand times, almost always with a cart, and it's never been a problem. So I asked, "Who am I hurting?" Whereupon he played the same card all low-echelon Napoleons play -- wordlessly pointing to The Sign. Which, y'know, has never been there before.

As I read it, it's corporate-speak for "HOMELESS: GTFO." Because who would want THOSE people performing an environmentally beneficial service in return for compensation? That's socialism!!!1!

Since I no longer have any returnables, much less two carts' worth, I shall be composing a sternly worded letter post haste. That oughta do it.

P.S. You may refer to this post using the shortened URL bit.ly/STOPANDSHOPFAIL. Pass it down.

Two nights ago?

Felt a bug crawling near the inside of my right elbow. Glanced down, whacked it with my left hand. Was kind of a hard-shell bug, so I had to blanch and whack it again.

Who knew fireflies could light up, and stay that way, after they're dead? Now I feel even more guilty.

Trolling the PACmen

Hmmm. This looks promising ...

[ + ]

Lotta wear and tear on this poster:

[ + ]

Now, this is a new one on me:

[ + ]

That guy to the left? I got him to the point of veins bulging all out of his forehead.

[ + ]

Also, who knew you could spray when you hiss liberal?

Good times.

Truckin'

[ + ]

Anybody from the Bhtv forums know if Piscivorous moved recently?

Good. Because there's nothing more tedious than a self-loathing Ruby script.

The process doesn’t daemonise itself ...

Wait. Wait wait wait. That's not the weird part.*

I happened across the above while looking to see if a semi-spammy-seeming email had anything behind it.

On a thoroughly unrelated note (except chronologically), and my weakness for nerd jokes aside, I did next find what I was looking for, and did the first thing you always do with a new search engine: type in your own name. Which didn't return much, but did lead me to discover that a phrase of mine apparently went sorta viral about a year ago.

I guess I have an OpenSalon post from The Majority Report to thank for that. So, thanks, Sam! (Or whoever actually runs that blog.) And let us hope a seed or two got lodged in Matt Bai's ear.

---

* (The part to which I refer starts at 0:24).

(alt. audio link | transcript)

I think I only ever saw that once, when it originally aired, but I've never forgotten it. (Although admittedly it did blur a bit -- if you know me AFK, you might have heard me say that the weird part is "a different golden retriever.")

Not as cool as my Streb hat, of course ...

... but I passed by some high school kids today, and my pride in being able to identify the headgear outweighed my embarrassment at realizing a few minutes later, "Uh, those have probably been around since before this afternoon."

Stream of consciousness. Or something.

So, last night, I'm waiting at JFK to pick up some people, and since traffic on the ride down had been heavier than expected and I'd had little else to do besides drink coffee, I headed for the men's room.

"Hmm, that's odd," I thought. "Seems a bit late in the year for a bug to be hanging out in the urinal." But there it was.

Sometimes I overthink these things, so just as I often break stride to avoid stepping on ants, I directed my stream below the bug. But then I couldn't resist seeing if I could, you know, make it move, so I started inching the stream upward to just below it. The bug didn't move. I finished recycling my coffee and stepped away from the urinal. Automatic flush kicked in. "Oh, no! I am guilty of negligent homicide insecticide entomolocide whatever!"

But then even with water pouring down the back wall, the bug refused to budge. "Must already be dead," I thought. "But boy, it's really stuck on there."

And then, walking towards the sinks, I noticed a bug in the next urinal. And the next. And the next. And then the light bulb finally came on. A story I'd heard somewhere bubbled up, and I remembered thinking when I'd heard it, "What a smart idea."

Oh, yeah. We of the stand-up-to-pee persuasion like nothing finer than having something to aim at. But I wonder if the designers ever thought about people who feel that ridiculous guilt about killing bugs? Or, who knows, maybe that made me aim even more carefully.

And yes, it was Terminal Four.

(Pic source, obvs.)

From the cabinet of curiosities

Not to get all ageist, but how old is this can of Cameo Copper Cleaner that I just found?

[Insert picture here as soon as digital camera is at hand.]

A suggestion is given by one of the selling points on the label (colors orig.):

Modern plastic container leaves no rust rings, marks or scratches on porcelain tile or other surfaces. Easy to handle, no mess, no soggy cans!

And how about on the other side, at the bottom of the label?

You'll find the Woman's Touch in every Purex product •

I mean, who puts the bullet point at the end of the line anymore?

Price stamped on top has some sort of weird mark, which I think signifies a foreign currency of some kind:

17¢

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Not to get all paranoid, but right after I finished composing this post, the next ad I saw (on some other site) led me to a place where I was invited to …

Sign up to contact Senior Dating Elite Club members!

Reconstruction 2010-09-29

Can insomniac be an adjective?

?

I guess, when you think of counting sheep, you could be said to be … no, let's not go there. There be double-entendres.

Let's start ... in the middle somewhere.

MORE »

The Blogger Who Mistook His Thoughts For A Bat

I just had occasion to look up the town of Branford, Connecticut, and so now I know that it is a town about eight miles due east of New Haven. (Or, if you're vehicularly inclined, "a few minutes north.") I-95 is at that point pretty much a line of latitude, and the center of Branford is about a mile south of it. Looks like one town boundary is the Atlantic Ocean -- the coastline there is also an east-west line -- so it's probably a pretty nice place.

Map link | Wikipedia page.

From the latter:

Trivia

• Two Major League Baseball players were born in Branford: Beauty McGowan (1901) and Ollie Sax (1904).

How great are those names?

And how do you suppose the second guy got interested in brain science? From the beanball wars of the pre-batting helmet days?

Curt Belfrey would probably not like me making such jokes.

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(What? | What? | Also | Also)

Also, too: @Mr. Riley: As it happens, the last player mentioned batted left, threw right, so if you ever wanted a more self-deprecating nickname, I'd say you can't go wrong with Clank.

I give it two dots

I forgot the keycode for a u with an umlaut* so I Googled. Found the answer, and also found a piece of very short fiction from Nora Ephron: "The Girl Who Fixed the Umlaut." It's good. Don't read it first, but the last sentence is FTW.

---

* On a Windows machine: Alt-129 for lowercase: ü, Alt-154 for uppercase: Ü. Thanks for the reminder, Pinyin Joe! And yeah, I confess: I was typing über alles again. In my own defense, at least this time it wasn't for purposes of fanboying the Dead Kennedys.

Wonder Woman's New Look Not Liked By Some Wonderful-Seeming Woman

So, the name Sandi Behrns came to my attention, due to a retweet by someone I follow, I think, so I went to her Twitter page. Then I @-ed her, to tease her about her choice of background image, because … you remember. She replied, which led me to this: "They Gave My Feminist Icon a Makeover." Which is an interesting take, which you may enjoy.

Your Moment of Cukeness

So, speaking of the movie that I was before, albeit obliquely [added: no wait, that was that other movie, which I am always confusing with this one], I had occasion a couple of days ago to go to the grocery store, which meant parking my car in the lot, which led to my noticing one of those giant long English cucumbers, that always come wrapped in plastic (at least in America), lying on the ground.

Thinking of the poor starving children in Biafra Wasilla, I picked it up.

The SUV in the space next to mine looked as though it had just been loaded, so I walked over to the driver's window, tapped gently, and said, "This is going to seem kind of weird, but is this yours?"

The driver laughed, and said, "No. I saw that, too! And I was wondering … But no."

I went back to the cart I had collected to push into the store, had what I believe was the seven millionth bit of l'esprit de l'escalier in my life, and decided, what the hell.

This time, due to the natural flow of traffic, I went up to the passenger side window. There, sadly, sat a rather muscle-bound man. But nonetheless, I waited until he rolled down the window. "Did you ever see the movie Animal House?" I asked.

He frowned and shook his head. She (the driver) laughed. I added, for clarity, "You know, the scene in the grocery store, where Otter meets the Dean's wife?" I dangled my English cucumber suggestively.

He frowned harder. "NO."

And then she really started laughing.

Small victories.

Good Fallout

Went out to dinner at one of my favorite restaurants earlier this evening, and it will probably not surprise you to hear that I still had Rima Fakih on my … let us say "mind." Sadly for my friend Haleim, the owner, it was not an overly crowded night. Happily for me, the wise-ass, the quiet room gave me space to ask, "Tell me, are you, as a man from Egpyt, OUTRAGED that a Lebanese woman has won the Two Thousand And Ten Miss USA contest?"

(Ordinarily, of course, I would not say that "And." But this time, you know, for comedy.)

Bastard. I have never been able to throw him off stride, not even for a moment. He knew exactly what I was talking about.

(We ended up having a fairly interesting conversation, stemming from this opening sally. (I would share some of the details with you, but, eh, now I'm getting the feeling he didn't think this would be an on-the-record talk (with some pajama-clad gossip blogger, to boot), so sorry, no.))

Anyway, I WILL get to him, one of these days.

And then he will have to stop calling me "Junior."

Being that he is probably a decade or so younger than me, his calling me that is kind of like being Dwight Howard, being dunked on by Rajon Rondo. Which will happen, which I am rooting for, and no, I am not actually comparing myself to Superman.

I could make way more free throws, dude. Please. 80% minimum, and that was after running suicides.

(Yeah, so I never actually got to shoot a foul shot in a so-called actual "game." Like that's supposed to mean something.)

What's In A Name Initials?

Via the good people at Sadly, No!, I have learned about a paper-thin-skinned woman who blogs up a wingnut storm, who has a sense of self-importance inflated to Hindenberg dimensions, whose attitude of do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do can only have been developed with steroids, who egosurfs incessantly, whose radar for perceived slights is always turned to 11, and whose reactions thereto put volcanoes to shame. (Except for the limited vocabulary -- volcanoes are far more eloquent.)

In her mind, mockery equals censorship, liberals are fascists, and the best response to criticism is either play the victim card or threaten to sue.

And her initials are A.A.

No, I'm not talking about Ann Althouse. Good guess, though.

It turns out there's another A.A. fitting this description, Amy Alkon, the self-billed "Advice Goddess."

The latest storm began with a post she put up a few days ago, a racist screed saying that a black woman who was shot by some cops deserved it, and going on to condemn all those dark-skinned people and their "litters." Perhaps in response, someone did a prank edit of her Wikipedia page, inserting a line describing her as "a male-to-female transsexual." In true Althousian fashion, she simultaneously displayed outrage at the "attack" and delight at the attention. And, of course, she blogged about it. Which led to one of those Wiki-edit wars, eventual lock-down of the Wikipedia page, and much sputtering from our Amy. Well, the Sadlys took note, and the rest, as they say, was Pure Comedy Gold.

I wandered over to the post after quite a few others had, and observed that at one point in the comments, she said:

You can't be a newspaper columnist and a blogger and be all sensitive about what people say about you, and I'm not.

Ironic enough, given her meltdown over her Wikipedia page, but then I noticed quite a few other comments that she had added under the same post. I observed that by the time I happened upon the scene, she had been going for about twenty hours non-stop, feverishly responding to every comment that didn't come from one of her usual fawning clique. With a quick CTRL-u, CTRL-a, CTRL-c, CTRL-w, ALT-TAB, CTRL-v, and a few moments in Emacs, I extracted the time-stamp lines for all of her comments in the thread up to that point. I posted the list of lines as a comment, underneath a blockquote of the above self-congratulatory line. She responded within minutes, accusing me of "trying to kneecap" her. I posted a follow-up comment suggesting she calm down and not get so bent out of shape at a little lighthearted snark. She called me a "tiny little fascist" and banned me from posting any more comments.

A short while later, she put up a new post, whining about the attention that she was so obviously loving, denying that she was just another right-wing blowhard, and added this, in the comments below:

Some creep named Brendan just posted a copy of the time-stamps of the corrections I made in my Wikipedia page, everytime [sic] these tiny jackbooted thugs posted another lie on the page.

I used a little trickery to get around her attempt to block me, and posted a comment on the new post, wondering aloud about the dichotomy between her repeated trumpeting of her investigative skills and her inability to get her facts straight -- the time-stamps, I reminded her, were not from the Wikipedia edit history, but from her own comments on her own blog.

She didn't like that very much, and deleted my comment a few minutes after I posted it. The truth hurts, I guess, particularly when it's about the Empress's new clothes.

Ah, well. No biggie. I'd already started to feel a little silly about teasing someone so obviously unable to take it. Fish, barrel, and so forth.

I'm not sure if you have the same morbid fascination for these A.A. types as I do; if so, you might have a look and get a few laughs. Be aware, if you're tempted to leave a comment of your own that you think she might not like, that she has the habit of publishing what easily obtainable personal information she can pick up from your browser and how you sign your comment -- email address, home page URL, IP address, and so on. Because she's

… absolutely fine with (and even encourage[s] … Anyone criticizing me or my ideas on my blog …

and she's against

… intimidating and punishing … for speaking in a way not approved.

The only remaining question for me is this: as part of the righteous battle to expose wingnuttery to the light, should I check in on her from time to time? It's not like the Sadlys don't already do a masterful job, but there's a lot to keep track of out there.

Or is this A.A., like the other one, just so pathetic that it's best not to give her any more attention?

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[Added] Just for the record, and so I have this link for my own future reference, I have retold this story in a comment on Glenn Sacks's site. Sacks is a friend of Amy Alkon's. He composed a blog post that appears to be based entirely on Alkon's side of the (larger) story. As a "tiny little fascist" who admires Teh Sadlys and think that they run one of the best and brightest sites on the 'Net , I felt compelled to add my voice.