The Scene Outside Morton’s Fine Catering As Seen By Someone Who’s Never Successfully Cartwheeled In His Life

Two minivans. At least two families’ worth of kids spilled out into the tiny lot. The adults keep walking back and forth between the cars. The kids are protesting in the way kids brought to a deathly dull adult place will do. One is sitting against a minivan’s rear wheel. Others have taken to doing handstands, even cartwheels. They’re not in danger of cartwheeling into the street. They’re just going back and forth on the sidewalk, or again, between the minivans, while the adults try to shepherd them into the building. I have never been inside it, but I just know it’s a slightly dark room that’s quieter than a noiseless room, decorated with a couple of tables that have those heavy tablecloths you feel bad for spilling stuff on, and while there’s some food the kids are going to be allowed to eat, it’s only one or two things, and it’s something like coconut macaroons that as a child can’t be fit into any known food category. I empathize with every person in this scenario, including the Fine Catering clerk who just wants nobody to cartwheel into anything that that breaks.

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

A sharp rise in the morning trading was tempered and partly reversed as news came in about this forest fire raging in Portugal this week, and investors realized they had never known that a country like Portugal could get forest fires, and then felt stupid for having made the casual assumption that somehow it wouldn’t. Is it weird to have just never thought about what kinds of forest Portugal has or doesn’t have, and so to be surprised that it would get forest fires?

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