The Case For: Allows you to book time as “cooking” while you’re being angry at people on phones.
The Case Against: Is just “heating”.
Froogle
The Case For: Unknowable hours of fun trying to remember if this was a real product or service that Google offered at one point or a name someone made up to make fun of Google.
The Case Against: Evokes but does not deliver frogs. Unless it was a way to deliver frogs, in which case, it’s not anymore.
April Fool’s Day
The Case For: Annual view of what corporate decision-making judges to be whimsy.
The Case Against: Honestly it peaked that time in like 1997 when all the comic strip artists swapped except that the Drabble guy couldn’t find a partner so just drew his own strip left-handed.
Snooze Alarms
The Case For: Everything great about being woken up, and at nine-minute intervals.
The Case Against: Association with the word ‘alarm’ is diminishing the fun value of the word ‘snooze’.
Easter in a Leap Year
The Case For: Can prank people into believing that the leap day means Lent was 41 days long.
The Case Against: If you thought of the prank around Ash Wednesday when anyone would have cared, now you have to sit and hope you remember this little touch of whimsy for 2028, and also this you is me, Joseph.
Organization
The Case For: Allows you to know what you have and how to get it.
The Case Against: Makes unavoidable the knowledge you have too much of the stuff you don’t ever need, too little of the stuff you do need, and no way to improve the situation.
The Case For: Unstoppable, unceasing stream of bubbles emerging from your mouth, nose, and ears for a full week.
The Case Against: None.
Self-Checkout
The Case For: Allows you to buy the week’s groceries without having to interact with anybody except the three different store employees who have to clear your good name from the AI camera that thinks you pocketed an 18-pack of Charmin Extra Charm.
The Case Against: How the person in line waiting for a register to open up glares at you, convinced of your incompetence, when the register demands you insert a coupon you’ve already dropped in and blown into the slot and pushed another coupon into the slot to rattle around some and it still won’t register.
Spice Racks
The Case For: Orderly place to keep your lifetime supply of eight bay leaves.
The Case Against: In addition to being an atrocity, information gathered from spices this way is filled with confabulation, and so is operationally useless.
Singing
The Case For: It’s like talking but with even more complicated rules!
The Case Against: Turns out nearly all songs were not authored by Joe Raposo to be sung by Muppets.
Laundry Chutes
The Case For: Rare socially acceptable chute one can still have in the home.
The Case Against: Clothes getting hung up on a very slightly loose nail or a part where one panel isn’t quite a perfect match to the one below that’s always eight feet away from any opening you can stick a broom handle through effectively and you have to just keep jabbing the laundry logjam around until something finally comes through and you get the dread Pantsvalanche raining down on your head.
Agreeing To Help The Neighbor
The Case For: Lets you appear to be friendly even to the guy in the rusted-out van who says he lives two blocks over and, by the Benjamin Franklin effect of psychology, makes you like the guy more.
The Case Against: After he’s explained twice that he’s trying to find his heavy green 507 (something) that his son saw in the yard just yesterday you can’t ask what it was he was looking for again and have to just promise you’ll keep an eye out in case you see it and then be stuck the rest of the day trying to think what would be a bright green 507 (something) a guy might be looking for.
90s Web Comics
The Case For: Introduced readers to the new creative potential of discovering a refreshing comic and then doing an archive-dive through years of material watching it evolve from a sketchy thing about mismatched college roommates into something with real dramatic and humorous maturity, in time for the cartoonist to go on hiatus a year, then post an apology about life and then post three comics in three weeks rebooting the series from the start, only way better-drawn and without the charm, before disappearing from the Internet forever.
The Case Against: Maybe there was something unintendedly wrong about the secondary character who’s part of the secret conspiracy that rules the world.
Horse People
The Case For: Are living beings who are somehow not intimidated by horses.
The Case Against: Every horse is a bundle of 284 freakish and complicated life-threatening health issues slouching against each other, so every Horse Person has a story they’re ready to deploy on you of the time this past week that sixteen of the issues started acting up and they had to spend four hundred hours hip-deep in horse innards and organic secretions in colors that don’t even exist, but it’s okay because their horse showed their appreciation by biting their ear hard enough they had to go to the emergency room.
Sponges
The Case For: Excellent way to transport dampness to new locations.
The Case Against: Freezing up with the memory that they’re animals and wondering what you should feel about this for upwards of twenty minutes instead of just wiping the F-R-O-G jam off the counter.
That One Dream
The Case For: It’s amazing how well you did keeping the refrigerator and the oven balanced on such precarious 18-inch-long flimsy sticks of woods despite all the people running around and threatening to knock it over or do some other mayhem!
The Case Against: Offers you no insight into how to balance your fridge or oven even three inches off the floor, let alone eighteen inches.
Mnemonics
The Case For: Puts your brain’s power to remember anything embarrassingly dumb to work for you.
The Case Against: So you remember stuff like how many counties are in Ohio.
Constellations
The Case For: Organizes random patterns by giving them names that make sense if you see four times as many stars as you can anymore and remember the myth where Antipodes tricked the gods into making us forget what we came into the room for.
The Case Against: Carl Sagan did this projection for Cosmos where in like a hundred thousand years the Big Dipper is going to look more like a radio telescope even though now, only 45 years after Cosmos, radio telescopes don’t look like that anymore.
Ideas Written Down in the Middle of the Night
The Case For: Free ideas you didn’t even have to think to have!
The Case Against: Idea is “tuna banjo but elevated”.
Etymology
The Case For: Every word has a story, and those words are made of other stories, so there’s plenty of story-hearing to get.
The Case Against: Those stories are all some nonsense like “bad first appeared in 13th century English as a word meaning ‘the part of an apricot which one eats’ and by metaphor came to mean any of the bounty of creation and by Chaucer’s time meant ‘the beard of God’ and so by a 16th century stage tradition of twin brothers who enter the priesthood or go to sea so took on a meaning of ‘sailing’, from which it came to mean the arrival of tropical birds promising easy sailing’ and so by the 18th century meant ‘the moment a shipwreck becomes inevitable’ and, by 1974 had generalized to its modern sense of any unpleasant situation or event or person”.
Harmlessly Weird Weather
The Case For: Child-like glee at how it’s white-out conditions but the precipitate is all this light fluffy ball stuff that doesn’t even make the sidewalks slippery.
The Case Against: Gets weird freak names like ‘graupel’.
Candles
The Case For: Most convenient way to bring fire to any tabletop cake.
The Case Against: Candlepower? Not actually powerful.
Hot Takes
The Case For: Speedruns judgement.
The Case Against: Turns out judgement is a completion goal.
Bread
The Case For: Turns your bananas into cake.
The Case Against: Whether you want it or not.
Hair (the musical)
The Case For: Every viewing lets you wonder what’s the part where Apollo 13 astronaut Jim Lovell walked out, after he’d gone and named his Lunar Module after that song from it and everything.
The Case Against: Wanting the lyric to be “o say, can you see my two eyes” because you think that’ll make the scansion work better and they sing it wrong every time. If it is the scansion. Maybe it’s the portcullis. Or the lepidoptera. Ask a music major.
Geography
The Case For: If there’s an easier way to get a series of maps of Mid-Atlantic and New England municipal population growth divided by dwindling revenues of canals within a 15-mile radius from 1819 through 1907 nobody has thought of it yet.
The Case Against: The geography department has posters up promising potential majors that “Geographers Know Where It’s At!”
Cheese Nevada
The Case For: Makes more grilled cheese sandwiches than actual Nevada.
The Case Against: Somehow, also makes fewer grilled cheese sandwiches than actual Nevada.
HDMI
The Case For: Plugs into the TV, seems to do whatever TVs need plugging-in for.
The Case Against: Your really tech-oriented friend has strong opinions that seem negative but the only way to find out is to ask them and when you do that they start telling you.
House Paint
The Case For: Is a socially acceptable way to make your house larger, but just by a little bit each time.
The Case Against: The previous layer is so awful it has to be scraped off, setting back progress in growing your house to absorb the neighborhood.
Jigsaw Puzzles
The Case For: Finally a way to stump your jigsaws!
The Case Against: Will round off the number of puzzles so, like, the 1000-piece puzzle is actually 992 pieces or 1023 and they figure nobody is going to care!
Debauchery
The Case For: You hear stories that make it sound like quite a bit of fun.
The Case Against: It’s comfortable having a life of bauchery and it would be so nice to stay in tonight and re-watch The Wrath of Khan instead.
Vaseline
The Case For: Can serve as an eye-rhyme to “baseline” in a poem emergency.
The Case Against: No eye-rhymes ever work.
Mall Directories
The Case For: Even Ozymandias can’t top that feeling of the impermanence of existence from knowing that You Are Here but the adequate shoe store promised to be in the Bamberger’s wing is not.
The Case Against: 75% of all the store categories are Boring Stuff but subdivided even more.
Infinite Scroll
The Case For: Not truly infinite.
The Case Against: Not truly a scroll.
Keychains
The Case For: Provide a convenient way to be sure your keys hang on the hook for keys.
The Case Against: Which you forget to use.
Roman Numerals
The Case For: Turns numbers into spelling without using algebra.
The Case Against: Every number between 1245 (MCCXLV) and 1889 (MDCCCLXXXIX) looks goofy and wrong.
Happy March! This year I didn’t forget about the seasonal fun of pitting things against other things!
Mulberries
The Case For: Bushes keep monkeys, weasels amused for indefinite times.
The Case Against: What is a ‘mul’?
The 1931 Movie Of _Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde_
The Case For: Four of the seven credited actors have last names all starting with ‘H’ and two have first names starting ‘H’.
The Case Against: Everyone in the film says his name as “gee-kill”.
I thought I had one more day left in the March Pairwise Brackety Contest Thing and I was getting all ready to work on acetylcholinesterase versus a topic I hadn’t picked yet. I was sure about the acetylcholinesterase, though. I bet you know why, too. It’s because it does such great stuff with neurotransmission. And also I swear I read somewhere that there’s this neat medical mystery where the body produces a lot of acetylcholinesterase. More than you’d think. Like, I don’t know how much acetylcholinesterase you figure the body makes in a day, but more than that. And it gets rid of it too, and the thing I remember reading said we aren’t sure exactly how the body makes and disposes of so much of the stuff. Only maybe it wasn’t acetylcholinesterase, but some other neurotransmitter instead? Or neurotransmitter-related chemical? Anyway I can’t find it and I can’t think of how to go searching for it without DuckDuckGo concluding there’s something wrong with me. And I thought bringing it up as a pairwise contest was my best bet to have someone tell me what I was talking about and whether whatever I read this in was even the slightest bit correct. And now that chance is lost, at least until next March. Too bad!
The letter G
The Case For: Its design, especially the lowercase, in typefaces where it’s two ovals connected by a descender? Just gorgeous.
The Case Against: Creeping in on consonant work that ‘J’ could be doing.
Bodies
The Case For: Allow one to experience comforting showers, large bowls of brothy soup, putting on new socks, and having petting-zoo animals lick your cheek.
The Case Against: Pretty much everything else.
Boxes
The Case For: Low-cost way to create the Halloween costume of “kid wearing boxes, I don’t know, maybe they’re a robot or a washing machine or something”.
The Case Against: Otherwise just a mechanism to turn piles of things into rectangular piles of things.
Land
The Case For: Best way to finish an airplane ride.
The Case Against: Without continuous tending will spontaneously morph into strip malls.
HTML’s span element
The Case For: Span, short for ‘spaniel’, lets you add a dog to any web page.
The Case Against: Semantic confusion as this adds any kind of dog, not just spaniels.
Pizzicato
The Case For: Thoroughly fun sound to hear and one of music’s beautiful words to say.
The Case Against: When you’re nine years old and taking violin lessons it hurts your fingers to do.
Trivia
The Case For: Is no better way to know what company Hi from Hi and Lois works for.
The Case Against: Really aren’t any bars or restaurants hosting trivia nights that have a deep enough menu to support going back for a whole season.
$20,090
The Case For: You don’t know anyone whose life wouldn’t be considerably improved for years if they got an unexpected twenty thousand and ninety dollars, like, today.
The Case Against: Still, just think how much even better twenty thousand, one hundred and fifteen dollars would be.
Old Couches
The Case For: Are at peace with sitting in weird poses on them.
The Case Against: Feeling of helplessness about the cushion that’s worn down because you always sit on it being right next to the mint-condition cushion that nobody ever sits on.
Viscosity
The Case For: Keeps every beverage from having the same mouth feel.
The Case Against: Is part of how the entropic heat-death of the universe happens, although you can say that about everything really.
Pangaea
The Case For: Turns out to be just the most recent supercontinent, not the only one, and they’re looking at making supercontinents again, and isn’t that cool?
The Case Against: Nerds used to say how they would put a “Pangaea Reunification Front” on their desk to make HR send out a memo about not posting political stuff and we were expected to pretend we believed that happened.
Beethoven
The Case For: Has a crater on Mercury named for him.
The Case Against: Only wrote the one opera, which is only one more than I’ve written, and I can’t even write music.
We’re finally through sixteen March Pairwise Brackety Contest Thing matchups! We’ve reached the stage of The Last Quartet! Got your bets in for who will win?
Dinosaurs
The Case For: Holding up really well to the burden of being the only thing that everybody would like to hear a cool fact about, like, right now.
The Case Against: There’s people trying to tell us T Rexes were just like chickens and that’s not doing T Rexes or chickens any good.
Quadrilaterals
The Case For: Most important part of geometry that also sounds like a muscle group.
The Case Against: Word sounds like you’re too good for rhombuses.
Merism
The Case For: Is the technical name for phrases where you match up opposites to refer to all of a thing, like, “high and low” or “big and small” or “young and old”.
The Case Against: Now that you know that it will never be asked at your Jeopardy! tryout.
Blue Jeans
The Case For: If you wear a pair of them enough they get very comfortable.
The Case Against: There are other genres of pants that are comfortable right away when you buy them.
Sesquicentennials
The Case For: Good compromise between centennials and bicentennials.
The Case Against: Does nothing to prepare you for the sestercentennial-versus-semiquincentennial debate, although you do have a hundred years to worry about it.
Protocols
The Case For: Are an essential period for the development of adequate cols.
The Case Against: The cool things are always going against them.
Hegelian Synthesis
The Case For: I mean, what else are you going to do with your thesis and antithesis?
The Case Against: Still seems like there should be a new direction to take things, though.
The United States of America
The Case For: Population and land-area leader compared to other generically-named countries like the United Kingdom, South Africa, the Central African Republic, and the United Provinces of the Netherlands.
The Case Against: Everything in the country needs you to fill out a form and yet with all that practice nobody’s any good at bureaucracy.
Another Blog, Meanwhile 