After The Weekend

My love and I spent last weekend at the State Games of America in Grand Rapids. We were in the pinball competition because there’s a pinball-contest organizer who’s a genius at getting bigger events to host pinball tournaments on the side. The pinball competition was in Ballroom B, as were the darts and the billiards contests. There was also a bar set up in the ballroom. I honestly don’t know if there was supposed to be or if gathering enough pinball, darts, and billiards players in one room caused it to spontaneously manifest.

In the fourth corner of the room they also had a boxing ring. That was inspirational, watching people holding up the championship belt. Boxing championship belts combine two great traditional guy interests, that of celebrating our ability to hit one another and that of celebrating how we can do take something ordinary and make it so large and dramatic that it’s useless for its original purpose of controlling the rate at which our pants fall down.

It turned out Michigan’s were the National State Games and the organizer told us that while Michigan residents could just show up and compete, residents of other states had to win their own state games first. I looked this up and it’s slightly off, not in important ways. If your state has games in that sport you’re supposed to win that first before going on to nationals. But per their Qualifying Standards document:

Due to National Congress of State Games neighboring state policy, athletes residing in Michigan, Illinois, Ohio, Indiana and Ontario, Canada are allowed to compete in SGA 2017 without qualification

My obvious question: so, wait, Wisconsin doesn’t border Michigan suddenly? Guess not. But Wisconsin only borders the upper peninsula, the whole population of which is abandoned copper mining platforms sinking into contaminated lakes. I can understand overlooking that. Not answered: Wait, so Illinois borders Michigan somewhere?

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

The index dropped nine points as the trading floor felt mixed emotions following the City Council primary vote. On the one hand, the guy whose campaign site was just one page, half of it a picture of Neptune, won’t be in the November election. On the other hand, we ain’t voting for a novelty-act candidate for anything ever again and we’re going to kick in the shins anyone who says they are, thank you.

381

Championship Posing

The local alt-weekly had a piece about competitive yoga, which is neat since the national championship was just this past weekend at the State Games of America, held in Grand Rapids. My love and I were there, competing for pinball. My love went home with a bronze medal for the Pro Division. I went home with an extra T-shirt the organizers had that isn’t actually in my size.

Anyway. Competitive yoga. I haven’t been to a yoga class in years, and I admit what I got was the sort of suburban yoga where the instructor mentions yeah, there’s some stuff about philosophy and a set of beliefs you should be considering about the nature of humanity and its relationship to the universe, but mostly if you need a towel to do a leg lift please do. I need many towels to do a leg lift, because I have the flexible hamstrings of a parking garage. Still, I have trouble imagining just what this is, and apparently yoga competitors have it to. From a particularly defensive quote:

“India has had a national yoga federation since the ‘70s,” said [ National Yoga Asanda Champion ] Ann Chrapkiewicz, “They’re going on their 42nd national championship, so it’s not an American thing that we made up.”

I appreciate that Americans will take anything and then form a championship out of it. If there were a way to do so much blinking that it might make somebody weep then we’d have National Blinking Championships. So I guess it’s nice that some other countries will championize what might otherwise just be things you enjoyed doing. But I guess I knew that already. Like, over in England there’s competitive pipe-smoking. I’m not sure the exact way it works. I think it’s a thing where you get two chances to light the pipe and one long draw, and then organizers watch to see which of the contestants have been dead since Rhodesia was expelled from the Commonwealth. (“Who amongst you is dead? Show of hands, please … yes, yes, I see you, Montgomery. No, you’re not dead then. Better luck next time.”) So I suppose we all have our traditions of doing things until we can give people medals for it.

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

The Another Blog, Meanwhile Index drifted down four points as traders hoped to get back to listening to some of those podcasts that have been gathering dust since mid-June.

380

Thinking About The Mud Supply

I’m not among those outraged by reports that a New Zealand music festival has spent NZ$90,000 importing five tons of mud from South Korea. What do I know from what New Zealand music festivals need? And besides, Juicero. I got to tell a friend who’d missed that all about the Juicero nonsense yesterday and it was great fun. But the people of a planet that produced Juicero investors have no place faulting music festival organizers for being part of the international mud trade.

No, what’s got me is that festival organizers said this purchase would meet their needs for the next five of their concerts. If this is an annual event, that’s five years’ worth of mud they’re buying. Again, I don’t fault them buying in quantity. If you know you need something and it’s nonperishable and you have the storage space, sure, buying in bulk makes sense. What’s got me is having a projection of your mud needs for the next five years. I have no idea what my mud needs are like. I know it’s killing my budget to keep running to the corner convenience-store-that-wants-to-be-a-neighborhood-grocery-but-isn’t-trying-very-hard to get a box every time I run short. I should write the festival and ask for their advice on mud need estimation. But now that they’re being made fun of in public I bet they wouldn’t think I was sincere. Too bad.

Also I had some more comic strip stuff on my mathematics blog. You might like that. I also started a new sequence of explaining mathematics terms, which I always like doing.

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

Somehow the Another Blog, Meanwhile traders found another 26 points to rise and I don’t know where they all came from. They can’t all be from swiping digits out of the Labor Of Like Index. We got those allegations cleared up by pointing at them and declaring that they were not allegations but crocodiles instead, and this set off a healthy Internet know-it-all intellectual dogpile from people who insist they do too get the joke but there’s a real point here that some other people might be confused about. I’m innocent, is what I’m saying.

368

Also Seen While On The Road

Again no photograph because we were on the road, and while I wasn’t driving I wasn’t going to get my camera out in near enough time for this. But the tall highway sign promised the place was the “House Of Cigar”, just like that. Just as if it were a 1960s-style Chinese Restaurant that had somehow got things really quite wrong. Or as if it were yet another Little Pig harassed by the Big Bad Wolf, who huffed and who puffed and reduced his house to an enormous and unpleasant blue stench rolling through the village. There’s no way to know, I guess, except by standing next to that friend who’s always going on about how They’re just ruining fairy tales by taking out the graphic violence and horribly abusive behavior. Get in range of that friend for maybe fifteen minutes and they’d explain all about how there used to be, like, Fifteen Little Pigs before Disney’s cartoon suppressed a long folkloric tradition. Like, there’d be a house of cigars, and a house of ice, and a house of matchsticks, and a house of muffins, and a house of floppy old boots, and a house that’s just a bunch of guys with really long necks huddling in a circle, and on and on and they all got cut because it made the cartoon run too long and we don’t ever hear about them anymore. Anyway, if you find this friend and can get a report about the pig with the house of cigars thing I’d appreciate it.

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

So much for natural trading ceilings.

342

The Conversation

My love’s father was thinking about town and said, “I wonder if the ice cream place is still serving.” My love went to the hypothetical: “Or what if there is no more service, and the place has degenerated to a Hobbesian battleground of all against all, customer, clerk, and pedestrians taking what they might without respect to law or custom, the Leviathan made manifest over the double-chocolate cookie dough?” They had this conversation over a year ago and I’m still thinking about it.

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

And now the index finished another trading day at 331. This is four days out of the last five it’s been here and analysts are already starting to form talk about a natural trading ceiling being at 333, what with that being kind of like a nice round number if you approach it with the right attitude.

331

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?

274

A Good Sign To See

First the routine news: comic strips on my mathematics blog. Plus I make reasons to include images of two of the comics so there’s no extra clicking through links for that. You like that, don’t you?

Now the exciting news. The auto care place that seems like it might be going through a slow-motion breakup announced by its sign board? It’s switched to this.

If that weren’t enough good news: they found a message that doesn’t require an ‘L’ or ‘7’ so they don’t have to use either of them upside-down to represent the other. I’m pretty sure that ‘W’ is a correct ‘W’ and not an upside-down ‘M’, based on how the vertical strokes on the ‘N’ appear.

Have to say, I don’t see how to read this except as a quiet announcement that there’s been some breakthrough in the cold-war-style relationship they’ve been working out. I’m glad. It’s been an awful year, compounding an absolutely brutal year. That an auto care place can have some chance at happiness can maybe be that first little flower proving that life will come again.

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

The index rose a point after traders finally got around to listening to the Flophouse Podcast Movie Minute thing where Elliott pitches his Ziggy movie and they’re not sure if they’re more entertained or just awestruck by how he went on for seven and a half minutes possibly without taking a breath.

224

Advertising-Wrapping Newspaper Continues Demands

If the Lansing City Community News demanding that I explain why New York execs are investing in Lansing’s fledgling fashion industry was a start, then this is a continuation. The next week’s installment of the four page “edition” of the Lansing State Journal starts out:

Investors are bringing their millions to Lansing. Here’s why

Alexander Alusheff

LANSING – Three multi-million dollar venture capital firms have opened in Greater Lansing in the past six months.

Investors from Ann Arbor and New York have come to invest in businesses started at Michigan State University and even local fashion designers.

The number of early stage investment firms in Greater Lansing now stands at six, on par with the Grand Rapids region.

The question is: Why?

The article goes on to explain there’s a bunch of venture capital firms intersted in Lansing now. There used to not be so many interested, and that was all right, but now there are more, and that’s all right too. What I really spot, though, are the points that Alusheff clearly got a note from someone that they just ran a piece about the fashion industry being invested in and made sure to mention that; and that the headline didn’t bother punctuating the “Here’s why” even though it’s so close to the period at the end of the first sentence. I’m not going to be staying up all night worrying about that now that I’ve seen it! Ha ha!

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

The Another Blog, Meanwhile index dropped eleven points and oh you would think it was the end of the world or something. Oh, the howling, oh the complaining, and meanwhile is anyone even looking at the futures market? No, because someone got the bright idea to start selling peeks at the futures market at 25 cents a pop and now suddenly everyone’s scared they’re going to run out of quarters. Really makes you wonder if a trading floor is worth the bother.

201

Is The Auto Care Place Close To A Relationship Breakthrough?

If you don’t care, maybe you might look at my mathematics blog since I had a couple of activity puzzles included in the roster of comic strips there this week.

Now I know everyone’s interested in whatever drama is going on with the auto care place up the street. If you’re just joining us, I’m pretty sure the auto care place up the street is caught in an Ashleigh Brilliant-esque state of cheerful despair, and possibly communicating a nasty breakup through its signboard. Anyway, for about two months or so it was the neutral-enough “The Best Way To Predict Your Future Is To Make It”. And this past week we’ve gotten this:

No word given on whether the other reasons to quit are still good reasons to quit. For example I am so tired of writing “quite” when I meant to write “quit” and somehow found myself unable to quite.

Is the auto care place trying to send word to its ex-friend that, angry as they both are after the breakup, it is open and amenable to reconciliation and that any gesture of good will would be met kindly and without bitter, blame-casting comments? I don’t know, so here’s the rabbit statue in our garden getting ready to punch a tulip.

Fun fact: some of our tulips are from bulbs bought in Holland, Michigan, while others were bought in Holland, the Netherlands. We don’t remember which. I grant this is only slightly fun, but it is a fact, and isn’t that reassuring in these troubled times?

Thank you for reading.

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

The index rose four points today just to show that it could and then went right back to where it had started from. Friends are growing concerned that it might be losing the ability to effortlessly socialize.

125

Something Else I Discovered In The Local Alt-Weekly

I didn’t discover this part, but my mathematics blog did a couple more comic strips yesterday. I would have posted that tomorrow, but I had other stuff that I wanted to take up that space. I might even post it yet.

Anyway, while last week’s issue of the local alt-weekly didn’t have a New In Town article to let me know what bars are opening, it did have the list of what bands are performing nearby. So now I know that whoever’s been booking acts for The Loft got sloppy about covering up how they’re also working for Moriarty’s Pub. Or else we had three musical acts lived that sitcom premise of having to cover two gigs at the same time in places that aren’t even next to each other. I hope they figured out where they should be and when. Also I hope they foiled international spies or something along the way because part of me still thinks the world should work like 1970s Hanna-Barbera cartoons.

Idle curiosity: how many bands do you figure named themselves ‘Karaoke’ in a fit of giddy joy and mutual hand-slapping before discovering why that isn’t actually a good idea?

Also if it seems like we have a lot of Reno’s in town yeah, it kind of does. We also have a lot of Tin Can Bars, it seems like, but they don’t have shows I guess. Nothing like we have Biggby Coffee shops, mind you. But nobody has as many of those as we have, not even us.

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

The index dropped another four points owing to investor confidence being shaken by this incredibly long line to get out of the parking lot. And yeah, the line got so long and so slow they just raised the barrier and waved people out without charging but, still, what was going on? That isn’t right.

121

Sorry For The Late Notice

Really am sorry, folks, but I only noticed this in the classifieds of our local alt-weekly and it’s an exciting opportunity. The City of Lansing, Michigan, is looking for someone who can supply it with bituminous material. You have to have your offer of the stuff turned in by Tuesday afternoon, so there probably isn’t time to go checking everything in your storage locker for signs of bituminosity. But if you have some on hand, this is your chance! Don’t miss it. You never know when fair-sized mid-Michigan cities will need material that’s got even one tuminous to it again. Bituminous is a special treat.

Yes, of course I wonder why the City of Lansing finds itself in need of bituminous materials in such an all-fired hurry, but they didn’t offer an explanation and I don’t feel our relationship is such that I can just barge in and ask. I mean, goodness, I’ve never even been introduced to Stephanie Robinson, I can’t go saying, “Hey! What are you up to with all the bituminous material already?” Heck, I live down the street from the alt-weekly’s offices and I don’t feel like I can ask them how they managed to spell it “untåil” in the eleventh line there. The City of Lansing Purchasing Office is way beyond me.

Also there was something about blueberry pies on Friday but we both missed that.

Finally over on my mathematics blog I just went crazy solving a puzzle from a FoxTrot Sunday strip and believe me, you want to see that. Someone does.

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

The index was slightly up today as traders found all kinds of material in their junk drawers and had expectations that at least some of it will be bituminous. What are the odds that none of it would be? Exactly. It just can’t happen.

127

In Which I Ask You To Check My Love’s And My Conclusions

If you’re like my wife and I you respond to a pretty snappy troll about the movie Blank Check by thinking of mid-90s monkey-based movie product Dunston Checks In. Naturally we looked it up on Wikipedia and found this under the “Reception” section:

The film had received overwhelming negative reviews from critics, and holds a 6% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Despite this, the film received positive reviews from several professional film reviewers, Desson Howe and Rita Kempley of The Washington Post referred to the film by saying “It ain’t half bad,” and “Plucky, prank-filled family farce” respectively.^[1] Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times stated that ‘Dunston Checks In’ “is a delightful and funny family film of exceptional high style.”, “as light as a souffle and just as delicious.”, and “plays like a tribute to the resourceful, unpretentious studio productions of the past.” giving the film five out of five stars.^[2] According to an article published in the Chicago Tribune, “The cast is talented, the hide-and-seek action is silly, and the bond between a sweet little boy and the adorable ape is touching.”^[3] Faye Dunaway’s performance in the film and in The Chamber earned her a Stinkers Bad Movie Award nomination and a Razzie Award nomination for Worst Supporting Actress. The film was also nominated at the 18th Youth in Film Awards (Young Artist Awards) for Best Family Feature Film: Musical or Comedy, and Eric Lloyd for Best Performance in a Feature Film – Actor Age Ten or Under. The film was successful at the box office in India, where it was dubbed as Ek Bandar Hotel Ke Andar.^[4]

Are we correct to read this, especially that copy-editing mess that is the Kevin Thomas statement, as the syntactically-scarred battleground of an edit war between factions who insist Dunston Checks In was critically acclaimed and ones who insist Dunston Checks In was not? Also, either Wikipedia doesn’t mention it or else Dunston Checks In has somehow not spawned a complicated cinematic universe of like twelve direct-to-DVD sequels you never heard of but get tangled up with the universes of Air Bud or Alpha and Omega or something like that. Is that a relief or somehow a weird shame? Didn’t The Land Before Time get so many sequels the last one was about the dinosaurs at the Battle of Manzikert or something? Please show your work.

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

The Another Blog, Meanwhile slid sideways four points today, but since we haven’t any way of measuring that it remains at the same old 116 as last time.

116

In Which Things Are A Little On The Nose Here

Just saying.

Oh, also, I want to point out my mathematics blog, with its weekly review of comic strips that mention mathematics in some way. Yesterday I put in the comics for the week prior and that included Pi Day so you can imagine just what sort of merriment was filling the comics pages. OK, that was filling three or so strips worth. But it was there. There isn’t a lot more to say on this point, but I want to say just a touch more because of the Responsive Design theme I’ve got on this. It rearranges stuff based on how wide the browser is. And with the browser I post stuff in, at the width I like it being open to, I have this slender column on the left with a posting’s dateline and tags and Leave A Comment link and all that. And if I include a picture that’s far enough down the page that it’s past the Leave A Comment link then it gets to use that horizontal space for itself. So it gets to appear bigger by virtue of an optical illusion created by having more horizontal and vertical space. (It’s a very convincing illusion.) And I like the picture bigger, so that’s why I’m going on until I have enough words that I can

Technically speaking I do not know whether there was any pizza in the box or not, but the event which I did not stage works equally well either way. The instruction card mentions the “Bodacious Skill Shot”, which serves as a reminder that there are some bits of vocabulary shared between Manhattan-dwelling turtle ninjas and Great Smokey Mountains-dwelling moonshiner Snuffy Smith.

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

The index dropped one point today as Dan thought he saw a sewing magazine promise “three alternatives to clapping” and he was stumped trying to think of a third. The trading floor broke out into one faction pointing out that the magazine cover promised alternatives to stitching and another faction saying sure, there’s snapping fingers, and there’s stomping on the floor, but what would be a third? And then the day ended in squabbles about whether it counts as an alternative to clapping if you slap your hand against some other body part, like your thigh or something.

126

Snip, Snap

My love discovered on Wikipedia the old English game of snap-dragon (“also known as snapdragon”), and it’s a bundle of wonderful things. The game, apparently, was one in which you poured brandy into a wide, shallow bowl, set it on fire, and then try to grab raisins out of the brandy. Only a cheater would fail to put raisins in. And yes, you might get burned, but that’s … I guess that’s the dragon part of things. It was popular from about the 16th through the 19th centuries, which reminds us that was also the height of competitive shin-kicking. Which is not even my joke but was part of the Cotswold Olimpick Games alongside beating each other with cudgels. Also competitive dancing while the opposite team throws a beer-soaked rag at you.

Anyway, there’s a lot that’s wonderful about the article so I recommend you read it yourself. If you can’t be bothered, fine, but do please enjoy this low-scale edit war playing out in tossing a heap of sentences onto each other and sprinkling [citation needed] tags on the opponent’s pieces:

Nevertheless, children often burnt their little hands or mouths playing this game,^[21] which may have led to the practice mostly dying out in the early 20th century.^{[citation needed]} In some families, this tradition continues to be practiced and enjoyed even into the 21st century.^{[citation needed]}

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

The index rose six points today when traders looked in on TrekBBS and discovered how many people are honestly, sincerely concerned for the actor who played Kes on Star Trek: Voyager. She’s been going through some rough times and had some legal trouble and it looks like she’s getting through it and it’s just really heartwarming to see how many people care and wish her well and, you know, for everything that’s wrong with the world right now, people worrying about the person who played Kes is the sweet sort of thing we need.

91

Service With A Smile

I forget what exactly got me looking up the “Matawan-style” Texaco gas stations of the 60s, although it’s probably a sense of home patriotism. I grew up not far from Matawan, New Jersey, famous for … being the namesake of this one kind of Texaco gas station. Also for two of the shark attacks of 1916. Anyway I wasn’t sure what made something a Matawan-style Texaco gas station of the 60s as opposed to, say, a Manalapan Texaco or a Manahawkin Texaco. There’s a lot of places in New Jersey with names that sound kind of alike, because we paid the Leni Lenape three thousand dollars back in like 1804 to go away and leave their places behind and stop making us feel guilty about it, and this is what we’ve got.

Anyway, the Matawan-style Texaco design question led me on an Internet voyage that revealed, wonderfully, there are enthusiasts of different gas station design who gather in communities that talk about, say, spotting where a Matawan-style station got mutilated but was still identifiable in Benton Harbor, Michigan. And then sometimes interrupt to explain how the Teague was a more versatile design anyway. And all this stuff about gas station architecture fandom has me feeling like the world might just be a good idea despite it all.

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

The index dropped four points today on revelations that Automan came out on DVD last year and we’re only hearing about this now? By accident? What did you think we were paying you for, Miss Tessmacher?

99

In Which The Pasta Was Nothing Special

The comic strips that don’t have stories to over-explain but do have someone say “algebra” in them I talk about over on my other blog.

The soup was Rack of Lima Bean. From the Blind Squirrel Tavern, Fremont, Michigan. (We were there for the pinball.)

No, I am not engaged in the lazy form of comedy in which someone notices a sign has a mistake in it. “Slidders” are a specialty of the restaurant, where they make extremely thin hamburger patties fried on an incredibly hot metal sheet. To keep the burgers from overcooking they’re literally slid down the heavily greased sheet. They’re then smothered under almost a soup of boiled onions and mushrooms, but that’s incidental. If this seems strange, is it really odder than planked shad? Anyway, I just want you to know they’re the tastestoostiest.

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

The index rose thirteen points today and — wait, what, really? No, huh, that’s exactly what the point-o-meter says it did. Well, we have no explanation for this phenomenon.

109

105 Minutes Of Your Life You Won’t Get Back, Unlike Any Other 105 Minutes Somehow?

So the overhead business is that my mathematics blog had another comic-strip-review day. No pictures, but you can get to places with pictures over there. That’s something, right?

In other news, my love was directed to a pinball podcast from 2007. It features something like an interview with Python Anghelo, crazypants designer behind video games like Joust and pinball games like Popeye Saves The Earth, the game with the most intense backstory ever when you consider a Popeye pinball game really just needs to set up stuff that he can then punch.

The interview is enlightening because it tells me what it would be like to interview a Dr Bronner’s Soap Label that had gone into game design. I think the host asks two, maybe three question, one of which gets answered, and then just lets Anghelo talk. Here’s the specific episode, TOPcast show 42 from the 1st of July, 2007. In at least one point Anghelo seems to suggest he composed poems for guidance for his game concepts, and I don’t know of any of them which have come to light, but the poem for the cancelled Zingy Bingy must have been to die for. Or to kill your game division for.

For those who somehow don’t know the big names of 80s/90s pinball design: there were a bunch of big names in 80s/90s pinball design. Don’t worry about who’s who. Zingy Bingy was a concept for making an “adult” pinball game. According to legend it featured things like flippers that were shaped to resemble a part of the male anatomy which was not fingers and which could under the right circumstances grow. Also according to legend the project went on until an actual grownup at headquarters heard this was going on. That covers the essential background. Go, enjoy listening, and pause anytime you start feeling dizzy.

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

The Another Blog, Meanwhile index rose two points before trading was suspended in order that everyone could make valentines to give to all the other traders, thank you. Also to wonder about people who complain that they make kids give valentines to everybody else in class these days because they’re all pretty sure that’s the way it was done back when they were kids too, and it’s not like it was any hassle back then.

103

Why I Am Not Paying Attention To You

I’m sorry, bunch of fun pinball friends with whom we got together after league at a Buffalo Wild Wings restaurant to figure out what vegetarians could eat there. (We could have the Diet Coke, or we could lick the clean silverware.) But the TV was showing the World’s Strongest Man competition and I couldn’t help it. If I understood things right they flew six pyramid-shaped men to Nairobi so they could lift a wooden Viking boat. I don’t know why. Maybe Nairobi over-invested in Viking boat making and the Nairobi Viking Boat Industrial Board thought having some large men lifting them was just what they needed to get through the downturn. But you can see how watching that would be more fascinating than hearing even the latest gossip about the state’s competitive pinball community. And if you don’t, then consider that the next event was pairs of men going out and lifting giant stone balls to put atop cylinders. And that’s not even counting the harness set up to lift and set down Toyota Borings. In short, I may have a new favorite pastime, and it’s watching very big men picking things up. Send help.

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

The Another Blog, Meanwhile index returned to 102 today as investors believed they might have left their keys behind. The keys turned out to be in the other pocket and everyone had a good chuckle about this.

102

I Just Need You To Tell Me Of Course I’m Completely Right About This

So given that the International House of Pancakes we went to over the weekend saw these phenomena:

• They were “out” of crepes, a thing made on-demand from eggs, milk, and butter.
• They could not split a check between three people at the table because, the server told us, that old policy made it too easy for dine-and-dashers.
• According to the sign at the register they no longer sold gift cards by credit or debit card but by cash only.
• The server asked us for advice on where in the area to buy a new SD card for his phone because apparently he took it in for servicing and they swiped his old bigger card for a smaller one.
• The server also talked to us a bit about how his phone’s news app normally required him to log in to stream any programs but for the inauguration it didn’t.
• Another sign at the register asked for comments to be sent to an address at Yahoo that had number in the user name.

So check me on this: there’s, like, at most a four percent chance we were at a legitimate IHOP and we were really at some weirdly elaborate counterfeit, right?

In short: always go to pancake places late nights on the weekends. You’re missing something otherwise.

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

The index stayed level through most of the day of trading until someone pointed out this would make it look like they weren’t doing anything. “Well,” said someone, “why don’t we raise it by three points?” This was reduced to two points in committee. The someone was Louis, who’s been taking the blame for breaking the George Foreman grill last week.

106

On Tour with P T Barnum

I picked up a biography of P T Barnum because, I don’t know, I had some strange desire to read about a renowned showman and humbug artist who chose to go into public service and did his best, despite hardships, to stand for the working class without compromising his Universalist faith. I don’t know. Anyway, in chapter seven of A H Saxon’s P T Barnum: The Legend And The Man came this, from his first tour of Europe, which just delights me so:

While they were in Brussels, Barnum decided to visit the site of the Battle of Waterloo, to which he and a friend set out one morning at the early hour of 4 am. He could not help being impressed by the brisk traffic he saw there in reputed “relics” of the battle and by the whopping lies told by the guides who swarmed about them. After one of these had pointed out with great authority the place where Wellington had his station, the spot where Sir William Ponsonby fell, etc, Barnum asked if he could show them where Captain Tippitimichet of the Connecticut Fusileers was killed. This the guide promptly did. The precise spots where some twenty other fictitious officers from such exotic locales as Coney Island, Hoboken, and Saratoga Springs had fallen were also obligingly pointed out, following which the showman could not resist asking where “Brigadier General James Gordon Bennett [ editor of the New York Herald and an unshakeable Barnum-hater ] had given up the ghost”. This time the guide, who claimed to have been present when Bennett died, excelled himself and recalled the famous general’s last words: “Portez-moi de l’eau!”

… Or so Barnum told the newspapers back home.

Also, hey, mathematics comics, there were some more of them. Maybe the last Jumble I’ll be able to run. Don’t know yet.

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

The Another Blog, Meanwhile index reached the psychologically baloney level of 100 today as the traders compromised on buying the new, larger, George Foreman grill and tabling the panini press issue. Supporting the decision is it turns out the sale on panini presses ended last Sunday so spending all this time on it was kind of dumb.

100