“If Books Could Kill” has an episode excoriating “Who Moved My Cheese”which reminded me that we read and analyzed it for my honors English class my senior year.
Most of our work in that class was teacher-generated packets about our books that existed to prove we’d done the reading — “What was the snack item in chapter 3? If Tybalt from Romeo and Juliet was a car, what kind of car would he be? Find a picture of that car in a magazine and cut it out and glue it to this packet. Where did the characters from Who Moved My Cheese keep their running shoes?”
Senior honors English. In high school.
The book argues (badly) that you should be stoic about changes at your job and instead of whining and moaning you should roll with the punches and find other sources of cheese in the weird cheese distribution maze you live in, instead of insisting on consistent cheese access from your current cheese provider. (The text says it isn’t actual cheese? There are sentient mice eating it and also humans depending on it? We are told trying to figure out cheese distribution mechanisms is a strategy of the bad character, as is agitating for improvements or asking questions about the cheese metaphor.)
My teacher was all in. I made points like “Didn’t your union just win a $10 billion dollar funding plan for your literal job? Didn’t you guys work together to figure out who moved your cheese and bring the cheese back? Isn’t that not accepting cheese movement and insisting on fixing the cheese situation for the betterment of all?” But it turns out she wasn’t a fan of her union securing funding for education.
So on my next break I toddled into the non-honors English class. I checked what they were studying — essays analyzing Steinbeck short stories — and got the transfer paper sorted out by the end of the day.
Or as I told my original teacher, I stopped hoping there would be the cheese of an actual education in Honors English and instead transferred to regular English. Where there was cheese. It was a very influential book. Taught me a lot.
love it when the leaves are green and then a couple trees start turning yellow and suddenly there’s a run on the sugar bank and the whole damn block is moving glucose to the trunk. we need to shed those leaves asap there’s just no time to waste
just like what a strange little creature. theyre related to hummingbirds. they cant actually sit and perch like most birds, the best they can do is cling to vertical surfaces. almost everything they do is done in mid-air. they have to drink by swooping at the surface of water with their mouth open. they build nests out of twigs they break off of branches as they fly by. they eat 5000-6000 bugs a day. And theyre the next president, of the united states of america
Honestly, that scale actually makes perfect sense, especially for a sixty person dance crew. You want people who are really good at what they do, but not who will attempt to stand out and affect the cohesion of the group. Too fresh and not fresh enough are both negative qualities. And Jason is just saying that an 8 represents the ideal amount. That’s actually pretty deep, and suggests a collectivist instinct in him.
And yes, that means that Jason is effectively saying that Michael is too smart for his own good, to his detriment.
He’s also inadvertently practicing Virtue Ethics. The theory of virtue ethics states that every virtue, like generosity, exists on a spectrum somewhere between two vices, like stinginess and being so generous you harm yourself.
The EP–1320 Medieval is, amazingly, a real gadget being sold by Teenage Engineering — it’s a “beat machine” (or “instrumentalis electronicum”) loaded with a bunch of musical phrases & instruments from the Dark Ages. “This is ludicrous and I love it.”
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Linen thread and wool fabric; https://burnleyandtrowbridge.com/ (they’ve got wool stuffs and worsted wool fabric for $15 a yard! I just got three yards of navy worsted wool I’m making a constellation winter skirt from)
More linen thread and wool; https://wmboothdraper.com/ (just ordered wool broadcloth to make a coat)
Silk fabric (THE best place to get silk lining fabrics and raw silk fabric):https://www.dharmatrading.com/
A varying assortment of wool and silk and cotton and even some leather, use coupon code spring2020 for 50% off your full order, worked yesterday when I bought some stuff there; https://metrotextilesnyc.com/
Wool. You want wool coating for under $20 a yard? Sure you do. It’s here. Not a huge variety of colors, most are black or brown, but hey https://www.fashionfabricsclub.com/Catalog?refinementIds=4096748&Keyword=wool&pageSize=16
I don’t know a lot about sewing, but I want to make or have my mom make some linen pants & shirts for when I’m watering, because it gets to 105 here and we have mosquitos so I need to be covered. What type of linen do I buy? Also, linen pajama shorts, yes/no?
(I’ve been wearing my renfaire pants which are a linen mix, I think. But the frikking mosquitos that hide in the tomatoes get my arms)
For wools, I cannot recommend Woolsome enough! They’re a bit more expensive then the above links, but they have a spectacular range of colours and weights, as well as diamond pattern and herringbone weaves. They also have a range of linens, though not as extensive.
Iirc the original images are from years ago, and everyone was worried that the owl was actually stuck to the toy - but apparently the townspeople had seen him put it down to hunt and such, and then go back to pick it up again. Which straight up triples my enjoyment of this story.
Image description: A screenshot of a headline from The Guardian reading ‘New images show remarkable state of preservation of Ernest Shackleton’s ship’. Above the headline is an underwater photo of the stern of a sailing ship labelled ENDURANCE.
I was raised agnostic and tend to remain ambiguous on theological matters.
-but my house has a porch on the second story that affords me a terrific view of my neighborhood and the Colorado Front Range and I was partaking of some peace before the 4th Of July Finger-Loss Festivities begin, and I have had a
~*Spiritual Experience*~
I just watched my neighbor try to unload an actual wooden pallet that had to have been forklifted into the back of his insecurity pickup worth of fireworks.
Except that he does not have a forklift in his garage.
He does have so much sports memorabilia and cardboard boxes of unsold MLM Merchandise and patriotically themed camping gear and posters of women in bikinis and flags of suspect political organizations in his garage that there is only
BARELY
enough space for the fireworks
and certainly none for his truck.
So he had to unload the individual boxes of recreational explosives from the back of his truck and stack them in the minimal space he had cleared by hand.
This is a tedious and time-consuming process as this neighbor has purchased a wide variety of recreational and locally illegal explosives instead of many of just a few types, so the individual boxes are rather small.
He begins,
and this is crucial to what happens next,
by cutting apart the industrial-grade saran wrap his explosives dealer had so carefully wrapped his merchandise in, and discarded it
unsecured
on his lawn.
Where Outdoor Conditions sometimes happen.
His process for unloading the fireworks is to
1. Climb up through the gate into the bed of his pickup truck (a feat made unusually difficult due to the slope of his driveway, and this man's fascinating decision to wear the world's Siffest and least Flexible Denim Overalls.
2. Once in the pickup bed, he selects ONE (1) box from the pile
He is apparently from a niche religious institution that doesn't believe in stacking things.
3. Carries it awkwardly around the palette that barely fits in the truck bed
4. His wife yells "Be careful!" when he nearly falls out of the pickup.
5. He Yells "SHADDUP!" back at her.
6. The Large German Shepherd barks from inside the house.
7. He yells "SHADDUP!" back at her too.
8. He sets the (1) box down on the gate
9. Slowly and awkwardly climbs out of the pickup bed
10. picks the box back up, and carries it into the garage.
Question: Aren't you going to help this poor man?
Answer: Absolutely Not.
There's four military veterans, MANY dogs, and several people with dementia in this neighborhood, all of whom are terrified by this chicanery every year and many neighbors have repeatedly asked him to maybe do the fireworks somewhere else.
(This is the Eighth Year Running he's held a major demolition event in his driveway, and for those of you who can do math, you may be able to guess the precipitating incident to this little ritual)
Additionally, I live in Colorado, a state marginally less prone to spontaneous and catastrophic conflagrations than a rotting grain silo, but only marginally.
Our recreational explosives laws are written accordingly.
I am in fact calling the Non Emergency line to report Fireworks violations, and reading off the brand labels to someone named Dorothy, who is gleefully totaling up a SPECTACULAR fine for my oblivious neighbor.
However, while I'm on the phone with Dorothy, I notice the wind begin to pick up.
and by "Notice" I mean "The Industrial Saran Wrap he left on his Lawn earlier is suddenly swept up about 100 feet into the air by an updraft intense enough to make my ears pop"
And by "Pick Up" I mean "I look up to see the sky has turned a fun and exciting shade of glass green, and the bottoms of the clouds are bumpy and rounded, and the overall effect is not unlike looking up through the bottom of the cup at God's Matcha Boba Tea."
For those of you who do not live in places with Inclement Weather, these conditions mean "You have about 30 seconds before a Major Meteorological Event Occurs."
I move under the eaves.
"Hang on Dorothy." I say, nose filling with Petrichor. "The show is about to be cancelled."
"Oh, that doesn't matter!" Dorothy cheerfully informs me. "It's illegal for him just to possess those, no matter if he actually gets to set them off or not."
"Terrific, because he's gotten maybe five boxes out of a hundred inside."
Sometimes,
the weather gods are Merciful and give you a verbal warning, typically in the kind of thunderclap that makes your ears ring.
The Gods were not merciful today.
It's not often that I am in the time, place, correct angle or in a properly observational frame of mind to see this,
But I got to see it today.
Huh. I thought. I've never seen a cloud just DIVE for the ground before.
Oh. I realized as it got closer.
That's RAIN.
Sometimes, a thunderstorm will form in such a way that the rain that would normally be distributed over an area of say,
five to tent square miles,
is instead concentrated into an area of say,
my neighborhood exactly.
So today, I was granted the rare privilege of being able to actually see the literal wall of water descend from On High and DIRECTLY onto my porch, my street, and my neighbor's truck, and his pile of unwrapped fireworks.
The sheer impact force of the downpour immediately scatters the teetering pile of fireworks boxes in the back of the truck, like the wrath of God striking down the tower of Babel.
Boxes tumble, then are washed out of the bed of the truck by the deluge.
Smaller Boxes are carried down the road in a little line by the stream forming in the gutter, like little impotent explosive ducklings.
My neighbor was definitely yelling something, but I could not hear what over the DEAFENING noise several million gallons of water makes upon high-speed contact with the earth's surface, but there was a lot of arm-waving and faces turning red as he went looking for the saran wrap that had probably blown to Nebraska by now, while his wife started disassembling the complex three-dimensional puzzle of interlocking material goods in search of a tarp.
They do not have a tarp.
They have one of those wretched Thin Blue Line flags though, and my neighbor jogs out in a futile effort to cover what's left in the truck.
Which is when the hail begins.
"HELLO?" Yelled Dorothy.
"HI!" I shouted. "WE'RE HAVING SOME WEATHER!"
"OH GOOD!" she shouts back. "WE NEED THE MOISTURE!"
I watch for a minute longer, but the loss was immediate and catastrophic- the hail is the size of marbles and dense and cares not for your pitiful cardboard and cellophane, ripping the boxes asunder and punching holes in the few things covered in plastic.
The colors on the Thin Blue Line Flag are seeping all over the remains of that it was supposed to protect in a particularly apt visual metaphor.
Not even the few boxes that made it into the garage are spared, as the German Shepherd escapes from indoors, and in an attempt to assist her humans, jumps directly into the small stack of not-yet-ruined boxes, scattering them into the driveway and deluge. She even picks one up so her humans will chase her around the yard, before dropping it in the gutter to be swept away.
So.
I was raised Agnostic
-but even I can recognize when God slaps someone upside the head and shouts "NO!" at them.
---
(If you laughed, please consider supporting my Ko-fi or preordering my book of Strange Stories on Patreon)
#it’s NOT inexplicable#it’s bc someone based it on the unicode 6 yellow heart#which is colorless but shaded with halftone dots#and someone interpreted that like stubble#and drew this#which is SO FUCKING FUNNY via @animusbell
Honey, don't worry about our daughter's new habit of standing in front of the security camera in her playroom and murmuring about bones every night. That's probably just something women do
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