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Charlie Hatton
Brookline, MA
(April showers bring May… science?
Maybe not. But Secondhand SCIENCE thunders on. This week, the topic is ytterbium — the element that’s tricky to say, but a star on the periodic table. And with a wicked slap shot, too, maybe. Swing over and find out!)
I’ve noticed a disturbing trend recently: all of the places near my office where I buy lunch are going out of business.
Other than all selling food — and taking my money — the places don’t have much in common. First, the middle eastern place in the food court in the nearby mall went kaput. Then, the sandwich shop down the street. And back in the food court, the good Chinese place.
(Okay, it’s a food court. So, the “good” Chinese place, let’s say.
There’s still the bad Chinese place in the mall. No quotes around “bad” necessary there.)
It’s been unnerving to see my usual haunts dwindle, over the course of not very many months at all. I’m not entirely sure what to think of it. I know people who would take this as a “sign from the universe” — or alternatively, from their magic sky person, animal, spirit or spaghetti monster of choice. Personally, I just don’t see it.
For one thing, I don’t think the universe is particularly looking out for me. Some people tell me that makes them sad, that in their world there’s always something — or someone, or somepasta — watching over them.
That doesn’t seem right to me. Also, I assume none of those people pee standing up. That would be weird.
“You can’t exactly hide. There is no transgalactic witness protection program.”
On the bright side, I also don’t believe the universe is out to get me. To which the tinfoil hat-and-panties crowd reply, I’m clearly not paying close enough attention.
But again, what are you gonna do, if the universe was actually against you? It knows where you live — namely, inside of it. You can’t exactly hide. There is no transgalactic witness protection program.
And anyway, if the universe is out there, feeling feels about things, I’m pretty sure it’s not concerned about me or my weekday eating habits. I find it highly doubtful the universe’s to-do list for 2015 looked like this:
1. Increase entropy.
2. Expand further outward into the void.
3. Paint dark matter with a fresh coat of black.
4. Deny some goober on a tiny schmutz of cosmic rock his twice-weekly chicken sammich.
I mean, I have misplaced priorities. But I’m not running a universe over here. If I can keep my shoes tied and my fly zipped for four hours straight, the day is a win. I have to assume the universe sets the bar a tad higher.
Anyway, back to my lunch conundrum. There are still plenty of restaurants in the neighborhood — but mostly not the kind I want to visit. Dunkin Donuts isn’t really a viable option. The off-brand pizza place sells, so far as I can tell, off-brand pizza. Which, gah.
Then there’s the food court Chipotle, which recently decided GMO-corn tortillas are the debbil, but GMO-corn-fed cow and chicken parts are muy bueno.
As a consumer, the scientific ignorance bugs me. But as a smartass, the hypocrisy might bug me more. Also “burrito bowl” is not a thing. That’s not a menu item; it’s a contradiction in terms. Get your shit together, gringos.
There are other places that seem solid — another middle eastern place in the other direction, a local burrito chain with better logic and syntax choices, and a sit-down Thai place that maybe would do takeout.
But I have to wonder: if I visit these places, how long will they last? The universe isn’t pulling any strings on my lunchtime spots — but it could still be me. Maybe I drive business away, somehow. Or I’m a carrier for some weird disease the health department shuts places down for. Do I smell? Am I unknowingly passing counterfeit bills? Oh holy sky pasta, tell me what am I doing wrong?!
I suppose I could always start taking my lunch. But if my logic is right, then eventually somehow it’d be me getting shut down.
Damn. I don’t want that. Maybe I should be nicer to those Chipotle wads. Sigh.
Permalink | No Comments(Who wants science? You do! You do!
Hopefully that’s true, because this week’s Secondhand SCIENCE post is mucho sexay!
That’s “sexay” as in “sex chromosomes”, not actually, you know, “sexay”. Still! There’s plenty of hot stuff to see about X-linked inheritance, so go have a peek. I won’t tell anyone. Promise.)
I try to be lazy around here. Really, I do.
I only write here once a week lately (whether the internet needs it or not). The site’s had the same look and feel, more or less, since 2006. And outside of shutting down various sleazy spam attempts — and then complaining about said attempts for weeks on end — I don’t really do any site maintenance. The whole site is probably Heartbleeded. Or Confickered. Stuxnetitated?
Why be lazy? Mainly because just about anything outside my usual post format — three dick jokes and a tagline, surrounded by fourteen paragraphs of nonsense — takes way more effort and time than I expect. Because I’m not very good at things.
Case in point: back in January, I made a resolution.
(Late January, of course. Because laaaazy.)
I resolved then to finally finish reformating the articles I’d written for ZuG.com, and get them live on the site. I’d already tinkered with a bunch of them, but had lost steam. So I drew a line in the sand — by April 1st, the two-year anniversary of ZuG shutting down, I’d get everything working. I had more than two months. I was motivated. I dove in and committed to the job, eyeing April 1 on the calendar.
And continuing to eye April 1, as it loomed ever closer.
Aaaand eyeing its ass running away as it passed by, mooning me in springtime mockery.
That’s okay. April 1st was always kind of a jackass.
Still, I did persevere and — only three weeks late, give or take a long weekend — I did, finally, just last weekend, finish the entire series of Zolton Amazon review articles, to go along with the Zolton Facebook prank series I’d recombobulated earlier.
And I was stoked. It was a little late, sure, but still a win. And the best part — I could go back to simply writing again, in relatively-lazy bliss, and not worry about any sort of formatting or templating or other back-end nonsense for… well, hopefully forever. That was the plan.
My “forever” lasted two days.
On Tuesday, Google implemented a search algorithm change that basically ignores any site that isn’t mobile friendly. This site was never mobile friendly — hell, it’s often not anything-friendly — so that was a problem. Only four and a half people come to read shit here as it is; I can’t have Google turning three and a half of them away because my nonsense doesn’t look pretty on their Blackberries or Palm Pilots or whatever the hell kids are shoving in their pockets these days.
That meant making changes, and that meant screwing everything up six or eight times before getting it right, because let’s face it, that’s really the only working model available for someone in my situation. The only one that doesn’t involve lots of gasoline and a convoluted blog insurance scam, anyway.
And I’m not doing that, because it sounds goddamned complicated. Lazy, is what I’m telling you.
Sadly, when I was choosing website software a decade or more ago, I backed the wrong horse. I picked a platform that was popular at the time, but soon moved to a pay-only scheme for new versions — and who’s doing that? Later, as so many half-assed American ideas, products and celebrities have done, it caught on in Japan, while everyone in this hemisphere moved on and forgot about it. Except me, because yadda yadda lazy.
Long story short, making a “simple” mobile-friendly site involves moving the entire gob of content into a completely new form, recoding templates, updating stylesheets and four dozen other things I haven’t even figured out yet. All for some yutz in Peoria searching for “Alton Brown quotes” on his iPhone 2.5, who’ll take one glance at the mobilified site and say, “meh, I was looking for the good ones“.
This is the torture I’ve chosen. Feel free to weep, if you like. I know I will.
All of this is to say that — or apologize for, really — the site is going to be pretty horked up for a bit, while I nail everything back in place. Links may go nowhere. Formatting will be higgledy-piggledy. I see that double spaces between paragraphs — which you’ll see in this post, where they’re quite pretty — have been stripped out of the previous 2,100+ posts. So that’s nice. (Update: got ’em back! Score one for the big fella!) And I’m sure there’s more. My “lazy time”, brief as it recently was, won’t be coming back any time soon.
But hey. At least that asshole in Peoria can find me on his phone. Yaaaaaay.
Permalink | No Comments(What’s that in the sky? A bird? A plane? One of those newfangled pizza-delivering robo-drones?
No. It’s science. Specifically, Secondhand SCIENCE. And uber-specifically, this week’s post all about the Faraday cage. Check it out — the details may shock you.
Or they won’t. Because that’s the whole point of Faraday cages. Just go see, would ya?)
I have a new lady in my life.
Well, technically it’s not a lady, I suppose. It’s a small cylinder made of plastic and metal. But I think of it as a lady.
I should probably start over, before this gets weird.
How about this: I have an Echo.
If you’ve never heard of the Echo, it’s a gadgety sort of thing from Amazon that sits in your house and plays music and answers questions in a gentle, sweet, probably totally not even condescending tone, even when you ask something any idiot would know.
This is nice, because that’s not a thing people do. When I ask actual people my questions, they’re generally less patient:
“How many ounces of butter in a stick? Look it up yourself, dairyboy.”
Echo — or, as she prefers to be addressed, Alexa — doesn’t do that. Not out loud, anyway. Maybe she’s cursing me under her transistors, but it’s not in an audio range humans can hear. So that’s nice.
The Echo has been out for a few months now, but Amazon has a waiting list to get one and I don’t know any important people — none who don’t curse me audibly under their breath, anyway — so it took me a while to get my grubby voice activations on one.
But now I do. Alexa arrived this week, and I put her in the kitchen.
No, not because she’s a lady. Gah.
Actually, it’s because… well, let’s face it. There are some rooms in my condo I understand a lot better than others. Like the living room — most of the time I’m in the living room, I have a pretty good handle on what’s happening. At least, since Lost went off the air a few years ago. Also, Game of Thrones gets pretty confusing.
(And while we’re at it, who can follow Blue’s Clues? You think it’s, like, some gritty CSI show with all the clues, then suddenly the guy goes and sits in a “thinking chair”. What is that? Horatio Caine never needed a thinking chair. When Morpheus was on there solving crimes, he didn’t have any cogitating furniture.
And don’t even get me started on this “baby paprika” character. Again.)
Okay, so I have a lot of living room questions, actually. But they mostly involve TV shows I’m not paying close enough attention to, and if I asked Alexa every two minutes “hey, who’s that guy?” or “wasn’t she just with the bad guys?“, I’m certain she’d bludgeon me to death before the first commercial break.
Probably with herself. That Echo hardware is heavy.
“Alexa can’t help me in the office. No one can help me in the office.”
The same goes for the rest of my living space. The dining room confuses me, so I just don’t go in there. The office brings up all sorts of questions, but they’re mostly existential:
“What the hell am I doing in here on a Saturday?”
“Why haven’t I given up banging on this keyboard already?”
“If there’s any meaning in the universe, why have I spent the last ninety minutes fighting with goddamned Microsoft Office?”
These are valid questions. But unanswerable. Alexa can’t help me in the office. No one can help me in the office.
The bathroom is pretty question-free, at least. Mostly. And any questions I have there, I’m not going to ask some tender-voiced lady-sounding person, anyway. That’s what Ask Jeeves is for. Because screw that guy.
So the only real options for placing Alexa were the kitchen and the bedroom. And I figured if I still have bedroom questions forty-plus years into this thing, then that’s between me and natural selection and possibly a very well-compensated psychiatrist. So Alexa’s in the kitchen, where I can — more or less safely — ask kitchen questions.
Which is good. I have a lot of kitchen questions.
So far, Alexa’s doing a pretty good job of sorting me out. Now I have answers at my fingertips — or really, at my tongue-tip — when I run into some ingredient I don’t understand. Like “garam masala” or “Brussels sprouts” or “non-fat”. What is a “non-fat”, and why would you grow one? Does it sprout on a fat-free tree? Who would even eat such a thing? And are the fat-frees free-range?
These are the questions I have. Alexa answers them all, without so much as a disapproving click.
Of course, she’s not perfect. Alexa can’t — can’t, or won’t, lady? — tell me which spatula would make the best back scratcher. And when I asked her to sniff the milk and tell me if it was bad, she just sat there on the counter. I don’t think she smelled it at all, frankly. That’s a little rude.
But overall, an Alexa in the kitchen is pretty cool. I’m learning a lot, and the voice activated interactions are very entertaining.
Now I just need her to explain what the hell is happening on The Americans. Seriously, this season is one big ball of “what?” It’s like that Powerpuff Girls movie all over again.
Permalink | No Comments(Jump back, it’s science time!
As always, that’s Secondhand SCIENCE. This week, come and meet mitochondrial Eve. And be cool to her; she’s, like, your mom. I don’t care who you are — she’s basically your mom. Seriously.)
So I’m thinking of taking a page out of the Chinese government playbook.
No, really. Hear me out here. I know they’ve had some crazy ideas in the past. And the present. And most every alternative universe anyone’s ever imagined.
And sure, Chinese policies like government-sanctioned censorship — very bad. Oppression and discrimination of citizens via polcies like the Hukou system — reprehensible. Rigged political processes, sham labor organizations, picking on Tibet, naming a puppet Lama, widespread use of capital punishment, repressing critical discourse and alleged dissident organ harvesting — all of these are pretty awful practices, and not the sort of things I’d want to implement around my own neighborhood.
(Though I bet that loudmouth asshole across the street has a nice healthy liver. I could make an exception.)
“Even I don’t want to live in a nation where everyone wears rugby shirts and listens to weird music and doesn’t know what to do with their hands at dinner parties.”
Still. It’s not like the Chinese government is always off base. Take that “one child” policy they’ve been rocking the past few decades. That’s not so bad. Yes, the implementation is horrendous — rampant strong-arming and gender-selecting and human rights violations — but the idea could work. One child per couple; a nation of only children. I’m an only child — just imagine a whole country full of me.
Okay, scratch that. That’s a terrible idea. Even I don’t want to live in a nation where everyone wears rugby shirts and listens to weird music and doesn’t know what to do with their hands at dinner parties. We’d be terrible at national security. And we’d have the most awkward parades on the planet.
So that doesn’t build confidence in adopting a Chinese government policy, either, really, but I have high hopes for this other one. You may be aware — as it’s been going on for years — that China is in a territorial dispute with… well, pretty much everyone on their side of the planet.
(No, but seriously. It’s been going on for years. The timeline in that linked Wikipedia article about it goes back to the third century B.C..
Seriously, who holds a grudge over fighting that started twenty-four hundred years ago? Back then, even the Christians, Jews and Muslims were getting along, I bet.)
(Yes, I’m aware. Move along.)
Currently, most countries bordering the South China Sea — Malaysia, Vietnam, Indonesia, the Philippines, you name it — claim a modest swath of ocean off their respective land borders as their territory. There’s some international maritime acronym-or-another who says that 200 miles out from your coastline should be yours, and generally speaking, these countries are cool with the rule.
But not China. No, China basically says:
“if it’s not a wave you can physically surf onto your beach, then it belongs to us.”
China’s made a claim — a dubious, greedy, Scrooge McDuckesque claim — on pretty much the entire South China Sea, and any lands, islands, peninsulii, isthmuseses, archipelageese or post-apocalyptic Waterworld-style floating cities that might be found there.
(I’m sure Kevin Costner will be happy to know somebody is finally interested in that nightmare.)
But lately, China hasn’t even worried about claiming the islands that are there. Instead, they’ve gone and made some new ones.
It’s a total dick move. A resource grab. A bullying, brazen, “my naval dick is bigger than your naval dick” play for all the marbles they can get.
And it’s genius. I’m totally getting me some of that.
Not in the South China Sea, of course. China’s naval dick is way bigger than mine. They’ve got a fleet of warships, probably. I have a rubber ducky and a pool raft that sinks if you don’t blow enough air into it. So I’m not expanding my borders there.
But around my neighborhood? Why not?
I figure the first step is claim all the “common area” in my condo building. Hallways, porches, the basement, any interesting parts of the rooftop — those are mine. Nobody else is using them, so I’m staking a claim.
Of course, I might have to physically mark my new territory. I can move an armoire outside the upstairs neighbors’ door to let them know. Maybe some desk lamps through the main hallway — nothing too obstructive. All the foot traffic can still move through. If they pay the tolls, of course.
But that’s just the start. None of the neighbors on the block are using their yards; they’re just littered with plants and bushes and nonsense. I’ll take those over, too — everything right up to their doorsteps. Or maybe their front walks; some of the actual doorsteps around here are pretty ugly. I don’t really have the furniture to stake out those claims, so I’ll just do what China’s doing: I’ll truck in a bunch of dirt and dump it on their lawns.
Sure, they’ll be pissed. But it’s my lawn now. And my dirt. Take it up with the U.N., sporto. Yo shit’s been annexed.
I figure I can get at least to the next block before I run out of lamps and dressers and money for claim dirt. That’s not quite a whole “south sea”, but it’s a start. You might think I don’t have the military force to keep all these extra lands — but I’ve got that covered.
This is the Boston suburbs we’re talking about here, not some gulf in the Asian Pacific. Remember that ducky and the pool float I mentioned? In this neighborhood, brother, I’m navally hung.
Permalink | No Comments(It may be April, but there’s no fooling science. Unless it’s Secondhand SCIENCE, possibly.
But let’s assume not, and form a single-file line to click over for this week’s discussion, all about orbital decay. It’s the only science article you’ll read this week that mentions the Hubble telescope, Paula Deen and a hockey mask-wearing horror movie murderer. No foolin’.)
I’m not really a trash talker. Mostly, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.
I mean, first of all, most trash talk people do is about something they have no control over in the first place. “My dad could beat up your dad,” for instance. That’s ridiculous. Nobody’s fathers are going to go at it in a cage match because their nine-year-olds got in an argument over whose Pokemon would win on Jeopardy or whatever.
(And anyway, my dad’s got a bad knee. He can still jab, probably, but his footwork’s not what it used to be. I can’t take that risk.)
But worse, the kids have no say in whose dad would come out of that tussle on top. And most trash talk is like that — not only are you bragging out your ass, it’s someone’s else’s ass you’re bragging about. The red sports team I like is better than the blue one you cheer for. My Miss America favorite eats your favorite’s lunch — or would, if either of them consumed solid food in the six months before the swimsuit competition. And my base-pandering, corporate-sponsored double-talking politician of choice is twice the man/woman/programmable talking robot your base-pandering, corporate-sponsored, double-talking politician will ever be.
Frankly, I don’t see the point. You might as well whip your wangs out to measure over who can predict a coin flip.
(Don’t do this, by the way. Besides being poor etiquette in general, you don’t want to be whacked in the willie by a tumbling coin. Especially a quarter. Trust me.)
Of course, some (tiny) percentage of trash talking is done to back up something personal. Whether it’s a race or a bet or a challenge over who can stuff the most live lobsters down their pants, before some people do it, they want to talk about it. How fast they’re going to run. How much money they’ll win. Their special secret underpants, which are way more crustacean-friendly than yours. Yak yak yak.
It all seems pretty exhausting to me, and I steer clear for two reasons. First, it’s an awful lot of extra energy going to waste that I could be using on winning whatever nonsense we’re doing. Stretching my calves or planning a strategy or supergluing a lot of lobster claws shut, for instance.
But also, I don’t trash talk because I’m pretty uniformly bad at everything. And when you run your mouth and lose, it’s a great deal worse than losing without running your mouth at all. Do your talking with your poor performance and pouty demeanor afterward, I say. Take the high road. Relatively speaking.
(Also, make excuses. Did I mention my father’s knee? I probably inherited that, so that’s why I lost any speed-related thing. Also, the sun was in my eyes. And I’m wearing those Fruit of the Lobster boxers, which can’t possibly help.)
It is for these reasons — and the doubtless ensuing shame and ridicule I’d likely endure — that I don’t engage in trash talk, as a rule.
“It was a big bug, though skinny — like Andre the mosquito giant, or a wasp that’s really into cardio, maybe.”
However. I do make one exception, and it happened this morning.
When I climb into the shower and there’s a bug inside — insect, spider, any-kind-of-crawly-pede — then shit is ON, brother. And I’m going to talk about it. Trashily.
When I stepped in this morning, I caught a glimpse of some winged something-or-other buzzing the shower head. It was a big bug, though skinny — like Andre the mosquito giant, or a wasp that’s really into cardio, maybe. But size doesn’t matter, in this situation.
(I mean, under moth size, obviously. Let’s not go overboard. I’m not Batman over here, for crissakes.)
I knew I could take this buzzing bozo — but I was going to let him hear about it while I did. So I yapped. I barked a bunch of stuff that ended with “MY house” and a waggly no-no finger. And I postured for effect.
As well as one can posture while standing naked with one foot in the shower and a bottle of Pert Plus in the non-finger-waggling hand. Which, if I’m honest, is not a lot.
Still, I trash-talked that bug, and I trash-talked him good. I don’t get a lot of practice — which is good, because otherwise it would mean a parade of crawly assholes were setting up shop in my showering spot — but I came through. It’s like riding a bike.
Or like berating a bike with “yo momma” jokes, maybe. I’m actually not sure how bicycles apply here, exactly.
Anyway, I told this waspy-legged interloper what for, and then I turned the water on and washed him onto the shower wall. He wiggled for a while, but I hosed him again — and talked some more trash, natch — and he mostly stopped. So I washed him down, into the shower and down by the drain, talking at him all the way. Like, in his face. Only from the other end of the shower, because ew.
I don’t know whether the bug made it down the drain all the way. It was pretty big, and I wasn’t going over there to look. I’ve seen horror movies — and especially ones where somebody trash talks the big ugly monster out to get everyone. If you go looking at it when it’s dead, then it’s definitely not dead, and that’s when it stings you or barfs acid on you or lays eggs up your nose while it slaps you around with a thorax or something.
So obviously, I didn’t take a shower today. And maybe won’t tomorrow, just to be safe. But I gave that bug a piece of my mind, and washed it onto, maybe down-maybe not, the drain. Where I trash talked it, but good. Like it was someone else’s favorite base-pandering, corporate-sponsored, double-talking politician, right before the swimsuit competition.
Aw, yeah.
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