granular survival
SPORTS: YOU CAN SKIP THIS PARAGRAPH
I have been quite transfixed by NHL playoffs this year, despite the dreadful showing of the home team (seriously, the Predators and their boring-but-effective neutral-zone-trap thing could not have been a worse match for Chicago). I do like a nice Game 7, no matter who the players are, just for the drama. I am mildly rooting for Ottawa. Penguins are a great animal but they were in it last year and it’s time to mix things up.
HOWEVER. It will always bug me that the Ottawa “Senators” have a Roman general as their logo. I suppose legati were TECHNICALLY members of the Senate, you got me there, but it also seems like a lazy play on “centurion,” and it’s not like a legatus would show up at the Senate in full battle gear. He’d likely look like a guy in a toga on Senate days. But no team wants a guy in a toga as their logo.
Also! The Ottawa Senators have a mascot called “Sparticat.” It is a weird ugly lion thing with oddly straight “hair” like Ozzy Osbourne, and why are we suddenly dragging SPARTA into this? Do we need to fly some Classics scholars to Ottawa to help get this mess figured out?
AMAZON IS ON TO ME
My basement smelled kind of weird and it was bothering me. It’s just a basement and of course there’s a drain and litter boxes and laundry and beer-brewing supplies down there, so maybe I could have just dealt with it. Basements are gonna basement. But it was bothering me so I started researching solutions to smells.
One thing you should know about me is that if I’m going to spend money I like to get the “best” whatever it is. Not in a flashy way—I’m not into designers or bling. (Yes, Mimi, we figured that out when you rolled up to the Target in your Toyota Camry.) But I can get very focused on reading reviews and figuring out what’s Best In Its Category, no matter how small the purchase. So when I wanted to make the basement smell better I naturally drilled down into different smell solutions, sorting by “Average Customer Review,” which is how I ended up getting a bucket of weird deodorizing crystals that I must admit are highly effective. The basement smells much better!
After I bought the MAGICAL CRYSTAL BUCKET, I noticed some funny stuff showing up in the “recommended for you” part of Amazon. Things like hydroponic gardening materials. And grow lights. And motion-detection cameras, and plant food. Then I Googled the crystal-smell-bucket some more and found that most of its purchasers were using it to cover of the smell of their home marijuana-growing operations. Oh, okay.
THINGS I AM SO PICKY ABOUT THAT I HAVE NO CLEAR ANSWER AS TO WHETHER I LIKE THEM OR NOT
- Tomatoes. Sauce is okay, very finely diced and fresh is okay, the firmer grape or cherry varieties with most of the goop gone is okay, canned is not very okay but I can deal, a slice on a sandwich or a wedge in a salad is not okay at all.
- The blues. I cannot stand the typical loud electric-guitar stuff that gets played for tourists in Chicago. I sort of like the kind on a scratchy 78 that is introduced by a solid minute of an old man coughing.
- Science fiction. There are way too many arguments about what even “counts” as science fiction. I think I mostly DON’T like science fiction, but I often like literature that happens to take place in the future or in a different world. But it has to be highly “literary” first and the other stuff is just the special sauce. So I don’t know.
MISCELLANEOUS
- Today I learned that Chinese people sometimes say “eggplant!” so as to appear to smile in pictures. Eggplant is the Chinese cheese (in this context).
- LT and I gave in to nostalgia and saw Jesus and Mary Chain earlier this month. It was pretty good, although it was one of the darkest shows I’ve ever seen. I mean literally dark, I’m not making a gothy statement here. I guess no one really wants to SEE Jesus and Mary Chain. Oh look, there’s some old Scottish dudes. Just play loud and pump up the light show.
- Fourteen years ago, in the last paragraph of this, I blathered about a mini-trend of air travel bands. Lately I have noticed an influx of water-themed bands. Beach House, Beach Fossils, Wavves, Surfer Blood, Poolside, Lagoons, Future Islands, Washed Out, Best Coast. Calling all armchair semioticians to make a mountain out of a band-name molehill!
- I go to Boston next week (work). Most of my time is sadly spoken for, but it’s a big publishing meeting and I know a lot of big publishing nerds read my thing, so if you are there let’s be awkward in a hotel ballroom together.
—mimi smartypants has a different name tag.