I’m taking a long train trip right now, and there are stops designated as “fresh air stops”. In this context, “fresh air” means there will be time for people to get off the train to smoke.
Fresh Air
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Category Archives: Observations
Vegetable Science
I am Vine. That means retailers on Amazon can offer me stuff in exchange for a product review. The theory is that Vine members can provide impartial reviews and drown out the paid shills. There are Vine members who don’t understand this, and there are retailers using Vine to dump inventory.
But as a part of this program, I explore categories I would never look at otherwise. It’s fun; I’ve learned about tools I never knew existed, and seen many, many useless things.
One of the categories I can explore is “Professional Medical Supplies”. And in categories like that, there are items that are obviously for one purpose, but can only be sold for another purpose. Syringes with hypodermic needles is an obvious example.
CLEARLY, these items are not meant to inject stuff into humans. They are for injecting stuff into… maybe… vegetables?
Perhaps you are a neatly-bearded scientist who needs to inject blue stuff into a zucchini. Have we got the tool for you! Or maybe it’s broccoli anchored to a chemical stand, with a needle up its butt, and you need to inject some red liquid:
I have to give props where due. Most sellers would not have bothered taking the above photos. The shallow depth of field in the top photo suggests that an actual photographer was involved. With lights and everything.
The entire effort is to support a fiction: that this product is for injecting colored liquids into vegetables, and not human beings. It’s a respectable amount of work to support a transparent lie that everyone knows from the get-go is a lie.
But now I wonder now how a floret of broccoli clamped in the air with a needle up its ass will respond to red fluid.
Cybertruck sighting!
A Tale of Two Cars
It is entirely possible that the members of the Muddled Enclave will never buy another automobile again. But still, I have many happy memories of challenging roads, a nimble car, and the top down so God can hear my laughter.
Good times, man. And while the challenges of clutch and throttle and stick go away with an electric, the joy of the turn, the climb, and the air in your face still remain.
For the other 99% of your time behind the wheel, all you need to do is get there. It’s just more pleasant to get there in a convertible.
And so it is that occasionally I look around at the electric convertibles out there that I might imagine owning. Not long ago, that list was empty. Now, the entrants are starting to pile up. After a recent review of upcoming offerings, two stood out.
In Europe this car will be called FreZy Frog. You can read more about it here. I looked at the odd proportions, and then called in a second opinion. “Is this adorkable?” I asked the Official Sweetie. After checking the video, and looking at the rest of the photos, she agreed, but only provisionally. Clearly this is a car for zipping to the store – is there room for grocery bags somewhere?
Funniest part of the description: They say it has four seats.
Honestly, though, I could imagine owning a car like that. They’re selling in China for the equivalent of $15K, a bargain if you ignore currency manipulation and slave labor.
And then there’s this:
For roughly the cost of twenty of the above vehicles, you could have one of these. If you visit Weismann’s Project Thunderball (yes, really) you will see many more angles of this simply gorgeous design. I do have some quibbles — I look at the tail light configuration with squinty eyes — but overall, day-um. And maybe the tail lights echo the instrument panel, where there are far more gauges than an electric would ever need. Battery, speed, and no one cares about the rest. But hey, it’s not a touch screen.
There are other electric convertibles on the way. MG’s horribly-named Cyberster and VW’s electric Cabrio are getting notice. There are other supercars to compete with Weismann – Fiskar and Bently and maybe even Maserati are getting into the game. (Uninformed reading makes me think the Maserati and the Weismann are sharing tech.)
Those are all fun and cool, but at the end of the day, I can more readily imagine myself bonking around town in a FreZy Frog. I’ll pay an extra 30% for a non-slave-labor version.
The Music in Our Heads
Recently someone in my orbit asked (something like), “Does anyone else have a song in their head every moment?” It had honestly never occurred to me before then that there could be any other existence.
It’s a tricky question to ask, I suppose, because if I ask you “is there a song in your head?” the answer will be yes. Even if there wasn’t one before, there will be one by the time the question lands down in the thinking-zones.
This question wouldn’t have stuck in my head so much, I think, if it weren’t for a comment someone made to me forty years ago. “You always have a song for the moment,” she said. Or something like that. Back then I would let my inner sound track leak out through my mouth, I think. I was not conscious of it before, but sure enough, for any dang topic I had a little musical quip.
The music in my head is situational and responsive, but given lack of stimulus will fall into a few deep grooves. As I type this, I am turning up the headphones to NOT THINK OF one of my most hated bonded tracks.
While I try to control what is playing in there, sometimes successfully, sometimes not, there is no off switch. I have always assumed that is the natural human condition. I’m pretty sure I’m right. I’m pretty sure the answer to this episode is “well, duh.” But I’d never even asked the question before, so I thought I’d say it out loud. Is it possible to live without a soundtrack?
I Went Back to East Hagbourne, and the City was Gone
Today I was reading an article that linked to a real estate listing in England. It includes a video. (DANGER! Ear worm!)
That was fun and cute and all, but it reminded me of a time I lived in a cottage some distance from London. I decided to pay a visit. I fired up Ye Olde Mappe Appe, zeroed in on East Hagbourne, and scanned up Blewbury Road looking for the pub near the brook.
No pub. That side of the road is now occupied by large, modern homes. The solar panels on the rooftops don’t fool me, these are English McMansions.
It makes sense. Nearby Didcot hosts the last super-high-speed train stop before London (at least it did in 1980). If I worked in London, East Hagbourne would be an ideal place to live, although only one of the three pubs I knew still stands. The Fleur de Lis was always the choice of the gentlemanly class in town, and now apparently that’s the only class remaining.
With all this change, I was not certain right away that the place I had called home for a little while still existed. I typed the address into Apple Maps, and was relieved to see it was still there, and a little bit delighted that the pin showed not only the address, but the home’s colloquial name. The cottage still stands.
Beyond the large new homes that line Blewbury Road, the fields remain. The land here is fertile, the rain reliable, and agriculture…
Holy shit Didcot has grown so much, usurping farmland to the point it has almost swallowed East Hagbourne. East Hagbourne also has doubled in size or more; entire neighborhoods of homes that look identical from space.
Compared to Orange County, the growth of Didcot is negligible. Just a little dot among the fields. But we have seen this show often enough to know how it ends. And if I worked in London, I would likely contribute to the destruction.
The Best Glue
Recently I was installing a shower curtain rod, but not the normal straight-across kind, but one that turned in the middle to enclose two sides of a space.
The kit was comprehensive, with different methods of anchoring the curtain rod based on what it needed to be secured to. I surveyed all the pieces, then turned to the instructions.
I shit you not, this is absolutely how the written instructions started:
After our experiment, we changed the glue in the non-performing installation scheme to Chinese glue, which is better and stronger than the Japanese glue we used before.
Okay, while I question the wisdom of bringing up past failures to new customers, I do have to appreciate that our Chinese friends weren’t done yet. The instructions follow:
Our factory sells 4000 bathroom poles every day in the world, which is a large amount. My colleagues and I work late every day. We work day and night to bring better products to customers, and we hope every product we sell can help everyone.
This all seems a little defensive. “Hey! We’re doing our best, man!” But this is the instruction sheet, so at any moment there might be instructions. I had to keep reading. But next comes a plea that if there are any problems with installation, that you contact them first and they will make it better. An email address is provided that is a big number and is probably unique to this exact copy of the product.
Another paragraph follows, on the same theme. If there is a problem, we will make it right. Just give us a chance.
It’s funny and I will always laugh about Chinese glue, but what we also see here is a company that is learning that in listings at Amazon and the rest, customer reviews are what separates success and failure. Some dickhead customer doesn’t apply the inferior Japanese glue properly, gets pissy about it, and it can ruin a business. So they upgrade the glue, and improve the instructions, and forge ahead in a wild-west marketplace.
Meanwhile, some other company, who is using fucking Andorran glue for crying out loud (Andorran! The fuck do they know about modern polymer chemistry?) is flat-out paying people to give them good reviews. It’s tough for an honest company out there these days.
DevOps and the Invisibility of Success
Some of you may have heard that some new guy owns Twitter now. You may also have heard that despite the dire hand-wringing by <insert people you don’t like>, Twitter is still running. Therefore, you might be tempted to conclude, all those engineers weren’t really necessary in the first place.
There are a lot of people working around us right now whose job it is to keep bad things from happening. I worked in a very small tech company once, and the boss was constantly trying to reduce the hours of our only IT person because clearly things were running just fine. When the people are doing really well at keeping bad things from happening, we forget we need them at all.
Twitter manages gazillions of data, and they propagate that information around the world in near-realtime. So many ones, so many zeroes. And right now, all those tweets are still flying around, and we’re willing to believe for a moment that Elon Musk is not simply an idiot baby of blood emeralds, but some kind of business smart guy. Twitter is still running! But that’s a tribute to the hard-working people who don’t work there anymore.
Elon has seen things running smoothly, and has not stopped to credit the people who are responsible for that. Quite the opposite, in fact; he has sent them packing. The plane is autopilot; it is a credit to the people who built the plane that it may go quite a while before slamming into a mountainside.
The Big Bed
Every now and then, when it has been an emotionally draining day, we invite the dogs to hop up into the big bed with us, so the whole pack can be together.
While Gilfoyle enjoys being up there, Lady Byng lives to be snuggled with the pack. Last night was a pack night. Tonight, every time I look toward the bedroom, she tears off in maximum excitement, sure that tonight her dream of being on the Big Bed will be realized again. She has cracked the code, knows what to do, and there will be Big Bed nights forevermore.
Except nope, there is nothing she can do to change the outcome tonight. Some outcomes you don’t control, as much as you would like to think you do.
The Trump Premium
I’ve been going to a Web site fairly regularly to check on the movements in the price of Bitcoin and other crypto tokens. This has exposed me to a lot of advertisements to invest in precious metals.
Most of those ads are for coins that are either one ounce of silver or one ounce of gold. Not coins in the “legal tender” sort of way, but round things made of pure metal that are struck with some sort of decoration.
While silver currently shows trading at $19.86 per ounce, I can buy a handsome silver coin for $24.27. The coin will have a picture on each side. Maybe liberty or the ol’ “Don’t Tread on Me” snake. That picture is apparently worth about four and a half bucks.
Unless that is, you want your coin stamped with the image of Donald Trump. In that case, the coin will cost you $25.78. Same amount of silver. Just a bigger markup because the buyer is making a value judgement with his testicles, rather than his brain. (I used the male pronoun intentionally, which now I see is a disservice to all the idiots who identify with different pronouns. But I’m leaving it, so I can keep this parenthetical comment.)
So.
There is a significant market in which people will pay extra for any random shit if it has Trump’s picture on it. I picture running a booth in a flea market, and buying shit from all the other booths, putting a Trump sticker on all that stuff, and selling it for 30% more. (Note: this blog episode is NOT filed under get-poor-quick.)
The idea scales. GMC Tundra Trump Edition. (Note to self: research what model of truck was used to commit murder by the “good people” in Charlotte.)
But in between those extremes is where the real money is. I’m sure most of this stuff already exists: Trump beach chairs. Trump shoes. Trump lamp shades. All that shit. Doorknobs, dildos, drapes. Trump condoms that are actually morning-after pills.
As I type this, I realize that all that shit is out there already. I’m not going to think of a new place to sell Trump’s face to his idiot idolizers that hasn’t been exploited already. But that won’t stop me from trying.
Froot Loops! Now with more Trump!
twiliight
It seems the Twilight series is out on a new print run, with a new covers. The covers are striking and pretentious and silly, and I am here to mock them. You don’t have to thank me; it’s what I do.
I had not planned on going to the trouble to find an actual image of this thing, relying instead on my near-mystical abilities of description, but let’s face it, images get the clicks. Here’s the cover:
Full disclosure here; I have never read twiliight (apparently) and it’s pretty unlikely I ever will. I have read and enjoyed many things similar to this, even written for a similar demographic, but this whole thing seems pretty awful.
BUT! You will find millions of readers who disagree with me, and the last time I wrote something millions of people liked was never. So my hat is off to the writer of this yarn.
Who is that again?
STEPHENIE MEYER
AUTHOR OF THE #1 BESTSELLING TWILIGHT SAGA
In other words, “Author of the book you are holding in your hands right now.” Which… I figure is kind of implied already. If you decide to read twiliight because it’s written by the person who wrote Twilight— you know what? You’re perfect for this story.
Tailwind
I was moving right quickly as I pedaled south this afternoon. The weather was perfect, clear but cool, the path dappled with the shadows of the trees. Just a great day.
While the wind wasn’t too fierce today, I knew that I had a tailwind, even as I felt the wind in my face.The tailwind manifests not as a push but a reduction in resistance.
It is easy to forget the extra push, to credit my skinny legs with my success. And my legs deserve a lot of credit! But on the way back north, those same skinny legs were having to work a lot harder, and I still wasn’t moving as quickly. That easy-to-ignore wind became a real burden.
Yes, this is absolutely a metaphor for privilege. Just because you face resistance, doesn’t mean you’re not getting a boost.
The Future of Plague
I came down with a cold yesterday, and used one of the COVID testing kits I have on my desk to make sure I wasn’t a threat to others. Yeah, that’s a thing now. And while they aren’t that common yet (I don’t think they are, anyway, but I could be wrong), it’s easy to imagine them becoming common as this whole pandemic thing drags on.
I write Science Fiction stories, but now is there any future that does not include tests like this as a part of everyday life? Will the kids born today ever know a time without ready tests for the latest plague?